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

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

Recorded live before the pandemic in January 2020 at the Castro Theatre for San Francisco Sketchfest, Josh and Chuck explore the 70s movement that attempted to teach apes human language and the Ape Language Wars that erupted from it. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's not here, but all of these beautiful people are at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, California.

Yeah. I love it. Very nice. Very nice. We got a Chuckers sign out there. I think I know who that is. That's pretty great. It's a good sign. It is. Thanks, mom. Oh, we're definitely not kissing. So we've asked you all here tonight to talk about being a child of the... Are those for us? Thank you very much. Oh, wow. Okay. Let's just start over. I thought you were just like, I'm just going to put my stuff up here. So if Chuck and I are children of the 70s and 80s, he was born in the very, very, very early 70s. I was born in the mid 70s.

And I mean, it might as well have been the 60s. Basically. I mean, you were right there on the cusp. And being children of this era, we were aware of certain things like all kids of the 70s and 80s were, like that vans could have carpeting on the wall. It's true. Every kid knew the precise amount of McDonald's orange drink that he or she could drink just before getting a crippling stomach ache. That's like 70s, 80s kid knowledge. Or that your parents like to go to swinger parties where there were keys and fish bowls and weird stuff like that. And did your parents not do that? And every kid of the 70s and 80s knew that somewhere out there, there was a gorilla named Coco who could talk. And if you've never heard of Coco, prepare to buckle up and have your mind

blown because that is what we're talking about tonight. Coco, the talking gorilla. Who is a local here, as I'm sure you guys know. This is actually a super local show. It is. Yeah. Because Coco, the gorilla was born fourth of July, just like Geraldo Rivera and Malia Obama and a bunch of other people I haven't heard of when I looked it up online. My dad was born on the fourth of July. Really? Yes. Why didn't he say that the other night? I just didn't feel like it. All right. Tom Cruise was, if I'm not mistaken. I think it was for the movie that he had been born for that movie. He's just so good. I bought it. Yeah. He really sold it. Coco was born on the fourth of

July, 1971, just four months after yours truly was born. There would be a lot of mirroring here between my development and Coco's. Coco was born at the San Francisco Zoo. Yeah. Six point one miles from here. And what was Coco's birth name in full? Hanabiko. So Coco is actually your nickname. And Hanabiko in Japanese means fireworks child. She was named that after the fireworks going off. You think that's cute? On the fourth of July. Just wait. Yeah. If that's got you alling already, man, you guys are going to love this one. So Coco was a Western lowland gorilla, which was a and still is a critically endangered subspecies of gorilla in central West Africa. And Coco was born into a world in the 1970s here in the United States, especially where people thought two things

about gorillas. They thought they were super scary because literally because of King Kong, the movies, kind of like jaws with sharks. Right. They two very huggable animals. Movies ruined it. Basically. And they thought gorillas were scary and they thought gorillas were really dumb. Like dumb. Even among apes, they thought gorillas were dumb. Exactly. And so this is the world that Coco was born into. And when she was born at the San Francisco Zoo, she had kind of a difficult infancy. Her mom wasn't producing enough milk to sustain her. And then when she was, I think, six months old, she caught dysentery. She developed dysentery and was basically at death store and had to be removed from her family unit so that she could be nursed back to health by

humans who took care of her around the clock, which is great. Sure. Because they actually did save her life, but they had a problem after she recovered. And that was that she had spent so much time away from her family unit and hanging out with humans instead, that they were worried that her family unit would reject her if they took her back. So now they kind of had a problem on their hands and had a gorilla. Yeah. The gorilla in the room. So that was a great movie. It's fantastic. So there was a Stanford grad student around this time. And it's a bad joke. Jerry, cut that one out already. Already. I've only got three of those for the whole show. So you guys keep score. There was a Stanford grad student around this time

that came on the scene, a 24 year old young woman named Francine Penny Patterson. She entered Coco's life at this moment when Coco needed her most. And she said, you know what, I'm studying apes. And I think that I can teach gorillas how to speak using sign language. You've got a gorilla. I need my PhD. This is all kind of perfect. That's a verbatim quote from that moment. So she took control of Coco's care. And for the next 40 something years, they had a relationship that can really only be described as a human mother and gorilla daughter. Very much so. Yeah, for sure. And so the whole point of trying to teach Coco or any gorilla sign language was to find out how or if a gorilla could acquire language and then compare how a

gorilla acquires language to how human kids acquire language. And then we can kind of compare and contrast the differences and kind of trace back humans evolutionary history for how we develop language because it's still a mystery. We don't really know why. We just know we seem to be the only species capable of using language. That's right. Plus it's a good party trick. And it was the 70s. Yeah. So at first, Coco and Penny were working together at the San Francisco Zoo, but it's a zoo. And there were people that were, you know, paying money to get in there and gawk at them. A lot of slack jawed yokels at the San Francisco Zoo. And look, Ma. Yeah. What was my favorite line? Oh, never mind. I can't get off track this early.

We'll save the Simpsons for later. So people were gawking and that's very distracting to a young gorilla. So she said, you know what, this is going pretty well, but I think I could do a lot better with my research. And for Coco's benefit, if we moved Coco to Stanford, and they basically said, sure, you can you can take Coco on loan and go do some serious research at Stanford University. Right. Right. Where there's a lot more dope to be smoked than at the San Francisco Zoo. You know what I mean? I'm sure we've got some Stanford grads here. So yeah. Oh, really? Really? That's surprising. Go Cardinals. I thought it was giant trees. Is there? Yeah, it was a little clunky. So they moved to Stanford, officially launched Project Coco. And Coco suddenly is surrounded by

a bunch of interesting people who are giving her their undivided attention. And she's raised in kind of this way that's similar to how you would raise a human child in like an ideal home school setting where like everything is about her and teaching her stuff and playing with her and keeping her attention going. And she really started to kind of thrive in this this environment. And she started to pick up sign language pretty quick in her first two weeks of being taught sign in an adapted form of American sign language. She knew food, drink, and more. And really the last one is the most important one. But she picked up these signs within two weeks. And again, remember, bear this in mind this whole time. Anytime we say something amazing about Coco,

imagine that at the time when she's doing this stuff, she's the first gorilla doing this stuff. And just amazing the world because we thought gorillas were scary, stupid. Just bear it in mind. Stun silence was not what I was going for, but I'll take it. I'll take it. Whatever I can get from you guys. So things were going well at Stanford, but she said, you know what, this is great. But I think we even need more space than they have at Stanford for a gorilla. And so she founded the Gorilla Foundation and moved Coco and Project Coco to a six acre private facility that basically had a mobile home for Coco to live in. And that's where Coco lived her life. They retrofitted it. So, you know, they had to make the walls a little stronger over the years as Coco grew.

And they made it so a gorilla could live in this trailer. Sure. And she loved it. It was her house. She made her little nest out of blankets every night and had a tire to sit in and had like all sorts of toys to play and TV to watch. A lot more than I had. For sure. Although you did have to make a nest of blankets every night in your house too. That's true. Or had you let that man touch your beard, that would have been your future, I think. That's true. Coco was learning faster than I was anyway. Yeah, but you had that innate like, don't let him do it. Don't let him do it. So, Coco was taught sign language using a couple of different techniques. There's one called the molding technique where they would literally take Coco's hand and shape her hand in the shape of the

sign and do the sign while they're either saying the word or showing a picture of the object or whatever or both. I know you have an example that you're pretty good at. The cat, the sign for cat is where you like kind of demonstrate whiskers. You draw whiskers across your face. So you would take Coco's hand and squish these together. Get these two right. There you go. And then just be like, cat, cat. You're like the guy in the Sky Lounge all of a sudden. So creepy. Right. So that was the molding technique. The other one, imitation is way simpler. It's just, you know, you would show her cat, cat, cat. And she would eventually be like, and you go, yes, cat, cat, cat. Stop. My God. So annoying. That's what Coco would have said too. I got it. I got it.

Okay. So within the Coco's first four and a half years, she went through a couple of big language growth spurts. She added about 200 new words to her vocabulary each year. Again, way faster than I was. And she was developing language basically at about the rate of a child eight months behind Coco, a human child. Right. But she was acquiring signs at about the same rate as a deaf child her age, which is pretty astounding, especially considering she wasn't taught sign language until she was one and she wasn't exposed to English until she was about six months old. So she kind of started from behind and started as a gorilla, but she was still picking up language at about the same pace as human children. And this was just knocking everybody's socks off.

It's amazing. So Coco, I think, had a working vocabulary by the time she was an adult of about 600 signs and then spontaneously used another 400. So that's 1000 signs and then could apparently understand about 200, I'm sorry, 2000 words of English. Right. So she could understand 2000 words. She could sign about 1000. And in the middle of sort of this early period is where Penny Patterson became Dr. Penny Patterson. Yeah. She got her PhD from Stanford and I think 79 or something like that. And Project Coco continued. Right. And one of the things that Coco taught the world is that not only could she understand sign language and use sign, she could actually use this to do things that we thought only humans could do like joke around. Like there's this really

good example of her making a joke. It's a gorilla level joke, but it's a joke nonetheless. It's still qualified. Do you want to tell them? Just sort of a Josh and Chuck level joke. Sure. So they would go in with a white towel and try and get Coco to sign white. And Coco kept signing red, red, red. And they were like, no, Coco. What color is the towel? Red, red, red. No, Coco. What color is the towel? I'm just kidding. They were very kind. And Coco eventually went over and picked a red piece of lint off the towel and held it up and said, red, red, red. And laughed and laughed and laughed. And everyone just, it was pretty much the best joke of all time. It definitely qualifies as a joke. We did not know that gorillas were capable of joking. Not bad. She also knew how to

lie. That's actually kind of sophisticated as wrong as it is. It's kind of sophisticated intellectually. We didn't realize gorillas could lie. We're not going to make any Trump books at all about the human sophistication it takes to lie constantly. It writes itself. All right. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to get political. So there was a, there was a time when Coco broke the kitchen sink in her, in her little kitchen. And later on, Penny asked her what happened and Coco said, Kate did it. Which is the first lie children tell literally is Kate did it. Yeah. Kate, it's always Kate's fault. Right. But she like threw her caregiver under the bus, which is very human. If you think about it, you know, she was like, Kate did it. You should fire her.

She was also pretty good at making it improv basically, at making up signs for things that she didn't know the signs for. For instance, a mask was an eye hat. It's not bad. Yeah. It's fairly cute. A zebra, she called a white tiger because she didn't know the sign for zebra. Not bad. Boy, they're going to lose their minds when you know what enters the picture. A ring was a finger bracelet. That's pretty good. And a Pinocchio doll was an elephant baby. This is a gorilla, everybody. Not bad. Not bad at all. She also had, are you asking me literally if you should say that? I think you should. Okay. Why don't you tell everyone about Coco's insults. So, so prepare to all some more.

She had her own little vocabulary of insults like bird and nut, like you're a bird, you're a nut. That was her insults. It got even better. Rotten stink. It's also a good punk band name. It is pretty good. Dirty toilet. Toilet dirty devil. And face mother. That was the one. I'm sorry. I apologize before I'll just apologize now as well. That's going to sound so sweet beeped out when we end up releasing this episode. Please come back. I said I was sorry. And I love in the middle of it, you look over at me and point to FFFF and you go,

I wanted you to be on the hook as well as me. All right, that's it. That's all the dirty language. It was, it was worth it. That's a good quality joke. You get to see Coco didn't really say that. That was Josh. So here's the deal though. We've talked so far about Coco insulting people and making jokes and throwing people under the bus. But that was not Coco's nature. Coco was actually a very sweet gorilla and everyone who came into Coco, especially Dr. Patterson, loved, loved, loved this gorilla. Yes. And so in 1976, this gorilla foundation expanded. The little family grew a little bigger when they brought in a gorilla male named Michael.

And Michael, which is a weird name for a gorilla. It's kind of like if you've ever seen somebody, you meet someone's dog and they're like, this is James or Alan or something like that. Like you can use a human name for a dog, but it's got to be just slightly off. Yeah. I'm trying to think of the most like or or name you could give a dog. Alan is pretty close. Sure. James. Larry is pretty good. Larry. But no, if it was like a big sloppy bulldog named Larry, you'd be like, of course, Larry. James, though, who would name a dog James? Jennifer, Jennifer's is pretty good name for a dog. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. No, Chuck's. It's a good dog name, too. Chuck is on the cusp of being goofy anyway. All right. That's enough. Everybody's shouting at the stage. We didn't ask for this. Anyway, Michael comes into the picture, Michael, the gorilla, Michael. And he also learned American Sign Language, too. And he picked it up pretty well, not quite as well as Coco, but still very well. He was also inculturated, which means that he was raised basically as a human and not as a gorilla, which means that he liked to listen to Pavarotti and paint very seriously.

They both painted actually, but Michael took it very seriously. But one of the big findings from Project Coco is that they found that Michael and Coco would sign to one another, unprompted. They would just communicate through sign and that each one taught the other signs that the humans hadn't taught them. Right? So Michael learned some stuff from humans that Coco hadn't, and he went and taught Coco and vice versa, which is pretty big. Yeah. It's big. It's cute and a little creepy. Especially if they develop their own sign language that the humans don't know.

Yeah. That's pretty good. You got the chloroform. We should also mention those. If you've seen the documentary, there's one on Netflix called Coco. I think the gorilla who could talk. It might be that on the nose. There's a colon in there somewhere. Yeah. From the BBC. And there's a man in that documentary. You see a lot. His name is Ron Cohn.

He came on the project very early on to document all this via camera and videotape, and stuck around through the whole project because he was clearly in love with Penny Patterson. That was the whole subtext of that documentary. The whole time I was like, he even says at the very beginning, he was like, I thought she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. Yeah. I was like, oh, Ron. You really feel bad for the, feel bad for him. It adds an extra kind of like a subplot to the

documentary. It totally was, but Ron wasn't a gorilla, so he had no shot. He would even dress up like one sometimes. It just didn't work. Didn't take. So word got around as it does in around Woodside, California, where this gorilla foundation was that there was a gorilla in their midst. That was terrible.

I would ask all of you not to encourage him. And by the way, this is just neither here nor there, but today where Coco lived is just a two minute drive from a Ross dress for less. This is one of Josh's, when you, when Josh puts together these, these things, you get these interesting little factoids like that. It's like two minutes away. There's a couple of them in every single one. I love it. People who are sitting there like smelling soap, like realize that two minutes

away, there's a gorilla foundation where there's sign language using gorillas. Probably not. I don't think so. Probably not. And by 1978, the world was introduced to Coco in a big way when Coco made her first appearance of what would be two on the cover of National Geographic Magazine. And if you've seen this very famous photo, what you see is a gorilla holding a camera and you think, oh, that's cute.

And when you look closely, you realize that the Olympus camera is backwards and Coco had taken her own picture in a mirror and was the photographer of note for National Geographic. Yeah. And it's like, it's a well-framed photograph. She's using it correctly and yeah, it ended up on the cover. The first gorilla selfie. Yeah. Sure. Sure. I was trying to avoid using that word, but yes, that's what it was.

The second cover, though, so that introduced the world to Coco. Inside, there was like a pretty substantial article written by Penny, basically describing Project Coco and how it was going. And everybody's like, wow, this is amazing. But in 1985, seven years later, she was on the cover again. And this time, the world just fell in love with Coco because in the cover photo, Coco is cradling her kitten, her kitten, not a kitten, Coco's kitten because Coco had a kitten and that is what this whole, this whole issue was about.

Yeah. It was, it's super cute. I mean, I think we can all agree that interspecies mingling is kind of like the best thing on the internet. Very cute. I could look at that stuff all day. I do sometimes. I mean, I just sit around and it's like, there's a parrot with an alligator. Isn't that adorable? They love each other.

You can't do it with reptiles. No, not easily. That's never cute. No. I have seen some cute reptile stuff, but it's few and far between. Like a snake cuddling a turtle. That's no cuddle. Sorry to break it to you. I've got to rethink the stuff I look at on the internet.

So Coco, maybe because Coco had been taught the word cat incessantly. Cat. Loved, loved cats and wanted a kitten. And for, for one, I think it was birthday or Christmas one year, they gave Coco a very realistic stuffy kitten and that didn't work because Coco's no dummy. And they're like, all right, I guess we got to go for it and do the real thing. Yeah. So they brought in a litter of kittens and had Coco pick one out.

She smashed all but one and that was the lucky kitten. That's not true. Not true. No, she picked out a little, a little tabby Manx. Manx's don't have, or Manx's I don't have tails. My brother's got a Manx, of course, because he's my brother. And so Manx didn't have a tail and so Coco named this little ball a fluff all ball. And that cute.

That was the name of Coco's kitten. And all ball himself was a pretty interesting cat. He had been abandoned and his whole litter had been by his mother. And so he was nursed by a dog for like four and a half weeks, not only just a dog, a caron terrier, which is the same breed as Toto from the Wizard of Oz. And then he wanted to become the pet cat of a talking gorilla. Pretty wild ride. What is going on?

Trigger warning, everybody. All ball died. All ball got out and was hit by a car and killed. I know. I'm sorry to have to tell you that. Yeah. But that's what happened. All ball got out, got smashed to buy a car.

And Penny told Coco this, we didn't hit him with our car. I know. Why are you turning on us? I guess I didn't need to say the same thing twice, probably. Yeah, yeah. In a more graphic way. Like really just crowned him in there. Oh.

It changed your name to All Tire. I can't believe I said that. I love cats. I have two cats. That was way worse than what I said earlier. That's awful. Way worse. I was not on the hook with that one.

A garbage podcaster. Garbage human, frankly. So sorry. I think I just got up and left. Yeah. So Penny had to break it to Coco, obviously, because this was Coco's best little buddy. And Coco, it's awful.

For about 10 minutes, she just turned her back. And like a child would, ignored everything. Like, you know, I didn't hear that, basically. And then later on, Coco started whimpering and making these sad gorilla, depressed gorilla sounds. And I can even say this next part, you've got to. Then eventually she signed Sleep Cat.

I know. And I think this is so sorry. This is a great place to put an ad if you ask me. So if you guys will bear with us, we're going to take a message break. In this situation, if you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep.

We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it.

So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. The situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn and stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know.

All right, we're back everybody. You've seen this before, you know how that works. It's like a roller coaster of emotions. Son, if you remember where we were, all ball has just been killed. You should not feel too bad though, because Coco had two more sets of kittens throughout her long life.

Lipstick and Smoky, and Miss Black and Miss Gray. So Coco loved her kittens. She did. And I don't know what happened to the rest of them. Don't ask is what I say. So Coco had become a celebrity and being a celebrity, other celebrities wanted to be around her. Not the least of which was William Shatner,

who was among the first to go visit Coco. Apparently he wrote about it in his autobiography that it was kind of a publicity stunt and he was scared to death about going to meet this gorilla like one-on-one, but he was determined he was going to do it and then Coco touched his genitals during their meeting. It's true.

He just cupped his little Shatners. Get over here. That looks painful. She's touching my balls. That was, I don't even know how to do. I worked with Shatner on a Cheerios commercial. I worked with Shatner. What?

Someone just yelled out a bad name about him. He was nice the day I worked with him. I don't know. I mean, I'm not a Star Trek guy, but he was a nice guy. All right, man. You need to quit calling me names. So Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers, also paid a little visit, right? Yeah.

I don't know if you guys have seen the Mr. Rogers documentary, but this is in that documentary. And if you look closely, Mr. Rogers looks kind of scared too, but he's like, no, I'm going through with this, but he's just a little like overeager to take, you know, direction from Penny Patterson. He's just a little nervous, especially when Coco cradles him like a baby, which she did.

That's very cute. And it gets even better because Coco and Michael were both big fans of Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. So when he showed up, they freaked out because there's Mr. Rogers and Coco took his shoes off. Like she'd seen him do so many times before. And it's better and better. Yes, I'm serious.

So Coco also got visits on separate occasions, I think from both Flea and Sting. I don't think they came together, right? I don't think so. They've been doing a little lunch, did a little shopping at Ross Dress for less, and then made their way over to the Gorilla Fountain. Maybe so.

Sting's like, why are you always just buying tidy whiteies? And tube socks. Little red hot chili pepper's humor. Got it. A little dated. It still works. All right. They both let Coco play their basses.

They both brought their basses and let Coco slap at a bass. Peter Gabriel showed up, as he does, situations like this. America's beloved treasure, Betty White went and visited. And Betty White was a board member of the Gorilla Foundation. So if you didn't love her enough before, love her even more now. That's true. And Coco was a fan of the Golden Girls.

So they were fans of one another. Of course. Leo DiCaprio paid a visit. He heard there was a young lady that he should meet. And all of this is in the documentary, all these various visits. And in Leo's, he didn't even get in the cage, at least from this.

Like Coco has her hand through there, and he's just kind of like stroking her finger. Not even with this fingertip, like with his knuckle. Yeah, with his knuckle. I think with an assistant's knuckle, actually. But of course, the most memorable visit was Robin Williams back in 2001. That's right.

Of course, San Francisco's own. You've probably seen this footage. If you haven't, go watch it. Yeah. Because... Like, go watch it right now, we'll wait. If only we had a big screen behind us where we could show this stuff.

Right. How could we ever do it? Fantastic. That would require 10% more effort. It's not just not going to happen. We challenge you instead to use your imagination. That's right. The world of the mind, everyone.

So, Robin Williams is the perfect person to go visit Coco, because Robin Williams was not scared, like a shatner. He was not intimidated, like a Mr. Rogers. He was not disappointed that it wasn't a human, like Leo DiCaprio. Yeah. He was Robin Williams,

and he gets in there and just wants to play with an ape. On that level, gets down on the floor, they're rolling around, they're tickle fighting. Coco takes off his glasses and puts them on and looks out the window. And you can just tell that he is legit having, like, one of the best times of his life. Yeah, he was definitely into it, for sure.

And later on, he was telling the story on one of the late night shows. I can't remember which one. And he said that they told him that Coco had indicated that she wanted to mate with him. And Robin Williams said, it won't have been a good story. Which if you let that just kind of sit for a little while,

it gets like, what? And years later, when Robin Williams passed away, they had to break the news to Coco as well. And Coco signed Woman Crying, and it was very sad. Which is pretty astounding, because Coco met Robin Williams. I mean, she watched his movies and everything, but she met him once, like 13 years before his death.

And so for her to be affected by it, that's extraordinarily significant. And because Coco had people like Leo DiCaprio and William Shatner coming to visit, the world watched everything she did. And she became an ambassador for Earth, like just this, a natural ambassador. Because here's a gorilla

who can communicate with humans, and gorillas come from nature. So why not just have her talk for nature? And that's exactly what happened. She became an ambassador for planet Earth, basically. Yeah, it was at a very good time for that too. It was here in America. It was in the early 80s,

when we were just starting to kind of come around to the green movement a little bit more, and Earth Day became a bigger and bigger deal. So it was kind of prime time for Coco to step in there. I think Penny Patterson wrote a book called Coco's Kitten. I don't think it ended in a car crash. Hope not.

No, there was stuffed Coco gorillas. I believe there still are. And like I said, she and Michael both painted, so they started selling prints of their paintings. And Coco's painting of a bird looks like a bird. It's pretty amazing. I mean, you can't tell what kind of bird it is, or anything like that, and you have to squint,

and again, use your imagination. But you can say, yes, that is a bird. I can tell. Have you ever held a chimp or anything, or been around one? Yeah, I have. I've been, I've held, I'm not quite sure what kind of ape it was,

but a little sweet one in a dress, who was very cute. And then... Where was this? Down in Florida. Oh, okay. Everybody's walks around with apes that you can hold in Florida.

Down in Florida, of course. And then one time I was in Mexico, and I was walking down the street, and I passed a courtyard, a gated courtyard, and there was a chimp, like on a leash that it could swing around the courtyard. And I was like, well, I have to stop and talk to this chimp.

So I did, and the chimp put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, not painfully, but this chimp was in charge of me right then. Just enough, yeah. And then stared more deeply into my soul than any other being has before. And I'm just sitting there with like cartoon sweat jumping off of my head.

And finally, I realized he wasn't going to stop this at any point in time, so I just one finger at a time, and slowly backs away. And then after, you know, 10 minutes later, I was like, I got to go see my chimp friend again, and they had closed the door. Yeah, that's what I said, too.

I worked another TV commercial with a chimp one time, and it was a lifelong dream to hold a chimp. I always wanted to, and so I went to the trainer and said, can I hold the chimp? And she was like, of course. And so I hold this baby chimp, and it wraps his legs around me and arms around me, swearing a little diaper for a good reason.

I don't think it was just to be cute. I think, you know, didn't want this chimp booping and being on people. Was it wearing a diaper and clothing? No, just a diaper. Okay, so that's all right. As long as it's not like a diaper and a shirt, sure, that's a terrible combination.

Just a diaper and a t-shirt. Yeah, that's no good. That's not a good look. Human chimp doesn't matter. Yeah, you're right. But then later, we were having our production meeting before the job where everyone kind of stands around and walks through what we're going to do for the day,

and I was standing there, you guys, and I felt it before I saw it. This chimp walked up and held my hand. And I looked down, and this little chimp was looking up at me and just holds my hand. Best thing that ever happened to me. And I'm married with a human child. Yeah.

Yeah. That's all right. She doesn't listen to podcasts. So, where are we here? We're in 1998, my friends. We are, we are. Right, so Coco is an ambassador for Earth at a time where we're becoming more eco-conscious,

coining dorky terms like eco-conscious. She's like the ambassador for Earth. You have to remember, though, she didn't necessarily think of herself this way. So just keep that in mind, because in 1998, she took part in the first ever interspecies internet chat, hosted by America Online. It does not get more 1998 than that.

Very 1998. Here is the setup, okay? So there was a AOL moderator who was the one working in the chat room on the phone with Penny, who was at the Gorilla Foundation. And so the AOL moderator would relay questions over the phone to Penny. Penny would ask the question or sign the question to Coco,

and then tell the moderator the Coco's response, and then the moderator would type it in. And so when this whole setup was explained to Coco, Coco said, nipple. Just put a pin in that. Nipples will figure in quite a bit. The point was she wasn't like, this is the part I was born to play.

I can't wait to get more eco-conscious. She was just like nipple. Coco was a gorilla, everybody. You've got to remember that. So if you look at that transcript from the AOL chat, that means it's 1998 still, because you're not digging up transcripts from AOL chat rooms anymore

unless you're in trouble with the law. And if you look at what's going on in this chat and the answers that Coco's giving and then the responses that Penny Patterson is giving, you start to see a little bit of a trend where I guess the nicest way to say it is that Dr. Patterson was being a little liberal with some of these translations

on what she thought Coco might be saying. All right. There's this really good example. One was AOL user Mini Kitty asked, Coco, are you going to have a baby in the future? Is Mini Kitty here, by the way? Anyone? That would be astounding.

Oh, God. Got a bunch of Mini Kitty. Sure. So Mini Kitty asked, Coco, are you going to have a baby in the future? And Coco went, and it doesn't make any sense when you're reading the transcript.

Coco covered her eyes. And when Dr. Patterson kind of translates it, then it makes sense. She said, well, I think what she's doing is assigning unattention that she doesn't see it. It's not going to happen. And you can't help but think, that feels like a bit of a stretch.

And when you read this transcript, you start to get a kind of clear idea why there are some people out there in the world who think that Project Coco was almost entirely BS. Yes, it was almost entirely made up and not true at all. That's right. So that first part of the show was a lot of fun. I think we can all agree.

Super cute. We don't like to burst bubbles, but we do what we do, and we have to show the other side of the argument because we get into a section now called the Ape Language Wars, which was a real thing. For some people,

they believe that Coco was super smart in communicating and making sentences and using sign language and understood what was happening. Right. But in other words, a whole other group of scientists who basically ended up thinking

that these experiments are BS and that Coco is basically like a bear you train to ride a unicycle in a circus. Sure. He's doing this for treats. Yes, there are rewards or something like that. She was trained to use these signs in the same way you could train a dog

to slow dance with you or something. It's very, very impressive, but it doesn't require or display human-level intellect. And we should say none of this is proven. And there's a huge division in the field of science over whether the Ape Language researchers are right or the skeptics are right. And it's actually pretty fascinating,

but you have to step back and look at it in this larger context because it wasn't just Project Coco that this gets leveled against it. Project Coco was part of a whole other field called the Ape Language experiments that really started way back in the 20th century. Yeah, so it was a pretty hot thing for a while.

There were a bunch of experiments going on where they would take chimps, mostly chimps. I think Coco was one of the few apes or a few gorillas. So she was the first. Yeah, the first one for sure. And they would take chimps and they would raise them as children by themselves or with siblings or dress them up

in little cute overalls and things and try and make them like little humans, a little later hosin maybe if they were feeling froggy. That is a good look, a chimp in later hosin, sure. Oh yeah, of course. There was one, one of the first ones in the 1940s it was a psychologist couple. And as you'll see, most of these are couples

that lead these experiments, which is why I still feel so bad for Ron Cohn because he was like, well, Penny, everyone else literally is married, except us. So Keith and Kathy Hayes, they trained a chimp named Vicky in the 1940s not to sign words to speak four human language words. Vicky could say, Mama, Papa, Up, and Cup. And we figured they really dropped the ball on that fifth word

because Pup is just staring them in the face. She had all the tools there, but they stopped at four. But here's the thing is that Vicky's experiment, even though she learned to speak four human words, was considered a failure. Failure, they taught a chimp to speak and it was considered a failure because everybody was like, just four words.

And the point was, was that, no, we should be able to teach them language. Like the theory was that if humans were the only ones who could use language, maybe it was a cultural thing. So if we start raising chimps as humans, they'll pick up language and you'll have a language using chimp. But Vicky proved, and some of the other ones proved that this is just not going to happen.

And later on, we figured out that the physiology of the other primates, it just doesn't allow for speech. So some people were like, well, that's it, case closed. It's only humans who can use language. Noam Chomsky, very famously, the famous linguist, came out and said, I hypothesize that humans have what's called a language acquisition device,

like a little seed program in our brain that allows us to start learning language, and that only humans have that. It's a hypothesis that hasn't been proven still, but he really kind of, set the tone for the skeptics who say, it's just humans who can use language. But then some people said, you know what, Chomsky,

he's a pretty interesting fella, but I don't really, I'm not swayed by this. I think that just because an ape can't talk doesn't mean they can't use language. And somebody, I think Alan and Beatrix Gardner, another couple, came upon this really novel idea. If you can't teach an ape to speak, you could teach an ape to speak,

you could teach an ape sign language, and they were definitely onto something, because it panned out pretty well. Yeah, this was in 1967, and they had a, was it a chimp? Yeah, a chimp. I think it was a chimp named Washo. Yeah. And I think Washo was from Washington,

from that mistaken? I think she ended up in Washington. Ended up in Washington? Yeah. And things went pretty well for a little while, but it yielded a lot of findings when they found out that Luli was a young male that Washo wasn't the real mama,

but Washo just sort of adopted this young chimp as her own. And they found out that Washo was teaching Luli sign language, and they were signing to each other, they were signing to other animals, they would walk up and sign to dogs and stuff like that. I guess like, are you with us? It's gonna go down, and we need to know if you're with us. You're either with us or against us,

there's no middle ground. I'm looking my butthole, man, I don't know. It is funny, if you watch footage from some of these experiments, there is often a dog just kind of hanging out like, what the hell are you guys doing? Which is why we love dogs so much. Yeah.

They don't care. No. They just want scratches and hugs. They do. So Project Washo just changed everything, because now all of a sudden you had a chimp that was using sign language. Like so, yes, like Noam Chomsky seemed like

he was going to be wrong. And that kicked off this whole ape language experimentation. It became kind of like the hot research topic in developmental psychology, just so hot. Well, you can see why, you know. It's cool. It's headline grabbing. You get to work with these apes.

That's super cute. It was at a time when Three's company was the number one show in America. It just made sense in a very 70s kind of way. Yeah. I guess, yeah. I thought so. There was one, and it wasn't just guerrillas and chimps.

It was an orangutan named Chantec who excelled at signing and would give directions whenever Chantec was in a car to the local Dairy Queen. It's so great. It's not bad. There's a very famous Project NIM. Do not watch that documentary. Josh tried to get me to, but he said it's a real bummer man.

Bummer is a very good word to describe it. So I did not see it. I refuse. It's a little sad. But I think this was at Columbia University in the mid-70s, and they threw a little shade at Noam Chomsky, the leader of this project named Herb Terrace by naming his chimp NIM Chimpsky,

which is pre-Simpsons. It's so Simpsons. So Herb Terrace figures in pretty big in this whole thing. He really does. And just like Washoe and Lulee and all of the other ones, NIM started to acquire sign language pretty quickly. He was using a lot of signs, and things were going along as expected.

But Herb Terrace, the head of this project, Project NIM, he wasn't convinced. He didn't believe that NIM was actually using language. He thought that he just knew some signs. And at the heart of this is this discussion of what constitutes language. Like, if you have a pie, you can point to a pie and say pie, and everyone will think, can I have some pie?

But all you're doing is pointing to an object and saying a word. That's just using a word. Language is like where you take other words and put them together and describe to people how to make a delicious pie. So you can make something that literally doesn't exist yet out of other things. That's the difference between language and words.

And what Herb Terrace thought was that NIM was just using words. So he did the normal thing that you would do and sent NIM back to his place of birth, very grim, ape research farm in Oklahoma, which is a deeply not okay thing to do. No, there should not be ape farms in Oklahoma. Yeah, I hate to break that to you. So we got to say that Herb Terrace,

he didn't go into this whole thing as a skeptic to prove everyone wrong. No, he was a star of the field. Yeah, he was a star of the field. He was way into it and he looked at the science and he was like, man, you know what? The more I look at this, not only do I think that they're not truly communicating

and understanding what they're saying, he's like, I think these researchers are tipping them off inadvertently. I don't think anyone's trying to cheat it, but inadvertently they're tipping their hand right before they would teach a sign or ask them to say a sign inadvertently. And I don't even think they know,

not only do I think they're not talking, I don't even think that they know what food means when they sign food. That they're just that basic. That they're really just mimicking. Yep, they're just imitating people to get that food treat. So Herb Terrace, again, he's one of the stars of the ape language research field,

says that he changed his mind about his data. He publishes a big influential article in 1981, becomes the most vocal critic of his former field. And normally when a scientist changes his mind about his data, it doesn't really amount to much, but this drew a really deep, clear line in the sand. What had once been like the hot research topic in developmental psychology was now considered

possibly fraudulent, anti-science, or at the very least unscientific, and you had to choose one side or the other, like the dogs and the chimps, right, versus humans. You had to choose, did you believe that that ape language research was actually just fraudulent and that it was really the humans who were producing the study data

because they were seeing what they wanted to see and believing what they wanted to believe, or did you believe that, no, they're actually onto something, and science still has plenty left to learn from studying apes. And you had to choose one side or the other, and a lot of kind of petty camps broke out

along that dividing line. Yeah, and at the center of all this is a word that I have always had a very hard time saying. This is gonna be beautiful. So I have broken it down into five parts. Anthropomorphism. Oh, you nailed it. You nailed it, Chuck.

Thank you, everyone. It says here, and dash throw, dash po, dash more. That's so easy. And I just left fism all by itself. You don't... I didn't break that down into two parts. You don't see fism spelled out very often. It's kind of funny in black and white.

Yeah. And for your throw, you added the w, like throw. Yeah. Not just T-H-R-O or T-H-R-O-E, throw. Fism looks too close to fish the band. It really does. So that's probably why I'm like naturally against it. I'm sorry, fish fans.

I don't think San Franciscans like music like fish or anything. There's no great music traditions here, are there? Journey. Huey Lewis. That's basically it from what I understand. I don't think anything in the 60s happened here at all. Still, it's not bad. You guys should be very proud of yourselves just for having Huey Lewis and Journey.

That's right. Forget the news. Just Huey Lewis alone. Sure. I thought that was implied. And his wiener, you know he showed his wiener in a movie once. It's true. Robert Altman Shortcuts.

Huey Lewis shows his wiener. Am I having a nightmare right now? Josh, wake up. You're in the Castro. It's all good. We're talking about Coco the gorilla. Herb Terrace. So, of course, anthropomorphism.

Jeez, that was a weird sidetrack. We're all guilty of it. We're all guilty of it. You know what that is? That's putting human characteristics on animals. That's when you go home and you see your dog or your cat and you think you know what they're feeling. And you think they have these inner lives and these emotions. I believe that they do.

Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know, but I don't care. That's what I believe. So, yes, it uses common sense and intuition. And you use your own eyes and your own empathy to see, like, yes, my dog is sad right now. Or, no, my dog is very happy right now. You can see it's just common sense. But if you're a skeptic, if you're a scientist, a rationalist,

I'm not. You would pound your fist and say, no. Science has never shown that animals have any kind of inner subjective life like humans do. You are just projecting that onto your stupid, stupid-faced dog. That's right. Because anybody who thinks like that hates dogs. On the other side, there are people like me and scientists that believe, like, honestly, like we kind of believe, that they do have these inner lives.

And we will look at them and say, you're all blinded by the science, like Thomas Dolby. So, what good are you? I'm on this side of the line in the sand. All right, so anthropomorphism is where, like, belief and rationalism, like, clink teeth. Yeah. It's a pretty good description, if you ask me. And I think that's another good time for a break. Yeah, you guys think so too, is this going well enough to release, you think?

Okay, well, then we have to add a second ad break just in case. So, if you'll bear with us, we'll be right back. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. The situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. emo.com There were a bunch of mean science people saying, your dogs and your gorillas are just dumb animals. And then there are people that have human hearts beating inside their body that say, no, you're blinded by science like Thomas Tolby. That was a good recap.

Thank you. So for some people, Penny Patterson included and other ape language researchers, they were like, you know, I don't think Herb Terrace changing his mind about his data actually amounts to proof that apes can't use language. I think we just haven't figured out how to demonstrate it sufficiently.

So some people stayed in this field of research and risk being labeled kooks or frauds or hucksters or diluted morons or what have you. And they stayed in, but they were scientists still and they wanted to stay scientific. So they had to jump through increasingly narrower hoops to prove that what they were doing was not actually them corrupting the study data basically.

Yeah, they couldn't just sit face to face and even risk their facial expressions giving something away. So there was a researcher named Sue Savage Rumbaugh at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta. And she would do her experiments wearing a welding mask. Good way to hide your face, I guess. She couldn't explain why her monkey

kept signing flash dance over and over. She would wear a welding mask and then off the shoulder sweatshirt. Oh man, I just saw that last year for the first time. I've never seen it. It's fantastic. Is it? Holds up.

What a feeling. It's amazing. All right. That'll make sense to me. Hey, don't boo that. So there was another thing that people were prompted of or accused of which was prompting, right? Like what Chuck was saying,

Herb Teres concluded that the researchers or the caregivers were kind of showing the sign right before the chimp used the sign, prompting. And so to get around accusations of prompting your subjects, Sue Savage Rumbaugh and her husband Dwayne realized that the, oh yeah, another couple. Another couple. Wow, this thing is lousy with couples.

Poor Ron. So the Rumbaughes, they said, well, let's just not teach them sign language then. Then you can't possibly prompt them. And they developed something called a lexicon board, which is like a trifold board of a couple hundred little boxes and each one has a symbol in it. And the symbol represents a word.

And what they did was they taught their Bonobos how to use this to speak. So you press the word and the computer on the little box says the word for you. And so they would kind of punch out word combinations and you can't prompt a Bonobo to do that. And astoundingly, they tried to teach one of their first subjects, Matata, this.

Which I think means worries. I don't know. I don't know. Wouldn't it? Never seen it. I haven't looked it up yet, but I think it would. Anyway, Matata was pretty interesting because they tried to teach her this

and she was like, mm, mm, I am not picking this up. That's right, but it got really interesting because Matata had a son named Kanzi and Kanzi could pick it up. And he actually taught mom how to use this. So Bonobos were exactly like human beings. Children teaching their parents the technology. And this was after Matata got a CD-ROM at Staples

called How to Use a Lexicon Board. She ordered it online, actually. Right. From that guy with the bald head. But the ponytail. Don't forget the ponytail. Oh my God. But the thing is about Kanzi, they never taught Kanzi.

He just happened to be present while they were trying to teach Matata. That's right. And one day he just started using the Lexicon Board and they just lost their shit. They were so excited. He knew how to use a Lexicon Board to say, come on, mom. Really?

So Kanzi is actually widely regarded as one of the most intelligent apes in any of the ape language experiments. Which he demonstrated when he wrote, the movie, Pay It Forward. I'm not sure I get that one. It's so bad it was written by an ape. You don't read it.

Enjoy it on its face. There's a lot of good movie refs in this one. I like it. So Pay It Forward. That was the bad man, right? Wasn't that spacey? Yeah. All right.

Everyone, did you hear that? Way to bring my joke down, Chuck. Sorry. The space man. So where are we? I'm so lost now. Sorry. They were, I'm genuinely lost.

Do you want me to swoop in? Jerry cut all that out, huh? Do you want me to swoop in? Well, since you put it that way. No, there was some other controversy in that they had, and not just Penny Patterson, but other people in this field had been accused of manipulating the public over the years.

Oh, yeah. And sort of doing things, especially when it comes to video, of kind of cooking the books a little bit. It's very easy with video, obviously. There was one sort of famous one with Kanzi, the aforementioned Bonobo. There's a video of Kanzi putting together some sticks

to light a fire and getting out a lighter, cut to perfect roaring fire, that kind of thing. You don't know what happened in between those moments. No, but you don't even notice it unless you're suspicious of ape language research already, because we're also trained to just overlook cuts and edits from all the movies and TV shows that we've seen. And that actually isn't harmful.

It doesn't really do anything wrong, but it opens up legitimate researchers, like the rumbos, to accusations of illegitimacy. Even though they're doing legitimate science, the fact that they're kind of exaggerating potentially what their subjects are capable of, in the mind of the public, opens them up to accusations like that.

Well, and even Dr. Patterson would use words like, Coco has mastered sign language and stuff like that. And we love Coco, and Coco learned a lot, but Coco never mastered sign language. And when you use words like that, these sort of unscientific descriptions of what's really going on, it doesn't do anyone in the field any favors.

It doesn't, and it makes linguists go like, yeah, you have some crazy. So today, the scientific community, basically, this is kind of where we are now. Since the 80s, a lot of this research has dried up. They don't really work with apes and gorillas to teach them sign language much anymore, partially because of this,

partially because of the ethics of taking apes and gorillas and putting them in human houses and mobile homes and things like that. Making them dependent on humans, taking them away from their family. We're in a different place now in the world where we don't do stuff like that as much. For sure.

Thankfully, but the scientific community does rightfully acknowledge that ape language research has shown apes are capable of using sign language of communicating on a human level with humans, which is just astounding. And we're still learning more and more, and we'll talk about that a little bit more. Like it's produced some insights into the minds of apes

that we did not have before. And one of the things that was pointed to as why apes couldn't communicate, couldn't actually use language, just because they lacked a theory of mind. And a theory of mind is like, I know Chuck has different beliefs, different views of the world.

Like we're two different people and they long thought that apes didn't have that. Well, in 2017, somebody thought to give apes theory of mind tests that was developed for human infants. And all of a sudden these tests started showing that no, actually they do have a theory of mind. And this was just a couple of years ago. So the field is still kind of going and developing.

And it's pretty exciting that people are still researching this kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, what they've kind of moved more into now, which makes sense to me is maybe we shouldn't try and teach gorillas English, even in sign language. Maybe we should just see how they communicate with each other and maybe we can learn from that and see what gorilla language is all about.

Like teach ourselves their language and that would give us kind of an insight into their world view. There was also, yeah. There's also some, we can sidestep some other controversies. The Gorilla Foundation was sued at one point, not too long ago by a couple of former female scientists that worked for them because remember the nipple thing,

Coco had a nipple fetish. There's really no other way to say it than that. Someone just wooed that. If you look at the Robin Williams video, Coco's trying to get in that shirt and see his nipples. And Dr. Patterson would show Coco her nipples over the years and then she would request that other employees do the same, both male and female.

And eventually some of those employees got uncomfortable with that. They took her to court and it was settled out of court. So we really don't know when things are settled out of court, what the final result is. But that was one of the sort of controversies that they had encountered. Right.

The big nipple incident. Yes, we're serious. Have you listened to stuff you should have before? Of course, we're serious. Are they making all this up? Are they just riffing? This is amazing. Who are these guys?

They're not funny enough to be comedians, but I don't think they're being truthful about their science. That was a really good impression of that person. Why am I here? Who are these people? So Dr. Patterson, was that Jerry Seinfeld? Okay. Dr. Patterson, basically when that line was drawn

in the sand on one side or the other, she said, you know what, this is my gorilla daughter and I'm not gonna leave her. She kind of shun the scientific community in large part. She didn't do as many publish papers. Those kind of dried up. The official research still goes on or still went on for a while, but it just wasn't presented as science

so much as she's like, screw that. I'm just gonna do it on my own then. Yeah, she was like, I'm just gonna go directly to the public, the scientific community can rot in hell basically. So her outreach to the public and her kind of pushing Coco and just kind of sharing all things Coco,

that increased while her kind of scientific commitment went down a little bit. But there's this documentary in 2014. I think you mentioned it before. It is Coco, the gorilla who talks and there is a colon in there. And then there's another colon called the sad story of Ron Cohn.

In parentheses beneath it. But in it, Penny Patterson talks about regrets and she said that her biggest regret is that Coco never had a baby and Coco apparently wanted a baby. She used to tell Penny a lot that she wanted a baby and Penny really wanted a baby for Coco. But it didn't happen.

Remember they brought in Michael and Michael was going to be a mate for Coco eventually but what they didn't realize is that an incest taboo exists among gorillas and that they raised them together from too young an age and when they finally got around to suggesting that they mate, both Coco and Michael signed you. Yeah.

Was not happening. It's not. They brought in another gorilla named Indume in 1991 to mate. They never produced a child either. So I think Indume went back to the Cincinnati Zoo. And then very sadly, and you probably all remember this not too long ago, June 19th, 2018, Coco passed away in her sleep

at the age of 46 years old and the world, or at least America for sure, mourned Coco's death in a big way. Yeah, for sure. And she touched the lives of people. Like that's just whether she knew language or not and we're pretty sure she was a very smart gorilla who did know sign language.

But whether she did or not, that ambassadorship for Earth like really did have an effect and not just for like everyday people who actually did care about the Earth more because they knew about Coco and she had kind of transformed their view of things. But also like scientists too, there was a 2014 symposium of gorilla experts,

like people who were experts in the gorilla field and they were asked at the symposium, who is here because they were inspired by Coco, like who got into this because of Coco and like half of the people in attendance raised their hand. So she really did have this major impact on the world. Yeah, for sure. There is great, great value in that to be sure.

So there was a man named Charles Wesley Hume, a British man who founded the University's Federation for Animal Welfare. And he kind of laid the stakes on this kind of science out there pretty plainly. And he said this, if I assume that animals have subjective feelings of pain, fear, hunger and the like,

and if I'm mistaken in doing so, no harm will have been done. But if I assume the contrary, when in fact animals do have such feelings, then I open the way to unlimited cruelties. Animals must have the benefit of the doubt if indeed there be any doubt. Right. I agree.

And so like what Coco lives on as is this kind of litmus test because until we can prove or disprove that apes or any animal does or doesn't have a subjective inner experience, did I get that? I think so. Then it's a matter of belief. Like you can believe whichever way you want. And Coco kind of pushes people to one side or the other.

And when she died, journalists around the world wrote headlines that use words like Coco, the master of sign language, Coco, the talking gorilla. And a lot of skeptics came out and tried to correct things with their own articles, but they were like a drop in the ocean compared to all the other articles. And it seems like the world does want to believe

that there is something more to animals than we can prove. And perhaps that ultimately is best. And that's Coco, everybody. Good job, guys. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. Podcasts and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me. And my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.