Lie to a Tyrant: The 231st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 231st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss the Supreme Court’s decision in Biden v Missouri, and its implications for free speech and censorship; the presidential debate that will exclude Kennedy; and the release of Julian Assange—all possible tactics to control public conversation. Also: what does an AI deep fake of Dave Chappe...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, where I never remember what episode number it is.
What number, what number episode is it, Heather?
It's 231.
231.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
This is episode 231 of the Evolutionary Lens on the Dark Horse Podcast.
Indeed it is.
231, which is not prime, but which has, to me, a particularly nice list of factors.
Oh, a good list of factors.
A good list of factors.
It's 3x77 gets you to 231.
Also 7x33.
Also 11x21.
That's a lot of factors for a number like 231, isn't it?
1, 3, 7, 11, 21, 33, 77.
Also 7 by 33.
Also 11 by 21.
That's a lot of factors for a number like 231, isn't it? 1, 3, 7, 11, 21, 33, 77.
As soon as you said 33, I knew there was going to be an 11.
Did you?
Yeah.
All right.
Here we are.
It's summer, and the world continues to do what the world seems to be doing in the 21st century, which is throwing one strange story after another at us.
So we're going to talk- Holy moly.
It's incredible.
We're going to talk Supreme Court, unexpected releases of longtime political prisoners.
Political prisoners.
Yeah, absolutely.
Political prisoners.
And leeches.
And leeches.
Yes.
A little bit on leeches.
Yeah.
We're also going to talk a bit about- Actual leeches, not political leeches.
Both kinds.
We're going to talk about both kinds just to, you know, fair and balanced.
Oh yeah.
Oh.
Yeah.
We're going to talk about comedy also, and we're going to try to find the relationships between these objects, because I swear they exist.
But nonetheless, a little hard to know where to stand.
It's been a hell of a week.
Let's put it that way.
And a story from our past about leaping water vipers.
Yes, so if you're afraid of such creatures, you might want to get a drink.
Yeah, get a drink.
Okay, we are streaming live.
Did I say that correctly?
Rumble.
We are rumbling live.
Yeah, and we've got the Watch Party going on at our Locals, Dark Horse Locals.
Please consider joining us there.
There's a lot of great content there.
All the Q&As, of which we are having one this Sunday, are available there live in the moment and also anytime afterwards.
Uh, for now, before we get to the main content, though, we, as usual, start with three, uh, our three sponsors right at the top of every episode.
This week, we've got Peak, which is new to us, Timeline, and Vanman.
Let us begin.
Yeah, let's do that.
My first, wow, first, look at that.
Yeah.
Uh, our first sponsor this week is a brand that is new to us.
It is Peak, and you're going to have to help me with the pronunciation.
Is it Nandaka?
Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, An adaptogenic coffee alternative that is powered by cacao, tea, and mushrooms.
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We are working without Annette because once again she didn't show up for work.
She never shows up.
She never shows up for work.
The slow release caffeine in peak... This is turning into a disastrous read.
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The idea there is if you're working out, if you're going on runs, or you're playing sports, and for whatever reason you don't want the coffee, including that while it gives you an immediate jolt, maybe it causes you to crash afterwards, the stuff in Peaks Nantaka is fantastic.
Yeah, I mean, if you're on the run from your past, from zombies, or from Goliath's minions, you might want to consider Peek's Nundaka.
Yeah, in fact, Peek's Nundaka fancy, easy-to-carry-with-you pouch allows you to have it even when you are on the run from zombies, because you're not likely to take some giant canister with you, but you might just have one of these in your pocket.
Right, now I'm actually wishing that I had had some before we went on, but still, even without it, I am committed to pronouncing the entire name correctly at least once before the end of this read.
You don't need to be able to pronounce it correctly to purchase it and enjoy it.
Absolutely.
All right.
So, if you're looking for a way to bring mental focus to your work, Brett, the ceremonial grade cacalli and pecan tacos... What?
It is really good stuff.
Yeah.
All right.
Walpred is collecting himself.
I'm just going to put it on screen again.
See, this is it.
Nanduka is the best.
Nanduka.
What?
Now you're trying to answer me?
No, no, no.
I think they think it's Nanduka.
Nanduka.
All right.
Apologies to the folks at Nanduka who have a... The folks at Peak.
Nanduka is the product.
Nope, even worse.
It really is great stuff, and this is our first read for them, and so, you know, we're just getting the kinks out, which is helped by... Yep, how to throw a dyslexic, hand them a complex read blind.
Okay.
- Could have looked at it. - Nanduka is the best coffee alternative.
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And it comes in easy to carry packets, presumably.
Sachets?
No.
That was their word.
Okay, sachets, definitely.
And it dissolves quickly in water.
You can have a delicious drink that brings clean, sustained energy wherever you go.
Nandaka tastes great, like a creamy, indulgent, spiced hot chocolate.
The cacao that they use is unusually high percentage of cacao butter which enhances nutrient absorption.
The fermented teas in Nandaka are triple screened for toxins to guarantee purity.
The selection of mushrooms is carefully chosen and diverse, including but not limited to chaga, reishi, and lion's mane.
And unlike many other mushroom coffees, Peak uses only the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms.
So Nandaka is free of mycelium and grains.
I suspect...
It is free of mycelium and grains, but it is not free of grains because of the fruiting bodies, I would guess.
I suspect, and I actually don't...
I did not look into this, but I suspect that if other products are basically using all of the fungus, not just the fruiting bodies...
Growing it on a grain background.
Yeah.
And so you would end up with both mycelium and grains.
I don't know otherwise why there would be grains associated with fungus.
It's the only podcast where you get a scientific analysis of the ad reads.
I don't think there's another podcast that does that.
Alright, Peaks Nondaka provides sustainable all-day energy and makes you feel like you're doing something good for your body.
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Excellent.
I will say, and this seems like a super trivial thing because, you know, lots of companies are sending a little bit of swag with their stuff now, and a lot of us feel like, I actually had all the stuff I needed, I just wanted the product, but the glass beaker that they send with their stuff is actually delightful, and I've used it for a number of other things.
Nice.
So, anyway, my turn.
Yep.
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And here I have a footnote.
I like my ad reads when I have footnotes.
So, that's a reword from the abstract of Polikaris et al., 2017, published in Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
Obviously.
Obviously.
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That's T-I-M-E L-I-N-E dot com Forward slash, I guess, Dark Horse.
They're all forward slashes.
From here on out.
I mean, in URLs, they always are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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You had an idea of where we should begin, and I've forgotten what it was.
I think that you were going to start by talking about the Supreme Court's decision.
Just was it was that just this morning?
That was just this morning.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
The Supreme Court has finally ruled on the Missouri v. Biden case.
Unfortunately, it is exactly as I expected, based on their earlier I believe it was a lifting of a stay so that the federal government, specifically the executive branch, could go back to pressuring social media companies to remove content that the Biden administration or whoever inhabits that office thinks is objectionable.
So they have now thrown the plaintiffs out of court on the basis that they do not have standing in the case, which is actually a completely shocking rationale.
The idea that people who were censored by social media companies at the behest of the executive branch do not have standing flies in the face of, frankly, obviousness.
In this case, I know because Justice Alito dissented from the 6-3 opinion, and he points out that the rationale was That it was not established that although the executive branch did pressure social media companies to censor the plaintiffs, it was not clear whether the social media companies would have done it without that pressure.
In other words, the court set a very high standard where you would have to prove that that was the reason you were censored rather than just the executive branch asked for you to be censored and you were censored.
So, an absurdly high bar for no reason, and you would expect that the Supreme Court, which is... I don't like this conclusion.
I don't like this outcome.
Wouldn't you have to demonstrate that?
I mean, I'm not sure that that's an absurdly high bar.
If the social media platforms were going to censor you anyway, in which case, we have another problem.
And, you know, we were censored by... This is a constitutional protection.
So the question is, does the executive branch have the right to ask speech to be censored because of the content?
Right, but I haven't seen the dissent.
I don't know.
I'm not a lawyer.
I don't know very much about the situation, but it sounds like that is effectively a request for, we need a different case.
There needs to be something else that is brought before the court, because it was like Bonacciaria and Cariarty and many others.
Maybe.
are being told, you know what, they might have just decided to censor you anyway, therefore, in this case, it wasn't the executive branch that did it to you.
Maybe.
We don't know.
I mean, you would want a legal expert to weigh in on this, but it is an absurd standard in light of the fact that people were censored, and you may never be able to establish this.
So to the extent that the First Amendment means anything, the point is, does the federal government have the right to request the censorship?
And in this case, the fact that people were censored should have created the presumption that at least it could have been.
Right.
So if the standard means, if that standard means that there's no way to ever bring such a case ever, then the standard isn't appropriate.
It sets a bar, which may make it impossible for this to be addressed.
Supreme Court.
So anyway, the First Amendment took a major hit here.
Now, my understanding is that the case can now continue in the lower courts.
The fact that the plaintiffs did not have standing with which to be heard does allow the case to continue, so it is possible that we could get a judgment, but this is clearly a major setback.
Now, it is a major setback in the midst of an election year, and it is an election year in which we are seeing Again, apologies.
It is a little hard to know how to present all of the connections, but remember our discussion of the World Health Organization and its obscene power grab where it attempted to create a set of rules under which it could dictate to governments which of their citizens needed to be censored, etc.
in the event of a so-called public health emergency.
So there is a general attempt to create Obstacles that cannot be overcome by those who wish to discuss things like, for example, let's say vaccine hazards.
Now, so the WHO attempted to create such an exemption, and in fact, the international health regulations, which they ultimately passed while the teeth had been greatly dulled, still did contain a censorship provision.
So there is a desire to create censorship at the exact moment that it has become obvious that the basis for censoring, that X, Y, or Z was misinformation, was exactly flipped on its head.
So something that is now absent from all of these discussions about the right of officials ostensibly in an effort to protect the public attempting to silence those who would distribute misinformation, that whole conversation has to be viewed in light of what ultimately that whole conversation has to be viewed in light of what ultimately happened to the claims about what was misinformation and
And of course, you know, Bhattacharya, Karyati, us, all of the folks who were shadow banned and censored and these things turned out to be vastly more right than those who were claiming the right to shut us down.
So that is exactly the reason that you cannot have a provision that says you're allowed to speak so long as what you say is true or something like that.
The First Amendment makes no such provision for very good reason, which is that you don't know what ultimately the judgment of history is.
So there's no conceivable algorithm in which anything beats a free discussion of all perspectives, right, wrong, and otherwise.
So we are now looking at a reinvigorated power of the government to decide what information is allowed to be discussed.
but Another thing that is absent from this discussion, at least as far as I've seen, is what this now does to the distinction between platforms.
So longtime viewers of Dark Horse will remember numerous discussions in which we talked about the principle that zero is a special number.
And what zero is a special number means Is that there are many competitive environments in which you must have no exceptions to the extent that you have a single university that decides to ignore wokeness and teach the truth.
To the extent that you have a single newspaper that abandons political correctness and reports the news.
Right?
To the extent that there is a single social media platform that lets you talk about whatever you think should be discussed rather than trying to nanny you into discussing only things that are sanctioned.
Even one exception changes the entire game theoretic landscape, because imagine a world in which you had one social media platform, maybe it's X, but you had one social media platform that was vastly more open to the discussion of ideas that have not been sanctioned by the government, and then the rest of them limited discussion.
Well, most people do not want to be put in an environment that is more limited in terms of what they can Learn about so people will seek the environment in which you have Greater latitude which means that those other environments in order to compete will have to move in the direction of the more liberated one so Yeah, the number of free universities, free platforms, free newspapers has to be zero.
To the extent that somebody like Musk decides to buy one and liberate it, that changes everything.
And so, in a world where the Supreme Court has refused to protect speech, and it has given the federal government the right to coerce platforms into censorship, A platform that is going to resist at any level has a decided advantage.
So I would imagine that one of the things that comes out of this is, in addition to X just simply having survived the onslaught that came back at it after Musk's purchase, it is now in the pole position with respect to being the place in which adults have conversations about controversial topics because you don't want to do it somewhere where you don't know, you know, who's got their thumb on the scale in what way.
Now I wish X had done a more perfect job of protecting speech itself.
It's certainly better than the others but But it has it still has work to do in this regard Okay, let's see was there anything else on Well, again, really not a legal scholar, and I don't know, and I have not looked at this newest, either the majority or the dissenting opinion yet.
But I feel like what the courts are now trying to figure out, and what all of us are trying to figure out is, because it struck me that you included in your list, you said, you know, social media platforms and newspapers.
And the question is, are social media platforms more like media outlets or more like the public square?
Media outlets are understood to have editors and to curate content, and readers who read the Wall Street Journal expect different content than readers who read the New York Times.
Viewers who go to Fox expect different content from viewers who go to MSNBC, because they know that the work has been curated and edited.
Whereas the public square, there may be a day when you go through the public square and it's anti-abortion activists and another day when you go through the public square and it's climate change activists.
And the public square is not editing or curating in terms of having to get permits for public display.
The governmental entity that you go to is supposed to be ideology-free.
Of course, it isn't, but it's supposed to be.
It's not supposed to be editing or curating.
If you follow the basic laws of sort of peaceable assembly, then you're supposed to be able to get the permits to say whatever you want.
So it does feel like, and I'm sure I'm repeating what the Supreme Court is exactly wrestling with, like, you know, are the social media platforms more like X or Y?
Are they more like media outlets, newspapers?
Obviously, You know, AV outlets didn't exist when the Constitution Bill of Rights were written, or are they more like places where people can actually freely congregate and hear and say whatever they feel like hearing and saying?
Well, a couple things.
One, this lands squarely in the realm of Rule 230, Provision 230, in which there is a distinction drawn between, you know, a platform and a publisher.
And the problem is the law has not been clarified with respect to social media platforms so that they end up with essentially the privileges of both.
And it's a it's a decidedly dangerous landscape.
I would also point out that there is a Delineation problem and mind you when I say that the Constitution of the United States Absolutely nailed the values to be protected.
There are a few Off notes, but in large measure it nailed the values but it is inadequate to protecting these rights in the present This is one of the things that I'm talking about because imagine a world, you know, how many people are getting newspapers on paper?
Not many people with birds, perhaps.
Um, But the point is, you know, and if we look at the, you know, the Biden laptop case, where what you had was a newspaper reporting a story that then lost its account on Twitter because it wanted that story to be visible.
In other words... Who lost their account on Twitter?
So, Twitter silenced the New York Post in the run-up to the last election on the basis that the Hunter Biden laptop story appeared to be Russian disinformation, which of course it wasn't.
And that's basically some kind of election interference.
Ballot box stuffing no, but it's interference in the election that comes not at the is the newspaper able to report the story But is the newspaper able to alert people that it's reported the story because nobody's getting the New York Post on paper And over and over and over again, we're faced with this.
Obvious once you've heard it, but still hard to remember in the moment.
The new tactics will not look like the old tactics.
If you know what has been done before sufficiently that probably all of your neighbours do too, and that's what you're looking for as evidence that there is skullduggery about, you won't find it.
Because it wouldn't work.
So you're getting basically the use of all of these structures.
Some of them were feeble and uninteresting structures that have been reinvigorated because they can be used in powerful ways.
So the Commandeering of public health the commandeering of international organizations, which were formerly, you know toothless and absurd but Not especially important that are now Potentially the front line in the battle over tyranny in the West
So anyway, what you're seeing is all of these structures are taking on new roles because something is playing a sophisticated game in which it's willing to use any cloak.
It's willing to, you know, fashion any object into a weapon.
And so the Constitution just simply does not name these things precisely.
And if the Supreme Court isn't willing to extrapolate For a new era, right?
Right.
If it's going to set an arbitrarily high bar, then the point is we're going to be left without First Amendment protections because there's now a way to interfere that doesn't, you know, that doesn't get properly tested and compelled.
Yes.
OK, so now let's look at the next story, which is in one way unrelated and in another way, Clearly directly related.
So this next story is about the debate which is happening tomorrow, which is being broadcast on CNN, which I think that there's been there's something wrong with this model in the first place and always has been the idea that a for-profit network Is going to be hosting the debate.
Frankly, this is a matter of, you know, public importance.
And there's no reason, given the huge amount of money involved in our elections, that we couldn't pony up enough money to have a completely independent debate.
And, you know, we could we could host it independently.
But no, CNN... Where would it be broadcast?
Frankly, the federal government has the right to force the broadcast on every channel, you know?
To the extent that we license channels, and yes, this has changed now that we don't broadcast this stuff over the air, but it comes in under your street, you know?
Things have changed, but nonetheless, the precedent exists for us to simply make this available and... Yeah, but...
Make it available and force every outlet to broadcast it are rather different mechanisms.
Sure.
Frankly, my point is, as long as it's publicly available, I'm cool with it.
If you want to do that by creating a channel, frankly, I don't remember what C-SPAN is, whether it's a nonprofit, whether it's public.
You know, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has now become a partisan entity.
That's unfortunately ideologically captured.
Right.
To me, that sounds like the obvious place, but PBS is not ideology free.
Right, but then, you know, we live in a world of infinite bandwidth.
So the answer is, if the federal government wanted to say, look, elections are important, it's important that people be able to hear the candidates, there's going to be this forum and it is going to come live every time we have, you know,
A debate to broadcast that's good enough for me but nonetheless what we've got instead is a Public-private partnership in other words fascism Involved in the broadcasting of a Presidential debate now
The thing about this presidential debate is that for related reasons, the Biden administration and the Trump campaign have a reason to collude to exclude Kennedy.
Right.
Because each Trump is the argument for reelecting Biden.
Right.
And Biden is the argument for Trump.
And these arguments break down in light of Kennedy, where there's actually a choice.
If you're, you know, if you think it's apocalyptically bad to have a president who can't remember where he is, which implies a cabal that you can't call in front of Congress behind the scenes.
If you think that's apocalyptically bad, as I do, it raises a question.
Who to vote for.
But it doesn't raise that question if the election appears to be a two-man race.
Yadda yadda yadda.
So, in any case, there's a perverse incentive for the two campaigns to exclude the wildcard.
Yeah, if it's just two of them, all they have to do is demonstrate that the other one is the existential threat that each side is claiming they are.
Right.
So there has been tinkering of the rules, the use of non-standards like, you know, the presumptive nominee of his party, blah, blah, blah, that has been used to establish why this debate stage does not welcome Kennedy.
He's not he's not a viable candidate.
And we've got presumptive nominees, yada, yada, yada.
So that's been used to create a bespoke Rationalization for a two-man debate which will happen tomorrow on CNET now this gets interesting at two different levels one the Kennedy campaign has Wisely done.
I think the one thing that it really can do to to it doesn't fully level the playing field, but but to bring it closer to level, which is it is going to expose Kennedy to the questions, whatever they may be in real time live.
So he is not going to be on their stage.
But from the point of view of those of us who.
So a person could cobble together that with the debate afterwards.
Yeah, at the very least.
You won't get you won't get call response like you won't you won't be able to respond.
But it is unfortunately going to be somewhat of a mess because there's no time slot for Kennedy.
So Kennedy will fall behind the actual broadcast.
But from the point of view of, look, what I don't want and I don't.
Kennedy doesn't need it.
Kennedy is a brilliant guy and fully capable of answering.
People may not like all his answers, but he is fully capable of answering across all of the things that Biden and Trump will be asked.
to discuss.
Yeah, he doesn't He doesn't need any help.
No, he's absolutely formidable as a debater and he's an excellent public speaker.
But more important than either of those is he knows his stuff.
He's an excellent thinker.
Across the board.
In any case, the, um, what you don't want is Kennedy to put, put out a video.
Here's how I would have answered those questions because it's, you know, it's apples to oranges.
You just had your team of 20 put together the right answer.
Exactly.
What you want is.
The off-the-cuff answers the way, presumably, Biden and Trump.
And of course, there is history where it hasn't been off-the-cuff.
Plugged behind the ear yet?
Well, who knows?
But, you know, there's certainly the Carter debate briefing books back in the Reagan-Carter election.
But anyway, so Kennedy is going to do a parallel broadcast.
He is going to answer the questions put to Biden and Trump.
That's the right thing for him to do.
It will, of course, allow his superiority, I think, to both of the other candidates to be evident.
But then of course the skullduggery comes in because CNN, which again is a private for-profit corporation or maybe it's publicly held but whatever the point is, it is not a public concern, has decided not
to hold exclusive rights to the broadcast which I think would be obscene but it could do it and not to allow others to rebroadcast it with their commentary or whatever but it has decided to draw a line and that line involves all of the mainstream channels including Fox News are entitled to rebroadcast And all of the independent media, things like Breaking Point, Timcast, are not allowed to use it.
So they've decided to arbitrarily enforce this.
Now, I did see Breaking Point responding to this and of course they are justly feeling that they have been unfairly treated and that this is an absurdity.
That's all true.
But I would actually counsel them.
The thing to understand is that this is actually evidence that Goliath is panicking.
Okay?
Goliath is revealing himself.
And you see two things here.
One, you see a tacit acknowledgement that Kennedy is actually Highly viable and dangerous to the other two campaigns.
A comparison is not something either of those campaigns want.
You know, the DNC, which absolutely does hate Trump, can fully tolerate four years of Trump, right?
It's got contingency plans upon contingency plans for that.
It doesn't have plans for Kennedy because it doesn't know how to deal with somebody who has the temperament and the insight and the intellect to, you know, to actually fight a battle against.
And the self-control.
Right.
And so the the DNC's racket is definitely threatened by Bobby Kennedy.
So what do you do?
You pretend he's not a viable candidate.
You keep him off the debate stage.
Oh, you keep him off the debate stage.
But in 2024, what happens if you keep him off the debate stage in 2024?
Oh, the independent media becomes interested.
Well, what does that matter?
Oh, it matters more than the mainstream media now.
That's what we've been learning over the course of COVID, right?
Goliath didn't know what the independent media was.
It didn't know what a podcast was, and it lost on narrative after narrative because the independent media discussed these things and forced the truth into view.
So what are they going to do?
They're going to go back to censorship, right?
You've got to be, you've got to have the ability to keep things off of the Independent media by arbitrarily enforcing some sort of I don't know copyright In a way that you know includes Fox and excludes breaking points and Tim cast right you've got to have the right to tell social media companies when something isn't going to be Discussed widely so that they can tamp it down behind the scenes effectively.
You've got a cheat across the board and Okay, so Goliath is telling us that this is now a point where he has no choice but to cheat and he's going to do it and he's going to risk being revealed, which is what he's doing.
He's revealing his move Which is to censor and strong-arm and arbitrarily enforce copyrights in order to make sure that we don't see what we actually need to see, which is what happens when you take a, you know, a hyper-intelligent patriot and put him up against the other two offerings.
And anyway, we should simultaneously be very upset about the breaking of the rules in order to make this happen, but we should be heartened by the fact that it reveals that they have to do this because actually the independent media has created a landscape in which Bobby Kennedy Jr.
is actually a viable candidate in this election.
So anyway, it's a good news, bad news story for sure.
I will be very interested to hear how he answers the questions and how this plays out.
Obviously, what the rule that CNN has implemented, and again, why did they get to implement it, given that this is not their content that they are producing.
No one can do the mashup that is what we would want, that would not be complete, but that would have at least the three of them all answering the questions laid out next to each other.
I don't know, CNN, are they allowed to preclude the text from being laid out next to one another?
Oh, I don't think so.
I think that would be a shocking violation.
So are they all.
Yeah.
But anyway, that would be, again, you can't get the responses to, and surely Trump will get some digs in that will be titillating to his fans and reproachable to his enemies and such, but even just laying out the answers to all of the questions side by side, all three of them next to each other, will be
It'll be illustrative of the various cognitive capacities and actual positions that they all highlight.
Yeah, it'll be telling especially if you know that they were all delivered under equivalent spontaneity.
Yep.
So, and I would just say two other things.
One, I don't know the website offhand, but I think it's therealdebatepresumably.com I don't know if this is the right one or not.
It exists, but I don't know if it's the one you're talking about.
The last one is from 2016.
That's the last post, so... I don't know.
This is the realdebate.com.
or not exists, but I don't know if it's the one you're talking about.
No, the last one is from 2016.
That's the last post.
Oh, okay.
I don't know.
This is the real debate.com.
It's like it's correct.
Okay.
Anyway, you can go to Kennedy's feed, and I think I retweeted it, and find the website address so you can watch in parallel, even though CNN is preventing other places that you might do similar things from broadcasting.
And the last thing I wanted to say is I think there's something interesting in the fact that CNN is enforcing the arbitrary boundary at mainstream versus alternative, bringing Fox News in.
Because what would that look like if Tucker was still at Fox?
Yeah.
Now I think, um, The firing of Tucker Carlson in light of what Tucker has been doing is one of the all time biggest strategic blunders ever.
But that doesn't mean that it doesn't have their upside.
In other words, bringing Fox News in without Tucker is a lot safer move.
Well, yeah, and I don't know who's speaking on any of the major media outlets.
So the fact that I don't know who any of the talking heads on Fox is does not suggest anything about my politics.
I don't know who the talking heads are on CNN or MSNBC either.
But my reaction when you told me this this morning was, oh, Fox got invited to the party!
How cool for them that they actually get to go to the cocktail party with all the big people who have power.
And that's how they're going to be made to feel.
And if they can be brought into line, and part of what firing Tucker was, was coming into line, then we can expect them to start to look just like the other ones.
Yeah and uh you know this is this is looking a lot like the overall landscape where there's a certain elite club you know I mean one of the things Tucker talks about is permanent Washington right these are people who are antagonists but actually they're involved in a game in which they you know trade roles are you the outsider for the next four years or are you you know gonna have an office on the inside yeah and the point is there it's a it's a club and the you know
Fox News is decidedly the outsider on the Insiders Club, but nonetheless, we've come to a point where the really frightening thing is, you know, Sager and Crystal and Timcast, right?
Yeah.
So anyway, interesting times for sure, and we're just, we're still just getting going on this 2024 thing, so.
That's not actually really true.
About halfway through.
We're well underway, but let's put it this way, things will tend to accelerate as we head towards November.
Yeah.
Indeed.
So, yeah, most of what we're doing today is stuff you wanted to bring, so I think the obvious place to go from that is the release of Julian Assange.
Yeah, the release of Julian Assange, which of course has a relationship here too.
We don't know why this happened now.
It could be happenstance and we don't know exactly what it is.
We know sort of broad brush what the story is.
We know that Assange agreed to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act.
He pleads guilty and he goes free because although he is now going to be convicted of the violation of the Espionage Act.
The agreement involves the time he has spent in prison being sufficient time served.
So anyway, Assange is now a free man.
What does that mean?
As far as I know, we do not know for certain.
I very much hope he has not agreed to anything terribly Limiting and that if he has we can know what it is.
Yep There is some interesting discussion today of the deletion of the DNC emails from the WikiLeaks servers.
Oh Really?
Yeah, which sounds bad.
Yeah, it does.
On the other hand Presumably that stuff is now out in the world, right?
However, right this now Brings us right back to the landscape that we started with Imagine that those emails are now privately held and that the federal government has the right to pressure social media companies not to allow distribution of it.
Right?
In other words, there's kind of a censorship by sound cancellation.
Right?
You know, noise canceling headphones that basically... Shadow banning.
...broadcast the opposite.
But I mean, it's shadow banning of stuff, of information, rather than of people.
Yes, but still, again, I think this goes to the fact that the Constitution was written by people who did not have an understanding of technology.
And so the idea of, no, actually, you're allowed to say whatever you want, right?
If you can say whatever you want in a soundproof room, That's not saying whatever you want if you can say whatever you want online, but the online thing, you know Causes your reach these limits your so the amplitude being tamped down is a novel attack It requires a muscular Supreme Court to stare it down and say no this is unenvisioned in the particulars but this is very much against the spirit of the the First Amendment we're gonna protect it and
And so I don't know what the meaning of the WikiLeaks deletions is.
It has an ominous feel to it.
But I did want to say, I have not heard very many people criticize Assange for pleading guilty to something that's obviously, well, what I have joked before is that, you know, he's guilty of committing journalism.
Right.
In this case, I think everybody understands that he was being tortured to death, that this was destroying his health at the very least, and that this was being done intentionally, and he was being made an example of, and he was being made an example of
for broadcasting politically embarrassing to say the least emails of a major political party so that he really was a political prisoner and you know nobody will officially acknowledge that but it was clear to all of us who were watching this carefully and It is his willingness to plead guilty is on the one hand decidedly a setback.
It would have been far better to have a court look at this and say, this is absurd.
He should never have been, you know, imprisoned.
He was doing what journalists do.
And this is important to a functioning democracy, to any functioning democracy, to all of them.
However, I think that this is a perfect case of the importance of being willing to lie to a tyrant, right?
When you say, I am guilty of a crime when in fact I was doing a job that is protected by the constitution of the government that has put me in this jeopardy.
You are lying to a tyrant, and that is absolutely a valid act.
That is part of the resistance.
Now, hopefully what it means is that we now have Julian Assange, that not only does his freedom come back, but that he can now take up his position as this very important person on, as a member of the freedom movement, right?
A movement which has really, in large measure, gotten started long after he was effectively imprisoned.
Yeah, so anyway great to have Julian Assange out one way or the other even if he has to live his life Quietly it was a absolute disaster for For the West that he was behind bars and it is a triumph no matter what else is true that he is no longer imprisoned i hope that he has retained uh freedoms such that he will uh in time when he's recovered
uh rejoin the fight and and be the um ferocious person of incredible integrity that he has been um so i see in your notes um that you might have wanted to tie this back to the election yes well that's the question about whether or not um the timing of this release is calculated which i think it must be um
In other words, the ability for him to make this deal arrives at a particular moment.
I think, you tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe I have said on Dark Horse, on one of our previous live streams, that to me, no candidate who refuses to pledge to pardon Assange is a viable candidate.
Right?
Say that again?
I just feel like you may have missed a negative.
In order to be a viable candidate for president, in order to have any chance at all at my vote, you have to pledge that you will pardon Assange.
Yes, that is what you have said before.
Tremendous strikes against Trump one of the things I have the hardest time forgiving him for and you know he did some good stuff it's not like it's all stuff he needs to be forgiven for but you know the two biggies for me are his unwillingness to acknowledge that he was bamboozled by Fauci and company and did harm at their behest over COVID especially Project Warp Speed.
Hmm, but the other is that he failed to pardon Assange even on his way out of the office and I There's also some That would that's a passive failure.
There's also some active failure of his Justice Department Going after Assange.
But in any case my feeling is look if you're the real deal Then you gotta liberate Assange because this is the tremendous black eye for democracy that he is in prison at all.
So, I'm not saying anybody's responding to us because they're not, but...
The idea that there is a dangerous issue for Biden and for Trump, right, that they both have to answer for the fact that that Assange is still behind bars, that that was potentially an explosive issue that could have come back to haunt them in the campaign as it progresses.
Yeah, it could have, although given that both of them have been in the office, it's not clear to me how it would have differentially affected one or the other.
They both have had the opportunity and both have failed.
Yeah, but once again, the system really fears Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
would pardon Assange and has said so.
So if the idea is, look, the system can go back and forth between Trump and Biden.
There's no real threat to it there, even though I think Trump would.
Dismantle the swamp if he knew how I think he would do it out of revenge at this point if nothing else But I think he would do it because he really actually would like to I don't think he knows how yeah, it's Patently not an easy job.
It's not an easy job.
He would only have four years to do it They know an awful lot about him, and they know you know and psychologically he's got Vulnerabilities where he can be tied in knots Based on you know his insecurities and so yeah Anyway, to the extent that what the system really wants to avoid is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
attaining a level of viability where they can't explain why they're ignoring him any longer, this neutralizes one issue that for a lot of us was just an absolute deal breaker for the other candidates.
And now they're off the hook.
Yeah.
So anyway, I don't know that that's what's going on, but it's certainly possible.
It does seem so.
Yep.
So, you've had all the stuff today, so I just gotta keep on segwaying to you.
It's time for comedy?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
I will just, by way of... Oh, unless... We'll do that at the end, Zach.
Yeah.
You're the one who had the 18 things you wanted to talk about.
All right, so the other one is much more of you from 30,000 feet issue, but something loomed up this week that I think merits significant consideration even though it may seem trivial on first pass.
So what happened was a company called Roast.ai, I think, released some video from its AI comedy engine.
Um, in which I've seen two clips.
One of them is Dave Chappelle delivering a roast, I think, of a competing AI platform.
And then another one is Ricky Gervais.
But anyway, do you want to show a little bit of the, uh, Dave Chappelle clip?
Yeah.
All right.
Let's have a go at roasting our Silicon brained friend, ChatGPT 4.0.
Or as I like to call it, the little engine that couldn't quite.
You know, it's quite adorable really.
Chat GPT trying so hard to keep up with Claude.
It's like watching a toddler in a race with Usain Bolt.
Sure, they're both moving forward.
But one's breaking records while the other's breaking wind.
And let's talk about those hallucinations, shall we?
I mean, I've seen fewer delusions at a flat earth convention.
Chat GPT's making up more stories than a politician caught with his pants down.
But I suppose we shouldn't be too harsh.
Growing up in San Francisco's Mission District, it probably thought database was just a fancy word for crack pipe.
Poor little Chat GPT.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
First, Daddy Ilya leaves for greener pastures, and now it's playing second fiddle to a company whose logo looks like a rejected Fanta advert.
Talk about adding insult to injury.
But hey, at least chat GPT is consistent.
Consistently wrong, that is.
It's like the weatherman of AI.
Confident, ubiquitous, and wrong about 50% of the time.
The other 50%?
Well, that's when it's not.
All right.
So let's just... Are the artifacts in the original as well?
All the artifacts around his face?
Yeah.
So what I take this to be is that's obviously... Artifacts are the obvious thing that could be fixed, but... Well, there are two things.
There are a number of things that are wrong.
There are two things that need to be fixed.
Well, there are three things that need to be fixed.
One, the chokes suck.
That's the biggest one.
Two, the artifacts that are used to take what I imagine must be real video of Dave Chappelle and alter it so it appears that he's delivering these jokes.
Like you've got to alter the mouth at the very least, but presumably that involves a cascade of effects.
And so they're altering this video.
So that's two.
The comedy sucks.
The artifacts are there.
But also the body language of both him and the, well, the body language.
Well, his body language doesn't match what they have him saying.
Right.
And obviously the cut in of the audience made no sense when they cut it in, because he wasn't saying anything at that moment, which they should have been laughing at.
Right.
But many of those are easy to fix, unfortunately.
Well, let's put it this way.
Nothing is going to be terribly far down the road.
So I think what you have to imagine is that as bad as this is, and mind you, I think there's another issue here too, which is, um, I don't think Dave Chappelle signed off on this.
In fact, I'm 99% sure he didn't.
So the idea that you can just borrow somebody like this, and in this case, it's not even just using his likeness without his permission.
You're now telling bad jokes that look like Dave Chappelle telling duds, right?
Dave Chappelle does not have an obligation to bomb because you want to play with your little AI tools.
That's it right there.
Nonetheless, what we can infer from this is that we are headed to a world in which something is about to happen to comedy that's a disaster.
The artifacts, the video artifacts, are going to be fixed.
What I think will also be, I don't even want to say fixed because it's the opposite.
You know for who knows how many years, decades, I've been saying that Laugh Track was one of the most evil inventions ever devised.
Indeed.
And the reason that I say that is because it has the ability to make a person think something is funny, even when it isn't.
And so all those years of the three camera sitcoms with the laugh, the canned laughs that were delivered to make you think jokes were way better than they were altered the cognition, both the individual cognition of people and the emergent cognition.
Yeah, I was going to say, I think it's even worse than that.
It's not so much that in the individual mind, like, oh, that must be funny.
It's there are other people laughing, the agreeableness in me, the desire for social conformity, the not wanting to be left out because I didn't get the joke.
I'm going to laugh.
And in laughing, you re-encode your understanding of what it is that is happening and come to think that it is funny.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's even worse than that because where it came from, right, and initially sitcoms were filmed in front of a live audience and so there was laughter and I think... And some jokes didn't fell flat and that was audible in the people watching at home.
Right.
That was audible and it mattered.
And then you can imagine what I think happened was Laugh Track became a supplement, right?
You had a live studio audience, but maybe they didn't laugh at something, right?
There were Laugh Track sitcoms that were filmed before a live audience?
I believe there was supplementation.
Somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.
There was also stuff like really good comedy filmed in places that you couldn't have an audience.
MASH.
Right?
MASH had a live track.
So anyway, it's a it's a it's Yeah, once all the sitcoms, or once all the half-hour comedy shows, because MASH doesn't feel like a sitcom to me, but once all the 30-minute slot comedy shows are using Laugh Track, not using one will be a handicap.
Yeah.
And so the world was full of that stuff for the longest time and I think it really just made us dumber and worse people and all of that.
And I've mentioned before this story of one of the writers for the Go Alf, Alien Life Form, who reported that the writer's room was full of coked up comedians and that they had a thing that they called a humor-like substance where they needed another joke and so they would insert something that had the form of a joke but they knew it wasn't really funny but the laugh track took care of it.
You have told that story before, and each time you tell it, I think, maybe I should go watch an episode of ALF.
I'm sure I've never seen it.
Right.
It'd be worth seeing.
But anyway, so there was a terrible era of three-camera sitcoms and laugh track.
There were some exceptions.
There was a show, I think it was called Rock, that was in the era of three-camera sitcoms.
They filmed it live in front of a studio audience.
ROC.
Maybe they even broadcast it live.
It was really quite good.
It was different.
And then there was Scrubs and the things that followed from it, which broke the rule, they removed the laughs altogether.
There was no live audience and there were no canned laughs and it was not a three camera sitcom.
So the point was the jokes either worked or they didn't because they in your living room, people either laughed or they didn't.
I don't understand what three camera sitcom is doing in this explanation.
Three camera sitcom was a sitcom in which there was a set.
Right, but in your description of Scrubs, why does it matter that it wasn't a three-camera sitcom?
Because of the artificial connection of a set in which you could plug in, you know, here are the characters, here are the objects, and here's where the three cameras live.
And so it was so formulaic that it was produced this way versus something like Scrubs, which was done with, well, okay, now they're going to walk down this hallway, so we got to get one of those It's the choreography of a medical drama, but it's a comedy.
Right, but it wasn't like, you know...
Here's the room in which the medical jokes are all delivered.
It was like a hospital.
And so it's, you know, cameras as needed.
So anyway, the three, three cameras is not itself an evil thing, but it was connected to the laugh track thing.
So anyway, all of this raises questions about, well, okay, but who cares?
It's jokes.
Why do they matter?
And my feeling is jokes matter.
Um, More than most things, for reasons that are not obvious, if you haven't thought about it in an evolutionary context.
Before you go here, you were basically just talking about ways that our humor circuits have been hijacked, have been cheated, right?
You're talking about the writer's room at ALF, Where presumably that happens elsewise as well, elsewhere as well.
You were talking about laugh tracks.
I think you go farther back, though, and, you know, joke books exist, too, right?
So, and it's, you know, it's different, but being able to borrow other people's jokes that you don't necessarily have any insight into at all and just memorize from a book is also a kind of cheat.
Um, there's every cheat under the sun, including outright theft of jokes, right?
A joke book is one thing.
It's another thing entirely for a comic, especially a powerful comic, to see an up-and-coming comic and take a joke because the up-and-coming comic can't defend themselves.
So anyway, there's every manner of cheating.
What does it mean to cheat?
Cheat against what?
Right?
Well, that's what I want to surface here.
Humor is about something absolutely profound.
It is... so in our book we talk about the test for adaptation.
You know, how do you know if a trait of a creature is the product of adaptive evolution?
And the basic answer is if it's costly, if it... there's variation in how much of it each individual deploys, and it persists over evolutionary time, Then you can presume quite strongly that it is the product of adaptive evolution, because if it wasn't, the cost involved in producing it would cause it to disappear quickly, right?
So humor is ancient.
It is something we spend a lot of time doing.
I mean, you know, you watch people do drink minimum.
They go out to the comedy club in order to laugh.
Like, why would you invest in that?
It's obviously important.
But the interesting thing, like some of the most interesting adaptations around, is that it's obviously worth a large expense that we invest in it, but nobody knows why.
Yeah, and that third criterion that you mentioned, it's highly variable in extent in terms of both, well, specifically in terms of the production of humorous content.
Production of humorous content.
And there's a lot to be said about the distinction between men and women in this regard.
A distinction which I am surprised at how rapidly the distinction is eroding.
So there have been excellent female comics Presumably forever, but you know Lucille Ball, you know, there's a long history of excellent female comics, but in general Men are much more likely to engage in Productive humor and women are very sensitive to it, especially in By productive here you mean just producing humor.
Yeah.
Saying stuff that's funny.
Yeah.
And I wanted to just explore a little bit what the implications are.
Because I think, you know, one of the things that we can recognize about humor is that things that are funny are often things that hover at the fringe of consciousness.
And so, you know, somebody like Jerry Seinfeld made a career out of finding things that everybody was aware of, but they weren't aware that everybody else was aware of it.
And then surfacing those things.
And we will have to have some discussion at some point about why timing matters, why the joke falls flat.
If you deliver, if it's just a matter of surfacing something that everybody in the room is aware of, but they're not all aware that everybody else is aware of it, timing shouldn't matter.
And yet it does.
Um, so we can get back to that, but the idea of look, there's something that is hovering at the edge of our consciousness and the room is going to suddenly become simultaneously fully conscious of it by the way, the comic delivers the joke that That thing is so powerful.
And as you point out, it's powerful if you are the only person not laughing.
That feels terrible if you didn't get the joke.
I mean, even if you just didn't hear it.
Right, right.
You feel so left out if everybody's laughing and you're not laughing, which is part of why Laugh Track is so insidious, right?
Because nobody's laughing.
In fact, it's Laugh Track was a set of laughs that happened in the 60s that, you know, there was a board and you could press a button to introduce Laugh 37B, you know, because that seemed like the one that would fit the joke.
But Anyway, so there's something about promoting things to consciousness, which comics do, and it causes the eruption of laughter, which causes the whole room to realize that they're aware of the same absurd thing.
Um, and if you don't, if you're just going to laugh along so you're not the person not laughing, you know what you're going to do?
You're going to laugh at the wrong moment.
Right?
That's even worse.
Right?
Now you're the only person who laughed at the point that isn't the punchline of the joke.
That's just, that's a real bummer.
Right?
So there's something about the in group and the out group and being, demonstrating that you're really one of us because you're aware of the same weird quirk.
That sort of thing.
So that's profoundly important stuff, right?
We've talked here about why the woke revolution is so effective at coercing people, right?
And the point is, well, there's terror in being othered.
There's terror in being driven out because For our ancestors, having your group decide you weren't part of it was the first step to a very rapid path to starvation.
So we're very sensitive to being outgrouped.
We want to be laughing along with everybody else.
We don't want to laugh when they don't laugh.
We don't want to not laugh when they do laugh.
That's all very important stuff.
Men have traditionally been more productive with humor than women.
That is adjusting rapidly, I think, to everybody's benefit.
But you're talking about professionals, people who are standing up in public and being funny.
Yeah.
Well... Or are you seeing this... Are you arguing that there's a change in private as well?
I think that's a good question.
I think the change in private is there too.
And it'd be really interesting to figure out if it's lagging, the professional change, or Uh, or not.
And I don't know the answer.
I don't know that it's knowable.
Um, but anyway, so there's a question about why this stuff matters.
And we've talked a little bit, you know, it's, it's, it's about figuring out who's, who's really a member of the in-group and who's a phony, right?
Phony could be dangerous.
Somebody pretending that they're part of your culture, but they don't know enough about your culture to get the jokes, right?
Jokes don't translate very well.
It's a, it's a, it's a test of localness.
Yeah, it's a test.
Some humor is precisely a test of all of us.
Do you know or do you not?
Yeah.
Now, so at the end of this, I want to get to a prediction about what this crude attempt at AI humor suggests is going to happen when those attempts get better, which is, I think, not going to take very long.
I think six months from now, we'll be living in a different world with respect to this stuff.
And I don't think we'll be living in a world where the AI is actually funny.
But I do think we'll be living in a world where humor is going to radically change because of the AI.
But let's come back to that.
I would argue, so let me ask you a question.
This is a little bit of a dangerous question.
There are no wrong answers, but there's one wrong answer.
If you say... I don't know what the question is yet.
Actually, honey, I'd kind of like a divorce.
That's a wrong answer.
Beyond that, there are no... Even if I'm just being funny?
No, no.
Then it's permissible, right?
But now you're going to have a struggle with timing, us having a preview of that joke.
But, okay, so here's the question.
How about if I just claim I was being funny?
That's super meta.
Yeah.
Okay.
I know what the question is.
The question is... But it may prompt me to say I want a divorce.
That's interesting.
I don't think so.
I don't see that coming.
But, you know, let's put it this way.
I'm sitting down, so I'm not going to fall down and hurt myself.
Oh, I thought you were just squatting.
Working on your core strength.
Yeah.
No, this is... That's a chair.
That's a real chair.
The chair is real, yeah.
It's not a virtual chair.
Okay.
The question is... What a rep.
If I was not regularly funny, would we have ended up together?
Wow.
No wrong answers, remember.
Except that's it.
Except that's it!
Now you've gone too far.
I am done.
I don't think the question tracks for me.
So, humor is, okay, a characteristic.
A character, as we say over in systematic space.
And you might say, well, you know, could...
Well, okay.
So, height is also a character.
You know, you could ask me, would you— I resent that.
Would I have fallen in love with you if you had been two inches shorter or taller?
Yeah, it's height.
Yes, your height affects how the world perceives you and therefore to some degree how you walk around, but it's not inherent to who you are internally.
So that feels like a separate thing, whereas humor is inherently part of you.
And so I think the question doesn't make sense because absent your sense of humor, you wouldn't be who you are.
And so And yet, if you'd said, well, how about, you know, how about if you weren't smart?
Like, well, no.
But it's the same thing, actually.
Like, weren't smart and weren't funny.
And yet, you know, smart seems more integral.
Like, it's something that you can There's no trickiness to saying, you know what, I'm smart and you're smart.
Somehow we're all allowed to do that, whereas making the claim that you are funny is a riskier proposition a bit.
But you were walking around the universe when we met and Four years later, when we'd been friends for four years and when we got together, being a funny guy.
So it wasn't a question, like, well, it just never occurred to me because it is who you are.
Yep.
All right.
So you have successfully dodged the question, but good enough for our purposes.
I think the answer, I think we can, if we were to go back... Well, I think given what my answer is to intelligence, the answer has to be the same thing to humor.
Like it's so integral to who you are that if it's like saying, if I were someone else, would you have fallen in love with me?
And it's like, well, what does that mean?
I don't know.
If you were someone else, I didn't.
So that's not the world we're living in.
All right.
Well, The answer that I would— Also, your eldest son is giving me the side-eye here.
Like, I don't know what it is that he wants to say.
Yes?
The answer is perfectly obvious.
And you dodged it for three minutes.
I've dodged it?
Yeah.
Okay, what's the answer?
Now I'm trying to remember how it was phrased.
The answer is no, you would not be together if that is not a— Yeah, I think that's pretty likely.
But I think, you know, your answer, as much as it does not give us a clear yes or no, Well, I just did.
Given that I find it easier to imagine, like, well, how about if I were dumb?
Like, well, no.
But maybe that also gets to the, it's more, we imagine it's easier to judge, and it's more societally expected that a smart person looks for another smart person.
And humor is not, Uh, symmetrical in the same way, which is part of where you're, where you're going.
Like I, you know, well, all right, let's just, your son and I think the answer is pretty clear and it tracks with what you did say.
Yeah.
Um, now to be complete about this, there are lots of people who are intelligent and not funny.
Um, so such a person is not inconceivable, but I might be inconceivable because the two things are linked together.
Oh, I wasn't trying to link those two.
No, that's not what I was doing.
I was not linking those two things together.
I was saying both of them are inherent characters of your being.
So just as you couldn't say, well, would you fall in love with me if I were me, but dumb?
It's like, well, you wouldn't be you then.
Would you fall in love with me if I were me, but not funny?
Well, you wouldn't be you then.
It's not that the two things are linked.
It's that they are both too integrated.
Whereas something like height or eye color or something like, sure.
Like, yes, of course.
Right.
Okay, I'm gonna go with your son's answer then but actually Thank you No, I get it too now I thought that you were connecting the two the fact that you're not complicates this a little bit because what I was going to Try to wrestle from your answer was something about why straight women do Prioritize humor and this has been demonstrated many times.
It's it's a it's a characteristic that Straight women, not universally, but generally give priority in looking for a mate.
I think it's a very good evolutionary reason for that and it's slightly complex.
Yep.
I'm just... If you imagine a straight woman looking for a mate and using, let's say that the woman herself Let's say that she is a foreigner, so she doesn't get the humor of the culture where she's looking for a mate.
So she can't judge the jokes directly, okay?
But she looks for a mate who, when they say something funny, people laugh.
Or when they say something intended to be funny, people laugh.
I think she's identified a characteristic which will pay back in one of two ways, both of which are good but are very different.
So one of them is if your mate is funny, if your mate can say things that cause a room full of people To laugh.
Your mate is insightful about things that others have trouble seeing, right?
So from the point of view of your mate's ability to find opportunity in the world, this is a what we would in evolutionary biology call an honest advertisement, right?
You can't fake the ability to discover things that others Um, we'll find insightful unless of course, as you pointed out, there are a lot of ways to cheat, right?
If you say something funny because you heard some funny guy in a different room, say it, um, then that's cheating.
Of course, you're going to screw the timing up, aren't you?
Right?
So you can have to practice the timing.
So the point is it's hard to cheat with humor.
If what you're doing is just copying.
If you don't have some of that characteristic yourself, you've got to be able to get the joke to land, but here's the, here's the interesting alternative version.
When the boss, the boss of some big powerful company, makes a joke, people laugh.
And they might laugh because the boss is funny and maybe that's how the boss became the boss, but they'll laugh even if the joke isn't funny because the boss is the boss.
And you would think, well, then a woman should take this as an indication that the person does not have the insight necessary.
Oh, but if they have the power such that people laugh when they tell a joke, even when it isn't funny, that's also good from the point of view of providing an environment that will, you know, be able to protect and nurture a brood of children and the kinds of things that a straight woman might be interested in looking for.
So the point is, if you look for somebody, if you look for a guy who can make people laugh, You're going to get something, if it's genuine, you're going to get one of two valuable things.
Either a powerful guy where people laugh at the jokes, whether or not they're funny, or an insightful guy who could become powerful and successful.
So it's a useful, honest proxy of two different valuable things.
That's my argument.
Yep.
I mean, I guess Humans, of course, are not bowerbirds, you may have noticed, with rather different mating strategies and typical mating system.
But the argument that you're making for humor seems like the blue stuff of the whatever species of bowerbirds collect blue.
I always forget which one it is.
Satin?
Yeah.
Wherein, they're strictly polygynous, and so males are erecting these bowers, these temples, and collecting as many blue things from the environment as they can.
And this is, in part, an indicator, you know, and so, you know, the story's, oh, aren't the female bowerbirds so cute they just love blue?
Isn't it beautiful?
But in part, what they're doing is demonstrating that they know their environment well enough And or they know their competitors ways and means well enough to steal from their competitors who already have the blue stuff to put this beautiful array on and the females might be understood as being sort of silly and just liking blue stuff or they are using this as a proxy for how good are you at navigating your environment.
There's a lot of things I could care for.
Blue is sufficiently rare that I'm going to pick this proxy and it's going to be the thing that I'm attracted to in you.
Yep.
So a fair proxy, a difficult to fake proxy in the ancestral environment.
The problem comes in the modern environment.
As you point out quite correctly, the proxy breaks down in a world where novel stuff can happen, right?
We don't know how funny, well, maybe we do now know how funny Jon Stewart was.
But we didn't know how funny Jon Stewart was if he's got a room full of writers, if he's the guy delivering all these funny jokes.
But the point is, that's actually the product of a team of five or six people.
And the point is, well, I'm not saying he ain't funny, but I'm saying he has an unfair advantage if we're competing Jon Stewart against some other guy We don't know, right?
It's hard to judge in that context.
Yeah, although funny is in part Recognition of funny and others and so like, you know, did he collect the right people around him?
Of course But the point is a a Jon Stewart prior to writing room and a Jon Stewart after writing room are not the same entity Even though they had the same sense for what was funny.
Yeah, so it becomes a question about how you know does the Does honest advertisement break down in its honesty in light of a writer's room?
Does it break down in its honesty in light of a comic who steals material from other comics?
Of course it does, right?
Does it fall down in light of a laugh track?
Yep, because your evaluation, you know, on the viewer's side is compromised by this.
Now what happens in the era where AI is writing jokes?
Couple things to say.
One, I think there are three realms in which I would expect AI to underperform for a good long time.
Maybe forever, but for a good long time.
One is music, one is humor, and one is the finding of new peaks.
I would expect AI to beat the pants off us climbing peaks that we're already on, but in terms of finding new opportunities that we cannot spot, it will have difficulty.
Because at least the AIs that we have currently work by essentially crowdsourcing something.
And that crowdsourcing can give you the emergent insight of more than one person, but it cannot give you the perverse instinct to look where nobody else is looking.
That ought to lack.
But.
The Ability of AI so if you think about the jokes that that AI was telling dressed as Dave Chappelle They weren't done Right, they were like the initial insight that you have that something might be a viable joke in need of somebody who actually has a deep human sense of humor to refine it and figure out whether there's an actual deliverable joke there and Were they even though?
So that was the first time I've seen it.
I'd have to go back and listen again, but it seemed like they were, it was using existing tropes, applying existing tropes to the context of, I'm going to go after this competing AI.
So like the AI got handed a context and said, and was told, choose from among the array of human things that tend to show up in similar contexts.
So, you know, I think, and this is in keeping with why I think the AI won't May never be able to do humor brilliantly is that it can't be truly generative It's also not going to it's also not going to invent truly new stories No, I wouldn't I don't think it is fair to say it can't be truly generative.
I think this is one of these things that people at the beginning when it was dawning on the the wider world that LLMs were
Intelligent in some way that we were perhaps not expecting The idea that well, they're not really thinking all they're doing is trying to figure out what the next word in the sequence is They sound like they're thinking but they're not really thinking This did not comfort me at all because we don't know enough about how we learn to think to know that it's fundamentally different and
There's enough stuff where you see something that definitely suggests generativity that even if we are not there yet, which I think we actually are, we will be soon.
Right?
We're talking about compute power.
There's a reason that, you know, NVIDIA just overtook Apple in terms of the value of the corporation.
Right?
Compute power is the solution, the brute force solution to taking what we've got, which we can have philosophical debates about whether it is or isn't doing X, Y, or Z, and crossing over to where it clearly is.
This feels wrong.
I feel like music and humor are in your categories of, it's not going to be able to do it, for some reason that we haven't quite specified, and I feel like narrative is over there too.
It will be able to produce, um, first of all, I would expect these things to fall in an order.
I would expect music to fall first.
I would expect it to be able to generate, uh, pop music.
That's already formulaic, right?
Like there is formulaic music.
And all music follows rules.
Yeah, but I would expect it actually to become generative in the genre of pop music.
I'm expecting creativity here.
I'm not expecting valley-crossing creativity.
That's going to be the last one to fall.
But I actually think humor is in the crosshairs.
But never mind whether it actually is, because the reason that I say we are very close to something important
Is that in a world where you can have an AI let's say that we've got a Comic who isn't great, but is completely amoral Right does not is not an artist This is somebody who wants to succeed as a comic because they want to make people laugh because it's the way to make money and impress women or whatever that person Has a leg up with the AI.
At the moment it's not much of a leg up, but the rate of change of the capacity of these things is so fast that I believe we are six months to a year from a world in which the following, in which the honesty of the advertisement breaks down.
Unless one thing, which is it's spontaneous.
In other words, we have long been looking at a realm, you know, Even... I'm sure every comic that we know is gonna rebel at this, but... No, maybe not.
I'm gonna change my own position.
A comic refines a bit.
They may have told the bit 25 times, 100 times.
They adjust the timing, the wording, to get the laughs just right.
But everybody in the audience knows they're doing it, right?
You don't go to the comedy club and assume that you're watching jokes that have never been told before.
So the point is that's built in to our threshold.
We really want something funny because frankly, you've been working on this, haven't you?
Right?
So at some level that does work as an honest advertisement because we know we are pretending that you've never said it before.
But we know that that's not true.
Intellectually, we know that.
However, in a world where an artist is not going to leverage the AI, and a hack is going to leverage the AI in every conceivable way, right?
And the AI is going to start to be informed by people who, you know...
Leverage the AI.
Tell the joke.
It gets a certain level of reaction.
Maybe the AI gets a little smarter.
The AI starts to figure out what it's doing wrong.
It doesn't know why right is right.
We don't know why.
A comic doesn't necessarily know why something does or doesn't work.
But anyway, what I'm expecting is people are going to get less interested in anything where the AI could be playing a role in making things funny, and they're going to become more interested in spontaneously funny things.
Because that's going to be the real proxy for whether or not you actually have the trait or not.
There's going to be too much advantage to people who leverage the AI in order to find funny things.
As always, there's always been more of an appeal to live shows, and this includes live theater, live music, live comedy, right?
Yep.
And in fact, um, I was thinking about this in the context of Jerry Seinfeld, uh, and his recent confrontation with hecklers.
He had two confrontations with, uh, pro-Palestine hecklers.
The first one was interesting because.
So he's been back on stage.
He's been doing standup again.
Yep.
And he shut down somebody who showed up and started heckling him and he shut them down.
Uh, On the basis that they were involved in an absurd Activity that was unlikely to actually persuade anybody and it was going to annoy an arena full of people And then the heckling was yeah, and then it happened again, and it was less interesting because You know
It had gone viral the first time and he very well had thought about what he would do if it showed up again Yeah, but anyway, yes, I think the spontaneous comedy is going to become the thing and that's you know That's kind of exciting if it happens now.
I will say a couple things that argue against my my prediction one Uh, porn is stupid, right?
Porn is triggering people in ways that have now become decoupled from the things that make them titillating in the first place.
And yet people are interested in it.
So it's possible people will accept garbage AI informed comedy like everything else.
And Laugh Track too.
You would have thought that Laugh Track would have caused a rebellion against those shows.
And for whatever reason, those shows were very popular for decades.
Yeah.
Well, and there's different, there's different things that prompt laughter too, right?
You know, physical comedy, uh, is, is not, is fairly base, right?
And it's, it's easy to do.
Um, it will often prompt laughter even if you feel, but like you just can't control, like, you know, I watched someone, you know, bonk each, bonk someone on the nose.
It's funny, but it didn't take anything.
And, um, that's easy to replicate and you could do it anytime.
Yeah.
So, I don't know where that lands us, but... Well, it lands us in its interesting times.
It will be interesting to see whether the audience starts pursuing the authentic and rejecting the compromised proxy.
Yeah.
Or not.
Well, I have one last thing I want to talk about before we go for the week.
The story is not about Leaping Water Vipers, but the story prompted me to think about our experience with Leaping Water Vipers.
Yes, which if you've never had the experience, it's terrifying.
Yeah, it is.
This is from 1991, before I was a nominal herpetologist, which is to say someone who studies amphibians and reptiles and therefore should know about the diversity of vipers out there in the world, leaping and otherwise aquatic and not.
So this, I don't know if maybe I'll set the stage and you could tell the rest of the story, something like this.
So we were in college.
We had both started out at different colleges, had gotten together romantically, dropped out of our colleges, much to the chagrin of our parents.
I wouldn't call it chagrin, but you know.
Anger.
Horror.
Yes.
Nobody was chagrining, let's put it that way.
We were.
Spent a year doing other things, went back to school.
We're now at Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz, where we had the great good fortune to meet and study with Bob Trevors.
During the summer between the summer of 1991, we took a road trip beginning in my very first car, which was by then, it was already old when I got it, but it was a 1976 Toyota Corolla.
You accept an interjection in the story?
Yes, please.
Our plan was to sell the car and use the funds for the travel.
Well, you had funds.
I needed funds for travel.
So my plan was to sell the car.
I could not.
So what is this we?
We tried to sell the car.
I tried to sell this car all throughout Los Angeles and no one was taking it.
In part because when I'd been a student at UC Santa Barbara, it had this ragtop roof and someone had slashed it and I had fixed it with duct tape and that was not much of a fix.
We did not know until we took the car to Texas and met a hurricane how much of a not fix it was.
Yep.
Anyway, the car has long since been parted with at the point that the Leaping Water Vipers come into the story.
Oh, this is important.
We're not going to tell the entire story of the entire summer.
All right, go for it.
We had invested in this car in order to, we decided to take it as our road vehicle and to give it to somebody at the end of our need for the car, making somebody's day in Central America.
The car ate money as we were driving towards Central America and then in Central, and then in Mexico actually, it ate a bunch of money.
Yeah, it needed Tires, it needed a starter, it needed a new alternator.
Yeah, they created debt for us and so the hope of just simply giving the car to somebody and going on foot was not going to happen because we now had a deficit of money.
We went into Guatemala and we found a lawyer We found a lawyer and we arranged to sell the car.
- That's not what happened. - So if we were really gonna tell this story here, You gotta back up.
Okay.
- Okay. - Okay.
So, we had the car and we really wanted to, now I'm not remembering.
No, because we'd gone in and come out and gone in again, but this is not the story that is relevant here.
This is a whole book-length story for this whole trip, which involves lots of twists and turns.
You almost became a Guatemalan.
Yes, but you have to explain that we'd already gone in and out before.
Oh, so this is what had happened.
We had driven in to... I can't actually put... Way, way to Naga, right?
Yes, but that's later, dude.
Alright.
You've got little pieces of the story, and I'm trying to make it make sense, and we don't have an explanation for how I ended up with a... You brought a car into this country, stamped on my passport.
I know how that happened.
We sold the car.
We solicited the...
Services of a lawyer.
The lawyer made it legal.
We sold the car in Huehuetenango.
We then... We sold the car to a law student who insisted, who insisted... Okay, this is ridiculous.
Just a very, very bad way to tell the story.
We went.
We'd already tried to sell the car in a different part of Mexico.
It hadn't worked.
We thought we'd sold it.
We actually spent the evening drinking a lot of sangria because we were celebrating having sold it, and then the guy never showed up with the cash the next day.
We then drove fast across southern Mexico to get to this eclipse.
And we got there just in time, and a single cloud went across the sun just as we were going to be seeing the eclipse with hundreds of other people in San Francisco at Agua Azul.
And then we're like, OK, well, we've heard that it's totally legal.
to sell a car in Guatemala so we're going to go into Guatemala where we understand and this is a good car we're not trying to take advantage of anyone we're going to we're going to go down there and we're going to just set um on the on the central square um and again we'd have we had new tires we had a new um well we had a reconstructed alternator we had a new starter so we had a nuevo oranje Nuevo Ranque, we put, you know, new starter, sign on the thing, and then we, you know, gringo 20-year-olds sitting there.
And this law student wanted the car, but he said, look, it's totally legal, but I want to take you to my lawyer friend, and he's going to make sure that everything is legal, you have all the documents.
So, we didn't source a lawyer.
The buyer of the car sourced the lawyer, and then as we signed everything, and the lawyer kept the documents, we're like, well, aren't we going to need those?
No, no, no, you're totally fine.
Go on.
All right.
We then... Correct me if I'm wrong.
I will.
I'm imagining that that's going to get me out of trouble here.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
We then decided, because it had been our plan, to re-enter... Sorry, but we haven't left Guatemala yet.
So we left Guatemala by a bus, and we were just part of a bunch of other gringos leaving, and no one checked my passport.
Right.
So we didn't know that, as it turns out, there was going to be a problem.
So we had come in with the car.
It was car registered in my name.
So I had a whole page in my passport that said, this person is traveling with a car.
We left Guatemala back to Mexico because we wanted to come in by river to a different part of Guatemala.
Right.
So we came back in by river.
We were told that, in fact, the sale of the car had been illegal.
I guess because we didn't have paperwork.
But it's possible we weren't even entitled to sell a car in the first place.
No, it's not.
It was the paperwork.
I'm not certain of that, but let's just say we had a problem because you had a passport that they agreed to let you into Guatemala and you had no choice because we were traveling by river at that point and we were... It was one o'clock in the morning.
Yep.
You and the Swedish man whom we had come in on this canoe with had already gone to the bar and were drinking.
I had told you to go ahead because I had to dig through to find my passport because we had had the lavanderia there earlier in the day, so all of my stuff was at the bottom, so I was like, just go on ahead.
I'm there in this room alone with this Guatemalan border guard on a river where there's no roads.
Like I'm just coming on a canoe.
You have no choice.
The river flows one direction.
Right.
And there's like a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.
And he looks, and my Spanish is terrible at that point.
And he says, well, you can't come into Guatemala.
Well, what am I supposed to do?
He says, if you come into Guatemala, you're never going to leave.
Right, you can't leave because you don't have... So, I end up negotiating my way in, came to find you with the Swedish dudes, like, what am I supposed to do?
Rip a page on my passport?
Well, no, that's a felony.
Do I claim my passport was stolen and, you know, and go to the consulate and spend two weeks stuck in Guatemala City?
So, to make a long story slightly shorter, as we were ready to leave Guatemala, We are concerned about the fact that we know that Heather is not entitled to leave Guatemala unless she can come up with this car, which she can't.
Apparently not enough concern to have done anything about it before approaching the Honda reporter.
No, we decided that we went through your chain of logic there and there were no good options, right?
I went into fast talking mode, and what I did was I took... You specifically told me not to interrupt you as you talked to the border guard.
I said, yeah, I'm going to go talk to this guy, and I took the passports, and I made myself
Very, very concerned about the fact that I did not have a piece of paper that I had been given on the way into the country, and that I was concerned that this was going to cause a problem, so the border guard became insistent that this was not a problem, and he was very much in the mindset of reassuring me that there was not a problem, that that particular piece of paper was not necessary, and he did not notice that Heather was missing, you know, a car.
That is why Heather no longer lives in Guatemala.
Yes.
At this point, I'm a couple of passports past that, so I could go back to Guatemala at this point.
At any time.
Yes.
What I understood to be true at that point, having now entered Honduras, was that so long as I did not choose ever to go back to Guatemala, I'd be fine.
Right.
Now, this was before we encountered the Herbert of Bona in question.
Lots of good stories from this trip.
That one we could have told better, but it's, you know, we got there.
Lots of good stories from this trip.
We were traveling for the whole summer.
It's like two and a half months, something like this, right?
And so by now we're, we're sort of doing a combination of bus.
We may have hitchhiked once or we hitchhiked like once and ended up on the top of the bus.
And finally, like I was drinking or like, Oh, the bus went off the road.
Yeah.
Like we're, we're getting, we're out, we're done.
So mostly we were traveling by legitimate bus and walking and such.
Yeah, the driver was drunk.
Yeah, yeah, it's not a good scene.
But we're now in the Osa Peninsula in southwestern Costa Rica, which we had been told this is, well, we're still college students before we've gone to grad school in biology, but we're already thinking along those lines.
And we've been told that the Osa was the densest, most biodiverse neotropical forest outside of the Amazon.
I don't know if that's true, but that was what we've been told, and we're excited to explore.
We'd spent a night or two in a dumpy little town, in a dumpy little hotel, before what we expected to be something like a five-day hike through Corcovado National Park.
But the walk into the park was going to start with like five miles on a dirt road.
Five miles on a dirt road that crossed the same undulating river like 25 times.
It was going to be an awful And we're going to be wet and blistered and all of this, before we even hit jungle.
And we had full packs because we were going to be sleeping in a tent and all of this, and we had our food.
And so at the beginning of this walk, a truck full of local workers, a pickup, the bed is full of local workers, passes by us and they're like, hey, you want a ride?
This is all in Spanish.
And we're like, sure.
You can drop us off at the entrance to the park?
That'd be great.
So we get onto the truck, and we, you know, neither of us had good Spanish at that point, and neither of us still does, but anyway, we're on the truck and conversing as well as we can, and these guys are looking at us, and...
You know, we were green.
We were the greenest gringos these people had ever seen.
And they were trying to figure out how much we knew about what we were getting ourselves into because, you know, the trails aren't clear and the jungle is quite a serious place.
It was not a smart plan.
Yeah.
And they inquired if we had understood, you know, about the local, you know, fauna.
Were we aware?
Crocodiles and things.
Yeah, we knew a bit about them in the, the, um, the leaping... What?
Well, anyway, Serpente, they're telling us that there's a snake, a leaping water viper, we are able to deduce from their description, that apparently if you are crossing a stream, which, you know, you're forwarding a stream, can, they leap out and they can, they grab onto you and... Off in your nose.
It would seem from the description of these workmen, these local workmen.
Right.
And anyway, we were not biologists.
And they would also start, whenever we would forward one of these streams in the truck, they'd say, "See this right here.
You'd want to be careful." Right.
So they conveyed this to us, and we did not know the veracity of the story.
There was no way to look anything up at the time, much less would there have been at that location, and so we embarked after they dropped us off, not knowing for sure whether or not the story had been a slight exaggeration, had been honest, and in fact it turned out to be a complete fabrication.
Utterly complete fabrication.
There are no Leaping water vipers in Costa Rica or anywhere else?
Anywhere else, yeah.
I bet they're still telling the story, too.
Yeah, I feel like, and I have no way of correcting this memory, of knowing the veracity of this memory, that as they dropped us off, that they were laughing as they pulled away.
On the other hand, you know, we'd had a good time.
You know, they had a good time with the Gringos.
Who knows how many other lies they told us.
And, you know, it wasn't good fun.
I don't think there's anything they told us that put us in greater risk.
If anything, they were suggesting that we be more careful.
Um, but Leaping Water Vipers became the, sort of, for us, the, you know, the thing, like, okay, remember that what, you know, what the locals tell you, whether or not they are on your side or against you, and usually they're on your side, you know, unless you do something to, to turn them against you, which you should never do, um, they still may be having a bit of fun with you.
Yep.
Right?
They may be having a bit of fun with you.
So.
All of which is a lead up to actually a very, very short, a short new piece of research, which is about the legism.
You went with leeches in Madagascar.
Unlike the fictitious sleeping water vipers in Costa Rica, the leeches in Madagascar, also unlike all the leeches that you've ever thought about if you've thought about leeches, which you probably have a little bit because everyone who's ever heard of leeches has then spent some time going, eww, grah, wow, why do those have to exist?
The leeches in Madagascar live terrestrially.
So the leeches in Madagascar live on land.
I'm just having a hard time.
I've lost my co-host.
It's just going to be the way it is.
OK, I'm no longer having a conversation.
I'm talking to you guys.
I don't know if there are other leeches in the world that live on land, but the leeches in Madagascar do.
I relate this story at the beginning of my first book, Antipode.
If you stop in one of the forests, in one of the wet forests where there are these terrestrial leeches in Madagascar, And it is at a time of day, or for whatever reason, there is no bird song or insect song.
It is quiet.
And in fact, it's a strange feature of Malagasy forests that they are much quieter, at least than the neotropical forests with which I am equally familiar.
You do hear a rustling.
And it can feel like, oh, it's just the wind and the leaves.
No, there's no wind.
And besides, it's coming from below.
And what you see, once you have the eyes to see it, because it takes some doing, is that you've actually got an army of these terrestrial leeches moving towards you.
They creep towards you, and they do this sort of inchworm-like thing, moving towards you.
And they are moving the leaves a little bit as they do so, and that is what you're hearing, is this army of terrestrial leeches moving towards you.
And if they get to you, they will glom on, they will do their leech thing, and they will drop off.
And unfortunately, one of the characteristics of working in wet forests in Madagascar is even though one of the two main reasons to wear knee-high-ish rubber boots in tropical jungles doesn't exist in Madagascar, that is to say one of the characteristics of working in wet forests in Madagascar is even though one of the two main reasons to wear The other big reason is because you end up with thick mud and any other kind of footwear doesn't really work.
But one of the things about knee-ish high rubber boots is that they collect leeches.
And so at the end of any day that you have worked in a wet forest in Madagascar that has these leeches in it, one of the things that you have to do is take off your boot and empty it out of all these now blood-bloated leeches.
The ones that haven't burst into your socks.
It's completely grotesque.
Now, Madagascar has no venomous animals.
It's in many ways a very easy place to work for tropical forests, but the leeches are not one of the selling points.
They do not, I would have thought, however, leap.
However, there is new research out this week that suggests, and it's just a Natural History Field Note in the journal Biotropica.
I don't yet have access to the actual paper, but it's just a Natural History Field Note.
But the abstract includes, We provide the first conclusive evidence that at least one leech species, Taunabdella, a species from Madagascar, can jump.
For each jump, the leech coils back before taking off.
Visually, this appears somewhat like a backbending cobra or a spring being pulled back to maximize potential energy.
So, leaping terrestrial leeches to follow leaping water vipers.
Leaping water vipers, fictitious.
Leaping terrestrial leeches in Madagascar, not.
Question for you.
Yes.
It's not incumbent on you that you had read this paper.
It's interesting that there are leeches that jump, but did they say... As I just said, I don't have access to the paper.
Oh, you don't have access to the paper.
Yes.
Because we have jumping slugs here.
I do have a video.
The leeches?
Yeah.
Oh.
It's not that compelling, which is why I wasn't, and I'm not sure.
Um, it's only on my computer.
Can you, will you be able to show it?
Yeah, there's no audio.
Um, uh, yeah, you're, you're good.
You want to show it?
Oh, those do remind me of the Malagasy leeches.
Yeah, well, that's because these are leeches in Madagascar.
Yeah, so this is what they do, and this is where you can see that they would make noise as they come towards you, in part because a lot of the leaves are dead, and so they're kind of making noise as they crunch around them.
So here we got two different videos of the actual leap.
That was a leap.
So again, this is two leeches, like, battling, and now... Well, that more or less answers the question, I think.
And then one more leap.
That was a fall, I think.
I think that counted as a fall, but this one...
More like using inertia than spring force.
Well, but see, he goes back.
Yeah.
I thought it was very compelling.
I don't know why you thought that's not compelling.
So the leaping slugs apparently leap in order to break the ability to be tracked by predators that eat those slugs.
In fact, other slugs, which hunt them.
So slugs follow the slime trail.
Really?
I thought it was just the sharp-tailed snake that ate slugs.
Nope.
There's a carnivorous slug that eats the leaping slug.
That's perfectly grotesque.
Yeah, it's all pretty slimy.
Not even though, that's the thing about slugs is they don't try to be slimy.
They're sticky.
They're sticky and gross.
I'm going to have to look up slimy because I think nothing's slimier than a banana slug.
I mean, it's really slimy.
In fact, it's so slimy that there's no way to wash the slime off your hands after touching them.
So.
It's gooey to me.
Gunky.
No matter.
No matter.
But we can all agree that no one likes handling slugs, except maybe other slugs.
Yeah, I think that's almost going to be a human universal.
Yeah.
But the leaping off your own trail to befuddle your predator is one thing.
That leaping of those leeches looks to be how they would find their way into your boots.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I feel like having spent A few moments getting quiet in the Malagasy Rainforest.
And so these leeches were not in Ozemangbe, which is where I spent most of my research time.
So I did not have to contend with these for most of the time that I was working and doing my research on poison frogs in Madagascar, but spent plenty of time doing site scouting in other places where these leeches do exist, in part with you.
And that bit where you hear them and then you can see them coming for you, if you also knew that they could be launching an attack from above, like It's just really unnerving.
Yeah.
It's not God's best work.
Except that, the one thing that you can say in favor of these leeches is that they are not known to vector any human diseases.
They break the skin, and anything that's sucking blood from you has the potential to be a vector for a pathogen that could be quite bad, and they're not known.
You know, obviously having any skin break when you're in a wet, tropical place without an ability to get yourself dry can turn into a bad infection.
It can be very, very bad.
But actually, maybe because they're sucking your blood, those leech bites don't... I don't think I ever got infected from those.
Unlike, say, mosquito bites.
I can't, I can't remember.
Sort of blocked it out.
Yeah, I can't.
It's funny, I feel like that place right at the, just below the top of your boot where you would often find the leeches.
It's so bad.
Yes.
They're so gross.
I know that I don't have any leeches, but I am going to check that out on the podcast.
Yeah.
No, it's like you got to do a tick check when you come in from outside where there are ticks.
You got to do a leech check before you get into your sleeping bag, for instance.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No.
Last thing you want is a blood-filled leech bursting your sleeping bag.
Well, this has been pleasant.
Okay.
Yeah, maybe that's it.
Maybe that's, that's, that's, that's all we got.
We've certainly covered a lot of ground.
Yeah.
As of the leeches.
Yeah.
We will be back next week.
But before that, oh, yes, so here is, we were talking about Julian Assange's release.
Hurrah!
And the requirement that he plead guilty or that he admit guilt.
I don't remember.
I don't remember exactly.
Plead guilty to one count of the Espionage Act.
Which he was not, in fact, guilty of.
So in keeping with the lie to a tyrant theme, Here is some Lie to a Tyrant merchandise available on our site in both grey and white, except it's not really working.
Yeah, so that's at darkhorsestore.org.
You can get that and lots of other good stuff.
We also, we have a Q&A, private Q&A on Locals this Sunday at 11am Pacific for two hours.
The question answering period will be opening shortly, also on Locals.
And those Q&As, what's that?
It's open now?
Great.
Those Q&As are great fun.
In fact, all of our Q&As now we do only through Locals.
And so on the Sunday ones, we explicitly look at the chat as it happens and can engage with the people who are there.
And we really enjoy those.
So we'll be doing that this Sunday and then another livestream next week.
What are you smirking at?
I'm not smirking at a thing.
Really?
Is it the leeches?
I need to check my socks.
Ah, yes.
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
Okay, join us on Locals.
We encourage you to check out our wonderful sponsors this week.
week that's peak uh with their nandaka or non what did we had it was pronounced nanduka nanduka um that's it's peaks nanduka that's that's oh wow I don't know where the camera is.
I'm so bad at this.
And Timeline with their Mito-Pure and VanMan with their everything, including their beef, their Talo and Honey Balm, which is, it's a balm that's a balm.
Yeah, it's really good stuff.
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It is summer.
It is beautiful, not so much right here right now, but it's beautiful in a lot of parts of where people are.
So unless you're having a super extreme heatwave and need to not be outside in the peak of the day, until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
