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SYSK Live: Koko, the Gorilla Who Talked · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: There's Charles W Chuck, Brian Jerry's not here, but all
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: of these beautiful people are at the Castro Theater at
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: San Francisco, California. Yeah. I love it. Very nice, very nice.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Got a Chucker sign out there. I think I know
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: who that is. It's pretty great. It's a good sign,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: it is. Thanks mom. Oh, we're definitely not gosing. So uh,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: we've asked you all here tonight to talk about being
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: a child of the Are this for us? Thank you
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: very much. Okay, let's just start over. I thought she
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: was like, I'm just gonna put my stuff up here. So, um,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: if Chuck and I are children of the seventies and eighties,
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: he was born in the very very very early seventies.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: I was born in the mid seventies, and I mean
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: it might as well have been the sixties basically. I
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: mean you were right there on the cusp um and
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: being children of this era, we were aware of certain things,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: like all kids of the seventies and eighties were um,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: like that vans could have carpeting on the wall, you know, um,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: every kid knew the precise amount of McDonald's orange drink
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: that he or she could drink just before getting a
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: crippling stomachache. That's like seventies eighties kid knowledge, um or
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: that your parents um like to go to swinger parties
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: where there were keys and fish bowls and weird stuff
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: like that, and did your parents don't do that? And
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: every kid of the seventies and eighties knew that somewhere
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: out there there was a guerrilla named Coco who could talk.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: And if you've never heard of Coco, prepared to buckle
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: up and have your mind blown, because that is what
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: we're talking about tonight. Coco. They're talking Grilla who is
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: a local here as I'm sure you guys know, this
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: is actually a super local show. It is, Yeah, because
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Coco the Gorilla was born fourth of July, just like
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: Haraldo Rivera and Malia Obama and a bunch of other
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: people I haven't heard of when I looked it up online.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: My dad was born on the fourth of July. Yes,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: why didn't you say that the other night? I just
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: didn't feel like it all right, Tom Cruise was if
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: I'm not mistaken, I think that was the for the
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: movie he had that he had been born for that movie.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: He's just so good my body. Yeah, you really sold it. Uh.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Coco was born in the fourth of July one, just
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: four months after yours truly was born. There would be
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: a lot of mirroring here between my development and Cocos.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Coco was born at the San Francisco Zoo. Yeah, six
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: point one miles from here. And what was Coco's birth
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: name in full, Hanna be Co. So Coco is actually
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: your nickname, and Hanna Biko in Japanese means fireworks child.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: She was named that after the fireworks going off. You
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: think that's cute on the fourth of July. Just wait yeah,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: if that's got you all in already, man, you guys
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: are gonna love this one. So Coco was a Western
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Lowland gorilla, which was a and still is a critically
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: endangered subspecies of guerrilla in Central West Africa. And Coco
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: was born into a world in the nineties seventies here
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: in the United States, especially where people I thought two
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: things about guerrillas. They thought they were super scary because
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: literally because of King Kong, the movies kind of like
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Jaws with sharks they two very huggable animals. Movies ruined
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: it basically, and they thought guerrillas were scary, and they
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: thought gorillas were really dumb, like duh um, dumb like
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: even among apes. I thought gorillas were dumb exactly um.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: And so this is the world that Coco was born into.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: And when she was born at the San Francisco Zoo um,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: she had kind of a difficult infancy. Her mom wasn't
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: producing enough milk to sustain her, and then when she
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: was I think six months old, she caught dysentery. She
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: developed dysentery and was basically at death store and had
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: to be removed from her family unit so that she
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: could be nursed back to health by humans who took
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: care of her around the clock, which is right sure,
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: because they actually did save her life. But they had
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: a problem after she recovered, and that was that she
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: had spent so much time away from her family unit
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: and hanging out with humans instead that they were worried
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: that her family unit would reject her if they took
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: her back. So now they kind of had a problem
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: on their hands, and they had a gorilla, Yeah, the
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: gorilla in the room. So a great movie it's fantastic.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: So there was a Stanford grad student around this time.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: It's bad joke, Jerry cut that one out already, already.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: I've only got three of those for the whole show,
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: so you guys keep score. There was a Stanford grad
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: student around this time that came on the scene, twenty
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: four year old young woman named Francine Penny Patterson. She
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: entered Coco's life at this moment when Coco needed her most,
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: and she said, you know what, I'm studying apes, and
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: I think that I can teach guerrillas how to speak
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: use sign language. You've got a guerrilla. I need my PhD.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: This is all kind of perfect as that's a verbatim
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: quote from that moment. So she took control of Cocoa's
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: care and for the next fortysomething years. Uh, they had
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: a relationship that can really only be described as human
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: mother and guerilla daughter very much. So, yeah, for sure.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: And so the whole point of trying to teach Cocoa
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: or any guerrilla sign language was um to find out
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: how or if a guerrilla could acquire language, and then
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: compare how a guerrilla acquires language to how kids human
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: kids acquire language. And then we can kind of compare
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: and contrast the differences and kind of trace back humans
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: evolutionary history for how we developed language, because it's still
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: a mystery. We don't really know why. We just know
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: we seem to be the only species capable of using language. Try.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: Plus it's a good party trick, right, And it was
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: the seventies. Yeah, so at first, Cocoa and Penny we're
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: working to other at the San Francisco Zoo. But it's
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: a zoo and there were people that were, you know,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: paying money to get in there and gawk at them.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: A lot of slack jawn yokels like John Yokels at
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: the San Francisco Zoo and uh, look, yeah, what was
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: my favorite line? Never mind, I can't get off track
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: this early. We'll save the Simpsons for later. So, uh,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: people were gawking and that's very distracting to a young gorilla.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: So she said, you know what, this is going pretty well,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: but I think I could do a lot better with
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: my research and for Cocoa's benefit, if we moved Cocoa
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: to Stanford. And they basically said, sure you can. Um,
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: you can take Cocoa on loan and go do some
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: serious research at Stanford University right right where there's a
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: lot more dope to be smoked. San Francisco zoo, you
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: know what I mean. I'm sure we've got some Stanford
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: grads here, so uh yeah, oh really really that's surprising.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Go cardinals. I thought it was giant trees, is there? Yeah,
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: it was a little clunky, so okay, um so uh
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: so they moved to Stanford officially launched Project Coco, and
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Coco suddenly is surrounded by a bunch of interesting people
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: who are giving her their undivided attention. And she's raised
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: in kind of this way that's similar to how you
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: would raise a human child, like an ideal homeschool sitting,
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: where like everything is about her and teaching her stuff
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: and playing with her and keeping her attention going. And
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: she really started to kind of thrive in this this environment,
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: and she started to pick up sign language pretty quick.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: In her first two weeks of being taught sign an
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: adapted form of American sign language, she knew food, drink,
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: and more. And really the last one is the most
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: important one. But she picked up these signs within two weeks.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: And again, remember bear this in mind this whole time.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: Anytime we say something amazing about Coco. Imagine that at
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: the time when she's doing this stuff, She's the first
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: gorilla doing this stuff and just amazing seen the world
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: because we thought grillas were scary, stupid, just bury the
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: mind stunned. Silence. Was not what I was going for,
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: but I'll take it. I'll take it whatever I can
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: get from you guys. So things were going well at Stanford,
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: but she said, you know what, this is great, but
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: I think we even need more space than they have
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: at Stanford for a gorilla. And so she founded the
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: Guerilla Foundation and move Cocoa and Project Cocoa to a
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: six acre private facility that uh basically had a mobile
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: home for Coco to live in, and that's where Coco
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: lived her life. They retrofitted it so, you know, they
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: had to make the walls a little stronger. Over the
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: years is Cocoa grew and they made it so a
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: gorilla could live in this trailer and she loved it
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: was her house. She made her little nest out of
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: blankets every night, and had a tire to sit in,
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: and had like all sorts of toys to play and
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: TV to watch a lot more than I had for sure,
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: although you did have to make a nest of blankets
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: every night in your house, it's true. Or had you
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: let that man touch your beard, that would have been
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: your future. I think that's true. Coco was learning faster
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: than I was anyways. Yeah, but you had that innate
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: like don't let them do it. Don't let them do it.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: So uh. Coco was taught sign language using a couple
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: of different techniques. There's one called the molding technique. But
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: they would literally take Coco's hand and shape her hand
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: in the shape of the sign and do the sign
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: while they're either saying the word or showing a picture
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: of the object or whatever or both. Um. I know
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: you have an example that you're pretty good at. Do
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: the cat. The sign for cat is where you like
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: kind of demonstrate whiskers. You draw whiskers across your face.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: So you would take you take Coco's hand and squish
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: these together, ship these two right there you go, and
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: then just be like cat cat You're like the guy
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: in the sky lounge all of a sudden, right, so creepy.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: But that was so that was the molding technique. The
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: other one, invitation, is way simpler. It's just you know,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: you would show her cat, cat cat, and she would
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: eventually be like, and you go, yes, cat cat cat.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Stop God, so annoying. That's what Coco would have said
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: to I got it, I got it, Okay Stop. So
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: within the Coco's first four and a half year she
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: went through a couple of big language growth spurts. She
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: added about two hundred new words to her vocabulary each year,
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: again way faster than I was uh. And she was
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: developing language basically at about the rate of um a
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: child eight months behind. Cocoa a human child, right, but
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: she was acquiring signs at about the same rate as
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: a deaf child her age, which is pretty astounding, especially
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: considering she wasn't taught sign language until she was one,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: and she wasn't exposed to English until she was about
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: six months old, so she kind of started from behind
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: and started as a gorilla. But she was still picking
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: up language at about the same pace as human children.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: And this is just knocking everybody's socks off. It's amazing.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: So Coco, I think, had a working vocabulary by the
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: time she was an adult of about six hundred signs
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: and then spontaneously used another four hundred, so that's a
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: thousand signs and then could apparently understand about two hundred
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry, two thousand words of English, right, so she
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: could understand two thousand words, she could sign about a thousand.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: And in the middle of sort of this early period
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: is where Penny Patterson became doctor Penny Patterson. Yeah, she
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: got her pH d from Stanford and I think seventy
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: nine or something like that, and Project Coco continued, right, um,
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: And one of the things that Coco taught the world
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: is that not only could she understand sign language and
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: use signs, she could actually use this to do things
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: that we thought only humans could do, like joke around.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Like there's this really good example of her making a joke.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: It's a gorilla level joke, but it's a joke. Nonetheless,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: it's still qualifies you want to just sort of a
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Josh and Chuck level joke. So they would go in
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: with a white towel and try and get Cocoa to
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: sign white, and Cocoa kept signing red, red, red, and
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: they were like, no, Cocoa, what color is the towel? Red? Red, red? No, Cocoa,
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: what color is a towel? I'm just kidding. They were
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: very kind, and Coco eventually went over and picked a
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: red piece of lent off the towel and held it
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: up and said red, red, red, and laughed and laughed
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: and laughed, and everyone just it was pretty much the
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: best joke of all time. Well, it definitely qualifies as
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: a joke. We did not know that gorillas were capable
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: of joking. She also knew how to lie. That's actually
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: kind of sophisticated. As wrong as it is, it's kind
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: of sophisticated intellectually. We didn't realize gorilla not gonna make
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: any true at all about the human sophistication it takes
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: to lie. It just kind of instantly it rights itself.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: All right, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: get political. So there was there was a time when
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: Coco broke the kitchen sink in her in her little kitchen,
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: and later on Penny asked her what happened, and Coco said,
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Kate did it, which is the first lie children tell,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: literally is Kate didn't. Yeah, Kate, it's always right. But
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: she like threw her caregiver under the bus, which is
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: very human if you think about it, you know, she
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: was like Kate did it, you should fire her. She
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: was also pretty good at making an improv basically and
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: making up signs for things that she didn't know the
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: signs for. For instance, a mask was an eye hat.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: It's not bad, it's fairly cute. A zebra she called
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: a white tiger because she didn't know the sign for zebra.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Not bad. Why they're gonna lose their minds when you
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: know what enters the picture. A ring was a finger bracelet.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: That's pretty good. And a Pinocchio doll was an elephant. Baby,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: this is a gorilla. Everybody, not bad, not bad at all.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: She also had are you asking me literally? If you
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: should say that? I think you should? Don't you tell
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: everyone about Coco's insults? So so prepared to aweso more. Um.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: She had her own little vocabulary of insults like bird
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: and nut like you're a bird, you're a nut. That
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: was their insults. Um it got even better, rotten stink.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: It's also a good punk band name, it is pretty good,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: dirty toilet, toilet, dirty devil, and um face mother, that
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: was that was the one. I'm sorry, I apologize before.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: I'll just apologize now as well. That's gonna sound so
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: sweet beeped out. When we end up releasing this episode,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: please come back. I said, I was sorry, and I
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: love in the middle of it. You look over at
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: me and point to f F f F and you go,
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: I want I wanted you to be on the hook
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: as well as me. All Right, that's it. That's all
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: the dirty language it was. It was worth it. That's
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: a good quality joke you get because see Coco didn't
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: really say that. That was Josh. So here's the deal though.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: We we talked so far about Coco insulting people and
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: making jokes and throwing people under the bus, but that
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: was not Coco's nature. Coca was actually very sweet gorilla.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: And everyone who came into Coco, especially Dr Patterson, loved, loved,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: loved this gorilla. Yes, um, And so in nineteen six,
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: this Guerrilla Foundation expanded, the little family grew a little
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: bigger when they brought in a guerrilla male named Michael,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: and um, Michael was weird. It's a weird name for
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: a gorilla. It's kind of like have you ever seen
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: somebody where you meet someone's dog and they're like, this
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: is James or Alan or something like that. Like you
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: can use a human name for a dog, but it's
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: got to be just slightly off. I'm trying to think
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: or for a name you could give a dog. Alan
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: is pretty close, Edwards, Larry is pretty good Larry. But no,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: if it was like a big sloppy bulldog named Larry,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: you'd be like, of course, Larry. James, though, who would
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: name a dog James? For Jennifer is a pretty good
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: name for a dog, right, Yeah, Nah, Chuck's that's a
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: good dog name too. She Chuck is on the cusp
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: of being goofy. Anyway, all right, that's another everybody shouting
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: at the stage. We didn't ask for this anyway. Michael
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: comes into the picture, Michael the gorilla, and he also
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: learned American sign language too, and he picked it up
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: pretty well. Not quite as as well as Cocoa, but
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: still very well. Um. He was also enculturated, which means
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: that he was raised basically as a human um and
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: and not as a gorilla, which means that you like
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: to listen to Pavarotti and paint very seriously. They both painted, actually,
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: but Michael took it very seriously. But one of the
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: big findings from Project Coco is that they found that
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Michael and Coco would sign to one another unprompted. They
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: would just communicate through sign and that each one taught
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: the other signs that the humans hadn't taught them. Right,
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: So Michael learned some stuff from humans that Coco hadn't
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: and he went and talked Coco and vice versa, which
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: is pretty big. Yeah, it's big. It's cute and a
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: little creepy, especially if they developed their own sign language.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: It's pretty good. You got the chloroform. We should also
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: mention there was there's if you've seen the documentary, there's
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: one on Netflix called Coco. I think the gorilla who
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: could Talk. It might be that on the nose. There's
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: a colon in there somewhere. Yeah, from the BBC uh.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: And there's a man in that documentary you see a lot.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: His name is Ron Cone. He came on the projects
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: very early on to document all this via camera and videotape,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: and it stuck around through the whole project because he
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: was clearly in love with Benny Patterson. That was the
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: whole subtext of that documentary the whole time. I was
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: like even says, at the very beginning, he was like fault.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: She was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: my life. Yeah, I was like, oh, I really feel
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: bad for the feel bad for m. That's an extra
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: kind of like a subplot to the document. Totally was.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: But Ron wasn't a gorilla, so he had no shot.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: He would even dress up like one sometimes and I
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: just didn't work. So the word got around, as it
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: does in around Woodside, California, where this gorilla foundation was,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: that there was a gorilla in their midst Its terrible,
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: all right, I would ask all of you not to
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: encourage him. And by the way, this is just neither
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: here nor there. But today where Coco lived is just
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: a two minute drive from a Ross dress for less.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: This is one of Asha's when you when Josh puts
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: together these uh these things, you get these interesting little
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: factoids like that it's like two minutes away. There's a
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: couple of them in every single one. Like other people
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: who are sitting there like smelling soap, like realized that
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: two minutes away there's a guerrilla foundation where there's sign
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: language using guerrillas. Probably not, I don't think so, probably not. Uh.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: And by nineteen seventy eight, the world was introduced to
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: Coco in a big way when Coco made her first
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: appearance of what would be Too on the cover of
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: National Geographic magazine. Uh. And if you've seen this very
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: famous photo, what you see is as a gorilla holding
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: a camera and you think, oh, that's cute, and when
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: you look closely, you realize that the Olympus camera is
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: backwards and Coco had taken her own picture in a
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: mirror and was the photographer of note for National Geographics
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: and it's like, it's a well framed photograph, she's using
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: it correctly, and yeah, it ended up on the cover
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: the first Yeah, sure, sure, I was trying to avoid
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: using that word, but yes, that's what it was. The
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: second cover though, so that introduced the world to to Cocoa.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Inside there was like a pretty substantial article written by
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Penny basically describing Project Coco and how it was going,
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: and everybody's like, wow, this is amazing. But in seven
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: years later she was on the cover again, and this
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: time the world just fell in love with Coco because
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: in the cover photo, uh, Coco is cradling her kitten.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: Her kitten, not a kitten, Coco's kitten, because Coco had
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: a kitten, and that is what this whole this whole
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: issue was about Yeah, it was, it's super cute. I mean,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: I think we can all agree that inner specs mingling
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: is kind of like the best thing on the internet.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: I could look at that stuff all day. I do
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: sometimes imily. I just sit around and it's like, there's
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: a parrot with an alligator that adorable. They love each other.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: They looked, you can't do it with reptiles. No, not easily,
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: never cute. I have seen some cute reptile stuff, but
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: it's few and far between. Like a snake cuddling a turtle.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: That's no cuddle. Oh, sorry to break it to you.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: I got to rethink this stuff I look at on
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: the internet. So Coco, uh, maybe because Coco had been
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: taught the word cat um incessantly cat loved I love
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: cats and wanted to kitten, and for for one I
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: think it was birthday or Christmas one year, they gave
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: Coco a very realistic stuffy kitten and that that didn't
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: work because Coco's no dummy, and they're like, all right,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: I guess we gotta go for it and do the
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: real thing. So they brought in a litter of kittens
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: and had Coco pick one out. Um, she smashed all
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: but one, and that was the lefty kittens. True not true.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: Now she picked out a little uh, a little tabby Manx.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: Manxes don't have or Manx, I don't have tails. My
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: brother's got a Manx of course because he's my brother. Uh,
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: And so Manx didn't have a tail. And so Coco
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: named this little ball of fluff all Ball, and then
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: cut That was the name of Coco's kitten. And all
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: Ball himself was a pretty interesting cat. Um. He had
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: been abandoned. His whole litter had been by his mother,
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: and so he was nursed by a dog for like
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: four and a half weeks. Not only just a dog,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: a Karen Terrier, which is the same breed as Toto
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: from the Wizard of Oz. And then he wanted to
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: become the pet cat of a talking gorilla. What is
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: going on? Trigger warning everybody. All Ball died, All Ball
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: got out, I was hit by car and killed. I know,
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry to have to tell you that, but that's
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: what happened. All Ball got out, got smashed to buy
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: a car, and Penny told Cocoa this, We didn't hit
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: him with our car. Why are you guessed to say
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: the same thing twice, probably yeah, and really just crowned
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: them in there, changed your name to all tire. I
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: can't believe I said that I love cats. I have
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: two cats. That was way worse than what I said,
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: way worse. I was not on the hook without a
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: garbage podcaster, garbage human. Sorry. I think he just got
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: up and left something, so uh, Penny had to break
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: it to Coco, obviously, because this was Coco's best little buddy,
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: and Coco, it's awful. For about ten minutes, she just
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: turned her back and like a child, Wood ignored everything,
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: like you know, I didn't hear that basically, And then
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: later on Coco uh started whimpering and making the sad
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: gorilla depressed gorilla sounds and I can't even say this
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: next part. You've got to Then eventually she signed sleep cat.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: I know, and I think it's so sorry. This is
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: a great place to put an ad if you ask me. So,
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: if you guys will bear with us, we're going to
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: take a message break all right, we're back. Everybody you've
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: seen us before that it's like a roller coaster of emotions.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: So I don't know if you remember where we were
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: all ball has just been killed. Um you should not
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: feel too bad, though, because Coco had two more sets
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: of kittens throughout her long life. Uh, Lipstick and Smoky
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: and Miss Black and Miss Gray. So Coco loved her kittens.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: She did. And I don't know what happened to the
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: rest of them. Don't ask, is what I say. Um. So,
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: Coco had become a celebrity, and being a celebrity, other
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: celebrities wanted to be around her. Uh not. The least
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: of what was William Shatner, who was among the first
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: to go visit Coco. Apparently he wrote about it in
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: his autobiography that it was kind of a publicity stunt
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: and he was scared to death about going to meet
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: this gorilla like one on one, but he was determined
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: he was gonna do it. And then Coco touched his
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: genitals during their meaning it's true. He kept his little
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: Shatners kid over here. It looks painful. She's touching my balls.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: That wasn't even know how to do. So. I worked
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: with Shatner on a on a Cheerios commercial. I worked
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: with Shatner. Yeah he what Someone just yelled out a
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: bad name about him. He was nice to day I
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: worked with him. I don't know. I mean, I'm not
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: a star Trek guy, but he was. He was a
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: nice guy, all right, ma'am, you need to quit calling
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: me names. So, uh, Fred Rogers, Mr Rogers also paid
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: a little visit, right yeah. And I don't know if
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: you guys have seen the Mr. Rogers documentary, but this
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: is in that documentary And if you look closely, Mr
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Rogers looks kind of scared too, but he's he's like, no,
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: I'm going through with this. But he's just a little
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: like over eager to take, you know, direction from Penny Patterson.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: He's just a little nervous, especially when Coco cradles him
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: like a baby, which she did. It's very cute. And
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: it gets even better because Coco and Michael were both
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: big fans of Mr Rogers neighborhood, so when he showed up,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: they freaked out because there's Mr Rogers and Coco took
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: his shoes off like she'd seen him do so many
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: times before. And it's better or better. Yes, I'm serious. So, uh,
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: Coco also got visits on separate occasion. I think from
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: both Flee and Sting. I don't think they came together, right,
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: I don't think so. They've been doing a little lunch,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: the little shopping at Ross Dress for lesson. They made
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: their way over to the Gorilla found maybe so things
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: like why are you always just buying tidy Whitey's and
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: tube socks? A little red hot chili peppers. Humor got
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: it well dated, it still works. Uh. They both let
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: them let Coco um play their bases. They both brought
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: their bases and let Cocoa slap at a base. Peter
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: Gabriel showed up, Yes he does situations like this. Um
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: America's beloved treasure, Betty White went and visited. Uh. And
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Betty White was a board member of the Guerrilla Foundation.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: So if you didn't love her enough before, love her
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: even more now. And Um, Coco was a fan of
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: the Golden Girls, so they were fans of one another.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: Course Leo DiCaprio paid a visit. He heard there was
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: a young lady that uh, he should meet, and all
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: of this is in the documentary, all these various visits
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: and and Leo's he's, he's he didn't even get in
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: the cage at least from this, like Coco has her
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: hand through there and he's just kind of like stroking
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: her fingers, not even with his fingertips, like with his knuckle,
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: his knuckle, I think with an assistance knuckle actually, um.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: But of course, the most memorable visit was Robin Williams
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: back in two thousand one h of course San Francisco's own.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: You've probably seen this footage. If you haven't, go watch it,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: because like, go watch it right now. We'll wait. Yeah,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: if if, if only we had a big screen behind
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: us where we could show this stuff, how can we
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: how can we ever do it? Yeah, that would require
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: ten percent more effort. This is not gonna happen. We
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: challenge you instead to use your imagination. That's right, the
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: world of the mind everyone. So Robin Williams is the
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: perfect person to go visit Coco because Robin Williams was
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: not scared like a Shatner, He was not intimidated like
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: a Mr. Rogers, He was not disappointed that it wasn't
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: a human like Leo DiCaprio. He was Robin Williams. And
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: he gets in there and just wants to play with
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: an ape on that level, gets down on the floor.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: They're rolling around their tickle fighting Coco takes off his
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: glasses and puts them on and looks out the window,
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: and you can just tell that he is legit having
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: like one of the best times of his life. Yeah,
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: he was definitely into it for sure. UM. And later
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: on he uh, he was telling the story on one
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: of the late night shows, I can't remember which one,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: and he said that they told him that, Um, Coco
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: had indicated that she wanted to mate with him, and
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: Robin Williams said it would have made a good story,
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: which if if you let that just kind of sit
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: for a little while, like it's like what And years later,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: when Robin Williams passed away, they had to break the
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: news to Coco as well, and Coco signed a woman
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: crying and it was very sad, which is pretty astounding
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: because Coco met Robin Williams. I mean, she watched his
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: movies and everything, but she met him once, like thirteen
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: years before his death, and so for her to be
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: affected by it, that's extraordinarily significant. UM. And because Coco
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: had people like Leo DiCaprio and William Shaton are coming
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: to visit the world watched everything she did, and she
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: became an ambassador for Earth like just this a natural
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: ambassador because here's a gorilla who can communicate with humans,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: and um, grilla come from nature, so why not just
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: have her talk for nature. And that's exactly what happened.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: She became an ambassador for plan at Earth. Basically. Yeah,
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: it was at a very good time for that too.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: It was here in America, was in the early eighties
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: when we were just starting to kind of come around
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: to uh, the green movement a little bit more and
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: Earth Day became a bigger and bigger deal. So it's
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: kind of prime time for Cocoa to step in there. Um.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: I think Penny Patterson wrote a book called Coco's Kitten.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: I don't think it ended in a in a car crash.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: I hope not. No, there was stuffed Coco gorillas. I
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: believe they still are. And like I said, she and
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Michael both painted, so they started selling prints of their paintings.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: And Coco's painting of a bird it looks like a bird.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: It's pretty amazing. I mean, you can't tell what kind
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: of bird it is or anything like that, and you
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: have to squint and again use your imagination, but you
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: can say, yes, that is a bird. I can tell
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: have you ever held a chimp or anything or been
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: around one. Yeah, I have, I've been. I I have
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: held I'm not quite sure what kind of um ape
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: it was, but a little little sweet one in address
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: who was very cute. And then, um, where was this done?
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: In Florida? Everybody's walks around with apes that you can
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: hold in Florida. And then one time I was in
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: Mexico and I was walking down the street and I
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: passed a courtyard, a gated courtyard, and there was a
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: chimp like on a leash that it could swing around
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: the courtyard in and I was like, well, I have
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: to stop and talk to his chimp. So I did,
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: and the chimp put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed,
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: not painfully, but this chimp was in charge of me
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: right then and then stared more deeply into my soul
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: than any other being has before. And I'm just sitting
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: there with like cartoon sweat jumping off of my head.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: And finally I realized he wasn't going to stop this
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: at any point in time, so I just, one finger
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: at a time slowly backed away. And then after, you know,
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: ten minutes later, I was like, I gotta go see
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: my chim friend again and they had closed the door. Yeah,
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: that's what I said to I worked another TV commercial
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: with a chimp one time, and uh, it was it
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: was a lifelong dream to hold a chimp. I always
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: wanted to. And so I went to the trainer and said,
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: can I hold the chimp? And she was like, of course.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: And so I hold this baby chimp and it wraps
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: his legs around me, in arms around me, swearing a
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: little diaper um for you know, for a good reason.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: I don't think it was just to be cute. I think,
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: you know, I didn't want this chimp booping and being
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: on people wearing a diaper and clothing. Just a diaper.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: It's okay, So that's all right, as long as it's
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: not like a diaper and shut. That's a terrible combination.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: Just a diaper and yeah that's no good. That's not
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: a good look. Human chimp doesn't matter. Yeah, you're right.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: But then later we were having our production meeting before
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: the job, where everyone kind of stands around and walks
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: through what we're gonna do for the day. And I
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: was standing there, you guys, and I felt it before
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: I saw it. This chimp walked up and held my hand.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: And I looked down and this little chip is looking
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: up at me and just holds my hand. Best thing
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: that ever happened to me. And I'm married with a
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: human child. Yeah, yeah, that's all right. She didn't listen
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: to podcast. So, um, where are we here? We are right?
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: So Coco is an ambassador for Earth at a time
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: where we're becoming more eco conscious, coining dorky terms like
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: eco conscious, and she's like the ambassador for Earth. Um.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: You have to remember, though, she didn't necessarily think of
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: herself this way, So just keep that in mind, because um,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: she took part in the first ever inter species internet
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: chat hosted by America on Line. It does not get
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: more than now very Here was the setup, Okay, So
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: there was a a o L moderator who was the
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: one working in the chat room on the phone with Penny,
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: who was at the Guerrilla Foundation, And so the AOL
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: moderator would relay questions over the phone to Penny. Penny
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: would ask the question or sign the question to Coco
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: and then tell the moderator the Coco's response, and then
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: the moderator would type it in. And so when this
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: whole setup was explained to Coco. Coco said, Nipple just
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: put a pin in that. Nipples will figure in quite
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: a bit. But but the point where she wasn't like
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: this is the part I was born to play. I
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: can't wait to get more eco conscious. She was just
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: like Nipple, Cocay. It was a gorilla, everybody. You gotta
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: remember that. So if you look at that train in
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: scripts from the A O L chat, that means it's
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: still you're not digging up transcripts from A L chat
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: rooms anymore unless you're in trouble with the law. And
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: if you look at what's going on in this chat
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: and the answers at Coco's giving and then the responses
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: that Penny Patterson is giving, you start to see a
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: little bit of a trend where I guess the nicest
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: way to say it is that Dr Patterson was being
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: a little liberal with some of these translations on what
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: she thought Coco might be saying. Right, Um, there's this
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: really good example. One was a O L user Mini
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: Kitty asked Coco, are you gonna have a baby in
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: the Mini Kitty here? By the way, anyone that would
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: be astounding? Oh god, I got a bunch of mini kids. Um,
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: so many. Kitty asked Cocoa, you're gonna have a baby
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: in the future, and Coco went, and it doesn't make
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: any sense when you're reading the transcript. Coco covered her
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: eyes and, uh, you when Dr Patterson kind of translates it,
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: then it makes sense. She said, Well, I think what
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: she's doing is signing unattention that she doesn't see it.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: That's not gonna happen. And you can't help but think
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: that feels like a bit of a stretch. And when
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: you read this transcript you start to get a kind
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: of clear idea why there are some people out there
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: in the world who think that Project Coco was almost
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: entirely bs. It was almost entirely made up and not
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: true at all. That's right. So that first part of
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: the show was a lot of fun. I think we
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: can all agree super cute. Uh, we don't like to
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: burst bubbles, but we do what we do, and we
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: have to show the other side of the argument because uh,
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: we get into a section now called the Ape language Wars,
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: which was a real thing. Um for some people. They
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: believe that Coco was super smart and communicating and making
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: sentences and using sign language and understood what was happening,
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: But there's a whole other group of scientists who basically
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: ended up thinking that these experiments are bs and that
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: Coco is basically like a bear you train to ride
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: a unicycle in a circus. Sure that is doing this
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: retreats yes, the rewards or something like that, or falling
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: that that that she was trained to use these signs
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: in the same way you could train a dog to
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: slow dance with you or something the kind of thing.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: It's it's very, very impressive, but it doesn't require or
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: display human level intellect. And we should say, like, none
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: of this has proven and there's a huge division in
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: the field of science over whether the ape language researchers
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: are right or the skeptics are right. And it's actually
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: pretty fascinating, but you have to kind of step back
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: and look at it in this larger context because it
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: wasn't just Project Coco that this gets leveled against it.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: Project Coco was part of a whole other field, um
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: called the ape language experiments that really started way back
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: in the twentieth century. Yeah, so it was a pretty
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: hot thing for a while. Um. There were a bunch
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: of experiments going on where they would take chimps, mostly chimps.
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: I think Coca was one of the few apes or
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: a few guerrillas, so that she was the first. Yeah,
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: the first one for sure. And they would take chimps,
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: and they would raise them as children by themselves or
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: with siblings, or dressed them up in little cute overalls
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: and things and try and make them like little humans
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: a little later hosing, maybe they were is a good
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: look a chimp in later hosing? Oh yeah, of course
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: there was one one of the first ones in the nineties.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: It was a psychologist couple. Uh. And as you'll see,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: most of these are couples that lead these experiments, which
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: is why I still feel so bad for Ron Cone
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: because he was like, well, Penny that, like everyone else
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: literally is married except us. So Keith and Cathy Hayes
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: they trained a chimp named Vicky in the nineteen forties
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: not to sign words to speak for human language words.
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: Vicky could say Mama, Papa, up, and cup and uh.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: We figured they really dropped the ball on that fifth
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: word because pup is just staring them in the face.
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: She had all the tools there, but they stopped at four.
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: But here's the thing is that Vicky's experiment, even though
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: she learned to speak for human words, was considered a failure. Failure.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: They taught a chimp to speak, and it was considered
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: a failure because everybody's like just for words, And the
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: point was was that no, we should be able to
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: teach them language. Like the theory was that if humans
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: were the only ones who could use language, maybe it
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: was a cultural thing. So if we start raising chimps
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: as humans, they'll pick up language, and you'll have a
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: language using chimp. Vicky proved and some of the other
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: ones proved that it's just not gonna happen. And later
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: on we figured out that the physiology of the other primates, um,
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: it just doesn't allow for speech. So some people were like, well,
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: that's it, case closed. It's only humans who can use language.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: H G. Noam Chomsky. Very famously, the famous linguists came
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: out and said, I I hypothesized that humans have what's
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: called the language acquisition device, like a little seed program
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: in our brain that allows us to start learning language,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: and that only humans have that. It's a hypothesis that
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: hasn't been proven still, but he really kind of set
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: the tone for the skeptics who say it's just humans
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: who can use language. But then some people said, you
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: know what, Chomsky, he's pretty interesting fellow. But I don't
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: really I'm not swayed by this. I think that just
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: because an ape can't talk doesn't mean they can't use language.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: And somebody, I think Alan and Beatrix Gardner came upon
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: this really novel idea, if you can't teach an eat
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: an ape to speak, you could teach an ape sign language.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: And they were definitely onto something because it panned out
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: pretty well. Yeah, this is a nineteen sixty seven and
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: they had a was it a chimp? Yeah? You think
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: it was a chimp named was Show And I think
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: Washo was from Washington, if I'm not mistaken, I think
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: I think she ended up in Washing ended up in Washington,
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: and uh, things went pretty well for a little while,
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: but uh, it yielded a lot of findings when they
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: found out that Lulie was a young male, that Washow
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: wasn't the real mama, but Washo just sort of adopted
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: this young chimp as her own. And they found out
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: that Washo was teaching Lulie sign language and they were
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: signing to each other. They were signing to other animals.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: They would walk up and sign to dogs and stuff
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: like that. I guess like, are you with us? It's
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: gonna go down and we need to know if you're
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: with us, there, with us against us? No middle ground.
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: I'm look in my butt hole, man, I don't know.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: It is funny if you watch footage from some of
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: these experiments, there is often a dog just kind of
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: hanging out, like what the hell are you guys doing,
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: which is why we love dogs so much. They don't care.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: They just want scritches and hugs. They do um. So
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: Project Washed like just changed everything because now all of
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: a sudden you had a chimp that was using sign
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: language like so yes like Noam Chomsky seemed like he
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: was going to be wrong, and that kicked off this
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: whole ape language experimentation. It became kind of like the
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: hot research topic in developmental psychology was just so hot.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: Well you can see why. You know, it's it's cool,
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: it's headline grabbing. You get to work with these apes,
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: that's super cute. It was at a time when Threes
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: Company was the number one show in America. It just
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: made sense in a very very seventies kind of way. Yeah,
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: I guess I thought. So there was one, and it
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: wasn't just gorillas and chimps. It was in rain tang
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: name Chantek, who excelled at signing and would give directions
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: whenever Chantic was in a car to the local dairy queen.
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: It's so great, not bad. There's a very famous project nim.
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: Um do not watch that documentary. Josh tried to get
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: me too, but he said it's a real bummer man.
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: Bummer is a very good word to describe it. So
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: I did not see it. I refused. It's a little sad,
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: but I think this was at Columbia University in the
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: mid seventies and they threw a little shade at Niam Chomsky.
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: The leader of this project named herb Terrorists by naming
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: his chimp Nim Chimpsky, which is pre Simpson's. It's so Simpsons,
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: really so Herb Terrorist figures in pretty big in this
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: in this whole thing, he really does and like just
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: like Wash Show and Loulie and all of the other ones.
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: Um Nim started to acquire sign language like pretty quickly
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: and was using a lot of signs, and things were
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: going along as expected, but Herb terrorists. The head of
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: this project, Project Nim. He wasn't he wasn't convinced. He
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: didn't believe that Nim was actually using language. He thought
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: that he just knew some signs. And like, at the
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: heart of this is this discussion of like what constitutes language. Um,
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: Like if you have a pie, you can point to
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: a pie and say pie, and everyone don't think, can
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: I have some pie? But all you're doing is pointing
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: to an object and saying a word. That's just using
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: a word. Language is like where you take other words
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: and put them together and describe to people how to
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: make a delicious pie, so you can make something that
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: literally doesn't exist yet out of other things. That's the
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: difference between language and words. And what Herb terrorists thought
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: was that Nim was just using words. So he um
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: did the normal thing that you would do and sent
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: him back to his place of birth, very grim ape
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: research farm in Oklahoma, which is a deeply not okay
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: thing to do. Now there should not be ape farms
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: in Oklahoma. Yeah, I hate to break that to you.
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: Uh So we got to say that Herb terrorists, he
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: didn't go into this whole thing. Two as a skeptic
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: to prove everyone wrong. Though he was a star of
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: the field. Yeah, he was a star of the field.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: He was way into it, and he looked at the
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: science and he was like, man, you know it. The
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: more I look at this, not only do I think
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: that they're not truly communicating and understanding what they're saying,
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: He's like, I think these researchers are tipping them off inadvertently.
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: I don't think anyone's trying to cheat it, but inadvertently
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: they're tipping their hand right before they would teach a
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: sign or ask them to say a sign, inadvertently, And
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: I don't even think they know. Not only do I
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: think they're not talking, I don't even think that they
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: know what food means when they sign food that they're
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: they're just that basic that they're really just mimicking. Yep,
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: they're just imitating people to get that food. So so
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: herb terrorists. Again, he's one of the stars of the
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: ape language research field. Says that he changed his mind
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: about his data, He publishes a big influential article in
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: n becomes the most vocal critic of his former field,
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: and normally when a scientist changes his mind about his
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: data doesn't really amount to much, but this drew a
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: really deep clear line in the sand. What had once
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: been like the hot research topic in developmental psychology was
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: now considered possibly fraudulent, um anti science, or at the
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: very least unscientific. And you had to choose one side
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: or the other. Like the dogs and the chimps right
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: versus humans, you had to choose where did you believe
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: that that ape language research was actually just fraudulent and
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: it was really the humans who were producing the study
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: data because they were seeing what they wanted to see
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: and believing what they wanted to believe, Or did you
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: believe that, no, they're actually onto something and science um
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: still has plenty left to learn from studying apes. And
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: you had to choose one side or the other, and
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: a lot of kind of petty camps broke out along
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: that dividing line. Yeah, and at the center of all
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: this is a word that I have always had a
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: very hard time saying. This is going to be beautiful.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: So I have broken it down into five parts. And thropomorphism. Oh,
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: you nailed it, You nailed it. Shut Thank you everyone.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: It says here and dash throw dash po dash more.
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: That's so easy, and I just left phism all by itself.
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: You don't, I didn't break that down into two parts.
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: You don't see phism spelled out very often. Yeah, and
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: for your throw you added the W like throw, yeah,
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: not just th h r O or th h r
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: o e throw. Pism looks too close to Fish the band.
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: It does, so that's probably why why I'm like naturally
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: against it. I'm sorry, Fish fans. I don't think San
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: Franciscan's like music like Fish or anything music. There's no
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: great music traditions here, are there, Journey hue Lewis. That's
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: basically that's what I understand. I don't think anything in
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: the six guys should be very proud of yourselves just
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: for having Huey Lewis and Journey. Forget the news jes
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: Huey Lewis alone. I thought that was imply And his wiener.
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: You know, he showed his wiener in the movie Ones.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: It's true, Robert Altman shortcuts Huey Lewis shows his wiener.
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: Am I having a nightmare right now, Josh, wake up?
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: But you're in the castro. It's all good, Okay, We're
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: talking about Cocoa. The gorilla so of course anthropomorphism. Geez,
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: that was a weird sidetrack. Uh, we're all guilty of it.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: You know what that is, that's putting human characteristics on animals.
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: That's when you go home and um, you see your
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: dog or your cat, and you think you know what
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: they're feeling, and you think they have these inner lives
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: and these emotions. I believe that they do. Maybe I'm wrong.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: I don't know, but I don't care. That's what I believe.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: That's it's okay. So so yes, that's it uses common
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: sense and intuition and you use your own eyes and
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: your own empathy to see like, yes, my dog is
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: sad right now, or no, my dog's very happy right now.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: You can see. It's just common sense. But if you're
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: a skeptic, if you're a scientist, a rationalist, I'm not,
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: you impound your fists and say no, science has never
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: shown that animals have any kind of inner subjective life
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: like humans too. You are just projecting that onto your stupid,
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: stupid faced talk. That's right, because because anybody who thinks
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: like that hates dogs. On the other side, there are
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: people like me and scientists believe like like honestly, like
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: we kind of believe that they do have these inner lives,
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: and we will look at them and say, you're all
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: blinded by the science, like Thomas Dolby, So what good
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: are you? I'm on this side of the line in
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: the sand a right. So anthropomorphism is where like belief
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: and rationalism like clink teeth. Yeah, yes, it's pretty pretty
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: good description if you ask me. And I think that's
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: another good time for a break. Yeah, you guys think
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: so too. Is it going well enough to release your thing? Okay,
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: well then we have to add a second ad break
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: just in case. So if you'll bear with us, we'll
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: be right back. We're back everyone. So before we took
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: our break, there are a bunch of mean science people
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: saying your dogs and your gorillas are just dumb animals.
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: And then there are people that have human hearts beating
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: inside their body that say, no, you're blinded by science,
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: like Thomas Tolby. That was a good recap, thank you.
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: So for some people Penny Patterson included in other ape
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: language researchers, they were like, you know, I don't think
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: herb terrorists changing his mind about his data actually amounts
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: to proof that that apes can't use language. I think
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: we just haven't figured out how to demonstrate it sufficiently.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: So some people stayed in this field of research and
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: risk being labeled cooks or rods or hucksters or deluded
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: morons or what have you. Um, and they stayed in.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: But they were scientists still, and they wanted to stay scientific,
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: so they had to jump through increasingly narrower hoops to
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: prove that what they were doing was not actually them
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: corrupting the study data. Basically, yeah, they couldn't just sit
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: face to face and even risk their facial expressions giving
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: something away. So there was a researcher named Sue Savage
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: Rumball at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, and she
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: would do her experiments wearing a welding mask. Uh. Good
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: way to behinde your face. I guess she couldn't explain
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: why her monkey kept signing flash dance over and over.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: She would wear a welling mask and then off the
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: off the shoulder sweatshirt. Oh man, I just saw that
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: last year for the first time. I've never seen it.
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: It's fantastic. Hold up, what a feeling. It's amazing. That'll
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: make sense to me. That so um, there was another
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: thing that um that that that people were prompted of
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: or accused of, which was prompting right like what Chuck
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: was saying. Herb terrorists concluded that the researchers or the
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: caregivers were kind of showing the sign right before the
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: chimp used the sign prompting. And so to get around
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: accusations of prompting your subjects uh, Sue Savage Rumba and
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: her husband Dwayne realized that the oh yeah, another couple,
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: this thing is allowsy with couple or run. So so
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: the Rumbas they said, well, let's just not teach them
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: sign language. Then then you can't possibly prompt them. And
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: they developed something called a lexicon board, which is like
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: a trifule board of a couple of hundred little boxes
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: and each one has a symbol in it, and the
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: symbol represents a word. And what they did was they
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: taught their bonna bows how to use this to speak.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: So you press the word in the computer on the
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: little litttle box says the word for you, and so
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: they would kind of punch out word combinations, and you
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: can't prompt a bonabo to do that. Um. And astoundingly
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: they tried to teach one of their first subjects, Matada this,
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: which I think means worries. I don't know, wouldn't it
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: looked it up yet, but I think it would Anyway.
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: Matada was pretty interesting because they tried to teach her
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: this and she was like, mmmmmm, I am not picking
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: this up. That's right. But it got really interesting because
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: Matada had a son named Kanzi, and Kanzi could pick
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: it up and he actually taught mom how to use this.
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: So Bonabo's were exactly like human beings, children teaching their
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: parents to technology. And this was after Matada got a
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: CD rom at Staples called how to use a Lexicon board.
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: She ordered it online. Actually right, and that I with
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: the bald head but the ponytail. Don't forget the pony Oh.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: But but the thing is about Conzi. They never taught Conzi.
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: He just happened to be present while they were trying
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: to teach Matata and one day he just started using
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: the alex com board and they just lost there. They
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: were so excited he knew how to use a lexicon
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: board to say come on mom. So Conzi is actually
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: widely regarded as one of the most intelligent apes in
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: any of the ape language experiments, um, which he demonstrated
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: when he wrote the movie Pay It Forward. I'm not
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: sure I get that one so bad it was written
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: by an ape. You don't read it, just enjoy it
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: on its face. It's a lot of good movie refs
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: in this one. So uh, pay It Forward? That was
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: the bad man right that say? Yeah, everyone, do you
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: way to bring my joke down? Shut? Sorry the spaceman so,
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: uh here where are we? I'm so lost? Now? Sorry? Um,
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: they were, Uh, I'm genuinely lost. Do you want me
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: to swoop carry? Cut all that out? Huh? Do you
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: want me to swoop in? Well, since you put it
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: that way, now, there was some other controversy in that,
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: um they had, and not just Penny Patterson, but other
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: people in this field had been accused of manipulating the
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: public over the years and uh sort of doing things,
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: especially when it comes to video, of kind of cooking
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: the books a little bit. It's very easy with video. Obviously.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: There was one sort of famous one with Kanzi, the
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: aforementioned Bonabo. There's a video of Kanzi putting together some
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: sticks to light a fire and getting out a lighter
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: cut two perfect drawing fire that kind of thing, or
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: you don't know what happened in between those moments. No,
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: but like you don't even notice it unless you're suspicious
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: of ape language research already, because we're also trained to
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: just overlook cuts and edits from all the movies and
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: TV shows that we've seen, and that that actually isn't harmful.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: It doesn't doesn't really do anything wrong, but it opens up,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: like legitimate researchers like the Rum Boss to accusations of
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: illegitimacy even though they're doing legitimate science. The fact that
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: they're kind of um exaggerating potentially what their subjects are
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: capable of in the mind of the public opens them
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: up to accusations like that. Well, and even Dr Patterson
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: would use words like, uh, Coco has mastered sign language
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: and stuff like that, and we love Cocoa and Coco
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: learned a lot, but Cocoa never mastered sign language. And
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: when you use words like that, um, these sort of
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: unscientific descriptions of what's really going on, it doesn't do
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: anyone in the field any favors. It doesn't and it
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: makes linguists go like, yeah, you have some crazy so uh.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: Today the scientific community. Um. Basically, this is kind of
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: where we are now. Since the eighties, a lot of
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: this research has dried up. UH. They don't really work
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: with apes and gorillas to teach them sign language much anymore,
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: partially because of this, partially because of the ethics of
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: of taking apes and guerrillas and and putting them uh
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: in human houses and making homes and things like that,
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: making them dependent on humans, taking away from their family.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: We're in a different place now in the world where
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: we don't do stuff like that as much, for sure, thankfully.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: But the scientific community does rightfully acknowledge that that ape
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: language research has shown apes are capable of using sign language,
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: of communicating on a human level with humans, which is
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: just astounding. And we're still learning more and more, and
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: we'll talk about that a little bit more. UM. Like
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: it's produced some insights into the minds of apes that
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: we did not have before. One of the things that
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: was pointed to as why apes couldn't communicate couldn't actually
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: use languages because they lacked a theory of mind. And
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: theory of mind is like, I know, Chuck has different beliefs,
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: um different views of the world, Like we're two different people.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: And they long thought that apes didn't have that. Well,
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: in two thousand seventeen, somebody thought to give apes uh
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: theory of mind tests that was developed for human infants,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, these tests started showing that no,
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: actually they do have a theory of mind. And this
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: was just a couple of years ago. So, um, the
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: field is still kind of going and developing, and it's
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: pretty exciting that people are still researching this kind of stuff. Yeah.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, what they've kind of moved more into now,
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: which makes sense to me, is maybe we shouldn't try
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: and teach uh guerrillas English, even in Sang language. Maybe
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: we should just see how they communicate with each other,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: and maybe we can learn from that and see what
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: guerilla languages all like teach ourselves their language, and that
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: would give us kind of an insight into their worldview. Uh.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: There was also Yeah, there's also some uh we we
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: can sidesteps some other controversies. The Gorilla Foundation was sued
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: at one point not too long ago by a couple
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: of uh former female scientists that worked for them, because
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: remember the nipple thing. Uh, Coco had a nipple fetish.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: There's really no other way to say it than that
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: someone just wooed that. Uh. If you look at the
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: Robin Williams video, Coco is trying to get in that
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: shirt and see his nipples. And uh. Dr Patterson would
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: show Coco her nipples over the years, and then she
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: would request other employees do the same, both male and female.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: And eventually some of those employees got uncomfortable with that. Uh,
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: they took her to court and it was settled out
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: of court. So we really don't know, you know, when
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: things are settled out of court what the final result is.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: But um, that was one of the sort of controversies
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: that they had encountered, the big nipple incident. Yes, we're serious.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: Have you listened to stuff you should before? Of course?
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: For serious? Are they making all this out? Are they
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: just riffing? This is amazing? Who are these guys? They're
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: not funny to be comedians, but I don't think they're
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: being truthful about their science. It was a really good
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: impression of that person. Why am I here? Who are
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: these people? So? Dr Patterson? Was that Jerry Seinfeld? Okay?
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: Dr Patterson? Basically when that line was drawn in the
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: sand on one side or the other, she said, you
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: know what. Uh, this is my my guerrilla daughter and
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to leave her. Uh. She kind of
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: shunned the scientific community in large part she didn't do
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: as many published papers. Those kind of dried up. Um,
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: the official research still goes on or still went on
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: for a while, and but it just wasn't like presented
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: as science so much as she's like, screw that, I'm
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: just gonna do it on my own. Then yeah, she
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: was like, I'm just gonna go directly to the public.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: The scientific community can rotten heell. Basically, so her outreach
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: to the public and um, her kind of pushing Coco
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: and just kind of sharing all things Coco that increased
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: while her kind of scientific commitment went down a little bit.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: But there's this documentary in two four I think you
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: mentioned before. It is Coco with a gorilla who talks
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: and there is a colon in there, and then there's
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: another colon called The Sad Story of ron Con in
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: parentheses beneath it. But in a um, Penny Patterson talks
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: about regrets and she said that her biggest regret is
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: that Coco never had a baby. Uh, and Coco apparently
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: wanted a baby. She used to tell Penny a lot
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: that she wanted a baby, and Penny really wanted a
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: baby for Coco. Um, but it didn't happen. Remember, they
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: brought in Michael, and Michael was going to be a
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: mate for Coco eventually. But what they didn't realize is
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: that an incest taboo exist among guerrillas and that they
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: raised them together from too young an age. And when
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: they finally got around to suggesting that they mate, both
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: Coco and Michael signed you it was not happening. It's
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: not Uh. They brought in another gorilla name in Duma,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: to mate. Uh. They never produced a child either, so uh,
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: I think in Duma went back to the Cincinnati Zoo
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: and then, very sadly, and you probably all remember this,
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: uh not too long ago. June nineteenth, two th eighteen,
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: Coco passed away in her sleep at the age of
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: forty six years old, and the world, or at least
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: America for sure, mourned Cocoa's death in a big way.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. Um, and she touched the lives of
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: people like that's just whether she knew the language or not.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: And we're pretty sure she was a very smart gorilla
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: who did no sign language. But whether she did or not,
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: that ambassadorship for Earth like really did have an effect,
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: and not just for like everyday people who actually did
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: care about the Earth more because they knew about cocoa
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: and she kind of transformed their view of things, but
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: also like scientists too. Um. There was a two thousand
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: fourteen symposium of guerilla experts, like people who are experts
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: in the grilla field, and they were asked at the symposium,
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: you know who is here because they were inspired by Coco,
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: Like who got into this because of Coco? And like
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: half of the people in attendance raised their hand. So
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: she really did have this major impact on the world. Yeah,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: for sure, there is great, great value in that, to
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: be sure. So there was a man named Charles Wesley Hume,
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: British Man who founded the University's Federation for Animal Welfare,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: and he kind of laid the stakes on this kind
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: of science out there pretty plainly, and he said this,
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: if I assume the animals have subjective feelings of pain, fear, hunger,
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: and the like, and if I'm mistaken in doing so,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: no harm will have been done. But if I assume
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: the contrary, would in fact animals do have such feelings,
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: then I opened the way to unlimited cruelties. Animals must
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: have the benefit of the doubt, if indeed there be
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: any doubt, right agreed, And so like what Coco lives
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: on as is this kind of litmus test. Because until
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: we can prove or disprove that that apes or any
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: animal does or doesn't have a subjective inner experience, um experience,
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: Did I get that? Then it's a matter of belief,
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: like you can believe whichever way you want. And and
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: Coco kind of pushes people to one side or the other.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: And when she died, um journalists around the world wrote
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: headlines that use words like Coco the master of sign language, um,
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: Coco the talking guerrilla, And a lot of skeptics came
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: out and tried to correct things with their own articles,
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: but they were like a drop in the ocean compared
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: to all the other articles. And it seems like the
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: world does want to believe that there is something more
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: to animals than we, you know, can prove, and perhaps
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: that ultimately is best. Let's Cocoa, Everybody Good? Double Stuff
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the I heart radio, app,
• 1:10:22
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• 1:10:28
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