Summary of Fear of Cold

00:00:00 - 00:40:00

The video discusses the fear of cold, which is a common phobia. It tells the story of a man who is freezing to death and how his various mistakes lead to his eventual death. The video also provides a story of a mountaineer who experienced difficulty in the cold and how he was able to overcome it.

• 00:00:00 The video discusses the fear of cold, which is a common phobia. It tells the story of a man who is freezing to death and how his various mistakes lead to his eventual death.
• 00:05:00 Fear of the cold is a common fear, and is often paired with the danger of isolation. In "To Build a Fire," the second domino falls just as the man starts to warm his hands and feet. His fire, his savior, becomes his downfall. In "The Shining," the cold deals a more personal end to Jack; he is frozen and thus preserved on the premises, rooted by the ice in space and time. In "The Thing," and the short story it's based on, the blasted frozen desert of the Antarctic similarly serves as a wall between the characters and the rest of civilization.
• 00:10:00 The fear of cold is a common fear, and can be paralyzing in its intensity. The video discusses the experiences of two different people who faced the cold: Admiral Richard Byrd, who spent five months in the Antarctic winter, and Christopher Knight, who lived for 27 winters in Maine without heat. Both men faced challenges and faced danger, but ultimately prevailed.
• 00:15:00 Christopher Knight, a hermit who lived in the Antarctic, nearly died from a deep freeze in his bed. He saw a "lady death" in his camp, which he knows was probably a hallucination. He reflects that while he was near death, the deep freeze was a reminder of what it means to be alive.
• 00:20:00 In "Fear of Cold," author Bong Joon Ho describes the fear of winter, noting that it can be an individual antagonist or a societal threat. He also highlights how summers are getting hotter and winters are getting colder, and how the cold can expose the vulnerabilities in our systems. In "Frostpunk," a survival game, the player is tasked with managing resources and conditions in a city during a cold winter.
• 00:25:00 In "Fear of Cold," children in the early 20th century worked to keep their families warm, leading to an increased fear of the cold. In "The Long Winter," a novel based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's life, the youngest in the family dies from hypothermia when the family's only source of heat, a stovepipe, collapses. In "The Long Dark," a post-apocalyptic survival game, the player's main goal is to find enough food to stay alive.
• 00:30:00 The video discusses how people fear cold and how it can be a challenge to survive in it. It also provides a story of a mountaineer who experienced difficulty in the cold and how he was able to overcome it.
• 00:35:00 The author discusses how the coldest naturally occurring temperature on Earth is -128 degrees Fahrenheit (-135 degrees Celsius), and how this temperature is also the coldest place in space. He also discusses how the coldest naturally occurring temperature on Earth is also the coldest place in which corpses can remain frozen, and how this coldness is weakening with global warming.
• 00:40:00 Humans are inherently fallible, and as a result, suffer setbacks in cold weather. For example, a cracked wall is not a catastrophe, and the cold will strip away our insulation to remind us of our situation. The cold is not an antagonistic force, and it exists before and after everything else.