Boonta Vista - EPISODE 407: The Bus Is Our Vines

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

Theo, Andrew, and Ben bring you: The incredible journey of one lightning bolt, a new term for 10 million years of having a cold one, and one Dutchman dedicating his life to one special sunflower. *** Outro: Plantlife - Autolux *** Support our show and get exclusive bonus episodes by subscribing on Patreon: www.patreon.com/BoontaVista *** Email the show at [e-mail]! Call in and leave us a question or a message on 1800-317-515 to be answered on the show! *** Twitter: twitter.com/boontavista Website: boontavista.com Twitch: twitch.tv/boontavista

Music Yeah, Tale of Two Cities, hey, we gotta wait till the other one wakes up. It's gonna be in a while. About time zones and stuff. Hello and welcome to WunderVista, episode 407. We are here live from Paxpo. That's right, we're here at the combination Pax and Sexpo. And the smell is incredible. This is the most nervous I've ever been at a live performance, Sexpo at the smell is incredible. Is the most nervous I've ever been at a live performance, but you know what?

We know gamers can be sexual too. And here's a bunch of them. Gamers and being sexual. Uh, I'm here with Ben, an adult performer who's performing a speed run of Mirror's Edge that we've applied a mod which makes all the enemies hang dong which means this run cannot count on the leaderboards but all the money goes to children in hospital. Now the best time for Mirror's Edge any percent is 25 minutes and change and Ben you're currently at four hours how are you feeling? Mirror's Edge is the like parkour, POV one.

It's fucking sick. It came out like, what, like eight years ago? I'm going to say way more. Way more. It's like 2011 or something. Yeah. Okay. 2009.

It's my last guess. Time really does just sort of. Theo. Bleed out of you, doesn't it? 2008. 2008. I was so close. I'm so good at guessing when games are from. You were very close on your third guess that's true.

Is this still a big... My second guess, fuck off. Is there still a big speedrunning community around Mirror's Edge? I just kind of want to know. Oh absolutely it is like uh it's a very popular game too but and and like it kind of feels right too right the speedrun Mirror's Edge it's a game about parkour. Yeah that's true you You are speed running. You were running with. Yes, literally. I hadn't actually thought about it. Like, fuck. You guys ever been to sexpo or packs?

No. What? No, why do you ask? Fucking disgusting place that is unholy, unchristian, and everybody there is going to hell for their sins and then also there's sexpo. Yeah, well hey. Yeah. Falling down the stairs towards the punchline like Porrister, I went to sexpo one time when I was in uni, like with some friends.

Yeah. Uh, and it's, gotta be so dope going to sexpo. It was like a, like a weedy kind of, it's a younger person. Young person. Well, yeah. And you're like sort of till later by everything, except it's mostly just

like, kind of like a trade fair kind of, it's just like a lot of people selling lube and stuff. But the one thing that really stuck in my mind was seeing a live appearance slash performance by the one and only Pricaso, who is the man that paints beautiful portraits using the tip of his raw paint covered penis. Okay. Yeah. He just sort of firmly grips it and uses that as his brush. Oh, so he's not just swinging it around.

He's using his hand to manipulate it. It's not like a claw machine style moving the axes of his hips. I was more thinking of like, you know, when they go, Ooh, look, this elephant's painting a picture. And I'm like, the picture's not great. Yeah. You know, you're acting like he's really, you're acting like he's really engaged in this process. Like he's thinking about the application to the canvas, you know, UTIs all the time.

I think Picasso, he's got a UTI doctor on call. I reckon he's like, you could tell even from a fair distance back, that his penis did not appear to be in great condition. Like, it couldn't be. It couldn't be with all that, could it? It's not an ideal paintbrush, the Glens. That's not the utility of it, yeah. He was also just a very kind of leathery looking guy. Dope.

In like, the impression I got from him, he was a guy that maybe like 40 years ago had started doing this at Woodford or something. And everyone was like, yep, there's the guy that paints with his penis. And then he sort of made it his entire life. And I wonder what he thinks in the quiet moments of the soul. And now he just has a completely like, ow, my penis. Completely calloused penis. My penis hurts. No, I reckon he can't feel anything in the penis. No.

I don't think it hurts. I don't think it's anything. I wonder how he's doing. Kinda, yeah, alright. Alright, let's go to the next stage and what's this? Looks like a completely nude Andrew. He's greased up head to toe except for a pair of fabric gloves which he needs to hold onto the wireless GameCube controller. And he's up there with three other piggies and they're slopping it up and rolling around

and at the same time desperately trying to stay on that rainbow road while a tall lady in latex attempts to get a rope on him take him off to slaughter. Hey Andrew! Hey! Yeah they will kill you. I can't stop this lady's really going for it. Yeah. I can't stop. Yeah plus you got to stay on rainbow road that classic race track that gamers might know. I can't stop this lady's really going for it. Yeah. I can't stop. Yeah, plus you gotta stay on Rainbow Road, that classic race track that gamers might know. I look, I'm really distracted by the lady who is trying to rope me. Lakitu is starting to appear very annoyed.

Yeah. Having to come and get me back on Rainbow Road yet again. And you are having to play Double Dash, the worst one, I think. Is Double Dash the Game worst one, I think. Is Double Dash the GameCube one? Another one on the back? Yeah, that's why I'm holding a GameCube controller. Oh, of course, yeah. Of course, yeah.

That's the one in between Mario 64 on the 64 and Mario Wii. Mario Kart, we don't have to, Mario Kart 8 was 8, the next one I have to do it. That's on the Switch. No. I thought it was one of the ones that got released on the Wii right before on the Wii U right before the switch came Out and then was also like the switch one different. That'd be the Wii U I think that sounds about right and I think you might be thinking about maybe it came out on the Wii U No, you're right along with Breath of the Wild. We do like to game here. Don't we?

Breath of the Wild was on the Wii U If you told someone that these days, they'd say, what is the Wii U? I gotta be honest with you, I was only half listening to the intro because I was looking at pictures of Picasso. Oh no, I just posted that in not our channel in the Discord, I posted that in Group 1. Leave it there, leave it there. How the fuck do I delete this? No, leave it there, leave it there. Leave it there. How the fuck do I delete this? No, leave it there. Leave it there. Leave it there.

Television, the show, just don't need to see that. But you do need to see this image because I had forgotten what the physique of Picasso was like. But also I think he might be... Is that a satirical artwork or is he pro-Trump? Oh, he's got... Okay. Is that a satirical artwork or is he pro Trump? Oh, he's got, okay. So we've got, he's got a trunk on, on, well, Picasso has a trunk too.

Yeah. Yeah. He's drawn beautiful, beautiful blonde feathered hair on Picasso. Looks like a, looks like former foreign minister Julie Bishop. He looks astoundingly like Julie Bishop. What have you been up to since leaving government, Julie Bishop? Well, oh my God, he has his website tattooed to his back like the URL. He has precasso.com tattooed to it across his shoulder blades.

Okay. It also took me a moment to notice, to register in this photo. I'm going to describe it for the listener because I think that's gonna help them in this segment of the podcast We have a a photo of a gentleman named Picasso He's wearing a large mentioned a large pink cowboy hat comedically like it's a lot like Like a like a styrofoam cowboy hat Homer Simpson might be wearing in an earlier episode of The Simpsons. He has the appearance of the members of the band Primus in the video clip for what known as Big Brown Beaver. Yeah, if they had no clothes on. If they were painting with their

penis. Comically large, comically oversized pink bowtie bear chest shoulder Holding up a those nipples pierced or are they just perky? I'm gonna say I think they've got little pink bells. Yes. Yes, the the bell bars. What do we call them on the sure? We all yeah, I think Yeah, so he's uh, so he's holding up a large portrait that he has painted, but it took me a moment to register that there is a long mirror right behind Picasso reflecting his nude back, butt and thighs. His bottom, you might say. Which terminate around the top of the thigh-high leg pink leather leg coverings I guess

nude ass but hey let's keep those legs covered up so this picture of Trump Trump it looks like Superman except he also has elephant ears and a big elephant trunk it says I am the greatest. And what does this say? Trumpdy Trump? Trumpdy Trump, yeah. Trumpdy Trump, and there's a dead donkey under him. So they're just hanging out from the side,

like behind Superman Trump? Yep, as though it has perished at the sight of how beautiful and amazing elephant Trump is. He's clocked him in the face, I guess. I'm finding it hard not to read this as a pro-Trump photo. I'm trying to figure out if there's this... Completely unreadable. If there's satire happening, I can't figure out what it is.

Yeah, because he is the flying Republican elephant punching the Democratic donkey in the face because they have that over there. I'm not entirely sure why. I've never looked into it. Donkeys and elephants? Yeah, their political parties have first learners, which is tremendous. Probably the only country on earth that has that.

Which animal do you think your political party is? Definitely donkey. Definitely donkey. I'd be happy for us to be represented as mules for the rest of time. Yeah. They're a bunch of pack of arses, am I right? You are sadly correct. I think there's no other way to read this other than Picasso is problematic, unfortunately. The classic nude gay conservative artist.

Oh, is he gay? The classic nude gay conservative artist. Oh, is he gay? Are you not reading this guy is gay? I don't know. He gives me a very like male stripper kind of vibe to him, which I don't know. There is a bit of a- It does look a lot like a middle-aged woman named Julie Bishop, who used to be the foreign minister of Australia.

Yeah. He is wearing all pink leather clothing, except for the majority of his nude body and his pink nipple piercings. All I'm saying is, I think this is, to me, this is pretty traditional gay coding for a man of Picasso's age. I will say he's taken incredible care of his body.

Regrettably though, we cannot see the state of his penis. Yeah, he's not revealing the penis, unfortunately, but his ass is tremendous. This man is doing squats on the regular and yeah, it's fully tanned. No, no sag. There's no sag in those cheeks. None whatsoever. That is the ass of a 25 year old. And he does not have the face of a 25 year old. Not at all. Hey, if you're at a function and you saw that big pink hat moving around atop the crowd,

you'd probably think that was a bad sign. We talked about bad signs. Might be Primus. You might have to hear some Primus. Yeah. That would be awesome. Shut up. It's time for Omen's Importance. You shall see hail fall from a clear sky and burn as fire upon the ground.

You shall see darkness cover Egypt when the sun climbs high to noon. And you shall know that God is God. Bow down to his will. This is from KOCO in Oklahoma. Cuckoo. Mega Flash Lightning Bolt traveled over 500 miles setting a new record. Oh, big Proclaimers fan.

Yeah. I guess so. What if it was humming that to itself? Is it shot over there? Yeah. It'd probably get like, not very far through the song I think. The World Meteorological Organization announced that a new record was set for the longest lightning strike. The strike happened on October 22nd, 2017 during a storm cell that covered parts of Eastern Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas.

The lightning strike, which scientists are calling a mega flash, was measured at 515 miles long. Measuring from the base? That is fucking bananas. I've never in my life had to think about how long the lightning bolt is. I was like, I dunno, a couple of kilometers maybe. Yeah. How far up are clouds?

A couple of kilometers? Yeah. Something like that. Two or three kilometers up, I think. Right. So I'm like lightning probably four to five kilometers. Maybe. Probably not 830 kilometers. No, that is, that's'm like lightning probably four to five kilometers. Maybe probably not

830 kilometers. No, that is that's like a lightning bolt going basically from Brisbane to Sydney Yeah, and to be clear lightning bolts should go from Brisbane to Sydney if they want to yeah Yeah They should all be leaving Britain and go to Sydney. And striking down Sydney. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I never conceived of them like this. This is genuinely blowing my mind. I don't want to get all, I fucking love sciency here, but that's, that's just amazing.

You're allowed to fucking love science. I have to kind of temper my enthusiasm a little here because I believe that lightning that goes straight down is the good lightning. And lightning that travels horizontally, or I guess at a tangent to the Earth's surface, is the bad lightning. That's the stupid lightning. I don't like it when it goes cloud to cloud. I like it when it goes straight down. If I see lightning go cloud to cloud, I have to cover my children's eyes.

I don't know how to explain it to them. Is this just like a belief that you've built? I wouldn't say so much as a belief as a strong personal preference. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Or aversion. I've got a new belief system that I have just conceived and decided is going to be part of my personality, which is, uh, generally we think of, you know, when people die, they ascend,

they're going up to heaven if they've been good or perhaps raptured, you know? Whereas lightning is coming straight down. No, it goes up. Lightning goes up. Light goes up. The ground goes up. It's crazy. All right. Great thing to drop into a dinner party conversation. Everyone's like, you've shattered my my belief system I've held for so long. I actually make several strikes along the same path because once it's sort of,

once that, once that lightning path's greased up, very easy for the lightning get in and out of it. Okay. Well, let's, let's revise this belief system and say, maybe it is the spirits of those who are passing on ascending through lightning yeah get zipped up to st. Peter you know but maybe the ones that go sideways are ones with a little unresolved business man they got a travel back to a town they used to live in you gotta go get hired by Atlassian they got a zip 500 miles sideways and like kill somebody.

Fuck you, I've always dreamed of working at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. I'm gonna fix Jira once and for all. Yeah, lightning strike flying 500 miles away into a data center at Atlassian and frying all the servers. And then it went straight up. And then it went straight up. And then it went straight up from there. It was the darnedest thing.

At the time, the WMO had just started using its new weather satellite for documenting and tracking lightning discharge. I bet that's what they say it's for. Yeah, for mind control probably. Yeah. Oh, they just set it up and they found the longest lightning strike ever. From eight years ago and we're supposed to just like believe that they're not

Messing with the weather. They're not doing it. They've noticed that lightning bolts are getting longer gang longer He thinks doing that back in the back in my day. They didn't go 500 miles. Yeah, they went like two or three kilometers I think They weren't like two or three kilometers I think. Qui bono! Qui bono! Who's benefiting from these long bits of lightning? Who's fucking with the lightning? Qui bono!

The storm that produced this lightning strike however was not fully documented in 2017. Now eight years later a re-examination of confirmed the lightning flash distance comfortably beat the previous record of 477 miles from a storm complex in April 2020. You fucking tell me, April 2020. Hmm. Oh, my red, my red cotton out tying my pins together. Honey, get in here. I've got a new thing to put on the board.

Just hearing this long sigh from the kitchen. I knew it. Goes from, where's that? From Singapore to Wuhan, China. These performances are lightning. It's all adding up. Uh, Randall Cervini with the WMO said it's likely that greater extremes still exist and that we'll be able to discover, we'll be able to observe them as more data comes in over time. The 515 mile lightning strike took 7.8 seconds. So not even long enough to complete a bull ride. No. To give context, a 515 mile trip would take eight to nine hours to drive

or 90 minutes to fly during a commercial flight. That's such a good little comparison to put in there. Well, if you're in your car, it would take you nine hours. Lightning is much faster than your car. Yeah. And when you think about it, the plane is faster than a car also. But slower than lightning. And there's probably some other things in the middle of those as well. Just in case you needed a broad taxonomy that you can kind of hang things off of in the future. Guy whose job is just coming up with other things to put in there. Well, the Concorde, it would actually be much faster, but they don't fly those anymore. But slower than Lightning.

Lightning, that's a part of nature. We talk about nature in Nature Corner. This is a press release from Dartmouth College. Did drunk apes help us evolve? New clues reveal why we digest alcohol so well. Maybe not so well, am I right, Andrew? You're hungover, bitch. Not even that hungover. I did really well. to alcohol so well? Maybe not so well, am I right, Andrew? Alcohol, chips like a beer? You hungover bitch. Not even that hungover, I did really well. I did really well.

I was drinking some tequila, but I didn't overdo it because there wasn't that much tequila left in the bottle and when I drank it all, it was finished. Smart, that's a really good tactic to use. So nothing bad could happen to me. If scientists are to better understand whether the genes that let us safely welcome the weekend with a cold beer or enjoy a bottle of wine with dinner began with apes eating fermented fruit, then the habit needs a name, according to a new study.

Scrumping is the name coined in a paper led by researchers at Dartmouth and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland for the fondness apes have for eating ripe fruit from the forest floor. Scrumping. Scrumping. Scrumping. Yeah. Hey, you're going out scrumping with the lads.

It's scrumplaclock somewhere. These primates palette for picked up produce has, God damn, don't do fun alliteration. There might be podcasters reading this. It has taken on new importance in recent years, the researchers report in the journal Bioscience. But scientists cannot fully understand the significance of this behavior, particularly for human evolution, because, quote, we never bothered to differentiate fruit in trees from fruits on the ground, says Nathaniel Dominy, the Charles Hansen professor of anthropology at Dartmouth and a corresponding author of the paper, which

includes co-author Luke Fannin, postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth. When they say we, got a mouse in your pocket? They don't mean humanity at large. I'd be differentiating fruit from the tree of fruit on the ground for like my whole life. What did you call it? I didn't need a name for it. I just knew it when I saw it. In other words, scrumping by no name at all just looks like eating fruit. Right.

Yeah. Okay. I guess that's true. It's true. When we don't call it something different, it does seem like the same thing. Yes. So this is their claim to fame? I don't think they're expected to get like recognized when they go out clubbing.

PhD studying, fruit on the ground, fruit on the tree. Interesting. What if that I make that my whole thing? I think you kind of have to do something. But yeah, like with your life, probably these people are probably passionate about ape research and this is probably very fulfilling for them Yeah, I mean you're obviously Fulfilled I'm fulfilled in other ways which I could kind of yeah. Yeah, we'd be

Said them all out loud for a guy who gets a generate reports about where electricity is going obviously this would seem super boring I don't do the reports. I thought you did the software that generated the reports. No, no, we don't really. I mean, there is a reporting function. The researchers write that Genetesis reported in a 2015 study that eating fermented fruit may have triggered a single amino acid change in the last common ancestor of humans and African apes that boosted their ability to metabolize alcohol by 40 times. Thank you to that one last common ancestor. Thank you so fucking much, dude.

And thank you for not being too drunk to fuck either. Otherwise, your bloodline would have ended with you. Oh my God. Thank you. Forget a little crazy with it. It's still fucking. The one chimp that somehow came wandering back out of the jungle with a lampshade on his head. Yeah.

Thank you. We salute you. All the girls are like, he's so, you see, do you see him? He's so random. He's doing a weird kind of confidence to him now as well. My huge clam is slopping it up. Come on. No.

The clam is tiny because the penis is tiny. We've talked about this. I forget which ones have big dicks and which ones have little dicks. Okay, I've only one. They've all got pretty little dicks, the chimps, I think. Pretty little dicks. Which was the monkey with the huge dick? I don't think there's a huge dick monkey. Just us. Just us. the monkey with the huge

Monkey with the huge dick fuck yeah, yeah Quite it's a fascinating idea, but nobody studying these ape species or Asian apes had the data to test it It just wasn't on our radar. Tommy says it's not that primatologists have never seen scrumping. They observe it pretty regularly Yeah, but the absence of a word for it has disguised its importance says, it's not that primatologists have never seen scrumping. They observe it pretty regularly. But the absence of a word for it has disguised its importance. We're hoping to fill an important void in scientific discourse. I don't want to be rude to scientists here. I'll go on. Nobody here wants to be rude to scientists.

I think it depends on the scientist for me personally. I would like to be rude to some scientists. But like, do you think if you had spent many, many years of your life going to university and doing your postdoctoral research and writing a thesis and then working in some sort of like research capacity and you'd been doing it for years. Do you think it's at some point there's a temptation to just kind of go? Yeah, like like we've seen them do this a bunch of times, but yeah, we've invented a word for it. I call that theowing. We've invented a word for it. Also, the word is currently in use and we all know what it is. Yeah, and it's also super close to a word that that all like, you know, the word that we chose is kind of the same thing, but different enough for it to. Yeah. And it's also super close to a word that, that all like, you know, the word that

we chose is kind of the same thing, but different enough for it to be confusing. Yes. Um, Hey Ben, if, um, if monkeys don't have big dicks and also I think you were mentioning off pod that they can't be like rude dudes as well. Explain the picture. I just put it in the show chat. This is just not good podcasting material. You've posted a photo in our group chat. just not good podcasting material. You've posted a photo in our group chat. It's a carving of a monkey. It's not even a photo. It's not even a photo of a monkey. It's a photo of a carving. It's a photo of a carving of a monkey. Genipa. I mean, I know what you're trying for. You were saying, I am not a monkey with a big dick.

Which I guess I agree. Senepa. Senepa. A monkey. A vek. In his grunt. And we will send that picture out through each listener individually. Well, it'll be on the mailing list. No text.

Just the wood carving. Oh, it's a shame that we can't have that as the photo for the episode. It's too rude. Too rude. He's a rude dude. Plus there's a shame that we can't have that as the photo for the episode. It's too rude. Too rude. He's a rude dude. Plus there's a penis in it. Scrumping, the researchers write, describes the act of gathering or sometimes stealing when fallen apples and other fruits.

The word is the English form of the medieval German word, schrimpen, a noun meaning shriveled or shrunken, used to describe overripe or fermented fruit. in England today, scrumpy refers to a cloudy apple cider with an alcohol by volume content that ranges from 69%. You guys ever get those, um, the big bottles of scrumpy, they used to have a BWS that weren't like the hillbilly style jar you could hook over your, your arm and drink. Oh, like the finger hook? Like a jar that would normally have like three X's. Yeah. But like a glass jug. And then once you've finished drinking the scrumpy,

you can become one of the members of canned heat. You're wonderful. That guy becomes one of the members of canned heat. That guy becomes one of the members of Canned Heat. And if you're under 50. That guy does be sounding like Kermit the Frog though. Singing from Canned Heat does sound like a Jim Henson character. That's what I'm saying. That is a band that if you just heard them, you could imagine them as a band entirely made of bears, like big anthropomorphic bears

in suits. The researchers set out to better determine how common their new behavior classification is among great apes. They examined dietary reports of orangutans, chimpanzees, and mountain and western gorillas observed in the wild. Feeding events were cross-referenced with how high off the ground the animal was when it ate, as well as the height at which the fruit grows. I love that as a differential.

So ape altitude minus the fruit's usual growing height. Yeah. And we're going to do a linear regression on that to find correlations. Yeah. Yeah. Boil this down to a variable we'll call S. What's the scrub factor here? Confusing part of ours is logarithmic. So if it goes up by three, that's twice as much scrumping

This is gonna be one of the smartest You think wow they're just to put that in there because the word scrumping sounds funny. No, there's maths. If an ape at ground level was recorded eating a fruit known to grow in the middle or upper levels of the forest canopy, it was counted as scrumping. That checks out. Previously or now? Now that we have the term for it, yeah. Now that we finally have a word for scrumping,

that word you knew already. You probably can't use S as a variable, sorry, because that's gonna get confusing if you have to do a Laplace transform on a scrumping function. Yes. Yeah. Do you think the ground level ape

is like just getting started in the organization? Yeah. Oh shit. This is some mid-level fruit. Oh my God. We are so stupid. This is like, no, it's like when you, uh, it's like when you work in an office and somebody says, oh, they had like a thing and there was some catering before

there's sandwiches left that you guys can eat and then you get in there and you go you eat some like not great sandwiches but you didn't have to pay for them yeah that's how I think the ground level ape feels do you think like do you think a forest or a jungle is sort of like the apes office it is kind of like yeah there is the boss who's the boss. There's an ape who's the boss. Hold on. Hold on, hang on. Hold on. Everybody else shut up.

Shut the fuck up. Hang on. Wait a second. Shut up. What if the office is sort of like our jungle? Fuck. Shit. Damn.

Jesus. I sometimes think of the city as a kind of urban jungle. Yeah. If you will. It's a jungle out there. It is. And in here. Have you ever heard of jungle theory?

Yo, it's fucking crazy. And the bus, the little handholds on the bus. Oh, swinging from handhold to handhold to get out of the bus. The bus is our vines. Yeah. The bus is our vines. Yeah. The bus is our vines. The bus is our vines. Yeah. The bus is our vines. Yeah. The bus is our vines. I'm with you here Theo because like if you know back then evolutionarily in the jungle we would

have been swinging from vine to vine to get to where we are. 100%. But now we get the simulacrum of hanging from the vine as the bus transports us like the vines would have in ancient history. And it keeps us calm. Yeah. It keeps us quiet. I'm swinging back and forth and I just feel satisfied. The bus is our vines. Simulacrum. Yes. Andrew's swinging back and forth. He's listening to jungle music on his headphones. Yeah, I think that's right. That sounds right. All true. Put that in your research paper, guys. You're going to want to listen to this. Yeah, we saw your paper and we've got some theories of our own. We're putting this in for peer review. You guys think buses are like vines? They're like vines.

Buses are like vines. It's the bus vine theory. I think this is sort of some of the stuff we've done that's the most suited to a viral video of us all laying back on couches like weirdly far back being like, whoa, yes. Yeah. Jungle theory. Buses are like vines. Jungle theory.

Buses are our vines. These podcasters worked out that buses are our vines. Busses are our vines. That weird sidewards cut. So you start with the punchline and then you do the weird sidewards cut and the whole time you sit there and go, when are they going to get to the bit about buses being vines? Because that was the first two seconds with the guy said buses are our vines. And I want to know how all buses have vines. And you've got to wait like 15, 17 seconds before they get to that part. Yeah.

And I've already swiped away at that point. You've already swiped away. Yeah. I think if it does work out for us, I think that we also have a potential, uh, like easy transition into evolutionary biology podcasts as well. Oh hell yeah. It's so easy to be having evolutionary body. To some race science from what we're doing here I think.

Evolutionary psychology too, let's get into that in a big way. Race science is in at the moment. The race science metrics are huge. Off the charts. The researchers found that African apes scrump on a regular basis, but orangutans do not. I think orangutans have higher standards in my opinion. I think that does sort of gel with my understanding of them, which I think is also reflected in the recent planet of the apes movies.

That the orangutans are sort of like wiser. They're more like a mobile scholar kind of figure. They talk and we listen. And they sound like Paul Giamatti. When orangutans talk, we shut the fuck up and listen. Yo, they must have been scrumping when they came up with this. He wasn't. He doesn't scrump. He doesn't scrump. He rarely scrumps.

What are our people to scrump? Up there, yeah. Scrumping down there. No, stop. We, Orangutans, do not scrump. Like common apes. Common chimp. Come here, boy.

It is forbidden for our people to scrump. We eat the fresh fruit from high up, which does not diminish the brain. We do not concern ourselves with the scrumping of the common chimp. What is higher than us? Probably nothing. We cannot say. Look down there upon them, rolling around in their own filth, scrumping.

That is not our way. Our way is the way of the katana. Oh. What a show. These results corroborate the 2015 gene sequencing study, which found the primary enzyme for metabolizing ethanol is relatively inefficient in orangutans and other non-human primates. Orangutans can't hold their piss. Although the other way around, they just get sick from it instead of getting drunk, I guess. The authors of the Bioscience paper propose that metabolizing ethanol may let African apes

safely eat the ripe fermented fruit they find on the ground. This adaptation could free them from competing with monkeys for unripe fruit in trees. It also could spare large- Oh, everyone gets a taste. The monkey up above and the ape down below, we all get a taste of the fruit. Busses are our points. It also could spare large apes the risk of climbing and possibly falling out of trees, which a 2023 study

by Dominic and Fannin reports is so incredibly dangerous that it influenced human physiology. And they're half cut by this point as well, so it's so fucking hard to get up in that tree. Tipsy on a few fermented apples, you shouldn't be climbing up there anyway, you know? Yeah. Climb then scrump. Stay down here tonight. Look ahead, yeah. You don't want to scrump then climb scrumping never climb never climb and of course and of course this has evolved into the human behavior of having too many beers and thinking it'd be cool to

get up on the roof and look at the stars yeah wouldn't it though wouldn't it though take a chair up there first risk nightisk night air out here, you know? Oh, it'd be magical. However, I've been scrubbing pretty hard. It is pretty crazy to imagine that the reason that we have alcohol at all in society, that that exists, is maybe because of a higher- Half-cut apes. Or just a tendency for us to do less climbing because we were able to eat fruit that was on the ground and now you can have an ice cold beer. Isn't that fucking awesome? Yeah. I fucking love science. I don't fucking love science.

Yeah. I love that evolutionary trait of saying, actually, if I just kind of sit around and wait, gets down here eventually. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, the fruit will come to you, brother. Yeah. Sure, it'll be a little squishy. And I'm sure it'll be very bruised and a bit alcoholic. Tastes horrible. Yeah, it'll smell bad.

It'll taste nasty, but it will make you dance better. Yeah. You have to compete with those god damn mid-level apes. And that's how we evolved the taste for IPA Hmm, I guess Given that chimpanzees consume about ten pounds of fruit each day the teams now Shit these animals suggest a non trivial amount of alcohol Domini says That level of intake suggests that chronic low-level exposure to ethanol may be a significant component of chimpanzee life. Amen, sister.

They're micro-dosing alcohol to get them through the day. It actually is very effective for treating depression. Yeah. Hang on, I'm micro-dosing beer. I've got a little something in my pocket. They also suggest that it may be a major force of human evolution. The next step is measuring levels of fermentation in fruits in the trees versus fruits on the ground to better estimate alcohol consumption in chimpanzees, Domini says. They've got to be more, it's got to be more like alcoholic on the ground, right?

Like that's the process that we get. Or do they ferment on the trees? No, they only ferment when they're fallen, yeah. There's lots of recorded examples of different kinds of animals that like to eat fruit that's fallen and fermented and then get a little loose with it. Have a little bit of a silly time. Yeah. Drunk animals.

Even birds do it too. Birds love wilding out on that fermented fruit. Birds do it. Bees do it. Bees do it, yeah. Even the apes that aren't in the trees do it. Fuck. Now this is somehow the best episode of Buntavista ever recorded. I think there'll be some scholarly debate on that.

Oh there you go. So elephants get drunk from eating food that's fallen on the ground, but the reason they get real fucked up is because they don't have the enzyme that can metabolize alcohol or ethanol. Get wrecked, idiots. They have a bit of it. They're enzyme. They're real lightweights. I was reading an article about,

there was a big incident in Russia a little while ago where there was a- The Tunguska explosion. Yeah. where there was a... The Telangaskh Explosion. Yeah. They shook the beer can up so much. Where there was...

It was quite common at this time and I fucking forget all of the details so I don't know which period of modern Russia or the USSR this was. But very popular source of ethanol from this cleaning product. And one batch got fucked up and a bunch of methanol got in it. And there were many, many, many deaths.

Um, but the people that survived with the people that were also drinking vodka at the same time. And the reason for this is that methanol and ethanol both bind to one of the same enzymes or something to break it down. And if you've got both ethanol and methanol in your body at the same time, the ethanol and methanol have competition between getting broken down. So if you just drink straight methanol, very, very, very poisonous. But one of the things they give to you if you have drunk methanol accidentally is ethanol to bind to those enzymes and fuck the methanol off. That's quite good. That's good to know. That is interesting. Isn't that interesting? It makes you think, it makes you laugh.

Isn't that interesting? It makes you cry. It makes you really it makes you laugh. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? It makes you cry. It makes you really aggratis if we talk about something that you like. Yeah, your kind of interests and we're just getting it wrong. And you're sitting there going, ah, kill him. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm not reacting normally to this.

There are rules in like that. Quite scrapping by the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans about 10 million years ago could explain why humans are so astoundingly good at digesting alcohol, Domany says. And some of us even more so. That's right. Not me. Australians.

We evolved to metabolize alcohol long before we ever figured out how to make it and making it was one of the major drivers of the Neolithic revolution that turned us from hunter-gatherers into farmers and changed the world. That rocks! Hey hunter-gatherers take a load off come on in drink my beer put your feet up. I badly fucked up making this bread. Yeah, this mash sure. It smells horrendous Like football Humans might also have retained social aspects that apes bring to scrumping says Katherine Hobbater a professor of psychology and neuroscience at St. Andrews and co corresponding author of the study Quite fundamental feature of our relationship with alcohol is our tendency to drink together,

whether a pint with friends or a large social feast. Oh, beta-sys. Elderberry wine, things of that nature. The next step is to investigate how shared feeding on fermented fruits might also influence social relationships in other apes. Right, so what I'm picturing is kind of a dogs playing poker

Situation but it's all the chimps around a big table perhaps like you know a big tree stump Yeah, a fallen tree they're sitting around They're all eating their fruit together two of them are kind of getting into an argument and the third is going hey, it's alright It's alright forget about it Your friends remember that your friend friends. You're the friend. You're the fucking brothers There's one there's one really a really snobby looking orangutan in the corner his arms are crossed and he looks like he's not we don't Have fun. Yeah, we do not dance Anytime he got forced into going out with his friends

Cheer up man, what's the problem? The music sucks and I want to go home. It's so loud. Hey, do you know a, um, would you like a fun little anecdote at the end here that I can't kind of transition into and it's also not fun. But I want to say it out loud.

So this morning I was, uh... Depends if Ben wants to finish this article first. I was thinking about it. It would be nice to finish the article at the end to kind of put a finale on the end of it. I'll fill in a little bit of time with this story, which won't take too long. I was searching for clothes, putting clothes away in the kids room this morning. I did a huge fart and it really stunk. You know how farts do. Sometimes they smell bad. And about 20 minutes later, I'm brushing my kids' teeth and Caitlin goes into the bedroom

and she goes, Theo, did you fart in here? Because I'm worried that one of the kids shat themselves. Or they shat the bed. I said, no, I farted in there a while ago. No, that's just how I smell. Yeah, I know. Anyway, Ben, we're going to finish the article. The word scamping will catch on if other scientists see its descriptive value,

Dominey says. The paper Bioscience notes other words invented to capture new concepts. It's going to catch on. Symbiosis coined in 1877 and the now ubiquitous meme introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976. Yeah. Quote, These are great examples of words that we never knew we needed until we did. If the term is useful, then it will catch on, Domeni says. That's natural selection at work. Yeah, I've honestly been, there's been a hole in my life to be, I need to describe this for so long. This behavior.

For you, in your life, collecting partially fermented fruit. Yeah. Off the grass in your backyard. Hey Ben, I don't like, this isn't meant to be critical at all. This is about a process of continuous improvement. Can I just get another line reading of that final sentence? Because in the transcript there is an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence. Oh sure, yes.

That's natural selection at work. Now that doesn't sound right. That's natural selection at work. Yes. Hey, scrumping. That's a kind of funny word. There's a language out there that's filled with funny words. It's Dutch. We talk about the Dutch in Dutch Watch.

Hey everybody, I'm from Holland. Isn't that beautiful? This is from DutchNews.nl. Dutchman nears world record for the tallest ever sunflower. That's beautiful. Can we maybe get a whip around of like prices, right rules, closest without going over how big do you guys think this sunflower is? Yeah. How tall can a sunflower be? I mean, usually when you see them like the impressive ones at the farms and stuff that they can be like shoulder height, right?

Yeah, I'm gonna go like two meters. That's my point for my shot in the dark Okay Interesting looks like what are you gonna guess Ben? Well, I've already read the article It's part of the process that I usually go through when I include stuff in the podcast. So you're admitting to cheating that I usually go through when I include stuff in the podcast. So you're admitting to cheating? This friendly competition? He knows the height and yet he still wants to play. A man from Intude has just eight centimeters to go and he will have

grown the biggest sunflower ever recorded according to local media. So he hasn't done it yet. He's getting close. media. So he hasn't done it yet. He's getting close. Your own van de Velde, 39, began growing the giant blooms as a child using seeds collected by his mother. And now he is hoping to beat a record currently held by a German grower. Yuck! Sort of like a high Dutch low Dutch competition the clash of the clash of the Germanics which which one is the forest floor Germanic and which is the mid-level Germanic yeah well I don't want to get into race sides but those German skulls are pretty Now he's hoping to beat the record currently held by German grow already said that.

There have only been two sunflowers taller than nine meters and mine is one of them. He told RTV East. Good Lord. Yeah. That is insane. There is like an old pool in Canberra that's been there for a million years.

And it has one of those like concrete, one of those concrete diving platforms, you know, like the real old school kind of shit. Yes, like from a Wes Anderson movie. And there's like a five meter one and a 10 meter one. And I remember jumping off the 10 meter one as a team and you get up to the 10 meter one and you go, oh, oh, I'm um, I'm really far off

the ground. I'm four stories off the ground. Let's get one thing straight. I do not get up to the 10 meter one. Yeah. That's really fucking tall. Really high. So tall.

People, people are very bad at estimating height. Not me, but people in general are very bad at estimating height. I'd look at that and I go, that's like nine to 11 meters or so. Right. That thing. But you know, you look at the, at a tree and you go, Oh, that's 25 meters tall, but it's barely three meters tall. Right.

We don't, I guess I've never had that experience. But nine is so tall. Nine meters is so tall for a, for a sunflow is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. And you'd have to keep looking up like... Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Yeah! That's outrageous! I wouldn't be diving off of it. He wouldn't be able to swim. The sunflower now towers over his insured of support? Is there scaffolding involved? There is scaffolding.

I think that's kind of cheating. I also think that it's kind of cheating. I think yeah, if the thing can't stand up on its own, then what are we doing here? It's in pain. It's in pain the whole time. You want the widest sunflower possible so that it can support itself. I think you want wide. I think you want width and girth. Good. Good.

Width and girth be the same thing. You want height and length and girth. You want length and girth. You want a, you want a long one, but you want a girthy one so that it could stand up. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. To get the tallest one, you also want one that's quite girthy. Quite girthy. But you can't just go for girth. I think there should be a second record for tallest... Oh, girthy as a sunflower?

Tallest freestanding sunflower. So three records. So tallest supported, tallest unsupported and girthiest is what you're saying. That's right. Although I think there will be a lot of overlap between the girthy category and tallest unsupported and girthiest is what you're saying. That's right. Although I think there will be a lot of overlap between the girthy category and tallest unsupported. I disagree. I think if you're min-maxing for girth, you're putting all your energy into girth. You're going out instead of up. You're getting a chode. You're getting a chode flower. A little tuna can. There's just far too much scaffolding on this thing. The rigging on this stuff is outrageous.

I think it's an affront to God, personally. These days there's too much technology and sunflower growing. Yes. Whatever happens is growing a nice flower, you know? Stress and temperature have to be continually monitored. Quote, I climb into the scaffolding very carefully, he said. Every movement in the scaffolding stresses the plant and that can affect its growth. Well, stop doing it The plant doesn't actually need to be nine meters tall. It does not need to be

To be nine meters to you. This is for you. It's not for the plant. Yeah Creating creating this horrible Frankenstein's monster of a plant every moment is agony It's too close to the sun. All it wants is for this quick turn on our mortal coil to end. And yet here you are monitoring its temperature, keeping it on life support, rigging it into a horrible harness. Let it die. Van de Velder said that the stem of his monster plant is now fully grown and it depends on how the flower develops as to whether or not he beats the record of 9.17 meters. Whatever

happens, he said, I am a happy man. I don't know. I reckon if he comes in a centimeter short, he's going to be fucking pissed off. Absolutely. Yeah. He's taken an axe to the sunflower. He's fucking jacking the beanstalking that thing down. Oh, it's no big deal. Then everybody goes home. Fucking, fucking piece of shit. What the fucking flower?

Stupid, stupid Dutchman. Yeah, I think a lot of the anger would be directed at himself. He has spent enough time caring for and loving the flower that he wouldn't blame the flower. Yeah. And after all that, what's it worth? Nothing. Yes. If you're going to grow a 9.16 meter tall sunflower, you might as well not have grown

one at all. Yeah, and in billions and billions of years when our Sun has shrunk to a little white dwarf or Something and there's no life left on this planet. What will have it all been for what they're yeah Yeah, true. Where did that get us? Hey, this was I'm sorry Theo did you put your hand up to speak? Just raise your hand. I was trying to mute myself because grandma's calling.

Yeah I'll put my hand up. Yo what up grandma? What's up? Is he, he's taking the call. Theo's taking a quick call with grandma. He has a real shitty grin on his face too. Is that the legendary Viv he's talking to right now? I hope it's Viv. I hope it's Viv.

I hope it's Viv. He couldn't call his grandma back in like 10 minutes. Shout out to Viv. God damn. I think that was definitely an episode of the podcast, Buntavista. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked what you heard,

you can get twice as much of this in a week by signing up at patreon.com slash Buntavistaista and if you don't have time for a second podcast don't worry about it no stress no stress don't worry about it there's a lot of fucking podcasts out there I reckon I listen to like three regularly and I sometimes struggle oh yeah I will implore the listener of the show though if you do happen to catch the bus regularly or another type of mass transit, perhaps a train or a tram, I urge you, hold onto that handhold.

Feel the gentle sway as you rock back and forth and think back to your ancestors. Think about how to feel sailing through the canopy of the jungle. Swing. Just close your eyes and think about that for a few stops. Do that for us. And then go and AI generate copy for horrible Instagram ads. And then go into your office building

and go chimp mode on your team leader, tear his face off. That's right. We will chat to you maybe on the bonus episode, but definitely next week. Bye! Bye bye. We're callously going Then to me, darling You'll see, darling It's a fabulous way we have Even when we smile You