The Daily Stoic - Justin Gregg on Animal Intelligence and Human Stupidity

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Ryan talks to Justin Gregg about his new book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity, what we can learn from the nature of animals, the double edge sword of human intelligence, and more.Justin Gregg is science writer and author. He writes about animal behavior and cognition, with articles and blog posts appearing in The Wall Street Journal, Aeon Magazine, Scientific American, BBC Focus, Slate, Diver Magazine. Justin produced and hosted the dolphin science podcast The Dolphin Pod, and has provided voices for characters in a number of animated films. Justin regularly lectures on topics related to animal/dolphin cognition and teaches a course on Animal Minds at St. Francis Xavier University. ✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. You've heard me talk about my farm before I live out in the country here, not far from the painted porch in Bastrop County. So the town is small, the county is big, the county is enormous and has about 90,000

people in it, but it's mostly rural. We live on a dirt road, we've about 40 or so acres. And it was a huge culture shock to move out to the middle of nowhere, which it was much more the middle of nowhere when we moved out here. But I think there's something about country life that I think is inherently philosophical,

Horace the poet we've talked about him talks about cherished in country life. But Mark is really as clearly does. Sennaka does. Going back to Cato, the elder, the Stoics, formed, raised cattle. And we're outside making their living by the sweat of their brown. Now, that's not exactly what I do. Our farm is a hobby farm. But as a hobby, it has helped me immensely philosophically. It's connected me to nature, changed how I think about life and death, changed how I

think about the climate, how I think about my obligation to my neighbors. I'll tell you, there's nothing quite like living on a dirt road that the county doesn't maintain that both binds you together with your neighbors and creates flashpoints for conflict with your neighbors. And there's nothing quite like having to send some of your cows off to auction or to sell them to a neighbor because, biologically, you cannot keep them or you risk in reading or to watch an animal that you love get torn apart by coyotes or wild dogs. And also just watching, you know, things grow up, watching the birds, watching the deer, Jack rabbits we saw this morning

is just something special about country life. And that's why I wanted to talk to today's guest, one because he too lives on a little hobby farm. And he wrote this fascinating book called If Nietzsche, We're a Norwall, what animal intelligence reveals about human stupidity. He talks about what is human intelligence, and is that maybe even a little bit of an oxymoron? He talks about how the animal kingdom and all its diversity gets by, without so many of the things that we consider are great evolutionary gifts.

And the author of If Nietzsche were in Orwell is Justin Greg. He's a science writer, he has a PhD from the School of Psychology at Trinity College in Dublin. He's an adjunct professor at St. Francis Xavier. And most of his research actually focuses on dolphins. He's the author of our dolphins really smart, 22 fantastical facts about dolphins. He's an expert on animal behavior and cognition. He's written for the Wall Street Journal, Scientific America, BBC, Slate, et cetera. And he's hosted the Dolphin Science podcast,

The Dolphin Pod. And he's also provided voices for characters in a number of animated films, just a fascinating guy. And his research on animal and dolphin cognition animal minds Make up most of the classes that he teach. I love this conversation. I had so much fun And I thought if Nietzsche were in Norwalt was a fascinating and

Just playful and fun book you can go to his website justin Greg dot com That's Greg with two Gs or follow him on Twitter and Instagram at JustinGreg. And I would say, because I hear this from people that go, oh, I've always wanted to do that by that they may live out in the country. You know, you don't have to pass a test. And it may well be cheaper and more enjoyable than wherever you live.

That was certainly the case for me, all their property values have kind of like crazy out in central Texas, but I'm glad we got in when we did. But if you're thinking about country life, I say go for it. And if you're thinking about reading, if Nietzsche were in Norwalt, I think you will enjoy it. Well, it's a pleasure to talk. I love the book.

I thought it was very interesting. I want to talk about your hobby form, but I thought I'd start start with something I've I saw it before and then I just saw it again so it might be more popular than I thought it was. But one of the funniest things I ever heard was this is a Ranger, a park ranger Yellowstone and they were saying that the tricky thing about designing trash cans at Yellowstone is that you have to make a trash can that's smart enough that a bear can't use it, but that's dumb enough that a human being can figure it out. And that strikes me as essentially the exploration of this book, where animals are smart, humans are dumb, where humans are smart, and animals are dumb.

Yes, that's a beautiful anecdote. That's exactly it. And sometimes a bear could probably find its way in no problem because they have the kind of smart subtle algorithms to do that, whereas a human would overthink it and then just watch and then throw their stuff on the ground. Yeah, it's like, if it's too easy, the bear can get in. If it's too hard, the human being will give up and just throw their trash on the ground, right? So it's the psychology of like, and then what's there's that, there's that thing in men and black, which it, you wish a philosopher had said it because we could quote it more often, but they say, a person can be smart, but people are dumb. Yes, that's correct.

I mean, that's it. Humans in the, in the aggregate are the problem. One human can't do that much damage, but you put them in a group of a thousand and forget it. You'll burn a forest to the ground. Is that because a thousand humans are dumb or if you get to a thousand, you definitely get some really dumb humans. I just think you compound the dumbness, you know, because especially when you make collective decisions through thinking too hard, rationality, you can arrive at some bonkers conclusions on how to behave.

And that, I think, is the nature of the problem. That makes sense. And then I would also imagine the tricky thing with humans is that we have all these complicated interests and calculations we're making. So let's say you get to 1,000 humans in the forest, maybe there's one of them for whom the forest is a great obstacle and they want to get rid of and then there's another person who wants to be seen I like I remember there was a famous fire a couple years ago in California where a

person started it so then they could put it out and be seen as a hero, right? Like you start to get to a lot of complicated motivations and Torture decision making when you get to that many people. Well, that's it, because we have some capacities that animals lack that allow that so language, right? We can talk about all of our different goals or as animals can't, which allows us to put those goals

into the heads of other people and collectively decide to do bonkers goals. But also, like you're saying, maybe they have an intrinsic desire to want to be something or do something or Accomplish something they're putting themselves in the future and imagining themselves putting out a fire and saving the world and Animals don't have that ability to the same extent so they can put their ego their mind forward in time And so that makes us a danger because we care about our future way more than animals do Yeah, it's like we're a danger to ourselves and others

because we're always up to something. That's it, and our schemes are long-term. But I argue this in the book, we're also really terrible at feeling the consequences of long-term schemes. Our brains are still designed for making decisions in the here and now, just like animals. You can decide, like, oh, 10 years from now, like, I'm gonna build this house on a hill,

and you didn't realize, of course, that what you were doing was eroding the hillside and causing a flood to happen in the town, and everyone dies. And so, you don't think about those things because you're not designed to really feel the consequences of building a house in a dumb way that kills people. That makes sense.

Yeah, I think about this as I have two pet donkeys and when I first got them, I remember I would go out and the donkeys would just, they can stand still and do nothing for a very long period of time. And I remember at first thing, I think that this was a sign that they were very stupid. And then I sort of realized like maybe actually he's smarter than me. Like the reason I can't sit still is I make up a million reasons why I have to be doing things, right? And you know, the sort of peace and equanimity and presentness that the donkey is able to

operate under may actually be vastly superior in intelligence and discipline than my business. Yeah, and I mean, that's why I chose Nietzsche for this book to couch it, because that's exactly what he talks about. And if I'm not wrong, I think the Stoics said something as well, which is animals live in the moment, and they're not as concerned with all these other things,

therefore in that moment they are happier. So in the book and they're not as concerned with all these other things therefore in that moment They are happier so in the book. I say like Well, that's not necessarily true with what we know from animal cognition They do have a bit of future planning, but sure the most part. Yes. That is the literal like we can think about our own deaths and plan for it And like does that make us happier? I don't know and in the book I do this advanced calculation I'm like, kind of not. Like thinking about your death, planning for it, planning for these projects, these legacy projects for after you die.

Like I wanna write a book and be remembered forever. That guides our actions, which is great, but man, do we lose a lot of sleep over it? Yeah, it's like, if you were designing a curse, that would be a pretty good one. Like, you're gonna have all these incredible skills, you're gonna be blessed with all these things, you're gonna be the apex predator, blah, blah, blah, blah,

but you will never know a moment of peace because your mind is your greatest enemy. It's like you couldn't do much better than that. Yeah, that's like the curse of Cassandra like that. We see what's coming down the pipe and yes, it allows us to do great stuff. Like we can invent wonderful things, medicine and, you know, building and mechanized farming, but like,

but yeah, on balance, I think is the thing. On balance, I think we may be more miserable because of exactly that. So you have chickens on your farm? I do, I have a bunch of chickens. And chickens are weird. They're like little dinosaurs if you really think too much about it. I remember, yeah, when I started my, when I was gonna do my PhD, I could choose between studying chickens or dolphins,

and I'm like, ah, dolphins, obviously, they're way cooler. But now I spend 100% of my time thinking about my chickens. Like they're fascinating animals, and I'm like, oh, these are way cooler than the dolphins to some extent. Cause like, cause like you know how it is, like chicken television, you just sit there and watch them,

trying to figure out what they're thinking. I love it. Mine are always trying to get into my house. They know that it's cooler inside the house. And so they kind of wait by the door, and then if my kids leave the door open, they will sneak inside. That's crafty. I mean, who wouldn't want to be in your house? This probably snacks all by the door, and if my kids leave the door open, they will sneak inside. That's crafty.

I mean, who wouldn't want to be in your house? This probably snacks all over the floor, if you have kids. Yes. That's also where the dog is, so it's not the smartest move. No, no. But I, I mean, I knew about chickens academically, because I read about them. But now that I'm watching their behavior,

I see that there is a lot more going on in the little minds than I even I thought and I wrote about how smart they were. So I love watching animals and just asking the question, why is the animal doing this right now? Yes. That's the whole field and it's so amazing to dig into their minds by asking that question. So when you watch your chickens, what are you seeing that maybe I'm not seeing? Well, let's say my rooster is doing the cockle-le-le-le thing.

And I'm like, well, why in this moment, what is it about his world that is making him want to create this sound? And so I have to go out, because I'll hear him, and I'm like, oh, is there a fox? Is there an eagle? And I have to ask the question, why? And most of the time it's because his hands are somewhere that he can't see and he wants them to come back. But, um, but trying to figure out why he's

making that sound gives you insight into what he's thinking about. Like, what is his desires? What is what is he want? He wants his hands to be close to him. He wants them to be safe. That's why he's creating the sound. So just every little behavior, every little sound that they make is a mystery to be solved. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's like every time I find the chickens are doing something weird, like it's like, why are there no eggs in the coop?

Or like, why are they spending so much time over here? It's almost always like, because there's a snake in the coop and it's been stealing the eggs and they've decided, they couldn't be like, hey, sir, can you come take care of this? You know, they're just like, well, we just started, we moved to the garage. We lay eggs in the garage now until you find them, get rid of the snake and lock us in the coop for a couple of weeks.

This is the new normal. Exactly. And, and you know, they do have those thoughts like my chickens like to roost in different sections and they'll roost on one branch over the other. And I'm like, well, why? And so then I'll start changing things. Like, what if I move it five directions, like five inches this way, or what if I close the window, or is it too drafty?

Like, they have ideas and you just got to figure out what, what, why are they doing that? Because they're not as, you know, you just quickly glance at them and they look like little insane dinosaurs running around doing nonsense things. But every action is for all reason in that chicken's mind. It is remarkable too. Like, one of the things, I remember we got chickens. This one, before we lived on our ranch, we lived in East Austin. And I remember I met my neighbor because I had to go over to their house and say, hi, I'm your neighbor, we never met. I'm going to get a ladder and climb on your roof to retrieve a dead chicken because a raccoon had stolen a chicken out of the coop, taken it up to my neighbor's roof, ripped its head

off, eaten as much of it as it could, and then moved on, but something scared it away or something. But I think one of the things that chickens definitely have done is because they just die all the time. It's just an and everything prays on them. It's just kind of a reminder of like the brutality of life. I've definitely taken that from my chickens. It is true, they're hardy in one sense

and that you can keep them out in the winter where I am, it's very cold. And it's like, wow, they're so hardy. But then sometimes they will die for stupid reasons. Like they, the small trauma causes them to go into shock and die. Yeah. Yeah. It's so, we just had this the other day where my friend is going back to Europe for a few weeks and he asked me to babysit his chickens. So he brought over his 10 chickens. I put them in the coop and they were all hens and I have a rooster and the alpha hen on his decided to challenge my rooster, which is pretty dumb on paper

because it's like a time to size. And they had a very brief fight. It was like a normal chicken fight, but my rooster had pecked that chicken in the head in such a way that within 30 seconds, he was dead. And I'm like, we were totally traumatized. We were like, we had not seen that coming.

But you're right, like, everything seems common. And you're reminded of the brutality of life as a praise species, which is what, like what you're saying, like, everything eats them. They're constantly in terror. Yeah, we're gonna be like, you go in, and you're like, wait, only five chickens came out of the coop, there should be six.

And you go in there and you're like, oh, there's a dead one in there. I know, it's been dead for like two days. If you guys just been hanging out with this dead bird, and you know what I mean? Just the way they can normalize themselves to death too. Yeah, yeah. It's true, I read about that in the book too,

because I'm always fascinated by what animals understand about death. Because like you and I understand that we will one day die. Animals do not, because that requires some skills that they probably lack. But there's a philosopher, Suzanne Monsot, who are right about in the book, who argues actually the most basic concept of death,

the minimal concept of death, is something that almost all animals have. So as soon as one chicken sees another dead chicken, it will sort of make a distinction between a normal chicken should be up running around doing things. This thing over here on the ground isn't, and they will suddenly have a new category for death in their minds.

They might not know that they're gonna die, but at least they know what death kind of is. Yeah, there's a DH Lawrence poem that I like, where he says, a wild bird will cling frozen to a branch. A wild bird has never been sorry for itself or something like that. The way that his point was that like animals are really hardy as you're saying, but there's also this lack of like, not, there's no pity for the other birds seemingly, but there's also no real self-pity. There's this kind of stoic in the lower S sense of like, it is what it is, man.

It is true. I mean, there's certainly Barbara J. King, she studies animals and she wrote a book on animal grief. And there's all these beautiful examples of animals having a companion or a friend that died and then expressing behavior that looks just like what we would do if we had a close companion die, spending weeks not eating and sort of moping around. So they do get sad about death to some extent,

but that doesn't necessarily mean that they know themselves are gonna die, or that they have self-pity. Because self-pity would mean, I have an idea of who I am and what I want, and I'm not attaining it, and that makes me sad about my failures in life. That's a really complex kind of thinking that probably animals don't have. So they may not have self-pity.

They do mourn, but they don't pitty themselves. I think that's probably true. Yeah, there's actually this weird letter, one of Senaqa's letters. He's talking about how, if you, and he probably was talking about the, what are they, orrocks or I forget what they're called before cattle, but he was talking about how, you know, you take a baby cow away from its mother because you're going to sell it or slaughter it or whatever, you know, he says they'll be sad for like three days and then it goes back to normal. And that's kind of what I've found.

I have a few cows and we have to, we don't slaughter them, but we usually sell them like to neighbors or whatever, because you can't keep the babies, there's an inbreeding problem, right? But they'll be upset for a little bit, and then it just kind of immediately goes back to whatever the status quo was before that happened. And that's what's great about my field

of studying animal minds, which is, how do you know what an animal is thinking in that moment? If it behaves like a human, you can make this sort of guess that maybe they're thinking like a human, but if they aren't, then either they are thinking like a human,

but not showing it, or they can't think like a human. So with, well, you know, the problem with animals is like if an animal gets hurt as you know, like a dog or a cat, it won't always let on that it's hurt because that means it's easy to, you know, be preyed upon. So maybe there, maybe your sheep, when it loses its sheep friend spends eight years in mourning, but you don't recognize that what it, what mourning looks like for a sheep, you know, that could be it.

And this is what's fun about this field is like, how would you design an experiment or interpret an observation to say for sure that an animal is grieving or can feel these deep emotions? And it's not easy. And the whole field is just scientific each other about interpreting animal behavior. It is weird because you'll watch things that,

yeah, if a human was doing it, this would be grotesque or horrendous. Like, when you watch it, let's say a cow reject a calf for whatever reason, right? Often the cow is doing it for some somewhat logical reason. It knows it's too weak to support the baby or it sends to the baby as weak. But if your friend had a baby and they were like, and I'm just not feeling this one, I'm going to let it with or and die. Someone will intervene, you know, if if it's worth saving, you'd be like, you're a monster. But then you watch an animal do it and you're like, oh, that's how it works. Now I have to go bottle feed this calf or whatever. It's true because humans do do

that and it is seen as monsters. But as I make an argument later in the book, like, what's wacky about humans is that we can use our rational minds, especially when it comes to trying to create morality, moral decisions, to go down these insane paths where you can rationalize genocide, right? You can say, I have very good reasons for killing all the babies in this town because our ethnic group, whatever, you know, is going to bring prosperity to the nation. And so that's what's crazy about you because a cow doesn't do that. It will reject its baby, but it's not going to tell every other cow to reject all the babies that are born with spots, for example. It would never press a button to murder all the other cows so it could have more grass. Right, because they don't have the capacity for that. So in one sense, like it sounds nuts,

like nature's, you know's red and tooth and claw, as Darwin would say. But on the other hand, yeah, cows aren't pressing those kill everybody buttons. Only humans have kill everybody buttons. Right. Well, and worse, we invented kill every, it's not like we were given kill everyone buttons.

Like, a cow's given horns or something, like a tiger is given what, like we invented that button and then we press it. buttons, like, you know, a cow's given horns or something like a tiger is given what, like, we invented that button and then we press it, you know, like that we existed for thousands of years before anyone gave us this horrendous capacity and we're like, you know what, we should have one, our group should have the ability to do that. So let's, let's pull our resources together, come, come up with the ability to do it and then have debates

about whether we should do it or not or who deserves it or not. Yeah, that's why human intelligence says a double-aged sword, because yes, we could do beautiful things with those things that we need. Sure. Nuclear energy, great. Free energy for everybody, great. Or, we made a bomb out of it. Yeah.

Everything that we create can be used to destroy or not destroy. And for some reason, we always tend to choose it like half the time. Like half the time we use it for good and half the time we blow up other people with it. So it's a real bummer because we could be virtuous and just decide to only ever help. But that's absolutely not how we're designed

by evolution. My friend, the novelist Aaron Ther, he has this line in one of his books and he says, the thing about humans is that we're so smart we could build a rocket and send people to the moon. And then he's like, and we're also so dumb that some of us would just believe that that never happened. Right? And he's like, if that doesn't describe the human species right there, I don't know what does. That's it in a nutshell. Yeah, I mean, we are, we, I would, if there were an alien anthropologist coming to try

and figure out what we're all about, they'd be constantly flummoxed. Like, look at these amazing things. They've discovered the nature of the universe and, you know, gravity and all this stuff. And yet, you know, they also don't believe that the earth is round. Or like, how are these both true at the same time, collectively?

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taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or The Wondering App. Yeah, like I saw a meme that was like, you know, science and the 1800s and they're like, the cusp of all these things. And then it was like a scientist today. I'm telling you for the last time, do not eat tide pods.

But yes, that's exactly correct. It's bonkers. It is nuts. It is nuts. You know what else is nuts, like historically, about humans and animals, is how profoundly dumb, really smart humans were about animals. Like, when you read, I'm sure you know,

like a medieval beastie area, like those collections of observations about animals. Yeah. And I remember I was reading a book about one of them and it was describing how in one of Shakespeare's plays he talks about how a chameleon survives only on air. Like it doesn't eat anything, it just survives on the air.

And they were like, well, where does that come from? And they like trace it all the way back. And I guess in like something that Pliny, the younger elder wrote, he had like caught a chameleon and they would like look at a chameleon and they didn't see it eating. And so instead of like, because it couldn't see the tongue going out and getting stuff so faster,

or maybe this chameleon was like near death or whatever. But he was just like, ah, yes, here it is. The chameleon just breathes nutrients out of the air. And then like this made up fact that some old white guy just pulled out of his ass like 2,000 years ago is like, you know, making its way through books over and over until it appears in Shakespeare's play.

And just like the preposterous nonsense that like the smartest people in the world claimed seriously about animals. It makes you question like all of western philosophy because you're like, wait, Aristotle believed that an elephant was 300 years old or what, you know, you're like the same guy? Yeah, well, that's what's fascinating. Let's just create about the scientific method and this sort of modern approach to naturalism, which it used to be, like if plenty of the elders had something

and it was passed down, he had never seen an alligator or a chameleon, I don't know. He just described it to somebody and they wrote it down. And then because it came from him, everyone accepts it on authority. And then that happened so often in these best areas, like no one had seen a camel who was drawing a camel. And then you get this picture of a camel and it looks absolutely ludicrous.

That's because no one had seen it. They just heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy who was going back 2000 years. And it's bonkers. And yeah, and nowadays we're like, okay, well that's not how information is transmitted. Like let's figure out if this thing is real. So thank God for a scientific method and trying to verify things. Well, yeah, it's like the people who are like, go to first principles, right? They were also like, yes, this is

what a rhinoceros looks like because I saw a drawing of a drawing of a drawing of a drawing from a person who witnessed one from a boat. Yeah. I mean, if my daughter is describing something she saw on TV, it's only like 80% accurate. Like imagine someone's 2,000 years ago, just like forget it, forget it. It's like the telephone game on steroids. Totally. No, I read this fascinating book a few years ago

about called Kingdom Under Glass. And it was about Carl Akley, like the naturalist. He like shot most of the animals in the Smithsonian, the naturalist museum. But he was also like the inventor of modern taxidermy, right? Which you wouldn't think would be a thing that someone would invent. But his invention was, no, you can't just like take the hide off of a bear and stuff it with straw. That doesn't make what a bear looks like, because a bear has a skeleton and muscles.

So he was like, you have to make a wire frame, now we use styrofoam, but you have to make the form of the animal and then put the skin around the animal. So if you look at like taxidermy in like a castle from the 1100s, it's like this preposterous, deformed looking animal, because like this is what a bear would look like if it was filled with jello or something, you know? And just like how much of people's experience with the natural world was like through these fairy tales or these horrible drawings. And so they were looking at like a refraction of a refraction and then making these statements

about like what it was to be a human or an animal based on nothing. That's it. And I mean, you know, like a narwhal, if you describe that, it's got this big tusk, go whatever. And then you get these ideas of mermaids and unicorns, all this stuff from inaccurate descriptions

and their past that. And then they enter into lore and folklore, but they still, like you're saying, they persist and that people still have ideas today about what animals are and what they do based on completely wrong knowledge that's been passed down. And so part of what I do is an animal cognition person is to say, like, oh, this is what's changed in the 2000 years since these people were writing about animals. This is what we actually know.

And people are always surprised. And how much of it do you think is just, I would argue that human beings have become more empathetic as we've progressed, right? Like, or at least, we've created cultural incentives and a culture that, to a certain degree, promotes and considers empathy to be a virtue, just in the same way that it'd be difficult to have a slave society in which empathy was a prominent trait practiced by people because it would get in the way of the economic system. So how much of it is just not just the science, but even the interest in doing the science.

Like you're like, I wonder what's going on in my chicken's head. I guess there's a few philosophers in Montana for instance that it's like, what's going on with my cat? But for the most part, it seemed like we were just totally uninterested in what was happening. I think so. And I can't say for certain why that would be,

why there's an increase in empathy. But I do know when societies became more secular, more interested in the scientific method, it left those questions open, or as before they had been answered, animals don't have souls, you know, the Christian doctrine, or the Stoics would have differentiated between rational animals like humans and the non-rational. So once you remove those preconceived notions which come down through doctrine, whatever

that might be, and you just start asking questions, then you find things and then empathy kicks in, because you're like, oh, wait, my cat might be sad. And then it changes the way you feel about cats. Whereas before, if you're like, a cat is a stupid robot that has no feelings, we can just kill it whenever we want. And that doesn't happen as much anymore. No, that's really interesting. Right. Like, if you think about literally

the opening pages of the Bible are like, and then God gave you dominion over the animals to do with what you wanted. You're like, okay, why do I care about any of it? What's going on in their interior life? Absolutely. And I mean, that gets passed down culturally. So like, you know, you talk with people,

and they, locally, who would never consider animals to have feelings or his consciousness or subjective experience, let alone souls. And that's just been transmitted through culture through Judeo-Christian culture. And that's just been transmitted through culture, through Judeo-Christian culture. And it's just accepted. No, they never thought about it. So yeah, and that will, it comes out of the Bible,

and it tells you how you can treat your animals. So once if you set that aside and you approach it from a completely objective standpoint, what is an animal, what do they think about? Then you get a completely different take on it. And it's often more empathic. Although I guess there is some stuff in the Old Testament also about not mistreating your animals, or if you steal somebody's animal, or if you hurt someone else's animal,

I guess there's some sort of basic, hey, my ox or my donkey is a tool, and if you screw with it, there does seem to be a little bit of that, but not like, hey, does the donkey like pulling the cart? Right, yeah. Most of that is based on what is still completely normal legal principle today, which is animals are things you can own. They don't have, they're not persons.

And so if you have a cat and I go over and steal your cat, it's your property, I'm stolen it. I'm legally responsible for paying you back or whatever. So they've always sort of been a transactional thing as opposed to a thing on its own. And I mean, there are animal rights advocates are fighting for personhood for animals and it's still not enshrined in the states anyway. There are welfare things about treating animals, but most of it is legality. Like I can't mess with your dog, it's your dog.

Right, but if you want to put your dog down, essentially any way you want that's not outright torture, you can pretty much do it, which is kind of a weird, great. It's kind of dark if you, it's like, yeah, you could shoot your dog if you wanted. Like that is weird. It's weird because here in Canada, you can raise your dogs for meat and eat them. There's no laws against that. There are welfare laws like you have to keep those dogs in a barn separately from your family dogs.

That's the only real, which is pretty wacky. They're the rules on the books legally for how to treat animals are all over the map. Like in the US, quite famously, you know, pigeons and mice and rats, they're not considered, or at least rats and mice, are not considered animals under the law, because that's how they bypass their use in research, because you don't have to have any welfare concerns to a non-animal. And so, strangely enough, in the US, rats and mice used in experiments are not animals.

Which is... What are you talking about? You talk about this in the epilogue a little bit, like about sort of the ethics of testing on animals and experiments on animals and how it's complicated. I think that Nym Chimski thing is like one of the most fascinating fucked up things I've ever heard about in my life. Yeah, I mean, I got into this whole thing

because I'm interested in human language. I like German language. And I want to know how it got here. How did it evolve? And so these early experiments where people thinking for the first time, maybe a chimpanzee can learn English. If we just take it home and raise it alongside my kids or whatever, like they did with a number of them. And like after 10 years, they're like, oh yeah, that didn't work. That's not how but there was a time period in the 60s when people were doing bonkers experiments. Oh, what about the dolphin one?

I don't know if you know this story, but John Lilly was a scientist who was also trying to teach dolphins to learn English. So he bought a house in the Caribbean, flooded it, and then had a dolphin live in this flooded house alongside a woman who tried to teach the dolphin to speak English. And this went on for months until it did not work.

Yeah, obviously. And that was the end of that. But it just, that was what was happening in the 60s, if you can imagine. Just like a woman sitting at a dinner table with a dolphin next door in two feet of water. It's wacky. Well, no, that's the Nymchim's thing. It's back to like, wow, these are really smart people being like pretty dumb.

You know what I mean? Like dumb in the sense like if you thought about it for two seconds, you'd be like, this is the most absurd thing I've ever thought in my life. But like the reason monkeys are not speaking is because they don't wear pants, you know, or whatever. Right, yeah. But at the same time, there is like,

it is, there is a kernel of like, if there's a one in a million chance of that being true, we should probably chase it down. Yeah, at the heart of it is a good scientific question, which is why don't chimpanzees speak? Maybe it's because they don't have enough exposure, because like you can teach a chimpanzee to put on pants or to use really like an iPad, right?

And that's, because it's never seen an iPad before, then you give it one and it can use it. So maybe that's true of English. It just turned out not to be true. But at the heart, it was a pretty good question. The experiments seemed like, I mean, John Lilly also gave like LSD to the dolphins. And he took LSD to see if you could establish psychic

communication. That wasn't a very good scientific question. But the language one is, I think, at least it was. Yeah. No, no. And then I was actually just listening to an interview scientific question, but the language one is, I think, at least it was. Yeah. No, no. And then I was actually just listening to an interview about someone who was talking about whether a chatbot is sentient or not.

And they were talking about how human beings are, how the bots are almost certainly not sentient, but the bots are really good at tricking humans into thinking they're sentient, especially they were saying like if it's a like a sex chat bot, like men are like particularly susceptible to it, right? And like what's interesting about the the Nymchimski thing was like not like how smart the Chim turned out to be, but like how profoundly susceptible the humans were into tricking themselves into thinking that the chip was like, and outsiders like this chip knows like two sentences, this isn't working, but the people were convinced because cognitive dissonance, because of their

emotional connection to it, because they wanted it to work, you know, the humans tricked themselves into thinking that it was working. Yeah, this is the clever Hans effect. I don't know if you've heard that term, but it was working. Yeah, this is the clever Hans effect. I don't know if you've heard that term, but it was based on this, there's this horse that it was in the 19th century and named Hans, and he could count.

And so the idea was he had his owner would show him a mathematical problem, like what's three plus four, and he would clomp his foot on the ground until he got to seven and then stop. And everyone was like, amazing. Yeah. And so they sent these scientists to be like,

is this horse counting? And it turned out that the horse was picking up on the signals of the owner so that when they got to seven, the owner would have a very slight smile or something that the horse picked up that the owner wasn't trying to do, the horse could pick it up. And so the horse was just reading these,

in facial expressions. But everyone was wanted to believe so the horse was just reading these, you know, facial expressions. But everyone was wanted to believe that the horse could do math. And so interesting. In the science of animal cognition, that's what we want to make sure we're avoiding is fooling ourselves. Because we want the dolphin to speak, you know, we want the crow to be super smart. And so all of the experiments we design are to stop us from fooling ourselves. My favorite name, Jimsky thing, I have a favorite and a least favorite, we'll talk about both of them.

But I read a book about it. And apparently, you know the show Friends? Yes. You know Janice, the Chandler's a annoying girlfriend, the one with the super high pitch voice. Yeah, I know. Yes, she was the neighbor of the people doing the Nymimski experiment and she would babysit

the chimp as, as like a 13 year old or whatever. Like, yeah, she grew up knowing Nimchim's, that's bizarre. That's so weird. That's so weird. Um, no, my least favorite was, again, this is how humans are dumber than animals in that they do this experiment. They, they plot this monkey from the wild, they subject it to all this insanity. And then when the experiment didn't work, they were like, well, we're done with the monkey,

you know, even though he lived for like another like 40 years or something. And the most heartbreaking thing in the movie and the documentary and in the book, but like, he just they just send him to a medical lab, and he would sign, like, please let me out of the cage. I had your... Just like, God, we're the worst. We're just the worst. There are so many animals like that,

especially from those language experiments in that time period. That is their exact fate. They would die early, like, Peter the Dolphin from the John Lilly thing, like he ended up dying early after, like I failed release or something. That's their fate.

Like if they no longer fulfill our fantasies of being a talking animal, we send them to terrible conclusions of their life. Like, and that again is a moral failing, I think, of our species. Like in pursuit of the truth and logic and something, we create misery, we're just awful in that sense.

Yeah, well, yeah, we would look at the chicken or the cow and be like, look how they just shrug off the death of this beloved companion. And then we're like, oh, well, we don't need the chimp anymore. So if we send them to a lab, you know, like, is out of sight, out of mind for the chimp. Like we're not actually that superior, if you think about it. That's it, that way.

Well, we just have a rational explanation, and that's the problem with ration and reason, is we can justify pretty much anything no matter how evil. Yes, and that's our biggest failing is that we can create bigger awfulness than animals through a ration and reason. Yes, yes.

Have you, how old is your, you said you mentioned your daughter, how old is she? She's 14, 14. Did you read the children's book, Fredrick, about the mouse? That sounds familiar, what happens on that? It's like five field mice and they're preparing for winter and they're all, I was just reading it to myself

the other day, they're all gathering mice, or they're all gathering stuff for the winter, except for Frederick, who just sort of lies around. And they're like, Frederick, why are you not helping? And Frederick says, oh, I'm gathering sun rays for the cold winter days. He basically, Frederick makes this convoluted explanation about how he's gathering ideas and blah, blah, blah.

Then the winter comes and they're all dying because they run out of food. They're not dying, they're whatever. They're struggling because they're running out of food. And then they go, Frederick, where's your contribution? And Frederick recites them a poem and that he's been observing in the poem, warms their bones and it gets them through the winter.

Which is, it's an interesting little cute story. But I remember as I was reading it, I had the other read of it is, ah, this is the way that human beings can manipulate other human beings into doing their work for them by nature of their made up professions, which both you and I have in a way. That's, Craig, I'm not sure what I'm producing. Like I have some vegetables, but I just eat them myself. So I'm not helping anybody. I'm just producing my own income. But no, that is true. I mean, part of what makes human cognition so special is our intimate knowledge of what's going on in each other's minds. Therefore, our ability to deceive and manipulate each other. We're so good at that. And that's great, because you can be like Frederick and you live a great life and whatever, but at the same time, you know, that's where you get lying and bullshitting and really

terrible stuff. So again, it's a double-edged sword. It makes us amazing and also terrible. Yeah, no, because it's like the positive read is like, ah, artist, perform an important role in society, right? And and that we, like, if you're a kid's an artistic kid, you should celebrate that. And then it's like the darker, more sinister Machiavellian version is, ah, this is the way that artists live off the work of others and make themselves seem more important. You know, like that, that I just struck me. It's like, ah, he's really, you know, he could also be gathering grain as he gathers the sun rays for his poems. Yeah. Wow. That's an anti-arts and humanities propaganda book. I think we should

write a letter to this person. It must be some STEM researcher from university trying to dissuade people from getting into the arts. Exactly. Exactly. It's a children's attack on the free writer problem. It's a children's attack on the free writer problem. And you've just read it to your children. So how do you're part of this problem? Did Nietzsche ever know that Norwalls existed? That's an interesting question. I'm sure he had heard of them. I don't think he traveled anywhere, we would have seen them. But yeah, no, so that was just the most absurd animal that I love that I could think of to contrast with him.

Because I like Marie Mammals, that's what I study. And not Rawls are great. And I'd be a picture of Nietzsche with a unicorn horn sticking out of his head. That looks like a funny idea. But yeah, but Nietzsche really was the, because of his writing, specifically a few passages about how he envied animals, because like you're saying,

they don't seem as if they care about the future and they can quickly get over things. And he's jealous of them, but he also pitted them, because he's like, oh, that's too bad. They can't understand nihilism or the point of life or think about morality. So he was conflicted and that he was jealous but also sad for animals that they lacked human capacities. So that's a right, you know, and that's Nietzsche for you. Like his life was miserable and he came up with these

amazing ideas because of that cognitive dissonance and conflict. Right, right. Yeah, norables, there's a couple of animals like the norwawers, just so absurd. You're like, that can't be real. Yeah, and a lot of them live in the deep ocean. Like you see bonkers animals that are like see through and like how do they swim? It's just like a round ball with two little fins,

like impossible that they exist. That's what's, I love the end. The natural world is filled with these impossibilities. But each of those is an evolutionary question as well. Like how are they here? How did they get here from a natural selection standpoint? Yeah, like what's the fish where it has the antenna that's a light right in front of it?

Yeah, those angler fish. Yeah, totally bonkers. But like what's great about, what's great about this that I do is trying to figure out what is a narwhal's tusk for. Yeah, because we thought we had answers and they keep changing every 10 or 15 years. We thought, well, maybe it was for fighting or it's a male display to show, well, that's not it,

because it's quite sensitive. So maybe it's for like gauging salinity or weather temperatures and that's probably it, but we're not sure. I love that you can look at an animal and have no idea what it's for and how it got there in 2022. You know what I mean? Yes. Yes. I've been a runner for like as long as I can remember.

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10,000 dot C slash Stoic free shipping free returns lifetime guarantee. Get off your ass. Get their gear. It's the most comfortable training shirt you've ever worn from 10,000. Yeah, I read about this experiment once with dogs and they were trying to see like, can dogs use tools, right? This goes to your point about designing experiments because you can get a crow to do this and they were finding that the dogs wouldn't use a tool, not because they weren't smart enough to use a tool, but there was weren't smart enough to use a tool, but there was a human in the room and a human is a tool.

So why not just try to manipulate the human into doing the thing for me? And the struggle of getting the dog to use a tool wouldn't work if there was a human in the room. And it makes total sense because dogs and cats evolved with us, right? And dogs, you know, dogs, manipulated us into domesticating them, you know?

Exactly. And there are so many examples of bad science questions that lead to the wrong conclusion when it comes to animal intelligence studies. Yeah. Like elephants, for example, when you try and test to see whether they can use tools, and you give them like a stick to hold

to try and reach something, like they can use tools and you give them like a stick to hold to try and reach something, like they won't grab it up with the end of their trunk because it will block their nasal passage. So like knowing what an animal's elephant's trunk is for means you have to design a different experiment. Or like the mirror self recognition test. That's when you look in the mirror and you realize that it's not another animal,

but it's you. That's like a test of self awareness. But gorillas were always terrible at this. Like they wouldn't, they couldn't pass. And it turns out that gorillas, like humans, are super sensitive to eye contact so much so that they don't like to look other gorillas in the eye.

And so if they see a mirror image of another gorilla, they'll look away because they don't wanna start a fight. And so they hate mirrors for completely different reason than we thought. And the experiment was wrong, but the intelligence that we're looking for was there. No, that's really interesting because I just saw a viral video of this bear walking through the woods and it chances a pot of beer. And it goes crazy and it destroys the beer. And yeah, like if perhaps a calmer, more primed bear to look at the mirror could have a different reaction than whatever the state

that that bear was in at that moment. If you saw that, you'd be like, a bear is too dumb to look in a mirror. And maybe it's like, no, it's just, it's fighting reflexes are so primed. Yeah. And maybe it's like, no, it's just, it's fighting reflexes are so primed that could never get a chance to look at itself in the mirror because it wouldn't ever look for long enough without reacting. Exactly, or like dogs, right? They're not so good at that test. But if you give dogs a test of self recognition

using the smell of their own urine because that's how dogs tell who other dogs are, they're good at that. They know who they are. They can smell their own urine. So it's just you got to use the right test for the right species. Interesting.

Yeah, I heard another thing about dogs too, where it was like they were trying to test like how good was a dog sense of smell. And then it turned out that like, it was too good for the machine to actually, like it was much better than the machine was capable of recognizing. So like there's this whole other let like, it's not just like,

hey, what can we find out? But it's like, what is even possible for us to comprehend or quantify because we may be so inferior to them that it's, we don't even know what we don't know. Exactly, it's like that's an echolocation. Before we knew that they echolocated, we didn't think to ask if they could, because it, who would have thought

that they can make mouth sounds that we can't hear that bounce off of object? Like, right, you don't know what you don't know. And that's what's fascinating. Yes, yes. So do you think if you had to be, I guess what I'm reading your book and from what I've read about Nietzsche, it doesn't sound like it was fun to be Nietzsche, I guess.

I'd rather be just about any animal than Nietzsche. Yeah, he was fundamentally miserable, and there may have been some medical reasons for it. But certainly, as I say in a book, it was compounded by his fixation on these philosophical issues, problems of nihilism and what morality is. And so it made him surely more miserable and might have contributed to his ultimate sort of

nervous mental breakdown, which incapacitated him. So yeah, if he didn't think about those things, he might have been a happier person. Why do you think him seeing that man beating the horse was the final straws? It random or was there something more to that? I like to think assuming it's actually true. It's probably a bottle circle, but assuming it's true. I think there was something about his relationship to animals and his compassion for them and their way of thinking, which made it extra hard for him to witness that moment. Someone being just cruel, creating misery for a horse.

The story is he went up and threw his arms around the horse and tried to comfort the horse and then collapsed. So I think there's something about his relationship to animals and the animal mind, which made him fragile. That is something I feel like we haven't really explored that much as a society. Like just until very recently Just animals were everywhere, right?

Like like I saw some statistic about like I forget the numbers But how many horses there were like in New York City? The year before the car was invented and then by like you know years after the car invented, like it's like 40 million horses disappeared in the country. So you know what I mean? Like just like how, if you think about how like people today, you see rude drivers, you see deer and COVID, people who won't wear masks, you know, like, if you see how people have reacted,

and just generally the cruelty or indifference or stupidity of people, and then you go, now I'm gonna design a world to you in which the vast majority of people are dependent on animals. Like just the fucked upness that you would have seen on a regular basis. Like it must have been surreal to just walk through the streets of New York City in 1890. Yeah, what's interesting is humans exist because of our relationship with animals like dogs.

Obviously, the ones that we hunted and ate, but also dogs and humans evolved. They, the reason we're here. And if you look at indigenous knowledge, for example, where I live in Nova Scotia, people living with animals as part of their lives, and they have to sort of be caretakers for the animals because they're their food source, and those other things. And so there's this constant interweaving of humanity

and animals for good. But like you're saying now, in modernity, like you can live in the city, and there's no relationship to animals, which is not a very human way to exist in that sense. Like we did not evolve to be that far removed from animals. And if you think about your children, they probably grew up looking at cartoons, reading books that were about animals.

Children are drawn to animals like all humans. So life without animals is an impoverished human life, in my opinion. Yeah, I'm just saying also though, I bet this sort of modern period where we were still very involved in with animals probably showed us like the scene of walking down the street and seeing a man beating a horse for no reason, that would have been appallingly common, I imagine. Do you know what I mean?

Like you would have seen like dead horses in the street and dead like, I'll give you an example where I mean? Like, you would have seen dead horses in the street and dead. Like, I'll give you an example where I live, it maybe Canada is different. But the big problem I have where I live is that people don't take care of their dogs. People dump dogs or they let their dogs run wild. And there's literally just packs of wild dogs, right? And so, and there's probably, I can't drive for more than 30 minutes in the area I live and not see a dead dog by the side of the road. If I make it to Austin, the city,

you're not going to drive through South Congress and see a dead dog in the middle of the road, but I might see five on the rural road that I live. So, you, and this is because people out here for a variety of reasons, some of which are probably poverty and educate, etc., are just much less attuned to giving a shit about the well-being of the animals, right? Even though they might be dependent on a horse or something, they're also just like dogs, whatever. And so I would imagine it was grim.

Like if you think about some of the atrocities of that time period, it was also true that just generally everything was treated poorly, including human beings. That's true. No, that is true. Our ideas about welfare toward animals and extending them more welfare

are relatively modern and also based on our sort of privilege. Because like certainly cats live in our houses now, that would not, would have happened. That 200 years ago, no, there's no cats in houses. They live in barns and they have lots of kittens and they all die and who cares? Most people did not think of them as cute fluffy children. So our relationship in the West anyway

has certainly evolved because you're right. There would have been cruelty and terrible horror everywhere you turned because of the animals that are pets, but the ones were farming and just the wildlife around us. That is true. We are different now. Some of it has to do with this pet culture that we currently have. Sure, which is a force for good on one hand because we're nicer to animals, so that's good. But it also, there's a lot of animals out there. There's a lot of dogs that end up unwanted in cats. That's a problem in and of itself.

Yeah, there's a story about Thierry Roosevelt, who some people know as a naturalist, but like the moment that wakes him up to loving that is he's walking down the streets of Manhattan and he sees a seal in the gutter, like just a dead seal in the gutter, and he takes it home and he dissects it. And like this is what unlocks his love of, you know, animals and taxidermies and blah, blah, blah, blah. But you're just like, well, that's a New York city that doesn't exist anymore.

I can't imagine seeing a seal in New York City. Yeah. How did it get there? So many questions in this story, Racist. I know. Well, I guess they're probably used to be, I mean, why wouldn't there be live seals in New York City, right? I don't know about the range of sales, maybe. I don't know enough about the historical range of,

I feel like that was somebody's pet. Or like that's weird. That's weirder. That's weirder. I don't know. Yeah, life is weird, people are weird. Or just the way, yeah, like people used to be like, oh, my grandma had a pet gorilla and you're like, huh, all right.

I know, like everybody was Tiger King back in the day. Yeah, yes. Well in Texas, there's more privately owned tigers than our alive in the wild. Yeah. I've read that. That's bonkers. And I don't know how I feel about that. It's sad and good and good that there are tigers sad that they're all in Texas and some weird dudes garden. You know, I mean, it's like I could have a tiger.

And if I never told anyone about it, how would they know? Do you know what I mean? Like you, you, you, you, when you own a little property, you're like, oh yeah, you really could kind of just do whatever you wanted. It's weird. I don't know if I, I think what keeps me up at night is like, do any of my neighbors have a tiger? I hope they don't have a tiger.

You know, like I don't want, I don't want to, like the nice part about, the nice part about living in the country, I tell people is that you can do whatever you want. The bad part about it is that other people can do whatever they want. That's true. You might look over at your neighbor's house one day and see that one of your cows is beheaded on the roof.

And then you know, there may be a tiger somewhere in the back. It's not a raccoon. Yeah. No, like, and like what qualifies as a zoo out here is not, is not what you like to see either. Yeah. Yeah. Texas is confusing in that sense. I mean, the illegal trade in wildlife is a huge problem worldwide or whatever. I feel like Texas can corner the market on bonkersness in that sense. So it's also weird to go back to the Stoics how common, how ancient that tradition is, right? They're like, the Romans are conquering Carthage

so they can bring back lions and tigers and baboons to fight them in the Colosseum. Like, yep, that's it. Like, just the way that like, humans are, humans have been weird about the same things for a very long period of time. That's true. I mean, all through England, there'd be Tiger Kings,

who would like, let's have some tigers and elephants in our little back garden zoo. Like, you're right. Humans have been weird about stuff. They like exoticness. That's a thing that people like. And it's a display of wealth, it's our power to have a weird tiger in your back garden.

Well, my son likes to watch this YouTube channel that just pits different animals against each other. It's fake, but it's like, what would a tyrannosaurus Rex do if it was fighting a raptor? Like, what would that look like? Do you know what I mean? And then you're like, I walk by and I'm like, I actually kind of want to know. Like, you know, like there is something like primal that it triggers where you're like, yeah, that's interesting. Well, what does happen if a great white and an orca fought each other? What would happen?

It's a good question. My daughter was also fascinated by that. And I also would love to know the answers to these things or like a megalodon versus a great white. But I, you're right. It's an old fashioned, humans are fascinated by animals. That's not just because we love them and want to cuddle them and pet them, but also because we want to see them fight and kill each other.

We've been doing that for thousands of years, because nature is fascinating. We have a morbid fascination. Why do we watch horror? Why is stranger things so compelling? There's something about death and danger, and animals really signify that. to bring this back to the Stokes, one of the interesting observations that Gregory Hayes makes about Marcus Aurelius in his translation of Mark Suresis, that Marcus was notorious for not liking the gladiatorial games. And he would be seen like writing or studying philosophy, like the Emperor had to go, but he would be seen studying philosophy

while the games were happening. And then everyone thought this was funny, this is sort of who he was. But Gregory Hayes points out that Marcus does kind of talk, he talks about how the games are. He talks negatively about gladatorio combat about man-fighting animals, but he's only talking about it as it,

from the perspective of it like being low-class, bad entertainment. Nowhere does he question whether it's morally right or wrong or what it's like to be the animal, just like he can use the metaphor of slavery, but never question whether a human should own another human. Right.

I love the idea of Marcus sitting like at a NFL football game with just like a book. He's that guy. He's like, oh, this is pedestrian. I don't want to watch this stupid. Exactly. But not, hey, this game is an abomination because people are getting, you know, CTE and we shouldn't participate in it. Yeah. Because that is the case with the Stoics, right?

Like they did believe that animals being non-rational, they didn't fit the same category as humans. Sure, we didn't have to worry too much about that sort of stuff. And that's totally common of pretty much any philosophy going back until around 1960. I think that's when things change. Right, right. It's like Nietzsche would throw himself

to stop that individual horse from being beaten but doesn't have any larger conception of morality probably when it comes to animals. It's true, I combed through the literature to see what his opinions were about whether or not animals had moral standing. And he just doesn't really enter, like he doesn't care. He's like this though.

It's just not really a conversation. It just never conceives of it as a thing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, it's, it's, uh, yeah, I guess that's a huge advancement that maybe we don't give ourselves credit enough credit for. I think so. I, I understand why you would have thought that, but I think it's wonderful that we live

in the current time period when we know so many facts about animal minds. There's a lot of speculation, but there's things we know for certain. And that has to change our relationship to them for the better. It means less suffering in the world, and that's a good thing. So I think I agree. We've come, we're progressing as a species. Or yeah, or to go back to the Frederick thing, it's kind of remarkable that we would have professors all over the world at all these different universities just doing these absurd experiments about

animal. Like the Nymchimski thing, like that was at Columbia, like taxpayer, you know, like, a lot of buddy went to be like, yeah, we should definitely find out if chimpanzees can speak sign language, you know, like yeah. Like that is a remark, like our society is so successful and yet also absurd that we can be like, we need to put some resources towards that. You know what's fascinating about John Lilly

was he was funded by the government, specifically because people, that's when SETI, like the search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search,

search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, search, the government from the US government into his experiments until they realized it was bonkers and then pulled it away. So yeah, and that's a weird reason to do something.

Yeah, thank you. Right, but there you go. That's humans. Yeah, we can go like our superpowers, our ability to go down very weird rabbit holes. That's it in a nutshell. I should use, if you just put that on a post it note, then you don't need to, or like read or buy my book because that's it in a nutshell. I should use, if you just put that on a post-it note, then you don't need to, or like read or buy my book, because that's it in a nutshell. Like, no, I thought the book was fascinating.

And yeah, I thought it was super, super interesting. Yeah, well, thanks. I'm super glad you liked it. And I thought, well, why would Ryan holiday like this book? And then I started reading all this stuff. And I'm like, oh, actually, it makes complete total sense why this would be interesting to him.

I like weird stories about animals. I, my dog is named Hannah, because Pope Leo the 10th, the Medici Pope, was given an elephant's named Hannah that lived behind the Vatican. And there's a great book about it called the Pope's Elephant. But he, he liked love to this animal. And it was a white elephant, if I remember him correctly. But he, all this absurd stuff about elephants. And then like, like Raphael painted a big painting of it that was lost. And anyways, the elephant dies. This is, again, human's being stupid.

The elephant gets sick and the Pope's doctor veterinarian prescribes it to be given a gold anima. So they just shoved gold up the butt of the elephant, which probably killed it, as you can imagine. And then, but the weirdest part is so, the Pope buries the elephant and then they they promptly forget about it because this is like not what a Pope should be doing. And they sort of expunge it from the records that like the Pope who's supposed to be this,

you know, Catholic charity kind of thing is like spending all his money on this, this Pope or this, this elephant. Anyways, like 50 years ago, they were doing some excavation to the Vatican and they found the elephant and they were like, did we just discover a dinosaur? Like they didn't know what it was. It wasn't conceivable to them immediately that it was an elephant

because why would there be an elephant be buried behind the Pope's apartment? So I love stories like that. They found like a clump of gold in the shape of the Pope's apartment. And I love stories like that. They found like a club of gold in the shape of an elephant's colon. Yeah, but like, what was the reasoning behind a gold enema? Did they explain? I mean, probably the same reasoning that was like, oh, you're sick and weak.

Let's cut a hole in your arm and just bleed you out and see if that helps. You know the way I look? I love it. Humans are crazy. I love it. Humans are crazy. I love that. That's insane. Right.

A nor a nor wall would never do that. There's a lot of things a nor wall can't do, but it would never, it would never give an elephant an elephant a golden ema. Exactly. That's correct. That's. Bronkers. Oh, that is the only way to describe human history, particularly our relations with animals.

Another book I just read is what's his name? My John Davis wrote a book about the history of the bald eagle and in America. And it's basically like the history of Americans poaching, killing, and abusing their natural their national symbol. Like he points out that for most of American history, not only did we not protect the eagle, but states had bounties on the killing of bald eagles, because someone had put, I can one of the early first films. There was this idea that a eagle could take your baby. Oh, okay. And so they were

just like open season on Eagles guys until like 1970. Well, you know what's funny is where I live, there's there's bald eagles everywhere. I think we have like the highest concentration of bald eagles in the world. And nobody cares, you know what I mean? Like if you as an American, I came here and I'm like, oh bald eagles, and then they're like, whatever, whatever. And then the most Canadian thing happened to me, which was I was driving on a road, it was a rural road, and there was a beaver dead in the middle of the road, and there's like three bald eagles, like eating from it.

And it was like, it was gonna stop traffic. So I went over with a shovel and was like, you know, surrounded by these eagles trying to get it to beaver and I'm like, hitting with a shovel, I'm like, get out of here, we're gonna get this beaver off the road. And I'm like, if anyone had a video of this, it would look as the most Canadian thing that ever happened to me. And somehow, Sac Religious has an American, like, I should be.

Right. Right. Yeah. That's amazing. All right, man. Well, I love the book, and everyone should read it. Thanks, and I agree. Thanks and I agree. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The app goes the way. You go as the enemy, still in this is the key.

The leatherbound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. you