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June 17, 2023 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:46:43
#178: Cheating as National Pastime (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)

*****Watch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2up8u5-bret-and-heather-178th-darkhorse-podcast-livestream.html***** In this 178th 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. Should men be competing in women’s sports? Do men who do so exhibit sophistry and cheating? What are the implications of Trump’s arraignment, and of the fact that MSNBC would not live broadcast his speec...

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Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 178.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying, and it's been a hell of a week, but it's always a hell of a week now.
It's just the way history has gone.
It is.
It is.
So we're going to talk some about sport today.
We're going to talk about the Trump arraignment some, I think, and we're going to talk about carnivorous plants, obviously.
I'm glad we're going to be talking about sport and carnivorous plants because there's no way those are political.
It gives us a chance to get out of the space in which things have a huge political dimension and talk about other things that people find interesting.
Yeah, well we are going to finish on carnivorous plants and I think I at least have, I've not gone looking, but I have not found the political angle on carnivorous plants.
Fingers crossed I won't find it before we get to that point in the podcast.
I have some concern that somebody will find a political dimension before we get to that segment.
Yeah, probably.
And somehow word will reach us and we'll get dragged in.
Yep, that's possible.
Well, we are streaming on Rumble.
That's where the chat is.
We're going to have a Q&A after this.
We encourage you to join us there only on Rumble.
And tomorrow we have our private Q&A that we do once monthly where you can find that Access at our Patreons.
We're going to talk more about some other places that you can find us and upcoming changes to our schedule.
We're actually going to come to you next Wednesday rather than Saturday, but we're going to be talking about that again at the end of this podcast for now.
I just want to thank you for being here, encourage you to like, subscribe, especially on the Rumble channel, etc.
And we're going to just jump right into our three ads right at the top of the hour.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
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All right, let's start Talking about sport.
All right.
Sport.
Yeah.
So this week in Natural Selections, I wrote in the place where I write weekly, and many people read what I write weekly, I wrote about yet another somewhat talented, but basically mediocre male athlete who's being allowed to compete as a woman, and he's beating the woman.
Because, um, because we are a species with, um...
with sexual dimorphism and we are sexually reproducing and have been uninterruptedly for at least 500 million years.
And those two things in combination mean that there are two sexes, only two sexes, you can't change between them.
And the male of the species in us and in mammals generally is a bit larger, a bit stronger, and you can't undo those things by taking cross-sex hormones later in life.
Or, indeed, by taking puberty blockers.
You can't undo the differences between the sexes.
You can suppress some of them, but you cannot undo them.
So, the title of my piece that I wrote about, this was in a bike race, a 134-mile, I think, bike race?
Yeah, brutal.
Over 40% of which is off-road.
There's a lot of single track.
There's rocks, there's sand, there's cactus, apparently.
There's water features.
Water feature sounds weird.
It sounds like a golf course.
You make it sound like an arboretum.
Yeah, but I imagine, you know, we have done our fair share of single track mountain biking and You know, these sort of, like, downhill single track where it's getting a little slippery because it's sandy and then suddenly you're in the water and it's rocky and now you've got to climb and it's loose and, you know, that's sort of what I have in my head.
Although 134 miles of it with almost 14,000 feet of vertical gain, like, this is... Yeah, this is serious and the water features are more like water bugs.
Yeah, I don't know if they're being chased by biting flies, too.
They release them at the beginning of the race, about three minutes after the riders go.
And the people who are most directly chased tend to win now.
The people who tend to win in the women's race now are the men who are masquerading as women.
Because they would.
You know, you have to have some skill.
Like, you know, you gotta, you gotta have skill to get through a 134-mile race.
131, I can't remember which it is.
Over a 130-mile race, uh, over 40% of which is in the dirt, uh, 14,000 vertical feet of gain.
Like, you know, just, it's a hard race regardless.
But, um, you know, over and over we're seeing men who were doing okay in the men's division.
They say, oh I know, I know what I'm allowed to do now.
I get to claim I'm a woman.
Okay.
And they start competing as women.
And in the case of this particular character, that seems to mostly mean that he wears dangly earrings.
That's apparently the source of womanhood.
And he wins.
And the woman who came in second was gracious.
Maybe even a little bit too gracious.
But said, and actually here let me find her exact line, and I quote her in my piece.
She says, it's Paige Onweller, who came in second, says, I couldn't match Austin in some of the single track.
The power is just not comparable.
And, you know, this is one-off.
You know, it's possible that, you know, we've got it wrong.
And, you know, one sporting event was won by someone who claims to be trans, and maybe it would be fair otherwise.
But this is just example after example after example.
And women's bicycling is falling, just as many women's sports are.
So there are a number of directions that I think are worth exploring here.
One is there's a question really about what the motivator is for some of these folks.
In other words, if you were a middling male athlete in a sport in which there was no hope of you getting to the elite level because you have to be, you know, this is the tale of a distribution.
There aren't very many people who can It's not just a matter of stick-to-itiveness.
So if you find yourself unable to reach the elite level and you crave, you know, the trappings of victory, then you discover that actually, oh, the world has become blind to absurdity and you can simply opt into a protected category's separate sports division.
And suddenly you are an elite athlete, not by virtue of you having done what the elite athletes do or being extraordinary in the way that they are, but simply by changing your category, then you can win.
Now, when I think about these stories, the same thing trips me up every time.
I can't imagine doing that and not being embarrassed by the win.
Just mortified.
Mortified by having obviously cheated.
Let me just say, I said I was going to say, but the piece that I wrote I called Celebrating the Cheater, how to beat women in the 21st century.
So when I see these people interviewed, and they express pride, like, oh, this was so hard.
Yeah, it was, you know, it's 134 mile, largely off road.
131 mile bike race, 14,000 feet of vertical climb.
largely off-road.
- And a 31-mile bike race, 14,000 feet of vertical climb. - 14,000 feet of vertical climb, which is-- - More than 40% off-road.
14,000 feet, that's like climbing Mount Whitney from sea level, right?
In the middle of, you know, one and a third century.
One and a third century is largely off-road.
This is a brutal, brutal race.
So, you know, everybody who did it is, you know, they have accomplished something.
Oh, absolutely.
As for whether or not you are a winner in that field, if you had changed your sex by some measure to join a category in which you are farther down the tail of the distribution and then you win,
Pride is not what you should be feeling, and because not only did you cheat, but you took a bunch of people who are at the tail of the distribution, who rode the same damn race as you did, and kicked ass, and the point is you're excluding them from glory that they earned.
You're not only getting glory for yourself that you're not entitled to, but you're excluding people who did it the honorable way from glory that they're entitled to.
And I can't imagine having a camera pointed at you in that moment.
And having the emotion, and then saying the emotion, pride.
Right, right.
So anyway, I guess my point would be, Maybe it's not surprising that the same person who would go through a so-called gender transition in order to become an elite athlete, right?
Become an elite athlete by, you know, a redefinitional feat.
Yeah, mostly it's... I don't know all of the rules across all of these things, but very often it's just self-ID.
It's like, I'm a woman now.
No, you're not.
You're never going to be.
You're never going to be, but let's put it this way.
We do know people.
We don't know why this has happened to them.
But we do know people who have been tormented by the sex that they were born to and have faced the frightening and unpleasant prospect of some sort of a transition in order to feel better.
Okay?
But that's one of two paths here, right?
It could be that something about the condition that you're born into, whether it's a hormonal disruption or an ancient phenomenon that emerges at some rate or whatever it is, right?
That's one way is that you could be motivated by whatever it is that drives people to do this.
Or you could be motivated by the opportunities it avails you of.
And this person, Austin Killips is his name, was like so many, I'm not going to say all because I don't know for sure, but like so many of these male athletes who are now beating women by claiming to beat women and getting to compete against them, which why are we allowing this to happen?
But they weren't, like, they were competing as men until just a couple years ago.
Right.
Right?
Like, they, it's, it's not that they transitioned, you know, way earlier than we ever should have let children transition, and they're coming up, and that's, that still would not be fair.
Right?
But these are, these are, these are people who were trying to make it as athletes and were not winning at it.
And saw a way in.
And we shouldn't be surprised that people will take that opportunity.
What we should be surprised at is that we are offering the opportunity.
Right.
The opportunity is absurd, but it is not surprising.
It's surprising to me because I think I'm normal in this regard, but it should not be surprising to us that somebody who's willing to use that gateway is also surprisingly deaf to the fact that they've just, uh, hurt people who ostensibly they share a sport with.
Right.
If you're passionate about mountain biking and you just drove some, you know, elite female mountain biker from the podium by pretending that you were a woman, right, you shouldn't be feeling pride.
But maybe the same kind of person who would cheat in this way would also be the kind of person who wouldn't recognize that their pride is completely out of place in this circumstance.
Exactly.
The same dude who just beat several women in this 131 Mile Race said in a piece published in May of this year in Cycling News, he said, it's incredibly painful to be othered.
And cyclist Hannah Aronsman, who is no longer competing professionally, having finished fourth behind Kellips in the U.S.
Cyclocross Championship event in December 2022, presumably feels rather differently about what Kellips is going through.
Said Aronsman, as she was or having just retired from biking, professional biking, at a young age, She says, I feel for young girls learning to compete and who are growing up in a day when they no longer have a fair chance of being the new record holders and champions in cycling.
So do I.
Right.
Now, the idea, you know, it's almost like it's a game, right?
That, okay, you're going to cheat to get into this thing, you're going to get on the podium, then you're going to say a bunch of stuff, and you're going to, like, you know, pull a bunch of tricks to make sure nobody notices what you're up to, which is, well, if you notice what I'm up to, then you're othering me, and you have no idea how painful that is, and you wouldn't want to cause somebody pain, would you?
And you know, two things actually work in the same direction here.
Not only, obviously, is it going to be natal males who are competing against women who are winning, right?
Like, natal women competing against males are not going to win.
But also, the women they're competing against, being women, are more likely to be agreeable and more likely to go like, that's like, I know that's not fair, but I'm just, I don't like the confrontation.
I'm just going to let it go.
And, you know, I think increasingly female athletes are not.
Of course.
Not letting it go.
But it is, you know, this is one of the differences between the sexes that women are more likely to be agreeable.
That's, you know, a term of art in psychology here, where, you know, not being as interested in confrontation, wanting to go along to get along.
And, well, when a dude shows up in your midst and, you know, wearing earrings and says, I'm a woman now, some number of women, even knowing for sure that they are absolutely being lied to, Are going to, you know, are going to fail the test.
Are going to say, yeah, you know, the Ash Conformity experiment, right?
You know, women are more likely to fail this than men are.
It's been redone many, many times.
So just Ash Conformity was in like the late 50s, I think?
60s, I believe.
Late 50s or early 60s.
I thought it was late 50s, but somewhere in there, mid-century.
And, you know, it was done at that point with all male undergraduates.
And that's going to be the test where, you know, I'm not going to remember exactly, but, you know, you've shown three lines or something, right?
Three lines are put on the board of obviously different lengths.
Of obviously different lengths.
And you go into the room and you don't know if you're the subject of the experiment that everyone else in the room is actually part of it, part of the experiment.
They have been told what to do and what to say.
They are confederates hired by the experiment to pretend to be subjects.
And so if, you know, you as the person being experimented on are last in a line of three or four and are asked, okay, just, you know, which line is shorter?
Or, you know, is this line shorter or longer than the other?
And it's patently obvious.
It's a simple question of fact.
If everyone before you gives the wrong answer, A surprising number of people are much more likely to look around, go like, what am I missing?
Where am I here?
And give the wrong answer as well.
And very few people give the wrong answer all of the time, but a surprisingly large majority give the wrong answer some of the time when the people around them have already publicly declared a patently wrong answer.
So that's the original version, and I don't remember all of the exact numbers here, but it's been redone a lot, a lot of times.
It's one of these things that does replicate.
It's one of these experiments out of psychology that does replicate, and it's been done with women.
And there's even a stronger pattern of conformity in women than in men, and this is going to be directly related to the agreeableness.
that women have, which in some circumstances is likely to be a good thing, right?
It's not that agreeableness is inherently a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of if there is, you know, a wolf in sheep's clothing in your midst.
It's not actually a good thing to pretend that's a sheep.
There's actually a deep irony here, right, which is The reason that males and females are dimorphic by size is about disagreeableness in a sense, right?
is the fact of male conflict having distorted, evolutionarily distorted male form from the optimal ecological form, the form that you would have if exploiting the resources of the world was what you were built for.
Males have been distorted by conflict with other males.
And so the idea that females are less athletically powerful because of the distortion of males, and now these distorted males who've had their power increased to fight with other males are now gonna be in competition with females is pretty absurd, right?
It's turning the whole thing on its head.
But I wanted to come back to this question of the otheredness, right?
The claim that, oh, it's so painful to be othered, right?
Yes, incredibly painful to be othered.
You have to squint at it just right to see it, but this person is participating in the othering of half the population, right?
Women who are simply born female and mature into women, right?
That's not something, it's not supposed to be subject to somebody's definitional games, or sophistry, or anything else.
It's a simple fact, you are entitled to be in this category, and there are some burdens that come with that category, and there are some privileges that come with that category, and you get the package.
But now suddenly, we've got men pretending to be women, and women being demoted from their own category, right?
We have all of these absurdities, like, well, we wouldn't want to, you know, other the trans women.
So that means we have to not refer to the normal characteristics of women as if they're normal because some of the people who are now women don't have them, right?
So we're going to go through the absurdity of saying chest-feeding rather than breast-feeding and birthing people rather than women or whatever the absurdity is.
How could that possibly be a greater feat of othering, right?
It's like the ultimate othering.
Half the population is now second-class citizens by virtue of the fact that a tiny number of people wish to join their category and therefore, you know, upset the entire apple cart.
Right.
And, you know, was it Johns Hopkins this week that they've since taken down their definition of gay and lesbian?
Oh, I don't know about that.
And the definition of lesbian that was published was a non-man attracted to a non-man.
Wait a second.
That would seem to include... Cows.
Cows, monkeys, pretty much, I mean, even plants if you look at it, right?
Sure, yeah.
Even this pen.
Except probably doesn't have attractive... Wait a second, no, it, look, watch.
Oh!
A lesbian interaction.
It's a lesbian interaction.
The pen attracted to the earth.
I mean, that's bestiality, actually, if you look at it right.
I feel like there were no animals involved there.
It's just like a cross-type interaction.
Everything that any of those objects were attracted to was not a person.
I don't know.
I'm not good at the sophistry thing.
I could probably practice, but anyway.
Yeah.
No, but the...
The campaign to make this into a civil rights fight, right?
And where someone can say, apparently, apparently with no self-awareness or embarrassment, how incredibly painful it is to be othered at the point that you are kicking ass over actual women in the sport that they have trained very, very hard to be superior at.
is extraordinary.
Like, this is a loss of civil rights, not a gain of civil rights.
This is a loss for, as you say, half the population.
And, you know, and it's more than that, because, you know, if we're talking about sport, it's half the population.
But if we're talking about the other ways that the ideology is marching forward, It's, of course, celebrating transness over being homosexual.
It's increasing the ability for people to be actually homophobic, right?
Like, actually be scared of their own sexual attraction by claiming something that's not possible, which is that they're the other sex that they're not.
And, of course, it's putting children at risk, as we've talked about extensively and as I've written about extensively.
So I wanted to throw an interpretation at you.
Sport.
Is obviously a big category.
There's a fair amount of work on the evolution of sport.
Yeah.
And one of the things that is certainly true within the realm of sport is that it functions as a kind of training practice for other things.
You know, team sports, warfare, most obviously.
But let's just take the idea That sport is a training ground for skills that are valuable in other parts of adult life.
Yes.
And I don't know quite what to... I don't know if this is an accidental fact or if there is something driving here, but it strikes me that The rearrangement of the rules surrounding what you have to be to participate in women's sports in order to accommodate trans or nominally trans folks, many of whom appear to be eager to cheat and not just to play sport with women, but to beat them because they're not women, right?
That what this is actually doing is training people for skills that are highly relevant in modern times, right?
This has nothing to do with what we think of, you know, The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
The things that we traditionally think of in conjunction with sportsmanship and the other things that go along with, you know, elite play.
But what this is training people for is capture, right?
This is men capturing women's sport.
It's training them for sophistry.
Right?
Another skill of the moment.
If you're good at sophistry, this is your era.
And it's trading them for cheating, as you point out.
And basically, here's the punchline of this.
So capture, sophistry, and cheating.
Yep.
Capture, sophistry, and cheating, which are three skills that really Should not be elevated, but at the moment they might be three of the most important skills for functioning in the modern era.
These are the things that put you ahead and anybody who decides to play by the rules, anybody who's interested in sportsmanship, anybody who is interested in independent regulators or independent thought or analysis that is designed to find out what's true rather than advance a particular perspective as if it were true, Right?
All of those things, you know, these are skills we shouldn't be training anybody in, but apparently we are training them.
And here's the training ground.
Can you talk your way onto the podium rather than ride your way onto the podium?
Yeah, that's right.
I feel that's, I think that's highly apt.
And I'm wondering, About, you know, so both of us played a fair bit of Ultimate Frisbee when we were younger, both highly competitively and then just a lot of a lot of pickup, you know, some, you know, for a couple summers, four or five games a week.
I never played competitively.
You did.
I played pickup exclusively.
Okay.
I mean, we did some leagues, but you know, nothing.
Yeah.
But we both played a lot, saw a lot.
And yeah, I traveled and played competitively as well.
And one of the things, even certainly in like summer leagues where it was competitive, but stakes are low, but also like on the Michigan women's team, which is the team that I played with competitively,
There was an emphasis, always in the game at the casual level, but also at the formal level, on self-referring, on calling your own fouls, on recognizing when something's happened, on, you know, when you're playing pickup or with newbies, you know, halting play in order to explain something if they don't know why something has happened the way it's happened, right?
It's actually in the official rules.
Yeah.
And it's wonderful.
And you know, it sounds like it could be, you know, kind of woo and like, you know, what the hell, don't we just want to play, guys?
But no, it actually really, really works.
And, you know, people who just can't yet throw frisbee and won't figure it out are not going to be welcome very long because it's just a pain to have such people, you know, on the field with you.
But especially for, you know, low stakes pickup games or even leagues, summer leagues.
It's really remarkable how many different ages can play together, how many different skill levels can play together.
With regard to the different ages, you've got different strategies, right?
Like, you know, the older players are not going to be running long to receive the Hawk in the end zone.
Mostly, right?
They're going to be strategizing and figuring out exactly where to place the disc and maybe some other slightly older player who doesn't have the stamina to beat everyone else down the field is going to figure out where to cut and receive the perfectly placed disc.
But similarly, men and women play together really effectively.
It's one of the few team sports where co-ed is, and it was my favorite, like I preferred playing co-ed to playing all-women's games or to watching all-men's games.
The all-women's games tended to be a little ponderous, a little bit slow, you know, there's a little bit more focus on like everyone's got to handle the discs.
Oh come on, can we just like, can we try to win a point here?
And, you know, of course that's an exaggeration, but there was, you know, you rarely got the long hooks down the field in a women's game, whereas in the men's game the points tend to be very fast and, you know, usually it was the same two guys, like, you know, as soon as one guy has the disc he knows that the other guy's gonna run and that's it, right?
Short points and not as interesting to watch and also presumably not as interesting to play unless you're one of those guys, right?
So, the co-ed games, though, they had both of those energies, and it was great.
And it worked if you're doing man-on defense or zoned, or like, it just worked across the board.
It wouldn't have worked, though, hold on, if you had someone who was claiming things that weren't true.
And that doesn't make sense in a co-ed situation, because Actually, no, it does.
Well, it wouldn't work if you're claiming to be a man or a woman.
Well, it would, because the way this works, and forgive us, this is worthwhile to understand why it is that this game, unlike others, does work, Co-Ed.
Yeah.
It's really a great game if you don't know it.
It's a wonderful game, but the sportsmanship is built in.
It's literally unrefereed in most circumstances, and it's self-refereed, and that means you really do say, yeah, I did not, you know, I did touch that disc before it hit the ground, therefore there's a turnover, right?
So that kind of thing.
Nobody lies in this game if they're playing it correctly.
I guess if it hits the ground, though, it's a turnover regardless.
I guess so.
But, um, I have now not played Ultimate for long enough.
Anyway, the point is, as a point is about to begin, in a man-on-man defense, which is most points in most pickup games, you line up across from the person that you are going to cover, right?
And the point is the teams would be chosen so they would end up relatively even, even number of strong players on both teams.
Otherwise it's no fun.
And then the strongest players line up against each other.
And typically the way that would work is if there are women evenly divided between the teams, which there typically would be, the women would line up on each other.
And so the point is it balances at the level of the individual across the whole team.
Now if you had a woman who was Excellent.
And you had a man who was not quite as elevated in play.
There's nothing wrong with the two of them lining up against.
I ended up defending against.
No doubt.
No doubt.
So anyway, but my point is within the team, the expectation is that you as a man are not going to line up against a woman because you can shut her down.
You're going to line up against a woman because you're evenly matched.
And it is that Self-assessment of evenly matched and therefore this makes sense, right?
And if you violated it, right?
If you did decide, hey, let's make some points by, you know, shutting down certain players and blah blah blah blah blah.
If you did that, right, it would be frowned on, right?
Nobody would view that as a success.
They would view it as a failure.
Right.
And, you know, this presumes the teams are relatively evenly matched.
So, you know, one of the ways that this self-corrects is that the teams are relatively evenly matched.
If you say, oh, I'm going to line up against someone who's clearly my inferior as a player, that presumably leaves someone else undefended who's clearly superior with an inferior defense.
And at least in pickup games, you know, you don't do this when you're playing competitively, obviously.
But in pickup game or even in leagues, if you start playing, and you know, again, we were playing pickup a lot.
And so we tended to know the, you know, all of us tended to know who was showing up and what our various skills were.
But you know, people have off days, people have extraordinary days.
And so you kind of pick teams and you start playing.
And if after a couple points, it's really clear, like these, this, this is not going to be fun for anyone.
Like one team is going to feel like amazing, except it's just not fun.
Like you came to play sport, you claim you came to be involved in athletic ability, athletic activity, With a group of people who are like-minded and also interested in being outside, throwing a disc around on a nice day, and also matching your skills and your wits against them.
And so if it's not an even match, you come together after a few points, be like, okay, let's swap a couple people.
And you don't, you know, if you're one of the people who swapped onto the team that was doing better, you don't feel bad about it.
You're just like, you know what, that's how it is.
I, you know, I'm like, And if you're one of the ones who was swapped on the team that was doing worse, you do feel a little good about that, but it's not what it's about.
It's about the team sportness of it.
And, you know, biking is not a team.
Well, biking can be, but in this case, this 131 mile, largely off-road event is not a team sport.
But I guess I don't understand how some part of that, like, we're doing this because we're matching our skills and our wits against one another.
Ethos isn't in part of everyone who thinks of themselves as an athlete.
I don't, I don't understand it.
And I do get that people will cheat if you give them the opportunity.
But I also, I guess I'm coming sort of full circle to where you started.
It's like, I can't imagine wanting to do that.
Right.
Can't imagine wanting to do it.
But I also think that this is, um, what was your developmental environment?
Yeah.
And the problem is, as we've come to in many of the issues that we've covered here, The younger generations are faced with a world in which a larger fraction of the things that trigger a dopamine release are mediated through the online environment, right?
Yeah.
And so there effectively is no or was no online environment aspect to Ultimate.
It was something you went and you did.
And you didn't, you know, frankly, most of the pickup games that we played, half of them at least, I would say, The only point that anybody remembered was the last one, right?
We may have a sense that we got more points than they did during a game, but people weren't keeping track because the whole point was... It was never the point, right?
It was never the point, right?
Even though in the...
Absolutely.
We want to win this point, and we are an entity that came together 30 seconds ago and will last for 20 minutes or an hour or maybe two hours, and then we'll disband.
We'll come back together tomorrow or three days from now, and it'll be a different we, and we want to win.
That's awesome, but it also has no meaning outside of exactly that context.
It has no meaning, and therefore there didn't need to be a scoreboard and nobody needed to keep track, and the fact is it was just as fun or more fun, because the point was what you remembered was You did something extraordinary, you know, you laid out in the end zone and you got the point even though nobody thought you were going to do it.
So anyway, all of that stuff is there, but the scoreboard at the end and the accolades weren't in pickup games.
Yeah, usually a pickup would be like, okay, you know, we've been playing for a while, it's getting like, okay, game to three, game to seven, like, should we cap this?
Because otherwise a bunch of us are just never going to want to leave because we're kind of addicted to it.
Right.
So, I guess, for me, there's a contrast between what's motivating you to participate and, you know, look...
I know how hard it must be to ride, what was it, 134 miles?
131, yeah.
131 miles, largely off-road.
14,000.
14,000.
I mean, let's put it this way.
There's never been a day in my life when I could have accomplished that, right?
That is beyond any, my highest level of capacity never reached that.
You could have.
I could have trained.
I think both of us could have trained for it.
I could have trained to accomplish it.
I couldn't have competed at that distance.
No, no, no, not competed, but like, could, could, could I have finished?
Could you have trained the route?
Yeah.
Yeah, probably I could have.
131 miles with 40% of it off-road is hard, and especially 14,000 feet of climb.
That's a lot.
Yeah, that's a lot.
Yeah, so I'm not even convinced I could have completed it.
But, um, But anyway, the point is, okay, hard for me to imagine that you would do that, because what you really wanted to do was brag enough that you were willing to, you know, cheat, right?
Like, I don't, I cannot get into the mindset where cheating, that's too big an investment, go cheat on something easier, right?
Right, that's a huge expenditure of effort and, you know, and equally of equal magnitude to the amazing effort there is the fact that other people who put in that same effort are excluded from credit.
You just should feel terrible that you would do that.
But anyway, contrast, that's like the inverse of a sport in which who won actually Nobody may even know at the end of the game and nobody cares, right?
The idea that the sport itself, the camaraderie of being on the team, even if it's momentary.
So, you know, what are we training people for?
That's really the question.
Are we training people to, you know, to become really dedicated cheaters?
Yes.
Because that's what this is.
Yes, we are.
Yes, we are.
And so the three salient skills that we are training people for that you named, just to wrap this up, were capture, sophistry, and cheating.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in fact, when you and I were talking a little bit about this before, and I was describing this situation to you, what you said was, he's cheating with pride.
Yeah, cheating with pride, which is a stunning, stunning thing.
It really speaks to a kind of defect that's hard to relate to.
And I don't mean to be hard on this particular individual, but it does seem to me probably this individual is not going to care because they're obviously quite comfortable with, you know, driving women out of their own sport.
That's right.
That's right.
All right.
Well, I like that as part of that we discovered that gravity creates lesbians.
I think that is what we discovered, right?
So if you were missing that part of the conversation, I encourage you to go back and figure out what I'm talking about.
I think people who were just listening are not going to have any idea why my pen is having lesbian interactions and with whom.
With what?
I mean, you don't want to other the table.
I'm going to utter the table, because here's the thing.
If... Oh, I guess they're both right.
Right.
No, no.
Here's the point, right?
But we're gonna need a term.
But here's the thing.
The definition of a lesbian interaction was a non-man attracted to a non-man.
And in this case, my pen, a decidedly non-man, is attracted not to the table, but to the earth.
So what's the table doing?
You see my point?
Yeah.
It's not cock-blocking.
No, it's not.
We need a synonym for pen.
Oh, it's a puritan table.
That's it.
Yeah.
No, it's not down with lesbianism.
Alright.
Who knew?
You learn something new about your table every day.
That's not true.
There are days when you learn new things about your table.
Yes.
All right then.
You wanted to follow up on some of the stuff you were talking about last week with regard to the indictment and now the appointment of former President Donald Trump.
And I would ask people to bear with us, right?
The reason to revisit this is that actually we've learned something new in the intervening time since last week, where we talked specifically about The question of Donald Trump, the classified documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago and that he makes no bones about the fact that he brought there from when he was president, and the indictment of him for stealing classified documents.
And I laid out what I thought was the best defense, which I think is actually, you know, I'm not a legal expert, but I did consult legal experts, and I think completely compelling, which is he's the president, he has the right to declassify documents at any time, for any reason, any document he wants.
There is apparently no procedure for doing so so it's not even that he forgot to file the papers and that basically by walking out of the Oval Office with those documents he declassified them and doesn't look like a crime.
Certainly not a crime.
Worth putting somebody in jail over, right?
Federal indictment on criminal charges.
Certainly not a crime that we would risk becoming a banana republic over where not only is a former president being put on trial for a crime that almost certainly isn't a crime and if it is a crime is almost certainly a trivial crime because he had the right to declassify those documents with some sort of a magic spell or whatever it is Is he?
that the Democrats imagine he should have done.
But the point is, this is also, you know, the Biden administration putting on trial its leading opponent in the Republican Party.
This is this is Banana Republic bullshit.
But anyway, is he is he leading?
Yeah, I believe he is leading.
I believe he is leading.
And, you know, I also think, in addition to being diabolical, the DNC in urging the Biden administration to do this, which is no doubt what happened, is also mind-bogglingly stupid, because it is creating the very powerful argument That the force that controls our politics and does diabolical things is its leading opponent is Trump, right?
They're creating another argument for electing Trump, which I think is a mistake.
I don't think he's the right guy for the job.
I've never thought he was.
But they are making an argument that's pretty hard to ignore, right?
Which is that the power structure, the deep state, or whatever it is, Seems to really dislike this guy enough to threaten him with prison Maybe he really is you know the thing that they fear most in which case you've just made an argument for him But anyway, I wanted to cover The somewhat more subtle developments of this last week.
So Trump was arraigned in Miami and he gave a speech in New Jersey after that arraignment.
And the speech, I watched the speech, absolutely fascinating, but I want to To highlight what MSNBC did in response to an obviously historical event, right?
A former president being charged with a felony that I think could put him in jail for 400 years or something absurd like this.
Seems like a long time.
It's a long time, but you know, the idea that he's on trial for something that could put him in prison is a very profound turn of events it is it is decidedly important whether you think he's absolutely guilty and this is a major compromise of national security or you think as we said last week it's a nothing burger with no patty right either way this is Big news, right?
You said that.
I did.
We did not.
You're not signing on to that formulation.
But anyway, can we play the... I need to say that former President Trump has just started making public remarks just as he did on the evening of his first arraignment on criminal charges.
That was April.
When he was booked on 34 felony counts brought by the state of New York.
Now tonight, after his arraignment on federal felony charges, he's speaking again, this time to an audience of his supporters that's gathered for a campaign fundraiser tonight at his golf club and summer home in New Jersey.
We knew heading into this that he was planning to make these remarks.
We are prepared for his pre-fundraiser remarks tonight to again be essentially a Trump campaign speech.
Because of that, we do not intend to carry these remarks live.
As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things.
We are here to bring you the news.
It hurts our ability to do that if we live broadcast what we fully expect in advance to be a litany of lies and false accusations, no matter who says them.
And I do not say this with any glee.
I hope it is clear that this is not a glib decision.
We take our responsibilities seriously.
We revisit decisions like this all the time.
We make the best call that we can in real time, every time.
But tonight, our call is this.
We will monitor that speech by the newly indicted former president.
We will not carry his remarks live.
If he says anything newsworthy, we promise we will turn that right around and bring it back to you.
All right.
Now, what MSNBC says, and what Rachel Maddow elucidates here, is that they are not going to cover President Trump's response to his arraignment because they've already decided that it is going to be full of lies.
And as a news organization, broadcasting lies compromises their credibility.
She says they're not going to broadcast it live.
She doesn't say they're not going to cover the speech.
I don't know what they did, but what she says is they're not going to broadcast it live.
Fair enough.
But, A, I do not believe they broadcast the speech.
They may have taken a clip or two.
But here, I don't think we need to split hairs here.
She says we are not going to cover it live because we already expect it to be full of lies.
We are a news organization and lies are bad for us to broadcast.
Okay?
She does.
This is a nonsense on several different fronts.
One, this is a former president of the United States.
As far as I know, the first president of the United States indicted on criminal charges.
His response, if he cries, if he breaks out in a beautiful aria, whatever his response to that is, is news.
It turns out that the speech in question contains a detailed analysis of his defense.
It is absolutely cogently argued by Trump.
He does present exactly the defense I talked about last week.
He says, I am not guilty of a crime.
And what's more, Joe Biden is guilty of a crime because Joe Biden did the same thing, took documents home, and he was vice president, had no right to take them home.
He was not allowed to declassify them.
So the point is, first of all, you can discover something about MSNBC in the fact that they have decided that this is going to be a speech of lies and they are not going to cover it.
It's a campaign speech, right?
Again, they're not going to broadcast it live.
Right, but nonetheless... It's different from not covering it.
And again, I have no idea if they did or did not cover it, but the statement that you just showed us is Rachel Maddow saying, we're not going to broadcast this live.
That is the thing that she is Fair enough.
However, this is a news organization.
What they have done is prejudge the speech.
Prejudice.
Pre-judged.
They have decided what the content of the speech is going to be, and the best thing you could say is that they weren't going to broadcast it live because they expected it to be live.
That's already a violation of their obligation as a news organization.
Yeah, I don't know.
Whatever it would be.
We have a right to know what it is.
And what they are doing is they are behaving in what is a non-journalistic, paternalistic fashion at best.
And really what they're doing is they're using the excuse of paternalism.
We're not going to let you hear what he said.
We're going to judge it for you in advance and prevent you from being able to hear it.
They are doing that because, frankly, what Trump said is highly compelling and raises questions.
But at the point the decision was made, they didn't know that, because it was a question of whether or not they were going to broadcast it live.
So they were predicting, they were making a prediction, they may or may not have, that prediction sounds like, I don't know, was falsified.
Yeah, but here's the test.
I guess if I'm going to steel man the MSNBC decision here, there is a lot of stuff that is newsworthy and they're making editorial decisions all the time about what to and to not show.
In addition, again trying to steelman the MSNBC position here, if you have a policy that under X, you know, this is the list of things which will always inherently be newsworthy and therefore if this has happened to you we will broadcast live something something something, I don't get it.
then that will be gamed.
And there will be people, you know, most people won't, right?
But some people will go, ah, that's my opportunity then.
And not that, you know, not that it was, not that Trump set up to be indicted and arraigned here, but given how everyone is playing it, it may end up being good for him.
I don't get it.
Okay.
The test of the hypothesis that this was their judgment in error that this was going to be a campaign speech rather than relevant to something newsworthy like an arraignment is that then they would realize upon hearing the speech, That was newsworthy, one end to the other.
We will now broadcast it in its entirety.
I can't say for sure that they didn't pick some hour late in the night and do that, but I do not believe they broadcast that speech in its entirety, which they had an obligation to do, because it was news, and the fact that it contained His defense, and that that defense actually casts a very serious pall over the idea that we are living in a democratic republic, right?
We are now living in a nation in which a sitting president is, his Justice Department is having his leading political opponent jeopardized with Obviously the equivalent of life in prison and well beyond for a crime that his opponent did not likely commit but that he himself did commit.
Now we will come back to what role Biden actually plays in this later here but My point is, this could not possibly be more newsworthy, and if they thought something else was going to come out of Trump's mouth, and if they somehow mistakenly understood their job as to be to decide what was worth hearing and not hearing rather than anything Trump says in the aftermath of being arraigned, On federal criminal charges is worth hearing.
It doesn't matter how inarticulate or full of lies it is.
It's still worth hearing in this case.
But that's not what was delivered.
And the fact that I do not believe that they reversed course and broadcast the whole thing upon discovering their error says it wasn't an error.
It was political.
And like with so much with MSNBC and CNN, the idea is the pretense that, hey, you've turned in for, you know, access to the truth.
And we know this is Trump, so it's not going to be true.
It's going to be the inverse of true.
And therefore, it is our obligation to do something else with this time rather than let you hear what he said for himself.
And then he goes on to deliver his legal defense in public.
And people aren't going to hear it.
They're going to assume that what he did was lie.
Right?
That is MSNBC, um, revealing the game.
And that is really the point.
Well, so, you know, one thing there.
If, if, if we had one and only one, you know, state-owned media outlet and it was MSNBC and they said, yeah, we're not going to show this live.
And then, and you don't know, I certainly don't know, but, and then they did not say that they did not broadcast it later.
And there was no other way for it to get out.
That would be a, much different situation.
I am not defending them here, although I don't know that I wouldn't if I had more information.
But presumably, the speech is broadcast.
I mean, you said you watched it.
I did watch it.
It's out there otherwise.
It's not that MSNBC, by nannying its viewers, is keeping those viewers from having access to it, but they certainly make it less likely that most of their viewers will end up watching it.
Right, but I mean, look, we live in a democracy, or a democratic republic is the proper way to say it, and the idea that you are going to take some large fraction of the voting audience and you're going to add obstacles to their doing this, so instead of tuning in and seeing the news, what they're going to have to do is go find the news for themselves in some channel that they don't happen to be watching, right?
That is, this is a kind of election meddling.
Right?
That's what this is, is pretending that you've got a narrative of history and we're not going to let you see any of the stuff that would allow you to discover that it was untrue.
And, you know, I will also point out We had a situation in which the cruddy bullshit that MSNBC puts on and CNN puts on was counterbalanced by the cruddy bullshit that Fox puts on and you could, by dodging back and forth between these things, make some sort of a corrective, right?
But we actually know what happened here at Fox because somebody at Fox did put up A chyron in the aftermath of the Trump arraignment.
That's the text that scrolls across the bottom of the screen.
I don't think the chyron is the sum total.
Some of it scrolls, some of it doesn't.
Yeah, show this screenshot.
So somebody, wannabe dictator, speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.
So this is this week.
Yeah.
That is, of course, a provocative bit of text.
Yeah, and the picture they've chosen has Biden looking uncharacteristically strong.
Well, I believe it must be taken from that speech with the red backdrop.
It doesn't look like that backdrop.
OK, well, in any case, look, MSNBC broadcast bullshit.
Trump is going to lie.
We know it because it's what Trump does.
I mean, it's what Trump is.
We're not going to show you lies because we're a news organization, not a lies organization.
Okay, that's bullshit.
Okay, this was news.
Fox came up with some bullshit of its own, which is it took a scenario in which one interpretation is that this is actually, you know, Banana Republic stuff unfolding right here in America, and it gave an extreme interpretation, too.
Want to be dictator.
Does Trump want to be a dictator?
I mean, does Biden want to be a dictator?
I doubt he's got it left in him, you know?
I think he wants some ice cream.
I think he wants some ice cream, too.
So, you know, do I agree with, you know, what Fox put on the screen?
No.
But is it worse than what MSNBC did?
No.
In fact, you know, it at least raises an interesting question.
And what Matto did was prevent the raising of an interesting question.
Is he maybe just innocent of the crime because he was president and for whatever reason the president has absolute authority to do what he did?
Right.
MSNBC's audience isn't going to get to that question.
Yeah, I mean, One of the things that the last three plus years now has made abundantly clear to me is how rarely when talking heads of any sort, so-called journalists, so-called heads of public health organizations, etc., make pronouncements, are they actually speaking from knowledge, right?
Did they actually go and look at the thing and do they know firsthand that these are safe and effective?
This is almost certain to be a lie and therefore, you know, what Mado said and, you know, the safe and effective proclamations about vaccines that couldn't possibly be known to be safe and therefore is the other thing next to it a lie as well, are different sorts of I don't even want to say they're both lies, or different sorts of rhetoric.
But in both cases, what you see, if you look behind the curtain, is — and, you know, we saw Walensky when she was still the head of the CDC — I don't know if she's stepped down yet, who knows — but saying on camera things like, oh, gosh, do you remember, you know, when we saw this thing on CNN and then I knew that the numbers were such and such for COVID?
You're the head of the CDC!
You're getting your data from CNN?
What is going on here?
I'm sorry, I'm still so blown away.
I don't have the specifics on that particular pronouncement from her.
But I thought, do any of these people actually know where they speak?
And given that they don't seem to, is that maybe actually intentional and protective?
Because if they don't know that they're lying, then it's harder to catch them in the lie, because they've just been handed a slate.
It's like, you know, don't, don't go into the footnotes.
Don't read the primary literature.
Don't talk to the scientists.
Don't look at the, you know, don't ask how the, you know, how the clinical trial was actually done.
Don't ask any of those questions.
Just sort of talk at this like ethereal, what's good for people?
What do people want to hear?
Let's, let's stick with the PR guys.
Let's stick with the marketing.
And so, I mean, I think, I think You know, I'm not as thrown by this particular thing from Matto and MSNBC as you are, but it also just feels like, yep, that's rhetoric.
That's not journalism.
Just like it's been rhetoric, not public health, rhetoric, not science, all the way down on all of these topics constantly.
Right.
But so I don't know.
I think what you're saying is you're not thrown.
OK, go for it.
The only question here is that I don't think you could come up with something more newsworthy in the last year.
It doesn't matter what Maddow said.
It doesn't matter if Trump lied for an hour or anything else.
The fact of a former president being indicted on felony charges and speaking about that is the most newsworthy thing.
We can disagree about the time frame, but certainly this week, you know, there's- they broadcast every night they have I don't think there's a reasonable argument against that.
anyway.
This is the most newsworthy thing in recent history.
I don't think there's a reasonable argument against that.
And what's more, if I can complete your argument, this news organization and all of the others that look like it, the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, all of them, are sitting in a location, a niche, and preventing real news organizations a niche, and preventing real news organizations from emerging.
So the idea that you have news organizations that do not report the news is not just, oh, that's a waste.
Oh, yeah.
No, there's opportunity costs.
They're taking up space and actively preventing competitors, would-be competitors, from getting ground.
Well, but... And actively, therefore, keeping people from actually getting informed.
Yes.
I would also point out the punchline to the Fox News version of this, where they came up with an overly simplistic view of this turn of events, is that the person who is responsible for putting that on the screen was quickly fired.
Now, and then there's the other punchline, which was, do you know what cannot be allowed to happen?
You can't.
Zero is a special number.
Zero is a special number.
Tucker Carlson on Fox News was an example of an exception to zero, right?
This was a person who was delivering wasn't always stuff we agreed with, although I feel weird even having to say that, right?
The number of people who tuned into Tucker Carlson's monologues and found real value in them regularly, and people across the political spectrum.
Can you just take a moment away for a moment?
You and I disagree on plenty of things.
Imagine if every time I spoke about you to anyone else, I felt the need to say, now, I don't agree with everything he says.
Yeah.
Duh.
Even I don't agree with everything I say.
Like, that's not helpful here, I don't think.
But seriously, like, The people we love most in the world, you know, if you agree with absolutely everything they say, figure out which one of you figured out all those things, and then the other of you, like, Girl pair!
Like, you know, get a life!
Like, figure out your own brain and figure out what things are actually different in your head and from your experience and what you think you understand to be true from what the person who you're apparently receiving all knowledge from is.
So, like, I too feel that pressure, of course, right?
Especially when talking about, you know, people on the right.
Oh, I have to say something nice about someone on the right.
Just to be clear, like, I don't agree with everything.
This is insane.
Oh.
Like, none of us agree with everything that anyone else thinks.
Right.
At all.
And you know, I was joking.
I don't even agree with everything I say, but the fact is, you know...
One's perspective does develop.
Unless you're anything, you know, if you're read-only then maybe... Right, it's just not a relevant point here.
No, it's relevant across the board.
The point is the idea that I don't agree with everything X person says.
If anything goes without saying, it ought to be that.
Right?
Especially if the person has anything like a complex perspective on the world.
So anyway, I take it back.
You can figure out whether I agree with everything Carlson says or not.
But I do know lots of people who get a tremendous amount of value about the way he juxtaposes things, and he's very gifted and eloquent.
And the fact, I really think, at the end of the day, You couldn't very well have the next election unfold and have Tucker Carlson sitting on Fox News at the anchor desk doing what he does because he would keep pulling back the curtain on the thing and it's not pulling back the curtain because it serves the right because frankly I don't think that's most of what he's doing.
I think he is actually
a patriot and that what he does is he reveals the hypocrisy of the rulers of the realm day in and day out and the they decided to they couldn't shut him up but what they could do is they could take away the anchor desk and they could leave him as another disembodied voice in a man cave or whatever right um so here's the point fox news is being snapped into line right tucker carlson is gone he was uncontrollable
He's now on his own.
The producer who put that aggressive counter-interpretation, the inverse of what MSNBC did, fired.
So the point is, okay, Fox News is no longer important or interesting in any way, because the one interesting thing it had is gone.
So your point is that the corrections are happening, but on the right.
My point is... And one of those, I mean, At least one of those corrections is patently bad for our society.
Yes, and I would point out that what Tucker Carlson did in his most recent monologue was comment on this very story.
And what he did is not Was not simple.
What he did was he outlined all of the ways that we know that that claim that Biden is a wannabe dictator are wrong because he went through a long list of things that dictators do and described how Biden wasn't doing any of them but of course anybody with the slightest sense of irony would understand that there were things that the Biden administration is doing It could be mapped onto every one of these things, and that that ought to raise questions.
Why is it that so many things do look like what happens in a banana republic if we're not living in a banana republic?
And mind you, I don't think any of this is simple, right?
This is, you know, is Biden a wannabe dictator?
No.
As you said, he doesn't want to be a dictator.
He wants ice cream.
I think that's where Biden is.
What we have is not a dictatorship.
It's something like an oligarchy, right?
Behaving in the same way.
The people in question are largely behind the scenes.
We don't know their names.
We don't know what they sound like, but we can infer from the pattern of behavior and what is tolerated and what is not
Um, where we are headed, and it is very much like a, um, a new twist on a very old theme, and that is the illusion of democracy, but the reality is, uh, controlled by something unelected which does not take our interests seriously more than is absolutely required to keep itself in power.
And that's a terrifying thing, right?
We're talking about the most powerful nation on earth, ferociously armed and under the control of who-knows-what with a rapidly declining figurehead whose administration is threatening to jail its primary political opponents, right?
That is a frightening set of facts and I haven't exaggerated anything.
No, no, that was a straightforward list or description of the situation and That doesn't sound like what I thought, if you had asked me 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, the U.S.
would sound like.
I would think that that might be a description of some far-off place that could really use the help of an amazing constitution like ours.
Yeah, and it would be terrifying if you could teleport that description, you know, If you and I could alert our high school selves that we would be sitting here, you know, in our 50s describing the current state of affairs in the U.S.
by those terms, it would be a completely jarring discovery.
Yeah.
It would fail to compute.
Yeah, it would fail to compute.
And if you did compute, you'd know where you were in history because you'd know That other societies had failed, and when they did, you would know what tragedies followed, and the idea that we are on such a trajectory would escape no rational person hearing that description.
Yep.
All right, is it time for carnivorous plants?
As far as I'm concerned, it's always time for carnivorous plants, so it's not always easy to find them in my experience.
No, not so much.
Yeah, so I came across a new piece of research this week about carnivorous plants, and it sent me into thinking a bit about carnivorous plants, and that was fun.
I remember when I got to do that for a living, you know, think about fascinating biology.
That was awesome.
So, carnivorean plants, the analogy I came up with upon discovering how many times it has evolved is like the mangrove habit.
Mangroves are plants that grow in salt water and have an ability to get rid of the excess salt.
But mangrove isn't a single thing.
Mangrove, the habit that we call mangrove, has evolved many, many, many times.
Similarly, carnivory in plants has evolved many, many, many times.
Something like at least nine separate evolutions of carnivory, including multiple evolutions of pitfall traps, sticky traps, and snap traps.
Okay, multiple evolutions of each of those types of traps, and at least nine different evolutions of carnivory.
I have not looked into the evolutionary history of carnivory.
And you're going to ask me questions I can't answer?
No, I'm going to put one possibility on the table.
I'm going to bet that there are a lot of cryptic evolutions of carnivory that we haven't spotted.
Ways that plants trick insects into dying in a place where they can have their nitrogen absorbed.
Yeah, so actually let me, there's a good paper, Givenish 2015, that defines what we, so and I think what you just said would classify you as a carnivorous plant, not you so much, or a lesbian.
I'm carnivorous, but yeah, I mean.
To be considered carnivorous, Givenish writes, a plant must be able to absorb nutrients from dead bodies adjacent to its surfaces, obtain some advantage in growth reproduction, and have unequivocal adaptations for active prey attraction, capture, and digestion.
You are going to be very impressed to discover that the next sentence out of my mouth was going to be the way to distinguish this was going to be some sort of chemical apparatus for specifically recovering the nitrogen that was once contained in those insects.
That would be the diagnostic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So interesting.
You know, this says unequivocal adaptations for active prey attraction, capture and digestion.
And you've skipped the attraction and capture.
Well, you've skipped the attraction part.
So you're saying basically that sounds more like... No.
Why can't I think... What's a vulture is doing?
Scavenging.
Yeah.
So you're talking to me about like scavenging plants as opposed to carnivorous plants.
A, you could have scavenging, but B...
I'm really just suggesting that the ability to cryptically attract an attractant, right?
If an attractant is like some, you know, sticky sweet substance on the surface that attracts insects, we'll spot it, right?
If some pattern on the leaf I don't know that this definition is the one that we really need to be beholden to here, but attraction, capture, and digestion.
right away that the pattern is actually an attractant right because it doesn't it's not a conventional attractant and then the so so then the question you know if i don't know that this definition is the one that we really need to be you know beholden to here but attraction capture and digestion digestion obviously like most plants can't make hay out of a dead insect next to them right hay plants can presumably grass can if you're parts of it yeah um
but uh but uh the the thing that the carnivorous plants that you're talking about may not be doing in the same way that we think of that might be cryptic as attraction and capture and and
you know the cat it's not really capture if like you did attract it through some cryptic means and you do have an ability to digest it once it's dead um but you know you're attracting some number of organisms and then most of them just go about their business and leave again but actually because the The lifespan of these little flies you're attracting is so short, some number of them simply die in place, and then you haven't actively captured them, and so does that qualify as carnivorous plants?
I still think it does.
It just doesn't happen to be the criteria of this particular definition.
Well, I like it.
They've set a high bar.
Yeah, they have.
You've got to do all these things, which, that's good.
That's the direction.
No, and I think, I mean, this paper is pretty great.
New Evidence on the Origin of Carnivorous Plants is a Short Paper Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
So it's in, you know, PNAS from... that's...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that's always a strange little acronym to say out loud, isn't it?
Yes, and people who publish in lesser journals suffer from penis envy.
Yes, yes they do.
Okay, but that's just sort of a setup of carnivorous plants.
Carnivores evolved lots and lots of times.
The bar for whether or not you're considered carnivorous is high, as we've just talked about.
Two stories, the first of which is what led me here, and then the second of which I've discovered while I was in this sort of rabbit hole of plant carnivory that I think may be actually even cooler.
The first one, I research out, I guess it's actually in May of this year, facultative carnivory.
Okay, facultative carnivory.
Here we have a picture of, and we'll just put this picture of this pretty little plant up for just a moment, and this is a science news piece and it was about a piece published in a different journal, which I'll go to in a moment.
Inducible carnivory.
Okay, so hand me my screen back if you would, yeah.
There's only one species out of all the hundreds of species of carnivorous plants known to be facultatively carnivorous.
Meaning, mostly when you think of like a Venus flytrap or an apenthes or something, it's obligate.
This is what you do for a living, is you attract insects and you digest them and that's how you get your resources.
But what about facultative carnivory, where sometimes it pays to be carnivorous and sometimes it doesn't.
Well, that's what this one plant is doing.
And so they live in West Africa, they've got this tropical monsoon climate, shallow, acidic, highly weathered soils with low nutrient levels.
So a lot like they're wrestling in a landscape that's hard to pull nutrients from.
And the tropical monsoon climate means that it's highly variable and somewhat stochastic throughout the year, okay, with regard to what's available to them.
And what this research finds is that when the growth medium is considered normal, like, you know, basically even appropriate, I don't remember exactly what the ratio, you got a prediction?
Well, hold on a second.
If you said it, from the point of view of our listeners and viewers.
These plants are getting nitrogen.
That is the limiting thing that they are getting from their carnivory.
They are not getting carbon compounds.
They're not getting energy.
These are photosynthetic plants who are getting nitrogen in... No.
No.
I mean, precisely this research was like, well, if there's carnivory that is inducible by environmental circumstances, what is inducing the carnivory?
What is it that makes them sometimes carnivorous and sometimes not?
And in this case, it's like three different types of leaves.
And one of the leaves is sticky and draws in insects and then they can digest them.
So what are the conditions?
Wait, wait, wait.
You are correct that they're not getting carbon compounds.
But wait, wait, wait.
Am I incorrect that a Venus flytrap or a Nepenthes pitcher plant are getting nitrogen and that this plant may be getting something else, or am I wrong about the entire category of carnivorous plants?
I think you are wrong only in that it's too simple.
If you think about gardening, we don't buy fertilizers, but it's three elements that tend to be limiting or that tend to be out of the right ratio.
It's nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
Okay.
And so what this research does is looks at those three and says, we're going to provide a normal ratio, I don't remember what that is, and then we're going to provide growth medium in which nitrogen levels are low, and one in which the potassium limits are low, deficient in potassium, and one in which phosphate, the phosphorus levels are low.
And only when the phosphorus levels were low did the carnivorous leaves develop.
So in this particular case, it wasn't the nitrogen, it wasn't the potassium, it was the phosphorus.
Now, they're in particularly different kinds of soils, right?
These highly weathered tropical soils that are, you know, low nutrients in general with monsoons coming through that are presumably helping leach the soils further.
So, you know, I don't know if More often it's nitrogen, but I wouldn't think that it was inherently nitrogen even though, even any more than I would think it was inherently phosphorus or inherently potassium.
These are two separate questions that may be the same.
Right?
There's a question about what triggers the morphology in which carnivory happens.
And so from a trade-off perspective, the interesting thing here is the reason that we have carnivorous plants and other plants, the reason that those are in general not, it's not a facultative question, is that a carnivorous plant is not able to compete with non-carnivorous plants where non-carnivorous plants have sufficient nutrients to do their thing.
So I suspect, you know, neither of us are soil chemists, right?
But I suspect that you're thinking it's going to be nitrogen more often than it's phosphorus or potassium because we know that there are all of these tricks for nitrogen fixation in the soil that some plants do and then others can make use of their nitrogen and all of this.
But I don't know that there aren't comparable tricks for phosphorus and potassium deficiencies as well.
Well, I'm not... I wasn't actually even going to that level.
The question is, the fact that you discover that low phosphorus triggers the production of carnivorous morphology doesn't necessarily say that what the plant needs is phosphorus, or that it's getting phosphorus.
It just says that you've got a trigger, which could be that it needs phosphorus and this is a way to get it from insects, or it could be That that's a good proxy that tells you when you're in a kind of soil in which nitrogen will be limiting, and it is picking up nitrogen from the insects, but it's triggered by the low phosphorus, right?
I could imagine that, like, for example.
But why wouldn't, I mean, if it's a proxy for, I need nitrogen, why wouldn't low nitrogen trigger it as well?
It might be, for example, So you're talking about a trigger which is going to precede the production of leaves that are capable of remedying the deficit.
And so there's a delay there, right?
So it could be that there's some sort of pattern, like if there's a leaching issue, that the soils are going to be depleted by the high flow through of water or something like this.
I agree with all that, but this feels like epicycles to me.
Why is it so strange that they might be limited in one of the things that we know plants in our agricultural systems to be limited by?
Oh, it's not.
I won't be surprised by this.
I won't be surprised by this at all.
So why are we working so hard to recover the, but maybe it's nitrogen after all, explanation?
Well, I'm not trying to impose that on this plant that I've never heard of.
Okay.
Okay.
My question, you know, I'm perfectly ready to accept that I've misunderstood Venus flytraps on the basis that, you know, the textbooks have been wrong and it's not about nitrogen.
That could be.
So your question is, so again, at least nine different evolutions for carnivorean plants.
Right.
Your question is, you thought that in general, maybe across all or most of the evolutions of carnivorean plants, it was driven by
Right, and you hinted at the reason that that would be such a common motivation for the evolution of this, which is that nitrogen fixation is actually a tricky business that most plants can't do, and so there are various mutualisms that bring in nitrogen Or you can eat bugs.
Or you can eat bugs, right.
So the point is, there are lots of ingenious solutions to this puzzle, and the one that is captivating to us is the consumption of animals by plants.
That's fascinating that plants do that.
But in any case, the idea that nitrogen-poor soils happen all the time for various reasons That lots of plants can't grow there.
They are actually excluded by the lack of nitrogen, which then creates a niche for any plant, even an inferior plant, that can figure out how to beat that limit, which is why we get the evolution of carnivorous plants, is that the point is, you know, if I can grow there and nobody else can, then it, you know, the limit on everybody else's growth there saves me from all this competition.
Right, but so this is why I find it analogous to the mangroves, right?
Like lots of evolutions of this habit that is marginal, where you're going to be at the edge of what most of your kin, and I'm talking about kin broadly, like most plants could possibly tolerate.
But poor nitrogen is something that biologists think about a lot more than, you know, farmers think about poor, you know, poor phosphorus and poor potassium soils as well.
And, you know, in this particular case, it seems to be about the phosphorus.
Yep.
Well, again, I just, I'm not saying it isn't about the phosphorus.
I'm just saying that to discover that the phosphorus deficit triggers the evolution of this morphology doesn't necessarily say that what the plant is then getting.
Yeah.
I don't know about the evolution.
Right.
triggers the deployment of this evolved adaptation, right?
It could still be about nitrogen or not.
I'm just agnostic about that until, you know, until that research exists.
The other story I ran into about carnivorous plants, though, some work published some number of years ago, 2009, I found even more charming, even though it involves poop.
Really?
Yeah.
All right.
So here goes.
It's a Nepenthes.
Nepenthes lowii.
We knew Nepenthes in Madagascar.
We saw pitcher plants.
So there are a couple of different origins, as I've talked about, evolutions of pitcher plants, but Nepenthes is one of the giant clades that's kind of all over the What is the dangling pitcher with the... Yeah, although in some species, including Nepenthes lowii, they have both a terrestrial form and an aerial form, and it's different by the age of the plant.
So in this guy, Nepenthes lowii, they live in Borneo.
Again, this is carnivorous pitchers at ground level when the plants are young, and just standard, like, you know, they got these pitchers and I think they, you know, close shut when they've got an insect in them.
Some of them do, I'm not sure these guys do, whatever, it doesn't matter.
But once older, the pitchers change structure and they don't attract invertebrates at all.
In fact, the slippery slopes of the terrestrial pitchers that help, you know, they attract the insects and then once they're there, they can't get traction and they slip in and then they get digested.
These pitchers, once the plant gets older and they're now raised off the ground, they get more robust, they change the shape, they're not slippery at all.
They actually have like footholds.
What they have in them is tree shrew poop.
And the tree shrews, and I've got a picture here, the tree shrews, here you go, um, The tree shoes are being offered some sweet nothings, some sweet stuff by these Nepenthes, and the adult Nepenthes that have these aerial pitchers have modified their structure sufficiently
Such that when, just like with pollinators, right, when they're getting the sweet stuff from the plant, their anuses are positioned just so, so that they poop into the nepenthes and something over 50% up to 100% of the nitrogen this time That these plants have in them is derived from tree shrew poop.
What was the percent?
Over 50 up to 100 percent.
That's incredible.
Isn't that completely incredible?
Let me get the actual number.
57 to 100 percent of the foliar nitrogen in mature Nepenthes lowii are from tree shrew poop.
So okay, this is incredible because in some sense it is An additional, so we have flowers in which typically a plant effectively hires an animal to transport pollen over a distance that the plant can't traverse.
Right.
Or another way to think of it is to radically reduce the amount of pollen necessary in order to reach a mate instead of a wind-pollinated thing which fills the air with pollen.
Tiny pollen grains are transported on an insect or a bird or Something like that.
So that's one version of plants hiring animals.
We've got frugivory, in which plants hire animals in a different way to transport a seed, to transport the seed into a new habitat or to escape competition from the parent plant.
These are very classic examples, familiar to everybody.
But this is really similar.
Yeah, it is.
It's so similar.
It's the hiring of an animal to collect, in this case it's a shrew, it's probably eating the very same insects that the plant would be collecting, but it's hiring this animal to go out, intelligently find those insects, collect them, and then poop in the pitcher, and it's getting its nitrogen that way.
So although this is not a, it's not a strategy that has taken over Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of plants the way fruit and flowers have.
But nonetheless, it's, you know, it's an equally powerful demonstration of the idea of plants hiring animals to do things that you have to be mobile to do, and plants aren't mobile.
That's right.
No, it's utterly extraordinary.
So this work was published in 2009.
Clark et al.
The title is Tree Shrew Laboratories, A Novel Nitrogen Sequestration Strategy in a Tropical Picture.
And I'm going to go out on a limb here.
I'm going based on just that one black and white picture which I've seen for all of five seconds here.
We can put it back up.
Looks like the reward is being offered on that app structure.
Yeah.
Right?
So imagine for a second that Again, I could be totally wrong about this, but that shrew is probably an insectivore at the dietary level.
It's a member of the insectivora, if it's a true shrew.
Right.
And it's a tree shrew, so I don't know.
Oh, right, right.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So I don't know if it's an insectivore, but the chances are the way this evolved, if it is an insectivore, is that insects were being attracted to Nepenthes because that's what Nepenthes does.
The tree shrew was using the Nepenthes as an attractant.
It was parasitizing the Nepenthes.
It was eating insects and the the Nepenthes, the pitcher plants, that facilitated rather than thwarted this behavior came out ahead because some fraction of the time the tree shrew would poop in the pitcher and it would get nitrogen more than it lost to the insects that were taken.
Yeah, no, I mean, you could, I mean, we can do a whole, I'm not actually dismissing this at all, but a whole like arm-waving story here where, okay, it was attracting the insects and the tree shrew was like trying to grasp, but he's slipping because it's slippery because it needs to be slippery for the insects to go in.
And the Nepenthes that gets a little bit stickier, maybe loses more insects, but gets more tree shoes and the tree shoes start to show up for the insects, but also maybe, oh, there's a little bit of a sweet reward.
And so you get a little bit of positive feedback there.
And then you get a modification of the size and shape of the pitcher such that when grasping in exactly this way, the tree shrew poops exactly into the plant and the plant gets all that nitrogen.
Yeah, I don't think this is, you know, hand-wavy at all.
The place it could falter is if the tree shrew doesn't eat any of the things that the penthes attract to it.
Yes, or attract in its younger form.
Right, but the idea, and you can Mind, just see it happening, right?
You've got this pitcher that is adapted to trap insects.
It attracts a parasite, the tree shrew, and that parasite behaves in a way that actually causes the pitcher to recover exactly the reward that it's built to recover but in a way that is not anticipated.
And then its structure modifies to orient the tree shrew, so it more frequently poops in the pitcher.
And by putting the reward at an increased level at a place that orients the shrew, it all works out.
So basically it's a gentle slope on the adaptive landscape.
It's actually a beautiful demonstration of why the term exaptation is so useless.
Good, let's do it.
So exaptation is... I don't know if Stephen Jay Gould came up with it, but he used to tout this.
Stephen Jay Gould is highly regarded amongst people who are not evolutionary biologists.
The evolutionary biologists by and large hate him because he was...
Politically motivated to discount stories of adaptation.
But anyway, the term is exaptation.
Exaptation means that instead of something being evolved for the job, it is borrowed for the job and it was evolved for something else.
And the problem with this term... Its original use was its adaptive use.
But if the organism is now using that structure that evolved for something else, For something new.
That's not an adaptation, that's an ex-adaptation.
Ex-adaptation.
And the problem with it is that absolutely every adaptation is going to be, you know, many ex-adaptations because we're all so far from the origin of whatever we were that everything's been borrowed multiple times on the route to Getting where we are.
It's like ecology's mistake in general with evolution, and it's the mistake of, well, the first peoples.
Are you sure they were the first peoples?
Because I feel like there were probably people here before them, and probably the people that we're talking about as the first peoples did some stuff to get rid of the people who came before them.
Start counting somewhere and decide that that's the beginning of history, but be clear about that's what you're doing.
So the same thing, same problem.
All adaptations are going to be ex-adaptations, and in this case you can see it, right?
Because you can see the pitcher plant if the story that we are intuiting must be approximately right here.
You've got a pitcher that is adapted to collect nitrogen from dead insects that it tricks into falling into a trap where they drown.
And is being modified to instead of picking up insects to adjust the behavior of a would-be parasite who becomes a collaborator on the basis that it gets a reward and having collected insects itself and therefore having nitrogen That it's not using drops it into the pitcher.
I mean, it's even possible, even possible.
And again, you know, maybe, you know, I don't, I don't know.
Um, but that the tree shrew benefits also not just from the reward, but from having its poop harvested so that it's not leaving a chemical trail out in the forest as to where it's been and where it might be findable by would-be predators.
Yep.
That's going to be a tough one, but I absolutely agree.
This is largely how mammals get hunted is they leave unavoidable evidence that a predator with A good sense of smell can find which explains interesting behaviors like cats burying their poop and one of the two sloths in Central and South America coming down the tree and actually burying its poop.
I think it also accounts for the other one coming down the tree and pooping but not burying it.
Right.
Yeah, I don't remember which is which, but yes.
Yeah, I forgot which is which, actually.
But anyway, all of these things are about disguising where you are because something, if it figures it out, can predate you.
Well, in the case of cats, probably it's more about so your prey don't know you're there.
I don't think so.
I think it's, you know, this is small cats and... Big cats don't do this?
Good question.
I don't know.
But in the small cats, I would say hiding from predators is more likely.
But it'd be interesting if big cats do it, then that would suggest that it might also be prey items.
Yeah.
All right.
That's carnivorous plants for today.
That's carnivorous plants for today.
Thank you for tuning in to carnivorous plants today.
We will have one and only one more episode of carnivorous plants today and it will be a long time in the future.
Right.
They're amazing.
We've run into carnivorous plants in the wild, and they are truly extraordinary.
You really can't spend a long time watching them, but we're not going to spend time watching carnivorous plants while on air, are we?
No.
Some of them are fast for plants, but they're not fast enough that we want to become... We do not want spectators spectating our spectating of the No, it's terrible being observed while you're observing.
Yes.
It's the worst.
Who will observe the observers?
Really not the worst.
Yeah.
All right.
I think that brings us to the end of... near the end.
We're going to do some housekeeping at the end here of yet another episode of Dark Horse.
You have been hard at work recording a bunch of guest episodes.
There was one that came out this week with Pierre Kory.
So we are going to come to you next Wednesday.
So we'll be back shortly and then next Saturday there will be another guest episode and then another one on that following Wednesday.
Uh, and then we'll be back the following Saturday, and then we are going to start, um, most of the live streaming on Wednesdays, um, starting in July.
Wednesdays at 11.30am Pacific.
Uh, but, of course, we will continue to have all of our shows available in all the normal ways, so if you can't tune in then, well, but you could tune in on Saturdays, apologies for that, um, but it's gonna, it's gonna help us out some to, to change it up.
Um, and soon we're going to have a website where all of those schedule changes will be posted, so that will be easier to track that way.
So, until we see you next time, if you want to find more of what we're doing, I write at Natural Selections.
That piece that we were talking about in the first part of the couple hours today is on naturalselections.substack.com this week.
Brett's got Twitter subscriptions going.
It's It seems subtle on the Twitter site, but it's... I don't know how subtle it is, because when I look at my page, it doesn't reveal itself.
But anyway, yes, they are there.
So consider joining.
Consider signing up.
We've got merchandise at Dark Horse Store.org, a great print shop, a great couple who make all of our stuff, and we're going to have a little bit of new merchandise soon based on something you said last week.
We've got our amazing artist working on art for that.
Let's see, we've got Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, signed copies available right here in the San Juans at Darville's, which you can Order online or, of course, you can get the book anywhere.
And tomorrow, on Sunday, July, no, June something, June 18th, we have our private Q&A at 11 a.m.
Pacific for two hours.
Questions have already been asked, but it's nice and small and we do actually watch the chat on that one and interact with people.
It's a lot of fun, so if you want to join that.
It's fun, nice community of people.
Yeah, yeah, it's great.
You can go over to my Patreon and sign up for that.
Brett's Patreon has a couple of conversations a month as well.
And we are going to be moving stuff over to Locals.
We've got people signing up at Locals.
That's great.
Keep doing that and we will be showing up there soon.
Yep.
And at both of our Patreons, and we'll be also through Locals, we have our Discord community.
Where you can engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, you can join a book club, sing karaoke, have virtual happy hours, maybe outlets?
Absolutely.
Probably not.
But, young or old, left or right, male or female, there's a spot for you around the Discord campfire.
And they also send us a question each week, so we will start the Q&A, which will begin in about 15 minutes, with a question from the Discord.
And we invite you to check out our wonderful sponsors for this week.
Once again, that was Uncruise, Sol, and Seed.
All fabulous.
I didn't say it this time, but we choose our sponsors very, very carefully.
We don't accept any that we don't actually and truly vouch for, so...
As always, those three this week are fantastic, and we're supported by you.
So share, subscribe, like, talk about things you're learning here, like free shrew poop with your friends.
Maybe not over dinner, but you know, anytime else.
And if your friends can't handle it, they're probably not worthy friends.
We're just not biologists, maybe.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I would think a crew friend could handle it, even if it wasn't their cup of tea.
Even at dinner?
You might wait till, you know, after dinner drinks, at worst.
I think that's wise.
I think that's wise.
Okay, until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
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