Icon #25 - Jane Goodall: The Chimp Simp

In this edition of The Iconograph, Jack and Brandie Posey are joined by Katie Goldin to talk about the only person in recorded history to spend a significant amount of her life with chimps and and not have her face ripped off:

Jane Goodall!

They'll explore her upbringing, her magical powers, how she likes her bread toasted and much more!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Rolling in recording and.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
It's really hard for me to not do that at
every computer.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Yeah, and this is a bit of a you're gonna
get punked because I told you it was about Jane Goodall,
but it's about Fred Durst. We're doing the Durst did dursty?
It's a Durst trap trap.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Do you do your Durst? This?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
This is the second. This is the second Icons episode
that's started without talking to from Durst talking about maybe
the second in like of the month something like that.
Definitely the second this year.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, taste again.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
There's no icon that's not related to Fred Durst in
some way.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
It's the Kevin Bacon Times is the Durst of times.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
That's right, Yeah, all right, Unfortunately we are going to
have to keep that. Thank you, Brian. But uh, here
we go with the actual episode about Fred Durst's grandmother.
Hello the Internet, and welcome to this spinoff episode of

(01:21):
Dirtily Zai Guys, which we're calling the Iconograph. So looking
at the Zeke guys through current events on Monday mornings.
We are looking at the Zeke guys through the powerful
pop culture deities that are our icons. We use them
to create identity, uh, to knock man down off his

(01:42):
pedestal man, both in the species sense and in the
the one with the penises sense. We use them to
discover the best excuse for drinking whiskey in the morning,
and to put a beating artistic heart back into the scientists.
That's right. This week we're talking. Good all, Jane, Goodall.

(02:06):
I'm joined by today's very special co host, the host
of Creature for You. Actually, I think I got this backwards. Brandy,
you're our co host today, right, and Katie you're our guest. Yeah, yeah,
that's sure.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Whatever, we're all equals.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Soever yeah, in in God's I We're.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
All under God's eye. I'm thrilled to be joined by
today's very special guest co host, a stand up comedian
who's got a hilarious new special called Milk Job. You
know her from Lady to Lady, the founder of the
comedy record label Burn This Record, about to do the
dang Warped Tour. Oh yeah, Brandy Posa.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Feels good to be here.

Speaker 4 (02:49):
I'm gonna find my inner Miles and try to channel
it for this episode.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
You're nailing it. Feels good to be here. Good Miles.
I'm Miles, and look at me. I'm Miles, isn't it
might having a pint? Awesoenal, It's not British. He's not British. Fuck,
I always get that wrong. Uh, Brandy, We're three to

(03:17):
be joined in our third seat by the host of
Creature feature, co host of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, one of
the writers on Some More News. Uh, the perfect person
to co host an episode about Jane Goodall. It's Katie Golden, yes.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Or as or as the chimpanzees say, Oh so you do.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Speak chang chang walla wella bing bang, Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah that was fluent. That sounded actually like you're you're
a native speaker. Yea yeah? Are you? Are you guys?
Goodall heads? Are you down down with the sickness for
Jane Goodall?

Speaker 3 (04:08):
I'm down with the transmissible illnesses that they only later
learned could happen between humans and primates.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yes, she has research on that. I will like.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Me a bit of good All old good All. She was,
She was great, She was she was a very very
fine lady.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
Imagine if I was like, I hate Jane Goodall.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Crazy and that would be great. That would be a
great premise for like doing doing the crossfire thing like
that where you're like, okay, and now your turn to
explain why Jane Goodall so.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
A jubilee video like one Jane Goodall stand versus haters chimpanzees.

Speaker 4 (04:58):
Yeah yeah, let me by Tucker bow Tie put it
on and be like Jane Goodall Actually.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Nightmare? Who are these monkeys?

Speaker 1 (05:07):
Why?

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (05:12):
That is an accusation that was lobbed by one Gary
Larson of the Far Side in one of his comics.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Sorry, I love this story.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, we will talk about that because she may. She
seemed like she was a really good sport about it.
And for people who don't know Farside Gary Larson, it
is a one panel comic that I grew up on
was really hit its stride in the early nineties. I
had I think, I would say the article of clothing

(05:41):
I had more than any other article of clothing was
Far Side T shirts T shirts with Far Side comics
on them, because I was fashionable and cool. And he did.
He did a comic that implied that she was having
an affair, maybe with with one of the apes, and
she everyone's like, she's a really good sport. But as

(06:02):
we'll get to she also might have like almost had
him killed.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
So, oh, yeah, powerful woman.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
I know exactly she's She's not so some of the
eye contests that we do you know that is she
like a Halloween costume? And you you would know who
she was in a Halloween costume, but it's not a
Halloween costume. I see a lot, you know, where I
see a lot of her is in kindergarten career day

(06:32):
and I go to those every year and I tailgate
them that even though my kids aren't in kindergarten anymore. No,
but I do remember seeing a lot of people who
were planning to be privatologists at accents, both both kindergarten
career days that I that I went to. And it's
a career she invented. Katie, you're you're a person of science.

(06:57):
It's my understanding that the relationship between science and animals
before Jane Goodall was less empathetic and expansive and romantic
and more we need something to put in our skinner boxes,
and they won't let us put people in them anymore.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
Sort of, we can't.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
We can't subject babies to experiments anymore because no longer
we can't.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
Enjoy Yeah, no, it's true.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
I mean She really pioneered these sort of or at
least she forced the scientific establishment in the West to
accept the observational on the ground sort of type study
where it's like she becomes kind of part of the
environment and there because there's a lot of issues with

(07:49):
laboratory type studies in terms of animals. Don't you know,
like you put an animal in a lab, it's not
going to act like it usually does in fact, in
any captivity, not even in a lab, but just in captivity.
That's where we got the whole alpha wolf problem.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
That it's not real, it's not true.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
It's just because you had a bunch of wolves and
captivity and basically you.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
Had what are we even doing here? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yeah, yeah, we had like Shaw Shank redemption and wolf form,
and then we based our entire understanding of wolves on
these uh, these prison wolves. And so with the chimpanzees,
Jane uh like she did. She started out not really
I'm sure you'll kind of get into this, but she
she started out not with like a formal primatology education.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
She's just like, what.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
If I just you know, I'm really interested in this.
I kind of just want to sit with them and
get them used to be and see if I can't
observe some behaviors that we haven't seen before.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
She was the Goodwill Hunting of primatology. She got in
as a secretary essentially, but was also an amazing genius
of like animal behavior and had been like educating herself
NonStop since the day she was one. Like she literally
like from the very start is just like, yeah, animals

(09:12):
are my thing. At ten years old, she decided she
was going to like go live with the apes in
Africa and that wasn't a thing like hunters, I guess
went and lived with animals and like tried to kill them,
but like nobody outside of like Rugyard Kipling books did
that and instead of accepting that reality that like everybody

(09:34):
else was living and she just like changed the world
until living with apes and studying them was a was
a thing because she was doing it, and by doing
it was like one of the most famous scientists in
the world.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
It's awesome.

Speaker 4 (09:47):
She was like a reverse Kipling or a reverse Mogli
kind of right.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
She did kind of do a reverse Moguent. She did
an intentional Mogli. Yeah, and it.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
Was It was weird because like a lot of like
the songs of the Bare Necessities was just like some
that guy like a man, so, you know, not as cute.
She got like a stuffed a monkey as a kid,
and that was that was basically what did it for her.
She got a toy stuffed monkey and she's like, Okay,
I'm gonna be I'm gonna be a primatologist. And she

(10:16):
didn't know what that was, but she just fell in
love with the idea of of monkeys and like stayed
with it. I when I was a kid, I got
a stuffed chipmunk, which I called squirrely because.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
I was stupid.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
But that's why I became a squirrelogist and embedded myself
with squirrels.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
I had a donkey Kong stuffed donkey Kong as a
as a five year old that I was romantically involved
with as a five year old. So the weird weird
thing about me.

Speaker 4 (10:50):
A situationship with a donkey Kong's yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
He's seen as pecks, I mean come on.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yeah, yeah, And then he got like a little tear
under his arm and he started bleeding out.

Speaker 4 (11:01):
No, no, that's been a part of your sexuality for
a long time.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yea, that is my king you better be better be
bled from that armpit. One other thing just before we
like go beat by beat through her biography is she's
a very nice change of pace in the sense that
she's one of the only icons that we've covered who

(11:30):
did not get what she wanted by like stealing from
and manipulating everyone. She's just kind of like patient and
opportunistic and persistent, and she just sort of wore reality
down until it like let her do what she wanted.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
She's just like she had.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
Like the same technique on people as she did on chimpanzees,
because with it was like the same thing with people,
just like I think I'm going to do this, and
you know, and she just like sat and insinuated herself
in the situation with the people until they're like, I
guess Jane is a primatologist now.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
And then the same thing with the chees, where.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
This is Jane's a fucking primatologists.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
She just sits with the chimpanzees there, and the chimps
are like, wait, I guess she's she's just a chimpanzee now.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (12:22):
I love that the kind of grounded confidence just to
be like you will move around me this is where I.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Belong to this exactly. It is wild. Also the uh
to Katie's point earlier about like the what where science
was beforehand, that they it's just like you see all
these smug scientists being like sweetheart, no no, no, no no,
and like the thing that they're advocating for is like

(12:50):
the best way to learn about these animals is to
put them in a cage and like watch how they
freak out. And she's like, I don't know. I feel
like if I just like go to where they are
and let that and get them to let me kick it,
like I'll understand more about them. And it's it turns

(13:11):
out she was right, but it's it is wild, like
how this even though there's like plenty of documentaries about her,
this did feel like a movie that is begging for
a biopic that this life is like there's just so
many like all the cartoonist dipshits from a biopick where
you're like, all right, well they had to like lay
that on extra thing. They are all over the place

(13:35):
in her life.

Speaker 4 (13:36):
You gotta love a bunch of scientists who are just
like no torture has historically only given us the truth.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
The truth has only ever come from torture.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
I can't play basketball.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
That was their other main point that they kept in
the back.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
They really were like they really like to harp on
this idea that you know, oh, facts before feelings.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
You're too emotional.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
You're acting like the these chimpanzees have feelings, and the
thing is that they do so that you know they're
they're conscious beings. But it was like any any kind
of it's there's always been this kind of tension between
overly personifying animals and under personifying them when in sort

(14:19):
of science, like you definitely don't want to put your
own human garbage on an animal because they don't necessarily
have the same kind of sure human psychology, but they
also have minds, so it's yeah, I felt like there
was a lot of sort of hypocritical like early scientists
would often have this this thing of like, oh, well,

(14:41):
we can't act like chimpanzees are human, but then they
would still kind of project all of these like human
ideas onto them rather than just observe them and try
to understand them, like you said, like where they're at.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, they One of the things she discovers spoiler alert
is that chimps use tools in the wild, and this
was actually something that people had discovered before in chimps,
like in large enclosures. But they were like, oh, they
must have learned that from us, Like that's how just
self centered and like if their own asshole male scientists

(15:17):
were up to this point. So yeah, amazing. I do
also just because it's one of my favorite facts of
all time. Brian the editor just pointed out in the
chat that in terms of where science was coming from,
Darwin pretty good scientist. All right, I'm gonna give him that.
He came up with a good theory, didn't eat every
animal he observed. He thought that was an important part

(15:39):
of the process. He was like, yeah, but what's it taste?

Speaker 4 (15:43):
Like? Absolutely well, he had to establish that he was
the fittest, right right, yeah exactly.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
I mean, if you've ever been on one of those
old timey ships where you get like salted pork and
some kind of biscuits.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yes, yeah, juschros let eat it.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Turtles starting to look pretty juicy?

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah yeah, all right. Her dad was Mortimer Herbert Morris Goodall,
an engineer who became a race car driver for Aston
Martin in the early nineteen thirties and was like, I
think he had the record for eleven appearances at the
twenty four hour lamon Grand Prix race. So and her

(16:26):
mom was like an author, a secretary and just like
a magic Pixie dream mom. She's just like so amazing.
Her name is van Jane Goodall, like brings a clump
of earthworms to bed as a one year old. As
a four year old, she disappears for five hours and
nobody knows where she is, and she comes back and

(16:49):
she's like, oh, I was watching a hen lay an egg,
but in foreshadowing my future career, I needed to completely
stay still for five hours hen didn't know I was
there so that it would go through the process of
having letting the egg. And her mom in both cases
was like, that's that's great, you fucking rull. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 4 (17:13):
Just love you to have like a four year old
just saying kuakea, just learning there.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
That's the kuwaka. But I would say there are moments
throughout her story where you're like, is this happening inside
a children's book? And like just like from the start,
her father was a race car driver and her mom
is like just the amazing magic, magical person, and then

(17:42):
she kind of gets her idea for her life off
of children's books. She reads Tarzan, she reads Doctor Doolittle,
she reads The Jungle Book and is like.

Speaker 3 (17:54):
That, yeah, yeah happens. This is what happens when you
endless validate your children. They become primatologists.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
I know, gross. I will say so that she lives
through World War two. World War two happens from age
five to age eleven, and they would experience the house
shaking from air raids. They're in England, you know, they

(18:23):
had a bomb shelter, and she believed her mom had
a kind of like sixth sense that helps them avoid
danger during the war. And when you see her just
like walking around Gombay and like shorts and flip flops,
like chilling with chimps that I'd be worried about ripping
my face and dick off, you kind of like wonder
where she gets her confidence that nothing bad can possibly

(18:47):
happen to her. And I do think that it's probably
when your first memory is surviving a quantum machine gun
of random death, Like you're like, yeah, my mom has
magic powers that like we were just like meant to
be here, you know, like I guess you would come
out of that feeling a little chosen that, Like when
you know the Gravity's Rainbow has the novel Gravity's Rainbow

(19:10):
has a bunch of good stuff about just that experience
of living in London as bombs are just it's like, oh,
the neighbor is no longer, the house next door is
completely gone, and it's just like complete randomness as to
like who lives and who dies.

Speaker 3 (19:30):
Yeah, I feel like surviving the Blitz would change your
understanding of risk and statistics significantly.

Speaker 4 (19:37):
Yeah, and make you want to go into the jungle. Also,
I think that's right, Like I get me the fun
I'm there.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah, yeah that Apes don't have to deal with.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
This bull shoot yeah right exactly, Yeah she does. In
the uh she is the first episode of Famous Last Words,
the Netflix documentary where they like interview people who they
kind of know are going to die pretty soon and
then like release it after they died. And in that
episode she expresses her you know, wanting to send Elon

(20:14):
Musk and Donald Trump and she jimping a surprising addition,
and Vladimir Putin into outer space on one of Ela
Musk's spaceships. So yeah, I don't think she's like a
giant fan of dictators and right wing lunatics, but I
do just as an aside but possibly relevant character building

(20:37):
from her childhood. So she grows up, her dad goes
away to war, she grows up in this matriarchy, and
like she said, nobody's ever told me I couldn't do
anything because I was a girl, like she just grew
it was all women in the household. A possibly relevant,
relevant character building detail about her great grandfather who was

(20:59):
the father of the grandma who was the head of
this household that she grew up in. Once, so his
wife had I think polio and like lost the use
of one of her legs. Once after rolling his wife
in her wheelchair down to the shops of Bournemouth, he
left for a few minutes as she was looking over
bolts of cloth for her summer dresses, and stopped to
meet a friend for a quick pint at the local hotel.

(21:21):
He returned one year later with a trunk full of
Maori artifacts, having shipped out to Australia and New Zealand
while drunk. So I just like that story first of
all because history was a wild ride, man, But also
I think it like she has to put up with
pretty unreliable, exhausting men throughout her journey, and I feel.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
Like that's how he became That's how she became so
patient with chimpanzee.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
Excellent, look at this balcan idiot. She as mentioned like
kind of invents her life out of Doctor Doolittle, Rugyard
Kipling lives a Rudyard Kipling ass life. And Tarzan she's
like in love with Tarzan. Says that Tarzan married the

(22:11):
wrong Jane.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
Now there's a reality show for you, just like two
Jane's fighting over Tarzan.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Tarzan, that's my man. She talks cash shit about Jane
from Tarzan like throughout her life she's always just like
she was. She was weak. She like, I don't I
don't know what he saw in her, but just in
terms of she she's also extremely smart. She goes away
to a boarding school or she's a day student at

(22:42):
a boarding school, but very good school, and she's always
like second or third in her class and exams. Her
journal at age seventeen shows she was reading one hundred
and twenty nine books a year, and not not children's
books to get her numbers up like I do. But
like Shakespeare and shitan pizza. How that's right exactly, but yeah. Uh.

(23:07):
A career advisor at this point is like, Okay, you
like animals, You're one of our best students, and suggests
that for a career she photographs pet dogs.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Hmmm, okay, there's being wrong with that. I mean that
that would kick some ass. I'd love to photograph cute dogs.
But also she you know.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
It's just selling her a bit short.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:33):
I also, I think instructive about how animals were thought
of at this time. It's like, oh, you like animals,
you must mean pets. You must mean the ones that
we keep on leashes, the domesticated ones. Yeah, we don't
want to deal with those ones out there. They seem
scary and annoying.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
They can't even wear little bow ties, and when we try,
they rip her faces off.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
That's right. Her family couldn't affor university, so she went
to Queen's Secretarial College, not in Queens, New York, just
over there. And this is just something. This is the
second time we've seen this. The last time was in
Marilyn Monroe's iconograph. The school's confidential report said Jane was
a clever girl, but rather smug and sometimes inclined to

(24:20):
behave as if she has nothing to learn. That Marilyn
Montrose confidential report from I think it was like modeling
school was equally like just like kind of read her
for filth and like, I'm just like, we need to
get these confidential reports back. They're so fun Like schools.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
Are just like, yeah, they just that maybe they were
too confident, like Oh, she really thinks.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
She's she's hot, she.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
Thinks so great with her chimpanzees. Take her down a
peg exactly, Tony tail is, so.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
It's dust in it. I do. I do feel like
you could make a good business by just like having
a business where you're like, we've compiled a confidential report
on you that says all the meanest stuff that people
actually think about you, and you can pay us like
seven thousand dollars to get it. Uh wow. People would

(25:23):
be like, yeah, getting that email. That means.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
All we have to do is get podcasts.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
I know. Yeah, we do have the benefit of just
having the Internet tell us all day what they think
of us.

Speaker 4 (25:37):
Oh love an anonymous stranger with an anime picture just
telling me that I'm not funny.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
Nothing better than that.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
Well, Goku really must know what he's talking about. Yes,
he's famously hilarious himself.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
You probably aren't asking why isn't she in Africa yet,
but apparently she was. She was the only reason she
hadn't gone to Africa yet, like after graduating from secretarial college,
was that her beloved dog, Rusty was still around. And
when Rusty died, she reached kind of an emotional turning
point and was like, all right, well I'm fucking out

(26:13):
of here. Yeah I respect that, Yeah, yeah, I do too,
absolutely amazingly. And this is kind of like must be
painful for chimps to hear. Her favorite animal, like to
the day she died was dogs. She was dogs over chimps.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
You know what's so interesting about that is, in terms
of research, there's a kind of attempt to move away
from studying apes primates in labs and actually a move
towards like studying dogs because you don't have to have
a captive population of dogs. You can just ask people
to bring their dogs in for studies, just like a

(26:49):
human being would come in for a study, and.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
They've co evolved with us.

Speaker 3 (26:53):
So there's a lot of really interesting research on dog
social behavior that is a lot easier to do, and
so there's just like some researchers were saying, like, yeah,
dogs are the new chimps in terms of studies on
social behaviors because they're just so it's there's a lot
of things to research there.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
So it's a I can kind of see why she was.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
Dogs are a lot nicer than chimpanzees in terms of
getting along with each other and with people.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
You have to be incapacitated for them to rip your
face off, yes, like whereas chimps will just come right
up and do it. Yeah, no thumbs on a dog. Yeah, yeah,
that's right. So this is when she decides to go
to Africa. When she was in boarding school, one of
her classmates, Klo, was from Kenya and had had a

(27:43):
farm outside of Nairobi. So she saved up money via
waitressing jobs and working at a hotel and mail delivery
until she had enough to go to Kenya. Went to
Kenya March nineteen fifty seven, took a five hundred and
seventy six foot steamship and arrived in Nairobi on her
twenty third birthday. Wes Anderson needs to get it over

(28:07):
with him. Make a biopic of Jane Goodall I think
is where we're at, like just traveling around on Steamer
father race car driver, Like everything is just and everything
feels like it takes place in a children's book, much
like a Wes Anderson movie. I'm just trying to get
pitched to him.

Speaker 4 (28:23):
We're trying to get him to try to get the
chimps in the middle of the frame to stay there,
though I think that the cinematography would be to become
difficult after this point in her story.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and
we'll talk about how she goes in a few short
years to being inventing primatology. Essentially, we'll be right.

Speaker 5 (28:45):
Now and we're back.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
So she's in Africa, staying with her friend, actually finds
a place to live, and her friend tells her about
this guy, doctor Lewis Leaky, who's an archaeologist and curator
at a museum at Nairobi's Natural History Museum. And so
this is one of those I don't think this works anymore,

(29:20):
but I haven't tried it, but it comes up a
lot in our icon episodes, like Steve Jobs did a
version of this too. She just cold called the museum
and said, I'd like to make an appointment to meet
your doctor Leaky, and he was like, I'm doctor Leaky.
Who the fuck is this now? He's like, well, what
do you want? And she was like, oh yeah. She

(29:42):
was like can I can I come over? And so
he showed her a museum that they say his secretary
had quit two days earlier, and so he soon hired Jane.
I think he he was like really always trying to
fuck her, like NonStop, which was in keeping with his

(30:02):
general vibe and so unclear if she had quit two
days before, if he was like, I don't know who
that person is. Don't let her into the office when
she when she tried to come in. But so her
secretarial training did pay off. She became his secretary. She
she kind of uses every piece of her light, like
the boarding school. She like finds a friend who lives

(30:23):
in Africa. She uses her secretarial degree to get a
foothold with the scientist who's going to like help her
build her career. So anyways, he lets her come on
an excavation and she gets to show off that she's
like really good at dealing with dangerous wildlife. She has
a run in with a lion, and like shows that

(30:44):
she like doesn't freak out because her again, her energy
is just so fucking chill, and like he so she
is like no, always knows what to do, never freaks out.
And then as they're on this trip together, she said,
he told me that the chimpanzee habitat was remote and rugged,
and that there would be dangerous animals and the chimpanzees

(31:05):
themselves were four times stronger than humans. Oh, how I
longed to undertake an adventure like the one Leaky was envisioning.
And so she said, I wish you wouldn't keep talking
about that, because that's what I want to do. And
you're making me fucking pissed. And he replied, Jane, I've
been waiting for you to tell me that one earth.
Did you think I talked about those chimpanzees to you?

(31:27):
And yeah, just dreamed this into existence with the help
of this very old, horny scientist who, by the way,
also so all right, I'm going a little confession. I
didn't know that Gorillas in the Mist was a different person.
I thought, Diana fo right, yes, exactly, And I didn't

(31:51):
know that, like I kind of knew it because I
knew that that person got murdered, and Janet All was
still alive.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
Raising that like the gorilla's in the mist, it's a
whole different person.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Is a whole different person, you guys. But he's she's
also sent by doctor Leaky, Like yeah, yeah, this guy
was just like would find young women and be like,
I'm gonna have them go do the science that i
want them to do and also try and you know,
have an affair with them if they'll allow me. Jane

(32:25):
was not a taker on that front, and there is
a rumor that he tried to get somebody else to
go in her set, like once she was not sleeping
with him, he offered the gig to somebody else who
just turned it down. But yeah, he sent Dan Fosse
to study mountain gorillas, someone named Bruti Goldykis to study orangutans,

(32:51):
and Jane good All to study chimps, and they were
all very successful, and it was just this one very
hornyist was like, you know, accidentally invented modern primatology.

Speaker 4 (33:07):
Doctor Leaky's angels, Like that's what they called it.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
The literal really that's what. Yeah, that is a nickname
that they gave it. In the sixties.

Speaker 3 (33:15):
Doctor sneaky, leaky sneak. Yeah, it's like, come up to
see my etchings. Just come up to see my primates, right, yes,
super remote area. Yeah, it's just like if you wanted
to get anywhere at any point, uh, you just have
to deal with gross guys like that.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
Yes, yeah he does. I have looked him up. He
does look like what we're describing to.

Speaker 1 (33:43):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (33:43):
Yeah, this man definitely was like, I know how I'm
want to get laid.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
I'm I'm glad it didn't work for him, that's crazy. Yeah,
I think it did. Occasionally. He definitely was having affairs
with some of his young assistants and secretaries, but not Jane.
And she's still you know again, he was like offered
the job to someone else. She was just like all right,
well I'm still going to get it. I'm still you know,

(34:11):
just patient, persistent.

Speaker 4 (34:13):
Like the Venn diagram also of like a woman that
like would want to go and do this necessarily and
that that would be in this situation that wants to
fuck him is like very that's a sliver, right. I
feel like most most people are like, I'm I should
be respected.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
I'm not here for you, dude.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Yeah, you'd hope. So yeah, yeah, but yeah, anyways, his
theory of the case and like you know this is
probably blending him with like some of his horniness, but
like his theory was like, I'm going to send somebody
who is not like part of the scientific establishment, because
the scientific establishment is so befucked, you know, like just
like so wrong about everything in this realm, and so

(34:56):
like I'm going to send someone with less training so
that they can like see this with open fresh eyes.
And that's what he does, and like that works, works
like a charm. So Jane is not allowed to go
to Gombe alone because it's the you know, sexism, I guess.

(35:16):
So she brought her fifty four year old mother. They
were like, you gotta your your mother needs to sign
the permission slip and accompany you as a as a chaperone.
So again, like I'm outraged on her behalf, and she
just like takes it in stride. She's like, ah, it
was actually good because like my mom encouraged me when
I was down on the dumps. And also her mom

(35:40):
is like really is really helpful. I think her mom
is in the Hall of Fame for good icon parents
with Tupac's mom. She's like just great. She like opens
a clinic there to help people, like help local humans
in the area and which helps them, you know, have
the goodwill of the people. As they're like starting this

(36:02):
longest ever kind of scientific study. At the time, people
were like, well, how long are you gonna send him for?
Send her for like ten days, that's that's entirely too long,
And he was like, actually three months, and then it
ended up being like two decades that she was there.
The Chip Reserve is right off of the coast of

(36:23):
Lake Tanganika, which is the second deepest lake in the
world holds more fresh water than all the North American
Great Lakes combined. I'm just woefully ignorant about Africa and
like all the amazing things that are there. They say,
it's like crystal clear, very beautiful. And she shows up
and like the chimps won't stay around her for like months,

(36:46):
basically like anytime she tries to get close to them,
they run away. It's a real This would be the
like montage of like, you know, her working to get closer,
they keep running away. There's like one psycho chimp that
like runs up on her and like bashes her in
the head and tries to push her over a cliff,

(37:07):
and again she's just like, Okay, well I'm gonna go
to keep keep hanging out, and slowly by slowly, they're like, man,
she can take a punch. This Jane Gal has got something.
She also gives them bananas, which is smart, but some

(37:28):
scientists are like, they're just they're just like going to
you because you're giving them bananas. It's like so so yeah, yeah,
it's not like it's like she has a briefcase of
cash and she's like, do a thing that I want
you to do, so that like they're going to her
and now she can observe them. But like, the scientific

(37:49):
orthodoxy is just like very very annoying to have a.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
Bunch of chimpanzees in captivity than to offer one a banana.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah, they're going to find anything.

Speaker 4 (38:01):
They kind of like invalidate her work at this point though,
you know, yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
But yeah. The other big thing that she breaks with
orthodoxy on is instead of numbering the chimps, she gives
them names. David Graybeard is like the star. He is,
you know, a leader in the pack, and like is
also just the first one who's like I think I

(38:27):
like her, like, starts hang out with her, is like
comes within five feet of her to grab some bananas,
and by the time, like six to eight months on,
the footage is incredible, like they're just chilling with her
and it's awesome. Yeah, Flow is the matriarch who hangs

(38:50):
out with her and is like another leader. But soon
everybody's hanging out with her and there's like these like
amazing baby who are hanging out. But so two of
the big things that she learns. One is everybody thought
chimps were vegetarians, and she like three months after arriving,

(39:13):
she finds them devouring a bush pig, which is I
don't know, I'm assuming that they just like found it,
but yeah, so they are definitively not vegetarians. And then
days after that, so she like, you know, is this
untrained privatologist who's like, oh, so you have the species

(39:33):
like exactly wrong, like completely wrong, guys. And then days
later she sees David Graybeard using a grass stem to
dig termites out of a nest. And not only is
he like fishing into the termite mound with these grass stems,
he has like a whole group of these grass stems

(39:56):
that he has like pre selected for being good at them.
So he has like a toolbox of these grass downs
that he is using to get termites.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Again, so yeah, and modifying like they would like they
would modify the tools like pull leaves off of it
and kind of like and then select things, modify them
and then have their little stick assortment. Then they would
use different sort of quality of branches, like for delicate
tasks like getting termites or less delicate tasks like murdering.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
Bush babies and eating.

Speaker 3 (40:35):
Right, they would use larger branches for that, just to
you know, whack a bush baby on that. And if
you've ever seen a bush baby, they're super super cute, adorable.
They're from the if you've seen Madagascar, the the DreamWorks
those yea.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
More it's a bush baby, very cute.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
But yeah, the chimpanzees would just like or no, I
don't know if that's actually true, but anyway, it was
they would just smack these poor little things and kill
them and eat them, and it's like yeah, probably no
not vegetarians.

Speaker 1 (41:09):
Very vegetarians and also able to use tools, which that
was how humans defined themselves at that point, Like like
was man are tool using animals like that was They're
they're trying to get by as being special on a technicality.

(41:30):
She informed leaky God, leaky, what a name. There's a
whole chat going on in the in the chat about
how that is the superducer. Catherine said that is the
perfect name for a scientific sex pest, and Brian pitched
doctor discharge, which is disgusting. Yeah, but when she let

(41:53):
him know about the tools, he said, now we must
redefine tool stop, redefine man stop, or accept chimpanzees as human.
Primatologist Jill Prutz calls this one of the most important
discoveries about animal behavior ever made, and she's like doing
it months after arriving with no scientific background, essentially like

(42:17):
a lot of pretty roud scientific background, but like none
of the official degrees that are supposed to make you
good at that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
That line goes extremely hard to just like or redefine
what it means to be human.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
It's very cool.

Speaker 3 (42:32):
Also, I have to correct a very terrible air I made.
A mort from Madagascar is not a bush baby, he's
a mouse slimer. And then there's a whole thing where,
for some reason, when you look at the Wikipedia for
more from Madagascar.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
It blames him for nine and eleven. I don't know
what's going on. Oh no, there's a theory.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Yeah, I've also always blamed him for nine to eleven.
That's so weird. I had no idea. Jane Goodall in
New York during nine to eleven just putting it out there.
I'm not saying she caused it. She does have a
knack for being in dangerous situations and just sort of
coasting by.

Speaker 4 (43:11):
I know there's also a Kermit also gets blamed for
nine to eleven as well. So not some but some
animated character absolutely is responsible, not us Kermit.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
I can definitely see, no question. Let's take a quick break.
We'll come back. We'll talk about she immediately becomes like
world famous, not immediately, but soon after this becomes world famous,
and we'll talk about Ginge Goodall as icon. We'll be
right back, and we're back. One detail of the chimps

(43:58):
that she studies that I thought was kind of impressively
human was I think it was like a one of
one of the recent interviews that she did. She did
so many interviews, it's crazy, but I think it was
actually WTF with Mark mahern. He asked if she like
keeps up with the old crew you guys, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
David gray Beard, you know, just name it all our.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
Old chimps, And she said that all the offspring of Flow.
So Flow is this like charismatic matriarch figure in the group,
and like all of her sons have been like subsequent
leaders of the tribe. So there's like nepotism also, and

(44:44):
that which is kind of impressive like that They're like, well,
she was cool, So like intergenerational nepotism is kind of impressive.

Speaker 4 (44:53):
Wow, man, I love thee I love the idea of yeah,
the other chimps are complaining about the nepotism within their
own tribe as well to being like it's just because
your mom was Flow, that's the reason you're starring in this.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
So at this point she and doctor Leaky like have
a sense of like what's happening here in that like
it would be helpful for her to have a little
bit more official training. So she is accepted to do
a PhD at Cambridge, even though she doesn't have an
undergrad degree. She's one of eight people I think who've

(45:32):
ever been admitted to a PhD program without first having
a bachelor's degree.

Speaker 4 (45:36):
I'm sure that was a very enjoyable experience, showing up
like as like the famous chimp woman with no undergrad
I'm sure she was accepted immediately.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
They were so randy. You're going to be shocked to
hear this. They were all like, no, no, no, no,
all wrong. You shouldn't be giving them names, and you
are giving them entirely too much credit for their emotions,
and yeah, just really putting her patients to the test.

(46:08):
But it does seem to be a bottomless resource of patients,
because yeah, this is this is where you would get
a lot of just the worst characters of all time
in her biopic are the Cambridge scientists who like as
she knows, like she has these direct observations, are like
contradicting her based on like some shit they saw a

(46:30):
chip doing a cage, you know.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Yeah, and they really liked I think one of the
issues was they really liked this artifice that to be
a scientist, you're completely.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
Objective. There's no subjectivity.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
It's facts before feelings, right, you know, you don't have
any You're not putting your thumb on the scale at
all when you're conducting studies and with Jane Goodall, She's like, yeah,
I mean I'm kind of involved with these chimps, right,
and yeah, of course, like I have biases, and I
have my favorites and my buddies and the ones that

(47:05):
I don't like so much, and.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
She's some of them are assholes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
She was very open about that, and she kind of
was like, yeah, you know, I'm I'm biased because I'm
communicating with other creatures, right, like just like you would
when you're talking to people, And so she kind of
didn't pretend to be completely objective, like a completely objective observer.
She was like, what is that in journalism, like gonzo journalism.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's like a gonzo scientist, yes, exactly,
which is kind of the only honest way to do
the job, because if you're acting like you're not there,
you're introducing a fiction into the very like premise of
the observation, like there is no world in which you
are getting these animals in a completely objective state, like

(47:57):
unless it's just you know, cameras, like I guess eventually.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
But have you seen spy in the wild where they
do those just nuts? Animal robots look insane? They're like
a completely normal looking sea lion's.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
So before they had that amazing technology. One of the
things she really had to put up with at this
time was that, uh and there's no easy way to
put this, she was hot, and everybody was like, oh,
she's just a cover model for this, Like you know,
they she did just like she showed up with like

(48:41):
short she wore short shorts and like just you know,
a short sleeve shirt and like sandals like that. It's
kind of crazy, like how little gear she had on.
And you know, people were like, she only got on
the cover of National Geographic because of her legs. It's like, no,
she just happens to have like great legs. Well, also

(49:01):
making scientific history, you dip shit. But they also every
time National Geographic would come out, they would be like,
all right, can we get you washing your hair in
a stream? It was like a very specific shot that
they got every time. She's like, hey, could we uhane, yeah, yeah,

(49:22):
yeah exactly.

Speaker 4 (49:23):
Here's an evening gown to blend in with the monkeys. Yeah, insane.
Everybody's so horny and weird.

Speaker 1 (49:32):
I know, everybody is just such a creep, especially in
that like man in the sixties and seventies. It's just
like they haven't even they hadn't even thought that they
were wrong about like being fucking perverts. There was like yeah, no,
of course, this is the way it has to be.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
It's just like mad Men, but with scientists, just like yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
Yeah, yeah exactly. In December nineteen sixty five, CBS News
aired the National geographic special misgod All and the Wild
Chimpanzee is narrated by Orson Wells, and it was viewed
by twenty five million households because there were there was
nothing else to do at the time, so just everybody

(50:15):
saw this shit and it, you know, changed to the
way that people think about humanity and our position in
the world. No big deal, but yeah, so she becomes
incredibly famous.

Speaker 4 (50:31):
I wish they would reshow some of this stuff a
little bit more often now, because then you see like
people getting into like the exotic trades and like dressing
their chimps up like.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
The Chucky doll or whatever, and you're like.

Speaker 4 (50:42):
No, no, please, please go watch what their society looks
like and respect it again, right, like no joke.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
I think the movie Nope is one of the best
things in terms of trying to set back the exotic
wildlife trade that in Tiger King. I don't know, but yeah,
it's it has been a minute since we really Because
one thing that I thought Jane goodall because she I

(51:10):
think she gets a little bit of We think of
her as like being sort of a like saying, like
being a chimp advocate, which she is, but she's also
pretty unflinching about how chimps are assholes, and we'll talk
about how violent and warlike they are as well, and
she doesn't She's not like, yeah, chimps suck, like, so

(51:31):
let's kill them all?

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Is she? She's just realistic.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
About them being violent but also having a lot of
interesting depth to them. So I think that's that kind
of Also, I think it's hard for people to wrap
their heads around where it's like, oh, so they're like
both violent and chill sometimes like people.

Speaker 1 (51:54):
Like people almost interesting. A war breaks out in the
seventies like between like there's part part of the group
of chimps like splinters off and then they have a
couple of years where they just like live together in
harmony and then something something sets them off and they
go to war and like five are killed, and that's

(52:14):
like very eye opening for her. She's like, wow, the
they are just like us. I'm like, at the time,
there's a lot of questions of like our people innately
aggressive and violent, and she was like, well, yeah, I
think so, Like it seems like that our closest you know,
genetic relative, Like we are closer than rats and mice

(52:37):
with chimps, you know, like we're basically the same to
any any other species looking at us, they're like, oh,
there goes some chimps.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
There have been revisions to that idea kind of more
recently where we think that probably are because like we're
also very close to Benobo's and our genetics, and there's
like this idea that we may have become, you know,
our sort of history became different from like chimpanzees because
we became less aggressive and more cooperative than say chimpanzees didn't.

(53:11):
That's why we've got Starbucks and chimpanzees don't.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Right, we're like the dog to like chimps are like
the wolf version of us. Kind of that's.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
Actually yes, that's actually a really good way to put it,
because there's this idea of sort of self domestication where
we selected ourselves for a more domesticated version of our ancestors.
And that's a similar thing that happened with dogs. We
domesticated dogs, of course, but also dogs or well early

(53:43):
well somewhat domesticated themselves because they would come and approach humans,
and like the ones that were more you know, amenable
to belly robbins were the ones that would survive.

Speaker 4 (53:56):
And we're kind of seeing the ways, well what we're
seeing that with like coyotes and raccoons are kind of
self domesticating now too, right, So like that just seems
easier if I'm just cute, make an Instagram account for me.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
Yeah, sure. And then so she becomes world famous. She's
doing all this great scientific work. They're like these Stanford
scientists who talk about you know, classically trained scientists who
are like I went in the field with her for
one day, and she just like has this amazing eye

(54:34):
and she like sees things in the animal's behavior that
like I wouldn't I hadn't noticed in being in the
field for like three months. She's just like very talented
as a scientist. And then she's also just like a
really uh like great at being a celebrity. Like she's
just like a really good time, and so she also

(54:55):
is able to kind of pivot the science career into
advocacy career. She went to this conference in Chicago in
nineteen eighty six called Understanding Chimpanzees, and she said she
like arrived at that conference as a scientist and left
as an activist because she didn't realize like chimpanzees were

(55:15):
actually going extinct because she was in this protected reserve
area and around the world, you know, habitats were being
destroyed and chimps were dying and disappearing. And so she's
then just like went to work creating like three point
four million acres of habitat under a conservation action plan.

(55:37):
She created this Roots and Shoots program which encouraged young
people to engage in local community action. That's still like
that one has grown and grown and grown, and it
does feel it like her focus on young people has
been effective. Young people, I think are as aware of
who she is and like the mission and conservation as

(56:01):
much as anybody.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
From what I read, it sounded like she really would have,
like if she could have just done sort of what
she felt like doing, she would have just been out
there with the chimpanzees all the time. And not having
to do sort of all the press that she did,
but she felt this responsibility and she was really good
at communicating with people, probably the same skills that made

(56:24):
her good at communicating with non people, and so she
did it anyways. Like she when she passed away, she
was in the middle of like a press tour, still
going at it. So she was like, really just I
think she she had like a huge amount of like
stamina and fortitude for doing things that were like maybe

(56:46):
not the most pleasant thing for her, but she would
do it anyways because she felt that that was important.

Speaker 1 (56:54):
From our researcher, Meredith Tenko, she said on the recurring
subject of drug use, because we do, I end up
talking about drug use a lot on the show, just
because all these icons are really into drugs, but Jane
was not. But she was a drinker who enjoyed wine
and whiskey, although she said on Call her Daddy that
she didn't like wine as much, but she did say

(57:15):
it's not just like she was. She occasionally sipped a whiskey.
She says she and her mom both didn't really drink water.
She was like, I didn't doesn't water doesn't really agree
with me. We kind of like whiskey, and so I
drink whiskey every night at seven And also I drink
whiskey if my throat is like if I need my

(57:37):
voice to be loose, which is one way of describing
the effects of alcohol.

Speaker 4 (57:42):
Sure, yeah, okay, Jane.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
But she's also like, as she's doing the work that
Kaye's talking about, where she's like out, you know, spreading
the word and like speaking and just being this iconic
figure for conservation and nature, she's just like really, she's
almost like camping. Like she talks about how she would

(58:08):
use her hotel clothing iron to like toast bread. She's
just like, she's like, I don't need much. I have
like three outfits and I just need a loaf of
bread that I can toast on the iron.

Speaker 4 (58:25):
I wonder if she's the one that's cleaning our underwear
in the coffee pot.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
Yeah, she might be. She might be the one.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
Yeah, that's a video of a guy at a hotel
with a hack where you cook chicken in a coffee pot,
And I just I don't I think civilization might have
been a mistake.

Speaker 4 (58:42):
Yeah, you can't be using those coffee pots for coffee,
don't we can't be trusted even No, but.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
Yeah, I mean her religion was basically, if I have
a soul, I think chimpanzees have a soul and trees
do too. And why the theory of an evolving of
evolving humans should be contrary to any kind of religion
I can't imagine, which I don't know. That does seem
like I feel like we're waiting for a religion that

(59:13):
embraces science and not not just by calling itself scientology,
but like actually it's like, yeah, no, we can have
room for both of those things.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
What about scienceology scientology?

Speaker 2 (59:26):
Maybe I won't get sued for that.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
Yeah. One of my favorite details about her is that
she I don't I won't say she believed in Bigfoot,
but she also is like she's kind of like I
am with aliens. She like wanted to believe in Bigfoot.
She's like agnostic. Yeah, she's like agnostic. And what There's
this anecdote where she said, so an interviewer said, I

(59:51):
have a silly question, if you'll indulge me, and I'm
sure you know where this is going. You've said you're
not ruling out the Bigfoot exists, and she said for
various reasons, And I'll tell you one my most striking one.
I was in Ecuador. We'd flown for two solid hours
over unbroken forest in a small plane, and we visited
four tiny little communities, thirty to fifty people, no roads,

(01:00:12):
and they communicate with each other by means of like
in the old days it was the town crier. But
these are hunters actually, and they carry the news from
one village to another, and letters and things like that.
So I had an interpreter and I said to him,
when you next meet one of these hunters, could you
ask if they've ever seen a monkey without a tail,
which would be a chimp. Three of the hunters came

(01:00:35):
back and said, oh, yes, we've seen monkeys without tails.
They walk upright and they're about six foot tall. And
she said, now, this was an interpreter from the village.
He knew nothing about Bigfoot, nothing at all. Every single
country has its version. YETI Yawie in Australia, wild Man
in China. So I don't know if it's perhaps a
myth that stems from maybe the last of the Neanderthals.

(01:00:57):
But then is the last of the Neanderthals still living
in these for us? I don't know, but I'm not
going to say it doesn't exist, and I'm not going
to say people who believe in it are stupid.

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
My theory, Hell yeah, my theory is very hairy pervert.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
Very hairy pervert named doctor Leaky, still out there jacking off. Jane.

Speaker 4 (01:01:19):
You, oh God, just covered himself in hair, just disappearing
into the forest.

Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
Just make you honey, Jane.

Speaker 4 (01:01:33):
Now I'm just thinking about a Bigfoot in an Austin
Powers Halloween costume, just like yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Another one of my favorite details that I came across
is that she met the British Royal family in nineteen
seventy nine, and in a letter she described her ten
minute conversation with the Queen as a most informal chat.
She wrote, she said she'd seen one of the films
on TV. All pleasant, but the almost uncanny part was

(01:02:00):
the way she turned on and off. It was almost
as though a computer inside her was sometimes a bit
late dropping the next penny in the slot, and the
smile and interest faded, Then suddenly zoom there was again,
in a flash, perfectly lovely, but also her essence is

(01:02:21):
that of a malfunctioning robot. It's like such a kind own.
That is amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:02:29):
Yeah, that's so.

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Real of her, like meets royalties, like kind of seems
like a robot.

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
Yeah yeah, not all there turns out.

Speaker 4 (01:02:38):
Imagine how disassociated you would be if you were the
Queen of England. Yeah, it'd be hard to be like, oh, yeah,
I'm they're probably about the same age ish kind of too, right,
because well they're both dead, so yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
In many ways there, everybody who's dead is the same age. Yeah. Yeah.
She had been told Prince Philip was interested in chimps,
but quickly realized he was quote not interested in animals
one tiny bit. Yeah. And then we have the far
side story, which Gary Larson published a comic. It's one

(01:03:19):
chimp grooming another. It says, well, well, another blonde hair
conducting a little more research with that Jane Goodall tramp.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
It's an important details.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
The speaking chimp has like horn room and glass, like
the sort of glasses that women would wear in the fifties,
uh huh with the little cati thing, and so it's
like that's his way of showing us that that's the ladies.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
That's a lady chimp, because.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
Yeah, it's yeah, I would when I was a kid.
I would read his comics whenever I would go to
the potty. I had a lot of the Gary Larson books. Yeah,
I know all of them.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
A Goodall Foundation representative wrote a letter of complaint, calling
it inexcusable and incredibly offensive. Jane Goodall was like, I
thought it was kind of funny. Yeah, so they ended
up becoming friends. Larsen visited Gombe at one point, and
on a hike he was attacked by the resident bully chimp, Frodo.

(01:04:23):
I think Frodo was also the one who almost threw
her over a cliff and had to hug a tree
to protect himself. He was bruised and scratched, but not
seriously harmed. And then Jane Goodall sold t shirts featuring
the comic and wrote the introduction for the Farsi Gallery five.
I will just say so, in one respect, I could

(01:04:44):
just be like, oh, she's a good sport, or it
could be that she was like once I saw that,
I decided to lay the trap. I was gonna be
very friendly to him, and yeah, bring him out and
then let Frodo intimidate him until he let me make

(01:05:05):
money off his Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:05:10):
I just heard a pair of aviators just tipping him
and being like, fro do.

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
You know what to do with this motherfucker? Right, he's
got the.

Speaker 3 (01:05:18):
Ring, they've got the little they've got the little earpieces.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
But it's just a banana.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
Yeah, I got a boss. He's holding it to his.

Speaker 4 (01:05:28):
Hands, solemnly hanging up a banana and then going on
a mission.

Speaker 1 (01:05:33):
Anyways, she passed away in October. Really sad, really sad,
But what a life.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
What an icon because she was quite she was quite old.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):
She's in ninety one when she died.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
Yeah, that's awesome, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
And yeah, the the famous last words, you know, is
the intro because it's the first episode. They're like, what
if you hear the words? What if the dead could speak?
Like they're really selling it, like it's like this thing.
It's just like I don't know, man, It's like we
we know that, we know about recording technology, we know that,

(01:06:14):
like we can watch a thing with somebody who's passed away.
But it is a cool interview because she's just, you know,
very circumspect and cool and claims to have the magical
ability to stop the rain. She's like, yeah, sometimes I
can do it. I can stop the rain. Just by
asking to stop.

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
Just afropom nothing just looks the interview or dead in
the eye.

Speaker 1 (01:06:36):
I can control the weather essentially. Yeah, but she does
just kind of have this magic about her, like that
is one of the things that you can't really describe,
but she likes it. Just seems like everybody has the
same experience where they're like, oh, and then I like
was in the same room with her and I found
myself crying and asking if I could touch her. It's like,

(01:07:00):
why did you do that? You fucking freak?

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
Get out of here.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
He is at you again.

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
He takes off a different.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
There's a what one anecdote. One time I accompanied Jane
to the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Connecticut, where a
group of women prisoners had started a Roots and Shoots chapter.
Arriving on a drizzly, misty morning, we were searched, fingerprinted,
and otherwise processed under the lock up by a pair
of guards, one of whom may not have had his
morning coffee yet. He was big, burly and business like,

(01:07:36):
tough looking stony faced until Jane greeted him with a
chimpanzee pant hoot, which, if I had tried that would
have gotten my ass kicked in this case, instantly shattered
the stone of his demeanor. The other guard said, that's
the first time he's smiled in history. I've got to
write that one down. But yeah, that's like the sort

(01:07:59):
of person and she is. She's just like you can't
really like take yourself too seriously around her, and she
she used it for good. I would say she's.

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):
Like very like saint, like without the kind of religious baggage.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, And that's kind of like what
religion should be, you.

Speaker 2 (01:08:20):
Know, immaculate vibes, loving Katie.

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Any anything else that I missed, since I feel like
you know more about this subject than.

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
No, I mean I think I think you got pretty
much all that. Just like she was.

Speaker 3 (01:08:38):
It was really her persistent chillness. Yeah, I mean, she
was excited. We can't understate or we can't overstate how
smart she was. She was extremely intelligent, but also just
very persistently chill. Yes, and in a way that was
just every like all like not just humans but non

(01:09:02):
human primates recognized as like, oh, this is just an
incredibly kind and patient person. So I will not rip
her limb from limb and hang out with her, and yeah,
in terms of like the greatest like paradigm shifts in
terms of like chimpanzees use tools, they have also like

(01:09:23):
that they have personalities, because that was the whole controversy
of her, Oh you're humanizing these chimps. There was this
idea that animals were all just kind of like, I
don't know, carbon copies of each other, just sort of
like printed out it, yeah, like printed out of a
genetic mold. And she's like, no, they have different personalities,

(01:09:44):
they're individuals, and that was kind of a I mean,
it was a huge paradigm shift. And in addition to
almost getting Gary Larson almost getting him killed, she did
save him from being.

Speaker 2 (01:09:58):
Sued, so that way, Yeah, so that's.

Speaker 3 (01:10:03):
Out. Yeah, because like he was, he was really worried
and stress about getting sued because he was actually a
huge fan of Jane Goodall and she was a huge
fan of his, and they just it was kind of
like a like a platonic meet cute, only like he
almost got sued and then almost got killed by.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
A chimpanzee.

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
Yeah, it's it's kind of wild, like just the danger
of like I remember watching the documentary Jane, which is
a lot of her. She ended up marrying the photographer
who National Geographic sent uh to like document all the
amazing work she was doing, and he was a jealous asshole,

(01:10:43):
another kind of infuriating man that she had to sort
of patiently suffer. But the footage of her walking through
the jungle, at first, I was like, oh, man, like
I guess I was overestimating how dangerous it is to
be in the jungle. And then you like She's like, no,

(01:11:05):
there were poisonous snakes everywhere, Like there were you know,
all these crazy things. But yeah, she just could kind
of float through on immaculate vibes. I feel like that's
sort of hers.

Speaker 4 (01:11:19):
Yes, Also, like what are you what You're jealous of
the other chimps? Like what are you doing?

Speaker 3 (01:11:24):
Dude?

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):
Like have have one ounce of your wife's child.

Speaker 1 (01:11:28):
Believe it or not, he was. He was jealous of
all the attention and adulation that she was getting, which
he could to essentially seems to be no. Yeah, but yeah,
I mean Dan Fosse like was murdered, Like there were

(01:11:49):
real dangers out there that like she just kind of
did they have.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
The relationship at all? All the various ape.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
Women, Yeah, Dian Fosse visit her and at first they
were chill and then she was like Jane was just
again like similar with the Queen, where it's like she's like, yeah,
she was perfectly lovely. She's kind of a fucking idiot though,

(01:12:19):
so like she just said that Diane Fossey like hadn't
really bothered, like she was heading into her Gorillas in
the Mist in the part of her career, like going
to study the gorillas where they lived in the mist. Presumably, Hey,
this isn't her icon episode. No no, no no, even though

(01:12:40):
I thought it was. Uh, and she she said that
we got slightly annoyed with her. Things started well, but
Jane thought Diane had quote the most romantic notions in
her head, which is kind of like Jen like her
hopes to keep a cow and hens where she was
and to spend time making jam and jam is like, no,

(01:13:02):
you toasts bread on a clothing iron and you get
back to work.

Speaker 2 (01:13:09):
Where was Frodo on the night that Diana died?

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
Where was.

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
I love the shade of just like she's out there
making jam.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
I think she's going to make jam and keep a fussy.

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
This jammy bitch.

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
This.

Speaker 1 (01:13:31):
Jelly ass out of here. Amazing Katie, wonderful having you.
Where can people find you? Follow you, hear you all
that good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:13:41):
Thank you so much for having me. I love talking
about Shane.

Speaker 3 (01:13:44):
Yeah, I have a show that a co host called
a secretly incredibly fascinating with human golden retriever Alex Schmidt.

Speaker 1 (01:13:54):
Much smarter than a golden retriever.

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
Yes, I'm just saying in terms of the ubulant joy for.

Speaker 1 (01:14:02):
The world, just a kind similarly unflappable disposition.

Speaker 3 (01:14:08):
Yes, but he actually does all he does all the
work on the show. I'm I just go like, wow,
that's secretly incredibly fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:14:17):
He was there to call him a human golden retriever.
It's also like a six time Jeopardy champion.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
Yes, he's very sharp.

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
And so good at fetch and very good at fetch.

Speaker 3 (01:14:30):
And yeah, I have my show, a creature feature. I
did I did just have a boy child, So a
boy child, a boy child.

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
I'm in the midst of that.

Speaker 3 (01:14:44):
So I'm on a hiatus from a Creature Feature. But
there's a huge back catalog, so if you've never listened
to it, there's a ton of episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
It's all about animals.

Speaker 3 (01:14:54):
And cool conversations with people about evolutionary biologies. So you
can check that out on this network. And yeah, if
you if you who enjoys politics, nobody, But if you
are masochistic and interested in politics, you can see I've
written some things for Summer News, which you can see
on YouTube.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
Jingoda also had a there's a lot we didn't even
have time to get to. She she had a boy
child while working in Gombay and like had to keep
the baby in a She like, wow, built a big
cage for the baby to keep because the chimps. A
baby cage, that's what I need. But it was massive,

(01:15:41):
it was big. It doesn't It's not as bad as
it sounded.

Speaker 3 (01:15:44):
Yeah, a cage to keep down just for the boy's safety.

Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
A giant boy.

Speaker 1 (01:15:49):
Giant put the boy in the cage. In the cage. Brandy,
Where can we thank you so much for joining us?
A lot?

Speaker 2 (01:16:00):
That was awesome?

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
Where can people find you? Follow you all that good stuff?

Speaker 4 (01:16:04):
I'm at brand Dazzle on Instagram. Brand Dazzle is here
on TikTok. My podcast is called Lady to Lady. It's
me Bab's Gray Test Parker. We sit down with a
fourth guest every week and just kind of like jam
and it's just like having a fun brunch with your friends.

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
And then my new special is called Milk Job.

Speaker 4 (01:16:21):
It is available on the burn This Record's YouTube page,
which I run that record label, and I'd really appreciate
it. It came over and watched it quite a lot to me. Also, Hey,
here's the thing. If you have watched already, go leave
a comment on it. Tell me your favorite Jane Goodall
fact or what you would name a chimp if you
had one living near you would love to get that

(01:16:42):
engagement would be great. Yeah, and I'm on warptour all summer,
so come say hi if you happen to be at
that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
There you go. All right, that's going to do it
for this part of the podcast. We'll be right back
with the notebook dump and we'll talk to you in
a second. All right. That was our episode. Thanks to
Katie Golden coming to us all the way from Italy, Italy.

(01:17:10):
Got them all near you, no Italia. Thanks to Brandy
Posey coming to us all the way from a different
building in Los Angeles than I was in. Thanks to
Meredith Danko for the research. This is the No No
No notebook dunk. We didn't spend a lot of time
with the men in her life for pretty good reason.

(01:17:31):
I mean, she's interesting enough on her own, but she
married the guy who photographed her for that first nat
Geo shoot Hugo, I forget if I mentioned that, And
with him she had a son who was called Grubb,
who mainly had to live inside a large steel and
mesh cage. To remain not eaten or killed, he had

(01:17:54):
to run in with a black mamba snake at a
certain point in a cobra at another's. By the way,
the cage sounds worse than it was. It was a
nice cage. I was decorated with hanging birds and stars
and held furniture like a cot, a chair, a stroller,
a bouncer. And yeah, Grub sounded awesome. He could speak

(01:18:16):
Swahili and English and Chimp. Again, just green light the
Wes Anderson movie. Okay, who loves a precocious white child
more than Wes Anderson Hugo sounds a little bit less awesome.
He got jealous of her success, and she eventually divorced
him and married another guy who also got jealous of

(01:18:38):
her success. Amazingly. One ingredient I hadn't had in mind
when I started doing research into these icons, and yet
an ingredient that keeps showing up is a belief by
these icons in like some mystical power, like a magical
force that is choosing them and powering their success. And

(01:19:04):
when you describe it out loud, it sounds stupid, but
you can just tell it's like life and death to them,
like like the one Elvis believing his stillborn twin Aaron
was like powering his musical career. Bob Dylan seeing Buddy
Holly live like three days before Buddy Holly died in

(01:19:25):
the plane crash, and Bob Dylan like believed he passed
his rock star force onto him before he died, Like
it follows. Yeah, Jane seems to believe she can like
stop the rain and seems to like have the sense
that she was protected from getting killed by nature but

(01:19:47):
possibly passed down from her mother's like Blitzkriegy sp I
wish I knew the trick for making myself believe something
like that. I guess that's why this is not a
self help podcast. This is not one simple trick your
doctor doesn't want you to know. You can't, as far
as I can figure it, make yourself believe that you

(01:20:07):
have these magic powers. The magic is like too stupid
sounding to come in through your conscious word mind, so
you just have to find a way to believe it
with your body. The icons just seemed to believe their
special and reality follows, And in her case, maybe she
was chosen in terms of the danger of what she

(01:20:30):
was doing. One of the other people working at the reserve,
like once they got up and running and became successful,
fell off a waterfall and died. A bunch of the
people who are working on the reserve got kidnapped once
some locals who were mad at them came to the
camp to try and scare her and her mom away,
and they just like happened to be out and so

(01:20:51):
they just like chopped a bunch of trees down and
like said rum and marched off. But yeah, she just
kind of floated through even as she was famous. Diane
Fosse got a little famous and was promptly murdered. Jane
just kind of floated through on the leaky stuff. Just

(01:21:12):
what a weird character. The guy behind the scenes of
history just driving important innovation with the wisdom of his horniness.
I don't know another example that I can think of
someone who's sexual pursuit of women who were presumably not
interested in him did more good, like his good instincts

(01:21:34):
around scientific research aligned with his penis instincts. I guess
a little bit of messiness. His biographer has suggested that
he ended up having a relationship with Van Jane's mom,
which I don't know. I guess not that scandalous, makes sense.
They wrote a book together, definitely more age appropriate than

(01:21:58):
Jane or any of the women he tended to pursue.
Others have speculated that they had a long standing affair
and that Jane was secretly his daughter, which would make
his hitting on her all the time either incredibly creepy
or you know, if he didn't know, just horrifying, dramatic irony,

(01:22:19):
like an old boy situation. But anyways, that idea that
he's her father probably apocryphal in terms of her being
extremely confident that she wasn't going to get hurt. There's
another reason for this that she provides in the Jane
documentary besides her magical powers, and she explains it when
she's talking about how her plan was to get the
chimps to come close to her. The interviewer says, except

(01:22:44):
they can rip your face off, And Jane said, well,
I didn't know that. I didn't think about that. There
was nobody talking about that. You have to realize that
back then there were no people out in the field
whose research I could read about except this one man,
and he saw chimps once or maybe twice in the
three months of his study. So, in other words, if

(01:23:05):
the chip researchers hadn't done such shitty work, maybe I
would have known that these chimps could kill me. It
is kind of crazy to think about her just like
out there fearlessly among these animals, being like they're peaceful,
loving animals, and then a decade in like war breaks out,
She's just like, oh oh no. In keeping with her

(01:23:30):
tendency to be in dangerous situations while remaining perfectly safe,
she was in New York City during nine to eleven.
She also had a correspondence with Secretary of State Colon
pal days before the Iraq War began. She wrote to him, quote,
in so many of the places where I spend time
around the world, I fear the anger against our two

(01:23:51):
countries will erupt and a world with even more terrorism
and hatred is horrible to contemplate. And he agreed with her,
and America stopped the unbroken string of terrible decisions that
was leading them to millions of preventable, unnecessary deaths. It's

(01:24:13):
almost like we still exist in the political equivalent of
the scientific world that you know, Jane entered at age
twenty six, you know, a world run entirely by men
with skinner boxes, being like, you can't show empathy. That's
not smart and objective. We got to got to be

(01:24:34):
cruel and number these living things. And yeah, maybe we
could use a Jane Goodall or many Jane's Goodall to
enter the sphere of political power to study all these
chimpanzees in Washington, act and operate. You know what I'm saying.

(01:24:55):
All Right, that's going to do it. For this week's episode.
Up next Monday, U is back with Francesca Fiorentini to
talk about the Johnny Knoxville of the early twentieth century
Amelia Earhart More Zeitgeist. In the meantime, we will.

Speaker 4 (01:25:11):
Talk to you all that are The Daily Zeitgeist is
executive produced by Catherine Law.

Speaker 1 (01:25:16):
Co produced by Victor Wright

Speaker 5 (01:25:18):
Co written by J M McNabb and edited and engineered
by Brian Jefferies.