Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: There's Charles W Chuck, Brian Jerry's not here, but all
Speaker 1: of these beautiful people are at the Castro Theater at
Speaker 1: San Francisco, California. Yeah. I love it. Very nice, very nice.
Speaker 1: Got a Chucker sign out there. I think I know
Speaker 1: who that is. It's pretty great. It's a good sign,
Speaker 1: it is. Thanks mom. Oh, we're definitely not gosing. So uh,
Speaker 1: we've asked you all here tonight to talk about being
Speaker 1: a child of the Are this for us? Thank you
Speaker 1: very much. Okay, let's just start over. I thought she
Speaker 1: was like, I'm just gonna put my stuff up here. So, um,
Speaker 1: if Chuck and I are children of the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: he was born in the very very very early seventies.
Speaker 1: I was born in the mid seventies, and I mean
Speaker 1: it might as well have been the sixties basically. I
Speaker 1: mean you were right there on the cusp um and
Speaker 1: being children of this era, we were aware of certain things,
Speaker 1: like all kids of the seventies and eighties were um,
Speaker 1: like that vans could have carpeting on the wall, you know, um,
Speaker 1: every kid knew the precise amount of McDonald's orange drink
Speaker 1: that he or she could drink just before getting a
Speaker 1: crippling stomachache. That's like seventies eighties kid knowledge, um or
Speaker 1: that your parents um like to go to swinger parties
Speaker 1: where there were keys and fish bowls and weird stuff
Speaker 1: like that, and did your parents don't do that? And
Speaker 1: every kid of the seventies and eighties knew that somewhere
Speaker 1: out there there was a guerrilla named Coco who could talk.
Speaker 1: And if you've never heard of Coco, prepared to buckle
Speaker 1: up and have your mind blown, because that is what
Speaker 1: we're talking about tonight. Coco. They're talking Grilla who is
Speaker 1: a local here as I'm sure you guys know, this
Speaker 1: is actually a super local show. It is, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: Coco the Gorilla was born fourth of July, just like
Speaker 1: Haraldo Rivera and Malia Obama and a bunch of other
Speaker 1: people I haven't heard of when I looked it up online.
Speaker 1: My dad was born on the fourth of July. Yes,
Speaker 1: why didn't you say that the other night? I just
Speaker 1: didn't feel like it all right, Tom Cruise was if
Speaker 1: I'm not mistaken, I think that was the for the
Speaker 1: movie he had that he had been born for that movie.
Speaker 1: He's just so good my body. Yeah, you really sold it. Uh.
Speaker 1: Coco was born in the fourth of July one, just
Speaker 1: four months after yours truly was born. There would be
Speaker 1: a lot of mirroring here between my development and Cocos.
Speaker 1: Coco was born at the San Francisco Zoo. Yeah, six
Speaker 1: point one miles from here. And what was Coco's birth
Speaker 1: name in full, Hanna be Co. So Coco is actually
Speaker 1: your nickname, and Hanna Biko in Japanese means fireworks child.
Speaker 1: She was named that after the fireworks going off. You
Speaker 1: think that's cute on the fourth of July. Just wait yeah,
Speaker 1: if that's got you all in already, man, you guys
Speaker 1: are gonna love this one. So Coco was a Western
Speaker 1: Lowland gorilla, which was a and still is a critically
Speaker 1: endangered subspecies of guerrilla in Central West Africa. And Coco
Speaker 1: was born into a world in the nineties seventies here
Speaker 1: in the United States, especially where people I thought two
Speaker 1: things about guerrillas. They thought they were super scary because
Speaker 1: literally because of King Kong, the movies kind of like
Speaker 1: Jaws with sharks they two very huggable animals. Movies ruined
Speaker 1: it basically, and they thought guerrillas were scary, and they
Speaker 1: thought gorillas were really dumb, like duh um, dumb like
Speaker 1: even among apes. I thought gorillas were dumb exactly um.
Speaker 1: And so this is the world that Coco was born into.
Speaker 1: And when she was born at the San Francisco Zoo um,
Speaker 1: she had kind of a difficult infancy. Her mom wasn't
Speaker 1: producing enough milk to sustain her, and then when she
Speaker 1: was I think six months old, she caught dysentery. She
Speaker 1: developed dysentery and was basically at death store and had
Speaker 1: to be removed from her family unit so that she
Speaker 1: could be nursed back to health by humans who took
Speaker 1: care of her around the clock, which is right sure,
Speaker 1: because they actually did save her life. But they had
Speaker 1: a problem after she recovered, and that was that she
Speaker 1: had spent so much time away from her family unit
Speaker 1: and hanging out with humans instead that they were worried
Speaker 1: that her family unit would reject her if they took
Speaker 1: her back. So now they kind of had a problem
Speaker 1: on their hands, and they had a gorilla, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: gorilla in the room. So a great movie it's fantastic.
Speaker 1: So there was a Stanford grad student around this time.
Speaker 1: It's bad joke, Jerry cut that one out already, already.
Speaker 1: I've only got three of those for the whole show,
Speaker 1: so you guys keep score. There was a Stanford grad
Speaker 1: student around this time that came on the scene, twenty
Speaker 1: four year old young woman named Francine Penny Patterson. She
Speaker 1: entered Coco's life at this moment when Coco needed her most,
Speaker 1: and she said, you know what, I'm studying apes, and
Speaker 1: I think that I can teach guerrillas how to speak
Speaker 1: use sign language. You've got a guerrilla. I need my PhD.
Speaker 1: This is all kind of perfect as that's a verbatim
Speaker 1: quote from that moment. So she took control of Cocoa's
Speaker 1: care and for the next fortysomething years. Uh, they had
Speaker 1: a relationship that can really only be described as human
Speaker 1: mother and guerilla daughter very much. So, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: And so the whole point of trying to teach Cocoa
Speaker 1: or any guerrilla sign language was um to find out
Speaker 1: how or if a guerrilla could acquire language, and then
Speaker 1: compare how a guerrilla acquires language to how kids human
Speaker 1: kids acquire language. And then we can kind of compare
Speaker 1: and contrast the differences and kind of trace back humans
Speaker 1: evolutionary history for how we developed language, because it's still
Speaker 1: a mystery. We don't really know why. We just know
Speaker 1: we seem to be the only species capable of using language. Try.
Speaker 1: Plus it's a good party trick, right, And it was
Speaker 1: the seventies. Yeah, so at first, Cocoa and Penny we're
Speaker 1: working to other at the San Francisco Zoo. But it's
Speaker 1: a zoo and there were people that were, you know,
Speaker 1: paying money to get in there and gawk at them.
Speaker 1: A lot of slack jawn yokels like John Yokels at
Speaker 1: the San Francisco Zoo and uh, look, yeah, what was
Speaker 1: my favorite line? Never mind, I can't get off track
Speaker 1: this early. We'll save the Simpsons for later. So, uh,
Speaker 1: people were gawking and that's very distracting to a young gorilla.
Speaker 1: So she said, you know what, this is going pretty well,
Speaker 1: but I think I could do a lot better with
Speaker 1: my research and for Cocoa's benefit, if we moved Cocoa
Speaker 1: to Stanford. And they basically said, sure you can. Um,
Speaker 1: you can take Cocoa on loan and go do some
Speaker 1: serious research at Stanford University right right where there's a
Speaker 1: lot more dope to be smoked. San Francisco zoo, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. I'm sure we've got some Stanford
Speaker 1: grads here, so uh yeah, oh really really that's surprising.
Speaker 1: Go cardinals. I thought it was giant trees, is there? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a little clunky, so okay, um so uh
Speaker 1: so they moved to Stanford officially launched Project Coco, and
Speaker 1: Coco suddenly is surrounded by a bunch of interesting people
Speaker 1: who are giving her their undivided attention. And she's raised
Speaker 1: in kind of this way that's similar to how you
Speaker 1: would raise a human child, like an ideal homeschool sitting,
Speaker 1: where like everything is about her and teaching her stuff
Speaker 1: and playing with her and keeping her attention going. And
Speaker 1: she really started to kind of thrive in this this environment,
Speaker 1: and she started to pick up sign language pretty quick.
Speaker 1: In her first two weeks of being taught sign an
Speaker 1: adapted form of American sign language, she knew food, drink,
Speaker 1: and more. And really the last one is the most
Speaker 1: important one. But she picked up these signs within two weeks.
Speaker 1: And again, remember bear this in mind this whole time.
Speaker 1: Anytime we say something amazing about Coco. Imagine that at
Speaker 1: the time when she's doing this stuff, She's the first
Speaker 1: gorilla doing this stuff and just amazing seen the world
Speaker 1: because we thought grillas were scary, stupid, just bury the
Speaker 1: mind stunned. Silence. Was not what I was going for,
Speaker 1: but I'll take it. I'll take it whatever I can
Speaker 1: get from you guys. So things were going well at Stanford,
Speaker 1: but she said, you know what, this is great, but
Speaker 1: I think we even need more space than they have
Speaker 1: at Stanford for a gorilla. And so she founded the
Speaker 1: Guerilla Foundation and move Cocoa and Project Cocoa to a
Speaker 1: six acre private facility that uh basically had a mobile
Speaker 1: home for Coco to live in, and that's where Coco
Speaker 1: lived her life. They retrofitted it so, you know, they
Speaker 1: had to make the walls a little stronger. Over the
Speaker 1: years is Cocoa grew and they made it so a
Speaker 1: gorilla could live in this trailer and she loved it
Speaker 1: was her house. She made her little nest out of
Speaker 1: blankets every night, and had a tire to sit in,
Speaker 1: and had like all sorts of toys to play and
Speaker 1: TV to watch a lot more than I had for sure,
Speaker 1: although you did have to make a nest of blankets
Speaker 1: every night in your house, it's true. Or had you
Speaker 1: let that man touch your beard, that would have been
Speaker 1: your future. I think that's true. Coco was learning faster
Speaker 1: than I was anyways. Yeah, but you had that innate
Speaker 1: like don't let them do it. Don't let them do it.
Speaker 1: So uh. Coco was taught sign language using a couple
Speaker 1: of different techniques. There's one called the molding technique. But
Speaker 1: they would literally take Coco's hand and shape her hand
Speaker 1: in the shape of the sign and do the sign
Speaker 1: while they're either saying the word or showing a picture
Speaker 1: of the object or whatever or both. Um. I know
Speaker 1: you have an example that you're pretty good at. Do
Speaker 1: the cat. The sign for cat is where you like
Speaker 1: kind of demonstrate whiskers. You draw whiskers across your face.
Speaker 1: So you would take you take Coco's hand and squish
Speaker 1: these together, ship these two right there you go, and
Speaker 1: then just be like cat cat You're like the guy
Speaker 1: in the sky lounge all of a sudden, right, so creepy.
Speaker 1: But that was so that was the molding technique. The
Speaker 1: other one, invitation, is way simpler. It's just you know,
Speaker 1: you would show her cat, cat cat, and she would
Speaker 1: eventually be like, and you go, yes, cat cat cat.
Speaker 1: Stop God, so annoying. That's what Coco would have said
Speaker 1: to I got it, I got it, Okay Stop. So
Speaker 1: within the Coco's first four and a half year she
Speaker 1: went through a couple of big language growth spurts. She
Speaker 1: added about two hundred new words to her vocabulary each year,
Speaker 1: again way faster than I was uh. And she was
Speaker 1: developing language basically at about the rate of um a
Speaker 1: child eight months behind. Cocoa a human child, right, but
Speaker 1: she was acquiring signs at about the same rate as
Speaker 1: a deaf child her age, which is pretty astounding, especially
Speaker 1: considering she wasn't taught sign language until she was one,
Speaker 1: and she wasn't exposed to English until she was about
Speaker 1: six months old, so she kind of started from behind
Speaker 1: and started as a gorilla. But she was still picking
Speaker 1: up language at about the same pace as human children.
Speaker 1: And this is just knocking everybody's socks off. It's amazing.
Speaker 1: So Coco, I think, had a working vocabulary by the
Speaker 1: time she was an adult of about six hundred signs
Speaker 1: and then spontaneously used another four hundred, so that's a
Speaker 1: thousand signs and then could apparently understand about two hundred
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, two thousand words of English, right, so she
Speaker 1: could understand two thousand words, she could sign about a thousand.
Speaker 1: And in the middle of sort of this early period
Speaker 1: is where Penny Patterson became doctor Penny Patterson. Yeah, she
Speaker 1: got her pH d from Stanford and I think seventy
Speaker 1: nine or something like that, and Project Coco continued, right, um,
Speaker 1: And one of the things that Coco taught the world
Speaker 1: is that not only could she understand sign language and
Speaker 1: use signs, she could actually use this to do things
Speaker 1: that we thought only humans could do, like joke around.
Speaker 1: Like there's this really good example of her making a joke.
Speaker 1: It's a gorilla level joke, but it's a joke. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: it's still qualifies you want to just sort of a
Speaker 1: Josh and Chuck level joke. So they would go in
Speaker 1: with a white towel and try and get Cocoa to
Speaker 1: sign white, and Cocoa kept signing red, red, red, and
Speaker 1: they were like, no, Cocoa, what color is the towel? Red? Red, red? No, Cocoa,
Speaker 1: what color is a towel? I'm just kidding. They were
Speaker 1: very kind, and Coco eventually went over and picked a
Speaker 1: red piece of lent off the towel and held it
Speaker 1: up and said red, red, red, and laughed and laughed
Speaker 1: and laughed, and everyone just it was pretty much the
Speaker 1: best joke of all time. Well, it definitely qualifies as
Speaker 1: a joke. We did not know that gorillas were capable
Speaker 1: of joking. She also knew how to lie. That's actually
Speaker 1: kind of sophisticated. As wrong as it is, it's kind
Speaker 1: of sophisticated intellectually. We didn't realize gorilla not gonna make
Speaker 1: any true at all about the human sophistication it takes
Speaker 1: to lie. It just kind of instantly it rights itself.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: get political. So there was there was a time when
Speaker 1: Coco broke the kitchen sink in her in her little kitchen,
Speaker 1: and later on Penny asked her what happened, and Coco said,
Speaker 1: Kate did it, which is the first lie children tell,
Speaker 1: literally is Kate didn't. Yeah, Kate, it's always right. But
Speaker 1: she like threw her caregiver under the bus, which is
Speaker 1: very human if you think about it, you know, she
Speaker 1: was like Kate did it, you should fire her. She
Speaker 1: was also pretty good at making an improv basically and
Speaker 1: making up signs for things that she didn't know the
Speaker 1: signs for. For instance, a mask was an eye hat.
Speaker 1: It's not bad, it's fairly cute. A zebra she called
Speaker 1: a white tiger because she didn't know the sign for zebra.
Speaker 1: Not bad. Why they're gonna lose their minds when you
Speaker 1: know what enters the picture. A ring was a finger bracelet.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good. And a Pinocchio doll was an elephant. Baby,
Speaker 1: this is a gorilla. Everybody, not bad, not bad at all.
Speaker 1: She also had are you asking me literally? If you
Speaker 1: should say that? I think you should? Don't you tell
Speaker 1: everyone about Coco's insults? So so prepared to aweso more. Um.
Speaker 1: She had her own little vocabulary of insults like bird
Speaker 1: and nut like you're a bird, you're a nut. That
Speaker 1: was their insults. Um it got even better, rotten stink.
Speaker 1: It's also a good punk band name, it is pretty good,
Speaker 1: dirty toilet, toilet, dirty devil, and um face mother, that
Speaker 1: was that was the one. I'm sorry, I apologize before.
Speaker 1: I'll just apologize now as well. That's gonna sound so
Speaker 1: sweet beeped out. When we end up releasing this episode,
Speaker 1: please come back. I said, I was sorry, and I
Speaker 1: love in the middle of it. You look over at
Speaker 1: me and point to f F f F and you go,
Speaker 1: I want I wanted you to be on the hook
Speaker 1: as well as me. All Right, that's it. That's all
Speaker 1: the dirty language it was. It was worth it. That's
Speaker 1: a good quality joke you get because see Coco didn't
Speaker 1: really say that. That was Josh. So here's the deal though.
Speaker 1: We we talked so far about Coco insulting people and
Speaker 1: making jokes and throwing people under the bus, but that
Speaker 1: was not Coco's nature. Coca was actually very sweet gorilla.
Speaker 1: And everyone who came into Coco, especially Dr Patterson, loved, loved,
Speaker 1: loved this gorilla. Yes, um, And so in nineteen six,
Speaker 1: this Guerrilla Foundation expanded, the little family grew a little
Speaker 1: bigger when they brought in a guerrilla male named Michael,
Speaker 1: and um, Michael was weird. It's a weird name for
Speaker 1: a gorilla. It's kind of like have you ever seen
Speaker 1: somebody where you meet someone's dog and they're like, this
Speaker 1: is James or Alan or something like that. Like you
Speaker 1: can use a human name for a dog, but it's
Speaker 1: got to be just slightly off. I'm trying to think
Speaker 1: or for a name you could give a dog. Alan
Speaker 1: is pretty close, Edwards, Larry is pretty good Larry. But no,
Speaker 1: if it was like a big sloppy bulldog named Larry,
Speaker 1: you'd be like, of course, Larry. James, though, who would
Speaker 1: name a dog James? For Jennifer is a pretty good
Speaker 1: name for a dog, right, Yeah, Nah, Chuck's that's a
Speaker 1: good dog name too. She Chuck is on the cusp
Speaker 1: of being goofy. Anyway, all right, that's another everybody shouting
Speaker 1: at the stage. We didn't ask for this anyway. Michael
Speaker 1: comes into the picture, Michael the gorilla, and he also
Speaker 1: learned American sign language too, and he picked it up
Speaker 1: pretty well. Not quite as as well as Cocoa, but
Speaker 1: still very well. Um. He was also enculturated, which means
Speaker 1: that he was raised basically as a human um and
Speaker 1: and not as a gorilla, which means that you like
Speaker 1: to listen to Pavarotti and paint very seriously. They both painted, actually,
Speaker 1: but Michael took it very seriously. But one of the
Speaker 1: big findings from Project Coco is that they found that
Speaker 1: Michael and Coco would sign to one another unprompted. They
Speaker 1: would just communicate through sign and that each one taught
Speaker 1: the other signs that the humans hadn't taught them. Right,
Speaker 1: So Michael learned some stuff from humans that Coco hadn't
Speaker 1: and he went and talked Coco and vice versa, which
Speaker 1: is pretty big. Yeah, it's big. It's cute and a
Speaker 1: little creepy, especially if they developed their own sign language.
Speaker 1: It's pretty good. You got the chloroform. We should also
Speaker 1: mention there was there's if you've seen the documentary, there's
Speaker 1: one on Netflix called Coco. I think the gorilla who
Speaker 1: could Talk. It might be that on the nose. There's
Speaker 1: a colon in there somewhere. Yeah, from the BBC uh.
Speaker 1: And there's a man in that documentary you see a lot.
Speaker 1: His name is Ron Cone. He came on the projects
Speaker 1: very early on to document all this via camera and videotape,
Speaker 1: and it stuck around through the whole project because he
Speaker 1: was clearly in love with Benny Patterson. That was the
Speaker 1: whole subtext of that documentary the whole time. I was
Speaker 1: like even says, at the very beginning, he was like fault.
Speaker 1: She was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in
Speaker 1: my life. Yeah, I was like, oh, I really feel
Speaker 1: bad for the feel bad for m. That's an extra
Speaker 1: kind of like a subplot to the document. Totally was.
Speaker 1: But Ron wasn't a gorilla, so he had no shot.
Speaker 1: He would even dress up like one sometimes and I
Speaker 1: just didn't work. So the word got around, as it
Speaker 1: does in around Woodside, California, where this gorilla foundation was,
Speaker 1: that there was a gorilla in their midst Its terrible,
Speaker 1: all right, I would ask all of you not to
Speaker 1: encourage him. And by the way, this is just neither
Speaker 1: here nor there. But today where Coco lived is just
Speaker 1: a two minute drive from a Ross dress for less.
Speaker 1: This is one of Asha's when you when Josh puts
Speaker 1: together these uh these things, you get these interesting little
Speaker 1: factoids like that it's like two minutes away. There's a
Speaker 1: couple of them in every single one. Like other people
Speaker 1: who are sitting there like smelling soap, like realized that
Speaker 1: two minutes away there's a guerrilla foundation where there's sign
Speaker 1: language using guerrillas. Probably not, I don't think so, probably not. Uh.
Speaker 1: And by nineteen seventy eight, the world was introduced to
Speaker 1: Coco in a big way when Coco made her first
Speaker 1: appearance of what would be Too on the cover of
Speaker 1: National Geographic magazine. Uh. And if you've seen this very
Speaker 1: famous photo, what you see is as a gorilla holding
Speaker 1: a camera and you think, oh, that's cute, and when
Speaker 1: you look closely, you realize that the Olympus camera is
Speaker 1: backwards and Coco had taken her own picture in a
Speaker 1: mirror and was the photographer of note for National Geographics
Speaker 1: and it's like, it's a well framed photograph, she's using
Speaker 1: it correctly, and yeah, it ended up on the cover
Speaker 1: the first Yeah, sure, sure, I was trying to avoid
Speaker 1: using that word, but yes, that's what it was. The
Speaker 1: second cover though, so that introduced the world to to Cocoa.
Speaker 1: Inside there was like a pretty substantial article written by
Speaker 1: Penny basically describing Project Coco and how it was going,
Speaker 1: and everybody's like, wow, this is amazing. But in seven
Speaker 1: years later she was on the cover again, and this
Speaker 1: time the world just fell in love with Coco because
Speaker 1: in the cover photo, uh, Coco is cradling her kitten.
Speaker 1: Her kitten, not a kitten, Coco's kitten, because Coco had
Speaker 1: a kitten, and that is what this whole this whole
Speaker 1: issue was about Yeah, it was, it's super cute. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree that inner specs mingling
Speaker 1: is kind of like the best thing on the internet.
Speaker 1: I could look at that stuff all day. I do
Speaker 1: sometimes imily. I just sit around and it's like, there's
Speaker 1: a parrot with an alligator that adorable. They love each other.
Speaker 1: They looked, you can't do it with reptiles. No, not easily,
Speaker 1: never cute. I have seen some cute reptile stuff, but
Speaker 1: it's few and far between. Like a snake cuddling a turtle.
Speaker 1: That's no cuddle. Oh, sorry to break it to you.
Speaker 1: I got to rethink this stuff I look at on
Speaker 1: the internet. So Coco, uh, maybe because Coco had been
Speaker 1: taught the word cat um incessantly cat loved I love
Speaker 1: cats and wanted to kitten, and for for one I
Speaker 1: think it was birthday or Christmas one year, they gave
Speaker 1: Coco a very realistic stuffy kitten and that that didn't
Speaker 1: work because Coco's no dummy, and they're like, all right,
Speaker 1: I guess we gotta go for it and do the
Speaker 1: real thing. So they brought in a litter of kittens
Speaker 1: and had Coco pick one out. Um, she smashed all
Speaker 1: but one, and that was the lefty kittens. True not true.
Speaker 1: Now she picked out a little uh, a little tabby Manx.
Speaker 1: Manxes don't have or Manx, I don't have tails. My
Speaker 1: brother's got a Manx of course because he's my brother. Uh,
Speaker 1: And so Manx didn't have a tail. And so Coco
Speaker 1: named this little ball of fluff all Ball, and then
Speaker 1: cut That was the name of Coco's kitten. And all
Speaker 1: Ball himself was a pretty interesting cat. Um. He had
Speaker 1: been abandoned. His whole litter had been by his mother,
Speaker 1: and so he was nursed by a dog for like
Speaker 1: four and a half weeks. Not only just a dog,
Speaker 1: a Karen Terrier, which is the same breed as Toto
Speaker 1: from the Wizard of Oz. And then he wanted to
Speaker 1: become the pet cat of a talking gorilla. What is
Speaker 1: going on? Trigger warning everybody. All Ball died, All Ball
Speaker 1: got out, I was hit by car and killed. I know,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to have to tell you that, but that's
Speaker 1: what happened. All Ball got out, got smashed to buy
Speaker 1: a car, and Penny told Cocoa this, We didn't hit
Speaker 1: him with our car. Why are you guessed to say
Speaker 1: the same thing twice, probably yeah, and really just crowned
Speaker 1: them in there, changed your name to all tire. I
Speaker 1: can't believe I said that I love cats. I have
Speaker 1: two cats. That was way worse than what I said,
Speaker 1: way worse. I was not on the hook without a
Speaker 1: garbage podcaster, garbage human. Sorry. I think he just got
Speaker 1: up and left something, so uh, Penny had to break
Speaker 1: it to Coco, obviously, because this was Coco's best little buddy,
Speaker 1: and Coco, it's awful. For about ten minutes, she just
Speaker 1: turned her back and like a child, Wood ignored everything,
Speaker 1: like you know, I didn't hear that basically, And then
Speaker 1: later on Coco uh started whimpering and making the sad
Speaker 1: gorilla depressed gorilla sounds and I can't even say this
Speaker 1: next part. You've got to Then eventually she signed sleep cat.
Speaker 1: I know, and I think it's so sorry. This is
Speaker 1: a great place to put an ad if you ask me. So,
Speaker 1: if you guys will bear with us, we're going to
Speaker 1: take a message break all right, we're back. Everybody you've
Speaker 1: seen us before that it's like a roller coaster of emotions.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if you remember where we were
Speaker 1: all ball has just been killed. Um you should not
Speaker 1: feel too bad, though, because Coco had two more sets
Speaker 1: of kittens throughout her long life. Uh, Lipstick and Smoky
Speaker 1: and Miss Black and Miss Gray. So Coco loved her kittens.
Speaker 1: She did. And I don't know what happened to the
Speaker 1: rest of them. Don't ask, is what I say. Um. So,
Speaker 1: Coco had become a celebrity, and being a celebrity, other
Speaker 1: celebrities wanted to be around her. Uh not. The least
Speaker 1: of what was William Shatner, who was among the first
Speaker 1: to go visit Coco. Apparently he wrote about it in
Speaker 1: his autobiography that it was kind of a publicity stunt
Speaker 1: and he was scared to death about going to meet
Speaker 1: this gorilla like one on one, but he was determined
Speaker 1: he was gonna do it. And then Coco touched his
Speaker 1: genitals during their meaning it's true. He kept his little
Speaker 1: Shatners kid over here. It looks painful. She's touching my balls.
Speaker 1: That wasn't even know how to do. So. I worked
Speaker 1: with Shatner on a on a Cheerios commercial. I worked
Speaker 1: with Shatner. Yeah he what Someone just yelled out a
Speaker 1: bad name about him. He was nice to day I
Speaker 1: worked with him. I don't know. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: a star Trek guy, but he was. He was a
Speaker 1: nice guy, all right, ma'am, you need to quit calling
Speaker 1: me names. So, uh, Fred Rogers, Mr Rogers also paid
Speaker 1: a little visit, right yeah. And I don't know if
Speaker 1: you guys have seen the Mr. Rogers documentary, but this
Speaker 1: is in that documentary And if you look closely, Mr
Speaker 1: Rogers looks kind of scared too, but he's he's like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm going through with this. But he's just a little
Speaker 1: like over eager to take, you know, direction from Penny Patterson.
Speaker 1: He's just a little nervous, especially when Coco cradles him
Speaker 1: like a baby, which she did. It's very cute. And
Speaker 1: it gets even better because Coco and Michael were both
Speaker 1: big fans of Mr Rogers neighborhood, so when he showed up,
Speaker 1: they freaked out because there's Mr Rogers and Coco took
Speaker 1: his shoes off like she'd seen him do so many
Speaker 1: times before. And it's better or better. Yes, I'm serious. So, uh,
Speaker 1: Coco also got visits on separate occasion. I think from
Speaker 1: both Flee and Sting. I don't think they came together, right,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. They've been doing a little lunch,
Speaker 1: the little shopping at Ross Dress for lesson. They made
Speaker 1: their way over to the Gorilla found maybe so things
Speaker 1: like why are you always just buying tidy Whitey's and
Speaker 1: tube socks? A little red hot chili peppers. Humor got
Speaker 1: it well dated, it still works. Uh. They both let
Speaker 1: them let Coco um play their bases. They both brought
Speaker 1: their bases and let Cocoa slap at a base. Peter
Speaker 1: Gabriel showed up, Yes he does situations like this. Um
Speaker 1: America's beloved treasure, Betty White went and visited. Uh. And
Speaker 1: Betty White was a board member of the Guerrilla Foundation.
Speaker 1: So if you didn't love her enough before, love her
Speaker 1: even more now. And Um, Coco was a fan of
Speaker 1: the Golden Girls, so they were fans of one another.
Speaker 1: Course Leo DiCaprio paid a visit. He heard there was
Speaker 1: a young lady that uh, he should meet, and all
Speaker 1: of this is in the documentary, all these various visits
Speaker 1: and and Leo's he's, he's he didn't even get in
Speaker 1: the cage at least from this, like Coco has her
Speaker 1: hand through there and he's just kind of like stroking
Speaker 1: her fingers, not even with his fingertips, like with his knuckle,
Speaker 1: his knuckle, I think with an assistance knuckle actually, um.
Speaker 1: But of course, the most memorable visit was Robin Williams
Speaker 1: back in two thousand one h of course San Francisco's own.
Speaker 1: You've probably seen this footage. If you haven't, go watch it,
Speaker 1: because like, go watch it right now. We'll wait. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if if, if only we had a big screen behind
Speaker 1: us where we could show this stuff, how can we
Speaker 1: how can we ever do it? Yeah, that would require
Speaker 1: ten percent more effort. This is not gonna happen. We
Speaker 1: challenge you instead to use your imagination. That's right, the
Speaker 1: world of the mind everyone. So Robin Williams is the
Speaker 1: perfect person to go visit Coco because Robin Williams was
Speaker 1: not scared like a Shatner, He was not intimidated like
Speaker 1: a Mr. Rogers, He was not disappointed that it wasn't
Speaker 1: a human like Leo DiCaprio. He was Robin Williams. And
Speaker 1: he gets in there and just wants to play with
Speaker 1: an ape on that level, gets down on the floor.
Speaker 1: They're rolling around their tickle fighting Coco takes off his
Speaker 1: glasses and puts them on and looks out the window,
Speaker 1: and you can just tell that he is legit having
Speaker 1: like one of the best times of his life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was definitely into it for sure. UM. And later
Speaker 1: on he uh, he was telling the story on one
Speaker 1: of the late night shows, I can't remember which one,
Speaker 1: and he said that they told him that, Um, Coco
Speaker 1: had indicated that she wanted to mate with him, and
Speaker 1: Robin Williams said it would have made a good story,
Speaker 1: which if if you let that just kind of sit
Speaker 1: for a little while, like it's like what And years later,
Speaker 1: when Robin Williams passed away, they had to break the
Speaker 1: news to Coco as well, and Coco signed a woman
Speaker 1: crying and it was very sad, which is pretty astounding
Speaker 1: because Coco met Robin Williams. I mean, she watched his
Speaker 1: movies and everything, but she met him once, like thirteen
Speaker 1: years before his death, and so for her to be
Speaker 1: affected by it, that's extraordinarily significant. UM. And because Coco
Speaker 1: had people like Leo DiCaprio and William Shaton are coming
Speaker 1: to visit the world watched everything she did, and she
Speaker 1: became an ambassador for Earth like just this a natural
Speaker 1: ambassador because here's a gorilla who can communicate with humans,
Speaker 1: and um, grilla come from nature, so why not just
Speaker 1: have her talk for nature. And that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1: She became an ambassador for plan at Earth. Basically. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was at a very good time for that too.
Speaker 1: It was here in America, was in the early eighties
Speaker 1: when we were just starting to kind of come around
Speaker 1: to uh, the green movement a little bit more and
Speaker 1: Earth Day became a bigger and bigger deal. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of prime time for Cocoa to step in there. Um.
Speaker 1: I think Penny Patterson wrote a book called Coco's Kitten.
Speaker 1: I don't think it ended in a in a car crash.
Speaker 1: I hope not. No, there was stuffed Coco gorillas. I
Speaker 1: believe they still are. And like I said, she and
Speaker 1: Michael both painted, so they started selling prints of their paintings.
Speaker 1: And Coco's painting of a bird it looks like a bird.
Speaker 1: It's pretty amazing. I mean, you can't tell what kind
Speaker 1: of bird it is or anything like that, and you
Speaker 1: have to squint and again use your imagination, but you
Speaker 1: can say, yes, that is a bird. I can tell
Speaker 1: have you ever held a chimp or anything or been
Speaker 1: around one. Yeah, I have, I've been. I I have
Speaker 1: held I'm not quite sure what kind of um ape
Speaker 1: it was, but a little little sweet one in address
Speaker 1: who was very cute. And then, um, where was this done?
Speaker 1: In Florida? Everybody's walks around with apes that you can
Speaker 1: hold in Florida. And then one time I was in
Speaker 1: Mexico and I was walking down the street and I
Speaker 1: passed a courtyard, a gated courtyard, and there was a
Speaker 1: chimp like on a leash that it could swing around
Speaker 1: the courtyard in and I was like, well, I have
Speaker 1: to stop and talk to his chimp. So I did,
Speaker 1: and the chimp put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed,
Speaker 1: not painfully, but this chimp was in charge of me
Speaker 1: right then and then stared more deeply into my soul
Speaker 1: than any other being has before. And I'm just sitting
Speaker 1: there with like cartoon sweat jumping off of my head.
Speaker 1: And finally I realized he wasn't going to stop this
Speaker 1: at any point in time, so I just, one finger
Speaker 1: at a time slowly backed away. And then after, you know,
Speaker 1: ten minutes later, I was like, I gotta go see
Speaker 1: my chim friend again and they had closed the door. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I said to I worked another TV commercial
Speaker 1: with a chimp one time, and uh, it was it
Speaker 1: was a lifelong dream to hold a chimp. I always
Speaker 1: wanted to. And so I went to the trainer and said,
Speaker 1: can I hold the chimp? And she was like, of course.
Speaker 1: And so I hold this baby chimp and it wraps
Speaker 1: his legs around me, in arms around me, swearing a
Speaker 1: little diaper um for you know, for a good reason.
Speaker 1: I don't think it was just to be cute. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't want this chimp booping and being
Speaker 1: on people wearing a diaper and clothing. Just a diaper.
Speaker 1: It's okay, So that's all right, as long as it's
Speaker 1: not like a diaper and shut. That's a terrible combination.
Speaker 1: Just a diaper and yeah that's no good. That's not
Speaker 1: a good look. Human chimp doesn't matter. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1: But then later we were having our production meeting before
Speaker 1: the job, where everyone kind of stands around and walks
Speaker 1: through what we're gonna do for the day. And I
Speaker 1: was standing there, you guys, and I felt it before
Speaker 1: I saw it. This chimp walked up and held my hand.
Speaker 1: And I looked down and this little chip is looking
Speaker 1: up at me and just holds my hand. Best thing
Speaker 1: that ever happened to me. And I'm married with a
Speaker 1: human child. Yeah, yeah, that's all right. She didn't listen
Speaker 1: to podcast. So, um, where are we here? We are right?
Speaker 1: So Coco is an ambassador for Earth at a time
Speaker 1: where we're becoming more eco conscious, coining dorky terms like
Speaker 1: eco conscious, and she's like the ambassador for Earth. Um.
Speaker 1: You have to remember, though, she didn't necessarily think of
Speaker 1: herself this way, So just keep that in mind, because um,
Speaker 1: she took part in the first ever inter species internet
Speaker 1: chat hosted by America on Line. It does not get
Speaker 1: more than now very Here was the setup, Okay, So
Speaker 1: there was a a o L moderator who was the
Speaker 1: one working in the chat room on the phone with Penny,
Speaker 1: who was at the Guerrilla Foundation, And so the AOL
Speaker 1: moderator would relay questions over the phone to Penny. Penny
Speaker 1: would ask the question or sign the question to Coco
Speaker 1: and then tell the moderator the Coco's response, and then
Speaker 1: the moderator would type it in. And so when this
Speaker 1: whole setup was explained to Coco. Coco said, Nipple just
Speaker 1: put a pin in that. Nipples will figure in quite
Speaker 1: a bit. But but the point where she wasn't like
Speaker 1: this is the part I was born to play. I
Speaker 1: can't wait to get more eco conscious. She was just
Speaker 1: like Nipple, Cocay. It was a gorilla, everybody. You gotta
Speaker 1: remember that. So if you look at that train in
Speaker 1: scripts from the A O L chat, that means it's
Speaker 1: still you're not digging up transcripts from A L chat
Speaker 1: rooms anymore unless you're in trouble with the law. And
Speaker 1: if you look at what's going on in this chat
Speaker 1: and the answers at Coco's giving and then the responses
Speaker 1: that Penny Patterson is giving, you start to see a
Speaker 1: little bit of a trend where I guess the nicest
Speaker 1: way to say it is that Dr Patterson was being
Speaker 1: a little liberal with some of these translations on what
Speaker 1: she thought Coco might be saying. Right, Um, there's this
Speaker 1: really good example. One was a O L user Mini
Speaker 1: Kitty asked Coco, are you gonna have a baby in
Speaker 1: the Mini Kitty here? By the way, anyone that would
Speaker 1: be astounding? Oh god, I got a bunch of mini kids. Um,
Speaker 1: so many. Kitty asked Cocoa, you're gonna have a baby
Speaker 1: in the future, and Coco went, and it doesn't make
Speaker 1: any sense when you're reading the transcript. Coco covered her
Speaker 1: eyes and, uh, you when Dr Patterson kind of translates it,
Speaker 1: then it makes sense. She said, Well, I think what
Speaker 1: she's doing is signing unattention that she doesn't see it.
Speaker 1: That's not gonna happen. And you can't help but think
Speaker 1: that feels like a bit of a stretch. And when
Speaker 1: you read this transcript you start to get a kind
Speaker 1: of clear idea why there are some people out there
Speaker 1: in the world who think that Project Coco was almost
Speaker 1: entirely bs. It was almost entirely made up and not
Speaker 1: true at all. That's right. So that first part of
Speaker 1: the show was a lot of fun. I think we
Speaker 1: can all agree super cute. Uh, we don't like to
Speaker 1: burst bubbles, but we do what we do, and we
Speaker 1: have to show the other side of the argument because uh,
Speaker 1: we get into a section now called the Ape language Wars,
Speaker 1: which was a real thing. Um for some people. They
Speaker 1: believe that Coco was super smart and communicating and making
Speaker 1: sentences and using sign language and understood what was happening,
Speaker 1: But there's a whole other group of scientists who basically
Speaker 1: ended up thinking that these experiments are bs and that
Speaker 1: Coco is basically like a bear you train to ride
Speaker 1: a unicycle in a circus. Sure that is doing this
Speaker 1: retreats yes, the rewards or something like that, or falling
Speaker 1: that that that she was trained to use these signs
Speaker 1: in the same way you could train a dog to
Speaker 1: slow dance with you or something the kind of thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's very, very impressive, but it doesn't require or
Speaker 1: display human level intellect. And we should say, like, none
Speaker 1: of this has proven and there's a huge division in
Speaker 1: the field of science over whether the ape language researchers
Speaker 1: are right or the skeptics are right. And it's actually
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating, but you have to kind of step back
Speaker 1: and look at it in this larger context because it
Speaker 1: wasn't just Project Coco that this gets leveled against it.
Speaker 1: Project Coco was part of a whole other field, um
Speaker 1: called the ape language experiments that really started way back
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century. Yeah, so it was a pretty
Speaker 1: hot thing for a while. Um. There were a bunch
Speaker 1: of experiments going on where they would take chimps, mostly chimps.
Speaker 1: I think Coca was one of the few apes or
Speaker 1: a few guerrillas, so that she was the first. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the first one for sure. And they would take chimps,
Speaker 1: and they would raise them as children by themselves or
Speaker 1: with siblings, or dressed them up in little cute overalls
Speaker 1: and things and try and make them like little humans
Speaker 1: a little later hosing, maybe they were is a good
Speaker 1: look a chimp in later hosing? Oh yeah, of course
Speaker 1: there was one one of the first ones in the nineties.
Speaker 1: It was a psychologist couple. Uh. And as you'll see,
Speaker 1: most of these are couples that lead these experiments, which
Speaker 1: is why I still feel so bad for Ron Cone
Speaker 1: because he was like, well, Penny that, like everyone else
Speaker 1: literally is married except us. So Keith and Cathy Hayes
Speaker 1: they trained a chimp named Vicky in the nineteen forties
Speaker 1: not to sign words to speak for human language words.
Speaker 1: Vicky could say Mama, Papa, up, and cup and uh.
Speaker 1: We figured they really dropped the ball on that fifth
Speaker 1: word because pup is just staring them in the face.
Speaker 1: She had all the tools there, but they stopped at four.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing is that Vicky's experiment, even though
Speaker 1: she learned to speak for human words, was considered a failure. Failure.
Speaker 1: They taught a chimp to speak, and it was considered
Speaker 1: a failure because everybody's like just for words, And the
Speaker 1: point was was that no, we should be able to
Speaker 1: teach them language. Like the theory was that if humans
Speaker 1: were the only ones who could use language, maybe it
Speaker 1: was a cultural thing. So if we start raising chimps
Speaker 1: as humans, they'll pick up language, and you'll have a
Speaker 1: language using chimp. Vicky proved and some of the other
Speaker 1: ones proved that it's just not gonna happen. And later
Speaker 1: on we figured out that the physiology of the other primates, um,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't allow for speech. So some people were like, well,
Speaker 1: that's it, case closed. It's only humans who can use language.
Speaker 1: H G. Noam Chomsky. Very famously, the famous linguists came
Speaker 1: out and said, I I hypothesized that humans have what's
Speaker 1: called the language acquisition device, like a little seed program
Speaker 1: in our brain that allows us to start learning language,
Speaker 1: and that only humans have that. It's a hypothesis that
Speaker 1: hasn't been proven still, but he really kind of set
Speaker 1: the tone for the skeptics who say it's just humans
Speaker 1: who can use language. But then some people said, you
Speaker 1: know what, Chomsky, he's pretty interesting fellow. But I don't
Speaker 1: really I'm not swayed by this. I think that just
Speaker 1: because an ape can't talk doesn't mean they can't use language.
Speaker 1: And somebody, I think Alan and Beatrix Gardner came upon
Speaker 1: this really novel idea, if you can't teach an eat
Speaker 1: an ape to speak, you could teach an ape sign language.
Speaker 1: And they were definitely onto something because it panned out
Speaker 1: pretty well. Yeah, this is a nineteen sixty seven and
Speaker 1: they had a was it a chimp? Yeah? You think
Speaker 1: it was a chimp named was Show And I think
Speaker 1: Washo was from Washington, if I'm not mistaken, I think
Speaker 1: I think she ended up in Washing ended up in Washington,
Speaker 1: and uh, things went pretty well for a little while,
Speaker 1: but uh, it yielded a lot of findings when they
Speaker 1: found out that Lulie was a young male, that Washow
Speaker 1: wasn't the real mama, but Washo just sort of adopted
Speaker 1: this young chimp as her own. And they found out
Speaker 1: that Washo was teaching Lulie sign language and they were
Speaker 1: signing to each other. They were signing to other animals.
Speaker 1: They would walk up and sign to dogs and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. I guess like, are you with us? It's
Speaker 1: gonna go down and we need to know if you're
Speaker 1: with us, there, with us against us? No middle ground.
Speaker 1: I'm look in my butt hole, man, I don't know.
Speaker 1: It is funny if you watch footage from some of
Speaker 1: these experiments, there is often a dog just kind of
Speaker 1: hanging out, like what the hell are you guys doing,
Speaker 1: which is why we love dogs so much. They don't care.
Speaker 1: They just want scritches and hugs. They do um. So
Speaker 1: Project Washed like just changed everything because now all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you had a chimp that was using sign
Speaker 1: language like so yes like Noam Chomsky seemed like he
Speaker 1: was going to be wrong, and that kicked off this
Speaker 1: whole ape language experimentation. It became kind of like the
Speaker 1: hot research topic in developmental psychology was just so hot.
Speaker 1: Well you can see why. You know, it's it's cool,
Speaker 1: it's headline grabbing. You get to work with these apes,
Speaker 1: that's super cute. It was at a time when Threes
Speaker 1: Company was the number one show in America. It just
Speaker 1: made sense in a very very seventies kind of way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I thought. So there was one, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't just gorillas and chimps. It was in rain tang
Speaker 1: name Chantek, who excelled at signing and would give directions
Speaker 1: whenever Chantic was in a car to the local dairy queen.
Speaker 1: It's so great, not bad. There's a very famous project nim.
Speaker 1: Um do not watch that documentary. Josh tried to get
Speaker 1: me too, but he said it's a real bummer man.
Speaker 1: Bummer is a very good word to describe it. So
Speaker 1: I did not see it. I refused. It's a little sad,
Speaker 1: but I think this was at Columbia University in the
Speaker 1: mid seventies and they threw a little shade at Niam Chomsky.
Speaker 1: The leader of this project named herb Terrorists by naming
Speaker 1: his chimp Nim Chimpsky, which is pre Simpson's. It's so Simpsons,
Speaker 1: really so Herb Terrorist figures in pretty big in this
Speaker 1: in this whole thing, he really does and like just
Speaker 1: like Wash Show and Loulie and all of the other ones.
Speaker 1: Um Nim started to acquire sign language like pretty quickly
Speaker 1: and was using a lot of signs, and things were
Speaker 1: going along as expected, but Herb terrorists. The head of
Speaker 1: this project, Project Nim. He wasn't he wasn't convinced. He
Speaker 1: didn't believe that Nim was actually using language. He thought
Speaker 1: that he just knew some signs. And like, at the
Speaker 1: heart of this is this discussion of like what constitutes language. Um,
Speaker 1: Like if you have a pie, you can point to
Speaker 1: a pie and say pie, and everyone don't think, can
Speaker 1: I have some pie? But all you're doing is pointing
Speaker 1: to an object and saying a word. That's just using
Speaker 1: a word. Language is like where you take other words
Speaker 1: and put them together and describe to people how to
Speaker 1: make a delicious pie, so you can make something that
Speaker 1: literally doesn't exist yet out of other things. That's the
Speaker 1: difference between language and words. And what Herb terrorists thought
Speaker 1: was that Nim was just using words. So he um
Speaker 1: did the normal thing that you would do and sent
Speaker 1: him back to his place of birth, very grim ape
Speaker 1: research farm in Oklahoma, which is a deeply not okay
Speaker 1: thing to do. Now there should not be ape farms
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma. Yeah, I hate to break that to you.
Speaker 1: Uh So we got to say that Herb terrorists, he
Speaker 1: didn't go into this whole thing. Two as a skeptic
Speaker 1: to prove everyone wrong. Though he was a star of
Speaker 1: the field. Yeah, he was a star of the field.
Speaker 1: He was way into it, and he looked at the
Speaker 1: science and he was like, man, you know it. The
Speaker 1: more I look at this, not only do I think
Speaker 1: that they're not truly communicating and understanding what they're saying,
Speaker 1: He's like, I think these researchers are tipping them off inadvertently.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone's trying to cheat it, but inadvertently
Speaker 1: they're tipping their hand right before they would teach a
Speaker 1: sign or ask them to say a sign, inadvertently, And
Speaker 1: I don't even think they know. Not only do I
Speaker 1: think they're not talking, I don't even think that they
Speaker 1: know what food means when they sign food that they're
Speaker 1: they're just that basic that they're really just mimicking. Yep,
Speaker 1: they're just imitating people to get that food. So so
Speaker 1: herb terrorists. Again, he's one of the stars of the
Speaker 1: ape language research field. Says that he changed his mind
Speaker 1: about his data, He publishes a big influential article in
Speaker 1: n becomes the most vocal critic of his former field,
Speaker 1: and normally when a scientist changes his mind about his
Speaker 1: data doesn't really amount to much, but this drew a
Speaker 1: really deep clear line in the sand. What had once
Speaker 1: been like the hot research topic in developmental psychology was
Speaker 1: now considered possibly fraudulent, um anti science, or at the
Speaker 1: very least unscientific. And you had to choose one side
Speaker 1: or the other. Like the dogs and the chimps right
Speaker 1: versus humans, you had to choose where did you believe
Speaker 1: that that ape language research was actually just fraudulent and
Speaker 1: it was really the humans who were producing the study
Speaker 1: data because they were seeing what they wanted to see
Speaker 1: and believing what they wanted to believe, Or did you
Speaker 1: believe that, no, they're actually onto something and science um
Speaker 1: still has plenty left to learn from studying apes. And
Speaker 1: you had to choose one side or the other, and
Speaker 1: a lot of kind of petty camps broke out along
Speaker 1: that dividing line. Yeah, and at the center of all
Speaker 1: this is a word that I have always had a
Speaker 1: very hard time saying. This is going to be beautiful.
Speaker 1: So I have broken it down into five parts. And thropomorphism. Oh,
Speaker 1: you nailed it, You nailed it. Shut Thank you everyone.
Speaker 1: It says here and dash throw dash po dash more.
Speaker 1: That's so easy, and I just left phism all by itself.
Speaker 1: You don't, I didn't break that down into two parts.
Speaker 1: You don't see phism spelled out very often. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: for your throw you added the W like throw, yeah,
Speaker 1: not just th h r O or th h r
Speaker 1: o e throw. Pism looks too close to Fish the band.
Speaker 1: It does, so that's probably why why I'm like naturally
Speaker 1: against it. I'm sorry, Fish fans. I don't think San
Speaker 1: Franciscan's like music like Fish or anything music. There's no
Speaker 1: great music traditions here, are there, Journey hue Lewis. That's
Speaker 1: basically that's what I understand. I don't think anything in
Speaker 1: the six guys should be very proud of yourselves just
Speaker 1: for having Huey Lewis and Journey. Forget the news jes
Speaker 1: Huey Lewis alone. I thought that was imply And his wiener.
Speaker 1: You know, he showed his wiener in the movie Ones.
Speaker 1: It's true, Robert Altman shortcuts Huey Lewis shows his wiener.
Speaker 1: Am I having a nightmare right now, Josh, wake up?
Speaker 1: But you're in the castro. It's all good, Okay, We're
Speaker 1: talking about Cocoa. The gorilla so of course anthropomorphism. Geez,
Speaker 1: that was a weird sidetrack. Uh, we're all guilty of it.
Speaker 1: You know what that is, that's putting human characteristics on animals.
Speaker 1: That's when you go home and um, you see your
Speaker 1: dog or your cat, and you think you know what
Speaker 1: they're feeling, and you think they have these inner lives
Speaker 1: and these emotions. I believe that they do. Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I don't care. That's what I believe.
Speaker 1: That's it's okay. So so yes, that's it uses common
Speaker 1: sense and intuition and you use your own eyes and
Speaker 1: your own empathy to see like, yes, my dog is
Speaker 1: sad right now, or no, my dog's very happy right now.
Speaker 1: You can see. It's just common sense. But if you're
Speaker 1: a skeptic, if you're a scientist, a rationalist, I'm not,
Speaker 1: you impound your fists and say no, science has never
Speaker 1: shown that animals have any kind of inner subjective life
Speaker 1: like humans too. You are just projecting that onto your stupid,
Speaker 1: stupid faced talk. That's right, because because anybody who thinks
Speaker 1: like that hates dogs. On the other side, there are
Speaker 1: people like me and scientists believe like like honestly, like
Speaker 1: we kind of believe that they do have these inner lives,
Speaker 1: and we will look at them and say, you're all
Speaker 1: blinded by the science, like Thomas Dolby, So what good
Speaker 1: are you? I'm on this side of the line in
Speaker 1: the sand a right. So anthropomorphism is where like belief
Speaker 1: and rationalism like clink teeth. Yeah, yes, it's pretty pretty
Speaker 1: good description if you ask me. And I think that's
Speaker 1: another good time for a break. Yeah, you guys think
Speaker 1: so too. Is it going well enough to release your thing? Okay,
Speaker 1: well then we have to add a second ad break
Speaker 1: just in case. So if you'll bear with us, we'll
Speaker 1: be right back. We're back everyone. So before we took
Speaker 1: our break, there are a bunch of mean science people
Speaker 1: saying your dogs and your gorillas are just dumb animals.
Speaker 1: And then there are people that have human hearts beating
Speaker 1: inside their body that say, no, you're blinded by science,
Speaker 1: like Thomas Tolby. That was a good recap, thank you.
Speaker 1: So for some people Penny Patterson included in other ape
Speaker 1: language researchers, they were like, you know, I don't think
Speaker 1: herb terrorists changing his mind about his data actually amounts
Speaker 1: to proof that that apes can't use language. I think
Speaker 1: we just haven't figured out how to demonstrate it sufficiently.
Speaker 1: So some people stayed in this field of research and
Speaker 1: risk being labeled cooks or rods or hucksters or deluded
Speaker 1: morons or what have you. Um, and they stayed in.
Speaker 1: But they were scientists still, and they wanted to stay scientific,
Speaker 1: so they had to jump through increasingly narrower hoops to
Speaker 1: prove that what they were doing was not actually them
Speaker 1: corrupting the study data. Basically, yeah, they couldn't just sit
Speaker 1: face to face and even risk their facial expressions giving
Speaker 1: something away. So there was a researcher named Sue Savage
Speaker 1: Rumball at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, and she
Speaker 1: would do her experiments wearing a welding mask. Uh. Good
Speaker 1: way to behinde your face. I guess she couldn't explain
Speaker 1: why her monkey kept signing flash dance over and over.
Speaker 1: She would wear a welling mask and then off the
Speaker 1: off the shoulder sweatshirt. Oh man, I just saw that
Speaker 1: last year for the first time. I've never seen it.
Speaker 1: It's fantastic. Hold up, what a feeling. It's amazing. That'll
Speaker 1: make sense to me. That so um, there was another
Speaker 1: thing that um that that that people were prompted of
Speaker 1: or accused of, which was prompting right like what Chuck
Speaker 1: was saying. Herb terrorists concluded that the researchers or the
Speaker 1: caregivers were kind of showing the sign right before the
Speaker 1: chimp used the sign prompting. And so to get around
Speaker 1: accusations of prompting your subjects uh, Sue Savage Rumba and
Speaker 1: her husband Dwayne realized that the oh yeah, another couple,
Speaker 1: this thing is allowsy with couple or run. So so
Speaker 1: the Rumbas they said, well, let's just not teach them
Speaker 1: sign language. Then then you can't possibly prompt them. And
Speaker 1: they developed something called a lexicon board, which is like
Speaker 1: a trifule board of a couple of hundred little boxes
Speaker 1: and each one has a symbol in it, and the
Speaker 1: symbol represents a word. And what they did was they
Speaker 1: taught their bonna bows how to use this to speak.
Speaker 1: So you press the word in the computer on the
Speaker 1: little litttle box says the word for you, and so
Speaker 1: they would kind of punch out word combinations, and you
Speaker 1: can't prompt a bonabo to do that. Um. And astoundingly
Speaker 1: they tried to teach one of their first subjects, Matada this,
Speaker 1: which I think means worries. I don't know, wouldn't it
Speaker 1: looked it up yet, but I think it would Anyway.
Speaker 1: Matada was pretty interesting because they tried to teach her
Speaker 1: this and she was like, mmmmmm, I am not picking
Speaker 1: this up. That's right. But it got really interesting because
Speaker 1: Matada had a son named Kanzi, and Kanzi could pick
Speaker 1: it up and he actually taught mom how to use this.
Speaker 1: So Bonabo's were exactly like human beings, children teaching their
Speaker 1: parents to technology. And this was after Matada got a
Speaker 1: CD rom at Staples called how to use a Lexicon board.
Speaker 1: She ordered it online. Actually right, and that I with
Speaker 1: the bald head but the ponytail. Don't forget the pony Oh.
Speaker 1: But but the thing is about Conzi. They never taught Conzi.
Speaker 1: He just happened to be present while they were trying
Speaker 1: to teach Matata and one day he just started using
Speaker 1: the alex com board and they just lost there. They
Speaker 1: were so excited he knew how to use a lexicon
Speaker 1: board to say come on mom. So Conzi is actually
Speaker 1: widely regarded as one of the most intelligent apes in
Speaker 1: any of the ape language experiments, um, which he demonstrated
Speaker 1: when he wrote the movie Pay It Forward. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure I get that one so bad it was written
Speaker 1: by an ape. You don't read it, just enjoy it
Speaker 1: on its face. It's a lot of good movie refs
Speaker 1: in this one. So uh, pay It Forward? That was
Speaker 1: the bad man right that say? Yeah, everyone, do you
Speaker 1: way to bring my joke down? Shut? Sorry the spaceman so,
Speaker 1: uh here where are we? I'm so lost? Now? Sorry? Um,
Speaker 1: they were, Uh, I'm genuinely lost. Do you want me
Speaker 1: to swoop carry? Cut all that out? Huh? Do you
Speaker 1: want me to swoop in? Well, since you put it
Speaker 1: that way, now, there was some other controversy in that,
Speaker 1: um they had, and not just Penny Patterson, but other
Speaker 1: people in this field had been accused of manipulating the
Speaker 1: public over the years and uh sort of doing things,
Speaker 1: especially when it comes to video, of kind of cooking
Speaker 1: the books a little bit. It's very easy with video. Obviously.
Speaker 1: There was one sort of famous one with Kanzi, the
Speaker 1: aforementioned Bonabo. There's a video of Kanzi putting together some
Speaker 1: sticks to light a fire and getting out a lighter
Speaker 1: cut two perfect drawing fire that kind of thing, or
Speaker 1: you don't know what happened in between those moments. No,
Speaker 1: but like you don't even notice it unless you're suspicious
Speaker 1: of ape language research already, because we're also trained to
Speaker 1: just overlook cuts and edits from all the movies and
Speaker 1: TV shows that we've seen, and that that actually isn't harmful.
Speaker 1: It doesn't doesn't really do anything wrong, but it opens up,
Speaker 1: like legitimate researchers like the Rum Boss to accusations of
Speaker 1: illegitimacy even though they're doing legitimate science. The fact that
Speaker 1: they're kind of um exaggerating potentially what their subjects are
Speaker 1: capable of in the mind of the public opens them
Speaker 1: up to accusations like that. Well, and even Dr Patterson
Speaker 1: would use words like, uh, Coco has mastered sign language
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, and we love Cocoa and Coco
Speaker 1: learned a lot, but Cocoa never mastered sign language. And
Speaker 1: when you use words like that, um, these sort of
Speaker 1: unscientific descriptions of what's really going on, it doesn't do
Speaker 1: anyone in the field any favors. It doesn't and it
Speaker 1: makes linguists go like, yeah, you have some crazy so uh.
Speaker 1: Today the scientific community. Um. Basically, this is kind of
Speaker 1: where we are now. Since the eighties, a lot of
Speaker 1: this research has dried up. UH. They don't really work
Speaker 1: with apes and gorillas to teach them sign language much anymore,
Speaker 1: partially because of this, partially because of the ethics of
Speaker 1: of taking apes and guerrillas and and putting them uh
Speaker 1: in human houses and making homes and things like that,
Speaker 1: making them dependent on humans, taking away from their family.
Speaker 1: We're in a different place now in the world where
Speaker 1: we don't do stuff like that as much, for sure, thankfully.
Speaker 1: But the scientific community does rightfully acknowledge that that ape
Speaker 1: language research has shown apes are capable of using sign language,
Speaker 1: of communicating on a human level with humans, which is
Speaker 1: just astounding. And we're still learning more and more, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that a little bit more. UM. Like
Speaker 1: it's produced some insights into the minds of apes that
Speaker 1: we did not have before. One of the things that
Speaker 1: was pointed to as why apes couldn't communicate couldn't actually
Speaker 1: use languages because they lacked a theory of mind. And
Speaker 1: theory of mind is like, I know, Chuck has different beliefs,
Speaker 1: um different views of the world, Like we're two different people.
Speaker 1: And they long thought that apes didn't have that. Well,
Speaker 1: in two thousand seventeen, somebody thought to give apes uh
Speaker 1: theory of mind tests that was developed for human infants,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, these tests started showing that no,
Speaker 1: actually they do have a theory of mind. And this
Speaker 1: was just a couple of years ago. So, um, the
Speaker 1: field is still kind of going and developing, and it's
Speaker 1: pretty exciting that people are still researching this kind of stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, what they've kind of moved more into now,
Speaker 1: which makes sense to me, is maybe we shouldn't try
Speaker 1: and teach uh guerrillas English, even in Sang language. Maybe
Speaker 1: we should just see how they communicate with each other,
Speaker 1: and maybe we can learn from that and see what
Speaker 1: guerilla languages all like teach ourselves their language, and that
Speaker 1: would give us kind of an insight into their worldview. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was also Yeah, there's also some uh we we
Speaker 1: can sidesteps some other controversies. The Gorilla Foundation was sued
Speaker 1: at one point not too long ago by a couple
Speaker 1: of uh former female scientists that worked for them, because
Speaker 1: remember the nipple thing. Uh, Coco had a nipple fetish.
Speaker 1: There's really no other way to say it than that
Speaker 1: someone just wooed that. Uh. If you look at the
Speaker 1: Robin Williams video, Coco is trying to get in that
Speaker 1: shirt and see his nipples. And uh. Dr Patterson would
Speaker 1: show Coco her nipples over the years, and then she
Speaker 1: would request other employees do the same, both male and female.
Speaker 1: And eventually some of those employees got uncomfortable with that. Uh,
Speaker 1: they took her to court and it was settled out
Speaker 1: of court. So we really don't know, you know, when
Speaker 1: things are settled out of court what the final result is.
Speaker 1: But um, that was one of the sort of controversies
Speaker 1: that they had encountered, the big nipple incident. Yes, we're serious.
Speaker 1: Have you listened to stuff you should before? Of course?
Speaker 1: For serious? Are they making all this out? Are they
Speaker 1: just riffing? This is amazing? Who are these guys? They're
Speaker 1: not funny to be comedians, but I don't think they're
Speaker 1: being truthful about their science. It was a really good
Speaker 1: impression of that person. Why am I here? Who are
Speaker 1: these people? So? Dr Patterson? Was that Jerry Seinfeld? Okay?
Speaker 1: Dr Patterson? Basically when that line was drawn in the
Speaker 1: sand on one side or the other, she said, you
Speaker 1: know what. Uh, this is my my guerrilla daughter and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to leave her. Uh. She kind of
Speaker 1: shunned the scientific community in large part she didn't do
Speaker 1: as many published papers. Those kind of dried up. Um,
Speaker 1: the official research still goes on or still went on
Speaker 1: for a while, and but it just wasn't like presented
Speaker 1: as science so much as she's like, screw that, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna do it on my own. Then yeah, she
Speaker 1: was like, I'm just gonna go directly to the public.
Speaker 1: The scientific community can rotten heell. Basically, so her outreach
Speaker 1: to the public and um, her kind of pushing Coco
Speaker 1: and just kind of sharing all things Coco that increased
Speaker 1: while her kind of scientific commitment went down a little bit.
Speaker 1: But there's this documentary in two four I think you
Speaker 1: mentioned before. It is Coco with a gorilla who talks
Speaker 1: and there is a colon in there, and then there's
Speaker 1: another colon called The Sad Story of ron Con in
Speaker 1: parentheses beneath it. But in a um, Penny Patterson talks
Speaker 1: about regrets and she said that her biggest regret is
Speaker 1: that Coco never had a baby. Uh, and Coco apparently
Speaker 1: wanted a baby. She used to tell Penny a lot
Speaker 1: that she wanted a baby, and Penny really wanted a
Speaker 1: baby for Coco. Um, but it didn't happen. Remember, they
Speaker 1: brought in Michael, and Michael was going to be a
Speaker 1: mate for Coco eventually. But what they didn't realize is
Speaker 1: that an incest taboo exist among guerrillas and that they
Speaker 1: raised them together from too young an age. And when
Speaker 1: they finally got around to suggesting that they mate, both
Speaker 1: Coco and Michael signed you it was not happening. It's
Speaker 1: not Uh. They brought in another gorilla name in Duma,
Speaker 1: to mate. Uh. They never produced a child either, so uh,
Speaker 1: I think in Duma went back to the Cincinnati Zoo
Speaker 1: and then, very sadly, and you probably all remember this,
Speaker 1: uh not too long ago. June nineteenth, two th eighteen,
Speaker 1: Coco passed away in her sleep at the age of
Speaker 1: forty six years old, and the world, or at least
Speaker 1: America for sure, mourned Cocoa's death in a big way.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. Um, and she touched the lives of
Speaker 1: people like that's just whether she knew the language or not.
Speaker 1: And we're pretty sure she was a very smart gorilla
Speaker 1: who did no sign language. But whether she did or not,
Speaker 1: that ambassadorship for Earth like really did have an effect,
Speaker 1: and not just for like everyday people who actually did
Speaker 1: care about the Earth more because they knew about cocoa
Speaker 1: and she kind of transformed their view of things, but
Speaker 1: also like scientists too. Um. There was a two thousand
Speaker 1: fourteen symposium of guerilla experts, like people who are experts
Speaker 1: in the grilla field, and they were asked at the symposium,
Speaker 1: you know who is here because they were inspired by Coco,
Speaker 1: Like who got into this because of Coco? And like
Speaker 1: half of the people in attendance raised their hand. So
Speaker 1: she really did have this major impact on the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, there is great, great value in that, to
Speaker 1: be sure. So there was a man named Charles Wesley Hume,
Speaker 1: British Man who founded the University's Federation for Animal Welfare,
Speaker 1: and he kind of laid the stakes on this kind
Speaker 1: of science out there pretty plainly, and he said this,
Speaker 1: if I assume the animals have subjective feelings of pain, fear, hunger,
Speaker 1: and the like, and if I'm mistaken in doing so,
Speaker 1: no harm will have been done. But if I assume
Speaker 1: the contrary, would in fact animals do have such feelings,
Speaker 1: then I opened the way to unlimited cruelties. Animals must
Speaker 1: have the benefit of the doubt, if indeed there be
Speaker 1: any doubt, right agreed, And so like what Coco lives
Speaker 1: on as is this kind of litmus test. Because until
Speaker 1: we can prove or disprove that that apes or any
Speaker 1: animal does or doesn't have a subjective inner experience, um experience,
Speaker 1: Did I get that? Then it's a matter of belief,
Speaker 1: like you can believe whichever way you want. And and
Speaker 1: Coco kind of pushes people to one side or the other.
Speaker 1: And when she died, um journalists around the world wrote
Speaker 1: headlines that use words like Coco the master of sign language, um,
Speaker 1: Coco the talking guerrilla, And a lot of skeptics came
Speaker 1: out and tried to correct things with their own articles,
Speaker 1: but they were like a drop in the ocean compared
Speaker 1: to all the other articles. And it seems like the
Speaker 1: world does want to believe that there is something more
Speaker 1: to animals than we, you know, can prove, and perhaps
Speaker 1: that ultimately is best. Let's Cocoa, Everybody Good? Double Stuff
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