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Speaker 1: Hey guys. Before I start a quick programming note, you'll

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Speaker 1: probably notice my audio quality is not as good as

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Speaker 1: it normally is. That is not because I decided to

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Speaker 1: record inside of a tin can. I don't exactly know

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Speaker 1: what happened. Some sort of computer grimlin I think switched

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Speaker 1: my audio inputs. So sorry about that, but I hope

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Speaker 1: you enjoy. Welcome to Creature, future production of iHeartRadio. I'm

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Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology

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Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and today on the show How to

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Speaker 1: Speak to Aliens, we talk about the way that biological

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Speaker 1: senses differ so vastly between humans, animals, and possibly aliens.

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Speaker 1: We use real life biology to talk about how an

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Speaker 1: alien encounter might actually go down and the infinitesimally small

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Speaker 1: chance that we ever I've been to intelligent life. Joining

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Speaker 1: me today is Prout of the show, particle physicist, host

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Speaker 1: of the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, and author

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Speaker 1: of the new book Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whitson, Welcome,

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Speaker 1: Thank you very much.

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Speaker 2: I am a particle physicist and I believe in science,

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Speaker 2: but I also irrationally believe we have more than an

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Speaker 2: infinitesimal chance to be visited by aliens?

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Speaker 1: How big of the chance out of out of like

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Speaker 1: one in five.

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Speaker 2: One in ten, I would say seventeen infinitesimals, not just

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Speaker 2: one infinitesimals.

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Speaker 1: Okay, all right, yeah, I mean that's a pretty decent chance.

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Speaker 1: I think. Yeah. I mean so in your new book,

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Speaker 1: you kind of talk about how you explore a lot

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Speaker 1: of philosophical questions about aliens, and then you involved both

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Speaker 1: like physics and also biology to talk about this how

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Speaker 1: it would be to try to essentially communicate with aliens essentially,

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Speaker 1: like you know, the whole thing and what was that

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Speaker 1: a rival when it turned out the aliens communicate with

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Speaker 1: coffee stains or something. But I find it a really

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Speaker 1: interesting topic because I think it makes us kind of

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Speaker 1: we get I think when we start to think about

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Speaker 1: like biology and human communication, we're so primed to think

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Speaker 1: about it in a very egocentric way because we're humans.

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Speaker 1: We have a human brain, we have human thoughts. It's

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Speaker 1: very hard to step outside of that. But when we're

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Speaker 1: forced to try to think about how it would go

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Speaker 1: down if we were actually talking to aliens, we have

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Speaker 1: to kind of step outside of that, and consider the

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Speaker 1: ways in which our experience is not objective reality but

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Speaker 1: filtered through all of our human meat.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, And nobody's more egotistical than physicists. Let me

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Speaker 2: tell you the personal experience. Because physicists tend to believe

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Speaker 2: that physics is sort of special among human sciences, like

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Speaker 2: biology that's awesome, but probably only of interest to things

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Speaker 2: on the Earth, and biology and alien planets probably vastly different.

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Speaker 2: But physics is supposed to be universal. Physics, Newton told us,

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Speaker 2: it doesn't just apply to apples. It also applies to

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Speaker 2: the heavens, which means it determines what happens on distant galaxies.

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Speaker 2: And they then take the next leap. And physicists mostly

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Speaker 2: assume that not only do our laws of physics apply

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Speaker 2: to denizens of distant galaxies, but those denizens would also

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Speaker 2: come up with the same laws, so that when the

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Speaker 2: aliens arrive, we can be like at the chalkboard, writing

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Speaker 2: e F equals MA within about ten minutes and use

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Speaker 2: physics to make a mental connection with the aliens. And

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Speaker 2: that would be wonderful if it were true. But I

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Speaker 2: feel like it's making the same mistake that physicists and

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Speaker 2: cosmologists have been making for centuries, which is putting us

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Speaker 2: at the center of the action, assuming that human physics

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Speaker 2: is the physics the way we assume that, like the

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Speaker 2: Earth is at the center of the universe because it

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Speaker 2: kind of looks like it and it's also quite flattering.

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Speaker 2: So while I'd love to sit down across the table

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Speaker 2: and exchange coffee scenes with aliens to understand quantum gravity,

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Speaker 2: I think it might be much more difficult. And so, Yeah,

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Speaker 2: in this book, I try to pick apart some of

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Speaker 2: the assumptions that underlie the feeling that physics could be

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Speaker 2: used to communicate with aliens and we might be part

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Speaker 2: of a galactic intellectual community all solving the same problems,

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Speaker 2: and wonder if aliens might be much more alien than

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Speaker 2: we expect, right.

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Speaker 1: And I think part of that is that the way,

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Speaker 1: like the way we think is influenced by our biology.

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Speaker 1: We can't really escape that. We like to believe that

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Speaker 1: we can escape that, right that once we start to

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Speaker 1: get to these more and more complex intellectual exercises where

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Speaker 1: it's like, but these are like fundamental truths about the universe. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so we don't have the sense being filtered through you

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Speaker 1: know our brains, which are a biological organ that is,

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Speaker 1: you know, it has its own biases and are also

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Speaker 1: just everything that our brains are connected to our sensory

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Speaker 1: experience so humans, and we don't even have to really

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Speaker 1: look to aliens right to see that. Our specific experience

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Speaker 1: of humans is very particular to us. Like so we

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Speaker 1: have extremely developed eyes. We see in color, we see

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Speaker 1: a lot of detail, so we focus a lot on

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Speaker 1: visual cues. Our sense of hearing is good at close range.

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Speaker 1: It's not great once you get too far away. But

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Speaker 1: our communication style is very like close range in terms

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Speaker 1: of like communicating with each.

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Speaker 2: Other, unless you're trying to talk to a teenager who

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Speaker 2: has AirPods, in which case nothing you say, we'll get're

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Speaker 2: going to get through exactly that. They have the parental

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Speaker 2: cancelation software.

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Speaker 1: Nice, it's like it the it matches the pitch of

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Speaker 1: your tone, encounters it exactly, so it cancels out any

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Speaker 1: parent voice.

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Speaker 2: There's some AI in there that's learned exactly my voice

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Speaker 2: that it.

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Speaker 1: Can cancel it out exactly.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, but you're exactly right, you put your finger on it.

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Speaker 2: We look at the universe through a human lens, and

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Speaker 2: it's very unlikely that that lens is completely unbiased. You know,

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Speaker 2: if you're like looking inside some mystery box and you

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Speaker 2: only have a few ways to probe it, what are

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Speaker 2: the chances that you see the full information of what's

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Speaker 2: going on inside that box. And because we can only

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Speaker 2: probe the universe through our one lens, because we haven't

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Speaker 2: talked to aliens, and so far we haven't cracked the

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Speaker 2: language of dolphins or whales or anybody else, we don't

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Speaker 2: know how much of the lens is influenced what we

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Speaker 2: see and what we understand. And I think you're absolutely

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Speaker 2: right that our perceptions shape our sense of reality. Like

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Speaker 2: we have a we have a limited set of senses,

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Speaker 2: and we can dig into into them in a minute.

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Speaker 2: But we've also extended those senses, right, we have new

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Speaker 2: technological senses. We can see in the infrared and the

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Speaker 2: ultraviolet and detect gravitational waves due to technology. But that

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Speaker 2: doesn't change our experience of the universe, because what we

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Speaker 2: tend to do is translate those new signals into the

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Speaker 2: old into the old basis. You know, we take infrared

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Speaker 2: and we don't look at them in the infrared. We

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Speaker 2: translate them to the visuals. So we can see them.

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Speaker 2: We convert gravitational waves to sound so we can hear them.

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Speaker 2: And I think it's not just the senses that we have,

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Speaker 2: but like what it's like to be a human, the

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Speaker 2: experience of the sensorium, which is where the philosophy comes in,

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Speaker 2: that could be very different from humans to octopy to aliens,

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Speaker 2: and it could really change, like how you interpret what

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Speaker 2: you're seeing and the framework you build to explain it.

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Speaker 1: One of the examples that I really like is that

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Speaker 1: when we look at math, right, because math seems very objective, Like,

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Speaker 1: how can we be biased about math one plus one two?

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Speaker 1: That's just true.

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Speaker 2: Towered right in his biology one times one equals too.

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Speaker 2: Maybe you could be.

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Speaker 1: An alien, but it's like if you look at your hands,

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Speaker 1: you have ten fingers, and it's generally understood that we

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Speaker 1: we think in base ten because we've got ten fingers,

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Speaker 1: and we can we use our fingers for counting because they,

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Speaker 1: I mean, they're called digits, and.

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Speaker 2: That anybody, anybody's ever had a digital proctal exam knows

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Speaker 2: what it's called the digital exam.

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Speaker 1: There's different kinds of digital. It turns out exactly really

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Speaker 1: high tech exams exactly yeah, exactly, so so we have

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Speaker 1: we we our mouth is in base ten, we think

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Speaker 1: in base ten. We think like and I don't. It's

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Speaker 1: really hard to wrap your head around if we had

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Speaker 1: perhaps tentacles, or a different number of fingers, or a

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Speaker 1: different way of counting, like instead of counting fingers, we

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Speaker 1: had a certain pattern of like speckles on our bodies

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Speaker 1: that we can change with chromatophores. Right, if we're an alien,

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Speaker 1: that our entire mathematical system might be different, not necessarily,

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Speaker 1: you know, contradictory to a base ten mathematical system. But

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Speaker 1: if you had, like say base five or base two,

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Speaker 1: and you're trying to do sort of like math problems,

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Speaker 1: then one plus one does not necessarily equal to anymore,

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Speaker 1: even though technically it still does. But the way of

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Speaker 1: thinking about it and communicating it is different because of

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Speaker 1: just a simple thing of like, how many of these

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Speaker 1: little weird flanges do you have?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know if you watched the show Alien Earth,

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Speaker 2: but there's a scene where they tap out a few

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Speaker 2: digits a pie and then the alien taps out the

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Speaker 2: next few digits and they're like, whoa mind blow? But

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Speaker 2: of course you know that's in base head, and so

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Speaker 2: it's it's a little silly, but I'd love the show anyway.

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Speaker 2: But you're exactly right. The bases are are a very

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Speaker 2: simple way that we could be doing math differently from aliens,

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Speaker 2: and even in human cultures. We don't all use base ten,

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Speaker 2: like the Mayans use base sixty. Right, our computers use

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Speaker 2: base two. But even beyond mine, you're the biologist, I

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Speaker 2: don't know about that. I can't sign on to that.

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Speaker 2: But even beyond that, like the question does one plus

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Speaker 2: one equals two? Does it have to equal to everywhere

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Speaker 2: in the universe? Sounds insane, right, But once you start

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Speaker 2: digging into it, you discover that these things you assume

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Speaker 2: have to be true everywhere. I actually rest on kind

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Speaker 2: of fuzzy philosophical principles, like let's think about what it

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Speaker 2: means for one plus one equals to make a concrete Like,

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Speaker 2: say you have two apples on the table, right, you know,

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Speaker 2: one apple plus one apple. That's two apples, obviously, but

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Speaker 2: those two apples are not the same. One is bigger,

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Speaker 2: one is smaller, one is darker, one is lighter. Why

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Speaker 2: have you decided to group them together into this thing

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Speaker 2: you call apples? Right?

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Speaker 1: Right?

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Speaker 2: An alien might be like, I don't know what you're

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Speaker 2: talking about. That's this apple plus of that apple? What

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Speaker 2: is this tube business? The concept of two assumes some groups,

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Speaker 2: some set where you've decided what goes in it and

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Speaker 2: what goes out of it. Or even if you don't

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Speaker 2: have apples, what about you know, I'm one person, you're

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Speaker 2: another person. I can argue I'm different from you. There's

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Speaker 2: like a boundary between me and you, or a boundary

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Speaker 2: between me and the universe. Where is that boundary exactly? Biologically?

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Speaker 2: You know? If I cut off my arm, is my

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Speaker 2: arm still part of me? These are fuzzy philosophical questions,

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Speaker 2: not hard and fast, and it's not hard to imagine

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Speaker 2: aliens that like exist in the atmosphere of stars and

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Speaker 2: their plasma tendrils merge all the time, and for them,

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Speaker 2: they might be like, why are you guys drawing these

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Speaker 2: weird dotted lines between yourselves? We're all just part of

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Speaker 2: the same flow, dude.

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Speaker 1: Right, And so you could have like saying like one

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Speaker 1: plus one equals two to an alien would be like

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Speaker 1: maybe to us saying like, you know, one plus red

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Speaker 1: equal Tuesday Tuesday exactly, like where it's like, what are

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Speaker 1: you what are you talking about? But yeah, there's a

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Speaker 1: lot of like things, like especially when it comes to physics,

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Speaker 1: where when we look into how we view just fundamental

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Speaker 1: concepts like time, it comes down to weird physiological quirks.

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Speaker 1: So our sense of time is often related to distance.

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Speaker 1: So when we when we look at a timeline, for instance, right,

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Speaker 1: we have a sense of going forwards in times or

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Speaker 1: backwards in time. Right, it's this very a lot of

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Speaker 1: words that we use to describe time are shared with distance, right,

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Speaker 1: Like we have kind of this time is viewed as

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Speaker 1: a linear progression but also kind of almost like like

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Speaker 1: a line that you're walking on. Right. Uh, you look

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Speaker 1: at illustrations of the evolution of man. He's like lined

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Speaker 1: up in a line from from little fish thing to

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Speaker 1: like upright, businessman. Here's the progress through time represented in

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Speaker 1: this line, measured by distance. And we've actually found that

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Speaker 1: when we do experiments where you have people in a

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Speaker 1: study setting where they are measuring lengths both geometrically and temporally,

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Speaker 1: they easily get confused. So like if you have a

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Speaker 1: line on a screen, it's like either a short line

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Speaker 1: or a long line, and then you have people say

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Speaker 1: short or long. But you also have another condition, which

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Speaker 1: is the length of time that it's on the screen,

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Speaker 1: either a shorter amount of time or a longer amount

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Speaker 1: of time. Interesting, and then when you start to mix

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Speaker 1: the signals, like you're trying to do both tasks at once,

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Speaker 1: and you get contradictory things like a long line that's

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Speaker 1: on screen for a short period of time or vice versa,

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Speaker 1: people make more mistakes. And the fun thing is pigeons

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Speaker 1: make the same mistakes.

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Speaker 3: So we've done this both the human beings into pigeons,

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Speaker 3: and we've found pigeons also mess this up. So other

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Speaker 3: animals also, like primates, will make similar mistakes. So a

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Speaker 3: lot of animals will have this connection between distance and time.

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Speaker 3: And is that because objectively speaking, somehow pigeons understand the

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Speaker 3: physics of the universe and that time is something like distance,

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Speaker 3: or is it because being able to use time and

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Speaker 3: distance together helps them triangulate food sources that they use

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Speaker 3: by that they're able to find using an internal biological clock,

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Speaker 3: as well as signals from the sun that they triangulate

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Speaker 3: with an understanding of distance to be able to understand that, hey,

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Speaker 3: I can go to this place.

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Speaker 1: At this time and get food, which is another thing

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Speaker 1: that has been confirmed by research. I had to list

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Speaker 1: it right in with a question once about like how

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Speaker 1: does this pigeon know always how to find me? Because

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Speaker 1: I come at a very specific time to give out

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Speaker 1: some peanuts and this pigeon always knows how to find

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Speaker 1: me and when to come. And it's because of this,

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Speaker 1: this sort of ability to triangulate this internal clock as

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Speaker 1: well as distance, position of the sun, and then it

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Speaker 1: is a huge motivator to be able to triangulate food.

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Speaker 2: So did you interview that pigeon. We couldn't get our

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Speaker 2: schedules to the line up for some reason, wouldn't sign

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Speaker 2: the release for him.

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Speaker 1: But it's a really interesting idea that this are the

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Speaker 1: whole way we view time right like generally speaking, where

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Speaker 1: we kind of view it almost like this like track

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Speaker 1: that you're running along, you're going forward in time. We

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Speaker 1: fantasize about being able to travel backwards in time again

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Speaker 1: like a distance related thing. And this could be an

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Speaker 1: artifact of the just simple need to be able to

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Speaker 1: use time in order to locate food sources, because we're

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Speaker 1: animals and we need to eat and we need to

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Speaker 1: find things, and we know that sometimes like in order

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Speaker 1: to locate a certain food or do a certain survival thing,

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Speaker 1: we need to be able to triangulate both distance and

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Speaker 1: time to be in a certain location at a certain time.

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Speaker 1: And we link those concepts very closely. So then when

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Speaker 1: it comes to physics and we start to you know,

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Speaker 1: get into some really weird things, that is really hard.

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Speaker 1: I mean even understanding this about like you know, being

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Speaker 1: human and maybe viewing time in this biased way, I

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Speaker 1: still can't wrap my head around a lot of physics

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Speaker 1: concepts because when you start talking about weird things with time,

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Speaker 1: it's really hard for me to kind of get off

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Speaker 1: of this like mental track of like I'm like walking

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Speaker 1: down this road called time and that is where I am,

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Speaker 1: and that's how I travel through time, and that's what

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Speaker 1: it is. And then when physics starts introducing these other

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Speaker 1: concepts relating to times, it's like very hard to get

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Speaker 1: out of that sort of like rigid way of viewing it.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and we experienced time over a certain set of scales, right,

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Speaker 2: Like we can think about time in terms of a second,

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Speaker 2: a year, maybe a decade. Really long time scales are

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Speaker 2: hard for us to grock. You know, theories like the

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Speaker 2: tectonic plates and glaciers initially were dismissed because they require

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Speaker 2: things to happen over such long time periods. They seemed absurd,

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Speaker 2: and we know that there's lots of physics that happens

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Speaker 2: over millions or billions of years, Like the Solar system,

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Speaker 2: if you look at it over a few years, seems

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Speaker 2: pretty steady. If you look at it over billions of years,

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Speaker 2: it's a chaotic mess, with planets moving in and out

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Speaker 2: and being tossed out. And probably there were other planets

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Speaker 2: in our Solar system which we've now a banded or

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Speaker 2: the universe looks very, very different on short time scales.

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Speaker 2: You know, you zoom in and you try to understand

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Speaker 2: the universe and like the microphysics and the interactions of particles,

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Speaker 2: and it looks vastly different from the way we do.

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Speaker 2: So if aliens, for example, live on really long time scales,

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Speaker 2: dark matter beings that take like a thousand years to

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Speaker 2: think a thought, or quantum mechanical beings that you know,

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Speaker 2: buzz here and there and pop in and out of

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Speaker 2: existence on microscopic time scales, it could be very hard

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Speaker 2: to communicate with them about these concepts of the universe,

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Speaker 2: because our notion of time really does determine how we

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Speaker 2: think about the universe and the kinds of physics that

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Speaker 2: we're just sort of capable of digesting, even though we

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Speaker 2: have you know, Einstein, who helped us understand the connection

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Speaker 2: between space and time that apparently pigeons intuitively know, right,

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Speaker 2: I mean I heard of pigeon English, but maybe this

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Speaker 2: pigeon Einstein.

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Speaker 1: Also pigeon Einstein knows where to get all the best breadcrumbs.

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Speaker 1: Relatively yeah, yeah, relatively speaking, But it is really interesting.

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Speaker 1: I mean, there's even on Earth, like you don't even

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Speaker 1: necessarily have to find an alien. Like the flicker frame rate,

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Speaker 1: which is like our brain's processing ability of basically our

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Speaker 1: eye sort of refresh rate, to put it in very

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Speaker 1: simple terms, is different depending on what animal you are.

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Speaker 1: So if you've ever wondered, like I want to, like

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Speaker 1: like when you have an annoying fly and you're trying

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Speaker 1: to swat it and it seems to live in bullet

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Speaker 1: time like Neo and be able to like sense when

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Speaker 1: your hand is coming down no matter how fast you are,

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Speaker 1: it's because it is it has the ability to actually

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Speaker 1: experience things very slowly, and so it is like it's

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Speaker 1: these The ability for it to escape you is because

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Speaker 1: like to it like your hand is coming down just

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Speaker 1: sort of gradually and it's like easy, peasy, I can

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Speaker 1: get away from that real fast.

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Speaker 2: And because we have selected four flies that survive our swaters, right,

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Speaker 2: every time you swatter fly, you're making the average fly faster.

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Speaker 2: Every time you kill a mosquito, you're selecting for more deadly,

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Speaker 2: more evasive mosquito. So thanks everybody.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, fly swater resistant bugs. They're going to

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Speaker 1: start to develop little helmets all because of us. But yeah,

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Speaker 1: before we move on to kind of talking more about

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Speaker 1: animals instead of well, people are animals, but you know,

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Speaker 1: cooler animals. One of the interesting things is that I

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Speaker 1: think when we look at like how we communicate, right,

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Speaker 1: and one of the ideas is that, well, like with

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Speaker 1: our human language, that basically shapes entirely how we think.

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Speaker 1: So we would never we could never pass think like

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Speaker 1: an alien because we have human language, which is a

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Speaker 1: specific thing, specific style of communication that completely shapes how

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Speaker 1: we think. Like we wouldn't think the way we do,

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Speaker 1: maybe we wouldn't even think at all if we didn't

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Speaker 1: have language. And there's actually been some research into that.

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Speaker 1: And it's not to say that language does not influence thought,

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Speaker 1: because it certainly does, but thinking and language right are

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Speaker 1: actually not completely dependent on each other, which is weird.

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Speaker 1: So ah, there were researchers at MIT and UC Berkeley

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Speaker 1: who used fMRIs to look at parts of the brain

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Speaker 1: that were active when people were doing tasks like anything

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Speaker 1: from reading to doing a saduco puzzle. I mean, for me,

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Speaker 1: they would find no brain activity because I'm really bad

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Speaker 1: at those. But in general, what they found is that

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Speaker 1: the language areas of the brain were not going off

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Speaker 1: all the time as they were thinking through these processes,

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Speaker 1: So it wasn't as we may have this experience of

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Speaker 1: like when you're sitting and you're kind of like thinking,

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Speaker 1: sometimes you have an internal narration where you hear you're

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Speaker 1: almost having a conversation with yourself in your head, where

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Speaker 1: you hear your own voice, you hear your own thoughts.

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Speaker 1: Not everyone actually has that, Like, not everyone experiences that.

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Speaker 1: There's variation in human thought, which we take for granted

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Speaker 1: we're all thinking the same, but there are people who

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Speaker 1: have a fantasia where they don't think in images, and

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Speaker 1: people who think almost entirely in images and don't have

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Speaker 1: a lot of that internal narration. So there's a lot

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Speaker 1: of variability even among people, even within the same language.

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Speaker 1: But generally speaking, we can think without language. People who

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Speaker 1: suffer a stroke, who actually have brain damage in the

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Speaker 1: region's responsible for producing an understanding language, and who can't

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Speaker 1: do either, can still sometimes do things like math problems,

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Speaker 1: play music so or even make future plans. So our

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Speaker 1: ability to think is not that it's completely independent from language.

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Speaker 1: These are parallel processes that influence each other but are

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Speaker 1: not completely integrated with one another. So we can think

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Speaker 1: without necessarily using our language center and as you probably

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Speaker 1: know listening to other people and politicians, you can also

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Speaker 1: use your language without thinking very much. People can talk

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Speaker 1: without necessarily being conscious or thinking about what they're saying.

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Speaker 1: That's not even just a joke like people can use.

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Speaker 1: There can be like sort of weird situations in which

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Speaker 1: someone is not actually conscious but is like talking and

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Speaker 1: not necessarily thinking, but is using language. So in this sense,

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Speaker 1: I think it's kind of maybe a little optimistic, because

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Speaker 1: even if we have a huge language barrier with another

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Speaker 1: alien and maybe they don't even have a language, they're

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Speaker 1: still potentially thinking, and we might share a lot of

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Speaker 1: a lot of ways in which we think. Of course

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Speaker 1: it's going to be different, but there's still there's still

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Speaker 1: thinking going on that maybe we're sharing. That might be

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Speaker 1: really hard to bridge that gap, but it still exist.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you that language captures some of

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Speaker 2: what we're thinking, but it isn't the same thing, because

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Speaker 2: when you go from the ideas in your head to language,

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Speaker 2: you're making this arbitrary translation to like these from these

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Speaker 2: ideas to these symbols. And we've just like agreed on

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Speaker 2: these symbols and what they mean so that when you

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Speaker 2: hear them, they create in your mind the same ideas

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Speaker 2: that I was trying to convey. But in order for

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Speaker 2: that to work, you have to know what that mapping

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Speaker 2: is from the ideas to the symbols. So you can

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Speaker 2: invert it, right, you can back it out and say

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Speaker 2: when Katie says pigeon, I know what that means. I

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Speaker 2: have this idea of a pigeon. It's connected to this

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Speaker 2: word pigeon, which I either hear or I see. And

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Speaker 2: the issue with that is that the mapping is arbitrary. Right,

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Speaker 2: there's no symbol which can only be mapped to one idea,

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Speaker 2: and there's no mapping, which like, well, how you have

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Speaker 2: to choose this symbol for this idea, which means if

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Speaker 2: you see a bunch of symbols, you have no idea

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Speaker 2: what ideas they might map to. And this is evidenced

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Speaker 2: by like our attempts to you know, decode whale song

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Speaker 2: or dolphins, or even languages from extinct human civilizations. These

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Speaker 2: are like equivalent biological humans with ideas probably very similar

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Speaker 2: to our own, but we just don't know how to

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Speaker 2: crack their ancient languages because it's an arbitrary mapping between

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Speaker 2: the ideas and the symbols. And you know, we've done

435
00:25:57,119 --> 00:25:59,280
Speaker 2: it in some cases, like for the Egyptians, but that

436
00:25:59,440 --> 00:26:02,600
Speaker 2: only with a cheat sheet of the Rosetta Stone, plus

437
00:26:02,960 --> 00:26:05,960
Speaker 2: a lot of cultural context and clues and going down

438
00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:09,600
Speaker 2: the wrong path for like sometimes twenty years. So we

439
00:26:09,640 --> 00:26:13,240
Speaker 2: should be really skeptical that we'll ever have a chance

440
00:26:13,320 --> 00:26:16,480
Speaker 2: to decode alien languages. I mean, I'm a big fan

441
00:26:16,520 --> 00:26:18,560
Speaker 2: of Seti, for example, and I think they should do it.

442
00:26:18,600 --> 00:26:21,879
Speaker 2: And Jill Titar is fantastic and none of this is

443
00:26:21,920 --> 00:26:24,120
Speaker 2: news to her, but the idea that we could get

444
00:26:24,119 --> 00:26:28,000
Speaker 2: a message from space, understand, recognize that it's an alien message,

445
00:26:28,000 --> 00:26:33,200
Speaker 2: and then somehow decode it into concepts is almost fantastical

446
00:26:33,520 --> 00:26:36,480
Speaker 2: without an alien there to interact with and to interrogate

447
00:26:36,560 --> 00:26:39,960
Speaker 2: and like point it stuff and say donut, pigeon, apple

448
00:26:40,400 --> 00:26:42,720
Speaker 2: or whatever. So I think that task is going to

449
00:26:42,800 --> 00:26:45,600
Speaker 2: be really, really hard, and that's why some people are like, oh,

450
00:26:45,640 --> 00:26:48,440
Speaker 2: you should begin with math. But even math has symbols, right,

451
00:26:48,560 --> 00:26:51,639
Speaker 2: representing one and two or pi or whatever. There's always

452
00:26:51,680 --> 00:26:54,159
Speaker 2: a symbol there, and that's always arbitrary. And if you

453
00:26:54,200 --> 00:26:57,840
Speaker 2: look at what physicists have done already trying to communicate

454
00:26:57,880 --> 00:27:01,800
Speaker 2: with aliens, it's you know, it's earnest and it's well intentioned,

455
00:27:01,920 --> 00:27:03,520
Speaker 2: and it's a great effort, and I don't have a

456
00:27:03,520 --> 00:27:06,119
Speaker 2: better idea, but it's also kind of hopeless. You know.

457
00:27:06,119 --> 00:27:10,280
Speaker 2: There's a guy who literally drew, literally scraped out canals

458
00:27:10,320 --> 00:27:13,440
Speaker 2: in the desert, filled them with kerosene, and lit them

459
00:27:13,440 --> 00:27:16,920
Speaker 2: on fire from and wrote mathematical equations in the Sahara,

460
00:27:17,000 --> 00:27:19,040
Speaker 2: hoping the Martians would read them and be like, oh,

461
00:27:19,080 --> 00:27:20,440
Speaker 2: there's intelligent life on Earth.

462
00:27:21,840 --> 00:27:24,400
Speaker 1: They're probably like, my god, they're burning their own planet.

463
00:27:24,760 --> 00:27:28,760
Speaker 1: It's very unintelligent life on Earth. Well, we're going to

464
00:27:28,840 --> 00:27:30,840
Speaker 1: take a quick break. When we get back, I will

465
00:27:30,840 --> 00:27:33,879
Speaker 1: talk about some of the unique ways that animals sense

466
00:27:33,960 --> 00:27:38,000
Speaker 1: the world that shapes their intelligence and their social lives

467
00:27:38,119 --> 00:27:41,880
Speaker 1: as a way to kind of perhaps conceptualize how this

468
00:27:41,960 --> 00:27:47,159
Speaker 1: might work for aliens. So we've mostly talked about the

469
00:27:47,520 --> 00:27:55,439
Speaker 1: human sensory experience, but the animal senses. I talk a

470
00:27:55,440 --> 00:27:58,280
Speaker 1: lot about like our similarities with animals on the show,

471
00:27:58,400 --> 00:28:01,600
Speaker 1: but also I highlight very different like in terms of

472
00:28:02,400 --> 00:28:07,400
Speaker 1: a lot of fundamental things in their There a lot

473
00:28:07,440 --> 00:28:13,240
Speaker 1: of times it comes down to their sensory experience. So like,

474
00:28:13,359 --> 00:28:17,280
Speaker 1: for instance, your dog, who we relate really well with dogs.

475
00:28:17,280 --> 00:28:20,240
Speaker 1: We've co evolved to the point where we communicate really well.

476
00:28:20,240 --> 00:28:22,919
Speaker 1: I'm sure we don't speak the exact same language, but

477
00:28:22,920 --> 00:28:27,040
Speaker 1: it's actually really remarkable how well we communicate with dogs

478
00:28:27,080 --> 00:28:27,960
Speaker 1: and vice versa.

479
00:28:28,400 --> 00:28:30,600
Speaker 2: You can tell when a dog is happy or sad.

480
00:28:30,760 --> 00:28:33,639
Speaker 2: What you can you feel, you emotionally feel their experience. Ye,

481
00:28:33,680 --> 00:28:35,200
Speaker 2: it's amazing that happens.

482
00:28:34,920 --> 00:28:37,399
Speaker 1: Exactly even though they don't smile in the way that

483
00:28:37,440 --> 00:28:41,160
Speaker 1: we do. They don't laugh, but we can. You know,

484
00:28:41,360 --> 00:28:46,280
Speaker 1: we have learned how to understand their body language, their

485
00:28:46,360 --> 00:28:49,160
Speaker 1: gestures and to the point where you know, we were like, yeah,

486
00:28:49,160 --> 00:28:51,120
Speaker 1: we get when a dog is happy, when a dog

487
00:28:51,160 --> 00:28:56,120
Speaker 1: is upset, But dogs also have this huge experience that

488
00:28:56,240 --> 00:28:59,080
Speaker 1: is just beyond us, which is their sense of smell,

489
00:28:59,160 --> 00:29:03,200
Speaker 1: which is incredible. Uh. And so often you'll take your

490
00:29:03,200 --> 00:29:06,040
Speaker 1: dog to a park and it's just like smelling everything,

491
00:29:06,080 --> 00:29:09,680
Speaker 1: and you're like, this is super boring. I don't you

492
00:29:09,720 --> 00:29:11,400
Speaker 1: want to run around, I don't want to play fetch,

493
00:29:11,440 --> 00:29:13,720
Speaker 1: And all the dog wants to do is smell some

494
00:29:13,840 --> 00:29:17,240
Speaker 1: gross little patch of unidentified liquid on the ground. And

495
00:29:17,440 --> 00:29:19,960
Speaker 1: it's you know, to the owner, it's like, I don't

496
00:29:20,000 --> 00:29:21,640
Speaker 1: understand why you don't want to play, why you don't

497
00:29:21,680 --> 00:29:24,040
Speaker 1: want to exercise, You're just doing all this boring smelling.

498
00:29:24,240 --> 00:29:26,280
Speaker 1: But to the dog, it's like going to an art

499
00:29:26,360 --> 00:29:31,360
Speaker 1: gallery of just like so many interesting smells. It's like, uh,

500
00:29:31,840 --> 00:29:35,200
Speaker 1: or scrolling through Facebook, right, because it's like I'm smelling

501
00:29:35,200 --> 00:29:38,040
Speaker 1: the pee of another dog. This is a female, she's

502
00:29:39,120 --> 00:29:44,080
Speaker 1: reproductively active. But also this is from two days ago,

503
00:29:44,280 --> 00:29:49,400
Speaker 1: so tough luck for me. And so yeah, so it's

504
00:29:49,520 --> 00:29:51,720
Speaker 1: so they get all this information, and to us, it's

505
00:29:51,760 --> 00:29:54,160
Speaker 1: just this kind of like locked world because we don't

506
00:29:54,280 --> 00:29:59,479
Speaker 1: have that experience of smells and it really influences dog's

507
00:29:59,480 --> 00:30:03,600
Speaker 1: social ba behavior. That's why they're so obsessed with smelling everything.

508
00:30:03,920 --> 00:30:07,120
Speaker 1: They are probably seeing us staring at our TVs with

509
00:30:07,240 --> 00:30:10,440
Speaker 1: like kind of some moving lights and stuff to that.

510
00:30:10,480 --> 00:30:13,000
Speaker 1: To them, it's like, I guess that's okay, but I

511
00:30:13,040 --> 00:30:16,040
Speaker 1: don't know why they're so fascinated by that. That seems

512
00:30:16,080 --> 00:30:19,200
Speaker 1: really boring because like for a dog, their eyesight is

513
00:30:19,240 --> 00:30:22,560
Speaker 1: not really as powerful as their sense of smell, where

514
00:30:22,600 --> 00:30:26,000
Speaker 1: they just have such an incredible minute ability to smell.

515
00:30:26,040 --> 00:30:28,280
Speaker 1: For them, going to a park smelling all the smells

516
00:30:28,280 --> 00:30:31,240
Speaker 1: is probably as fun as reading a book or watching

517
00:30:31,280 --> 00:30:32,920
Speaker 1: a TV show exactly.

518
00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:36,440
Speaker 2: And there's two components of that. There's the biological senses, right,

519
00:30:36,560 --> 00:30:39,440
Speaker 2: like their nose is complicated, it's got these different receptors,

520
00:30:39,720 --> 00:30:41,480
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera. But then there's like what is

521
00:30:41,520 --> 00:30:43,959
Speaker 2: it like to be that dog? Like how does your

522
00:30:43,960 --> 00:30:46,800
Speaker 2: brain their brain interpret it? What are the quality of

523
00:30:46,800 --> 00:30:49,640
Speaker 2: as philosophers would say, of that senses and what is

524
00:30:49,640 --> 00:30:52,200
Speaker 2: it What kind of mental model of the universe are

525
00:30:52,200 --> 00:30:55,480
Speaker 2: they building if it's built on sense? Right, as you say,

526
00:30:55,520 --> 00:30:58,280
Speaker 2: we're so visually cute that we were trying to imagine

527
00:30:58,320 --> 00:31:01,040
Speaker 2: a dog's world, I immediately art with like a mental

528
00:31:01,080 --> 00:31:03,240
Speaker 2: map of the room, but like, I don't even know

529
00:31:03,280 --> 00:31:05,560
Speaker 2: if that's like dogs put that in a sort of

530
00:31:05,600 --> 00:31:07,960
Speaker 2: space and time in their heads the same way we do.

531
00:31:08,720 --> 00:31:11,160
Speaker 1: Yeah, they could have, like they could think and smells,

532
00:31:11,200 --> 00:31:13,360
Speaker 1: which is very weird for us because our sense of

533
00:31:13,440 --> 00:31:16,760
Speaker 1: smell is not great. It's good enough to be able

534
00:31:16,760 --> 00:31:20,000
Speaker 1: to smell something good sometimes. I mean, I guess the

535
00:31:20,040 --> 00:31:22,680
Speaker 1: closest we could get is sometimes you have like a

536
00:31:22,720 --> 00:31:28,160
Speaker 1: smell dependent memory, like maybe peppermint makes you think of winter,

537
00:31:28,320 --> 00:31:31,920
Speaker 1: maybe pumpkin spice makes you think of fall, right, like,

538
00:31:31,960 --> 00:31:36,440
Speaker 1: so we do have some ability to map smells to emotions,

539
00:31:36,480 --> 00:31:40,000
Speaker 1: to thoughts and feelings. But you know, if our smell

540
00:31:40,120 --> 00:31:42,560
Speaker 1: is like, you know, a hundred times more powerful in

541
00:31:42,600 --> 00:31:45,720
Speaker 1: the way that like dogs have this extremely powerful smell,

542
00:31:45,760 --> 00:31:49,080
Speaker 1: I think like we might think more in smells and odors.

543
00:31:49,080 --> 00:31:50,920
Speaker 1: So you're thinking, and you're having a memory of a

544
00:31:50,960 --> 00:31:54,160
Speaker 1: smell or maybe several smells, and that's kind of basically

545
00:31:54,160 --> 00:31:55,240
Speaker 1: a whole thought to you.

546
00:31:55,560 --> 00:31:58,840
Speaker 2: There's some dog podcast where the host is like smelling

547
00:31:58,920 --> 00:31:59,640
Speaker 2: is not thinking.

548
00:32:02,000 --> 00:32:04,680
Speaker 1: They'd have to do some kind of dog podcasts that's

549
00:32:04,720 --> 00:32:10,080
Speaker 1: in smellovision court to be fun for dogs. There's definite

550
00:32:10,160 --> 00:32:13,040
Speaker 1: impacts of the way that animals sense the world on

551
00:32:13,520 --> 00:32:17,200
Speaker 1: their social structures. So like, for instance, with bats, they

552
00:32:17,320 --> 00:32:23,720
Speaker 1: use echolocation, particularly insectivorous bats, because they need to hunt

553
00:32:23,760 --> 00:32:27,560
Speaker 1: down the insects, little fly insects usually, and so using echolocation,

554
00:32:27,720 --> 00:32:30,480
Speaker 1: they send out a sound that bounces off their environment,

555
00:32:30,520 --> 00:32:33,600
Speaker 1: comes back to them, gets captured those giant amazing ears.

556
00:32:34,120 --> 00:32:36,240
Speaker 1: That works a bit like SETI because it's just these

557
00:32:36,320 --> 00:32:41,320
Speaker 1: huge panels that take in all these sounds, and then

558
00:32:41,320 --> 00:32:44,280
Speaker 1: that's how they can like sort of be able to

559
00:32:44,520 --> 00:32:48,840
Speaker 1: find the movement of little moth or a mosquito. And

560
00:32:49,800 --> 00:32:55,760
Speaker 1: bats generally speaking are quite social actually, particularly smaller species

561
00:32:55,800 --> 00:32:59,680
Speaker 1: like insectiv wares. They live in these huge colonies. But

562
00:33:00,080 --> 00:33:03,440
Speaker 1: you'll notice they don't necessarily hunt in massive groups, and

563
00:33:03,480 --> 00:33:08,480
Speaker 1: they don't, which is actually because of a limitation of

564
00:33:08,680 --> 00:33:12,200
Speaker 1: their echolocation. When they're roosting, they're all together, they're having

565
00:33:12,200 --> 00:33:15,959
Speaker 1: a nice time, a lot of socializing and grooming. When

566
00:33:15,960 --> 00:33:19,720
Speaker 1: they're out hunting, they are usually in smaller groups, maybe

567
00:33:20,240 --> 00:33:23,440
Speaker 1: a handful of them, but certainly not a huge group

568
00:33:23,720 --> 00:33:27,840
Speaker 1: of them. All feeding like you actually see sometimes swifts,

569
00:33:27,880 --> 00:33:31,040
Speaker 1: which is a type of bird, and huge groups like

570
00:33:31,120 --> 00:33:37,040
Speaker 1: going around feeding all going bananas, having mosquitoes, and even

571
00:33:37,120 --> 00:33:40,920
Speaker 1: like spie little spiders that are floating in the air.

572
00:33:41,280 --> 00:33:43,840
Speaker 1: You don't see this with bats as much. They usually

573
00:33:44,440 --> 00:33:47,400
Speaker 1: try to fan out, and that's because there's interference if

574
00:33:47,400 --> 00:33:51,720
Speaker 1: there's too many bats in one area. Using echolocation, they

575
00:33:51,960 --> 00:33:54,840
Speaker 1: up to a certain point they actually get some benefit

576
00:33:54,960 --> 00:33:59,640
Speaker 1: from other bats echo locating near them. Interesting, they yeah,

577
00:33:59,720 --> 00:34:02,480
Speaker 1: so it's like because the feedback from the other bats

578
00:34:03,360 --> 00:34:07,000
Speaker 1: is letting them know the location of some insects, and

579
00:34:07,040 --> 00:34:09,879
Speaker 1: so up until a certain point, like a certain number

580
00:34:09,920 --> 00:34:13,720
Speaker 1: of bats, like they actually see a benefit they hunt

581
00:34:13,760 --> 00:34:16,680
Speaker 1: more efficiently. And then after that point, when it gets

582
00:34:16,719 --> 00:34:19,560
Speaker 1: too crowded and the bat density gets to be too much,

583
00:34:19,960 --> 00:34:23,880
Speaker 1: it falls off where they there's too much interference and

584
00:34:23,920 --> 00:34:29,719
Speaker 1: they don't hunt as well. So their entire system of

585
00:34:29,760 --> 00:34:35,839
Speaker 1: ecco location completely changes their little bat society, like it's

586
00:34:36,160 --> 00:34:39,200
Speaker 1: it limits how many of them can be cooperating and

587
00:34:39,280 --> 00:34:42,360
Speaker 1: hunting together at once. Whereas like you think of humans,

588
00:34:43,040 --> 00:34:47,399
Speaker 1: we have both verbal communication and visual communication. We're able

589
00:34:47,480 --> 00:34:50,160
Speaker 1: to plan, so we could get into we could get

590
00:34:50,160 --> 00:34:53,160
Speaker 1: together in a massive group and hunt together, like go

591
00:34:53,239 --> 00:34:55,920
Speaker 1: after some big prey and be hunting together and remain

592
00:34:56,320 --> 00:34:59,200
Speaker 1: relatively silent because we don't have to keep going like hey,

593
00:34:59,600 --> 00:35:03,480
Speaker 1: to be a to see where the the masdon we're

594
00:35:03,560 --> 00:35:07,319
Speaker 1: hunting is. So we you know, not that we did

595
00:35:07,360 --> 00:35:09,480
Speaker 1: too much of that, but you know, like when we're

596
00:35:09,520 --> 00:35:11,440
Speaker 1: when we're trying to hunt animals, we can be in

597
00:35:11,520 --> 00:35:15,319
Speaker 1: relatively large groups and work together. We can also plan,

598
00:35:15,400 --> 00:35:18,799
Speaker 1: we can communicate, so then that shapes human society. A

599
00:35:18,880 --> 00:35:25,000
Speaker 1: really weird example of communication is one of the strangest mammals,

600
00:35:25,000 --> 00:35:28,000
Speaker 1: which is the naked mole rat, which is one of

601
00:35:28,160 --> 00:35:35,600
Speaker 1: the only use social mammals in the world. There's uh there.

602
00:35:35,400 --> 00:35:39,799
Speaker 1: You've probably seen them. They're little weird looking, very weird looking,

603
00:35:39,840 --> 00:35:46,200
Speaker 1: a little scrotle. They're there. They have they're almost completely hairless.

604
00:35:46,200 --> 00:35:49,920
Speaker 1: They have a few sensory hairs, but they're pink and wrinkling,

605
00:35:50,080 --> 00:35:53,560
Speaker 1: kind of ugly or cute depending on your perspective. But

606
00:35:53,640 --> 00:35:57,560
Speaker 1: they live in these vast underground tunnels. Uh. And they're

607
00:35:57,680 --> 00:36:02,319
Speaker 1: use social, which means that they have defined roles, and

608
00:36:02,360 --> 00:36:06,240
Speaker 1: they have reproductive roles. So there is a reproductive queen

609
00:36:06,840 --> 00:36:12,200
Speaker 1: and all of the other females don't reproduce. And it's

610
00:36:12,320 --> 00:36:16,120
Speaker 1: actually really interesting how they do this because unlike ants

611
00:36:16,280 --> 00:36:21,319
Speaker 1: or termites, insects that are used social often have like

612
00:36:22,160 --> 00:36:26,480
Speaker 1: these like weird genetic shenanigans, happily diploid where you found

613
00:36:26,800 --> 00:36:30,720
Speaker 1: this high relatedness between the queen's offspring and the worker

614
00:36:30,800 --> 00:36:35,239
Speaker 1: ants to the point where you see some benefit of

615
00:36:36,160 --> 00:36:39,000
Speaker 1: not necessarily everyone reproducing, and then also a lot of

616
00:36:39,040 --> 00:36:43,439
Speaker 1: pheromone communication. With naked morats, you don't have that sort

617
00:36:43,440 --> 00:36:49,560
Speaker 1: of weird genetic shenanigans. So the enforcement of the sexual

618
00:36:49,640 --> 00:36:52,360
Speaker 1: hierarchy where the queen is the only one reproducing is

619
00:36:52,400 --> 00:36:56,840
Speaker 1: really interesting. They have really bad eye sight. They mostly

620
00:36:56,880 --> 00:37:00,720
Speaker 1: communicate through touch, smell, and sound and sense. The smell

621
00:37:00,800 --> 00:37:04,080
Speaker 1: is really good, and they do a lot of weird

622
00:37:05,280 --> 00:37:11,279
Speaker 1: kind of poop related communications. So the number one thing

623
00:37:11,360 --> 00:37:16,319
Speaker 1: is they have public toilets which everyone goes in and

624
00:37:16,360 --> 00:37:19,319
Speaker 1: does their business in, and they'll go in and they'll

625
00:37:19,400 --> 00:37:22,399
Speaker 1: roll around in the public toilet and get everyone sent

626
00:37:22,480 --> 00:37:26,759
Speaker 1: on them. And that's because you're basically this is your

627
00:37:26,840 --> 00:37:30,279
Speaker 1: identification card, your membership to the colony, where it's like

628
00:37:30,400 --> 00:37:34,040
Speaker 1: I'm part of this colony. Because I smell like everyone's poop,

629
00:37:34,640 --> 00:37:37,640
Speaker 1: and so when they smell each other, it's like, great,

630
00:37:37,800 --> 00:37:41,000
Speaker 1: I know that you're part of this colony. We have

631
00:37:41,080 --> 00:37:44,640
Speaker 1: no problems with each other because you smell like everyone's crap,

632
00:37:45,360 --> 00:37:48,400
Speaker 1: and so do I. And we love it because otherwise,

633
00:37:48,440 --> 00:37:51,520
Speaker 1: like sometimes these these big naked molerat colonies can like

634
00:37:52,080 --> 00:37:54,680
Speaker 1: intersect with each other, right, you have a different colony,

635
00:37:54,680 --> 00:37:57,520
Speaker 1: and then their tunnels intersect, and they might run into

636
00:37:57,960 --> 00:38:00,800
Speaker 1: a stranger, and how do they know it's a stranger

637
00:38:00,880 --> 00:38:03,279
Speaker 1: if they're they're blind and they all look like weird

638
00:38:03,280 --> 00:38:07,320
Speaker 1: little pink, wrinkly things. The smell like if it smells

639
00:38:07,520 --> 00:38:10,560
Speaker 1: like some other colonies communal toilet and I'm like, hey,

640
00:38:10,560 --> 00:38:13,680
Speaker 1: you're not you don't belong here, And then there's a conflict.

641
00:38:14,960 --> 00:38:18,640
Speaker 2: And so the different communal toilets smell different, like the

642
00:38:18,680 --> 00:38:22,200
Speaker 2: Ohio naked mole rats smell different from the California naked

643
00:38:22,239 --> 00:38:24,080
Speaker 2: mule rats, and they can tell.

644
00:38:23,960 --> 00:38:27,000
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the Seven eleven toilets smell different from the

645
00:38:27,000 --> 00:38:27,920
Speaker 1: Harvey's toilets.

646
00:38:28,520 --> 00:38:30,440
Speaker 2: We all believe that, I believe.

647
00:38:33,080 --> 00:38:37,240
Speaker 1: But also even weirder is a way that the queen

648
00:38:37,440 --> 00:38:41,680
Speaker 1: enforces the hierarchy through poop. So one of the questions

649
00:38:41,960 --> 00:38:45,520
Speaker 1: is like, how we know that the presence of the

650
00:38:45,600 --> 00:38:50,279
Speaker 1: queen suppresses reproductive hormones in the females. So they have

651
00:38:50,480 --> 00:38:56,960
Speaker 1: this gonadotropin hormone that is suppressed, and it only develops

652
00:38:57,600 --> 00:39:00,160
Speaker 1: when the queen is removed from the colony or and

653
00:39:00,239 --> 00:39:03,080
Speaker 1: individuals removed from the colony. So there's all these females

654
00:39:03,120 --> 00:39:08,760
Speaker 1: and they can't reproduce because they are their hormones aren't

655
00:39:08,760 --> 00:39:12,359
Speaker 1: allowing them to reproduce, which seems to be enforced by

656
00:39:12,880 --> 00:39:17,799
Speaker 1: some kind of weird combination of social enforcement, potentially bullying

657
00:39:18,000 --> 00:39:23,640
Speaker 1: from the queen or her enforcers, but also potentially through

658
00:39:23,640 --> 00:39:28,400
Speaker 1: her poop. So naked roller routes regularly eat each other's poop.

659
00:39:28,719 --> 00:39:32,160
Speaker 1: This is a behavior that starts since their pups. Sometimes

660
00:39:32,200 --> 00:39:35,839
Speaker 1: they eat their own poop. It's not so uncommon for

661
00:39:36,000 --> 00:39:40,880
Speaker 1: rodents to do this because eating like they will digest,

662
00:39:40,920 --> 00:39:42,920
Speaker 1: they'll poop, and then if they re eat the poop,

663
00:39:42,960 --> 00:39:46,000
Speaker 1: they might be able to extract more nutrients from the poop.

664
00:39:46,239 --> 00:39:49,120
Speaker 1: Don't try this at home. We have a different digestive system.

665
00:39:49,160 --> 00:39:51,520
Speaker 1: You don't want to do that, but for them, it works,

666
00:39:51,719 --> 00:39:55,239
Speaker 1: and something that researchers found is that when workers eat

667
00:39:55,280 --> 00:39:59,000
Speaker 1: the queen's poop, it seems like it has a hormone

668
00:39:59,040 --> 00:40:03,239
Speaker 1: in it that causes them to go and take care

669
00:40:03,280 --> 00:40:06,880
Speaker 1: of the queen's pups. So there is like a brainwashing

670
00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:10,680
Speaker 1: hormone in the queen's poop that is telling these workers like,

671
00:40:10,880 --> 00:40:15,719
Speaker 1: go and babysit my kids, which is you know, this

672
00:40:15,800 --> 00:40:20,360
Speaker 1: is a whole method of communication that is just completely

673
00:40:20,440 --> 00:40:25,239
Speaker 1: separate from any hopefully any human experience.

674
00:40:25,680 --> 00:40:29,160
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, it's hard to imagine what that's even like

675
00:40:29,800 --> 00:40:32,600
Speaker 2: what it means for them and whether you know, they

676
00:40:32,600 --> 00:40:34,640
Speaker 2: could even explain it to us if we like develop

677
00:40:34,760 --> 00:40:37,600
Speaker 2: some amazing AI connection with these communities, is there a

678
00:40:37,640 --> 00:40:41,040
Speaker 2: way to translate these ideas into something that makes sense

679
00:40:41,040 --> 00:40:44,160
Speaker 2: to us? And you know, this is something like again

680
00:40:44,239 --> 00:40:48,239
Speaker 2: on Earth, developing the same biome as us and yet

681
00:40:48,320 --> 00:40:51,799
Speaker 2: having such a vastly different experience. You can use that

682
00:40:51,840 --> 00:40:54,560
Speaker 2: to try to like extrapolate what it might be like

683
00:40:54,719 --> 00:40:58,000
Speaker 2: to be a creature on another planet and how different

684
00:40:58,040 --> 00:41:00,560
Speaker 2: that sensorium could be in their social ste structure and

685
00:41:00,560 --> 00:41:03,360
Speaker 2: how that's all connected. And that's going to definitely affect

686
00:41:03,480 --> 00:41:06,759
Speaker 2: like the things they wonder about and the explanations they

687
00:41:06,800 --> 00:41:09,719
Speaker 2: accept and the way they describe the universe around them,

688
00:41:10,360 --> 00:41:15,000
Speaker 2: And so I think that we're hopelessly inadequate in extrapolating

689
00:41:15,200 --> 00:41:19,359
Speaker 2: to other species on Earth, and therefore, like deeply, it's

690
00:41:19,400 --> 00:41:22,600
Speaker 2: deeply impossible for us to anticipate what it could be

691
00:41:22,800 --> 00:41:26,120
Speaker 2: like to be an alien and how they might foster

692
00:41:26,560 --> 00:41:29,480
Speaker 2: and build explanations about the universe.

693
00:41:30,800 --> 00:41:33,400
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like Close Encounters of the

694
00:41:33,400 --> 00:41:36,200
Speaker 1: Third Kind would be a very different movie if those

695
00:41:36,239 --> 00:41:39,840
Speaker 1: aliens communicated through coop rather than a light show.

696
00:41:41,440 --> 00:41:44,239
Speaker 2: So the mash potatoes, they were kind of getting there

697
00:41:44,239 --> 00:41:45,799
Speaker 2: with the mashed potatoes.

698
00:41:45,320 --> 00:41:49,440
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, but I just all I know is

699
00:41:49,520 --> 00:41:53,440
Speaker 1: the Simpsons version of that where Homer really wants to

700
00:41:53,560 --> 00:41:55,520
Speaker 1: go learn to be a clown at a circus, so

701
00:41:55,600 --> 00:41:59,680
Speaker 1: he's shaping his mashed potatoes in the shape of a circus.

702
00:42:00,440 --> 00:42:02,240
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we're going to take a quick break,

703
00:42:02,360 --> 00:42:04,799
Speaker 1: and when we get back, we're going to talk about

704
00:42:04,880 --> 00:42:09,880
Speaker 1: a couple of examples showing how strange our behavior could

705
00:42:10,120 --> 00:42:15,239
Speaker 1: seem to aliens and vice versa, using incomprehensible behavior of

706
00:42:15,280 --> 00:42:17,359
Speaker 1: a couple of animals, and then we'll play the Mystery

707
00:42:17,360 --> 00:42:23,399
Speaker 1: Animal sound game. All right, So I feel like one

708
00:42:23,400 --> 00:42:29,200
Speaker 1: thing that could potentially happen in a human alien cultural

709
00:42:29,239 --> 00:42:34,280
Speaker 1: crossover is that we do not understand why the heck

710
00:42:34,400 --> 00:42:37,480
Speaker 1: we're doing certain things right, Like our behaviors might seem

711
00:42:37,920 --> 00:42:43,200
Speaker 1: completely counterintuitive, self destructive, and strange to aliens, particularly if

712
00:42:43,200 --> 00:42:49,040
Speaker 1: they don't understand how we communicate. And one example of

713
00:42:49,080 --> 00:42:52,920
Speaker 1: this when we look at our own planet is the

714
00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:59,840
Speaker 1: habit of hermit crabs crawling en mass into a plastic

715
00:43:00,040 --> 00:43:03,719
Speaker 1: bottle or a glass jar and then dying and then

716
00:43:03,800 --> 00:43:06,439
Speaker 1: you'll find, yeah, you'll it's very sad. You'll find these

717
00:43:06,480 --> 00:43:10,560
Speaker 1: like glass jars full of dead hermit crabs. So it's

718
00:43:10,640 --> 00:43:13,640
Speaker 1: it's very weird behavior. It's like, did these hermit crabs

719
00:43:14,200 --> 00:43:18,239
Speaker 1: join like a cult? Are they are they all kind

720
00:43:18,280 --> 00:43:21,279
Speaker 1: of coming in? Is this like a crab thunderdome? Or

721
00:43:21,560 --> 00:43:23,960
Speaker 1: they came in and did combat to the death. Is

722
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:27,000
Speaker 1: this a crab graveyard where they're all kind of going

723
00:43:27,160 --> 00:43:31,000
Speaker 1: off to this area to die? Uh, It's it seems

724
00:43:31,120 --> 00:43:35,680
Speaker 1: very mysterious, like not knowing anything about how crabs communicate,

725
00:43:35,800 --> 00:43:37,959
Speaker 1: Like can you come up with a guess of why

726
00:43:38,000 --> 00:43:41,759
Speaker 1: these hermit crabs are all going inside like on mask

727
00:43:41,880 --> 00:43:45,200
Speaker 1: going inside these bottles to die.

728
00:43:45,680 --> 00:43:47,160
Speaker 2: I don't know. It could be like a bug in

729
00:43:47,200 --> 00:43:50,440
Speaker 2: their system. Like hermit crabs don't. They exchange shells, and

730
00:43:50,440 --> 00:43:52,520
Speaker 2: they sometimes like give up a shell to move into

731
00:43:52,520 --> 00:43:54,880
Speaker 2: a bigger shell. So maybe they it seems like a

732
00:43:54,880 --> 00:43:58,200
Speaker 2: shell to them or something. That's my guess, that's it.

733
00:43:58,400 --> 00:44:01,359
Speaker 1: That's You're exactly on the right track. So that's exactly right.

734
00:44:02,280 --> 00:44:06,640
Speaker 1: And one of the ways they communicate in terms of

735
00:44:06,960 --> 00:44:10,360
Speaker 1: the exchange of shells is that when a hermit crab dies,

736
00:44:10,440 --> 00:44:14,680
Speaker 1: it lets off a particular odor as it's decaying, which

737
00:44:14,680 --> 00:44:19,360
Speaker 1: attracts other hermit crabs to its location. Because like for

738
00:44:19,600 --> 00:44:23,080
Speaker 1: some for us, right when we smell decay, we're like,

739
00:44:23,280 --> 00:44:27,640
Speaker 1: oh no, gross, stay away. That could be diseased. There

740
00:44:27,680 --> 00:44:30,239
Speaker 1: could be something dangerous there. To the hermit crab, it's

741
00:44:30,280 --> 00:44:35,759
Speaker 1: saying free house. So like they'll smell a dead hermit

742
00:44:35,800 --> 00:44:37,560
Speaker 1: crab and go like, hey, I should check out to

743
00:44:37,640 --> 00:44:43,200
Speaker 1: see if this dead guy's house fits me. And it's

744
00:44:43,440 --> 00:44:48,480
Speaker 1: unfortunately what happens with something unnatural right, like hermit crabs

745
00:44:48,480 --> 00:44:53,000
Speaker 1: did not co evolve with sprite bottles, is the hermit

746
00:44:53,040 --> 00:44:55,800
Speaker 1: crab will see the opening of a sprite bottle crawl inside,

747
00:44:55,800 --> 00:44:58,240
Speaker 1: maybe thinking it's a home, maybe thinking it's an interesting

748
00:44:58,320 --> 00:45:02,359
Speaker 1: little cranny to go into, and it can get in

749
00:45:02,440 --> 00:45:05,080
Speaker 1: because of the friction of the sand. Then once it's in,

750
00:45:05,160 --> 00:45:08,560
Speaker 1: it's all slippery, it's slick. It can't get back out,

751
00:45:08,880 --> 00:45:12,240
Speaker 1: so it dies, and then it gives off the odor

752
00:45:12,600 --> 00:45:15,239
Speaker 1: that another hermit crab is going like, oh, hey, that's

753
00:45:15,360 --> 00:45:18,279
Speaker 1: the smell of a dead crab. I don't sense any

754
00:45:18,520 --> 00:45:21,520
Speaker 1: danger necessarily. That just means a free house to me.

755
00:45:21,880 --> 00:45:24,960
Speaker 1: So then it goes and crawls inside the bottle, and

756
00:45:25,000 --> 00:45:29,160
Speaker 1: then it finds this dead hermit crab and it's like, great,

757
00:45:29,160 --> 00:45:31,000
Speaker 1: I'm gonna check out this free house. And then it

758
00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:33,080
Speaker 1: finds it can't get out of the bottle. And this

759
00:45:33,120 --> 00:45:35,240
Speaker 1: happens over and over again until you get a bottle

760
00:45:35,239 --> 00:45:39,399
Speaker 1: full of dead hermit crabs. And it's all because they're

761
00:45:40,520 --> 00:45:43,920
Speaker 1: communicating there thinking, and their communication is through this, like

762
00:45:44,960 --> 00:45:50,000
Speaker 1: you know, these chemoreceptive organs, and then their interpretation of

763
00:45:50,040 --> 00:45:52,560
Speaker 1: it is when they smell, you know, a bunch of

764
00:45:52,560 --> 00:45:55,799
Speaker 1: dead hermit crabs, it's not oh, that's probably dangerous. I

765
00:45:55,840 --> 00:45:59,080
Speaker 1: should not go over there. It's a bunch of free houses.

766
00:45:59,280 --> 00:46:01,520
Speaker 1: That's great. I'll go over there and check out if

767
00:46:01,560 --> 00:46:03,160
Speaker 1: I can get a free house. So you have this

768
00:46:03,600 --> 00:46:06,960
Speaker 1: feedback loop for these poor little crabs who are kind

769
00:46:06,960 --> 00:46:11,279
Speaker 1: of helpless in the face of their biology in the

770
00:46:11,320 --> 00:46:14,280
Speaker 1: way they sense the world, and get stuck in this trap.

771
00:46:15,360 --> 00:46:18,960
Speaker 2: It's like a bunch of millennials looking for an apartment.

772
00:46:19,000 --> 00:46:21,080
Speaker 2: They're like, oh, maybe somebody died in there, let's go

773
00:46:21,160 --> 00:46:23,680
Speaker 2: in if it's available, and then they die, and it

774
00:46:23,840 --> 00:46:25,080
Speaker 2: just leads to more and more.

775
00:46:25,480 --> 00:46:29,080
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, yeah, exactly, there's it's got There's got to

776
00:46:29,080 --> 00:46:34,399
Speaker 1: be like some corror movie where it's like teenagers keep

777
00:46:34,440 --> 00:46:41,040
Speaker 1: going to the same haunted place, the same scary, scary house,

778
00:46:42,120 --> 00:46:45,000
Speaker 1: and then they live stream in and it makes even

779
00:46:45,040 --> 00:46:49,960
Speaker 1: more teenagers go over to see what exactly and other

780
00:46:50,160 --> 00:46:52,880
Speaker 1: So another example of this of the importance of chemical

781
00:46:52,880 --> 00:46:57,000
Speaker 1: communication and how it could result in really bizarre behaviors

782
00:46:57,000 --> 00:47:00,319
Speaker 1: that are really hard to interpret once before you stand

783
00:47:00,360 --> 00:47:03,640
Speaker 1: what they do. It's like ants will sometimes army ants

784
00:47:03,680 --> 00:47:08,640
Speaker 1: specifically will sometimes start marching in a circle, and is

785
00:47:09,440 --> 00:47:12,080
Speaker 1: it's like just this endless circle that they're marching in

786
00:47:12,160 --> 00:47:15,480
Speaker 1: until they die of exhaustion, which again just seems like

787
00:47:15,719 --> 00:47:17,719
Speaker 1: why are these ants doing this? Is this some kind

788
00:47:17,760 --> 00:47:21,600
Speaker 1: of weird ant cult. Do they have an ant religion

789
00:47:22,040 --> 00:47:26,719
Speaker 1: or they're sacrificing themselves to an ant god. Well, no,

790
00:47:26,880 --> 00:47:30,920
Speaker 1: as it turns out, they are army. Ants do not

791
00:47:31,000 --> 00:47:34,760
Speaker 1: have good eyesight, they're mostly blind, so they're completely dependent

792
00:47:34,880 --> 00:47:38,879
Speaker 1: on pheromone communication. And when they're on an ant trail,

793
00:47:38,920 --> 00:47:42,200
Speaker 1: it happens is another ant is basically, as it's making

794
00:47:42,280 --> 00:47:45,359
Speaker 1: a trail, it lays down a small amount of pheromones

795
00:47:45,840 --> 00:47:48,040
Speaker 1: that may or may not compel another ant to come

796
00:47:48,120 --> 00:47:51,200
Speaker 1: join it. But the stronger the signal, the more like

797
00:47:51,239 --> 00:47:53,840
Speaker 1: the ant is to follow it. And so this allows

798
00:47:53,880 --> 00:47:56,360
Speaker 1: the ants to have this communication style where it's like

799
00:47:56,760 --> 00:47:59,400
Speaker 1: voting with their little tiny ant feet and their pheromones.

800
00:47:59,400 --> 00:48:01,680
Speaker 1: So the more ants go down and trail, it's like, ah,

801
00:48:01,719 --> 00:48:04,160
Speaker 1: this is the right trail to go down, because there's

802
00:48:04,480 --> 00:48:09,120
Speaker 1: this like democracy of the ants marching down this trail,

803
00:48:09,200 --> 00:48:12,319
Speaker 1: laying down pheromones, it makes that signal really strong. When

804
00:48:12,360 --> 00:48:16,640
Speaker 1: that trail gets interrupted, and then the ants sometimes like

805
00:48:16,719 --> 00:48:21,279
Speaker 1: loop back on themselves. What can happen is essentially this

806
00:48:21,440 --> 00:48:25,200
Speaker 1: marching circle where they get confused, they lose the trail,

807
00:48:25,640 --> 00:48:30,320
Speaker 1: they start to follow the old pheromone trail in this loop,

808
00:48:31,040 --> 00:48:35,760
Speaker 1: and because they're all following it, and the more ants

809
00:48:35,760 --> 00:48:38,279
Speaker 1: that make the same mistake, the stronger the signal gets,

810
00:48:38,280 --> 00:48:40,439
Speaker 1: and the more ants join in, and then this even

811
00:48:40,520 --> 00:48:43,200
Speaker 1: stronger the signal gets and then you get this like

812
00:48:43,239 --> 00:48:47,719
Speaker 1: death spiral, and we would have no idea why they're

813
00:48:47,760 --> 00:48:53,440
Speaker 1: doing this very counterintuitive behavior without understanding this invisible thing, like,

814
00:48:53,760 --> 00:48:57,439
Speaker 1: you know, imagine a human being before we understood what

815
00:48:57,520 --> 00:48:59,920
Speaker 1: ant pheromones are. It just seems like the ants are

816
00:49:00,160 --> 00:49:03,040
Speaker 1: possessed by demons, right and doing a little circle.

817
00:49:03,680 --> 00:49:07,279
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And it's hard to imagine doing that. But

818
00:49:07,320 --> 00:49:10,360
Speaker 2: then you know, like obviously humans are affected by trends,

819
00:49:10,440 --> 00:49:13,200
Speaker 2: and you know, all the teenagers in my life are

820
00:49:13,200 --> 00:49:15,600
Speaker 2: saying the same six to seven joke over and over again,

821
00:49:16,160 --> 00:49:21,440
Speaker 2: death marching to the end of humor, you know. Yeah,

822
00:49:21,000 --> 00:49:24,080
Speaker 2: And so you know, back to the context of aliens,

823
00:49:24,160 --> 00:49:27,040
Speaker 2: like it could be so foreign to us why they're

824
00:49:27,040 --> 00:49:29,000
Speaker 2: doing what they're doing and what it means to them,

825
00:49:29,040 --> 00:49:31,800
Speaker 2: and how to crack into that. It's going to be

826
00:49:31,800 --> 00:49:32,680
Speaker 2: a real challenge.

827
00:49:33,440 --> 00:49:36,160
Speaker 1: Exactly. Aliens take one look at us, see how many

828
00:49:36,239 --> 00:49:38,200
Speaker 1: latle boo boos we have, and just assume that that

829
00:49:38,320 --> 00:49:42,359
Speaker 1: must be their offspring, right, Like, why else would they

830
00:49:42,440 --> 00:49:46,799
Speaker 1: propagate so many lat booboos? All right, so before we go,

831
00:49:46,840 --> 00:49:48,319
Speaker 1: we got to play a little game called Guests Who

832
00:49:48,440 --> 00:49:50,920
Speaker 1: Squawk of the Mystery Animal Sound Game. Every week I

833
00:49:50,920 --> 00:49:52,800
Speaker 1: play Mystery Animal sound and you, the guests, need the

834
00:49:52,880 --> 00:49:56,560
Speaker 1: listener guess who is making that sound. Last week's hint

835
00:49:56,600 --> 00:50:04,080
Speaker 1: was this ret row. All right, so Daniel, you got

836
00:50:04,120 --> 00:50:06,920
Speaker 1: any guesses as to who could be making that beautiful sound.

837
00:50:08,160 --> 00:50:10,440
Speaker 2: M that sounds to me like a bird.

838
00:50:11,680 --> 00:50:16,320
Speaker 1: It's not quite a bird. It's the bird of the woods,

839
00:50:16,360 --> 00:50:18,200
Speaker 1: also known as the road deer.

840
00:50:21,360 --> 00:50:21,760
Speaker 2: Or something.

841
00:50:22,000 --> 00:50:25,040
Speaker 1: No, no, it's the it's the bird. It's the bird

842
00:50:25,080 --> 00:50:28,759
Speaker 1: of the ungulate world, which is the road deer. No,

843
00:50:28,880 --> 00:50:33,759
Speaker 1: it's it sounds I get bird because there's kind of

844
00:50:33,760 --> 00:50:36,480
Speaker 1: a screeching sound. But yeah, road deer. It's found all

845
00:50:36,480 --> 00:50:41,640
Speaker 1: over continental Europe and it barks when it's alarmed. I

846
00:50:41,680 --> 00:50:44,560
Speaker 1: feel like it's interesting because when we see deer, we

847
00:50:44,680 --> 00:50:49,200
Speaker 1: kind of imagine them as these beautiful, graceful, silent creatures

848
00:50:49,280 --> 00:50:53,520
Speaker 1: who do not make any kind of upsetting noise because

849
00:50:53,560 --> 00:50:55,960
Speaker 1: you look at Bambie and they're all so gentle and

850
00:50:57,320 --> 00:51:01,920
Speaker 1: but yeah, they can they can be quite noisy when

851
00:51:01,960 --> 00:51:05,520
Speaker 1: they're defending themselves, when they're alarmed, when they're defending their territory.

852
00:51:07,640 --> 00:51:10,759
Speaker 1: When this is just a fun little fact about roe deer.

853
00:51:10,800 --> 00:51:13,520
Speaker 1: When they mate, they chase each other round in rings,

854
00:51:13,840 --> 00:51:18,799
Speaker 1: which leaves behind sort of deer crop circles. So there's

855
00:51:18,840 --> 00:51:21,319
Speaker 1: these like they call them row rings. But if you

856
00:51:21,360 --> 00:51:23,400
Speaker 1: didn't know it was caused by deer, it'd be like,

857
00:51:23,440 --> 00:51:27,160
Speaker 1: are there aliens in the woods like creating these little circles?

858
00:51:27,400 --> 00:51:31,759
Speaker 2: Oh and now I get the hint, got it all right?

859
00:51:31,920 --> 00:51:33,839
Speaker 2: That made me think of dogs and let me down

860
00:51:33,880 --> 00:51:36,360
Speaker 2: the wrong. Very tricky kid, you very tricky.

861
00:51:36,440 --> 00:51:40,160
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I'm sneaky like that. All right,

862
00:51:40,239 --> 00:51:42,960
Speaker 1: onto this week's mystery animals sound. The hint is this.

863
00:51:43,280 --> 00:51:45,800
Speaker 1: It may sound like a cat call, but I assure

864
00:51:45,840 --> 00:51:53,840
Speaker 1: you this animal wants nothing to do with cats. All right, Danielle,

865
00:51:53,840 --> 00:51:54,720
Speaker 1: you got any guesses?

866
00:51:55,239 --> 00:51:57,280
Speaker 2: I'm gonna have to go for bird again. That sounds

867
00:51:57,280 --> 00:52:00,120
Speaker 2: like a bird? Am I wrong? Twice?

868
00:52:00,400 --> 00:52:04,080
Speaker 1: Well? We will find out next week on Creature Feature.

869
00:52:04,120 --> 00:52:07,240
Speaker 1: If you think you know who is making that woo

870
00:52:07,239 --> 00:52:10,040
Speaker 1: woo sound, you can write to me at Creature Feature

871
00:52:10,080 --> 00:52:13,600
Speaker 1: Pod at gmail dot com. Daniel, thanks so much for

872
00:52:13,800 --> 00:52:16,000
Speaker 1: coming on the show today. Where can people find you

873
00:52:16,040 --> 00:52:17,360
Speaker 1: and where can people buy your book?

874
00:52:18,080 --> 00:52:21,160
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can buy my book anywhere people sell books,

875
00:52:21,160 --> 00:52:25,240
Speaker 2: but also go to the website www dot Alienspeakphysics dot com.

876
00:52:25,280 --> 00:52:27,440
Speaker 2: If you order it before the release date, you can

877
00:52:27,440 --> 00:52:30,440
Speaker 2: get a free set of alien stickers drawn by my

878
00:52:30,600 --> 00:52:34,480
Speaker 2: friend and co author Andy Warner, who's a gifted cartoonist,

879
00:52:35,000 --> 00:52:37,080
Speaker 2: So go check it out. I'm also the co host

880
00:52:37,120 --> 00:52:40,880
Speaker 2: of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe by iHeartRadio, which you

881
00:52:40,880 --> 00:52:44,400
Speaker 2: can find on all nice podcast platforms. And it's been

882
00:52:44,400 --> 00:52:46,719
Speaker 2: a pleasure to talk to you about aliens. Thank you

883
00:52:46,800 --> 00:52:47,680
Speaker 2: very much, Katie.

884
00:52:48,040 --> 00:52:51,760
Speaker 1: Maybe somedays aliens will read this book and be like, Nah, Daniel,

885
00:52:51,800 --> 00:52:54,640
Speaker 1: ye got it all wrong. We understand English.

886
00:52:54,800 --> 00:52:57,360
Speaker 2: Come and tell me how wrong I got it. Aliens.

887
00:52:57,440 --> 00:53:00,000
Speaker 2: I want to hear it. I can't even guess birds

888
00:53:00,160 --> 00:53:00,719
Speaker 2: versus dear.

889
00:53:02,719 --> 00:53:04,520
Speaker 1: All right, Well, thank you so much for listening.

890
00:53:04,960 --> 00:53:05,080
Speaker 3: Uh.

891
00:53:05,440 --> 00:53:08,120
Speaker 1: If you have any questions about animals, you can write

892
00:53:08,120 --> 00:53:10,640
Speaker 1: to me at Creature feature Pod at gmail dot com.

893
00:53:10,680 --> 00:53:13,239
Speaker 1: Thanks to the Space Coassics for their super awesome song

894
00:53:13,600 --> 00:53:16,799
Speaker 1: XO Lumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio. For more

895
00:53:16,800 --> 00:53:19,279
Speaker 1: podcasts like the one you just heard, visit the iHeartRadio

896
00:53:19,320 --> 00:53:21,640
Speaker 1: ap Apple podcasts, or Hey, guess what one of you

897
00:53:21,840 --> 00:53:24,080
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. I'm not your mother. I

898
00:53:24,120 --> 00:53:27,160
Speaker 1: can't tell you what to do. Uh, but you know

899
00:53:27,280 --> 00:53:30,239
Speaker 1: if you always wear clean underwear just in case you

900
00:53:30,320 --> 00:53:32,759
Speaker 1: get abducted by aliens, you don't want to be embarrassed.

901
00:53:33,360 --> 00:53:36,040
Speaker 1: See you next Wednesday.

902
00:53:37,000 --> 00:53:38,480
Speaker 2: I gotta go change mind to wear hold on