Brain Food
Old trees, new forgeries, insider trading on war, the evolution of lactose-induced nightmares, and how I fell in love with seals.
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I: Insider Trading on War
On June 12th, an anonymous trader opened a new account on Polymarket, a Peter Thiel-backed anonymous internet betting site that uses cryptocurrency to obscure the source of money.
The new trader was interested in betting on one topic: whether the Israeli military would strike Iran within the next 24 hours, by Friday, June 13th.
As the 13th approached, most people thought it was unlikely, but this new account seemed convinced that airstrikes were imminent. The trades started during a one hour period around 12pm UK time; $1,728 of bets in the first one, then another $311, $280, $560. Then, between 10pm and midnight UK time, with time running out, they accelerated their betting, showing their confidence by ramping up the bets, putting about $20,000 in total at risk.
Three and a half hours later, Israel struck Iran in a surprise attack—and the Polymarket trader cashed out. They had made a total of $134,000 in profits. After taking their winnings, they closed the account, never trading again.
This was, as
argues, probably a case of geopolitical insider trading. Someone who knew that the strike was imminent decided to use that knowledge to make a lot of money anonymously through online betting markets.The way these binary markets work is simple: traders can bet on whether something will or won’t happen. The “price” is set by perceptions of likelihood. If the price goes down to $0.05 per “share,” then the market is suggesting that the crowd believes there’s a five percent chance that the outcome will happen. If it goes up to $0.95 per share, then the market seems to think that there’s a 95 percent chance it will happen.
Then, when the moment finally comes, the price permanently resolves, either to $1.00 per share (it happened) or $0.00 per share (it didn’t happen). The account that was likely using insider trading to profit off the Israeli airstrikes bought most of the shares at between $0.14 and $0.17, so they made a killing when the price resolved to $1.00 per share a few hours later.
Aside from all the dubious issues thrown up by the role of cryptocurrency in these trades, there have long been worries about market manipulation.
For example, during a critical point in the final days of the 2024 US presidential election, a single account—betting under the pseudonym Fredi9999—single-handedly increased the perceived odds of a Trump victory with a massive infusion of cash.
Because these prediction markets are viewed by some as having independent predictive value, Trump’s rise in that market was covered by the press and may have affected public perceptions about the state of the race. In other words, the prediction markets can be manipulated to try to influence real-world outcomes.1
That differs from the case of the Israeli strikes on Iran, in which an individual simply appears to have decided to use his or her insider knowledge to make some extra cash.
Either way, this is dystopian: individuals, state actors, even terrorist groups can decide to bet on their own behavior, even their own uses of violence. There’s nothing stopping someone who’s a high profile political actor—or the people around them—from betting on an outcome, then making comments or posting something on, say, Truth Social or X, that inevitably affects public perceptions about a likely course of action. They can drive the price up or down at will, knowing full well that they can ultimately decide whether the value of a “share” goes to $0.00 or to $1.00.
And then, they can anonymously cash out, with nobody the wiser. It’s the Wild West of insider trading, but it’s not just about improperly getting rich; it’s an unregulated mechanism to get rich by sowing chaos.
II: Seal of Approval
Humans were not made to clack on keys and stare at screens while chasing digital representations of little pieces of valuable paper. Sure, needs must. But we are nonetheless creatures of the natural world and we are most alienated from ourselves when we forget that basic truth, spending long grey stretches locked away by economics, sequestered from our more beguiling surroundings.
As E.M. Forster rightly asked: “What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?”
For me, that daily connection is most often going for a riverside run with my dog, but a few days ago, as a special birthday treat, I decided to venture out into the magical underwater world of sea dogs.
I’m speaking of the lovely colony of 200 grey seals that live in the marine protected area of Lundy Island, a skinny little blip—three miles long and half a mile wide—off England’s breathtakingly jagged and verdant North Devon coastline.
After an hour and a half boat ride, we insulated ourselves from the cold water by throwing on two wetsuits, one on top of the other, along with dive hoods, boots, and gloves. Then, with a big stride, we plopped into the chilly, murky water clouded with sediment—and waited.
For the first ten minutes, nothing happened, other than the occasional storm of silt being kicked up, making it nearly impossible to see anything. And then, suddenly, the seals showed up and decided it was time to play. Several of them shot into view, twirling underwater, blowing bubbles, biting our outstretched fins.
Before long, one little lady decided she particularly liked me. After feeling a tug on my leg, I clicked record on my underwater camera, pointed it over my shoulder, and captured the most unusual marine encounter of my life.
See for yourself:
If you turn the sound on, you can hear—amid the hiss of my SCUBA breathing—a bit of my underwater laughter, as I couldn’t contain myself as she attached herself to me like a limpet and waggled her lovely whiskers in front of my mask.
Maria Popova was poetically astute when she wrote that “to live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live.” Consider me utterly wonder-smitten with the natural world, of which we are but one tiny part.
III: The Value of Forgery
It is a fact of life that some people are rather good at forgery. This is bad news for banks and treasuries and auction houses, but good news for people who just like to look at beautiful objects.
In fact, some recently produced art forgeries are so good that the only way to reliably prove that they are not the original is by analyzing how many Carbon 14 isotopes are contained within the canvas or the paint. (From 1945 to 1963, when the partial nuclear test ban treaty was signed, so many atomic bombs were blown up that it radically changed the concentration of Carbon 14 isotopes on Earth, inadvertently providing a reliable signature of post World War II modernity for any item created in the Atomic Age and beyond. It is now an effective test to identify recently produced art fakes).
This raises the obvious but rarely asked question: if art is about aesthetic beauty and the forgeries are so identical that the only reliable way to identify differences is through invisible isotopes, then why do we care that something was forged?
This argument was made, according to a lovely recent essay at
, by one of the world’s most successful forgers:Henricus (‘Han’) van Meegeren was one of the most successful forgers of the 20th century, creating numerous paintings in the style of the 17th-century Dutch masters such as Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, and especially Johannes Vermeer. Van Meegeren’s masterpiece, Supper at Emmaus, was executed with such craftsmanship and detail that it fooled all the leading experts of the day to conclude that it was a genuine Vermeer. Van Meegeren was also famous for duping Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring into buying another fake Vermeer, Christ and the Adulteress. He made major bank on these hoaxes and bought a bunch of mansions and filled them with genuine Old Masters art…
…During van Meegeren’s trial he was reported as saying, “Yesterday this picture was worth millions. Experts and arts lovers came from all over the world to see it. Today it is worth nothing and nobody would cross the road even to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What’s different?” The thing is, Van Meegeren is right: the aesthetic value of the painting had not changed. It was still as creatively composed, elegantly painted, and pleasing to the eye as it was before.
Clearly, for us, the subjective value of art is not solely aesthetic. If it were, there would be no difference in value between a perfectly convincing forgery and the original. In China, as Byung-Chul Han points out, that viewpoint is more widely accepted, with forgers being celebrated for their technical skills. Indeed, as the author explains, some Chinese collectors care little for provenance and certifications of authenticity, but rather evaluate an object purely by its subjective beauty. If art is for aesthetics, not investment, this viewpoint makes some sense.
But the reason most of us find that notion unsatisfying is because human creations are not just about the creation; they are also about the human. As I previously explained in a recent essay on AI and writing, “this is part of what is lost by ChatGPT, the mistaken belief that the spat out string of words in a reasonable order is the only goal, when it’s often the cognitive act of producing the string of words that matters most.” And it’s not just the cognition we encounter when we consume art, but the mind, personality, and lived experience of the person who made it.
When I read a beautiful sentence by Karen Armstrong about the value of quiet contemplation in nature, it matters to me that I know she was previously a nun and not just a computer who was trained to regurgitate wistful views about the natural world. When I read a macabre slapstick laugh-out-loud paragraph by Kurt Vonnegut—about the senselessness of destructive technology left in the uncalloused hands of callous men—it matters to me that I know he survived the 1945 firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war.
This, as the essay in
argues, is evidence that artistic creations have not just aesthetic but also relic value—in which they connect us to the person who brushed the paint across canvas or conjured up their own depiction of reality with nothing more than well-assembled words.Forgery, then, forces us to confront what, precisely, we value. And my instinctive aversion to a copy of a masterful painting, no matter how masterfully reproduced, is the reason why I find the notion of an AI-generated novel repulsive. I read to connect with humanity, not to find myself in computer-generated thickets of prose, no matter how aesthetically pleasing the strings of words. And that is why I hope that Philip Stone, a senior figure at Nielsen, will be proven wrong when he says that there will be an AI-generated bestselling book before 2030.
In many creative industries, surefire mediocre sludge often sells, but I’m clinging onto naive hope that enough humans ultimately recognize that the reason we read novels and philosophy and poetry and profound, erudite works isn’t because we want to efficiently suck the condensed marrow of an idea from a lifeless text, but because we know—and care—that the idea was brought into existence by a human mind.
IV: Lactose Nightmares and Forever Chemicals
For most of human history, humans could only digest lactose from birth through to early adolescence. Across the species, after we stopped consuming our mother’s milk, the ability to digest milk used to uniformly disappear. Still, today, roughly two-thirds of adults globally are lactose intolerant.
However, the distribution of that trait is uneven; most people of white European and North American ancestry have a genetic difference that continues to produce lactase, the enzyme that breaks down lactose in milk. Generally speaking, northern Europe tolerates lactose better than southern Europe, which is part of the reason why dairy products are often fermented or turned into yogurt or cheese the further south you go—and why there’s a stark “butter/olive oil” divide within Europe, too.
Fascinating research from my colleague Mark Thomas at UCL and fellow research superstar George Davey Smith explains the abrupt shift in evolutionary history.
Most of the time, lactose intolerance is merely an irritant; it won’t kill you. But during times of famine or major outbreaks of disease, human populations are on the edge of survival. In those moments—say when crops fail for a year—many people in Europe would have turned to drinking milk out of necessity.
Those who were most lactose intolerance would get even sicker and more malnourished, making them more likely, on average, to die. By contrast, those who had developed the trait of “lactase persistence” would be more likely, on average, to survive, thereby creating a strong evolutionary selection pressure. Over time, more and more people developed lactase persistence.
Their innovative research tools (which I will explain more in-depth in a future essay) show that these explanations are correct. If you can happily tolerate unlimited quantities of lactose, then you can chalk that up to your long-gone ancestors who pulled through devastating moments of starvation and disease partly because they could digest milk better than others.
Now, new research from Canadian academics published a few days ago adds to the literature on lactose intolerance and its possible effects on our minds.2 Their findings suggest that lactose intolerance individuals who consumed dairy before going to sleep were more likely to have nightmares (further evidence of the “gut-brain connection”). So, it is possible that your bad dreams are being caused by that little morsel of cheese.
On the flip side, gut bacteria could help humanity out of a jam of its own creation. I’m talking about the scourge of PFAS, or so-called “forever chemicals.”
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that certain strains of bacteria are astonishingly adept at consuming PFAS. The research showed that those bacteria can absorb high levels of PFAS without suffering any toxic effects, unlike us. Through testing in mice, the researchers were able to show that the gut bacteria can provide a protective salve against PFAS, such that the bacteria basically removed the PFAS from mouse’s system.
This opens the door to the possibility that future probiotics could be designed to deliver higher concentrations of those bacterial strains into humans, naturally removing dangerous levels of PFAS concentration in people—thereby reducing the risks of “decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, and a higher risk of certain cancers and cardiovascular diseases.”
V: How to Make an Old Tree
How do you create an old tree? This isn’t a bad riddle (“Ooo, I know: time!”) but rather a scientific puzzle. Is it possible to speed up the process of tree aging?
Why, you might ask, would you want to do that? The ambition is not to accelerate a forest genocide, but rather to restore the natural world—and save ourselves.
As researchers recently summarized it:
Old forests containing ancient trees are essential ecosystems for life on earth. Mechanisms that happen both deep in the root systems and in the highest canopies ensure the viability of our planet. Old forests fix large quantities of atmospheric CO2, produce oxygen, create micro-climates and irreplaceable habitats, in sharp contrast to young forests and monoculture forests.
In short, old trees provide enormous ecosystem resilience—with features that do not exist in younger trees.
However, for hundreds of years during the Age of Sail, old, tall trees became coveted. So, they were chopped down. As I highlighted in Fluke:
Navies require ships, and ships require timber. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy had three hundred ships in active service, built with wood from 1.2 million trees. The Royal Navy’s voracious appetite for wood, which thinned forests and felled soaring trees, forever altered Britain’s landscape. As demand for solid, soaring timbers grew, supply dwindled. Good trees became precious. “Statesmen plotted to obtain them, ships of the line fought to procure them.”
America was to be the saving grace of the Royal Navy, a vast continent of untouched forests. In Connecticut, the governor boasted of the “cloud-kissing” pines. Early American settlers harvested that pine, turning trees into houses.3 But across the Atlantic, the king wanted the trees for the Royal Navy. To ensure that none of the finest specimens of pine were harvested, government officials went around forests and farms marking tall trees with the King’s mark, a “broad arrow” shape imprinted into the bark with three blows from a hatchet. Soon, an illicit trade emerged, violating the king’s laws.
This arrangement was a key trigger for the Revolutionary War. (The Pine Tree Riot was a catalyst for the war—and the first flag of the nascent American navy was a single pine tree against a white background). But it also caused mass deforestation, particularly for the most desirable mature trees.
In places like Sherwood Forest, then, as this essay from Noema points out, there’s now a lack of veteran trees. According to one conservation expert: “At Sherwood, it’s not an exaggeration to say that there’s now an age gap, conservatively, of 500 years between the oldest trees and the next cohort…So, what we’re really after is something to bridge that gap.”
Strangely, then, restorative ecology demands a new process of “veteranization” of trees, in which some specimens are chosen for a process of human-induced accelerated aging. As Matthew Ponsford explains:
Armed with a chainsaw, an arborist might make a slice akin to a lightning strike, carve out an artificial “woodpecker hole” or make a series of plunging cuts into a trunk to create a “nestbox.”
Other veteranization techniques are even cruder than rough cuts with a chainsaw. Harris has ripped off branches using a winch attached to his pickup, mimicking the way strong winds tear at trees during storms. Walloping the base of a tree with a sledgehammer has turned out to be a surprisingly efficient way to cause a column of rot to form above. This “horse kick damage” replicates impacts by roaming herds of horses and extinct megafauna like aurochs or elks, whose creative disturbances have been disappearing or missing entirely from the British Isles for millennia.
Initial results are promising, suggesting that there may be ways for us to engineer more resilient ecosystems. But it would obviously be better to protect the trees and the forests in the first place. After all, the limits of our knowledge of the complex system that is nature routinely humble us as we try to reverse engineer the wisdom of the environment.
The poet W.S. Merwin, as Ponsford highlights, was himself humbled as he tried to rewild three acres of land in Hawaii.
He carted seaweed from coastal coves to spread on the barren land, heaved wheelbarrows of manure from neighbors’ cows and goats and planted some 14,000 native and imported palms. Many of them died, and the resulting collection of trees was not much like a Hawaiian forest.
“Only a forest knows how to grow a forest,” he eventually concluded.
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Fredi9999 made about $50 million on the bets when Trump won the election.
My language is a bit wishy-washy here because the research method used (surveys) strike me as pretty flimsy and subject to wide-ranging problems with samples and reporting biases.
Trees that were more than twenty-four inches in diameter typically belonged to the Crown. In truly old New England houses, a suspiciously large number of floorboards are just below that threshold, suggesting that the king’s trees were cut to appear below the legal limit.
Great mix of ideas, Brian.
The notion of "surefire mediocre sludge" resonated with me following a visit to a noted museum in Bilbao where a significant amount of space (and energy) is devoted to AI generated graphics.
“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”