#124 The Beauty and Tragedy of Earth (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 124th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss the biology, geology, and conservation of the Bahamas, particularly the Exumas islands. How do parrotfish turn coral into sand, what’s up with tropicbirds, and what does it mean that all Caribbean beaches have trash on them? Apologies for the sound quality during the videos. We also discuss ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 124, an even number, therefore it couldn't welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 124, an even number, therefore it couldn't Who are you?
Oh, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, and you are Dr. Heather Hying.
Indeed.
And we are here at an odd moment in the week, but doing the job that we usually do, which is trying to unpack at least some of the madness that's in the world and introduce Some curious bits that might otherwise escape your notice.
So anyway, that is at least the broad brush picture from 30,000 feet.
Now we will zoom in to a picture at a more reasonable altitude.
Indeed.
So we are, as we mentioned last week, going to be coming to you from some various moments and maybe even places in the next few weeks.
But before we launch into a little bit of logistics, today we're going to be talking a little bit about the Bahamas.
The Bahamas.
And the biology and geology of the Bahamas, which we were fortunate enough to experience for the first time this last week.
And also about... Fortunate enough to experience and unfortunate enough to have to leave.
Indeed, yeah.
We were almost hoping to fail those mandatory COVID tests on the way back into the country and be forced to stay, except that only one of our wonderful children was with us, so that would have put rather a damper on things.
I don't know if our marvelous host would have loved that either.
They claimed to want it, but you know, it's hard to imagine actually.
We're going to talk about the mask mandates being lifted.
Actually on federal, I think, or maybe it was all transportation, but the federal mandate on masks in at least air travel in the U.S.
was lifted while we were gone.
So we flew down in masks, we flew back without masks, and talk a little bit about that.
We're going to talk a little bit about a couple things happening over in the White House, including some disinformation czars, the newly appointed.
Oh, disinformation czar.
It just makes you wonder whether you're there for or against.
Yeah.
And then if we have time, just a couple of tidbits from some scientific findings that are out this week, or I think this week, or at least reported on this week, that, you know, you could probably, I challenge you, I challenge any of you to make them political, but these are apolitical scientific findings that just can bring either joy or awe or inspiration or curiosity and not at all make you wonder what planet you can move to because this one is no longer making sense.
But somehow they will be polarizing.
I don't yet know how.
Depending on the creature's mode of sexual reproduction, it will be an offense to one camp or another, whether it's the Binarists or the Continuists.
I don't know.
Somebody's going to be offended somehow.
Sure.
Well, that is the coin of the realm, I guess, at this point.
Right.
Well, I mean, you know.
And even if it isn't the reproductive mode, it could be the color of the creature.
It could be supremely white, or not, or something.
Or orange, God forbid.
Right.
If it's camouflaged, it could be appropriating a color inappropriately from something else.
Yeah.
Ecosystem appropriation.
Exactly.
Wow.
Doing their work for them.
That can't be good.
Well, you know, I think frankly they're often they, whoever they are here, are bad enough at their work that I just help them along a little bit.
We can help them and they'll still be no good at it.
I have previously ranted about biogeographical appropriation and how those of us not from the new world shouldn't be eating potatoes or tomatoes or quinoa or peppers or Oh boy.
Coffee, I guess?
No.
Does coffee come from here?
Yeah.
Chocolate.
I have bad news for you, though.
The term the New World, it now refers to Mars.
Nope.
I'm not going there.
You're not doing that?
I'm not going to Mars either.
Yep.
Too dry.
Makes you see red.
Too dry.
Although I will say that I finally, after a lot of receiving this recommendation from a lot of people and one wonderful audience member actually sent Us, or me, I don't remember how it was addressed.
The three books of C.S.
Lewis's space trilogy, and the first one takes place on Mars, and I read it this last week, and it is fantastic.
And in this fantastical, it is fantastic in both meanings of the term, and in this fantastical rendering, That C.S.
Lewis has of Mars.
It is, in fact, neither dry nor inhospitable nor lifeless.
Really?
Quite a wonderful book.
And I'm told that the third book in the trilogy, which I'm not to yet, has many, many allegories for our time.
So we will come back to you with that once I get there.
I'm reading a lot of other things at the same time, so it may be a while.
All right.
Logistics?
Yes.
Yes.
Wow.
Amazing things just happened in front of us, but no one needs to panic.
Yeah, no, and we're not tripping.
No.
Okay, so this is livestream number 124.
I'm just going to walk down some of the upcoming schedule because it's a little weird and say, as I said last week or whenever we were here last, a week and a half ago, that hopefully soon, within a few months, we're actually going to have a new platform where you can go and see the upcoming schedule and other events potentially and community happenings and such.
But for now, it's just us reporting out here.
And next Wednesday is going to be, oh, we are not going to do a Q&A today, after the live stream today.
And in general, those that happen on non-Saturdays, we probably won't do Q&As just because of the vagaries of scheduling.
Well, we can't stop them from having Qs.
But we will not be delivering the corresponding A's.
The end A part is on us.
They might infer them.
They might, yeah, and I'm sure some of the A's will be excellent and thought-provoking in and of themselves, prompting perhaps more Q's, which is the way it should go.
Right, the Q's just keep on coming.
Yeah.
Okay, so next Wednesday, May 4th, we're going to do our Livestream number 125 in the middle of the day, probably around noon Pacific, no Q&A, the following Saturday, May 7th.
Then it's going to be a while because we have some travel that is just going to make it impossible for us to do another one until May 26th, Thursday, May 26th.
But in that intervening time, there will hopefully be one or two solo-hosted guest episodes that are coming out from you, Brett, that should be really excellent.
And there's one or two that are going to come out sooner than that as well, I'm thinking.
Yes.
There is also, I will just say, a possibility of something live happening this weekend.
No promises, but keep your eye out if you're interested in such a thing.
But having nothing to do with me.
You won't be here.
No.
I mean, you'll be live, but we're not gonna Zoom call you in.
That would be a demotion from, you know, being present right here in the room.
All right, so then we're going to do a couple Thursday, May 26th, and then Saturday, May 28th, and then for a couple of weeks continuing on with our Saturdays.
So just a weird schedule for which we apologize, but there are opportunities, some of which we will talk about as they have happened, that are getting in the way of normal scheduling.
Yeah, can't be avoided.
No, I was just pointing out that it can't be avoided that, you know, part of what we do here involves us being involved elsewhere in the world and when it happens we go and...
It's such a relief to feel things opening up, even as there is a sense of dread for those of us who have no way to forget about it.
And frankly, it would be better if no one could forget about the fact that we have now, in most of the West, or at least certainly in Canada and still in the US,
And I assume, I actually don't even know what's happening in Australia and New Zealand at this point, effectively have a two-tiered society now, where those who can prove their cleanliness and exaltedness and closer-to-godness of having been vaccinated against COVID get all of the things that were previously understood to be just perks of being a human being.
Largely, and those of us who are closer to, I don't even know what, the base existence of man, and filthy, and presumably uneducated, and rather dim, don't get as many of those things anymore.
As many of those perks, and even worse, you and I haven't talked about this, but it re-emerged in my sphere, at least today, That this question of effectively subordinating our sovereignty to the World Health Organization is actually rapidly on the march, and so in the future such questions might not even be decided.
Domestically, they might be decided by some other authority, which is, if you think about it, quite terrifying.
Indeed it is.
Especially when it's the WHO.
Especially when it's an organization with such an appalling track record on exactly this question just now.
So, you know, if we can potentially be willing to hand over sovereignty to an organization that has just failed on exactly this topic, then what aren't we willing to hand over our sovereignty for?
How badly would they have to perform in order for us not to be willing to hand over our sovereignty to them?
That's the question, because it really, you know, they... Unfortunately, that sounded to me like a challenge.
Yes, well, fortunately it may turn out that way.
Indeed.
Okay, so we do encourage you, just logistics again, we encourage you to read our book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and to join our Patreons, where we have Uh, monthly conversations available to patrons of various stripes and colors and creeds.
Striped patrons.
Yes, I think so.
Yeah, there was, didn't that, didn't that zebra show up for you one time?
Didn't talk much.
That was two guys in a zebra suit, but.
Oh, you didn't tell me how that resolved.
That was what it turned out to be.
Resolved with them taking off the zebra suit and participating in the conversation, but anyway.
Yeah, it's not as interesting as it could have been, but I mean, I guess how a zebra gets access to currency, I don't know.
Exactly.
To pay for access to the, okay.
I guess they use Stripe.
Yep.
It wasn't great, but admission was free.
It was sitting right there.
Somebody was going to have to.
That joke was not going to make itself, that's for sure.
They rarely do.
They rarely do.
Okay, we are live right now on YouTube and Odyssey.
Chat is happening on Odyssey.
We will of course be on Spotify, Apple.
All the usual places.
Soon thereafter, we have some merchandise at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
We have my Natural Selections sub-stack, which this week I wrote about some of the biology and geology of the Bahamas.
We'll be talking about that some here today.
And we have, as has become, our want.
What is a want?
I think it's an O, W-O-N-T.
See, now you're getting me into the spelling where I have no O. Okay, forget about the spelling.
What is it?
It's a predilection.
A predilection.
I think.
Yes.
I mean, yes.
I guess I wonder about the etymology.
I'm pretty sure it's a predilection, but I'm going to look both words up later.
No, I think you're right.
I just, I guess I was wondering about the history of the word want with an O. As is our want.
As is our want.
You don't think it has an O?
No, I don't think so.
Can the audience hear you?
Yeah, okay, so now we're just talking at our producer in the other room.
That's not very good.
We're hearing voices.
And our only defense is that they are actually coming from people.
Indeed.
As is our want.
So, Zach, after we read our ads, you can come back to us with the answer on this.
Shall we pay the rent?
We must pay the rent.
Apparently, it is want with an O. Want with an O. But we don't know the etymology, so... Awesome.
And find out if it's related to wanton.
That also has an O, doesn't it?
No, but it's W-A-N-T-O-N.
It's an O in the wrong place.
See, it does have an O, but it's a whole...
It's like Brett Weinstein with two T's except the second T is in the second word.
Yeah, it's rather like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so we have three sponsors this week.
We are very grateful for our sponsors.
As those who have, who are regular viewers or listeners know, We introduce our sponsors with a sound, and what's the opposite of introduce?
Extroduce?
Evict.
No, we do not evict our sponsors.
We close out doing our ads with another sound, and for those watching, there's always a green border around when we are reading our sponsored content.
And we do not do ads for any products that we do not actually vouch for, so we reject more sponsors than we accept.
So you can be sure that if we are reading ads for these guys, we are actually enthusiastic.
And without further ado, you're first.
Aha!
I am reading this having not looked it over.
I'm working without Annette, who called in sick for work today.
Always.
Yes.
I don't know what it is with her, but...
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That alarm is the bad thing we're trying to avoid.
Waking up by being alarmed is bad.
It should be the... The wake-up feature.
The rouse feature.
I'm not actually sure that they call it the alarm feature.
They may.
Well, we should stop calling it the alarm feature because... The wake-up feature.
Yeah, the wake-up feature.
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Chlorine?
Apparently.
That's insane.
Yep.
There is a problem with what you're trying to do, and it would involve using alcohol, not chlorine.
But anyway, we digress.
Indeed.
Well, and actually, I mean, that's not too far afield from talking about... It's going to sound very far afield from talking about the Bahamas, but not necessarily with regard to the amazing beauty and function in the world and how it is that we have responded to fast growth and high population density with choices that are unnecessarily damaging.
You know, we have real, real limits that we are coming up against with regard to habitat degradation and destruction and places where the population is just too dense to live as healthily as we would want.
But there are almost always at least better solutions than the ones that we are engaging in.
Absolutely.
And you were bringing one of these up by suggesting that for the vast majority of chickens that are not raised with, call it integrity, and more traditional methods, at least an alcohol dip rather than a chlorine dip.
Might do the trick.
I actually, I don't know, and I don't know what else that would do to change the meat texture, flavor, lastingness, any of it, but it's at least... Well, I mean, I think this is biologically fairly clear, and I have no doubt that alcohol would be more expensive and would require tending, because of course the alcohol, well, chlorine might evaporate out too, but
But this strikes me as a mirror for one of the most horrifying stories of industrial development that I've ever encountered, which my grandfather introduced me to.
I don't know.
I was probably still in high school.
And it was a story of tetraethyl lead and how it ended up in gasoline, which is a real jaw dropper, right?
And the long and short of it is there was a perfectly viable alternative that wasn't patentable.
And so they patented tetraethyl lead.
And its function in gasoline was?
To prevent knocking and pinging.
Knocking and pinging are basically explosions that are out of place and so end up over time distorting the engine.
They basically release energy at an inappropriate moment in the compression stroke and that is destructive of the engine, so none of us should want knocking and pinging, you know.
It is an actual indicator of something that is potentially doing damage to your car.
Doing damage to the vehicle, and is therefore environmentally bad, because it means that the engine and maybe the whole vehicle will have to be replaced sooner.
So it is an honest-to-goodness problem, but tetraethyllead is an appalling solution to it, because, you know, the toxin in tetraethyllead is lead.
It's an element.
It doesn't go anywhere in this combustion process, and so effectively... Into the air, where we breathe it in, and become dimmer as a result.
Right, and you know in places like Los Angeles where cars were everywhere and the mountains are shaped just so it's not like it blows away so it accumulates in the atmosphere and there's a credible line of thought that suggests that this has a lot to do with the crime waves that we may have seen at various periods of history.
And the fact that no one of any intelligence was produced in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
Something like that.
We barely avoided that one.
But yeah, it's an appalling story, and it involves all kinds of things like the delusions of the people who were advancing this terrible solution, who went to demonstrate that it was safe.
And there are terrible stories of people dying on the factory floor from mere contact with the stuff.
Yeah, it's an awful story.
But anyway, the point is, You have various kinds of solutions and then you have a series of perverse incentives.
You know, if alcohol is more expensive than bleach, you know, do we expect them to use it?
Well, not unless you force it.
And from a health perspective, if the harm that comes to you from eating chickens that have been, you know, dipped in bleach is delayed, then how the hell are you ever going to know that the tumor you had or the decrease in your IQ or whatever might befall you from that?
Bleach is your stand-in for chlorine here.
That's what you're saying.
Bleach.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, in any case, the point is the system is built so that you'll never catch up to the people who made this terrible decision on your behalf.
In fact, I only learned today that anybody had made a decision like this on my behalf.
And anyway, we need to get better at this.
Yes, we do.
The Bahamas.
We were talking about that.
Yeah, you know, I don't have a plan so much.
I think you have some photographs that you would like to share, but maybe just... So I will link to the piece that I wrote on the way back from the Bahamas.
So we have friends, both skillful and generous, who invited us down to spend six nights on their boat where they have been, and they're actually headed back home to Florida now.
For two months or so, our friend Dave Stevens was able to do his work remotely, which is, you know, one of the things about modernity, which is really quite remarkable.
And of course, we also saw, you know, got introduced to a little bit of the navigation that he was using.
So he and Madeline, his wife, were cruising in and they invited us to be with them and we went down with our 16-year-old son Toby in the Exumas, an island chain in the Bahamas that I'd never heard of before they invited us.
And it's right on the edge of a vast, like hundreds of square miles, and I actually couldn't totally figure out how big, I think it may be well over a thousand square miles, of incredibly shallow water, like never goes below 30 feet deep and is often less than 10 feet deep.
And of course that's going to change somewhat with the tides, but that means that no boats with a deep draft can can explore these waters at all.
And so you have You have some very, very nice boats, of course, but all with shallow drafts.
There's no cargo boats, there's no shipping lanes, and for the most part you don't have speedboats and other things that you may have come to associate with really gorgeous Caribbean seascapes and landscapes.
And so this was in many ways a revelation, being down in this place.
The first night that we were out, we spent on anchor off of Shroud Key, and Shroud Key has no marina, no buoys even, I think.
I think.
So you have to be skillful enough to get there, to know the weather enough and know the tides enough, and the soundings I guess is the word for the depths, and to put your anchor down safely.
And from there you can dive in right off the boat and snorkel or take a skiff in through these Creeks.
Yeah, they're not really creeks.
They're informally called creeks, but they're basically cracks in these limestone outcroppings in which the salt water flows through.
Exactly, exactly.
And they are, Shroud Key in particular, is just lined with mangroves.
And when we heard, when I heard Madeline talking about the mangroves in advance, I imagine the mangroves I have known.
And mangroves... mangrove is not a lineage.
Like, mangrove is a strategy that has evolved actually apparently more than 30 times.
A strategy for, I'm a plant, I find myself in this really marginal place where most of the water that I have access to is salt water, and even if I can pull water in somehow from the rain that falls from the sky, my roots are still soaked in salt water.
What am I going to do?
And so there are a lot of different evolutions of the mangrove strategy, and I have been in a lot of them, as have you.
We've been in mangrove in Madagascar, in Panama, I've been in mangrove in Mexico, in Costa Rica, I feel like other places, oh, and in Honduras.
A lot of places, they're always kind of tall, and these mangroves are incredibly short and dense.
Presumably this is because of the winds that are coming that occasionally come off the Atlantic in the form of hurricanes and lesser winds as well.
But you can take a small skiff through these creeks, which are actually tidal flow, and Sea, green sea turtles, and sharks, both nurse sharks, and I think we saw another species, but we saw it briefly enough, I'm not totally sure.
Rays, a fair number of fish, although inside the channels there, you don't really have coral, so it's not the abundance of reef fish that we saw elsewhere on the coral reefs.
And it's just an abundance of diversity that is extraordinary.
And also, when you go someplace else and around coral reefs, you find the number of strategies, the number of, again, lineages of just fish, just fish we're talking about for the moment, that have learned how to make a living off a reef, and who do things like specialize on cleaning the insides of other fishes Gills or mouths.
And there are some scientists still who are saying, yeah, not so sure.
It's exactly the kind of symbiosis that we're thinking.
Sometimes those bigger fish do in fact eat the smaller fish.
But they're really, and there are also some cleaner shrimp, dedicated cleaner shrimp.
So there's that.
There are these beau gregories, which as juveniles they're bright blue and yellow, who hang out in abandoned conch shells, live in abandoned conch shells.
There are a number of fish who are sequential hermaphrodites.
We were observing parrotfish, for instance, which are protogenous hermaphrodites, which means proto, first, gin, gine, female.
So they start out as females and then some of them, if the male dies, the dominant female will turn into a male.
And in every way, both her sex, she will start, she will move from producing eggs to producing sperm.
Everything about her will change into a him, both anatomically and physiologically and also behaviorally, the sex role, the gender, if you will.
And there are other, there are other lineages that are hermaphroditic as well.
And then the thing I learned about parrotfish on this trip, not from watching, but from watching, observing, us talking, and then looking in, I didn't bring it here, um, this fabulous field guide that I brought along with me, which is reef fish behavior for, um, Florida, Bahamas, and the Caribbean, I think is what it's called.
They claim, and I actually did seek out a paper suggesting that this is a claim that is legitimate, that much of the sand on Caribbean reefs and beaches Came out the back end of a parrotfish.
Yeah.
Parrotfish have these modified teeth that they've turned into beaks.
They're very hard, and they rasp algae off of dead coral.
And depending on the species and the mood of the parrotfish, they just bang their heads in the dead coral.
And some of them are neater than others, but none of them are particularly neat.
And they end up just taking in a huge amount of coral skeleton.
And apparently something like 75% of the gut content of parrotfish is inorganic material.
And they've got specialized anatomical and physiological structures that grind the stuff down.
And basically, if you follow a parrotfish, they're releasing a constant plume of this coral that has now been grounded to tiny bits, which is what we call sand.
Yeah, and my experience up until this trip was that on anything that you would call a coral reef, the sound of parrotfish chomping is almost constant.
Snap, crackle, pop.
It's constant snapping.
And it was actually kind of rare on this trip, and I'm not sure what to make of it because of course we'd never been to this place before, so I don't know if The amount of it has dropped, or this particular location, which has obviously a huge amount of sand associated with it, you know, is just low in relative density of parrotfish.
You know, we did see a few, but not many.
So, anyway, it sort of left me wondering.
I mean, clearly, given the amount, the volume of sand that we're talking about, we're talking about hundreds of thousands, probably millions of years of accumulated Parrotfish droppings are the fine sand on these beautiful Caribbean beaches.
Yes.
Which is a really cool fact.
It's amazing!
But yeah, it was interesting.
I must say that one thing that I got out of this little adventure that I had not gotten from any previous one.
In general, you and I have sought out You know, the great snorkeling wherever we go, right?
And the great snorkeling... Not in the Amazon so much.
Right.
But it tends to be, you know, a big reef and it's sort of the classic, you know, you drop off the boat or whatever it is and there you are and there's this giant accumulation of coral heads and a huge number of fish and all of that.
And in this case, Snorkeling did not seem to be what the people who were there were doing in any significant numbers.
In fact, we were really, the people doing the snorkeling, enough that other people we spoke to were sort of curious about what we were seeing and where to go and all of that.
And so what it did was it revealed what I think is the much more normal distribution of these reefs, which is a coral head here, a coral head there, large expanse of sand between them.
The seagrass, yeah.
So in any case, the biologist in me was very excited to get good at figuring out where to go look for the reef fish, rather than just be dropped in a place where they're everywhere.
Yeah, it was less like a nature documentary.
It was less like it had already been curated or Disney-fied or whatever.
And that's not to say that some of the other experiences we've had haven't been extraordinary.
Oh, they've been great!
But having to work for it a bit, and having to swim for it, and sometimes swim a fair ways, There's also a lot of reward and just like, okay, at some point I'm going to turn around because I've gone a while and there's just nothing but sand and seagrass and oh, whoa, wait, there's a slope now and here we go.
Here we happened upon another thriving area of diversity after a long expanse of seagrass.
Yeah, it's actually, it's its own kind of training program for your mind.
How well do you understand what these creatures are doing enough that you can look at a landscape and say, I bet if I go over there, I'll see it.
And then sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong and your model gets better.
But it's a little bit like when we take people into, you know, uh, an intact tropical rainforest and you know, everybody's experience is the same when they walk into such a thing, which is Where are the critters?
Where's all the fighting and the sex and the exuberance?
What I see is a wall of green I can make no sense of.
And the point is you do learn to make sense of it, but you learn to make sense of it in some ways that you don't expect.
You know, how do you find monkeys?
With your ears.
You almost always hear them before you see them, right?
How do you find peccaries?
With your nose.
You smell them before you see them or hear them.
Right, and then you think carefully about whether you want to confront them.
And where to stand.
Right, exactly.
Not so much on reefs.
I've rarely run into peccaries on reefs.
For some reason, we did not get anywhere near it.
But for some reason, somebody has pigs that tourists go to swim with in the Bahamas and the Exumas.
I don't get it.
Yeah, we actually passed it on one of our forays actually to get our final COVID test to be allowed to come back to the U.S.
I don't get it.
I don't get it either.
And it's domestic pigs.
Whatever it is, it's not kosher.
That's my feeling.
But anyway, so I was enjoying the learning how Coral reef actually works rather than being dropped into the overwhelming experience and getting a very wrong idea, I think, for what the majority of these, you know, fish and other creatures are.
Do you want to show a few?
Yeah, why don't we show a few things?
And you know, I now realize after all the things you said, I picked many of the wrong images and videos.
Hey, Zach, you want to put up the-- Just one .
All right, well, let's try-- how about the image of the tropic bird? .
So this is a tropic bird.
And so as we arrived at Shroud Key, our first mooring, there were a group of these tropic birds.
And Brett is not misspeaking.
This is also a tropical bird.
We were actually just outside of the tropics.
We were about 24.5 degrees north and the tropic line is at 23.5.
But we were in, you know, this is a subtropical bird, but it's called a tropic bird.
This individual is hanging out just barely in the subtropics.
But anyway, it's a tropic bird.
These are squid specialists.
This is one of three species of tropic bird.
Wait, what?
They're squid specialists.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, isn't that amazing?
I hope I'm speaking correctly about this species.
But in any case, the cool thing about this, this demonstrated something.
That's crazy!
Yeah, it's wild.
Heather, you and I and our family ran into tropic birds the first time on Isla de la Plata in Ecuador where some guides offered us a choice that we could not make heads or tails of where there were some Nazca boobies on one part of this island and there were what they called tropical birds Tropical birds.
Do you want to see the tropical birds?
If we wanted to see the the Nazca boobies or the tropical Nazca boobies being also tropical birds.
Right, every bird that is there is a tropical bird.
So we couldn't figure out what they were talking about but they seemed like the more exotic interesting thing would be The Tropical Birds, so we followed them to see the Tropical Birds, and it turned out it was Tropic Birds, which we had never seen before.
Now, I think, I believe I have only seen Tropic Birds twice.
Once on that excursion, and then here as we pulled in to Shroud Key, there were a number of them vocally interacting and chasing each other, and it was very dramatic, and I immediately, you know, I have learned painfully as a photographer that if you arrive someplace and suddenly you see some creature and you think, wow, while I'm here, I'm going to get pictures of those, you may not see them again.
And so anyway, I took the camera out and I started trying to capture it so that at least I wouldn't, you know, Walk away without anything.
Yeah, and anyway, it's a beautiful I think believe this is a female the males have an even longer train Yes, which raises really interesting questions about what the sexual selection regime is that both the males and females are ornamented with this long train But the males are longer So anyway, there it is Next photograph.
Yeah, you could also just have him pop up since you gave our amazing producer.
So these photographs, I haven't been through them.
I haven't corrected them.
This one obviously could use a little correction with these some turns.
Your photographs are beautiful.
Sorry for those of you just listening.
Yeah, you're just listening.
But anyway, here we have a pair of turns on a piling.
One of them descending and landing next to the other.
Actually, I got the whole sequence of the landing and it was pretty comical.
But yeah, it wasn't the most graceful landing I've seen.
They're kind of comical birds.
Yeah, they're pretty nice though.
It's like a fancy gull.
Yeah, totally.
All right, now Zach, can you show... I think the terns are sister to the gulls.
I'm pretty sure they're very close.
Oh no, not this one.
Stop that.
That one's last.
Oh no, it says that that one has to be last.
I will say, well, let's go.
Oh, this is a small, I'm sitting in a cell phone.
I'm sitting in a cell phone.
Anyway, I'm sitting in a cell phone.
I'm sitting in a cell phone.
So this was a compass key, where the arrows that were hanging on the door to one page of a book would close the other one to be able to use it with yourself.
Part of how they make a living for themselves is they have a marina, like they're a duck, and also they feed some research from the possible path.
It helps to send a good idea.
But they're doing things.
So, yeah.
So, I think it's awesome.
It's amazing.
Okay.
So, we're going to have to go through the front.
Okay.
So, we're going to have to go through the front.
So, we're going to have to go through the front.
We're going to have to stay there.
Um.
So, we're going to have to go through the front.
This is, when I asked Zach to hold to the last one, that is obviously a lionfish.
And a lionfish is obviously probably one of the most interesting fish in the wild.
It does not belong in the wild.
It's in a maze.
And I put it there to remind... You didn't put it there.
No, I didn't put it there.
You put the video here.
Yeah, so I did learn, actually, there was a...
Why aren't you still around?
I talked to her about the Lion Fiction and she told me that actually the Lion Fiction It was a lab leak.
basically all over the Caribbean.
It was.
They are in the Caribbean as the result of effectively an academic error.
They are...
But also, it was a lab leak.
It was a lab leak.
It was.
So apparently, with the help of a hurricane, a colony that was being studied had some escapees, and they're now all over the Caribbean, and they're...
It was, I don't want to cast aspersions here, but University of Florida Gainesville or something, right?
I don't know who it was, so I'm gonna hold off on that.
But somewhere in Florida had a colony that they were studying for some reason, and we have not pursued this story beyond what Nancy told us, but then a hurricane breached the colony.
And, you know, this is one of these terrible things that people do not intuit, which is There are some creatures that if they get out, they don't survive.
There are other creatures that'll survive, but they don't invade.
And then there is this third kind of creature that is so well adapted to the habitat that they find themselves in, that they actually outcompete the local fauna.
And there's no, it's not always fauna, but there is no good way of dealing with it.
And the number of stories where something has gotten out where it shouldn't and has effectively naturalized.
And then somebody has introduced some other thing to try to get rid of it.
You know, mongoose and mongooses in Hawaii and Jamaica, things like this.
And it just never works, right, for biological reasons.
They, you know, predator and prey cycle or whatever.
But anyway, the point is this.
Every time we now travel to one of these amazing places, it is both glorious and an absolute tragedy, right?
And this trip had this sort of bittersweet aspect to it.
Not only the lionfish, of which we only saw one, which is pretty good, but there was also this thing which we have now seen in so many places, especially in the Caribbean.
Which is every one of these absolutely spectacular beaches, at least on the ocean side, every single one of them is just filled with things that have washed up out of the ocean, right?
And we're talking about, you know, plastic carboys, flip-flops, I saw medical waste, And at some level, you know, I think A, it's interesting.
The people who go to these places, including us, have the reaction of like, oh my goodness, I tell you what, I'll bring a trash bag.
We'll at least do something, right?
And it's pointless, right?
The amount of material washing out of the ocean is so great that there's just no making a dent.
But, you know, everybody has this reaction of like, Oh my god, I can't believe it.
At least let me do something.
Right, I'm looking at one of the most beautiful vistas I've ever seen and it's compromised.
In order to take a picture that I want to look at again, I'm going to have to place myself very carefully.
You know, there's a tire there, you know, whatever it may be.
And so this is just a classic externality, right?
This is an externality of the way we live.
We have chosen materials that are cheap.
We have chosen to dispose of them in ways that result in them not being captured and dealt with appropriately.
Some of these materials are not permanent.
They will break apart.
The plastics are all breaking apart in the sun, but unfortunately we now know What they break apart into is microscopic dust which gets into all of our lungs and into all of the animals and, you know, things are differentially tolerant of it, but it's a tragedy.
We are effectively wrecking the planet and, you know, Because we'd never been to the Bahamas before, we are in no position to compare it to how it was.
And this is one of the questions we were asking each other, right?
What did this place look like a hundred years ago?
Right.
And we don't know.
We don't know.
And I don't know if that has been recorded.
Presumably it has somewhat, but... But the problem is that where we are in a position to compare, even over relatively short time spans, There is often a horror story hidden, right?
And so, you know, let's take the trash example.
Most of the places that we go are now compromised in this way, but you and I know a few places where this isn't true, right?
In the Amazon at Tipitini, for example, it is very rare that you encounter anything.
I believe the most prominent example of trash that had come in from the outside world is a piece of dimensional lumber that had lodged in the river, right?
That's pretty mild at that point.
Yeah, you don't... Upstream, you know, the source of the rivers in the Andes is not generating trash that is, at least, that's making it down to... Right, it's getting stuck somewhere else.
The Rio Tipitini or the Rio Chiropuno or the Navajo.
So, on the one hand, from the point of view of visual indicators, it seems more like it's untouched.
On the other hand, over the period of time you and I have been going there, which is At this point, nine years.
Nine years, not quite a decade.
We have seen certain kinds of animal life disappear and inexplicably in some cases.
It used to be that you could go out at night and you could reliably find caiman in the Tipitini River, right?
There's a trick.
You use a headlamp.
It's mounted on your head.
The animals look at you because you're emitting light and you can see the shine from their eyes and it was like It was relatively easy to find Caiman.
You could probably find 20 in an hour of boating.
Didn't see one last time.
That's pretty amazing.
Didn't see any?
Didn't see any.
I was looking for them.
And I was looking for them, you know, in part I was looking for them as a photographer, looking for, you know, I'd learned from the photographs I'd taken last time and I wanted a redo, right?
I want a rematch.
And just didn't see it, right?
That's amazing to see a spectacular, it's not like we saw half as many and we were wondering.
And that's not a, that's not a species that we would think of as being particularly fragile.
Right.
Why should it be?
Right?
It's a crocodilian.
It's a small crocodilian.
It's a small crocodilian.
It's pretty robust.
It's not going to be highly sensitive to slight changes in temperature of the river.
Probably what it means is that the things that it eats in the river, which are very likely to be fish, have crashed.
Right?
And that we don't see that because the river is muddy.
We can't see the fish, but we can see the caiman.
Yeah, the muddy, the Rio Tipitini, which is a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon, is what's called a whitewater river in the Amazon basin, of which there are whitewater rivers and blackwater rivers.
Whitewater doesn't mean the same thing as having a lot of rapids.
Whitewater refers to the amount of silt which is coming basically off of glacial melt.
The water is not clear.
It is the opposite of the water on the Bahamas, in fact.
And then Blackwater rivers are very dark from the tannins released by leaf fall from plants.
And in fact, neither here nor there, but where the Rio Negro and the Rio Amazon come together and then we name rivers...
I don't actually know that there's an established way that they get named.
I assume it's like whatever seems bigger or more important.
But anyway, once they come together, the Negro just gets assimilated into the Amazon.
But they literally run side by side for a while, and I was lucky enough to be there in, gosh, 2003, I guess.
And the Rio Negro is, as you would expect from the name of Blackwater River, the Amazon is a whitewater river.
And they literally, for like a couple of miles in Manaus, the city in Brazil where this happens, where the confluence of the Negro and the Amazon happened, they just run side by side.
There's nothing separate in them but water chemistry and temperature.
And then at some point you realize, oh, it's now just all one color, but it's extraordinary.
Aqueous apartheid.
I guess.
To put an absolutely obnoxious spin on it.
But okay, so the fact is, almost anywhere we go, if we do have any sort of a time series, we get the same story, which is things are not going in a good direction.
They are going so wrong, so quickly, that even, you know, it doesn't take a human lifespan to see the decline.
It takes less than a decade in many of these places.
And this happens On so many different fronts.
Now I have to say, the thing one always has to be careful about if you're scientifically minded, and if you just simply want to know what's happening in the world, is you've got to correct for the fact that it may be that you've heard horror stories about the world coming apart, and so you're sensitive to the stuff that you can no longer find where you were, but you're not sensitive to the stuff you can find there now that wasn't there to begin with.
Right?
And so the idea is, yeah, there's ebb and flow and maybe what you're really seeing is dynamism and you're just sensitive to the stuff that seems like it's gone.
Like loss aversion is causing you to misassess.
And there are some stories, you know, when we were kids, Bald Eagle, that was like a mythical creature.
Right?
Now, we didn't live in a place in Southern California.
Bald eagles would not have been common.
I don't think they would have been present at all.
However, they wouldn't have been common up north either, and now we see them all the time.
They're really common.
Yeah, I mean... We know where a few areas are just right here within a couple miles of our home in Portland.
Yeah, if you're sensitive to them so that, you know, you're assessing Every bird that flies over, if you can figure out what it is and you're looking for them, you'll see bald eagles.
It's relatively common.
And that is a direct result of our intervention, right, on their behalf.
And there are many stories like that.
Northern elephant seals were nearly extinct.
What did we do for them?
Well, we protected their rookery, and there must be a hunting story involved there.
It might actually just really be the beach, the rookery.
Sea otters were hunted, I think the population was below 80.
Yeah, I think you're right.
In the world left, Pacific sea otter.
And it rebounded beautifully and now it's on the decline again.
Is it?
Yeah, oh very much so.
They've gotten much harder to see.
So anyway, these stories, you know, there are some positive stories, there are some mixed stories, but in general the stories are all negative.
And the degree to which, when you and I started traveling to, you know, the Yucatan, for example, the degree to which you could go to a beach and it wasn't just covered in flotsam and jetsam, you know, it's not that there was none.
Right, but it has changed dramatically.
The oceans were noticeably cleaner, and you could tell that by what was flung up out of them onto the coasts.
Right, and if you think about the puzzle that this represents, like let's say, you know, A. And that would have been, that's 30 years ago.
That's when we started traveling.
So, I would argue people have a right, right, that it's hard to define how the right works.
But it's nobody's right to rob other people of the ability to emerge onto a beach and have it be natural, right?
It's not your right to throw stuff into the sea somewhere that destroys somebody else's beach.
And even people who live in these places, they don't get the benefit of having their own coastline.
You know, they may be impoverished and the one glory of their existence is that they happen to live in a beautiful place and the point is even that will be robbed.
From them it's it's it's it's a tragic state of affairs But if you think about what you would have to do if you just recognized yeah, actually we don't have the right to do that to anybody's beaches That means we have an obligation to control this stuff Right.
Well, then how would you even solve that?
Because the question is you would have to be really good at capturing this stuff everywhere right at the point that it was no longer useful it would have to be captured and The problem is that would jack the price up and so the point is it's far easier to ignore it.
It's a classic.
And some products shouldn't be allowed.
Just as the increase in bald eagles and other raptors is largely attributable to the regulation around DDT.
Right, because DDT is now understood to thin eggshells and birds at the top of the bird food chain are likely to get the most of it and so bioaccumulate it.
There are likely to be other products, not chemical in nature, but physical plastics and such.
Some kinds of products that actually shouldn't be made.
Oh, many, many products that shouldn't be made, and many products that should be made out of something else, and many products that should have a built-in cycle so that it's made but it is recaptured, right?
There are a lot of ways to address this, but the problem is people cannot wrap their mind
out of if you take as a given we don't have the right to lose control of these things and have them emerge on somebody else's beach right then you have to construct the world differently and nobody's up for that level of regulation and so it doesn't end up happening which means that we're just living one giant tragedy of the commons but even worse if you think about most people are not lucky enough to have the uh kind of access to these remote places that we've had yes
When people get access very often they get access in the context of you know, well, I'd like to go to Mexico and you know Here's a here's a resort right and the point is the resort will of course for its own selfish reasons hire local people for presumably too little money to keep the beaches clean of this stuff which would falsely give the impression that this is a beautiful tropical beach and not that it is an exceptional beach that's the result of high vigilance etc
And so people people get the wrong impression and then because everybody wants to take nobody wants to I mean, you know, look I'm a photographer.
I was thinking about the trash this whole trip And I was thinking I should be documenting this and there was a part of me that just couldn't bring myself to do it Right, I couldn't make myself do it I didn't want to accept that it was that real and so I don't have those pictures Right, even though I I felt obligated to take them.
I just I didn't live up to my obligation and There's something very important here, and this is a theme that we should come back to, but something that I think you too, but I certainly used to always spend time in my teaching on around the concept of ecotourism, where ecotourism appeals to people who think that they care about nature and the environment and are making green decisions.
And I ended up, you know, quite by accident, sort of in deep with some ecotourism politics as a result of my very first field research where, you know the story, but I was, we were, we were in Costa Rica with four of the graduate students and our professor for the summer.
And he was basically doing a field course for us for the first five or six weeks.
And then we were to do our first research before, presenting that as part of our qualifying exams to get to the next stage in graduate school.
And I went down to Costa Rica with a hypothesis that I had generated in Madagascar around monkeys preferring fruit trees that have been cultivated and planted by humans to the wild fruits because monkeys would have similar aversions to secondary compounds as we do, right?
I was pretty pleased with it.
I generated it by watching what crowned lemurs in Madagascar prefer tamarind, which is an import from India to all of the local trees.
And we were at this little tiny field station in Sarapiqui, not La Selva, the big one, but a little tiny one called Silva Verde.
Silva Verde?
No, Sola Verde was the name of the ecotourist lodge.
Yeah.
It was called... Bahooko.
Bahooko.
Bahooko, meaning vine, right?
Or liana, anyway.
We were at this field station, which is where we had decided that we would be doing our research, and I just couldn't find the monkeys.
Couldn't find the monkeys at all.
They weren't there, and I'd go out, you know, every morning, you know, with Don, and at dawn... Don wasn't with us at the time.
At dawn... Also called in sick for work.
Also called in sick for work.
Couldn't take the humidity.
I was out there for many hours every day, slogging through the mud, and never found the monkeys.
They were just MIA.
But what I did happen upon were some poison dart frogs, which was my introduction to them.
I had no previous experience with them, so I was called dart poison frogs.
And it included a species that wasn't supposed to be there, that I didn't know that at first, but I started talking to you and the other graduate students and our professor, and it became clear, like, there's this one species I'm seeing, what was then called Dendrobates auratus, it's still auratus, which is a big black and green job, which is, you know, much larger than the native pomelio, a blue-jeans frog with bright blue legs and a red back and sort of a
Some dark, dark arms.
Aratus, as it turns out, had been introduced by this local ecotourist lodge.
Why?
Why would a place that is trying to attract tourists, mostly gringos from the U.S., to come and supposedly enjoy intact, undisturbed, lowland tropical rainforest, also known as jungle, in Costa Rica, why would they introduce a species of frog?
And they didn't introduce it from very far away.
They introduced it from, I think, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, if memory serves.
But it was bigger, it was brighter, a little easier to see than the native congener, than the native close relative.
And you bring in a bigger version of the organism that's already there, and maybe it would work out.
In this case, it didn't, though.
And so my very first research ended up being documenting the way in which Aratus, the introduced by a supposed ecotourist lodge species, was actually driving extinct, locally extinct, Pamelia, the blue-jeans frog.
And, you know, for why?
Who wins as a result of that?
A few American tourists, presumably, who had no idea what had been done on their behalf, presumably wouldn't have signed off on it if they had known, got access to another photo opportunity they might not have had, and saw a frog in a place that it had no business being, and that frog was responsible for driving a local species extinct.
Okay, let's be fair about this.
There's a lot of stuff, so I agree with you.
It's a tragedy that Aratus was introduced in Sarepaki.
For one thing, we know exactly what it is that it drives at, right?
It's a direct competitor for Pamelio, and that makes it an obvious tragedy.
If we take the situation on San Juan Island.
On San Juan Island, San Juan Island has a couple of hazards to navigation that have lighthouses on them.
Back before these were inhabited islands, the lighthouse keeper needed to tend to the lighthouse in order that ships didn't get wrecked.
In order to feed the lighthouse keeper, rabbits were released.
This is a brilliant strategy if you think about it.
You release rabbits and you hunt them as needed.
And the rabbits got out of control.
They stay fresh that way.
They do stay fresh that way.
Rabbits got out of control, predictably enough, so foxes were brought in, right?
Now the foxes are an utterly delightful feature of this landscape, and it's not obvious to me that the net impact of that sequence was terrible, right?
It may be that the things... A. These were islands.
They may have actually had empty niches because dispersal prevents certain things from getting to the island.
So it may be that there's no huge downside in terms of some creature that was eliminated by either the rabbits or the foxes.
I've never heard the analysis of what the rabbits displaced.
Right.
I don't know the answer.
I don't know that it is known or if in fact it's possible they did not displace.
Right.
They may not have.
Yes.
Right.
There are just simply things missing from these islands.
Which we know, because even the islands don't have the same stuff on them.
They have a grab bag of different critters.
So just, you didn't specify, although many people will be familiar, San Juan Island is the eponymous island in the San Juan Archipelago, which is in the far northwest corner of the continental of the lower 48 United States, part of the same archipelago that continues into Canada, which are called the Gulf Islands, and which also includes the massive island that is Vancouver Island.
Right.
And they are a lovely place, and I think foxes are only on San Juan Island.
I believe that's right.
But in any case, the point is, you can be damn sure, biologically speaking, at least on the mainland, if you introduce a critter, it comes at a cost to other critters.
It may drive them to extinction, it may compete with them in some way that reduces, you know, reduces their niche size.
It's not always a tragedy, but you're rolling the dice every time you do that.
And the problem is that many things that seem very normal, even some things that we now worry will go extinct, came that way, right?
Like our honeybees.
Our honeybees are Asian, right?
They're not supposed to be here.
They're now so thoroughly naturalized and so long ago that we treat... They're Asian?
Yeah, Asian honeybees.
In fact, I didn't tell you this.
I wish I had the video handy.
In fact, I may send it to Zach and see if he can show it.
I was...
Our cars got absolutely devastated by the pollen that came off the trees in the last few weeks, and I took the car to the car wash.
Yes.
As I got out of the car wash, I was at the intersection just leaving, and the honeybee, I think they were honeybees, were swarming.
Thousands of them.
I've never seen anything like it.
Really?
And with no explanation.
I think it must have been somebody's hive I've heard that this happens if you raise honeybees, that a swarm can take off on you and it can go somewhere.
But anyway, it was a very... I was glad the windows were up.
None of this makes any sense.
But I can prove it because it was... You could prove that you found yourself in a swarm of honeybees in late April in Portland.
I can't prove the rest of it, but I can prove that much.
Say what?
It was above Interstate 5.
I'm not sure why that's relevant.
So are you sure we want to be doing this right now?
Well, I don't know.
Probably not.
But anyway, so let's finish out this theme.
The point really is, this is a beautiful planet.
Full of the most glorious stuff.
And I don't care if you think Mars is a good idea.
I don't care if you think we're gonna, you know, cross the galaxy and find cool, amazing other places.
This is always going to be our best bet.
And it ain't forever.
Humanity will ultimately go extinct and the planet will ultimately fail.
But it is so insane to allow a planet that is This marvelous to be degraded so rapidly that an individual can detect it over the course of a small fraction of their life.
That is an amazing rate of devastation.
Indeed.
And, you know, it can't be defended.
And I guess I guess I feel like, you know, because we are in the fraction of the small fraction of people who are lucky enough to be able to go to some of these places that we have some Rather profound obligation to convey both the marvelousness of it and the tragedy so that, you know, both can be seen in parallax.
Indeed.
I agree.
I'm just going to finish with one sentence from this paper, Yarlet et al.
2021, called Quantifying Production Rates and Size Fractions of Parrotfish-Derived Sediment, a Key Functional Role on Maldivian Coral Reefs.
So this is not the Caribbean.
The Maldives are in the Indian Ocean.
South of India.
But this, yes, it's in science language, but this struck me because one of the things that we were doing, one of the things that I wrote about in my sub stack this week, was really trying to figure out, like, where are these islands from?
Like, what made these islands, right?
And so these authors, Yarlet et al., In the journal Ecology and Evolution, write, Reef sediment production can result from physical, mechanical disturbance by waves and storms, and chemical, oooid formation, as well as biological, scraping, excavating, etching, boring, and endogenous production by reef organisms, processes.
That's just a perfect encapsulation.
So we've got physical, chemical, and biological methods by which Landform is created in these low-lying islands, and reef sediment production in particular.
I doubt this is an actually complete, complete list, but it's a really nice categorization scheme, and it's sort of the kind of way of thinking about it that we were trying to derive from our own heads while we were down there, and I decided not to pursue anything in the literature until after I'd published this thing.
on subset basically to demonstrate like look you can you can end up knowing a lot and you may not end up knowing everything that humans know if you rely on your own brain and the brains of others and you don't Google it but you will end up being better equipped to try to figure things out in the future if you try to figure it out for yourself or with other people as opposed to using your fingers to to Google it.
Yeah, and in fact this particular Archipelago is a marvelous example of just how complex these explanations are because even just a brief snapshot as soon as you realize that the sand is isn't really rock, right?
The sand is coral skeleton ground up by fish in pursuit of algae.
And the sand moves around based on the currents and therefore it can accumulate in places.
And where it accumulates and it can become shallow enough, you have these plants that are basically putting a toe in the water and they're marching.
They're accumulating.
The mangroves.
Yeah, they're stabilizing this And that's the shorter term processes, right?
Yeah, and the mangrove roots trap the sediment.
Right, and so you can sort of see how the whole thing is sort of growing and moving, and it's only because our lives are so short that you don't really intuit that.
It's a little like that.
And that's the shorter-term processes, right?
Like you go back hundreds of millions of years, and you've got the accumulation of all the skeletons of all the shelled organisms and the corals into limestone, which is compressed dead stuff.
Yep.
Yeah.
And yeah, so you have basically Some sort of fractal And maybe it isn't really fractal because the point is the longer somewhat different processes.
Yeah, so you get some scale dependence But nonetheless you do get a very different sense.
It's not like You know and then God made the rocks and then he made the critters and the critters sit on the rocks and they make some soil No, you know, they're making the landforms.
No, and I think that was actually one of the one of the revelations I had down there where I was, you know, we're walking around They're so low-lying, and I feel like I know from past knowledge that many of the Caribbean islands are volcanic, but man do these not feel volcanic.
And as it turns out, I think I'm right.
They're not, yeah.
It's not volcanism that formed these, it's some much more ancient tectonic stuff.
It's added to an ongoing process right up until today and tomorrow and the next day with regard to sediment trapping by mangroves and ancient things with pressure and time being turned into limestone and sandstones and parrotfish scraping algae off coral and pooping it out of sand.
Extraordinary.
It is really marvelous.
While we were down there, the mask mandates lifted for transportation, and we flew down in masks.
And when we came back to the airport last Saturday in the Bahamas, the airport in the Bahamas was still saying masks required.
Okay, well, that's unfortunate.
And we as I was ahead of you guys on the jetway.
That's the word for it, right?
The jetway is the walk.
Yeah, on the jetway.
And there was space between me and the people in front of me.
So I'm sort of all alone, like walking down the jetway.
And there was a stewardess ahead of me.
Without a mask on.
And we haven't traveled much in the last years.
We've traveled some, and I haven't seen anyone without a mask on a plane in forever.
And the people... it looked like the people who were just disappearing around the corner in front of me, who I didn't get a good look at, still had their masks on.
I hadn't taken them off.
But as I got closer to her, I sort of did like...
Take this off.
And she just beamed.
She was so happy.
She said, yes, take it off.
We're free.
We could do this.
And I was like, awesome.
We got someone who's actually really enthusiastic about this.
And on a different flight, we had someone who wasn't enthusiastic about it.
And they made a point of saying, Basically, don't judge.
You know, you're allowed to judge when everyone has to wear them, but now that you don't have to wear them, don't judge!
Everyone has their own decisions to make.
Fine, I guess.
But I will say that I ran into, I ran into because I looked for it, this piece.
That's wrong.
Hold on, Zach.
Don't don't do this yet.
This piece, yes, now you can show.
In Washington Post, the headline for which is, Justice Department to appeal mask mandate ruling if CDC says it's needed.
The department said it would defer to the CDC's assessment of health conditions before filing any appeal.
So if I may have my screen back here, there's a line in this article That is, the abrupt end of the mandate left little time for airports, federal agencies, such as the Transportation Security Administration, which was charged with enforcing the mandate, and transit systems to prepare.
And my first response was, are you kidding me?
Like, little time to prepare for the lifting of a mandate?
People can just take off their masks and that's not so hard.
Yeah, stop mandating it.
Stop mandating it, right?
And then, you know, a couple paragraphs into the piece, they're talking about signage.
I'm like, okay, sure, they're gonna have to change up the signage again.
Like, first off, just invest in a bunch of removable stickers that say, you know, masks optional.
Just slap them on all the signs, but whatever.
I'm glad I'm not in charge of this.
But, okay, signage is Kind of an issue, but seriously, that's the best argument they're coming up with.
Well, but this happened so fast.
But then, as we're, so we ended up with a layover in Dallas, and get off the plane in Dallas, and no one's wearing masks, of course, in the Dallas airport, but there's still all the signs are up.
Still all the signs are up that say mask are mandatory, and no one's wearing masks, because they don't have to, because the signs are out of date.
And the happy thought that I had, which may be exactly why, you know, WAPO, on behalf of the Transportation Security Administration and airports and federal agencies and all, are concerned here, is that people walking around in open defiance of the signage, because they actually know that the signage is out of date, may make them more ash negative, may make them more likely to say, hey, you know what, actually, I don't need to comply.
compliance is last week's news and now that I've seen what not compliance looks like maybe I'm more likely to resist bad orders going forward yeah it is a kind of a happy thought on the other hand the whole point is we've got captured governance right What it wants us to do, I don't want us to do, right?
It's up to something and I don't want to comply.
On the other hand, I don't want a world of people who are not compliant.
I want us to have, you know, Really high quality, light-handed regulation.
No more than is necessary to accomplish the job and done in a way that it is, you know, interferes as little as possible with freedoms of really any kind to leave people as free to do what they would choose to do as possible, right?
That's the ideal.
Which means that at the point that you have a non-captured I'm actually reminded, maybe summer of 2020, maybe a little later than that, I was in a text conversation with a friend of ours from grad school who's been living in Sweden for a very long time.
And at that point, a lot of people were like, what is Sweden doing?
What is going on there?
And then, as it turns out, Sweden had an effective approach.
And I asked our friend, what were they thinking?
Early on, when the US and the rest of the weird world were putting really strict requirements in place for people, Sweden was doing quite the opposite, and it seemed really not what most people who have, at least like me, like a cartoon version of what Sweden might do in their head, seemed like the last thing I would have expected them to do.
And she said, our friend Jen said, Well, the people of Sweden, in her experience, actually really do have a good relationship with their government, because the government does not hand down dictates very often.
And the government doesn't do that very often, such that the goodwill of the people is so intact that if they ever find that they have to, there will be Jennifer's position was nearly 100% positive response.
Like, okay, if the government is actually telling us now that we have to do this, then we should do this.
But that's because they reserve it, that they don't act quickly, they don't act stupidly.
And sure, there will be mistakes, but they err on the side of not imposing restrictions and lockdowns and such on people.
They prefer that error, which preserves the goodwill of the people and the relationship between the people and the government.
To the opposite error, which is what most of the rest of the weird world engaged in.
Yeah, it's sort of a second-order value, right?
That we, you know, we think in terms of preventing disease or failing to prevent disease or, you know, things like that.
But there's this other question, which is the integrity of the system that is trying to protect you from disease.
That is actually fundamental, and you ought to move very cautiously so as to not burn its credibility, which is what they've now done in multiple directions by flip-flopping on everything as You know, frankly, people like us have embarrassed them into acknowledging things or courts have forced them to lift, you know, mandates they apparently did not have the authority to impose.
But, you know, if we can connect these two things, we've got an authoritarian force that wants to mandate all kinds of things.
It has no business mandating.
And in many cases that, you know, even somebody with a passing knowledge of the facts can tell don't make any sense.
Right?
A mask mandate.
Well, if you mandated N95 masks, then maybe your mandate is about something epidemiological.
But if your point is cover your mouth with a cloth or whatever, we now know that that doesn't make any sense, right?
Your mandate is not about epidemiology.
It's about symbolism.
So that's a horrifying abuse of authority.
But we need something with authority, something that actually gives a damn.
To frankly engage in the treaty making and the alteration of the processes that we have in order that, you know, our grandchildren can actually emerge onto a beach and not see a sea of flotsam, right?
So, the point is the authority, it's not like the need for it has gone anywhere, but it's just being used for all the wrong things.
Indeed.
Actually, I think that's a decent segue, although it won't sound like it immediately, to talking about a couple things that have happened in the White House of late.
So let me just start with, this is from actually a couple weeks ago.
Zach, were you able to pull up the video from the tweet that I sent you?
Okay, you want to show this?
It's just about 50 seconds or so.
Okay, so this is Jen Psaki.
here we go.
This is John Pisaki spinning wildly.
Okay.
That's fine.
I have the quote.
It's fine.
No, we're good.
So this is just a little snippet of CNN footage from a few weeks ago.
I think it's early April.
And the relevant quotation from her is, every major medical organization agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is the best practice and potentially life-saving.
Wow.
Holy moly.
Holy moly.
That's not true.
No.
It may be true that every major medical organization has stated that this is the case.
Right.
But then every major medical organization is wrong.
Wrong.
And we ought, at this moment of all moments in history, Be able to say, huh, have there been any other instances where every major medical organization has been wrong, giving advice that was dangerous and ridiculous and alarmist and terrible for huge swaths of society, if not the entire society?
Yeah, let's think.
Let's think, let's think.
Possibly, at this moment, as horrifying as this is, and this is why, you know, the happy thought from the signage in the airports is, maybe people will become more ash negative, maybe people will become less compliant, is at this moment, the authorities are so bad at what we have been told they're trying to do, or maybe they're very, very good at what they're actually trying to do, and that seems kind of more likely.
But if every major medical organization is agreeing about something so patently and obviously wrong, That affirming a child's statement that they are born in the wrong body and therefore you should allow them to do anything that's down that path?
These incredibly invasive, fertility-killing, soul-killing interventions that are totally modern and have nothing to do with the very few trans people that have existed throughout history?
Well, if every major medical organization is advising that, then really why are we listening to them on anything?
Yeah.
Why are we listening to them on any subject whatsoever if what Pisaki said is true, and that they all say yes?
Affirmative therapy.
Affirmative care.
Whatever the language is.
Affirmative just means you say yes when your child claims X. Anything?
Really?
He's a turtle?
He's Spider-Man?
Really?
No!
Yeah, no.
Were there any reality to this whatsoever?
Right?
The fact that that is not what every medical organization would have said ten years ago.
Or five years ago!
It's so fast!
It's crazy!
Okay.
There are times when suddenly we all wake up to some reality that's so well demonstrated and important that it, you know, it spreads horizontally across society and we all come to the realization, you know, that this is caused by that or whatever.
Okay, if that was what happened, then there would be a result somewhere that we could all scrutinize.
And we could talk about it here on the Dark Horse Podcast, and you would be able to hear us evaluate whether this result actually, you know, whether the experiment was well-structured, whether or not the statistics reflect the actual result that's, you know, portrayed in the title and all.
But the point is, there is nothing.
This is just, it's a contagious belief.
That has apparently apparently contagious belief is now what medical advice is based on right and that is A jaw-dropping recognition that that is what we are now doing in order to figure out how to treat You know, yes, geez, who is it again children, right?
We're now treating children based on you know, who famously live in fantasy scapes right, exactly it was the uh The woke trans activists who made this medical discovery, which was done so compellingly, their experimentation was so rigorous that their conclusion could not be ignored and has now spread into medicine.
That's what happened.
That's what happened.
Lived experience experimentation.
Right.
Except we can't talk about people who transitioned and then realized they didn't want to and transitioned back.
That's forbidden.
That's somehow transphobic.
You're killing them if you do so.
Right.
So anyway, I guess the point is, look, there's just no, there's no way to take all of the things that would have to be true in order for this to be legitimate and to find them.
And in their absence, then the question is, well, then what the hell are we doing?
What the hell are we doing?
And how can anyone, anyone with a straight face get up in front of the world and say, what you have to do is affirm the child, no matter what they say, if it has to do with their deep understanding of, of sex if it has to do with their deep understanding of, of sex and whether or not they were born in the and
As many children don't know what it means to be a boy or a girl.
Right?
Well, how would you?
I mean, of course, infants don't.
You know, there's some moment at which it comes to sort of dawn on you, and this is part of the reason that there is such a... kerfuffle is minimizing it, but such an important discussion that is being had around, you know, sex ed for kindergarten through third graders?
Like, no!
No, actually, because it's too young.
Because children shouldn't be exposed to that then.
Well, it's also sleight of hand in the following sense, right?
Now, as we've said every time we've talked about this, there are trans people.
We should treat them with respect.
They are deserving of respect.
It's not an easy path to follow.
Well, in order to treat them with respect, surely we're going to have to educate the kids that there are such people, right?
And then, what we're going to do is we're going to say to small children who have no way to calibrate what we're saying, you know, some people are born in the wrong body, right?
And children are going to think, I wonder if I was born in the wrong body?
A thought that might not have occurred to them otherwise, right?
And it's a little bit like if I said, you know, if I took a three-year-old Five-year-old, seven-year-old, and I said, you know, some people are colorblind and see the world differently than you do.
Or maybe you are one of them, right?
Then the question is instantly, gee, I wonder if I see the same colors as everyone else and how would I know?
And doesn't that lead to a deep philosophical question?
How does one know if my yellow is your yellow, you know?
This kind of thing.
The point is that questioning is totally normal.
And what is it spurred by?
It's spurred by adults saying weird things to you like, you know, some people are born in the wrong body, right?
Which is just... So anyway, the point is the thin end of the wedge is in order to protect some among us who we all agree deserve protection, We have to be sensitive to the fact that they exist so then we're going to tell children that they exist and we're not going to give them a sense of just how rare it is because of course if you say it's rare Then maybe the lesson of you should treat these people with respect won't stick.
So you have to pretend it's very, very common, right?
And once you pretend it is very, very common, the child can't help but wonder.
And then you're, you know, you're in some sort of medical malpractice situation if you fail to validate the child wondering one day on the basis of what you told them that they too might be born in the wrong body.
No, and I made this argument here a while back, and then I also wrote about it on my sub stack.
I'll put it in the show notes.
Which error do we prefer to make, right?
Which of the two types of errors do we prefer to make?
Do we prefer to make sure that no actual trans person has ever been delayed in their ability to transition, which would cause them to be somewhat less good at passing as the opposite sex as an adult, recognizing that trans people are exceedingly rare.
Or, do we prefer not to allow legions of children to potentially get, and actually get, Fertility-stopping, soul-killing, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and in the worst cases, surgery, that will change them forever, from which they can never fully come back.
Which of these things do we prefer?
We prefer zero.
We'll be the answer of the unnuanced, uncritical, illogical people on the trans activist side.
Well, of course we can't have any of these mistakes.
Sorry, no.
You live in a land of trade-offs.
There's no escaping them.
You have to have one or the other of these errors that you slightly prefer to make.
And I know which one I prefer to make.
I prefer not to put all the children who aren't trans at risk, which is the vast majority of them.
Right, and the irony is that you can tell that this is part of the epidemic of sophistry from the fact that we are having to make an argument that is really as basic as, you know what?
Being a parent isn't simple, but this is the job, is figuring what is in your child's interest because they can't do it yet.
Yeah.
They don't know.
And it's becoming so much harder for parents.
I mean, gosh, the stories I hear from people and I haven't even responded to everyone at this point, and I just don't even know what to say.
But the parents who I hear from who have their children coming to them and declaring that they are the opposite sex, and these are parents who know what's what, and they know their kids.
And they're not transphobes, and they're not bigots, and they're not Nazis, and they're none of those things.
These are good, honest people who love their children deeply, and they are fighting against the current that is coming at these children in the schools, and in the media, and in the everything.
Yeah.
And in the doctor's office.
And in the doctor's office.
From the healthcare professionals, from the so-called educators, from the so-called healthcare professionals, and the so-called educators, and from the so-called journalists.
Yeah.
All of whom are doing a propaganda job, and it's destroying children.
And how dare they?
Right.
And why, you know...
Let's put it this way.
There is a reason that at least until five minutes ago, and for some of us continuing right through this very instant, we detest pedophiles, right?
There's a reason and it is because they are a threat to children.
They will destroy the lives of children if they are allowed to do what they want to do, right?
And so the point is, okay, we have certain rights, right?
If somebody is trying to molest your child, you have actually extraordinary rights to protect that child.
If the somebody who's trying to destroy your child is a confused teacher or doctor or bureaucrat, You have no such rights.
Because what they're telling you is that actually we are acting in your child's interest and you've lost track of what it is.
And we may in fact take your parental rights.
Right.
And, you know, we are marching ever further in that direction.
Again, it's like, look, at what point do you hear yourself trying, struggling to make an argument that actually these people don't have the right to interfere with my child's future fertility, right?
Why am I even having to make that argument?
Why would I ever have to make that argument?
Isn't that self-evident?
Maybe it's the sophistry.
Maybe the sophistry has gotten to this topic too, right?
You think?
Right.
And so I guess that's what I want, is I want just like an emblem, a flag, something I can hold up at the point that the sophistry has reached the next argument.
I don't want to have to argue it again.
I just want to say, ah, it's happened again.
The contagion has gotten here as well.
Darn.
Sophistry foul.
Yep.
I can't imagine that we're going to solve this in English now because the sophists have arrived.
You know, that sort of thing.
Yep.
All right.
We're gonna have to work something up for that.
Okay.
You want to talk about Elon, Twitter, Lefty Meltdown, Biden Administration, Department of Homeland Security.
Those are the keywords I have written down here.
I'll try to streamline a little bit because we're pretty deeply into this.
We really are.
It's late now.
It's dinnertime.
It's after dinnertime for everyone listening live unless you're in Hawaii or Australia.
It has been very interesting to watch Elon so far do exactly what he suggested he was going to do apparently for the reason that he suggested he was going to do it and to watch all of the people on the blue team freak the fuck out about this guy who actually figured out how to put electric cars on the road in a way that we are all encountering them and driving them and charging them and all of the things that we do.
I mean right it's like How dare he?
It's not the most Hitlerian move I've ever seen, right?
Maybe he's just really bad at it.
Yeah.
We have to be on the lookout for Hitlers that are bad at it as well.
Crypto-Hitlers.
Yeah, and you know, Hitler wasn't a subtle guy.
No.
In any case, it's very interesting to watch people freak out and project all kinds of things onto this, which, you know, I admit it could just be a business thing, but I really don't think this is just a business thing.
I think Elon, who frankly is a user of Twitter, more than most of us, right, actually has innovated his own mechanism.
He's pushed the limits of edgelording and whatever it is that he does on Twitter, and he's done it artfully.
He actually likes the place, and frankly, I think he's just pissed off on a lot of our behalf, and the behalf of many of the departed, and, you know, by whom I mean Megan Murphy.
But anyway, so far, I'm enjoying watching Elon do what Elon said Elon was going to do and watch it turn the world inside out.
I think that's pretty good stuff.
But at the same time, you watch the other side on the march and it's actually quite revealing of what they've been about and what we've, you know, inferred that they are about from their behavior over the last several years.
Right?
So we have, you know, the White House making noises about finally doing something about Section 230, right?
You know, as Elon is threatening to create a free speech platform, the White House is threatening to make platforms responsible for the content that their users put on and things like this.
So that's an interesting maneuver.
And also at the same time, We find the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security, the Biden administration appointing a disinformation czar, right?
It's like they did everything except label it the Ministry for Truth, right?
They did everything.
It's the same idea, right?
It's obviously intended to shape discourse, not to purify it of incorrect ideas, which is impossible, of course.
But it is clearly designed to police those of us who would dare critique the official narrative.
And in fact, even their staffing of the thing, the person they put in charge whose name – Zach, could you put up the article I had here?
All right.
Could you put it where we can read it?
Yeah, here we go.
Yeah, scroll down a little bit.
All right, so you want to read a couple paragraphs here.
You want me to start?
Yeah.
Okay.
Is Team Biden no longer even trying to avoid being a laughingstock?
Wait, what am I reading?
This is the New York Post.
New York Post, okay.
Is Team Biden no longer even trying to avoid being a laughingstock?
Why did Biden just appoint a champion of the Hunter Biden laptop cover-up to serve as chief of his new ministry of truth?
Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, probably butchering that name, I apologize, announced that his agency is creating a quote, disinformation governance board.
Given the Biden record, it is unclear whether the new board will be fighting or promulgating disinformation.
Nina Jankowicz, the head of the new board, is a Bryn Mawr graduate who worked for the National Democratic Institute, which is heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which spurred perennial controversy for interfering in foreign elections.
All right.
So here we have somebody who has We're back.
Here we have somebody who has promulgated actual disinformation, who has advanced the idea that Hunter Biden's laptop was the result of a Russian disinformation campaign rather than the result of a drug addict stupidly leaving his laptop at a repair shop and its embarrassing and illegal content spilling into the world.
Right?
So, is this person really in a position to tell anybody what is and is not disinformation?
What's more?
The agency in question, the DHS.
The DHS has defined malinformation, which we have mocked here on this very channel, malinformation being things that are based in truth that make you distrust your government, right?
So, do we want this... Or that are bad for the other messaging of the government.
Right.
The point is, it's terrorism.
Malinformation, that is, things that are based on truth that cause you to distrust your government.
That is a form of terrorism, according to the DHS, which has now this new disinformation controlling branch headed by this person who has promoted at least incorrect ideas.
And the fact is, During the election.
During the presidential election of 2020?
The 2020 presidential election.
Okay.
I actually was very concerned about Hunter Biden's laptop and I was very concerned about Twitter throwing the New York Post off for For reporting on the story, right?
A story which turned out to be true in the end.
I was also very concerned about the state of mental decline of our president, right?
Our now president.
Our now president.
And I was told on both of these fronts that This was some kind of disinformation, right, that we were being manipulated by some force that wanted us to believe that Biden was compromised, both as a matter of corruption and as a matter of mental decline.
And, you know, it hasn't taken long.
And I will remind people, I've been very good at predicting things.
One of the things I got really, really, really wrong was I predicted that Biden would not actually take office.
And the reason I predicted that, as I think I mentioned last week, Is that I did not believe that the Democratic Party could be so stupid and so craven as to allow somebody in this obvious state of decline to take this office in which he would have, for example, control over our nuclear arsenal, right?
In which he would be, you know, for example, in a position to manage a pandemic, right?
The idea of taking somebody Who is experiencing obvious senility and putting them in such a role is insane.
I didn't think even the Democrats were up to it and yet apparently they are.
And so actually on that second point, Zach, do you want to put up that video I sent you?
- You got that video? - Do you wanna say some things while he's doing that?
Here we go.
We're going to seize the the ill-begotten gains of Putin's kleptocracy.
The guys who are the kleptocracies.
Did you get through it?
We're going to seize their yachts.
All right.
So in that video, which you and I could not hear as I was having it played, the president stumbles through a statement about effectively some bluster about going after Putin and the other kleptocrats in Russia.
There are multiple errors and he never comes up with the term kleptocracy or he does come up with it but can't figure out that it's the right word to place in the sentence.
No doubt had it stolen from him.
*laughs* Probably, yeah.
But, alright.
We're stuck in one of two unacceptable worlds.
We are either in a world where we have a nuclear nation having invaded its neighbor, right, in which nuclear weapons could be in play.
And President Biden, in this confused, compromised state of mental decline, might actually be in charge of whether or not we respond to something that shows up on NORAD's radar with, you know, nuclear retaliation or maybe something that would nuclear retaliation or maybe something that would show up on their radar would be a mistake and President Biden would take somebody too seriously who thought it was real, Who knows?
The point is, it would be the height of insanity to take a nation with weaponry as ferocious as ours and to put it in the hands of somebody who is obviously, obviously in decline.
And my point further would be He's obviously in decline now.
Some of us could detect it during the election.
We weren't guessing.
It was apparent then, and what that means is if we can all see it now, the people who were in charge of his candidacy saw it then, and they allowed this to happen anyway.
So, here are the two worlds we live in.
That guy in that state is in charge of our nuclear arsenal and also in charge of whether or not to create a ministry of truth, right?
Is that who decided to make the ministry of truth?
Do we believe that he understands the implications of such a thing?
Or here's the other universe we might be living in.
Maybe he's not really in charge, right?
And maybe, yes, they're losing control of his ability to deliver a long enough speech that he's not an embarrassment to himself and to the country.
But then, who is in charge?
Right?
Now, we've got a question of, is this a coup?
Right?
Is somebody who's actually mentally competent in charge of all the things you would want a mentally competent person to be in charge of?
In which case, who is it?
Right?
Accountability, our entire structure, our governmental constitutional structure, depends on our knowing who it is.
Right?
This can't be some unelected, nameless person behind the scenes.
So... Transparency is paramount.
Right.
I guess my point would be, neither of these things is the least bit acceptable.
And this did not happen by accident.
It wasn't invisible.
In fact, the very fact that his mental decline was not widely, widely discussed on all sides during the election Had to do with the intimidation of people who did discuss it.
I was one of them.
I remember what happened when you talked about it.
So, you know, do we really want a Ministry of Truth deciding who gets to say what and acting on the basis that it believes that to say things that are out of step with this mainstream narrative might be terrorism?
I mean, this is all sounding quite dystopian and I don't think one has to be particularly imaginative to see it.
I agree.
So I guess that means even though it is the case that if you were to list All Americans and you were to rank order them in terms of how much I want to see them as president, Kamala Harris would be way down at the bottom of that list.
Not at the very bottom.
No, no, no, no.
There are people I want to see less than Kamala Harris, but not a lot of them.
That's what I'm saying, right?
Nonetheless, you've been in downtown Portland lately because I hear you.
I hear you.
It's tough.
But here's how bad this is.
As much as I do not trust Kamala Harris, the fact of having somebody who has lost his mental faculties in a position this important is so dangerous.
It's so dangerous that I believe actually the right thing, we should all agree on it, is Kamala Harris 2022.
you know Kamala Harris 2022 that's my point 2022 yeah as if it's a campaign well Well, I guess, you know... I think I just lost the plot.
Yeah, I think the point is, we have allowed maniacs to mismanage our system so badly that the only rational course of action is for Kamala Harris to ascend to the presidency.
And I don't, you know, let's put it this way, you don't know On what day the generals are going to wake up the president and say, look, let me explain to you what the situation is.
We have 15 minutes to figure out what to do next.
Right?
You don't know when that's going to happen.
We can't afford any nights in which the president is going to be awoken to answer a question as serious as do we launch nuclear weapons and have it be Joe Biden in his current condition.
Well, but, I mean, your two worlds question that you began with suggests strongly that we're not living in that world, right?
That we're not living in the world in which the current president by name is the one who would be asked.
Okay.
If that's the case, though, then how frightening is it for us to have just discovered that our nuclear arsenal is in the hands of somebody whose name we do not know?
Very.
I mean, I just don't, you know.
Yeah.
I guess the point is, if that's true, I'm still for Kamala Harris because actually, you know, the line of succession goes through her next.
And so, in order for there to be a nation that makes any sense at all based on the... It has to be her no matter how briefly.
Right, exactly.
And hopefully it would be very brief.
Yep.
Okay, can we just talk briefly about human footprints in Giant Sloth footprints?
I was hoping you would raise this issue.
Yeah.
Okay, you want to lead?
I do want to lead, but I don't know anything about this story, and so I'm not in a good position to do it.
Yeah, just two very, very brief... I mean, we're closing in on two hours here, and I gotta get on a plane tomorrow, so we're gonna close this up here.
Are you wearing your mask?
On the plane?
Yeah.
Or right now?
No, no.
Yeah, it's a very fancy mask that you can't see.
No, I'm not wearing my mask.
No, I was talking about your snorkeling mask.
Oh, on the plane?
Yeah.
I think that's the way to confront those mandates, to confuse them.
Yeah, totally.
It covers my nose and my eyes.
You didn't say what kind of a mask.
Yeah.
Okay, just two news stories from science this week.
You can put on my screen if you like, Zach.
Neither of these were published, thank you, in the journal Science, but Science does a thing where it sort of It scrapes other scientific journals and finds the stories it finds most interesting.
So here we have ancient human playground found inside sloth footprints.
Fossilized tracks of a giant ground sloth are stamped with tiny human feet.
Whoa.
I know!
So that's kind of the story.
So wait, let me see if I've got this.
So Giant Ground Sloth, which I have to tell you is a creature I've been fascinated with since I was a kid because they used to be, you know, La Brea Tar Pits.
I grew up right near there and Giant Ground Sloth was one of the creatures.
What I'm confused by is the term fossil.
It should be sub-fossil, right?
I'm sure.
Probably.
And actually, I really don't know much.
Can you give me my screen back here, Zach?
Let me see.
This is still unpublished work.
The slightly newer, the slightly more expansive version says 11,500 years ago.
So that's sub-fossil.
So that's sub-fossil, indeed.
So the distinction for those of you who are puzzling over it is Fossils are mineralized replacements for bones.
So if you have a bone that gets buried in some sediment then over a very long period of time the actual bone disappears and it is replaced by something in the shape of that bone that is basically rock.
In the case of things Very similar to what limestone... oh, maybe not.
No, there's not replacement there.
Never mind.
But in the case of somebody who died 15,000 years ago and fell into a tar pit, there's not been nearly enough time for that replacement.
So what you get is actual bone and things like that.
So in this case it's, you know, it's neither.
It's footprints.
But the period of time is short enough that bone would not have been replaced.
But anyway, the story is, here's a little glimpse into the ways that 11,500 years ago in New Mexico, children were playing in the puddles left by the footprints of a giant sloth.
Now here is the question.
Okay.
Were the adults in this child's group morally obligated to help this child transition into a giant ground sloth, since apparently the child, as it was maneuvering through the footprints, was probably imagining that he had been born into the wrong spot?
Yeah, I think this is probably the origin of the concept that those are really big shoes to fill.
Yeah.
And then probably what came up next was, well, sloths don't actually wear shoes as far as we know.
No, they don't.
But I think they could pull them off.
Not so well, because they don't have thumbs.
Okay, so that's one.
Hello, it's dinner time for Tesla.
And the second little bit of scientific, apolitical science story for this week is, and here again you can just show my screen briefly, Zach, is When it comes to scorpions, it's the small ones you need to watch out for.
Study confirms Indiana Jones line.
Bigger scorpions are indeed less deadly.
This does come out of a published piece of research which, so long as that's on my screen, I can't find for you guys.
Basically, it says what it says it says.
And the paper is just published, called Scorpion Species with Smaller Body Sizes and Narrower Chelae Have the Highest Venom Potency, published in the journal Toxins.
Chile being, I had to look this up, pinchers or claws at the end of appendages in arachnids or crustaceans.
And this paper has a distinction of beginning in the abstract with the following sentences.
The very first sentence in this paper, Scorpionism is a global health concern with an estimation of over 1 million annual envenomation cases.
Scorpionism.
Scorpionism.
That's not the term I would have thought.
Scorpionism.
But yes, so as Indiana Jones apparently said in one of the less popular Indiana Jones movies, it is the smaller ones that deliver the worst, not bite, but sting.
And the larger ones tend to be less dangerous.
Any analysis in there about why?
Not as far as I saw.
I only skimmed the paper that was actually in Toxins briefly, as I only found it just before we came live here, but I did not see that in my skimming.
It's one of those things, I'm going to guess, and if I am slandering the authors here I apologize, but this is one of these things where a Very provocative empirical result like this will result in very low quality adaptive speculation on the reason.
Some of which then gets written into the lore as if it was a fact.
Like, you know, baby rattlesnakes are more deadly because they haven't learned to control their venom.
Right.
Right.
Rather than there's a very good ecological reason why a smaller rattlesnake might be more likely to envenomate you.
Which I think is far more likely.
But anyway, you know, how would you even test that they haven't learned to control it yet?
I mean, it's not impossible, but it's difficult for sure.
You certainly can't use a questionnaire.
You can, at your own risk.
very very spotty data um no i don't think it's here oh well i'm not sure so I'm just trying to quickly, again, look over the actual paper, but at least on second quick pass, I don't see it here.
You don't see the adaptive explanation.
Alright, well, maybe that's for the best.
Perhaps.
But I'll post this.
The lead author is in the Venom Systems and Proteomics Lab at National University of Ireland, which I think that's great.
Venom Systems and Proteomics Lab.
Yeah.
It's a pretty awesome lab.
You don't want to cross those people, that would be my guess.
Yeah, no, very much so.
so let me just jump right to the bottom where they're often if they're going to be any adaptive explanations would be there um yeah it's a lot of not finding it No.
Okay.
All right.
Well, have we arrived?
I think that we have arrived.
So we are not going to do a Q&A today.
We'll be back here in six days, next Wednesday, midday our time, so noon-ish Pacific.
We will also not do a Q&A, but we will be back then four days after that for our normal Saturday.
Not this Saturday, but the following Saturday we will do a Q&A.
And in the meantime, look for, there'll probably be a guest episode of Dark Horse that comes out before we're back live streaming.
I believe there will be a guest episode that will emerge and there may be a live stream.
Keep your eye out for that.
Keep your eye out for that.
So maybe, without further ado, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.