Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W Chuck, Brian Jerry's not here, but all of these beautiful people are at the Castro Theater at San Francisco, California. Yeah. I love it. Very nice, very nice. Got a Chucker sign out there. I think I know who that is. It's pretty great. It's a good sign, it is. Thanks mom. Oh, we're definitely not gosing. So uh, we've asked you all here tonight to talk about being a child of the Are this for us? Thank you very much. Okay, let's just start over. I thought she was like, I'm just gonna put my stuff up here. So, um, if Chuck and I are children of the seventies and eighties, he was born in the very very very early seventies. I was born in the mid seventies, and I mean it might as well have been the sixties basically. I mean you were right there on the cusp um and being children of this era, we were aware of certain things, like all kids of the seventies and eighties were um, like that vans could have carpeting on the wall, you know, um, every kid knew the precise amount of McDonald's orange drink that he or she could drink just before getting a crippling stomachache. That's like seventies eighties kid knowledge, um or that your parents um like to go to swinger parties where there were keys and fish bowls and weird stuff like that, and did your parents don't do that? And every kid of the seventies and eighties knew that somewhere out there there was a guerrilla named Coco who could talk. And if you've never heard of Coco, prepared to buckle up and have your mind blown, because that is what we're talking about tonight. Coco. They're talking Grilla 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 Haraldo 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. Yes, why didn't you say that the other night? I just didn't feel like it all right, Tom Cruise was if I'm not mistaken, I think that was the for the movie he had that he had been born for that movie. He's just so good my body. Yeah, you really sold it. Uh. Coco was born in the fourth of July one, just four months after yours truly was born. There would be a lot of mirroring here between my development and Cocos. Coco was born at the San Francisco Zoo. Yeah, six point one miles from here. And what was Coco's birth name in full, Hanna be Co. So Coco is actually your nickname, and Hanna Biko 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 all in already, man, you guys are gonna love this one. So Coco was a Western Lowland gorilla, which was a and still is a critically endangered subspecies of guerrilla in Central West Africa. And Coco was born into a world in the nineties seventies here in the United States, especially where people I thought two things about guerrillas. They thought they were super scary because literally because of King Kong, the movies kind of like Jaws with sharks they two very huggable animals. Movies ruined it basically, and they thought guerrillas were scary, and they thought gorillas were really dumb, like duh um, dumb like even among apes. I thought gorillas were dumb exactly um. And so this is the world that Coco was born into. And when she was born at the San Francisco Zoo um, 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 right 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 they had a gorilla, Yeah, the gorilla in the room. So a great movie it's fantastic. So there was a Stanford grad student around this time. It's 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, twenty four 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 guerrillas how to speak use sign language. You've got a guerrilla. I need my PhD. This is all kind of perfect as that's a verbatim quote from that moment. So she took control of Cocoa's care and for the next fortysomething years. Uh, they had a relationship that can really only be described as human mother and guerilla daughter very much. So, yeah, for sure. And so the whole point of trying to teach Cocoa or any guerrilla sign language was um to find out how or if a guerrilla could acquire language, and then compare how a guerrilla acquires language to how kids 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 developed 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. Try. Plus it's a good party trick, right, And it was the seventies. Yeah, so at first, Cocoa and Penny we're working to other 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 jawn yokels like John Yokels at the San Francisco Zoo and uh, look, yeah, what was my favorite line? Never mind, I can't get off track this early. We'll save the Simpsons for later. So, uh, 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 Cocoa's benefit, if we moved Cocoa to Stanford. And they basically said, sure you can. Um, you can take Cocoa on loan and go do some serious research at Stanford University right right where there's a lot more dope to be smoked. San Francisco zoo, you know what I mean. I'm sure we've got some Stanford grads here, so uh yeah, oh really really that's surprising. Go cardinals. I thought it was giant trees, is there? Yeah, it was a little clunky, so okay, um so uh 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, like an ideal homeschool sitting, 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 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 seen the world because we thought grillas were scary, stupid, just bury the mind stunned. 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 Guerilla Foundation and move Cocoa and Project Cocoa to a six acre private facility that uh 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 is Cocoa grew and they made it so a gorilla could live in this trailer and she loved 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, it'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 anyways. Yeah, but you had that innate like don't let them do it. Don't let them do it. So uh. Coco was taught sign language using a couple of different techniques. There's one called the molding technique. But 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. Um. I know you have an example that you're pretty good at. Do the cat. The sign for cat is where you like kind of demonstrate whiskers. You draw whiskers across your face. So you would take you take Coco's hand and squish these together, ship 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, right, so creepy. But that was so that was the molding technique. The other one, invitation, 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 God, so annoying. That's what Coco would have said to I got it, I got it, Okay Stop. So within the Coco's first four and a half year she went through a couple of big language growth spurts. She added about two hundred new words to her vocabulary each year, again way faster than I was uh. And she was developing language basically at about the rate of um a child eight months behind. Cocoa 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 is 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 six hundred signs and then spontaneously used another four hundred, so that's a thousand signs and then could apparently understand about two hundred I'm sorry, two thousand words of English, right, so she could understand two thousand words, she could sign about a thousand. And in the middle of sort of this early period is where Penny Patterson became doctor Penny Patterson. Yeah, she got her pH d from Stanford and I think seventy nine or something like that, and Project Coco continued, right, um, And one of the things that Coco taught the world is that not only could she understand sign language and use signs, 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 qualifies you want to just sort of a Josh and Chuck level joke. So they would go in with a white towel and try and get Cocoa to sign white, and Cocoa kept signing red, red, red, and they were like, no, Cocoa, what color is the towel? Red? Red, red? No, Cocoa, what color is a towel? I'm just kidding. They were very kind, and Coco eventually went over and picked a red piece of lent 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. Well, it definitely qualifies as a joke. We did not know that gorillas were capable of joking. 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 gorilla not gonna make any true at all about the human sophistication it takes to lie. It just kind of instantly it rights itself. All right, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna get political. So there was 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 didn't. Yeah, Kate, it's always 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 an improv basically and 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, it's fairly cute. A zebra she called a white tiger because she didn't know the sign for zebra. Not bad. Why they're gonna 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? Don't you tell everyone about Coco's insults? So so prepared to aweso more. Um. She had her own little vocabulary of insults like bird and nut like you're a bird, you're a nut. That was their insults. Um it got even better, rotten stink. It's also a good punk band name, it is pretty good, dirty toilet, toilet, dirty devil, and um face mother, that was that was the one. I'm sorry, I apologize before. I'll just apologize now as well. That's gonna 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 f F f F and you go, I want 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 because see Coco didn't really say that. That was Josh. So here's the deal though. We we talked so far about Coco insulting people and making jokes and throwing people under the bus, but that was not Coco's nature. Coca was actually very sweet gorilla. And everyone who came into Coco, especially Dr Patterson, loved, loved, loved this gorilla. Yes, um, And so in nineteen six, this Guerrilla Foundation expanded, the little family grew a little bigger when they brought in a guerrilla male named Michael, and um, Michael was weird. It's a weird name for a gorilla. It's kind of like have you ever seen somebody where 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. I'm trying to think or for a name you could give a dog. Alan is pretty close, Edwards, 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? For Jennifer is a pretty good name for a dog, right, Yeah, Nah, Chuck's that's a good dog name too. She Chuck is on the cusp of being goofy. Anyway, all right, that's another everybody shouting at the stage. We didn't ask for this anyway. Michael comes into the picture, Michael the gorilla, and he also learned American sign language too, and he picked it up pretty well. Not quite as as well as Cocoa, but still very well. Um. He was also enculturated, which means that he was raised basically as a human um and and not as a gorilla, which means that you like 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 talked Coco and vice versa, which is pretty big. Yeah, it's big. It's cute and a little creepy, especially if they developed their own sign language. It's pretty good. You got the chloroform. We should also mention there was there's 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 uh. And there's a man in that documentary you see a lot. His name is Ron Cone. He came on the projects very early on to document all this via camera and videotape, and it stuck around through the whole project because he was clearly in love with Benny Patterson. That was the whole subtext of that documentary the whole time. I was like even says, at the very beginning, he was like fault. She was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, I was like, oh, I really feel bad for the feel bad for m. That's an extra kind of like a subplot to the document. Totally was. But Ron wasn't a gorilla, so he had no shot. He would even dress up like one sometimes and I just didn't work. So the word got around, as it does in around Woodside, California, where this gorilla foundation was, that there was a gorilla in their midst Its terrible, all right, 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 Asha's when you when Josh puts together these uh 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. Like other people who are sitting there like smelling soap, like realized that two minutes away there's a guerrilla foundation where there's sign language using guerrillas. Probably not, I don't think so, probably not. Uh. And by nineteen seventy eight, the world was introduced to Coco in a big way when Coco made her first appearance of what would be Too on the cover of National Geographic magazine. Uh. And if you've seen this very famous photo, what you see is as 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 Geographics 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 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 to Cocoa. 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 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, uh, 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 inner specs mingling is kind of like the best thing on the internet. I could look at that stuff all day. I do sometimes imily. I just sit around and it's like, there's a parrot with an alligator that adorable. They love each other. They looked, you can't do it with reptiles. No, not easily, never cute. I have seen some cute reptile stuff, but it's few and far between. Like a snake cuddling a turtle. That's no cuddle. Oh, sorry to break it to you. I got to rethink this stuff I look at on the internet. So Coco, uh, maybe because Coco had been taught the word cat um incessantly cat loved I love cats and wanted to kitten, and for for one I think it was birthday or Christmas one year, they gave Coco a very realistic stuffy kitten and that that didn't work because Coco's no dummy, and they're like, all right, I guess we gotta go for it and do the real thing. So they brought in a litter of kittens and had Coco pick one out. Um, she smashed all but one, and that was the lefty kittens. True not true. Now she picked out a little uh, a little tabby Manx. Manxes don't have or Manx, I don't have tails. My brother's got a Manx of course because he's my brother. Uh, And so Manx didn't have a tail. And so Coco named this little ball of fluff all Ball, and then cut That was the name of Coco's kitten. And all Ball himself was a pretty interesting cat. Um. He had been abandoned. 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 Karen 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. What is going on? Trigger warning everybody. All Ball died, All Ball got out, I was hit by car and killed. I know, I'm sorry to have to tell you that, but that's what happened. All Ball got out, got smashed to buy a car, and Penny told Cocoa this, We didn't hit him with our car. Why are you guessed to say the same thing twice, probably yeah, and really just crowned them in there, 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, way worse. I was not on the hook without a garbage podcaster, garbage human. Sorry. I think he just got up and left something, so uh, Penny had to break it to Coco, obviously, because this was Coco's best little buddy, and Coco, it's awful. For about ten minutes, she just turned her back and like a child, Wood ignored everything, like you know, I didn't hear that basically, And then later on Coco uh started whimpering and making the sad gorilla depressed gorilla sounds and I can't even say this next part. You've got to Then eventually she signed sleep cat. I know, and I think it's 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 all right, we're back. Everybody you've seen us before that it's like a roller coaster of emotions. So I don't know if you remember where we were all ball has just been killed. Um you should not feel too bad, though, because Coco had two more sets of kittens throughout her long life. Uh, 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. Um. So, Coco had become a celebrity, and being a celebrity, other celebrities wanted to be around her. Uh not. The least of what 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 gonna do it. And then Coco touched his genitals during their meaning it's true. He kept his little Shatners kid over here. It looks painful. She's touching my balls. That wasn't even know how to do. So. I worked with Shatner on a on a Cheerios commercial. I worked with Shatner. Yeah he what Someone just yelled out a bad name about him. He was nice to day I worked with him. I don't know. I mean, I'm not a star Trek guy, but he was. He was a nice guy, all right, ma'am, you need to quit calling me names. So, uh, Fred Rogers, Mr Rogers also paid a little visit, right yeah. And 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 he's like, no, I'm going through with this. But he's just a little like over eager 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. It'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 or better. Yes, I'm serious. So, uh, Coco also got visits on separate occasion. I think from both Flee and Sting. I don't think they came together, right, I don't think so. They've been doing a little lunch, the little shopping at Ross Dress for lesson. They made their way over to the Gorilla found maybe so things like why are you always just buying tidy Whitey's and tube socks? A little red hot chili peppers. Humor got it well dated, it still works. Uh. They both let them let Coco um play their bases. They both brought their bases and let Cocoa slap at a base. Peter Gabriel showed up, Yes he does situations like this. Um America's beloved treasure, Betty White went and visited. Uh. And Betty White was a board member of the Guerrilla Foundation. So if you didn't love her enough before, love her even more now. And Um, Coco was a fan of the Golden Girls, so they were fans of one another. Course Leo DiCaprio paid a visit. He heard there was a young lady that uh, he should meet, and all of this is in the documentary, all these various visits and and Leo's he's, he'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 fingers, not even with his fingertips, like with his knuckle, his knuckle, I think with an assistance knuckle actually, um. But of course, the most memorable visit was Robin Williams back in two thousand one h of course San Francisco's own. You've probably seen this footage. If you haven't, go watch it, because like, go watch it right now. We'll wait. Yeah, if if, if only we had a big screen behind us where we could show this stuff, how can we how can we ever do it? Yeah, that would require ten percent more effort. This is not gonna 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. 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 their 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. UM. And later on he uh, 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, Um, Coco had indicated that she wanted to mate with him, and Robin Williams said it would have made a good story, which if if you let that just kind of sit for a little while, like it's like what And years later, when Robin Williams passed away, they had to break the news to Coco as well, and Coco signed a 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 thirteen years before his death, and so for her to be affected by it, that's extraordinarily significant. UM. And because Coco had people like Leo DiCaprio and William Shaton are 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 um, grilla come from nature, so why not just have her talk for nature. And that's exactly what happened. She became an ambassador for plan at Earth. Basically. Yeah, it was at a very good time for that too. It was here in America, was in the early eighties when we were just starting to kind of come around to uh, the green movement a little bit more and Earth Day became a bigger and bigger deal. So it's kind of prime time for Cocoa to step in there. Um. I think Penny Patterson wrote a book called Coco's Kitten. I don't think it ended in a in a car crash. I hope not. No, there was stuffed Coco gorillas. I believe they 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 it 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 I have held I'm not quite sure what kind of um ape it was, but a little little sweet one in address who was very cute. And then, um, where was this done? In Florida? Everybody's walks around with apes that you can hold in Florida. 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 in and I was like, well, I have to stop and talk to his 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 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 slowly backed away. And then after, you know, ten minutes later, I was like, I gotta go see my chim friend again and they had closed the door. Yeah, that's what I said to I worked another TV commercial with a chimp one time, and uh, it was 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, in arms around me, swearing a little diaper um for you know, for a good reason. I don't think it was just to be cute. I think, you know, I didn't want this chimp booping and being on people wearing a diaper and clothing. Just a diaper. It's okay, So that's all right, as long as it's not like a diaper and shut. That's a terrible combination. Just a diaper and 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 gonna 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 chip is 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 didn't listen to podcast. So, um, where are we here? 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, and she's like the ambassador for Earth. Um. You have to remember, though, she didn't necessarily think of herself this way, So just keep that in mind, because um, she took part in the first ever inter species internet chat hosted by America on Line. It does not get more than now very Here was the setup, Okay, So there was a a o L moderator who was the one working in the chat room on the phone with Penny, who was at the Guerrilla 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. But but the point where 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, Cocay. It was a gorilla, everybody. You gotta remember that. So if you look at that train in scripts from the A O L chat, that means it's still you're not digging up transcripts from A L 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 at 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. Right, Um, there's this really good example. One was a O L user Mini Kitty asked Coco, are you gonna have a baby in the Mini Kitty here? By the way, anyone that would be astounding? Oh god, I got a bunch of mini kids. Um, so many. Kitty asked Cocoa, you're gonna 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, uh, you when Dr Patterson kind of translates it, then it makes sense. She said, Well, I think what she's doing is signing unattention that she doesn't see it. That's not gonna 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. 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. Uh, 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 uh, we get into a section now called the Ape language Wars, which was a real thing. Um for some people. They believe that Coco was super smart and communicating and making sentences and using sign language and understood what was happening, But there's 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 that is doing this retreats yes, the rewards or something like that, or falling that that that she was trained to use these signs in the same way you could train a dog to slow dance with you or something the kind of thing. It's it's very, very impressive, but it doesn't require or display human level intellect. And we should say, like, none of this has 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 kind of 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, um called the ape language experiments that really started way back in the twentieth century. Yeah, so it was a pretty hot thing for a while. Um. There were a bunch of experiments going on where they would take chimps, mostly chimps. I think Coca was one of the few apes or a few guerrillas, so that 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 dressed them up in little cute overalls and things and try and make them like little humans a little later hosing, maybe they were is a good look a chimp in later hosing? Oh yeah, of course there was one one of the first ones in the nineties. It was a psychologist couple. Uh. And as you'll see, most of these are couples that lead these experiments, which is why I still feel so bad for Ron Cone because he was like, well, Penny that, like everyone else literally is married except us. So Keith and Cathy Hayes they trained a chimp named Vicky in the nineteen forties not to sign words to speak for human language words. Vicky could say Mama, Papa, up, and cup and uh. 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 for human words, was considered a failure. Failure. They taught a chimp to speak, and it was considered a failure because everybody's like just for 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. Vicky proved and some of the other ones proved that it's just not gonna happen. And later on we figured out that the physiology of the other primates, um, 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. H G. Noam Chomsky. Very famously, the famous linguists came out and said, I I hypothesized that humans have what's called the 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 pretty interesting fellow. 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 came upon this really novel idea, if you can't teach an eat 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 is a nineteen sixty seven and they had a was it a chimp? Yeah? You think it was a chimp named was Show And I think Washo was from Washington, if I'm not mistaken, I think I think she ended up in Washing ended up in Washington, and uh, things went pretty well for a little while, but uh, it yielded a lot of findings when they found out that Lulie was a young male, that Washow 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 Lulie 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, there, with us against us? No middle ground. I'm look in my butt hole, 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. They don't care. They just want scritches and hugs. They do um. So Project Washed like 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 was just so hot. Well you can see why. You know, it's it's cool, it's headline grabbing. You get to work with these apes, that's super cute. It was at a time when Threes Company was the number one show in America. It just made sense in a very very seventies kind of way. Yeah, I guess I thought. So there was one, and it wasn't just gorillas and chimps. It was in rain tang name Chantek, who excelled at signing and would give directions whenever Chantic was in a car to the local dairy queen. It's so great, not bad. There's a very famous project nim. Um do not watch that documentary. Josh tried to get me too, 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 refused. It's a little sad, but I think this was at Columbia University in the mid seventies and they threw a little shade at Niam Chomsky. The leader of this project named herb Terrorists by naming his chimp Nim Chimpsky, which is pre Simpson's. It's so Simpsons, really so Herb Terrorist figures in pretty big in this in this whole thing, he really does and like just like Wash Show and Loulie and all of the other ones. Um Nim started to acquire sign language like pretty quickly and was using a lot of signs, and things were going along as expected, but Herb terrorists. The head of this project, Project Nim. He wasn't he wasn't convinced. He didn't believe that Nim was actually using language. He thought that he just knew some signs. And like, at the heart of this is this discussion of like what constitutes language. Um, Like if you have a pie, you can point to a pie and say pie, and everyone don't 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 terrorists thought was that Nim was just using words. So he um did the normal thing that you would do and sent him back to his place of birth, very grim ape research farm in Oklahoma, which is a deeply not okay thing to do. Now there should not be ape farms in Oklahoma. Yeah, I hate to break that to you. Uh So we got to say that Herb terrorists, he didn't go into this whole thing. Two as a skeptic to prove everyone wrong. Though 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 it. 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 they're just that basic that they're really just mimicking. Yep, they're just imitating people to get that food. So so herb terrorists. 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 n becomes the most vocal critic of his former field, and normally when a scientist changes his mind about his data 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, um 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 where did you believe that that ape language research was actually just fraudulent and 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 um 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 going to be beautiful. So I have broken it down into five parts. And thropomorphism. Oh, you nailed it, You nailed it. Shut Thank you everyone. It says here and dash throw dash po dash more. That's so easy, and I just left phism all by itself. You don't, I didn't break that down into two parts. You don't see phism spelled out very often. Yeah, and for your throw you added the W like throw, yeah, not just th h r O or th h r o e throw. Pism looks too close to Fish the band. It does, so that's probably why why I'm like naturally against it. I'm sorry, Fish fans. I don't think San Franciscan's like music like Fish or anything music. There's no great music traditions here, are there, Journey hue Lewis. That's basically that's what I understand. I don't think anything in the six guys should be very proud of yourselves just for having Huey Lewis and Journey. Forget the news jes Huey Lewis alone. I thought that was imply And his wiener. You know, he showed his wiener in the movie Ones. It's true, Robert Altman shortcuts Huey Lewis shows his wiener. Am I having a nightmare right now, Josh, wake up? But you're in the castro. It's all good, Okay, We're talking about Cocoa. The gorilla so of course anthropomorphism. Geez, that was a weird sidetrack. Uh, 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 um, 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. That's it's okay. So so yes, that's 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's 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 impound your fists and say no, science has never shown that animals have any kind of inner subjective life like humans too. You are just projecting that onto your stupid, stupid faced talk. That's right, because because anybody who thinks like that hates dogs. On the other side, there are people like me and scientists believe like 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 a right. So anthropomorphism is where like belief and rationalism like clink teeth. Yeah, yes, it's pretty 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 it going well enough to release your thing? 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. We're back everyone. So before we took our break, there are 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 in other ape language researchers, they were like, you know, I don't think herb terrorists changing his mind about his data actually amounts to proof that 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 cooks or rods or hucksters or deluded morons or what have you. Um, 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 Rumball at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, and she would do her experiments wearing a welding mask. Uh. Good way to behinde your face. I guess she couldn't explain why her monkey kept signing flash dance over and over. She would wear a welling mask and then off the off the shoulder sweatshirt. Oh man, I just saw that last year for the first time. I've never seen it. It's fantastic. Hold up, what a feeling. It's amazing. That'll make sense to me. That so um, there was another thing that um that that that people were prompted of or accused of, which was prompting right like what Chuck was saying. Herb terrorists 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 uh, Sue Savage Rumba and her husband Dwayne realized that the oh yeah, another couple, this thing is allowsy with couple or run. So so the Rumbas 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 trifule board of a couple of 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 bonna bows how to use this to speak. So you press the word in the computer on the little litttle box says the word for you, and so they would kind of punch out word combinations, and you can't prompt a bonabo to do that. Um. And astoundingly they tried to teach one of their first subjects, Matada this, which I think means worries. I don't know, wouldn't it looked it up yet, but I think it would Anyway. Matada was pretty interesting because they tried to teach her this and she was like, mmmmmm, I am not picking this up. That's right. But it got really interesting because Matada had a son named Kanzi, and Kanzi could pick it up and he actually taught mom how to use this. So Bonabo's were exactly like human beings, children teaching their parents to technology. And this was after Matada got a CD rom at Staples called how to use a Lexicon board. She ordered it online. Actually right, and that I with the bald head but the ponytail. Don't forget the pony Oh. But but the thing is about Conzi. They never taught Conzi. He just happened to be present while they were trying to teach Matata and one day he just started using the alex com board and they just lost there. They were so excited he knew how to use a lexicon board to say come on mom. So Conzi is actually widely regarded as one of the most intelligent apes in any of the ape language experiments, um, which he demonstrated when he wrote the movie Pay It Forward. I'm not sure I get that one so bad it was written by an ape. You don't read it, just enjoy it on its face. It's a lot of good movie refs in this one. So uh, pay It Forward? That was the bad man right that say? Yeah, everyone, do you way to bring my joke down? Shut? Sorry the spaceman so, uh here where are we? I'm so lost? Now? Sorry? Um, they were, Uh, I'm genuinely lost. Do you want me to swoop carry? Cut all that out? Huh? Do you want me to swoop in? Well, since you put it that way, now, there was some other controversy in that, um they had, and not just Penny Patterson, but other people in this field had been accused of manipulating the public over the years and uh 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 Bonabo. There's a video of Kanzi putting together some sticks to light a fire and getting out a lighter cut two perfect drawing fire that kind of thing, or you don't know what happened in between those moments. No, but like 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 that actually isn't harmful. It doesn't doesn't really do anything wrong, but it opens up, like legitimate researchers like the Rum Boss to accusations of illegitimacy even though they're doing legitimate science. The fact that they're kind of um 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, uh, Coco has mastered sign language and stuff like that, and we love Cocoa and Coco learned a lot, but Cocoa never mastered sign language. And when you use words like that, um, 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 uh. Today the scientific community. Um. Basically, this is kind of where we are now. Since the eighties, a lot of this research has dried up. UH. 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 of taking apes and guerrillas and and putting them uh in human houses and making homes and things like that, making them dependent on humans, taking 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 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. UM. Like it's produced some insights into the minds of apes that we did not have before. One of the things that was pointed to as why apes couldn't communicate couldn't actually use languages because they lacked a theory of mind. And theory of mind is like, I know, Chuck has different beliefs, um different views of the world, Like we're two different people. And they long thought that apes didn't have that. Well, in two thousand seventeen, somebody thought to give apes uh 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, um, 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 uh guerrillas English, even in Sang language. Maybe we should just see how they communicate with each other, and maybe we can learn from that and see what guerilla languages all like teach ourselves their language, and that would give us kind of an insight into their worldview. Uh. There was also Yeah, there's also some uh we we can sidesteps some other controversies. The Gorilla Foundation was sued at one point not too long ago by a couple of uh former female scientists that worked for them, because remember the nipple thing. Uh, Coco had a nipple fetish. There's really no other way to say it than that someone just wooed that. Uh. If you look at the Robin Williams video, Coco is trying to get in that shirt and see his nipples. And uh. Dr Patterson would show Coco her nipples over the years, and then she would request other employees do the same, both male and female. And eventually some of those employees got uncomfortable with that. Uh, they took her to court and it was settled out of court. So we really don't know, you know, when things are settled out of court what the final result is. But um, that was one of the sort of controversies that they had encountered, the big nipple incident. Yes, we're serious. Have you listened to stuff you should before? Of course? For serious? Are they making all this out? Are they just riffing? This is amazing? Who are these guys? They're not funny to be comedians, but I don't think they're being truthful about their science. It 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. Uh, this is my my guerrilla daughter and I'm not going to leave her. Uh. She kind of shunned the scientific community in large part she didn't do as many published papers. Those kind of dried up. Um, the official research still goes on or still went on for a while, and but it just wasn't like 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 rotten heell. Basically, so her outreach to the public and um, 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 two four I think you mentioned before. It is Coco with a gorilla who talks and there is a colon in there, and then there's another colon called The Sad Story of ron Con in parentheses beneath it. But in a um, Penny Patterson talks about regrets and she said that her biggest regret is that Coco never had a baby. Uh, 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. Um, 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 exist among guerrillas 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 it was not happening. It's not Uh. They brought in another gorilla name in Duma, to mate. Uh. They never produced a child either, so uh, I think in Duma went back to the Cincinnati Zoo and then, very sadly, and you probably all remember this, uh not too long ago. June nineteenth, two th eighteen, Coco passed away in her sleep at the age of forty six years old, and the world, or at least America for sure, mourned Cocoa's death in a big way. Yeah for sure. Um, and she touched the lives of people like that's just whether she knew the language or not. And we're pretty sure she was a very smart gorilla who did no 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 cocoa and she kind of transformed their view of things, but also like scientists too. Um. There was a two thousand fourteen symposium of guerilla experts, like people who are experts in the grilla field, and they were asked at the symposium, you know 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, 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 the 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, would in fact animals do have such feelings, then I opened the way to unlimited cruelties. Animals must have the benefit of the doubt, if indeed there be any doubt, right agreed, And so like what Coco lives on as is this kind of litmus test. Because until we can prove or disprove that that apes or any animal does or doesn't have a subjective inner experience, um experience, Did I get that? Then it's a matter of belief, like you can believe whichever way you want. And and Coco kind of pushes people to one side or the other. And when she died, um journalists around the world wrote headlines that use words like Coco the master of sign language, um, Coco the talking guerrilla, 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, you know, can prove, and perhaps that ultimately is best. Let's Cocoa, Everybody Good? Double Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H