September 3, 2025 • 62 mins
Do you have a bond with a household pet? Do they understand what you say to them -- and, if so, how much? In the first part of this two-part series, Ben, Matt and Noel dive deep into a question that's mystified humanity since the dawn of history: Can we really talk to non-human animals? Not at or to... but with? Tune in to learn how science may finally crack the code and turn us into real-life Doctor Doolittles.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
They call be Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you are here. That makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know, and we hope that your
pets are listening in as well. In tonight's conversation, we're
getting to something that is going to be familiar to
(00:50):
all pet owners and animal lovers in the crowd. It's
the idea that you might have a favorite pet and
you feel that, oh my gosh, this pet gets me.
We have a genuine bond. I don't just interact with
this dog or this cat or this parrot. We wholeheartedly
communicate with and understand each other on a deep level.
(01:15):
Have you guys ever had that feeling with an animal,
a furry, scalier feathered friend.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
I'm starting to feel it with my buddy Apollo. He's
very young, still less than a year old. But I
don't know. I feel like we get each other, and
it's a new face for me having that kind of
connection with an animal. I've only had cats in the past.
I don't feel like it's possible to connect with cats
on that level.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Ben, you may disagree.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
I just feel like they're kind of weird aliens and
they don't literally more figuratively speak the same language as
we do.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
A little man, my cat, Smoky really got me.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
That's cool.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I think, Toby, it's.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
A cat to cat situation.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
It is.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
I would say it's probably it's cat to cat. It's
person to person. And cats, as we're gonna find, are
a really interesting break in the narrative of domestication. You know,
we as we say, they domesticated themselves.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
And I saw recently a study. I need to look
deeper into it, but I've seen it in a few places. Evolutionarily, apparently,
they're like xenomorph levels of the perfect organism.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yeah, yeah, just like how alligators and crocodiles got to
a certain point of evolution and said we figured it out.
We're good, Well, we'll just continue. And I've seen I
don't know if you guys have seen clips of people
befriending gators. It's amazing. Also, don't try it at home.
(02:36):
But I love that you're bringing up the scientific breakthroughs there, Noel, because,
as we're going to find, recent research is making this
question of animal human communication more and more fascinating with
each passing year. So is it true, can we actually
speak not just at but with other animals? Hopefully here
(03:07):
are the facts. I mean, it's a fascinating question, right,
And the first thing we have to point out is
that humans are themselves technically animals.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
For sure, And also the concept of communicating with animals
seems very like anthropomorphizing and human centric, you know what
I mean, Just like, on a very basic level, it
implies a very you know, I don't know, Homo sapien
centric view of the animal kingdom, which just doesn't seem
(03:36):
to always hold because communications for all kinds of things
and can be very species dependent and very environment dependent,
and since we've kind of evolved away from a lot
of those things being as crucial, I just feel like
we're kind of in a little bit of an island
in terms of what that communication would even feel like.
I don't mean to poo poo, the idea I do
think there are probably breakthroughs coming that could bridge that gap,
(03:59):
but yeah, I don't know. It seems a little selfish
to think that dogs or cats or merangutans even given
about what we think.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
It's anthrocentric for sure, and I agree with that it's
because part of it is because humans just happen to
be the animals we know the most about, because humans
like asking questions about what it means to be human
and amid all the animals. If we put the anthrocentrism aside,
humans do appear to consistently have some of the most
(04:30):
sophisticated cognitive skill sets, you know, abstract thought, object permanence,
tool making, empathy. Your results may.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Be vary cognition key part of that too.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Thinking about thinking and science now agrees these and related
traits are by no means unique to humans. It was
something that was taught in school pretty often human exceptionalism.
It seems that despite sharing these traits across various organisms,
humans themselves are overall the most advanced in these pursuits,
(05:08):
depending again to your excellent point how you look at it.
Another issue is that humans and animals have been doing
little team ups since people started peopling, and then probably
before then, before modern Homo sapiens, the ancestors, the predecessors
of the Homo sapiens were befriending you know dogs, well, wolves,
(05:31):
wolves that they turned into dogs.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Well, yeah, and there's had to have been interaction between
human and animal, as you're saying, there have been for
so many different reasons.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
So there's been this history of humans hearing the calls
of various types of animals, right, and then attempting to
use language to communicate something to those animals. And we've,
as you said, were mentioning canines here, we've had some
success in getting canines to at least understand in some
(06:06):
part like a single word or a couple of words
strung together or something like that. And you could do
that with other animals like New Caledonian crows and a
bunch of other you know, apes that we've interacted with
and other other creatures. But like that, that thing, it's
still missing there to be able to the feedback right
(06:29):
from one to the other. Just because you can command
a dog to do something, doesn't mean that dog can
fully you know, give you a response.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Right, And just like someone singing along to a sublime
song in Spanish, and not speaking Spanish doesn't mean you
understand what you're saying. You're mimicking speech rather than participating
in conversation. And this a lot of this does go
back to domestications worth mentioning. We have a series about
(06:57):
the domestication of dogs on Ridiculous Hists or check it out.
Domesticated types of animals are actually quite rare in the
grand scheme of things. The alpaca, the sheep, the cow,
the pig, et cetera. All the hits, and then again cats,
you're a bit of an exception. You just showed up.
You literally just walked onto stage. And we also talked
(07:19):
previously in a conversation about plants that domestication is perhaps
more of a two way street than a lot of
humans like to admit, because certain animals and plants, you
could argue, have themselves affected the course of human evolution.
(07:39):
I mean, it's it's endlessly fascinating, and it's also incredibly difficult,
to your point, Matt, to prove how the first human
animal interactions that led to domestication began. We have good
guesses we're probably right, but somebody, wolf, pups and increasingly
(08:02):
tamed them. So the best analog for that is going
to be, of course, the infamous phenic fox experiments over
in Russia, where they found that you can take a
wild animal ethics aside over time, you can breed it
to become increasingly open to human interaction in a nonviolent way.
(08:23):
And when you are domesticating these types of animals, the
one thing that I think surprised a lot of people
is that they tend to keep juvenile features as they
as they grow up. Right, That's why wolves can look
like serious, you know, hard case customers. But you might
(08:43):
have a shizoo that is kind of like a baby
for the entirety of.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Its life, very strange.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
I don't know if it's fair to them. You ever
see certain dogs and you think, man.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
They don't look like they're having a good time, like
the problems and not and stuff. I mean, little Apollo
is like what you consider a purebred miniature poodle or
sorry toy poodle and has these tear stains that like
around the eyes that sort of like I don't think
it bothers them, but the eyes just get really really crusty,
(09:17):
and I do sometimes wonder is this a product of
or is this just a dog thing.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
I don't know, but ah yeah, there's a shizoo in
my family that is just adorable, but is a companion
dog rather than what we would call a function dog,
you know, like a hunting dog or art. Yeah, and
I've been hanging with that guy for a number of years,
(09:44):
who was probably my mother's favorite kid for a while
before she passed on.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
But uh yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
But the these traits have been purposely created by humans
over time, and they're not just physical, They're not just cosmetic.
Communicative traits have been encouraged too. And even if we
don't know how the grand story began, like I said,
we've got some pretty good guesses. And one thing that
was interesting I think to all of us in the
(10:11):
research is some people will even today tell you that
it was the intervention of the Anu Naki that led
to domesticated animals, so along with agriculture and fire return.
I love it.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
That's not on you, man, It's just the course of
human civilization.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I think ANKI came down with some of that toxoplasmosis
and that's how we got Christy.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
That's what I'm saying, man, talking about the perfect organism.
I mean, they literally can infect you and cause you
to do their bidding.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Me and toxoplasmosis is a fascinating example of symbiosis too right,
or a parasitic relationship, especially when you look at how
it affects some types of humans differently than others. They
get the general rule of thumb. What talks plasmosis Gandhi
is that female identified women who are infected will tend
(11:06):
to be more promiscuous, and that the dudes in the
crowd to get infected will tend to have like mental
issues down the road.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
That's the idea.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
That's what it did to me.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I think I'm not sure did you did you ever
get tested?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Did you actually tested? But I've had many a cat
in my life, and I was a wee boy, so
I imagine that it seemed in from somewhere.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
It has to have. And I'm sorry, I don't mean
to derail this at all, but like that is real, right,
I mean, obviously it's real in terms of like being tested,
But does it like what what are we meant to
be doing if infected with this.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Question?
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:42):
It changes it changes behavior, So it's we can't totally
blame this on the cat. But it changes behavior such
that it's easier for toxoplasmosis gandhi to to reproduce. That's
what parasites are all about. Ultimately, it's change in behavior
(12:02):
so that it can make more of itself and then
get to other things in its life cycle.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Okay, that's why I eat so much hot sauce, guys,
to hopefully flush out the gandhi.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, And we didn't even know about
the effects of this organism on human cognition until nineteen
forty seven, you know, and severe congenital toxoplasmosis can lead
to some like very gnarly stuff. But anyway, that is
(12:33):
maybe on a positive note, that's a communication aid with
your cat, But the idea of equal peer to pure
human animal communication is a real bag of badgers. Like
you were saying, animals, some animals and humans definitely communicate,
because all animals communicate on some level. If we're defining
that as action and response. Where cat meows, cat's also
(12:57):
meowing in general is another very weird thing. Your dog
knows how to signal your concerns like meadow knows how
to get the message across.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yes, and she says, give me food in dog, and
it's very.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Clear, it's quite explicit. Apollo does the same. My old
buddy Ed was very good at it too, because German
shepherds are quite clever. But I was thinking about it.
We could kind of also argue that every animal communicates
with humans. A tiger is effectively communicating displeasure by you know,
(13:32):
murder humans.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the exact same way that all
of our cats will eat our eyeballs the moment we.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Die, dogs will too.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
I think it'll take the dogs a little longer though.
That's my theory and I'm sticking to you.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
I like to think that.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
But ultimately, the coolest thing about that's very funny, guys,
But just take it to that tiger. The tiger is
communicating so much in its body language, right, That's one
of the things we talked about with.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Animal Lincoln her ass like a these.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Little things and sometimes like a small sound that is
not the same sound that's an alert sound that you
would hear. And there's all kinds of really interesting hunting
things like cats do. Right when you imagine them mimicking
the birds and doing that fun stuff by the window,
there's stuff going on there. But again it's us. It's
up to us to figure out what the hell it
really means or what is actually being, what the thoughts
(14:23):
are that are linked to that. Actually, I have.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
A real problem with my cat, Vanessa, because he just
it's yes, it's a male cat named Vanessa seems to
only know how to communicate through incessant, repetitive, noisy mewing,
and I often don't know what he wants and he
doesn't make it clear. He'll mea me me out to
come inside, then immediately mea mea me how to go outside. Uh,
(14:47):
it's not food time. I'm giving him pets. I'm perplexed
as to is he just trying to torture me and
and and reck my sanity? Like what do you want?
You Devil's spont or it's just open remarks, possible commentary, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Well, well, we're going to get into it further in
the episode. But there are some folks out there working
on getting you answers NOL specifically thank you.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yeah, And we're going to talk about some pretty fascinating
science when we when we explore these concepts, because animals
do communicate through scent, through marking territory, insects have really
creative communication abilities, like the fact that certain bees communicate
directions by not dancing for each other.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
That their little bee butts.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Uh huh yeah, yeap, work your way to like forget gps.
We have bees twerking that that is how they talk.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
It's what is the flag thing. It's like semaphore, right,
but with butts, but with butts.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Finally, finally, the time has come. That is the only
problem with semaphore and birds. Of course, anyway, it goes
on and on. This is the crux of our episode.
Aside from communication overall, what about speech? Can you, as
a human not just talk at or two animals, but
(16:17):
can you speak with them? Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, goodness, yes,
asteris caveat fine print mm yep.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
M m yeah. All the things we've mentioned previously probably
being contained within that asterisk.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
So first, to be clear, by talking with we mean
holding a conversation like you were saying, there, Matt, it's
that's not the same thing as your favorite non human animal.
Knowing a few of your vocalizations what we would call words,
you know, like the name you use for them, apollo,
come here, boy, or key phrases, like walk or treat
(16:57):
or sit or you know, if you got commands, maybe
just say norway and the dog knows that means to
spin around in a certain way.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
Yeah, or Machschnell to your Doberman.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
What does that do?
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (17:12):
I mean, I mean apparently a lot of neo Nazis
trained their their attack dogs with German commands.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Oh that's love.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Yeah, yeah, it's a new way to profile dogs. I
feel really bad about it, but I do it too.
I'm like, I don't know, I don't know. I trust
this dog. It does no German.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Oh jeez.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
But those who were like, I don't trust the owners,
you know what I mean? I think we're all very
pro dog here.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
There was a really interesting study coming out of the
University of Geneva last year about dog human communication in
those respects and about those singular words you know, or
commands that you're talking about there, and and it was guys,
it was amazing. They connected the EEGs up to both
dogs in humans like pairs, as they're talking and communicating
(17:58):
and wanting things from each other. It was so cool
to see how basic it's. It's almost as if humans
and canines are on different speeds. If that makes sense
when it comes to how much like you and I
and we can all understand per minute, and then how
much a dog can understand per minute, and then why
(18:19):
those commands are so effective when it's only one or
two syllables that occur to make a thought happen or
a concept occur. It's really interesting stuff. But then it
makes you think about, well, how when we're communicating to
our canine in that way, and then it is communicating
back to us in pretty similar like phrasings and similar
(18:44):
repeated sounds like the barks. If you think about those,
it's not a bunch of different types of barks occurring
at once. It's like bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, barks. Well,
it just just to put out there. It's very interesting
when we're thinking about communication in this way and our
(19:04):
effectiveness thus far as humans talking with animals like that's
probably as close as we've come outside of some bird
species that can mimic and repeat, right, But some of
that's a little different. And then of course some of
the primate studies where you can actually communicate often sent
with sign language and things like that.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, or appear to communicate yeah, a sign language. Yeah,
well we got to get into it. So the anthrocentrism
point is something we're going to return to time and
time again, because it's more fair to say that human
animals have different modes of communication than that of other animals.
If you think your dog is dumb because it doesn't
(19:48):
understand what you're saying about the gold standard and the
eighteen hundreds, well guess what Fido thinks. You're pretty slow
too in terms of dog language. It's like this guy.
I've known this guy for three years, hasn't stiffed my
butt once? You know what I mean? Like what it is?
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Yeah, come on, what's wrong with me?
Speaker 3 (20:07):
It's because humans tend to prioritize sight. That is one
of the big information channels through which the human experience
is the world. And that's also why body language is
often more important in an in person conversation than the
content of the speech. That's also why text messages can
be so easily misinterpreted. Sorry to my mom and all
(20:31):
of my ex girlfriends. My bad. We can all unfortunately
feel that way, no doubt. Yeah, so it's crazy because
that the site thing is very common across a lot
of primates. Right, the parent company of the human experiment,
which is why you should never, ever, under any circumstances,
(20:53):
make prolonged eye contact with a gorill. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
They'll rip your face off, if I'm not mistaken, your
face off.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, even if everything is cheesecake and you have known
this gorilla for years and you hang out and you
share sign language with each other, don't look them in
the end.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
Because that is a very species specific form of threat. Right.
Can we take a minute here really quickly to talk
about the all the ink that's been spilled about Coco
the gorilla and the sign language of it all, and like,
is that really communication or is it training?
Speaker 3 (21:29):
You know?
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Wait, wait, wait, well I don't know this, So there's
like huge.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Falsific not that it's falsified, it's just it's you can
train an animal with a certain level of intelligence to
do a thing, but does that mean that it understands
exactly what it's doing? And you know, folks who interacted
with Coco would say yes, like Flea and Robin Williams
or whatever, But what do you know, Ben, I just
thought it would be a good time to bring that
(21:54):
up because it's all, oh yeah, been a head scratcher
for me.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah, we'll get into this in more depth as we
go through some examples, but you're absolutely right now. There
is a huge amount of controversy about Coco the gorilla
and the experiments with communication. There By the time she
had passed away in twenty eighteen, people who were fans
(22:18):
of the research and researchers involved in the project believe
that she could understand something north of two thousand spoken
words in English. But as we'll go, we'll see why
some other people take.
Speaker 4 (22:31):
Except me the scoop us on that it's just on
my mind and I'm excited to dig more into it.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Oh, one hundred percent, man right there with you. We
also know that the leader of the pack are a
plus students are, of course dogs, because they've evolved to
communicate more effectively with humans, up to understanding things like
pointing right or even sign language. You don't always have
to talk to a dog. You can do a little
(22:57):
twirly and it'll know what you mean. They even evolved.
I think I don't know about you, guys, but I'm
pretty sure this is one of our favorite dog evolution facts.
They evolved muscles, physical musculature around the eye, socket to
help them convey info to humans. Puppy dog guys are
a real evolutionary grift.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
This is my least favorite thing because my dog, who
is asleep behind me right now, very happy, very content.
But when she's awake and I'm doing something and I'm busy,
like sitting here at the desk researching or something, she
will wink at me. She will stare at me until
I make eye contact with her, then she will wink.
And she's doing it on purpose, you could tell. And
(23:40):
I don't know what she means or why she's doing it,
but it freaks me out.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I hear you, man. I also feel like I love
how that's somewhat ominous. Yes, and I've met Meadow and
she's awesome.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
She is awesome, But it's this. Have you ever you
guys ever watch Awquatine Hunger.
Speaker 4 (23:57):
Force absolutely number one?
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Hood Well, it reminds me of the hand Banana, Like,
look up that episode the hand Banana that for some
reason I get those vibes. It creeps me out.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
I also am a little freaked out by when it
feels like a dog is smiling. I think they can, yeah,
but is it just being you know too anthrocentric. It
feels like they smile and I had. You know, my
my last dog ed a legendary German shepherd. Uh. I
(24:32):
feel like he had a sense of humor. I feel
like he had. It's a humor because he would uh,
he would do something and then he would smile at me,
so he didn't know he was supposed to. Dylan is
saying smiling is often a sign of discomfort. However, Dylan
has not specified whether that's a sign of discomfort for
humans or for dogs. And mat is smiling and hurt.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
It hurts. I'm uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, yeah, And that's a cultural thing too. Throughout different
human civilizations. There are some parts of the world where
you just smile to avoid disagreeing with someone or saying something.
I'm thinking specifically of Thailand, which has the nickname the
Land of a Thousand Smiles.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Biting your tongue right.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Exactly. So this is crazy because the primary way a
dog encounters communication in the world around it is smell.
So a blind dog is kind of like a person
who lost their sense of smell in that they can
still get around easily in their world, but a dog
without a sense of smell could be said to be
(25:43):
similar to a blind person because their environmental interactions can
be much more challenging. It's a weird way to think
about it, but it's worth mentioning because it does affect communication.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, there's a group of these like gray that are
back behind my house, and the only reason Meadow knows
they're there is because she smells them. I can see
them walking around back in the woods, but she doesn't
usually see them. But then all of a sudden, you'll
see her ears perk up and sniff the air, and
then she gets real riled up and like, oh, basically
(26:18):
get away from here kind of vibes. And it's only
because she smelled them.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Yeah, and that's again, there's so many facets to communication,
and talking or speaking is just one very small part
of that.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
A pretty good companion piece to this episode would be
our recent discussion on pheromones and all of the ways
that chemical chemical communication.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
I guess right, one hundred percent. Yeah, and good callback.
Speaking of speech and communication, we're going to pause and
introduce you to some sponsors we've returned all to say, yes,
you can sort of talk with animals and they can
(27:01):
sort of understand you in that like all the examples
we named, we can generally get the gist of basic stuff.
Oh you've got a poop, Oh you're hungry. Oh there's
some coyotes over there, you know.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
But yo, did you know that.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
There are tons of coyotes around here in Atlanta?
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Yeah, I had no idea. I was recently looking to
adopt a pup and this is the woman from the
rescue situation told me about how we are just lousy
with coyotes, especially in the cab County area.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Oh yeah, I love reading the reports on neighborhood pages
where someone's like, have you lost a dog anybody in
this neighborhood?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (27:44):
No, I mean that's the thing. I do have indoor
outdoor animals, And it really has made me rethink that
I actually had no idea.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
So good to know the old house. They look they
look like foxes that are way too big. What the
hell is that?
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Crypt So definitely, and so many people, you know, maybe
not more familiar with the wilderness because they grew up
in or reside in cities, genuinely will mistake coyotes for dogs,
up to an including trying to pet them.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, you guys heard of the mained fox, the mained wolf.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yes, I have heard of the mained wolf.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Dude, I discovered that thing in research for this episode,
and yeah, I am fully freaked out. Look at that
thing and then imagine one that's hairless or you know,
losing its hair or another, and then imagine a cup
of Caabra's.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Animate, like a skinny likely fox. Yeah, yeah, I wish
they're the proportion of their leg to head to torso
didn't bother me so much, I know.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
YouTube deer yeah, YouTube headline deer fox Wolf.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Nope, yeah, exactly. And if you see footage of them walking,
they look sneaky. They untrustworthy.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
Oh yeah, they also got like a weird black mohawk,
almost like a razorback pig or something.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
That's the main Yeah baby, yeah. So all right, Look,
you can talk all the livelong evening to all sorts
of all sorts of non human animal companions, but there's
currently no real case of someone like debating the history
of the Right Brothers or the meaning of mortality and
(29:28):
the soul. No feline to date has made a hip
hop album, probably because they don't want to, but I
assume right, But for most of human history, again, anthrocentrism reigned.
We were convinced this communication didn't work because animals were
dumber than humans. Human exceptionalism. It's the argument that people
(29:54):
are at the top of the hierarchy of evolution because quote,
people are just the best the bee's knees. But it's myopic,
it's convenient, it's kind of self serving because humans, again,
we always have to bring this up, don't really have
an understanding of intelligence other than being able to function
successfully in a given environment. So that means if you
(30:17):
wake up in a mangrove swamp and there's a tiger there,
technically the tiger is the smartest one in the room.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, at least for a while. But I
think the thing that trips me up with this kind
of discussion is just the fact of language as an invention,
as a technology, as a thing, right, because we humanity did,
for one reason or a thousand create this thing, and
(30:48):
then that thing appears to be the reason we're able
to do almost everything if yeah, everything that we do
together collectively like some big works, right, Language at least
played a very large part in all of that stuff.
So I think one of the bigger, biggest questions for
today is do other species and animals, especially ones that
(31:11):
we see working together a lot, everything from you know,
ants to cetaceans, is there a fully shared language with
complexity that we just cannot grasp with our understanding, right
and with our.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Language and with our hardware and our equipment. That's a
big part of it. Yeah, that's why the concept of
intelligence anthrocentrically put is so dangerous. Right, Humans, despite being
somewhat condescending historically to the natural world, humans also really
really want to talk with animals, like really want this
(31:48):
one to work out, and so the human wants to
feel that there's this mutual exchange of ideas and concepts.
We're going to have a genuine dialogue and that creates
or that can create damning confirmation bias and otherwise really robust,
rigorous research. Like we mentioned Coco the gorilla briefly, there
(32:10):
also an equal shout out to Alex, the parent, who
is just heartbreaking. And we were talking about this a
little bit off air. Noel, you remember Alex, right, the parrot.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
I'm sorry, I don't think I do. I remember Mango. Well,
what's the who's Alex?
Speaker 3 (32:26):
Mao? Mago's the snitch parent. Yeah, Alex. The Gray Parents
a subject of some controversial research about human animal communication
and Alex. Alex sadly went viral with a quote that
we had at the at the top of our episode here.
(32:48):
His last known words were in English to his human partner,
his bonded partner and researcher, Alex. As she was leaving,
Alex looked at and said, you be good. I love you.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
I know, never have I felt a feel about a
bird before this very moment.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Well that's the thing too, to that earlier point we made,
was he mimicking sound that he had been trained to mimic?
Or was it I want to know what love is
kind of situation? Was it a what song is that?
Speaker 4 (33:25):
I don't know the artist is, I think wonder, but
it's a banger.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
I want you to show want you to show me.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
And so uh, these assumptions, these desires of long stymy
the science and our question is what if that is changing?
Could new research, tech and new cooperative endeavors make our
big wish of talking to animals come true? It's it's similar.
If so, it'd be similar to what we talked about
(33:55):
in the past with humanity literally creating superpowers and ghost
through technology. Right, And you could also say, kind of
to your point about languages. Technology, it's so important for
the human experiment because it allows us to speak to
the dead, right or to learn from the dead. You know,
(34:18):
pretty powerful when you think about it that way. So
maybe the way that we're making all these amazing things
happen now, maybe something similar will happen with animals. I
don't know. I think.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
I got my hopes, so Ben, I got my way. Yes,
there's there's some cool stuff going on out there. All
you got to do is be super super positive about
the things AI can do. That's all you gotta do.
Just be really excited about AI, and then there's some
(34:54):
cool stuff coming up.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah, it's it's a give and take for sure. I
mean we also one thing I'm sure we all saw
this too. One thing that had a real flash in
the pan moment that a lot of people were hopeful
about was the idea of the paw pads, the button
pads that your dog could use. Uh as you can
(35:19):
tell you. Yeah, he was in the back. It's bull
it's blarky.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
And also this this cardinal has really giving me the
old stink eye.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yeah, this button communication craze. We've all I think we've
all seen the videos.
Speaker 5 (35:40):
Right.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Someone has their dog and they've got something that looks
like an old ne e S power pad on the
living room floor and they're like, oh, you know, Buster
or mcguiver or whatever, do you want to go outside?
And then the dog hits a button and it's a
recorded voice going like yes, mother, I would enjoy a
constitution or whatever.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
Is Well, it's because the human partner can program and
record what the buttons say, right.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
And there's some really astonishing videos out there, and people
who you know, have been using those buttons with their
Kanine Companish for a long time and it appears to
be super effective, at least in the footage we get
to see.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
That's a very important point. Yeah, so you will not
see unsuccessful versions of this. You'll see versions where a
dog wants to treat and they walk over to the
pad and they hit the button that says treat or
wants to go on a walk, and it hits the
button that's signals walk. You could also code it to
(36:49):
have more complex things like hey, Kujo, do you want
to go see grandmother? The idea goes, if this stuff works,
the dog understands enough about what you're saying to select
a yes or no answer. But then, you know, you
could alternatively say, hey, Kujo, do you want to go
to the vet and get your balls cut off? And
(37:10):
Kujo could hit a button that says Sharon again, your
constant betrayal is ruining our relationship. Like you can just
type whatever is the point.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah. There have been examples that were caught on video
where let's say a couple is working in their home
office and there's a video that's running live downstairs where
the buttons are set up, and the dog goes down
there and starts growling and then runs over to buttons
and hits.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Stranger out five, stranger outside.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
Stranger, you know.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And it's like that. It's tough to argue with that
kind of response where the dog is attempting to communicate
something it is experiencing to its you know, its person.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
Yeah, fully agree. And this is not we're asking if
this works. We have to remember it's not itself an
original technology. This is part of what we call alternative
communication tech, and it's been around for quite some time.
It's been very helpful for people who have certain levels
of autism, or suffer from neurological conditions or encountered a stroke,
(38:19):
you know what I mean. In some ways, it's very
very similar to this, and I keep getting hung up
on it. I think we all do. Does the dog
understand the conversation taking place? Or is it just showing
how effective operant conditioning can be. You know, is it
responding to you and the content of what you're saying,
(38:41):
or is it more your body language and your smell
and your intonation and the thousand other signals you send
out that you are not aware of. But the dog
clocks immediately.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
It tends toward the latter. Not to be a web
blanket or anything, but that just that kind of condition
is powerful. And you know, we know dogs, domesticated animals,
dogs in particular, are pretty good at picking up on
that kind of stuff, or you know, they're trainable.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, that's one of the interesting things that came out
of that Geneva study I mentioned earlier in the episode.
They they did find that the patterns of stress and
intonation in whatever is being said end up being one
of the most important things for a dog to feel,
to seem like it's understanding what's being said. So not
even the words themselves as much, so like the way
(39:34):
words are formed, but it's how you say it. When
you say you want to go to see Grandma or
you know, hey, meadow, and like right.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Now they're probably perked up.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Nope, she's fast asleep, she's fine. But if I say
it in that way, I know she's I'm going to
get a response. And it's not because I've trained her
to do that. It's because she knows or she has
almost like learned right over time. When I talk like that,
something good is going to be following that.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Right exactly. Yeah. So so what your dog heres is
when you say want to go for a walk, your
dog heres baba da ba da bah.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
But if you say do you want to go for
a walk, yeah, it's not the same, it's not. It
reminds me of that excellent moment in pop music history
when a spiteful Italian made a song that sounded like English.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Oh yeah, and it was a hit, right, it was
a hit.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Yeah, And he pretty much did it because I don't
know about this.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
What was the song?
Speaker 1 (40:37):
No?
Speaker 3 (40:38):
I think what we'll do here is if you're okay
with the guys, let's just play a clip of it.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Oh okay, you gotta find a place that will recognize
I don't remember the intro to this one.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm going past the intro where
he's teaching. Okay, formula, do you prison coolin is mini
at cause you wow? Okay, we're not even gonna spell it,
but here we go.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Wait a times, hoping the same, then maybe get to
come above time. I'm grooving hard, y'all.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Oh man, don't sue us, Adriano and your representatives.
Speaker 4 (41:20):
What are they saying? What are they yelling at me
about it?
Speaker 3 (41:23):
It's totally made up?
Speaker 4 (41:24):
Cool got it?
Speaker 3 (41:25):
It sounds like English, made it up to sound like English,
So if you didn't speak English, based on the intonation,
you could think it's about anything, any number.
Speaker 4 (41:34):
Of positive, happy things, fascinating.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
It's not a banger.
Speaker 4 (41:40):
I couldn't agree that. I'm putting it on my dance
party playlist.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
Your certified summer gold playlist.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
Yeah, you've still got a few few days left to
maximize summer grooves.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
Can I throw something in your real quick?
Speaker 4 (41:52):
Guys?
Speaker 2 (41:53):
I mean, this is one of the words of the
day for me at least in the research this week,
Prosody and I, I think I've heard this. I think
I've heard us say this before on this show, proso
d Y. That is the quote patterns of stress and
intonation in a language, which is exactly what that person
was using to make it sound like English.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
One hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (42:16):
Yeah, the cadence there, but there the right emphasis on
the right selab.
Speaker 5 (42:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
And I wasn't expecting us to get to that, frankly
awesome reference, but it does. I do think it's a
cool analogue to what maybe your dog is hearing, right,
because your dog doesn't really speak your language outside of
knowing a few terms. Yes, and it's not because at all.
It's not because we're not saying dogs are dumb, quite
(42:44):
the opposite. They just have a vastly different tool set
of communication avenues.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
Yeah, and I guess you know. I'm sorry I keep
harping on cats. Sounds like I'm picking on them, But
I sometimes wonder do the cats not under stand that
cadence the same way or do they just not give
a crap.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
I saw a study years back that said day wired
up some cat brains. They said the brain activity, the
cognitive activity, in your cat's head when you call its name,
proves that it does know you are talking to it
about like it. It just doesn't care. Okay, that's it,
(43:28):
And that that does seem to be a pretty solid
experiment because we have data right from brain scans, from monitoring.
But what say we pause for word from our sponsors
and we come back with some examples of how these
experiments can go so hilariously wrong. We now introduced to
(43:52):
the stage clever hands. Oh yes, the hardest, Yes, the
smartest of our equine ends apparently early nineteen hundreds. He
could tell us a little bit about this.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
He did stuff with his hoofs, with his quiet. He
was like he was like a regular mister red.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Well, but he was math based rights so much.
Speaker 4 (44:14):
That's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Yeah. Also, the way they got mister ed to quote
unquote talk on that so weird.
Speaker 4 (44:25):
No, on the gums, he wouldn't see the peanut butter,
but that's what he was like eating it from the inside.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
Yeah, it's gross. I can't believe they made a whole
series that just hinged on that one idea.
Speaker 4 (44:36):
Yeah, it gets in all kinds of high jinks. Clever Hans.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
Indeed the early nineteen hundreds. For a while, everyone, including
Hans's trainer, the closest human to this creature, believed that
he could do maths, real, real good. The trainer would
pose math problems and Hans would listen and then clippity clop,
clippity clop the sert with his hooves on the wooden floor.
(45:04):
M hm.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
And people thought that Hawns was better at math than
a lot of human school children. The pickle of it
is the badger in the bag here is that people
asked Hans math questions when the trainer wasn't there, And
if they asked when the trainer wasn't there, this poor
guy had no idea what to do. He's staring at
(45:27):
people like, well, are you gonna give me a carrot
or an apple or something? Or he just gobbledygook in me.
He was he was not a polymath of the equine world.
He was getting unconscious cues from his trainer. So without
those cues, Hans didn't know what to do.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Interesting, so like the way his trainer would look would
show him what the answer was, or like movements or
I don't know, it makes me wonder if Hans was
just like.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
You can't make me do these tricks again. The trainer
wasn't like trying to pull a grift. I think he
believed this was going on as well, and maybe did
not realize he was giving the game away.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
That's what we suspect because Hans would start his response
to a question by tapping his hoof, and then he
would notice, because horses are very observant animals, that people
around him were getting more tense as including the trainer,
as he was approaching the correct number of taps. And
(46:33):
then so you'd say like, hey, Hawns, what's uh five
plus four? And Hawns would think about it for a
second and would look like he was thinking. He's kind
of looking around to get the you know, to read
the room. And so as he's getting closer to eight,
people are leading in yeah, and he gets denied and
(46:53):
everyone's like, oh my god, he's done it again. He
just stops, and he just stops yeah, and he gets it. So,
I mean, dogs are even better than horses at picking
up those cues. And it's true that the vast majority
of dog owners don't know the full extent of the
signals we're communicating. To our furry pals, especially especially smell right,
(47:19):
like you could say, you know, I think a lot
of us dog lovers f had situation where you were sad, right,
you didn't say anything to your dog about it, but
your dog somehow new and then came and like cuddled
up next to you or walked up to him, whimpered
or something. You know, Have you guys ever experienced that,
(47:39):
like your dog seems to have clocked something about your
mental state.
Speaker 4 (47:45):
Absolutely, I just yeah, it just feels like dogs are
That's why people love them so much. That there's a
certain intuition there and a certain like I don't know,
ability to kind of have those types of exchanges, whether
they're real or imagine. But I think any dog lover
would say that they're definitely real. And I, again, as
a relatively new dog person, I kind of feel that.
(48:07):
So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
With I don't know, I feel like I've just got
a distorted lens here, But I feel like I had
that with one of my cats when I was a kid,
When I was feeling low, this specific cat would do
the whole lay on your chest thing, but only and
the specific time. So I don't love but again that's
my perception of a moment and behaviors right that are
(48:29):
that I can't fully interpret other than how it's affecting me.
So yuh oh, that's an interesting concept.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
It's a tough one, right We also, as we noted earlier,
with the buttons, with the button pads, the paw pads,
you'll see a lot of videos of dogs appearing not
to just hit one button to say walk, but like
you were saying, Matt, Mom, stranger outside. This would imply
that they were making full sentences and phrases right right now.
(49:01):
As much as we hate to be those folks at
the party or at the dog park, the current scientific
consensus is that in these situations, your pooch is not
responding to the conversation. It's responding to the human behavior.
I can tell you're excited. It's excited too.
Speaker 4 (49:19):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
This is the tone that guy always uses when I'm
getting a treat, you know. So I know that I
can hit this button get a treat. But that's just conditioning.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
But I do know, just as not to be contradictory,
just to state that I have observed in my life
doing the tone, intonation and kind of thing that we're
talking about but using a different keyword. And I think
it is something at the connection between that intonation and
a specific keyword or two to where I can say
(49:51):
you want to go for a run? Want to go?
Or you want to go for a run, and she's like, no,
I don't know what you mean. But then if I
use the W word that I'm I'm not going to
use her right now because she's right behind me, would
she would flip out and be excited?
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Okay? Yeah? Yeah. I think there's definitely a trigger with
some phrases and with training. Right. It also reminds us
of the earlier experiments with human language when I can't
remember which monarch it was, but he became convinced that
if you raised children without any language at all, they
(50:31):
would naturally begin speaking the original language, the divine language,
whatever that was. Yeah, it turned out no, they didn't.
Their cognitive years or their formative years were robbed of language,
and life was very difficult for them. I think we
did something more ridiculous history about those folks. Yea, yeah,
(50:53):
But anyhow, this gets us to the continuing research. You know,
we are going to talk about some more different types
of research, some initiatives some specific experiments with specific kinds
of animals, including cetaceans, elephants, birds, cephalopods, and primates. Maybe
maybe we start there right because we mentioned Coco earlier
(51:16):
and humans or technically primates, so logically those two things
would be close enough together to maybe have the best
chance of pure communication.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
The hope at least is that the way the brains
are formed, right, our brains are their brains, there's gonna
be something in there that makes that magical connection of language. Hopefully,
even though we have yet to observe, you know, primates
with a sophisticated enough vocalization, you know, series of patterns
to call it something language, right, we haven't observed it yet.
(51:53):
But again, as you stayed before, Ben, maybe we're just
not fully able to pick things up in a way
yet that there is communication happening, right. That's why I
think about some of the other animal species we're going
to talk about, like maybe we literally just don't hear
them when they're talking, right, because they can pick up
different frequencies and things like that. But I think that's
(52:14):
been tested actually in many cases, especially when we get
into the whale communication. Like, oh, like, could you create
a whole language with that sound maybe.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
And elephants as well, that that's a trippy one too. Yeah,
so okay, we have a reasonable assumption, but an assumption nonetheless,
that it might be easier to speak with primate relatives.
And we know that physiologically, your average gorilla doesn't have
(52:46):
the hardware needed in the throat and the larynx to
create the vocalizations that humans use in language, or to
create all of them. So why not use sign language?
And did you have that moment where you realize that
different languages have different versions of sign language as well?
Speaker 4 (53:06):
No, I didn't know that, I don't think, but that
makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
Yeah, it weirded me. I was very proud of learning
some asl not with fluency, and I couldn't wait to
show it off. And the person I talked to, who
was very nice, hipped me to the fact that, no,
you're just sort of doing a hand version of yelling
at someone in English after they told you they don't
speak English. You know, the classic tourist thing. What if
(53:32):
I ask louder? So, Yeah, we're in that situation with
a lot of primate communication stuff, because the idea there
is we can still count it as talking if we're
communicating in sign language. And that's where you see those
amazing clips like the ones who were describing nol with
(53:52):
Robin Williams meeting Coco and who else was was it
mister Rogers?
Speaker 4 (53:57):
Mister Rogers also flee from the red hot chili peppers.
Speaker 3 (54:02):
I don't know why that makes sense?
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong here. Wasn't Jane
Goodall involved in a lot of that? Or was she
just a part of it on the side?
Speaker 4 (54:11):
And do I just have a college she was Coco adjacent?
She's definitely like gorillas in the misted adjacent. Okay, but
maybe so, I mean she certainly would have been aware
of Coco.
Speaker 3 (54:21):
Yeah, yeah, she would have to have been aware. So
Coco gets this huge amount of scientific interest and the
spotlight because her sign language is seen by her supporters
as not just exhibiting empathy, but also being capable of
doing things like arguing or creatively conveying concepts by making
(54:46):
new word phrase groups. Right, So it's a big indicator
of language. If you have let's say you have two
separate symbols. One of them is for trash and one
of them is for cat and then you show you
show this gorilla a raccoon, and instead of saying what's that,
it says, oh, trash cat.
Speaker 4 (55:09):
Exactly makes sense, also known as trash Panda, also.
Speaker 3 (55:13):
Known as trash Panda. Yeah, man, So that's that's the idea.
But the issue again with Coco became that perhaps the
humans who had bonded with this gorilla and with other
gorillas and similar experiments, perhaps they were just kind of
hearing what they wanted to hear, or perhaps they were
(55:35):
just sort of like setting someone up to respond for
a treat or affection or something like that. And it's
heartbreaking to know that's a controversy because those videos are just.
Speaker 4 (55:48):
So heartwork they are, but it's also a powerful thing.
That confirmation bias can be a real powerful thing. And Matt,
to your point about Jane Goodall, she didn't meet Coco
one time, and she looked at Coco as a confirmation
of what she had long believed about these primates, that
they were sentient in that way. I mean, of course
(56:10):
they're sentient, but they were communicative and had the ability
to connect on a direct level. And when Coco passed
away in twenty eighteen, Jane Goodall said, Coco, you taught
us much about the gorilla intellect, and you were much loved.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
You will be missed.
Speaker 4 (56:24):
And then it says in this Instagram post, though doctor
Goodall only had the chance to meet Coco once, her
interaction remains a remarkable one for Jane, and all Coco
taught us will live on as Jane study chimpanzees. The
insights of Coco's life as a gorilla with tremendous communication
skills were essentially understanding more about great apes, and she
lived as a reminder of what Jane had always believed,
(56:44):
that we are not so different from the rest of
the animal kingdom. So I'm not saying she was wrong.
I'm just saying, like, when you work towards something your
whole life and then you see something that confirms that
it's easy to want that thing to be true.
Speaker 3 (57:00):
Yeah, well there is.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
I just remember Jane Goodall's work span so much right,
and there's so so many interesting things. I recall her
looking at chimpanzees, like early on in the what if seventies,
maybe sixty seventies, when chimpanzees were being first taught like language,
sign language, and then this concept that potentially they could
(57:22):
understand written language in the written word, which was that
was always the big one for me. I could a
chimpanzee or you know, any great ape read a sign
and understand what it says. And when you see some
of that, some of that stuff, you just realize, oh, well,
maybe there is the capacity for at least written language,
(57:42):
even if you don't have the hardware right to make
the sounds. Maybe could write h.
Speaker 3 (57:48):
Yeah, it's similar to those other assistive technologies that have
been used for people with strokes. Could you could you
just make it like if the mind is already working
and capable of doing that, the capable of functioning that level,
then we just need to get at the right toye
and the right tools. And that's pretty amazing if true.
Speaker 2 (58:10):
You know.
Speaker 3 (58:11):
Also, I've got to give a shout out here as
we're wrapping up part one of this exploration, I've got
to give a shout out to everybody who owns a
husky who heard us say arguing is indicative of communications.
Crazy argumentative. Yeah, huskies will just not not stop. They
(58:33):
got a lot of sass.
Speaker 2 (58:36):
It's still asleep, by the way, that she's.
Speaker 3 (58:37):
Still asleep because she knows it was you. If you
get a real husky in there, no, she'd smell it first.
But with this guy's we're kind of ending, we're kind
of pausing in media arrests. We haven't gotten to cephalopods
or seti or a couple of other organizations we want
to talk about, or even birds or elephants. I oh gosh,
(58:59):
it keeps going citations whales, whales.
Speaker 2 (59:03):
Dude, let's give let's give everybody a little bit of homework.
If you choose to do it. You're not gonna get
a grade on this and this is and you're not gonna,
you know, get in trouble if you don't do this,
But just ask some homework if you want to. In
between this episode and the next part that comes out,
look up something called the Earth Species Project and something
called Project Cetacean Translation Initiative. Check those out and see
(59:28):
what you think about them, because we're gonna have a
whole conversation about those and other animals and the attempts
to get humankind to be able to not only understand
what animals specifically are vocalizing, but also to be able
to revocalize to those.
Speaker 3 (59:44):
Animals right to speak with to meet them where they're at. Yes, linguistically,
and this is an exciting time to be alive and
to learn about this research. Folks, we can't wait to
hear your animal anecdotes. You have come to the right place.
You can always send us cat pictures, dog pictures, pet pictures.
Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
We love it.
Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
Tell us your weirdest situations with animal communication, and please
tune in in the near future for chapter two of
Can We Actually Talk to Animals? In the meantime, you
can call us on a telephone. You can send us
an email. You can find us on the line.
Speaker 4 (01:00:24):
Yes, indeed, find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where
it gets crazy, on ax fka, Twitter, and on YouTube
with video content for you to enjoy. On Instagram and TikTok. However,
we are Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
You can also call us. Our phone number is one
eight three three st dwy TK. Turn those letters into numbers.
You'll figure it out, and then you'll find yourself in
a voicemail system. You'll hear somebody's voice, you know it's beat,
and you'll hear some sounds like some music, and then
leave your message. You've got three minutes. Say whatever you want,
(01:01:03):
give yourself a cool nickname, and let us know in
the message if we can use your name and message
on the air. If you would instead like to send
us an email, you sure can.
Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet I'm afraid sometimes the
void writes back and just for the vibe check now, folks,
the email us looking for random fact. It's probably going
to be animal related, at least for this week. I
just think we got super into this one conspiracy at
(01:01:33):
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
They call be Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you are here. That makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know, and we hope that your
pets are listening in as well. In tonight's conversation, we're
getting to something that is going to be familiar to
(00:50):
all pet owners and animal lovers in the crowd. It's
the idea that you might have a favorite pet and
you feel that, oh my gosh, this pet gets me.
We have a genuine bond. I don't just interact with
this dog or this cat or this parrot. We wholeheartedly
communicate with and understand each other on a deep level.
(01:15):
Have you guys ever had that feeling with an animal,
a furry, scalier feathered friend.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
I'm starting to feel it with my buddy Apollo. He's
very young, still less than a year old. But I
don't know. I feel like we get each other, and
it's a new face for me having that kind of
connection with an animal. I've only had cats in the past.
I don't feel like it's possible to connect with cats
on that level.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Ben, you may disagree.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
I just feel like they're kind of weird aliens and
they don't literally more figuratively speak the same language as
we do.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
A little man, my cat, Smoky really got me.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
That's cool.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I think, Toby, it's.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
A cat to cat situation.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
It is.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
I would say it's probably it's cat to cat. It's
person to person. And cats, as we're gonna find, are
a really interesting break in the narrative of domestication. You know,
we as we say, they domesticated themselves.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
And I saw recently a study. I need to look
deeper into it, but I've seen it in a few places. Evolutionarily, apparently,
they're like xenomorph levels of the perfect organism.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yeah, yeah, just like how alligators and crocodiles got to
a certain point of evolution and said we figured it out.
We're good, Well, we'll just continue. And I've seen I
don't know if you guys have seen clips of people
befriending gators. It's amazing. Also, don't try it at home.
(02:36):
But I love that you're bringing up the scientific breakthroughs there, Noel, because,
as we're going to find, recent research is making this
question of animal human communication more and more fascinating with
each passing year. So is it true, can we actually
speak not just at but with other animals? Hopefully here
(03:07):
are the facts. I mean, it's a fascinating question, right,
And the first thing we have to point out is
that humans are themselves technically animals.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
For sure, And also the concept of communicating with animals
seems very like anthropomorphizing and human centric, you know what
I mean, Just like, on a very basic level, it
implies a very you know, I don't know, Homo sapien
centric view of the animal kingdom, which just doesn't seem
(03:36):
to always hold because communications for all kinds of things
and can be very species dependent and very environment dependent,
and since we've kind of evolved away from a lot
of those things being as crucial, I just feel like
we're kind of in a little bit of an island
in terms of what that communication would even feel like.
I don't mean to poo poo, the idea I do
think there are probably breakthroughs coming that could bridge that gap,
(03:59):
but yeah, I don't know. It seems a little selfish
to think that dogs or cats or merangutans even given
about what we think.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
It's anthrocentric for sure, and I agree with that it's
because part of it is because humans just happen to
be the animals we know the most about, because humans
like asking questions about what it means to be human
and amid all the animals. If we put the anthrocentrism aside,
humans do appear to consistently have some of the most
(04:30):
sophisticated cognitive skill sets, you know, abstract thought, object permanence,
tool making, empathy. Your results may.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Be vary cognition key part of that too.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Thinking about thinking and science now agrees these and related
traits are by no means unique to humans. It was
something that was taught in school pretty often human exceptionalism.
It seems that despite sharing these traits across various organisms,
humans themselves are overall the most advanced in these pursuits,
(05:08):
depending again to your excellent point how you look at it.
Another issue is that humans and animals have been doing
little team ups since people started peopling, and then probably
before then, before modern Homo sapiens, the ancestors, the predecessors
of the Homo sapiens were befriending you know dogs, well, wolves,
(05:31):
wolves that they turned into dogs.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Well, yeah, and there's had to have been interaction between
human and animal, as you're saying, there have been for
so many different reasons.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
Right.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
So there's been this history of humans hearing the calls
of various types of animals, right, and then attempting to
use language to communicate something to those animals. And we've,
as you said, were mentioning canines here, we've had some
success in getting canines to at least understand in some
(06:06):
part like a single word or a couple of words
strung together or something like that. And you could do
that with other animals like New Caledonian crows and a
bunch of other you know, apes that we've interacted with
and other other creatures. But like that, that thing, it's
still missing there to be able to the feedback right
(06:29):
from one to the other. Just because you can command
a dog to do something, doesn't mean that dog can
fully you know, give you a response.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Right, And just like someone singing along to a sublime
song in Spanish, and not speaking Spanish doesn't mean you
understand what you're saying. You're mimicking speech rather than participating
in conversation. And this a lot of this does go
back to domestications worth mentioning. We have a series about
(06:57):
the domestication of dogs on Ridiculous Hists or check it out.
Domesticated types of animals are actually quite rare in the
grand scheme of things. The alpaca, the sheep, the cow,
the pig, et cetera. All the hits, and then again cats,
you're a bit of an exception. You just showed up.
You literally just walked onto stage. And we also talked
(07:19):
previously in a conversation about plants that domestication is perhaps
more of a two way street than a lot of
humans like to admit, because certain animals and plants, you
could argue, have themselves affected the course of human evolution.
(07:39):
I mean, it's it's endlessly fascinating, and it's also incredibly difficult,
to your point, Matt, to prove how the first human
animal interactions that led to domestication began. We have good
guesses we're probably right, but somebody, wolf, pups and increasingly
(08:02):
tamed them. So the best analog for that is going
to be, of course, the infamous phenic fox experiments over
in Russia, where they found that you can take a
wild animal ethics aside over time, you can breed it
to become increasingly open to human interaction in a nonviolent way.
(08:23):
And when you are domesticating these types of animals, the
one thing that I think surprised a lot of people
is that they tend to keep juvenile features as they
as they grow up. Right, That's why wolves can look
like serious, you know, hard case customers. But you might
(08:43):
have a shizoo that is kind of like a baby
for the entirety of.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Its life, very strange.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
I don't know if it's fair to them. You ever
see certain dogs and you think, man.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
They don't look like they're having a good time, like
the problems and not and stuff. I mean, little Apollo
is like what you consider a purebred miniature poodle or
sorry toy poodle and has these tear stains that like
around the eyes that sort of like I don't think
it bothers them, but the eyes just get really really crusty,
(09:17):
and I do sometimes wonder is this a product of
or is this just a dog thing.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
I don't know, but ah yeah, there's a shizoo in
my family that is just adorable, but is a companion
dog rather than what we would call a function dog,
you know, like a hunting dog or art. Yeah, and
I've been hanging with that guy for a number of years,
(09:44):
who was probably my mother's favorite kid for a while
before she passed on.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
But uh yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
But the these traits have been purposely created by humans
over time, and they're not just physical, They're not just cosmetic.
Communicative traits have been encouraged too. And even if we
don't know how the grand story began, like I said,
we've got some pretty good guesses. And one thing that
was interesting I think to all of us in the
(10:11):
research is some people will even today tell you that
it was the intervention of the Anu Naki that led
to domesticated animals, so along with agriculture and fire return.
I love it.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
That's not on you, man, It's just the course of
human civilization.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I think ANKI came down with some of that toxoplasmosis
and that's how we got Christy.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
That's what I'm saying, man, talking about the perfect organism.
I mean, they literally can infect you and cause you
to do their bidding.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Me and toxoplasmosis is a fascinating example of symbiosis too right,
or a parasitic relationship, especially when you look at how
it affects some types of humans differently than others. They
get the general rule of thumb. What talks plasmosis Gandhi
is that female identified women who are infected will tend
(11:06):
to be more promiscuous, and that the dudes in the
crowd to get infected will tend to have like mental
issues down the road.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
That's the idea.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
That's what it did to me.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I think I'm not sure did you did you ever
get tested?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Did you actually tested? But I've had many a cat
in my life, and I was a wee boy, so
I imagine that it seemed in from somewhere.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
It has to have. And I'm sorry, I don't mean
to derail this at all, but like that is real, right,
I mean, obviously it's real in terms of like being tested,
But does it like what what are we meant to
be doing if infected with this.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Question?
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:42):
It changes it changes behavior, So it's we can't totally
blame this on the cat. But it changes behavior such
that it's easier for toxoplasmosis gandhi to to reproduce. That's
what parasites are all about. Ultimately, it's change in behavior
(12:02):
so that it can make more of itself and then
get to other things in its life cycle.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Okay, that's why I eat so much hot sauce, guys,
to hopefully flush out the gandhi.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, And we didn't even know about
the effects of this organism on human cognition until nineteen
forty seven, you know, and severe congenital toxoplasmosis can lead
to some like very gnarly stuff. But anyway, that is
(12:33):
maybe on a positive note, that's a communication aid with
your cat, But the idea of equal peer to pure
human animal communication is a real bag of badgers. Like
you were saying, animals, some animals and humans definitely communicate,
because all animals communicate on some level. If we're defining
that as action and response. Where cat meows, cat's also
(12:57):
meowing in general is another very weird thing. Your dog
knows how to signal your concerns like meadow knows how
to get the message across.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yes, and she says, give me food in dog, and
it's very.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Clear, it's quite explicit. Apollo does the same. My old
buddy Ed was very good at it too, because German
shepherds are quite clever. But I was thinking about it.
We could kind of also argue that every animal communicates
with humans. A tiger is effectively communicating displeasure by you know,
(13:32):
murder humans.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the exact same way that all
of our cats will eat our eyeballs the moment we.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Die, dogs will too.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
I think it'll take the dogs a little longer though.
That's my theory and I'm sticking to you.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
I like to think that.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
But ultimately, the coolest thing about that's very funny, guys,
But just take it to that tiger. The tiger is
communicating so much in its body language, right, That's one
of the things we talked about with.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Animal Lincoln her ass like a these.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Little things and sometimes like a small sound that is
not the same sound that's an alert sound that you
would hear. And there's all kinds of really interesting hunting
things like cats do. Right when you imagine them mimicking
the birds and doing that fun stuff by the window,
there's stuff going on there. But again it's us. It's
up to us to figure out what the hell it
really means or what is actually being, what the thoughts
(14:23):
are that are linked to that. Actually, I have.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
A real problem with my cat, Vanessa, because he just
it's yes, it's a male cat named Vanessa seems to
only know how to communicate through incessant, repetitive, noisy mewing,
and I often don't know what he wants and he
doesn't make it clear. He'll mea me me out to
come inside, then immediately mea mea me how to go outside. Uh,
(14:47):
it's not food time. I'm giving him pets. I'm perplexed
as to is he just trying to torture me and
and and reck my sanity? Like what do you want?
You Devil's spont or it's just open remarks, possible commentary, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Well, well, we're going to get into it further in
the episode. But there are some folks out there working
on getting you answers NOL specifically thank you.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yeah, And we're going to talk about some pretty fascinating
science when we when we explore these concepts, because animals
do communicate through scent, through marking territory, insects have really
creative communication abilities, like the fact that certain bees communicate
directions by not dancing for each other.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
That their little bee butts.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Uh huh yeah, yeap, work your way to like forget gps.
We have bees twerking that that is how they talk.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
It's what is the flag thing. It's like semaphore, right,
but with butts, but with butts.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Finally, finally, the time has come. That is the only
problem with semaphore and birds. Of course, anyway, it goes
on and on. This is the crux of our episode.
Aside from communication overall, what about speech? Can you, as
a human not just talk at or two animals, but
(16:17):
can you speak with them? Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, goodness, yes,
asteris caveat fine print mm yep.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
M m yeah. All the things we've mentioned previously probably
being contained within that asterisk.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
So first, to be clear, by talking with we mean
holding a conversation like you were saying, there, Matt, it's
that's not the same thing as your favorite non human animal.
Knowing a few of your vocalizations what we would call words,
you know, like the name you use for them, apollo,
come here, boy, or key phrases, like walk or treat
(16:57):
or sit or you know, if you got commands, maybe
just say norway and the dog knows that means to
spin around in a certain way.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
Yeah, or Machschnell to your Doberman.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
What does that do?
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (17:12):
I mean, I mean apparently a lot of neo Nazis
trained their their attack dogs with German commands.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Oh that's love.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Yeah, yeah, it's a new way to profile dogs. I
feel really bad about it, but I do it too.
I'm like, I don't know, I don't know. I trust
this dog. It does no German.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Oh jeez.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
But those who were like, I don't trust the owners,
you know what I mean? I think we're all very
pro dog here.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
There was a really interesting study coming out of the
University of Geneva last year about dog human communication in
those respects and about those singular words you know, or
commands that you're talking about there, and and it was guys,
it was amazing. They connected the EEGs up to both
dogs in humans like pairs, as they're talking and communicating
(17:58):
and wanting things from each other. It was so cool
to see how basic it's. It's almost as if humans
and canines are on different speeds. If that makes sense
when it comes to how much like you and I
and we can all understand per minute, and then how
much a dog can understand per minute, and then why
(18:19):
those commands are so effective when it's only one or
two syllables that occur to make a thought happen or
a concept occur. It's really interesting stuff. But then it
makes you think about, well, how when we're communicating to
our canine in that way, and then it is communicating
back to us in pretty similar like phrasings and similar
(18:44):
repeated sounds like the barks. If you think about those,
it's not a bunch of different types of barks occurring
at once. It's like bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, barks. Well,
it just just to put out there. It's very interesting
when we're thinking about communication in this way and our
(19:04):
effectiveness thus far as humans talking with animals like that's
probably as close as we've come outside of some bird
species that can mimic and repeat, right, But some of
that's a little different. And then of course some of
the primate studies where you can actually communicate often sent
with sign language and things like that.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, or appear to communicate yeah, a sign language. Yeah,
well we got to get into it. So the anthrocentrism
point is something we're going to return to time and
time again, because it's more fair to say that human
animals have different modes of communication than that of other animals.
If you think your dog is dumb because it doesn't
(19:48):
understand what you're saying about the gold standard and the
eighteen hundreds, well guess what Fido thinks. You're pretty slow
too in terms of dog language. It's like this guy.
I've known this guy for three years, hasn't stiffed my
butt once? You know what I mean? Like what it is?
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Yeah, come on, what's wrong with me?
Speaker 3 (20:07):
It's because humans tend to prioritize sight. That is one
of the big information channels through which the human experience
is the world. And that's also why body language is
often more important in an in person conversation than the
content of the speech. That's also why text messages can
be so easily misinterpreted. Sorry to my mom and all
(20:31):
of my ex girlfriends. My bad. We can all unfortunately
feel that way, no doubt. Yeah, so it's crazy because
that the site thing is very common across a lot
of primates. Right, the parent company of the human experiment,
which is why you should never, ever, under any circumstances,
(20:53):
make prolonged eye contact with a gorill. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
They'll rip your face off, if I'm not mistaken, your
face off.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, even if everything is cheesecake and you have known
this gorilla for years and you hang out and you
share sign language with each other, don't look them in
the end.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
Because that is a very species specific form of threat. Right.
Can we take a minute here really quickly to talk
about the all the ink that's been spilled about Coco
the gorilla and the sign language of it all, and like,
is that really communication or is it training?
Speaker 3 (21:29):
You know?
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Wait, wait, wait, well I don't know this, So there's
like huge.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Falsific not that it's falsified, it's just it's you can
train an animal with a certain level of intelligence to
do a thing, but does that mean that it understands
exactly what it's doing? And you know, folks who interacted
with Coco would say yes, like Flea and Robin Williams
or whatever, But what do you know, Ben, I just
thought it would be a good time to bring that
(21:54):
up because it's all, oh yeah, been a head scratcher
for me.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah, we'll get into this in more depth as we
go through some examples, but you're absolutely right now. There
is a huge amount of controversy about Coco the gorilla
and the experiments with communication. There By the time she
had passed away in twenty eighteen, people who were fans
(22:18):
of the research and researchers involved in the project believe
that she could understand something north of two thousand spoken
words in English. But as we'll go, we'll see why
some other people take.
Speaker 4 (22:31):
Except me the scoop us on that it's just on
my mind and I'm excited to dig more into it.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Oh, one hundred percent, man right there with you. We
also know that the leader of the pack are a
plus students are, of course dogs, because they've evolved to
communicate more effectively with humans, up to understanding things like
pointing right or even sign language. You don't always have
to talk to a dog. You can do a little
(22:57):
twirly and it'll know what you mean. They even evolved.
I think I don't know about you, guys, but I'm
pretty sure this is one of our favorite dog evolution facts.
They evolved muscles, physical musculature around the eye, socket to
help them convey info to humans. Puppy dog guys are
a real evolutionary grift.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
This is my least favorite thing because my dog, who
is asleep behind me right now, very happy, very content.
But when she's awake and I'm doing something and I'm busy,
like sitting here at the desk researching or something, she
will wink at me. She will stare at me until
I make eye contact with her, then she will wink.
And she's doing it on purpose, you could tell. And
(23:40):
I don't know what she means or why she's doing it,
but it freaks me out.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I hear you, man. I also feel like I love
how that's somewhat ominous. Yes, and I've met Meadow and
she's awesome.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
She is awesome, But it's this. Have you ever you
guys ever watch Awquatine Hunger.
Speaker 4 (23:57):
Force absolutely number one?
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Hood Well, it reminds me of the hand Banana, Like,
look up that episode the hand Banana that for some
reason I get those vibes. It creeps me out.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
I also am a little freaked out by when it
feels like a dog is smiling. I think they can, yeah,
but is it just being you know too anthrocentric. It
feels like they smile and I had. You know, my
my last dog ed a legendary German shepherd. Uh. I
(24:32):
feel like he had a sense of humor. I feel
like he had. It's a humor because he would uh,
he would do something and then he would smile at me,
so he didn't know he was supposed to. Dylan is
saying smiling is often a sign of discomfort. However, Dylan
has not specified whether that's a sign of discomfort for
humans or for dogs. And mat is smiling and hurt.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
It hurts. I'm uncomfortable.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, yeah, And that's a cultural thing too. Throughout different
human civilizations. There are some parts of the world where
you just smile to avoid disagreeing with someone or saying something.
I'm thinking specifically of Thailand, which has the nickname the
Land of a Thousand Smiles.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Biting your tongue right.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Exactly. So this is crazy because the primary way a
dog encounters communication in the world around it is smell.
So a blind dog is kind of like a person
who lost their sense of smell in that they can
still get around easily in their world, but a dog
without a sense of smell could be said to be
(25:43):
similar to a blind person because their environmental interactions can
be much more challenging. It's a weird way to think
about it, but it's worth mentioning because it does affect communication.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, there's a group of these like gray that are
back behind my house, and the only reason Meadow knows
they're there is because she smells them. I can see
them walking around back in the woods, but she doesn't
usually see them. But then all of a sudden, you'll
see her ears perk up and sniff the air, and
then she gets real riled up and like, oh, basically
(26:18):
get away from here kind of vibes. And it's only
because she smelled them.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Yeah, and that's again, there's so many facets to communication,
and talking or speaking is just one very small part
of that.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
A pretty good companion piece to this episode would be
our recent discussion on pheromones and all of the ways
that chemical chemical communication.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
I guess right, one hundred percent. Yeah, and good callback.
Speaking of speech and communication, we're going to pause and
introduce you to some sponsors we've returned all to say, yes,
you can sort of talk with animals and they can
(27:01):
sort of understand you in that like all the examples
we named, we can generally get the gist of basic stuff.
Oh you've got a poop, Oh you're hungry. Oh there's
some coyotes over there, you know.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
But yo, did you know that.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
There are tons of coyotes around here in Atlanta?
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Yeah, I had no idea. I was recently looking to
adopt a pup and this is the woman from the
rescue situation told me about how we are just lousy
with coyotes, especially in the cab County area.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Oh yeah, I love reading the reports on neighborhood pages
where someone's like, have you lost a dog anybody in
this neighborhood?
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (27:44):
No, I mean that's the thing. I do have indoor
outdoor animals, And it really has made me rethink that
I actually had no idea.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
So good to know the old house. They look they
look like foxes that are way too big. What the
hell is that?
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Crypt So definitely, and so many people, you know, maybe
not more familiar with the wilderness because they grew up
in or reside in cities, genuinely will mistake coyotes for dogs,
up to an including trying to pet them.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, you guys heard of the mained fox, the mained wolf.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yes, I have heard of the mained wolf.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Dude, I discovered that thing in research for this episode,
and yeah, I am fully freaked out. Look at that
thing and then imagine one that's hairless or you know,
losing its hair or another, and then imagine a cup
of Caabra's.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Animate, like a skinny likely fox. Yeah, yeah, I wish
they're the proportion of their leg to head to torso
didn't bother me so much, I know.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
YouTube deer yeah, YouTube headline deer fox Wolf.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Nope, yeah, exactly. And if you see footage of them walking,
they look sneaky. They untrustworthy.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
Oh yeah, they also got like a weird black mohawk,
almost like a razorback pig or something.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
That's the main Yeah baby, yeah. So all right, Look,
you can talk all the livelong evening to all sorts
of all sorts of non human animal companions, but there's
currently no real case of someone like debating the history
of the Right Brothers or the meaning of mortality and
(29:28):
the soul. No feline to date has made a hip
hop album, probably because they don't want to, but I
assume right, But for most of human history, again, anthrocentrism reigned.
We were convinced this communication didn't work because animals were
dumber than humans. Human exceptionalism. It's the argument that people
(29:54):
are at the top of the hierarchy of evolution because quote,
people are just the best the bee's knees. But it's myopic,
it's convenient, it's kind of self serving because humans, again,
we always have to bring this up, don't really have
an understanding of intelligence other than being able to function
successfully in a given environment. So that means if you
(30:17):
wake up in a mangrove swamp and there's a tiger there,
technically the tiger is the smartest one in the room.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, at least for a while. But I
think the thing that trips me up with this kind
of discussion is just the fact of language as an invention,
as a technology, as a thing, right, because we humanity did,
for one reason or a thousand create this thing, and
(30:48):
then that thing appears to be the reason we're able
to do almost everything if yeah, everything that we do
together collectively like some big works, right, Language at least
played a very large part in all of that stuff.
So I think one of the bigger, biggest questions for
today is do other species and animals, especially ones that
(31:11):
we see working together a lot, everything from you know,
ants to cetaceans, is there a fully shared language with
complexity that we just cannot grasp with our understanding, right
and with our.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
Language and with our hardware and our equipment. That's a
big part of it. Yeah, that's why the concept of
intelligence anthrocentrically put is so dangerous. Right, Humans, despite being
somewhat condescending historically to the natural world, humans also really
really want to talk with animals, like really want this
(31:48):
one to work out, and so the human wants to
feel that there's this mutual exchange of ideas and concepts.
We're going to have a genuine dialogue and that creates
or that can create damning confirmation bias and otherwise really robust,
rigorous research. Like we mentioned Coco the gorilla briefly, there
(32:10):
also an equal shout out to Alex, the parent, who
is just heartbreaking. And we were talking about this a
little bit off air. Noel, you remember Alex, right, the parrot.
Speaker 4 (32:22):
I'm sorry, I don't think I do. I remember Mango. Well,
what's the who's Alex?
Speaker 3 (32:26):
Mao? Mago's the snitch parent. Yeah, Alex. The Gray Parents
a subject of some controversial research about human animal communication
and Alex. Alex sadly went viral with a quote that
we had at the at the top of our episode here.
(32:48):
His last known words were in English to his human partner,
his bonded partner and researcher, Alex. As she was leaving,
Alex looked at and said, you be good. I love you.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
I know, never have I felt a feel about a
bird before this very moment.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Well that's the thing too, to that earlier point we made,
was he mimicking sound that he had been trained to mimic?
Or was it I want to know what love is
kind of situation? Was it a what song is that?
Speaker 4 (33:25):
I don't know the artist is, I think wonder, but
it's a banger.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
I want you to show want you to show me.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
And so uh, these assumptions, these desires of long stymy
the science and our question is what if that is changing?
Could new research, tech and new cooperative endeavors make our
big wish of talking to animals come true? It's it's similar.
If so, it'd be similar to what we talked about
(33:55):
in the past with humanity literally creating superpowers and ghost
through technology. Right, And you could also say, kind of
to your point about languages. Technology, it's so important for
the human experiment because it allows us to speak to
the dead, right or to learn from the dead. You know,
(34:18):
pretty powerful when you think about it that way. So
maybe the way that we're making all these amazing things
happen now, maybe something similar will happen with animals. I
don't know. I think.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
I got my hopes, so Ben, I got my way. Yes,
there's there's some cool stuff going on out there. All
you got to do is be super super positive about
the things AI can do. That's all you gotta do.
Just be really excited about AI, and then there's some
(34:54):
cool stuff coming up.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yeah, it's it's a give and take for sure. I
mean we also one thing I'm sure we all saw
this too. One thing that had a real flash in
the pan moment that a lot of people were hopeful
about was the idea of the paw pads, the button
pads that your dog could use. Uh as you can
(35:19):
tell you. Yeah, he was in the back. It's bull
it's blarky.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
And also this this cardinal has really giving me the
old stink eye.
Speaker 3 (35:34):
Yeah, this button communication craze. We've all I think we've
all seen the videos.
Speaker 5 (35:40):
Right.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Someone has their dog and they've got something that looks
like an old ne e S power pad on the
living room floor and they're like, oh, you know, Buster
or mcguiver or whatever, do you want to go outside?
And then the dog hits a button and it's a
recorded voice going like yes, mother, I would enjoy a
constitution or whatever.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
Is Well, it's because the human partner can program and
record what the buttons say, right.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
And there's some really astonishing videos out there, and people
who you know, have been using those buttons with their
Kanine Companish for a long time and it appears to
be super effective, at least in the footage we get
to see.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
That's a very important point. Yeah, so you will not
see unsuccessful versions of this. You'll see versions where a
dog wants to treat and they walk over to the
pad and they hit the button that says treat or
wants to go on a walk, and it hits the
button that's signals walk. You could also code it to
(36:49):
have more complex things like hey, Kujo, do you want
to go see grandmother? The idea goes, if this stuff works,
the dog understands enough about what you're saying to select
a yes or no answer. But then, you know, you
could alternatively say, hey, Kujo, do you want to go
to the vet and get your balls cut off? And
(37:10):
Kujo could hit a button that says Sharon again, your
constant betrayal is ruining our relationship. Like you can just
type whatever is the point.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah. There have been examples that were caught on video
where let's say a couple is working in their home
office and there's a video that's running live downstairs where
the buttons are set up, and the dog goes down
there and starts growling and then runs over to buttons
and hits.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
Stranger out five, stranger outside.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
Stranger, you know.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And it's like that. It's tough to argue with that
kind of response where the dog is attempting to communicate
something it is experiencing to its you know, its person.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
Yeah, fully agree. And this is not we're asking if
this works. We have to remember it's not itself an
original technology. This is part of what we call alternative
communication tech, and it's been around for quite some time.
It's been very helpful for people who have certain levels
of autism, or suffer from neurological conditions or encountered a stroke,
(38:19):
you know what I mean. In some ways, it's very
very similar to this, and I keep getting hung up
on it. I think we all do. Does the dog
understand the conversation taking place? Or is it just showing
how effective operant conditioning can be. You know, is it
responding to you and the content of what you're saying,
(38:41):
or is it more your body language and your smell
and your intonation and the thousand other signals you send
out that you are not aware of. But the dog
clocks immediately.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
It tends toward the latter. Not to be a web
blanket or anything, but that just that kind of condition
is powerful. And you know, we know dogs, domesticated animals,
dogs in particular, are pretty good at picking up on
that kind of stuff, or you know, they're trainable.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, that's one of the interesting things that came out
of that Geneva study I mentioned earlier in the episode.
They they did find that the patterns of stress and
intonation in whatever is being said end up being one
of the most important things for a dog to feel,
to seem like it's understanding what's being said. So not
even the words themselves as much, so like the way
(39:34):
words are formed, but it's how you say it. When
you say you want to go to see Grandma or
you know, hey, meadow, and like right.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
Now they're probably perked up.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Nope, she's fast asleep, she's fine. But if I say
it in that way, I know she's I'm going to
get a response. And it's not because I've trained her
to do that. It's because she knows or she has
almost like learned right over time. When I talk like that,
something good is going to be following that.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Right exactly. Yeah. So so what your dog heres is
when you say want to go for a walk, your
dog heres baba da ba da bah.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
But if you say do you want to go for
a walk, yeah, it's not the same, it's not. It
reminds me of that excellent moment in pop music history
when a spiteful Italian made a song that sounded like English.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Oh yeah, and it was a hit, right, it was
a hit.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Yeah, And he pretty much did it because I don't
know about this.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
What was the song?
Speaker 1 (40:37):
No?
Speaker 3 (40:38):
I think what we'll do here is if you're okay
with the guys, let's just play a clip of it.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Oh okay, you gotta find a place that will recognize
I don't remember the intro to this one.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm going past the intro where
he's teaching. Okay, formula, do you prison coolin is mini
at cause you wow? Okay, we're not even gonna spell it,
but here we go.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Wait a times, hoping the same, then maybe get to
come above time. I'm grooving hard, y'all.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Oh man, don't sue us, Adriano and your representatives.
Speaker 4 (41:20):
What are they saying? What are they yelling at me
about it?
Speaker 3 (41:23):
It's totally made up?
Speaker 4 (41:24):
Cool got it?
Speaker 3 (41:25):
It sounds like English, made it up to sound like English,
So if you didn't speak English, based on the intonation,
you could think it's about anything, any number.
Speaker 4 (41:34):
Of positive, happy things, fascinating.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
It's not a banger.
Speaker 4 (41:40):
I couldn't agree that. I'm putting it on my dance
party playlist.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
Your certified summer gold playlist.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
Yeah, you've still got a few few days left to
maximize summer grooves.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
Can I throw something in your real quick?
Speaker 4 (41:52):
Guys?
Speaker 2 (41:53):
I mean, this is one of the words of the
day for me at least in the research this week,
Prosody and I, I think I've heard this. I think
I've heard us say this before on this show, proso
d Y. That is the quote patterns of stress and
intonation in a language, which is exactly what that person
was using to make it sound like English.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
One hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (42:16):
Yeah, the cadence there, but there the right emphasis on
the right selab.
Speaker 5 (42:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
And I wasn't expecting us to get to that, frankly
awesome reference, but it does. I do think it's a
cool analogue to what maybe your dog is hearing, right,
because your dog doesn't really speak your language outside of
knowing a few terms. Yes, and it's not because at all.
It's not because we're not saying dogs are dumb, quite
(42:44):
the opposite. They just have a vastly different tool set
of communication avenues.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
Yeah, and I guess you know. I'm sorry I keep
harping on cats. Sounds like I'm picking on them, But
I sometimes wonder do the cats not under stand that
cadence the same way or do they just not give
a crap.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
I saw a study years back that said day wired
up some cat brains. They said the brain activity, the
cognitive activity, in your cat's head when you call its name,
proves that it does know you are talking to it
about like it. It just doesn't care. Okay, that's it,
(43:28):
And that that does seem to be a pretty solid
experiment because we have data right from brain scans, from monitoring.
But what say we pause for word from our sponsors
and we come back with some examples of how these
experiments can go so hilariously wrong. We now introduced to
(43:52):
the stage clever hands. Oh yes, the hardest, Yes, the
smartest of our equine ends apparently early nineteen hundreds. He
could tell us a little bit about this.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
He did stuff with his hoofs, with his quiet. He
was like he was like a regular mister red.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Well, but he was math based rights so much.
Speaker 4 (44:14):
That's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
Yeah. Also, the way they got mister ed to quote
unquote talk on that so weird.
Speaker 4 (44:25):
No, on the gums, he wouldn't see the peanut butter,
but that's what he was like eating it from the inside.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
Yeah, it's gross. I can't believe they made a whole
series that just hinged on that one idea.
Speaker 4 (44:36):
Yeah, it gets in all kinds of high jinks. Clever Hans.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
Indeed the early nineteen hundreds. For a while, everyone, including
Hans's trainer, the closest human to this creature, believed that
he could do maths, real, real good. The trainer would
pose math problems and Hans would listen and then clippity clop,
clippity clop the sert with his hooves on the wooden floor.
(45:04):
M hm.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
And people thought that Hawns was better at math than
a lot of human school children. The pickle of it
is the badger in the bag here is that people
asked Hans math questions when the trainer wasn't there, And
if they asked when the trainer wasn't there, this poor
guy had no idea what to do. He's staring at
(45:27):
people like, well, are you gonna give me a carrot
or an apple or something? Or he just gobbledygook in me.
He was he was not a polymath of the equine world.
He was getting unconscious cues from his trainer. So without
those cues, Hans didn't know what to do.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Interesting, so like the way his trainer would look would
show him what the answer was, or like movements or
I don't know, it makes me wonder if Hans was
just like.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
You can't make me do these tricks again. The trainer
wasn't like trying to pull a grift. I think he
believed this was going on as well, and maybe did
not realize he was giving the game away.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
That's what we suspect because Hans would start his response
to a question by tapping his hoof, and then he
would notice, because horses are very observant animals, that people
around him were getting more tense as including the trainer,
as he was approaching the correct number of taps. And
(46:33):
then so you'd say like, hey, Hawns, what's uh five
plus four? And Hawns would think about it for a
second and would look like he was thinking. He's kind
of looking around to get the you know, to read
the room. And so as he's getting closer to eight,
people are leading in yeah, and he gets denied and
(46:53):
everyone's like, oh my god, he's done it again. He
just stops, and he just stops yeah, and he gets it. So,
I mean, dogs are even better than horses at picking
up those cues. And it's true that the vast majority
of dog owners don't know the full extent of the
signals we're communicating. To our furry pals, especially especially smell right,
(47:19):
like you could say, you know, I think a lot
of us dog lovers f had situation where you were sad, right,
you didn't say anything to your dog about it, but
your dog somehow new and then came and like cuddled
up next to you or walked up to him, whimpered
or something. You know, Have you guys ever experienced that,
(47:39):
like your dog seems to have clocked something about your
mental state.
Speaker 4 (47:45):
Absolutely, I just yeah, it just feels like dogs are
That's why people love them so much. That there's a
certain intuition there and a certain like I don't know,
ability to kind of have those types of exchanges, whether
they're real or imagine. But I think any dog lover
would say that they're definitely real. And I, again, as
a relatively new dog person, I kind of feel that.
(48:07):
So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
With I don't know, I feel like I've just got
a distorted lens here, But I feel like I had
that with one of my cats when I was a kid,
When I was feeling low, this specific cat would do
the whole lay on your chest thing, but only and
the specific time. So I don't love but again that's
my perception of a moment and behaviors right that are
(48:29):
that I can't fully interpret other than how it's affecting me.
So yuh oh, that's an interesting concept.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
It's a tough one, right We also, as we noted earlier,
with the buttons, with the button pads, the paw pads,
you'll see a lot of videos of dogs appearing not
to just hit one button to say walk, but like
you were saying, Matt, Mom, stranger outside. This would imply
that they were making full sentences and phrases right right now.
(49:01):
As much as we hate to be those folks at
the party or at the dog park, the current scientific
consensus is that in these situations, your pooch is not
responding to the conversation. It's responding to the human behavior.
I can tell you're excited. It's excited too.
Speaker 4 (49:19):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
This is the tone that guy always uses when I'm
getting a treat, you know. So I know that I
can hit this button get a treat. But that's just conditioning.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
But I do know, just as not to be contradictory,
just to state that I have observed in my life
doing the tone, intonation and kind of thing that we're
talking about but using a different keyword. And I think
it is something at the connection between that intonation and
a specific keyword or two to where I can say
(49:51):
you want to go for a run? Want to go?
Or you want to go for a run, and she's like, no,
I don't know what you mean. But then if I
use the W word that I'm I'm not going to
use her right now because she's right behind me, would
she would flip out and be excited?
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Okay? Yeah? Yeah. I think there's definitely a trigger with
some phrases and with training. Right. It also reminds us
of the earlier experiments with human language when I can't
remember which monarch it was, but he became convinced that
if you raised children without any language at all, they
(50:31):
would naturally begin speaking the original language, the divine language,
whatever that was. Yeah, it turned out no, they didn't.
Their cognitive years or their formative years were robbed of language,
and life was very difficult for them. I think we
did something more ridiculous history about those folks. Yea, yeah,
(50:53):
But anyhow, this gets us to the continuing research. You know,
we are going to talk about some more different types
of research, some initiatives some specific experiments with specific kinds
of animals, including cetaceans, elephants, birds, cephalopods, and primates. Maybe
maybe we start there right because we mentioned Coco earlier
(51:16):
and humans or technically primates, so logically those two things
would be close enough together to maybe have the best
chance of pure communication.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
The hope at least is that the way the brains
are formed, right, our brains are their brains, there's gonna
be something in there that makes that magical connection of language. Hopefully,
even though we have yet to observe, you know, primates
with a sophisticated enough vocalization, you know, series of patterns
to call it something language, right, we haven't observed it yet.
(51:53):
But again, as you stayed before, Ben, maybe we're just
not fully able to pick things up in a way
yet that there is communication happening, right. That's why I
think about some of the other animal species we're going
to talk about, like maybe we literally just don't hear
them when they're talking, right, because they can pick up
different frequencies and things like that. But I think that's
(52:14):
been tested actually in many cases, especially when we get
into the whale communication. Like, oh, like, could you create
a whole language with that sound maybe.
Speaker 3 (52:25):
And elephants as well, that that's a trippy one too. Yeah,
so okay, we have a reasonable assumption, but an assumption nonetheless,
that it might be easier to speak with primate relatives.
And we know that physiologically, your average gorilla doesn't have
(52:46):
the hardware needed in the throat and the larynx to
create the vocalizations that humans use in language, or to
create all of them. So why not use sign language?
And did you have that moment where you realize that
different languages have different versions of sign language as well?
Speaker 4 (53:06):
No, I didn't know that, I don't think, but that
makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
Yeah, it weirded me. I was very proud of learning
some asl not with fluency, and I couldn't wait to
show it off. And the person I talked to, who
was very nice, hipped me to the fact that, no,
you're just sort of doing a hand version of yelling
at someone in English after they told you they don't
speak English. You know, the classic tourist thing. What if
(53:32):
I ask louder? So, Yeah, we're in that situation with
a lot of primate communication stuff, because the idea there
is we can still count it as talking if we're
communicating in sign language. And that's where you see those
amazing clips like the ones who were describing nol with
(53:52):
Robin Williams meeting Coco and who else was was it
mister Rogers?
Speaker 4 (53:57):
Mister Rogers also flee from the red hot chili peppers.
Speaker 3 (54:02):
I don't know why that makes sense?
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong here. Wasn't Jane
Goodall involved in a lot of that? Or was she
just a part of it on the side?
Speaker 4 (54:11):
And do I just have a college she was Coco adjacent?
She's definitely like gorillas in the misted adjacent. Okay, but
maybe so, I mean she certainly would have been aware
of Coco.
Speaker 3 (54:21):
Yeah, yeah, she would have to have been aware. So
Coco gets this huge amount of scientific interest and the
spotlight because her sign language is seen by her supporters
as not just exhibiting empathy, but also being capable of
doing things like arguing or creatively conveying concepts by making
(54:46):
new word phrase groups. Right, So it's a big indicator
of language. If you have let's say you have two
separate symbols. One of them is for trash and one
of them is for cat and then you show you
show this gorilla a raccoon, and instead of saying what's that,
it says, oh, trash cat.
Speaker 4 (55:09):
Exactly makes sense, also known as trash Panda, also.
Speaker 3 (55:13):
Known as trash Panda. Yeah, man, So that's that's the idea.
But the issue again with Coco became that perhaps the
humans who had bonded with this gorilla and with other
gorillas and similar experiments, perhaps they were just kind of
hearing what they wanted to hear, or perhaps they were
(55:35):
just sort of like setting someone up to respond for
a treat or affection or something like that. And it's
heartbreaking to know that's a controversy because those videos are just.
Speaker 4 (55:48):
So heartwork they are, but it's also a powerful thing.
That confirmation bias can be a real powerful thing. And Matt,
to your point about Jane Goodall, she didn't meet Coco
one time, and she looked at Coco as a confirmation
of what she had long believed about these primates, that
they were sentient in that way. I mean, of course
(56:10):
they're sentient, but they were communicative and had the ability
to connect on a direct level. And when Coco passed
away in twenty eighteen, Jane Goodall said, Coco, you taught
us much about the gorilla intellect, and you were much loved.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
You will be missed.
Speaker 4 (56:24):
And then it says in this Instagram post, though doctor
Goodall only had the chance to meet Coco once, her
interaction remains a remarkable one for Jane, and all Coco
taught us will live on as Jane study chimpanzees. The
insights of Coco's life as a gorilla with tremendous communication
skills were essentially understanding more about great apes, and she
lived as a reminder of what Jane had always believed,
(56:44):
that we are not so different from the rest of
the animal kingdom. So I'm not saying she was wrong.
I'm just saying, like, when you work towards something your
whole life and then you see something that confirms that
it's easy to want that thing to be true.
Speaker 3 (57:00):
Yeah, well there is.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
I just remember Jane Goodall's work span so much right,
and there's so so many interesting things. I recall her
looking at chimpanzees, like early on in the what if seventies,
maybe sixty seventies, when chimpanzees were being first taught like language,
sign language, and then this concept that potentially they could
(57:22):
understand written language in the written word, which was that
was always the big one for me. I could a
chimpanzee or you know, any great ape read a sign
and understand what it says. And when you see some
of that, some of that stuff, you just realize, oh, well,
maybe there is the capacity for at least written language,
(57:42):
even if you don't have the hardware right to make
the sounds. Maybe could write h.
Speaker 3 (57:48):
Yeah, it's similar to those other assistive technologies that have
been used for people with strokes. Could you could you
just make it like if the mind is already working
and capable of doing that, the capable of functioning that level,
then we just need to get at the right toye
and the right tools. And that's pretty amazing if true.
Speaker 2 (58:10):
You know.
Speaker 3 (58:11):
Also, I've got to give a shout out here as
we're wrapping up part one of this exploration, I've got
to give a shout out to everybody who owns a
husky who heard us say arguing is indicative of communications.
Crazy argumentative. Yeah, huskies will just not not stop. They
(58:33):
got a lot of sass.
Speaker 2 (58:36):
It's still asleep, by the way, that she's.
Speaker 3 (58:37):
Still asleep because she knows it was you. If you
get a real husky in there, no, she'd smell it first.
But with this guy's we're kind of ending, we're kind
of pausing in media arrests. We haven't gotten to cephalopods
or seti or a couple of other organizations we want
to talk about, or even birds or elephants. I oh gosh,
(58:59):
it keeps going citations whales, whales.
Speaker 2 (59:03):
Dude, let's give let's give everybody a little bit of homework.
If you choose to do it. You're not gonna get
a grade on this and this is and you're not gonna,
you know, get in trouble if you don't do this,
But just ask some homework if you want to. In
between this episode and the next part that comes out,
look up something called the Earth Species Project and something
called Project Cetacean Translation Initiative. Check those out and see
(59:28):
what you think about them, because we're gonna have a
whole conversation about those and other animals and the attempts
to get humankind to be able to not only understand
what animals specifically are vocalizing, but also to be able
to revocalize to those.
Speaker 3 (59:44):
Animals right to speak with to meet them where they're at. Yes, linguistically,
and this is an exciting time to be alive and
to learn about this research. Folks, we can't wait to
hear your animal anecdotes. You have come to the right place.
You can always send us cat pictures, dog pictures, pet pictures.
Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
We love it.
Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
Tell us your weirdest situations with animal communication, and please
tune in in the near future for chapter two of
Can We Actually Talk to Animals? In the meantime, you
can call us on a telephone. You can send us
an email. You can find us on the line.
Speaker 4 (01:00:24):
Yes, indeed, find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where
it gets crazy, on ax fka, Twitter, and on YouTube
with video content for you to enjoy. On Instagram and TikTok. However,
we are Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
You can also call us. Our phone number is one
eight three three st dwy TK. Turn those letters into numbers.
You'll figure it out, and then you'll find yourself in
a voicemail system. You'll hear somebody's voice, you know it's beat,
and you'll hear some sounds like some music, and then
leave your message. You've got three minutes. Say whatever you want,
(01:01:03):
give yourself a cool nickname, and let us know in
the message if we can use your name and message
on the air. If you would instead like to send
us an email, you sure can.
Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet I'm afraid sometimes the
void writes back and just for the vibe check now, folks,
the email us looking for random fact. It's probably going
to be animal related, at least for this week. I
just think we got super into this one conspiracy at
(01:01:33):
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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