Watching backyard fights on YouTube and reviving dead trees with gene therapy: Links roundup.

Castles in the Sky #10

Drum roll, please! This is the new description for the About Page for Thought Bananas!

To dream, to look within, to satisfy your curiosity. This is how you live the life of the mind.

Thought Bananas is a weekly newsletter built around the idea that the life of the mind is an essential part of a life well lived. In each issue, Charlie Becker shares original essays and stories that are funny yet profound, reverent yet ridiculous, fictitious yet true.

• What does a nearly extinct tree have to do with family and destiny?

• What do Icelandic bodybuilder novelists have to do with the notion of truth?

• What can a semi-retired skateboarder teach us about meaning and sacrifice?

Sometimes we grow more from posing complex questions than from finding simple answers. Subscribe to get these and other questions in your inbox every week.

🍌A Favor from Readers

A lot has been happening in the background. In the coming months, I’ll be publishing some big essays. I’m also going to be featured alongside my writing in some other writers’ newsletters.

What I would appreciate from you is feedback, a testimonial of what it’s like to read Thought Bananas. How would you describe it to someone else? What do you like most? I will be using this information to improve and market my writing.

🍌Quote of the Week

"Originality is dependent upon the obscurity of your sources. There's no such thing as pure originality. It's not where you get it from – it's where you take it to. We are all artists, but some of us shouldn't exhibit."

-John Hegarty

🍌In the Newsletter This Week

• Original Writing: Eastern Redwoods in the Washington Post

• On My Mind: New Semester Starting Up, Write of Passage Mentor, Artificial Intelligence Art

• My Favorite Things: Getting Blessed with Great Music by the Online Platforms, Playing and Watching Combat Sports

• Crowd Work: Testimonials

Original Writing

🍌 Eastern Redwoods in the Washington Post

On August 30th the Washington Post published a story: Gene Editing Could Revive a Nearly Lost Tree. Not Everyone Is on Board (paywall). It’s about the tension between using new science and using old science to revive the American Chestnut Tree.

These trees once ruled the canopies of much of Appalachia, with billions of mature American chestnut trees that towered in leafy forests from Maine to Mississippi. But around the beginning of the 20th century, an exotic fungus nearly drove the tree out of existence. Today, they still sprout in the wild but rarely reach maturity. Outside of growers’ orchards, scientists say, the tree is “functionally extinct.”

On the one hand, you have traditional tree farmers and cross-breeders, looking to restore the American Chestnut. They want to use the slow, tried-and-true method of planting as many trees as possible, inoculating them with the virus that normally kills them, and propagating the survivors. The results from this so far have been promising but very slow.

“We don’t need genetic engineering to bring the chestnut back,” Melican said. “They are coming back. All that’s necessary is patience.”

On the other hand, there are scientists using super-advanced gene editing technology of CRISPR to add in or edit out a small number of genes, making the American Chestnut Tree resistant to the blight that killed so many of them.

Powell countered that crossbreeding transfers far more genes between species. “Genetic engineering is actually a less-risky procedure than a lot of things that we’ve done in the past,” he said. “We are very precise. We’re only moving one, two — just a small number of genes into the tree.”

I hope that this project brings the American Chestnut Trees—once called the Redwoods of the East—back to prominence in the eastern United States. I have been fascinated by American Chestnut Trees since I first read The Overstory in 2019, and it inspired my most popular essay to date, A Dirge for Eastern Redwoods.

A Dirge for Eastern Redwoods

On My Mind

🍌New Semester Starting Up

Last week, we kicked off the Fall Semester with an enormous event where over 300 current and aspiring entrepreneurs came to campus for an all day event celebrating small business and entrepreneurship.

In the morning, we had lectures and activities about what the SURE Program can offer them and their businesses, then in the afternoon we had a series of distinguished entrepreneurs speak on panels. You can read more about the event here.

Me teaching 300 people how to write an elevator pitch

🍌Write of Passage Mentor

I’m super excited to announce I’ll be returning to Write of Passage, the online course that inspired me to kickstart this Substack. Except this time, I’ll be doing so as a mentor!

This means I’m taking the course again but as an “upperclasman,” guiding other people through the course and hosting study sessions. I join a very inspiring group of people, who you can see in my co-mentor’s tweet below. (Note: I was chewing a peanut butter sandwich, haha.)

Natasha Tynes 🇯🇴🇺🇸 @NatashaTynes

So thrilled that I have been selected as one of @david_perell Write of Passage's mentors for the upcoming cohort. I can't wait to give back to the community that gave me so much while working under the guidance of the amazing @matttillotson.

The first time I took Write of Passage was the most productive five weeks of writing I’ve ever had, so I am looking forward to seeing how my writing evolves as a mentor.

🍌Artificial Intelligence Art

Like anyone else on the internet, I have wondered about artificial intelligence. Until recently, this was all reading other people’s thoughts and looking at other people’s work. However, a few days ago, I got access to one of the artificial intelligence image generators, midjourney.

It has definitely given me a lot to think about, but I’m not sure what I think yet. It is both more and less sophisticated than I originally thought. To see what it looks like, here are some of the prompts I tried and the pictures I got. Not all of these came out exactly this way, I had to play with it a bit:

banana grove with books rococo

american chestnut tree, family, norman rockwell

houston skyline, starry night, van gogh

Although this is super interesting, the internet is somewhat saturated with people writing about AI-generated art. I most agree with what Erik Hoel has said so far, but plan to read a lot more about this and decide how this makes me feel as an aspiring artist (writer) myself.

My Favorite Things

🍌Getting Blessed with Great Music by the Online Platforms

I love online music platforms for two reasons: charts and discovery algorithms.

I love charts because I can poke around and see music that’s popular in genres and countries I would never explore otherwise. A few days ago, I was looking through a chart for songs that are popular all over the world and ran into this amazing song by Burna Boy. This might be the catchiest song I’ve heard in years—and I only understand about 40% of what he’s talking about.

I love discovery algorithms because they recommend music I may have never otherwise heard, but sound familiar to me already. Spotify recommended two great songs to me this week. First is Not Letting Go by Tinie Tempah featuring Jess Glynne (XY Constant Remix), which is just a great upbeat electronic song. Second is Tyrone by Minus The Bear—a cover of Tyrone by Erykah Badu that was so good that she has actually performed the song live with them.

🍌Playing and Watching Combat Sports

I recently started going back to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) classes after taking three years off. I know that getting beat up by strangers in pajamas multiple times a week doesn’t sound fun, but I love it. The classes are a blast plus they are a taxing cardio and strength workout.

It’s not for everybody though. The first BJJ class is a polarizing experience. After one class you either say:

Why would anyone do this?

Or—

Can I come back later today for another class?

After my first class, I was in the second group. I stopped going for nearly three years because of the pandemic and moving to another part of town, so getting back “on the mats” has been great.

Doing BJJ has also made me want to watch MMA more often. One Championship, the second largest MMA promotion in the world (after UFC), recently inked a deal with Amazon so that any Prime members can watch all the promotion’s fights. I was able to watch their most recent fight, One on Prime Video: Moraes vs. Johnson II. The production quality was fantastic and the fights were mostly great.

I realized that I like watching combat sports more than any other sport, and I’d like to present two reasons why they are the best sport to watch.

I find it tough to keep up with other sports. It can be tough to sit down to a soccer, football, or basketball game without having a deep knowledge of the sport or knowing something about the players or teams.

However, with combat sports, the announcers are able to give you all the relevant background information in the time it takes the combatants to walk into the ring. The first reason combat sports are the best sport to watch is because, as a viewer, you can know nothing when you sit down to a watch a fight, but still get all the power, athleticism, skill, intrigue, and drama of professional sports.

The second reason combat sports are the best to watch is that, for other sports, watching random people get together in a backyard and play is usually only fun if you can join in. Not true of fighting. Even amateur fights are fun to watch. How do I know this? Is it because I frequently come across people in a backyard fighting? No. Let me tell you how I know.

One day, I was doing one of the boring tasks knowledge workers find themselves doing every now and then. I was tired of the ambient music I usually listen to and put on my other go-to source for YouTube videos that I watch when doing boring work: Streetbeefs YouTube channel.

My wife walked in after a few minutes but I didn’t hear her. “What the hell are you watching?” she asked me.

I answered, innocently, “Streetbeefs.” As if she knew what that meant.

She playfully said the fact that I watch strangers fight each other in unsanctioned fights in someone’s backyard while cleaning spreadsheets means I’m probably a psychopath. But I challenge anyone (who isn’t squeamish) to watch one of these and not get hooked immediately.

Random people fight each other for fake belts. They have nicknames and backstories. Then they beat the hell of each other then they hug and bow to one another. They fight in a chain-link octagon with adorned with plywood, painted with the names of past Streetbeefs champions.

If you’ve ever thought about it, I recommend taking BJJ class—the first one’s free and you’ll know right away. And if you want to try something different, I recommend checking out One Championship on Amazon Prime.

Crowd Work

In standup comedy, crowd work is when the comic speaks directly with the audience. This section is a place for us to directly engage one another. 

🍌Testimonials

As mentioned above, I will be featured in a few places so I am looking for reader feedback to use for a “testimonials” section. Please let me know your thoughts!

That’s all for now—see you next week!

Thanks to everyone who edited, proofread, and gave feedback on the writing in this issue. And thanks for reading Thought Bananas!