July 9, 2024 • 46 mins
There aren’t too many people walking around today who get a pass from the entire world for anything remotely negative they do or say. That’s just how the world receives Jane Goodall, and she’s earned that from a lifetime of building greater human understanding of our animal relatives.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know podcasts. How you doing, I'm good, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
You I'm sweepy?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Oh are you?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I'm a little beat myself. Is it just life or
did you stay up till five am drinking?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
No, it's just hitting right around the old nap time,
So you know.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I'm with you. Do you ever doze off all your studying?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Uh? No, but I you know, I still try and
catch a short nap every day, and on the recording
days that sometimes happens. But today was I was not
able to gotcha?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Well, we'll retire eventually. Hang in there.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I'll sleep when I retire.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Hey, So what do you want to talk about today?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I mean, I prepped for a show on Jane Goodall,
so did I. And she's the best.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
She is she is she is widely roundly, basically globally
universally probably seen as essentially a great person.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, I think she's cherished and for good reason. After
did you watch the documentary for this at all?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
By the way, I didn't the Future one from twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Jane, Yeah, yeah, no I didn't. It's great.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It sounds great. I read a lot about it, as
I do, but I haven't seen it. Yeah, I'll have
to watch it still.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, it's really good. Highly recommended if you're listening and
if this hearing about her, you know, inspires you to
learn more at all, because it's a great documentary of footage, beautiful,
beautiful color film stock from back then when she was
doing her studies. And it's not it's not like a narrate.
(02:07):
It's it's narrated just by her thoughts and this beautiful
score and it just shows it. It's just really really
lovely the way it plays out.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
That's awesome. I heard the car chase in the middle
is really great.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Yeah, I didn't expect it, but very good.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
So drive drive, drive. Yeah, so we're talking Jane Goodall.
For those of you who don't know who Jane Goodall is,
she is one of the world's foremost renowned primatologists. And
she did it the old fashioned way by going out
into the jungle and learning as she did. It's called
(02:44):
the school of hard knocks, I think. Yeah, that's the
thing about Jane Goodall. She had a high school education
when she started. She did not go to college, not
for a while, and a guy named Lewis Leakey, a
famous anthropologist, took a gamble on her on purpose because
he was looking for somebody who could who was not trained, purposely,
(03:05):
not trained so that they weren't bringing a bunch of
preconceptions to them to study chimpanzees. And Jing Goodall fit
the bill. As we'll see, she's loved animals since she
was a kid, and after just a few months started
excelling at it and eventually changed how the world sees chimpanzees.
We didn't know much about him before, We had a
(03:26):
lot of assumptions about him, and Jing Goodall showed that
they were just let's just turn those on their heads.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah, how's that.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
For an intro baby?
Speaker 1 (03:36):
It's pretty good?
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Thank you?
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Do we I mean, do we get more specific? Even?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Oh? I thought we'd get specific as we went along,
but sure, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah. So she was born in nineteen thirty four in
England to her mother Margaret and her father Mortimer. Go
ahead and forget I even said father Mortimer, because he
was not around much and he does not feel much
in her story. He divorced when Jane was but sixteen.
But especially after watching this documentary, if we're going to
(04:08):
salute Jane Goodall, we are going to have to salute
her mother, because her mom was the one who was like, Hey,
you want to figure something out, then go figure it
out and go learn it and go do Instead of
talking about something, go out and do it because no
one else is going to do it unless you do it.
(04:29):
And who cares that it's the nineteen forties and fifties.
Who cares that you're a young girl. Just go out
and do it, Jane, by God, and she did.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, She very famously encouraged her to go dance on
the rain, feel the rain in her skin because no
one else will do it for you.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
That's right, And like you said, and this is what
maybe set her apart from other scientists at the time.
She loved, loved and loved animals like capital l O vee,
and that sort of flew in the face of the
dispassionate history of how you study animals.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, biologists typically approached animals totally detached, totally unemotional.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
They were aware opposed to.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
That was how they were trained to and it makes
sense in a way because this is there was a
widespread fear and there apparently still is among you know,
hardcore biologists and other ologists that study animals, that we
humans have a just a great propensity for anthropomorphizing animals.
(05:44):
And how can you study animals if you're just essentially
presuming that they're behaving like humans. You can't if they're
doing something that's actually not human like and you're just
misinterpreting it, you're being misled by your anthropomorphism. So there
was a real there was The workaround that they figured
out was to just look at them dispassionately. They're just animals.
(06:05):
I don't care what their names are, I don't care
anything about them. I'm just going to study them as
dispassionately as possible in the hopes of preventing from anthropomorphizing.
That was the predominant view, and again it still kind
of is. It's complete hogwash, the idea that there's just
no inner lives to animals, and apparently there's still some
(06:27):
academics that cling on to that, but it does make
a little bit of sense where if you're worried about
projecting your own feelings and values and emotions and thoughts
onto the animals you're studying, then just don't get attached
to the animals. And that's what she entered into.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
You know, he said, what they don't care what their
names are.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Well, I'm sure they have names like ragnor the Conquerors.
Probably a pretty regular name for a cow.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
I would think so. But you're right, But she flew
in the face of that. She loved animals as a child.
She would just spend hours and hours and hours as
a young girl drawing animals, talking about animals, writing about animals,
and not just you know, birds are fun because they fly,
like observing them like a little miniature scientist. So she
(07:20):
had recollections about bringing worms to bed when she was
a toddler, like one of her first memories. Another was
when she went to watch a hen laying an egg
and like document that whole process. Spent five hours in
a hen house as a young girl, and her parents
couldn't find her, and her mom, you know, called the cops.
(07:42):
They thought she had wandered off.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, and I saw very pivotally when she was younger.
I'm not sure what age, but she was a young kid.
Still she was fascinated with the pigs that she saw
on the English countryside, and she wanted to hang out
with them, but they would always run away. So she
taught herself to be super patient and to sit and
get them to come closer to her and eventually feed
them and won their trust that way, and that would
(08:06):
later serve her very well when she started to study chimpanzees.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, and in fact, that patient's in the documentary you
know you mentioned Lewis Leaky. He was a very famous
paleontologist and anthropologist who gave her her break in the
nineteen fifties when she met him in Kenya. I guess
we should say she got there because she graduated from
high school and was like, you know what, I'm not
(08:32):
gonna we can't afford college. I'm gonna go get a
couple of jobs, hustle save money so I can go
to Africa and study on my own. But she got there,
and Leaky she said part of the reason she got
the job was because he wanted someone with monumental patients.
I ease, somebody who would sit there for what ended
(08:52):
up being five months before she even saw chimpanzees.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Basically, man, that guy would be like a senior VP
at ZIP recruiter, just based on that one pick he made. Yeah,
for sure, if you were around today, did you like that?
That was a little buzz marketing for one of our advertisers.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
They haven't been around in a while, so okay, well
for maybe they'll come back.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
So yeah, Lewis leaky. Apparently she started out as a
secretary for him, right, yeah, And then I guess he
found out that she wanted to do animal studies, and
he said, okay, here's your chance. I'm going to send
you to Tanzania to study chimpanzees. We don't know much
about chimpanzees. We want you to go find out all
about them. And so, at age twenty six in nineteen sixty,
(09:39):
she arrived in Tanzania with her mom. Because the Tanzanian
government I believe it was still a colonial government at
the time, if not then at least a transitional government. Still,
they required a chaperone for someone in her position, so
she brought her mom along, who'd been a great supporter
and booster all her life, like you said, And they
also very importantly had an cook who was a local
(10:01):
named Dominic and within a very short amount of time,
both her mom and she came down with malaria and
they were very fortunate to have Dominic from what I saw,
because he helped nurse them back to health.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yeah, for sure, he was a big He's kind of
like part of the family from what I gathered.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
That's what I gathered too.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
This is at the Gombi Stream Game Reserve which is
now the Gombi Stream National Park, and her mom didn't
stay too long. She was there about four months. But
while her mom was there, she helped set up a
either set up or work with medical camp there to
help provide you know, medical services to locals. So her
(10:42):
mom was getting in there getting her hands dirty. Eventually
would leave to go back to England and Jane stayed there.
You know, she was not with Leaky. He didn't like
stay there with her. He set her up with his
job also apparently was you know, making passes at Erica's
(11:03):
Jane Goodall and this kind of popped that throughout her
career was a very pretty young scientist at a time
when that was fairly unusual, I think, especially where she
was located. And she was like, no, thank you, doctor Leaky.
I'm not interested, but I appreciate you. You you know
trust in trusting this position to me at least, but
(11:24):
hands off.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
He said, that's what That's just what I wanted to hear.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure he wanted to hear just that.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
So apparently she got set up with six months of
funding initially, and she started to get really worried because
at least three months passed and she was spending all
day every day with a couple of locals who were
walking her around the jungle looking like pointing out like
this would probably be a pretty good place for chimps
to show up. This tree has a bunch of fruit
on it. They'd sit around. The chimps wouldn't show up.
(11:52):
They did show up, they were covered up by leaves.
She couldn't see what they were doing if she got
if she moved to get a little closer so she
could get about, they would all run away. That was
when she saw them, Like she was her research was
in great jeopardy. She was, you have to have chimps
to study to get more funding and continue your research.
(12:13):
So she was starting to get worried by month three
or four. And I guess finally she won the trust
of at least one group enough that they wouldn't run
off when she would just kind of show up and
hang out and feed or watch them feed. And I
saw that one of the reasons, or one of the
ways that she won the trust of the chimpanzee groups
(12:35):
that she was observing was by kind of behaving like them,
Like she ran around barefoot everywhere. She would hang out
in the trees for a long periods of time and
just kind of tried to treat them or behave as
if they were her peers rather than study subjects or
test subjects.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah, I mean, she those one. At one point in
the documentary, she's talking about the dangers of where she
was and these poison snakes everywhere, and you know, all
manner of ways in which you could die out there
doing what she was doing, and she was and it
didn't sound naive either. She just said, you know, I
felt like I was supput And she's got that great
British accent too, so it just everything sounds so great.
(13:15):
But she said she felt like she was supposed to
be there, and that if she just treaded carefully and
respected the land and the creatures around her, then they
would like allow her to stay there, like these snakes
were not going to come bite her and send her away,
because she's, like I was, I'm supposed to be here,
(13:35):
And it was really kind of a lovely thing. She
really seemed like she fit in such that finally, five
months in, with time running out, a chimp named David
Graybeard obviously she's giving them these names, and he had
a kind of looked like me a little bit. He had,
this little gray Beard trusted her. He was the first
(13:55):
one of that group allowed her to get closer and
closer and closer. He eventually alsome bananas, came back for
more bananas, and he was the one that said to
the other chimps, hey, this lady, she's not too bad.
Look at her.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
So we then treat bananas.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
She's hanging out and the footage of her and we'll
get to whether or not this was the correct thing
or not later, but the footage of her dead, still
holding bananas out in her hand and seeing these very
large chimpanzees coming up and taking them from her hands,
and the way she's acting is is breathtaking because nobody
(14:33):
had done that before.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, I was gonna say today you could see somebody
doing that, And the reason why you could see someone
doing this, because Jing Goodall was the first to do
it exactly. She had no idea. She had no frame
of reference for whether they were going to be violent
toward her or whether they were going to throw their
poop better or whatever. She had no idea. So that
was a real risk that she was taking by interacting
(14:55):
with them that directly. And then in addition to it
being risky, it was driving any academic who was aware
of her work completely baddie, because that is a big
nice man. That's not at all what you do. Not
only do you not like get attached to them, you
certainly don't feed them, you don't interact with their infants,
(15:18):
don't you don't give them names. That was another one,
David Graybeard. Yes, I'm gonna go with you and assume
that that wasn't his actual name, that she gave them
that name. And that was driving like academics crazy, like
she was doing everything wrong, and yet it was starting
to really pay off in aces.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, they're like, you're not supposed to name Jimps And
she's like, have you ever bet at a gym? Jump right?
Speaker 2 (15:43):
It's like it's working, Yeah, it really, and it really
did work, Like thanks largely thanks to David Graybeard, at
least at first who who, like you said, said this
lady's all right? And then her patience and then her
feeding them an endless supply of bananas. All those three
combined to win over the trust of large groups and
families of chimpanzees.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Should we take a break, I think we should. All right,
We'll be right back with moron. Do you know who?
Right after this?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Okay, Chuck, So, Jane Goodall is feeding chimps bananas. At
this point, she's named them, named all of them. I mean,
she really kind of had to get very creative with
the names because she would identify a family lineage by
like a letter, so like the F family, all of
the members for generations had first names that began with F,
(17:02):
like Flow or Flossy or Fabian or Freud, and that's
how she kept track of them. But again, other academics
would have just given them numbers, like maybe they all
started with the same number or something like that, but
certainly not names. And from observing them that closely, and
I guess, I guess interacting with them probably had a
(17:25):
lot to do with it. But interacting with them allowed
her to get that close, and by interacting that closely,
she was able to see things that up to that
point people had no idea chimpanzees were capable of. One
of the first things she realized is that they have
a huge, intricate, complex social system with hierarchies, like I said, families, alliances, territories,
(17:48):
like all sorts of stuff that people just did not
realize chips were capable of engaging in.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, big time. Communication wise, she found out there were
at least twenty different sets that they were making to communicate,
and that's in addition to any kind of body language
or behaviors they may exhibit towards one another. She was
the first person that said, hey, these guys aren't just
eating bananas and berries and things. They are omnivores. They're
(18:17):
eating birds, they're eating insects, they're eating baby baboons. Sometimes
she would figure this out later, much to her dismay,
they would eat other chimps. But the big finding that
she came out with that kind of shook signs to
its core was that she observed chimpanzees engaging in object modification,
(18:39):
which is basically sort of proto tool making, when they
would take blades of grass and sticks and things and
strip them down or bend them, or clump blades of
grass together and shape them in certain ways to stick
into ant hills most effectively and efficiently to draw out
ants to eat them. And she was like, hey, wait
(19:01):
a minute, Like, the big differentiator up until this point
in the history of evolution between us and them is
that we use tools. That's all everyone talked about was
that we use tools and animals don't, and that's what
makes us different. She's like, right here in front of
my face, they are using object modification, which is basically
(19:22):
a tool.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, like you just you said it. It shook the
scientific world to its foundations. Like that was just such
a huge finding that Lewis Leaky declared very famously that
we must redefined tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.
Like that's how big of a deal.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
It was.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Dramatic, it was, But I mean, up to that point,
like you said, people just tools made a human. Anything
that could make a tool technically qualified as human. Everything
else couldn't make tools. So it was a big deal.
And then on top of that, to me, even more
groundbreaking is that they realized that different groups of chimps
(20:03):
use the same tool in different ways, and that like
say one group would use the short stick to get
termites on it to eat them one by one. Another
group would use a longer stick to let a bunch
of them walk on and then eat it like a
corn cob probably, and that they would pass how to
do that down to different generations. And that's culture and
(20:25):
its most basic definition that qualifies as culture. And I
saw it compared to how Westerners use forks, but people
in Asia use chopsticks. They're both the same tool they're
used to they're implement to get food to your mouth,
but they're just different and they're passed down through the
culture their cultural differences. And that's the same thing with
(20:46):
the different ways of using a termite stick, right, And
that is culture. So she discovered that chimps have cultures as.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Well, and some of them open their presence on Christmas Eve,
some of them wait until Christmas more or all kinds
of things she observed.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah, that was a big surprise too. They're terrible at
wrapping presents too, they're so sloppy.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Another big surprise, Well, they just used the funny papers
from Sunday, which can you blame them. Another big surprise
was in nineteen sixty two when National Geographic then Geo
Society that is, sent a filmmaker, a Dutch filmmaker name
Hugo von Lowick there to film her work. She was
not thrilled at this idea. She really enjoyed her solitude there.
(21:33):
She did not want some dude mucking up the works
and kind of quite honestly spoiling her scene that she
had going on there. She really enjoyed climbing trees and
being alone and not having to deal with some jerk
with a camera. But she knew that's where the funding
came from. They needed this footage if she was going
to continue to get funding. She put up with the
(21:55):
sky chainsmoking and throwing his cigarette butts around in the jungle,
which upset her very much, But she was like, this
guy really loved animals. He was also handsome, and she
said it became pretty obvious pretty soon that I was
also the subject of his films. Long story short, they
fall in love and make a baby.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Right that they nicknamed Grub. Did you see anywhere why
they nicknamed their kid Grub? I could not find it.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
I would assume because of a grubworm.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
But what did he do?
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Like?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Did he was he famous for writhing around in the
dirt or something like that. Why would you name your
kid grub well?
Speaker 1 (22:34):
I mean this kid was raised in the jungle. I
imagine all he did was writhe around in the dirt. Okay,
I mean there's footage of him. He was literally raised
in a jungle in a cage. Sounds bad, but it
was a big pin that they had previously used for animals,
and she decorated it all up for her son just
to keep him safe. It was very large. It was
(22:55):
like a large, you know, pin, less than a cage,
but was a cage. And the other thing she said, too,
was that having her own human baby really helped her
research it. It made her understand the how chimpanzee mothers
behaved and vice versa. And she said it really just
(23:19):
added a lot to her understanding of the family groups.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
NAT that's pretty neat so around this time, So what
that was the early sixties. I think that her husband
showed up and her son was born in the late sixties.
Nineteen sixty seven, okay, in the I think in nineteen
sixty three National Geographic it essentially told the world that
Jing goodall existed in what she was doing. There was
(23:46):
an article cover article called My Life among the Wild Chimpanzees,
and she was starting to recount this is the thing
that she would become most advanced at, in addition to
chimpanzee's studies, is telling the rest of the world about
chimpanzees in order to get the world to keep from
(24:07):
driving chimpanzees and other animals into extinction. That was her
kind of second love.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, for sure. And again they started, you know, her
the fact that she was an attractive young woman came
up in the press and the articles were framed as
you know, Beauty and the Beast and nat Geo cover
girl and stuff like that, which it bothered her some,
but she did realize that that got more attention and
(24:33):
that that inspired young women, you know, to develop interest
in science and stuff like that. And so she was like,
it's it's fine, this is what we're dealing with here
in the nineteen sixties, and it's bringing you know, attention
to my cause. Right.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, she would have a really good kind of a
feel for that. And I keep speaking of her in
the past ten she's not dead. She just turned ninety
in April, and she seems to be doing just fine.
Her foundation says she still travels about three hundred days
a year doing speaking appearances on behalf of chimpanzees and
nature and earth in general. And a good example of
(25:10):
her kind of figuring out or knowing a good pr
piece when she sees it, her opportunity when she sees
it came in nineteen eighty seven Gary Larson, who did
the Far Side, one of the great comic strips of
all time.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
You know, oh yeah, that's going to be a subject soon.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Okay, So he did a far Side one one comic
panel or one panel comic of a female chimp grooming
a male chimp, and the caption is the female chimp saying, well, well,
another blonde hair, conducting a little more research with that.
Jane Goodall tramp and the Jane Goodall Institute found out
(25:53):
about this and sent Gary Larson a cease and desist letter,
and that's where everything ended.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
No, no, no, of course not, you're just being coy
good always out of town. Apparently she got back in town,
heard about it, thought it was very funny, said Gary,
you can tear up that cease and desist letter, and
book your ticket for Africa.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
You're going, and you're going, and you're going.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
And that's what happened. She reached out to him, he
came out there. He actually gave the Institute permission to
use the cartoon on T shirts for fundraising. She wrote
a preface for one of his book collections and it
turned into like this school friendship.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, so prior to that, we kind of jumped ahead
a little bit. But prior to that, she in addition
to that National Geographic cover story, less than ten years later,
she released her first book, In the Shadow of Man,
And this is around where she really became like a
science communicator, which she's been forever. She was one of
the early ones, pre Sagan even. I mean, she released
(27:04):
this book in nineteen seventy one and it was telling
the world again about all of the stuff she had
found about chimpanzees and really just revolutionizing our understanding of
chimpanzees and animals in general. And her work was so
significant that, remember she only graduated high school. Cambridge University
came a knock in and said, hey, you want a PhD.
(27:26):
Because we got a seat for you here, come take it.
And she thought about it a while consulting Gary Larson.
He said, Hey, I haven't met you yet. This doesn't
make any sense, and finally agreed, Sure, I'll get your
I'll take a PhD course with you guys Cambridge.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
That's right. She got a degree in the study of
animal behavior, that's mythology in nineteen sixty six. No, we're
all over the place of the timeline. It's fine. I
hope everyone gets what is following the story. Sure, for
about five years she worked at Stanford as a visiting
professor and psychiatry. Also became a visiting professor of zoology
(28:04):
at Tanzania's University of Daris Salam. While all this is
going on, though, she's not like, oh, by the way,
I'm just leaving Gmbhi. For years and years at a time,
she was basically there from nineteen sixty to seventy five.
It was her home. It was her emotional home, her
spiritual home. She felt very, very tied to Gombi into
(28:27):
that specific area, and you know that was where she
started a family and was raising a son. It was
her place.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
So I didn't see the documentary did they cover why
she left? Was it because of her son? Because I
saw that she was conflicted, and I realized she had
to decide raise a sun or study chimps.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, he had to be schooled formally schooled in England.
But also there was the issue of her marriage, and
that's you know, we might as well talk about it now.
She started to travel some with her husband to other
places for him to film because he didn't get all
his work through that GEO. Eventually he has work with
(29:08):
them completely dried up, so he had no reason to
be there other than the fact that his wife was
there and loved her work. But it was at a
time and he was one of these guys where he
was like, hey, you know, work comes first and I
hope you can support me. She did that for a
little while and then she said by that time, in
a very English way, she said that had we had
begun bickering, and that seemed to be the kindest way
(29:30):
to say that. You know, their marriage was kind of
on fragile ground and they would eventually part ways because
of that and because of life and work, and it
just seemed like it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Out, gotcha. So five years after she started, she established
the Gombi Stream Research Center again in the Gombi Wildlife
preserve game preserve, which means you can go hunt there.
She very fortunately met and married a member of parliament
in tan Zania named Derek Bryson, and he happened to
(30:04):
direct the country's national parks and went presto Chanjo and
turned the game reserve into a national park protecting Gambia
and its inhabitants.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Pretty cool, it is pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Unfortunately, he passed away from cancer five years later, and
from that point on, Jane Goodall was a swinging solo lady.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
That's right, and you know, I'm sure it was a
tragedy for her life, but she sort of ended up
being married to her work and seemed very happy to be.
She spent decades and decades at the Gambi Center, publishing
hundreds of papers. All kinds of researchers and doctoral students
(30:47):
have done field work there, gotten their PhDs through there.
She is still very active, like you said, as part
of the Jane Goodall Institute, which is basically run by
Tanzanians and has just you know, she's it's easy to
think now, like you said, like you see so many
(31:08):
documentaries and so much footage of people doing research and
just no one had done this stuff to that degree
at the time, as far as just living among the animals.
And it just can't be overstated how revolutionary this idea was.
This twenty six year old, you know, young British woman
was just like, yeah, that's what I want to do.
(31:28):
I want to climb a tree and be with them.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Yeah. And Lewis Leaky had a knack for picking the
right people for this kind of work. He also hired
two other young women over the years. Diane Fosse, who
studied gorillas in Rwanda who is very memorably played by
Sigourney Weaver and Gorillas in the Mist. Yeah, and another
woman named Berrute Galdicas who studied orangutangs in Borneo. And
(31:53):
when you put Diane Fossei and Barute Galdicas and Jan
Good all together, you had the group that were known
as the Trymates.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
We just couldn't not mention that it was just too good.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
I mean, we didn't give them that name. No, no, actually,
to make it clear.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, So, Chuck, we're starting to have a little too
much fun. I say, we need to take a break
and recompose ourselves, come back and just get serious again.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
All right, all right, so earlier in the episode you
(32:52):
mentioned a family made up of the letter F where
she you know, this is how she named and cataloged
these groups in these families and it would help her
keep track of things. And we're gonna tell you a
little story that Livia dug up about the F family
led by Flow, who was the mama to her young children.
(33:13):
And Flow was pretty instrumental in good Alls understanding of
just how these chip families worked. And then later through
the just beyond the family, the whole group and local
culture of that family.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Right, and the whole group that they studied that the
Flow in her family were members of was the cass Kela.
And there were other groups that ended up being studied,
if not by a good All, but by other research
scientists and doctoral students who showed up over the decades.
But kesse Kela was the group that she kind of
(33:50):
made her name on and did her research on originally.
And like you said, from studying these these families so closely,
she watched like how generations interacted sometimes with their own
kin group like Flow had a son named Fabian who
(34:10):
overthrew his younger brother, who's overthrown by his younger brother
Fagan to become the dominant male, and she noticed, like
becoming a dominant male of your family or of your group,
I should say, there's not one set way to do it.
Some do it by Some chimpanzees do it by being
kind and calm in the face of aggression. Others do
(34:33):
it through sheer force and bullying. Vegan was known to
just basically do it through trickery, like he would lead
others in the group away from food and then run
back and get it himself. Somehow he became the dominant male.
But by studying these chimpanzees this closely, she was able
to kind of see individual personalities and how those personalities
(34:55):
work together to create a society.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Yeah, and it's you know, well, it's a game of
thrones up in there, basically. Yeah. He had Flow's daughter, Fifi,
she became the dominant female. She gave birth to nine kids,
one of which was a daughter named Flossi, So this
is Flow's grand baby. Flossie ended up leaving that group
for a neighboring community called the Matumba Community. Another one
(35:22):
of her children was Freud, born in seventy one. Freud
grew up and then along with Fifi and Vegan helped
him rise within that hierarchy even though he was like
not really cut out for the job. Became the dominant
male in nineteen ninety three. So, like families are leaving
communities joining up with others who had previously left the community,
(35:45):
they're kind of grooming successors and like propping up other
chimps is like helping them become the leader and the
dominant male or female. And it's just just fascinating for
her to sit there and like document all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Yeah, it's very much Kevellian totally. Now we have to
talk about Frodo, who was one of Fifi's sons, one
of Flow's grandsons. He was born in nineteen seventy six,
and he is one of the more famous chimpanzees of
all time because he was bad to the bone. Yeah,
(36:19):
he was. You if you believe in chimps having an
internal life and empathy and awareness of others' experiences, then
you would consider Frodo a.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Murderer, straight up murderer, totally for real.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
I've seen it argue that he should be considered a murderer.
He was just that bad.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, I mean, he killed people, he did.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
So he deposed his brother Freud back in nineteen ninety seven,
and he was one of the He was the one
I was citing when I said some of them do
it just through sheer force and intimidation. That was Frodo.
He didn't have a lot of friends, he didn't have
many alliances. He was just the biggest chimp and the
meanest chimp. And he from a young age he started
(37:02):
bullying Jane Goodall. I think I don't want to anthropomorphise here,
but I'm quite certain, one hundred percent certain in fact,
that he noted Jane Goodall was the person in charge
of the humans, and he targeted her specifically. He attacked
other humans over the years, but Jane Goodall. They said
(37:22):
that he would have a certain look on his face
that he reserved just for her, and he put her
in for some of the worst treatment, almost broke her
neck once, and she said kind of famously that she
was alive because he wasn't trying to kill her, that
he was just trying to show her who is boss,
and that if he wanted her dead, she would be
(37:43):
dead right now.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Which you know, again not to use the A word,
but it sounds like he had respect for her.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah, yeah, in a way, like a kind of a
backhanded way.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
I would say he allowed her to live.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Right, I guess so, or maybe he'd needed her.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
He let Gary Larson live in nineteen eighty eight when
Carrie Larson got his arm yanked, giving him a legit injury.
So that happened as well, but very sadly. Frodo was
probably most well known for killing a toddler, a fourteen
month old in two thousand and two. It was the
daughter of a park attendant who was visiting with his wife,
(38:26):
and he killed this fourteen month old and partially ate
this fourteen month old, and people spoke up and were like, hey,
you need to kill this chimp and take him out,
and Jane Goodall went to bat for him, and it's like, basically,
it's a chimp being a chimp, and we're the ones
that are here, and you know there's cars killing kids
(38:46):
all over the place. You know, go out and take
all the cars away.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
That's called a straw man argument.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
It is.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
There's a thing though, the remember I said, I saw,
I'd argue that like he was a Frodo should be
considered a murderer. Certainly could be yeah, I think the
same person who made that argument was had been a
researcher at Gambi and argued, like, yes, we need to
kill Frodo. He's a murderer. Like he did that, he
knew what he was doing. He's a murderer. We need
(39:13):
to put him down. And she argued that they intervened
when the chimps were starving, they intervened when they needed
medical attention, but they're not going to intervene when the
chimp murders a human baby. It just seemed like a
pretty good argument, I think. At the same time, though,
if you're Jane Goodall and you're like, well, chimps are
(39:33):
kind of like humans, and humans are kind of like chimps.
We don't kill Frodo when he eats chimp babies, which
they do, so why would you do that for.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
A human baby.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Seems a little out of touch to me with you know,
human society in general. But I guess I get both
sides in that case.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, I mean that's one of the things we should
talk about. I guess is that later in her career,
she you know, she basically said, hey, if I had
it to do over again, I would do it differently.
We probably should not have been feeding these things bananas.
We probably shouldn't have been I shouldn't have been holding
baby chimps like they were human babies and petting them
(40:11):
and stuff. And I should have maybe been a little
more dispassionate in my work because if you want, you know,
really accurate data and results, like again, you shouldn't be
handing them food and stuff. So, you know, she came
clean about the things that she felt like she had
her missteps over the years as a researcher. So I
take my hat off to her for that, and very sadly,
(40:34):
it looks like, you know, it's possible at least that
they're stay there, their interactions, they're just merely being there.
Could have been one of the factors in what was
known as the Gombi chimpanzee War, when in nineteen seventy
one there was kind of a full on war between
(40:55):
two groups of chimpanzees that played out right in front
of her eyes.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah, so the dominant male of the Caskela group died
and I guess he was holding the glue together. This
guy was like Tito or something, and the group splintered.
I think nine adults and their kids said, we're going
to form our own group, and they took over the
southern half of the range, and the original Caskela. The
(41:21):
remaining Caskela they stuck to the northern part of the
range at first. I think over the years, the male
started making aggressive sounds and gestures to one another, and
it became clear that they were no longer treating them
as a kin group. You know, these were no longer friends,
even though they had been super tight friends when they
lived together. These were now enemies and trespassers and encroachers,
(41:44):
and the whole thing came to a head starting in
nineteen seventy four when Godie, one of the members of
the tribe that had broken away and took up in
the south, was just sitting there eating fruit and six
Caskela males ambushed him and I had to get away,
and they got him and they beat him to death
over a period I think about ten minutes, and that
(42:07):
kicked off the what are known as, like you said,
the Gombi Chimpanzee War.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah, and then other wars had been documented since then
in different areas between different groups, and like I said,
you know, part of the reason was they were being
sort of choked out by human development. Part of it
was because there was a more stressful atmosphere though, with
people there watching and observing and doing what she was doing.
(42:33):
So I don't I'm not going to say that really
charnished her work. If anything, it did show that they
observed something else that they didn't know had previously happened,
which is they could be very territorial and go to
war like this. But since that time she has just
been a tireless advocate for animals over the ensuing decades,
(42:55):
like you said, into her early nineties now with the
Jane Goodall Institute that is based in Virginia, has twenty
offices around the world, and she continues to write books
and speak and do ted talks, and she's just still
kicking it.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yeah. She had a podcast called the jing Goodall Hope
Cast that she launched during the pandemic, and then as
soon as she could stop, she stopped. The last episode
came out in twenty twenty two. She's very famously her
quote was that sucked.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Yeah. By the way, when I said she's still kicking it,
I meant kicking, but like not just kicking it on
the couch. That's what kicking it really kicking. Yeah. Now
she's just still very active, and I just have a
lot of respect for the lady. She's awesome.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Yeah, she is an awesome person, and yeah she gets
criticized by people in academia still, But like I said
at the outset, she's just the world loves her, like
she's done so much good that whatever missteps she has
or whatever weird side she takes in moral quandaries, like
(44:01):
the world just forgives her. It's like it's Jane Goodall.
She does good for the planet and has the whole
time essentially agreed. If you want to know more about
Jane Goodall, there's a lot to read about her and
by her, and you can listen to her hope casts.
I presume they didn't erase all of the episodes. And
in the meantime, while you're looking all that stuff up,
(44:23):
let's go ahead and kick it old school with listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Let me call this the Ballad of grit, because that
is what Ed calls it, Okay in the subject line,
Hey guys, I'm a self described band of great I
should say I've never considered myself a conscientious person to
the full meaning of the word. However, I do consider
one of my strengths is being responsible. My opinion is
(44:49):
that it's an insult for a gritty person to be
confused with being conscientious. Conscientiousness is a luxury for the
already bright minded person. In my opinion, I believe most
intelligent people who are successful are equally gifted with conscientiousness. Grit,
on the other hand, is the ugly twin of conscientiousness.
It's the path less travel to success. It's how I
(45:11):
got through college during an engineering degree, even though I
graduated with a low GPA, barely scraping by in many
classes and had to retake some because I didn't pass
to begin with. My road was less traveled than it
was a tough one. I worked forty hours a week
for five years while I supported myself in college, and
I was compared to my peer graduates with whom I
(45:31):
lived at home with her parents, who had the funds
to build proper projects for courses. Grit is invisible, guys.
It can't be measured. Comes from within. Grit is what
you have when you succeed without conscientiousness. I love the
show that is from ED.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
I think ED is a pseudonym for Angela Duckworth. I
think this is Angela Duckworths writing in it. Good email, Yeah,
this is a good email. Good for you for persevering.
Hats off to you, man, for sure, I admire anybody
who worked and put themselves through college. That's really something
I like me. Yes, I admire you for that.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Oh, the first part was paid for and then I
was on my own.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Hey man, even a little bit still counts like that.
That's hard to do.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
You know that was fine? Waited tables whatever.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
Shate it, all right, just forget it. I'll direct my
comments toward Ed only then.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
All right, No, I appreciate it. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
If you want to be like ED and give us
an email to argue over, we love that kind of thing.
You can get in touch with us via stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know podcasts. How you doing, I'm good, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
You I'm sweepy?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Oh are you?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I'm a little beat myself. Is it just life or
did you stay up till five am drinking?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
No, it's just hitting right around the old nap time,
So you know.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I'm with you. Do you ever doze off all your studying?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Uh? No, but I you know, I still try and
catch a short nap every day, and on the recording
days that sometimes happens. But today was I was not
able to gotcha?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Well, we'll retire eventually. Hang in there.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I'll sleep when I retire.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Hey, So what do you want to talk about today?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I mean, I prepped for a show on Jane Goodall,
so did I. And she's the best.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
She is she is she is widely roundly, basically globally
universally probably seen as essentially a great person.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, I think she's cherished and for good reason. After
did you watch the documentary for this at all?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
By the way, I didn't the Future one from twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Jane, Yeah, yeah, no I didn't. It's great.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It sounds great. I read a lot about it, as
I do, but I haven't seen it. Yeah, I'll have
to watch it still.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, it's really good. Highly recommended if you're listening and
if this hearing about her, you know, inspires you to
learn more at all, because it's a great documentary of footage, beautiful,
beautiful color film stock from back then when she was
doing her studies. And it's not it's not like a narrate.
(02:07):
It's it's narrated just by her thoughts and this beautiful
score and it just shows it. It's just really really
lovely the way it plays out.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
That's awesome. I heard the car chase in the middle
is really great.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Yeah, I didn't expect it, but very good.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
So drive drive, drive. Yeah, so we're talking Jane Goodall.
For those of you who don't know who Jane Goodall is,
she is one of the world's foremost renowned primatologists. And
she did it the old fashioned way by going out
into the jungle and learning as she did. It's called
(02:44):
the school of hard knocks, I think. Yeah, that's the
thing about Jane Goodall. She had a high school education
when she started. She did not go to college, not
for a while, and a guy named Lewis Leakey, a
famous anthropologist, took a gamble on her on purpose because
he was looking for somebody who could who was not trained, purposely,
(03:05):
not trained so that they weren't bringing a bunch of
preconceptions to them to study chimpanzees. And Jing Goodall fit
the bill. As we'll see, she's loved animals since she
was a kid, and after just a few months started
excelling at it and eventually changed how the world sees chimpanzees.
We didn't know much about him before, We had a
(03:26):
lot of assumptions about him, and Jing Goodall showed that
they were just let's just turn those on their heads.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah, how's that.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
For an intro baby?
Speaker 1 (03:36):
It's pretty good?
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Thank you?
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Do we I mean, do we get more specific? Even?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Oh? I thought we'd get specific as we went along,
but sure, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah. So she was born in nineteen thirty four in
England to her mother Margaret and her father Mortimer. Go
ahead and forget I even said father Mortimer, because he
was not around much and he does not feel much
in her story. He divorced when Jane was but sixteen.
But especially after watching this documentary, if we're going to
(04:08):
salute Jane Goodall, we are going to have to salute
her mother, because her mom was the one who was like, Hey,
you want to figure something out, then go figure it
out and go learn it and go do Instead of
talking about something, go out and do it because no
one else is going to do it unless you do it.
(04:29):
And who cares that it's the nineteen forties and fifties.
Who cares that you're a young girl. Just go out
and do it, Jane, by God, and she did.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, She very famously encouraged her to go dance on
the rain, feel the rain in her skin because no
one else will do it for you.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
That's right, And like you said, and this is what
maybe set her apart from other scientists at the time.
She loved, loved and loved animals like capital l O vee,
and that sort of flew in the face of the
dispassionate history of how you study animals.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, biologists typically approached animals totally detached, totally unemotional.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
They were aware opposed to.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
That was how they were trained to and it makes
sense in a way because this is there was a
widespread fear and there apparently still is among you know,
hardcore biologists and other ologists that study animals, that we
humans have a just a great propensity for anthropomorphizing animals.
(05:44):
And how can you study animals if you're just essentially
presuming that they're behaving like humans. You can't if they're
doing something that's actually not human like and you're just
misinterpreting it, you're being misled by your anthropomorphism. So there
was a real there was The workaround that they figured
out was to just look at them dispassionately. They're just animals.
(06:05):
I don't care what their names are, I don't care
anything about them. I'm just going to study them as
dispassionately as possible in the hopes of preventing from anthropomorphizing.
That was the predominant view, and again it still kind
of is. It's complete hogwash, the idea that there's just
no inner lives to animals, and apparently there's still some
(06:27):
academics that cling on to that, but it does make
a little bit of sense where if you're worried about
projecting your own feelings and values and emotions and thoughts
onto the animals you're studying, then just don't get attached
to the animals. And that's what she entered into.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
You know, he said, what they don't care what their
names are.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Well, I'm sure they have names like ragnor the Conquerors.
Probably a pretty regular name for a cow.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
I would think so. But you're right, But she flew
in the face of that. She loved animals as a child.
She would just spend hours and hours and hours as
a young girl drawing animals, talking about animals, writing about animals,
and not just you know, birds are fun because they fly,
like observing them like a little miniature scientist. So she
(07:20):
had recollections about bringing worms to bed when she was
a toddler, like one of her first memories. Another was
when she went to watch a hen laying an egg
and like document that whole process. Spent five hours in
a hen house as a young girl, and her parents
couldn't find her, and her mom, you know, called the cops.
(07:42):
They thought she had wandered off.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, and I saw very pivotally when she was younger.
I'm not sure what age, but she was a young kid.
Still she was fascinated with the pigs that she saw
on the English countryside, and she wanted to hang out
with them, but they would always run away. So she
taught herself to be super patient and to sit and
get them to come closer to her and eventually feed
them and won their trust that way, and that would
(08:06):
later serve her very well when she started to study chimpanzees.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, and in fact, that patient's in the documentary you
know you mentioned Lewis Leaky. He was a very famous
paleontologist and anthropologist who gave her her break in the
nineteen fifties when she met him in Kenya. I guess
we should say she got there because she graduated from
high school and was like, you know what, I'm not
(08:32):
gonna we can't afford college. I'm gonna go get a
couple of jobs, hustle save money so I can go
to Africa and study on my own. But she got there,
and Leaky she said part of the reason she got
the job was because he wanted someone with monumental patients.
I ease, somebody who would sit there for what ended
(08:52):
up being five months before she even saw chimpanzees.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Basically, man, that guy would be like a senior VP
at ZIP recruiter, just based on that one pick he made. Yeah,
for sure, if you were around today, did you like that?
That was a little buzz marketing for one of our advertisers.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
They haven't been around in a while, so okay, well
for maybe they'll come back.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
So yeah, Lewis leaky. Apparently she started out as a
secretary for him, right, yeah, And then I guess he
found out that she wanted to do animal studies, and
he said, okay, here's your chance. I'm going to send
you to Tanzania to study chimpanzees. We don't know much
about chimpanzees. We want you to go find out all
about them. And so, at age twenty six in nineteen sixty,
(09:39):
she arrived in Tanzania with her mom. Because the Tanzanian
government I believe it was still a colonial government at
the time, if not then at least a transitional government. Still,
they required a chaperone for someone in her position, so
she brought her mom along, who'd been a great supporter
and booster all her life, like you said, And they
also very importantly had an cook who was a local
(10:01):
named Dominic and within a very short amount of time,
both her mom and she came down with malaria and
they were very fortunate to have Dominic from what I saw,
because he helped nurse them back to health.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yeah, for sure, he was a big He's kind of
like part of the family from what I gathered.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
That's what I gathered too.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
This is at the Gombi Stream Game Reserve which is
now the Gombi Stream National Park, and her mom didn't
stay too long. She was there about four months. But
while her mom was there, she helped set up a
either set up or work with medical camp there to
help provide you know, medical services to locals. So her
(10:42):
mom was getting in there getting her hands dirty. Eventually
would leave to go back to England and Jane stayed there.
You know, she was not with Leaky. He didn't like
stay there with her. He set her up with his
job also apparently was you know, making passes at Erica's
(11:03):
Jane Goodall and this kind of popped that throughout her
career was a very pretty young scientist at a time
when that was fairly unusual, I think, especially where she
was located. And she was like, no, thank you, doctor Leaky.
I'm not interested, but I appreciate you. You you know
trust in trusting this position to me at least, but
(11:24):
hands off.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
He said, that's what That's just what I wanted to hear.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure he wanted to hear just that.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
So apparently she got set up with six months of
funding initially, and she started to get really worried because
at least three months passed and she was spending all
day every day with a couple of locals who were
walking her around the jungle looking like pointing out like
this would probably be a pretty good place for chimps
to show up. This tree has a bunch of fruit
on it. They'd sit around. The chimps wouldn't show up.
(11:52):
They did show up, they were covered up by leaves.
She couldn't see what they were doing if she got
if she moved to get a little closer so she
could get about, they would all run away. That was
when she saw them, Like she was her research was
in great jeopardy. She was, you have to have chimps
to study to get more funding and continue your research.
(12:13):
So she was starting to get worried by month three
or four. And I guess finally she won the trust
of at least one group enough that they wouldn't run
off when she would just kind of show up and
hang out and feed or watch them feed. And I
saw that one of the reasons, or one of the
ways that she won the trust of the chimpanzee groups
(12:35):
that she was observing was by kind of behaving like them,
Like she ran around barefoot everywhere. She would hang out
in the trees for a long periods of time and
just kind of tried to treat them or behave as
if they were her peers rather than study subjects or
test subjects.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah, I mean, she those one. At one point in
the documentary, she's talking about the dangers of where she
was and these poison snakes everywhere, and you know, all
manner of ways in which you could die out there
doing what she was doing, and she was and it
didn't sound naive either. She just said, you know, I
felt like I was supput And she's got that great
British accent too, so it just everything sounds so great.
(13:15):
But she said she felt like she was supposed to
be there, and that if she just treaded carefully and
respected the land and the creatures around her, then they
would like allow her to stay there, like these snakes
were not going to come bite her and send her away,
because she's, like I was, I'm supposed to be here,
(13:35):
And it was really kind of a lovely thing. She
really seemed like she fit in such that finally, five
months in, with time running out, a chimp named David
Graybeard obviously she's giving them these names, and he had
a kind of looked like me a little bit. He had,
this little gray Beard trusted her. He was the first
(13:55):
one of that group allowed her to get closer and
closer and closer. He eventually alsome bananas, came back for
more bananas, and he was the one that said to
the other chimps, hey, this lady, she's not too bad.
Look at her.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
So we then treat bananas.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
She's hanging out and the footage of her and we'll
get to whether or not this was the correct thing
or not later, but the footage of her dead, still
holding bananas out in her hand and seeing these very
large chimpanzees coming up and taking them from her hands,
and the way she's acting is is breathtaking because nobody
(14:33):
had done that before.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, I was gonna say today you could see somebody
doing that, And the reason why you could see someone
doing this, because Jing Goodall was the first to do
it exactly. She had no idea. She had no frame
of reference for whether they were going to be violent
toward her or whether they were going to throw their
poop better or whatever. She had no idea. So that
was a real risk that she was taking by interacting
(14:55):
with them that directly. And then in addition to it
being risky, it was driving any academic who was aware
of her work completely baddie, because that is a big
nice man. That's not at all what you do. Not
only do you not like get attached to them, you
certainly don't feed them, you don't interact with their infants,
(15:18):
don't you don't give them names. That was another one,
David Graybeard. Yes, I'm gonna go with you and assume
that that wasn't his actual name, that she gave them
that name. And that was driving like academics crazy, like
she was doing everything wrong, and yet it was starting
to really pay off in aces.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, they're like, you're not supposed to name Jimps And
she's like, have you ever bet at a gym? Jump right?
Speaker 2 (15:43):
It's like it's working, Yeah, it really, and it really
did work, Like thanks largely thanks to David Graybeard, at
least at first who who, like you said, said this
lady's all right? And then her patience and then her
feeding them an endless supply of bananas. All those three
combined to win over the trust of large groups and
families of chimpanzees.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Should we take a break, I think we should. All right,
We'll be right back with moron. Do you know who?
Right after this?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Okay, Chuck, So, Jane Goodall is feeding chimps bananas. At
this point, she's named them, named all of them. I mean,
she really kind of had to get very creative with
the names because she would identify a family lineage by
like a letter, so like the F family, all of
the members for generations had first names that began with F,
(17:02):
like Flow or Flossy or Fabian or Freud, and that's
how she kept track of them. But again, other academics
would have just given them numbers, like maybe they all
started with the same number or something like that, but
certainly not names. And from observing them that closely, and
I guess, I guess interacting with them probably had a
(17:25):
lot to do with it. But interacting with them allowed
her to get that close, and by interacting that closely,
she was able to see things that up to that
point people had no idea chimpanzees were capable of. One
of the first things she realized is that they have
a huge, intricate, complex social system with hierarchies, like I said, families, alliances, territories,
(17:48):
like all sorts of stuff that people just did not
realize chips were capable of engaging in.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, big time. Communication wise, she found out there were
at least twenty different sets that they were making to communicate,
and that's in addition to any kind of body language
or behaviors they may exhibit towards one another. She was
the first person that said, hey, these guys aren't just
eating bananas and berries and things. They are omnivores. They're
(18:17):
eating birds, they're eating insects, they're eating baby baboons. Sometimes
she would figure this out later, much to her dismay,
they would eat other chimps. But the big finding that
she came out with that kind of shook signs to
its core was that she observed chimpanzees engaging in object modification,
(18:39):
which is basically sort of proto tool making, when they
would take blades of grass and sticks and things and
strip them down or bend them, or clump blades of
grass together and shape them in certain ways to stick
into ant hills most effectively and efficiently to draw out
ants to eat them. And she was like, hey, wait
(19:01):
a minute, Like, the big differentiator up until this point
in the history of evolution between us and them is
that we use tools. That's all everyone talked about was
that we use tools and animals don't, and that's what
makes us different. She's like, right here in front of
my face, they are using object modification, which is basically
(19:22):
a tool.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, like you just you said it. It shook the
scientific world to its foundations. Like that was just such
a huge finding that Lewis Leaky declared very famously that
we must redefined tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.
Like that's how big of a deal.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
It was.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Dramatic, it was, But I mean, up to that point,
like you said, people just tools made a human. Anything
that could make a tool technically qualified as human. Everything
else couldn't make tools. So it was a big deal.
And then on top of that, to me, even more
groundbreaking is that they realized that different groups of chimps
(20:03):
use the same tool in different ways, and that like
say one group would use the short stick to get
termites on it to eat them one by one. Another
group would use a longer stick to let a bunch
of them walk on and then eat it like a
corn cob probably, and that they would pass how to
do that down to different generations. And that's culture and
(20:25):
its most basic definition that qualifies as culture. And I
saw it compared to how Westerners use forks, but people
in Asia use chopsticks. They're both the same tool they're
used to they're implement to get food to your mouth,
but they're just different and they're passed down through the
culture their cultural differences. And that's the same thing with
(20:46):
the different ways of using a termite stick, right, And
that is culture. So she discovered that chimps have cultures as.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Well, and some of them open their presence on Christmas Eve,
some of them wait until Christmas more or all kinds
of things she observed.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah, that was a big surprise too. They're terrible at
wrapping presents too, they're so sloppy.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Another big surprise, Well, they just used the funny papers
from Sunday, which can you blame them. Another big surprise
was in nineteen sixty two when National Geographic then Geo
Society that is, sent a filmmaker, a Dutch filmmaker name
Hugo von Lowick there to film her work. She was
not thrilled at this idea. She really enjoyed her solitude there.
(21:33):
She did not want some dude mucking up the works
and kind of quite honestly spoiling her scene that she
had going on there. She really enjoyed climbing trees and
being alone and not having to deal with some jerk
with a camera. But she knew that's where the funding
came from. They needed this footage if she was going
to continue to get funding. She put up with the
(21:55):
sky chainsmoking and throwing his cigarette butts around in the jungle,
which upset her very much, But she was like, this
guy really loved animals. He was also handsome, and she
said it became pretty obvious pretty soon that I was
also the subject of his films. Long story short, they
fall in love and make a baby.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Right that they nicknamed Grub. Did you see anywhere why
they nicknamed their kid Grub? I could not find it.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
I would assume because of a grubworm.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
But what did he do?
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Like?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Did he was he famous for writhing around in the
dirt or something like that. Why would you name your
kid grub well?
Speaker 1 (22:34):
I mean this kid was raised in the jungle. I
imagine all he did was writhe around in the dirt. Okay,
I mean there's footage of him. He was literally raised
in a jungle in a cage. Sounds bad, but it
was a big pin that they had previously used for animals,
and she decorated it all up for her son just
to keep him safe. It was very large. It was
(22:55):
like a large, you know, pin, less than a cage,
but was a cage. And the other thing she said, too,
was that having her own human baby really helped her
research it. It made her understand the how chimpanzee mothers
behaved and vice versa. And she said it really just
(23:19):
added a lot to her understanding of the family groups.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
NAT that's pretty neat so around this time, So what
that was the early sixties. I think that her husband
showed up and her son was born in the late sixties.
Nineteen sixty seven, okay, in the I think in nineteen
sixty three National Geographic it essentially told the world that
Jing goodall existed in what she was doing. There was
(23:46):
an article cover article called My Life among the Wild Chimpanzees,
and she was starting to recount this is the thing
that she would become most advanced at, in addition to
chimpanzee's studies, is telling the rest of the world about
chimpanzees in order to get the world to keep from
(24:07):
driving chimpanzees and other animals into extinction. That was her
kind of second love.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, for sure. And again they started, you know, her
the fact that she was an attractive young woman came
up in the press and the articles were framed as
you know, Beauty and the Beast and nat Geo cover
girl and stuff like that, which it bothered her some,
but she did realize that that got more attention and
(24:33):
that that inspired young women, you know, to develop interest
in science and stuff like that. And so she was like,
it's it's fine, this is what we're dealing with here
in the nineteen sixties, and it's bringing you know, attention
to my cause. Right.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, she would have a really good kind of a
feel for that. And I keep speaking of her in
the past ten she's not dead. She just turned ninety
in April, and she seems to be doing just fine.
Her foundation says she still travels about three hundred days
a year doing speaking appearances on behalf of chimpanzees and
nature and earth in general. And a good example of
(25:10):
her kind of figuring out or knowing a good pr
piece when she sees it, her opportunity when she sees
it came in nineteen eighty seven Gary Larson, who did
the Far Side, one of the great comic strips of
all time.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
You know, oh yeah, that's going to be a subject soon.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Okay, So he did a far Side one one comic
panel or one panel comic of a female chimp grooming
a male chimp, and the caption is the female chimp saying, well, well,
another blonde hair, conducting a little more research with that.
Jane Goodall tramp and the Jane Goodall Institute found out
(25:53):
about this and sent Gary Larson a cease and desist letter,
and that's where everything ended.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
No, no, no, of course not, you're just being coy
good always out of town. Apparently she got back in town,
heard about it, thought it was very funny, said Gary,
you can tear up that cease and desist letter, and
book your ticket for Africa.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
You're going, and you're going, and you're going.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
And that's what happened. She reached out to him, he
came out there. He actually gave the Institute permission to
use the cartoon on T shirts for fundraising. She wrote
a preface for one of his book collections and it
turned into like this school friendship.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Yeah, so prior to that, we kind of jumped ahead
a little bit. But prior to that, she in addition
to that National Geographic cover story, less than ten years later,
she released her first book, In the Shadow of Man,
And this is around where she really became like a
science communicator, which she's been forever. She was one of
the early ones, pre Sagan even. I mean, she released
(27:04):
this book in nineteen seventy one and it was telling
the world again about all of the stuff she had
found about chimpanzees and really just revolutionizing our understanding of
chimpanzees and animals in general. And her work was so
significant that, remember she only graduated high school. Cambridge University
came a knock in and said, hey, you want a PhD.
(27:26):
Because we got a seat for you here, come take it.
And she thought about it a while consulting Gary Larson.
He said, Hey, I haven't met you yet. This doesn't
make any sense, and finally agreed, Sure, I'll get your
I'll take a PhD course with you guys Cambridge.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
That's right. She got a degree in the study of
animal behavior, that's mythology in nineteen sixty six. No, we're
all over the place of the timeline. It's fine. I
hope everyone gets what is following the story. Sure, for
about five years she worked at Stanford as a visiting
professor and psychiatry. Also became a visiting professor of zoology
(28:04):
at Tanzania's University of Daris Salam. While all this is
going on, though, she's not like, oh, by the way,
I'm just leaving Gmbhi. For years and years at a time,
she was basically there from nineteen sixty to seventy five.
It was her home. It was her emotional home, her
spiritual home. She felt very, very tied to Gombi into
(28:27):
that specific area, and you know that was where she
started a family and was raising a son. It was
her place.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
So I didn't see the documentary did they cover why
she left? Was it because of her son? Because I
saw that she was conflicted, and I realized she had
to decide raise a sun or study chimps.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yeah, he had to be schooled formally schooled in England.
But also there was the issue of her marriage, and
that's you know, we might as well talk about it now.
She started to travel some with her husband to other
places for him to film because he didn't get all
his work through that GEO. Eventually he has work with
(29:08):
them completely dried up, so he had no reason to
be there other than the fact that his wife was
there and loved her work. But it was at a
time and he was one of these guys where he
was like, hey, you know, work comes first and I
hope you can support me. She did that for a
little while and then she said by that time, in
a very English way, she said that had we had
begun bickering, and that seemed to be the kindest way
(29:30):
to say that. You know, their marriage was kind of
on fragile ground and they would eventually part ways because
of that and because of life and work, and it
just seemed like it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Out, gotcha. So five years after she started, she established
the Gombi Stream Research Center again in the Gombi Wildlife
preserve game preserve, which means you can go hunt there.
She very fortunately met and married a member of parliament
in tan Zania named Derek Bryson, and he happened to
(30:04):
direct the country's national parks and went presto Chanjo and
turned the game reserve into a national park protecting Gambia
and its inhabitants.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Pretty cool, it is pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Unfortunately, he passed away from cancer five years later, and
from that point on, Jane Goodall was a swinging solo lady.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
That's right, and you know, I'm sure it was a
tragedy for her life, but she sort of ended up
being married to her work and seemed very happy to be.
She spent decades and decades at the Gambi Center, publishing
hundreds of papers. All kinds of researchers and doctoral students
(30:47):
have done field work there, gotten their PhDs through there.
She is still very active, like you said, as part
of the Jane Goodall Institute, which is basically run by
Tanzanians and has just you know, she's it's easy to
think now, like you said, like you see so many
(31:08):
documentaries and so much footage of people doing research and
just no one had done this stuff to that degree
at the time, as far as just living among the animals.
And it just can't be overstated how revolutionary this idea was.
This twenty six year old, you know, young British woman
was just like, yeah, that's what I want to do.
(31:28):
I want to climb a tree and be with them.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Yeah. And Lewis Leaky had a knack for picking the
right people for this kind of work. He also hired
two other young women over the years. Diane Fosse, who
studied gorillas in Rwanda who is very memorably played by
Sigourney Weaver and Gorillas in the Mist. Yeah, and another
woman named Berrute Galdicas who studied orangutangs in Borneo. And
(31:53):
when you put Diane Fossei and Barute Galdicas and Jan
Good all together, you had the group that were known
as the Trymates.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Pretty funny.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
We just couldn't not mention that it was just too good.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
I mean, we didn't give them that name. No, no, actually,
to make it clear.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, So, Chuck, we're starting to have a little too
much fun. I say, we need to take a break
and recompose ourselves, come back and just get serious again.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
All right, all right, so earlier in the episode you
(32:52):
mentioned a family made up of the letter F where
she you know, this is how she named and cataloged
these groups in these families and it would help her
keep track of things. And we're gonna tell you a
little story that Livia dug up about the F family
led by Flow, who was the mama to her young children.
(33:13):
And Flow was pretty instrumental in good Alls understanding of
just how these chip families worked. And then later through
the just beyond the family, the whole group and local
culture of that family.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Right, and the whole group that they studied that the
Flow in her family were members of was the cass Kela.
And there were other groups that ended up being studied,
if not by a good All, but by other research
scientists and doctoral students who showed up over the decades.
But kesse Kela was the group that she kind of
(33:50):
made her name on and did her research on originally.
And like you said, from studying these these families so closely,
she watched like how generations interacted sometimes with their own
kin group like Flow had a son named Fabian who
(34:10):
overthrew his younger brother, who's overthrown by his younger brother
Fagan to become the dominant male, and she noticed, like
becoming a dominant male of your family or of your group,
I should say, there's not one set way to do it.
Some do it by Some chimpanzees do it by being
kind and calm in the face of aggression. Others do
(34:33):
it through sheer force and bullying. Vegan was known to
just basically do it through trickery, like he would lead
others in the group away from food and then run
back and get it himself. Somehow he became the dominant male.
But by studying these chimpanzees this closely, she was able
to kind of see individual personalities and how those personalities
(34:55):
work together to create a society.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Yeah, and it's you know, well, it's a game of
thrones up in there, basically. Yeah. He had Flow's daughter, Fifi,
she became the dominant female. She gave birth to nine kids,
one of which was a daughter named Flossi, So this
is Flow's grand baby. Flossie ended up leaving that group
for a neighboring community called the Matumba Community. Another one
(35:22):
of her children was Freud, born in seventy one. Freud
grew up and then along with Fifi and Vegan helped
him rise within that hierarchy even though he was like
not really cut out for the job. Became the dominant
male in nineteen ninety three. So, like families are leaving
communities joining up with others who had previously left the community,
(35:45):
they're kind of grooming successors and like propping up other
chimps is like helping them become the leader and the
dominant male or female. And it's just just fascinating for
her to sit there and like document all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Yeah, it's very much Kevellian totally. Now we have to
talk about Frodo, who was one of Fifi's sons, one
of Flow's grandsons. He was born in nineteen seventy six,
and he is one of the more famous chimpanzees of
all time because he was bad to the bone. Yeah,
(36:19):
he was. You if you believe in chimps having an
internal life and empathy and awareness of others' experiences, then
you would consider Frodo a.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Murderer, straight up murderer, totally for real.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
I've seen it argue that he should be considered a murderer.
He was just that bad.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, I mean, he killed people, he did.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
So he deposed his brother Freud back in nineteen ninety seven,
and he was one of the He was the one
I was citing when I said some of them do
it just through sheer force and intimidation. That was Frodo.
He didn't have a lot of friends, he didn't have
many alliances. He was just the biggest chimp and the
meanest chimp. And he from a young age he started
(37:02):
bullying Jane Goodall. I think I don't want to anthropomorphise here,
but I'm quite certain, one hundred percent certain in fact,
that he noted Jane Goodall was the person in charge
of the humans, and he targeted her specifically. He attacked
other humans over the years, but Jane Goodall. They said
(37:22):
that he would have a certain look on his face
that he reserved just for her, and he put her
in for some of the worst treatment, almost broke her
neck once, and she said kind of famously that she
was alive because he wasn't trying to kill her, that
he was just trying to show her who is boss,
and that if he wanted her dead, she would be
(37:43):
dead right now.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
Which you know, again not to use the A word,
but it sounds like he had respect for her.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah, yeah, in a way, like a kind of a
backhanded way.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
I would say he allowed her to live.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Right, I guess so, or maybe he'd needed her.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
He let Gary Larson live in nineteen eighty eight when
Carrie Larson got his arm yanked, giving him a legit injury.
So that happened as well, but very sadly. Frodo was
probably most well known for killing a toddler, a fourteen
month old in two thousand and two. It was the
daughter of a park attendant who was visiting with his wife,
(38:26):
and he killed this fourteen month old and partially ate
this fourteen month old, and people spoke up and were like, hey,
you need to kill this chimp and take him out,
and Jane Goodall went to bat for him, and it's like, basically,
it's a chimp being a chimp, and we're the ones
that are here, and you know there's cars killing kids
(38:46):
all over the place. You know, go out and take
all the cars away.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
That's called a straw man argument.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
It is.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
There's a thing though, the remember I said, I saw,
I'd argue that like he was a Frodo should be
considered a murderer. Certainly could be yeah, I think the
same person who made that argument was had been a
researcher at Gambi and argued, like, yes, we need to
kill Frodo. He's a murderer. Like he did that, he
knew what he was doing. He's a murderer. We need
(39:13):
to put him down. And she argued that they intervened
when the chimps were starving, they intervened when they needed
medical attention, but they're not going to intervene when the
chimp murders a human baby. It just seemed like a
pretty good argument, I think. At the same time, though,
if you're Jane Goodall and you're like, well, chimps are
(39:33):
kind of like humans, and humans are kind of like chimps.
We don't kill Frodo when he eats chimp babies, which
they do, so why would you do that for.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
A human baby.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Seems a little out of touch to me with you know,
human society in general. But I guess I get both
sides in that case.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, I mean that's one of the things we should
talk about. I guess is that later in her career,
she you know, she basically said, hey, if I had
it to do over again, I would do it differently.
We probably should not have been feeding these things bananas.
We probably shouldn't have been I shouldn't have been holding
baby chimps like they were human babies and petting them
(40:11):
and stuff. And I should have maybe been a little
more dispassionate in my work because if you want, you know,
really accurate data and results, like again, you shouldn't be
handing them food and stuff. So, you know, she came
clean about the things that she felt like she had
her missteps over the years as a researcher. So I
take my hat off to her for that, and very sadly,
(40:34):
it looks like, you know, it's possible at least that
they're stay there, their interactions, they're just merely being there.
Could have been one of the factors in what was
known as the Gombi chimpanzee War, when in nineteen seventy
one there was kind of a full on war between
(40:55):
two groups of chimpanzees that played out right in front
of her eyes.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah, so the dominant male of the Caskela group died
and I guess he was holding the glue together. This
guy was like Tito or something, and the group splintered.
I think nine adults and their kids said, we're going
to form our own group, and they took over the
southern half of the range, and the original Caskela. The
(41:21):
remaining Caskela they stuck to the northern part of the
range at first. I think over the years, the male
started making aggressive sounds and gestures to one another, and
it became clear that they were no longer treating them
as a kin group. You know, these were no longer friends,
even though they had been super tight friends when they
lived together. These were now enemies and trespassers and encroachers,
(41:44):
and the whole thing came to a head starting in
nineteen seventy four when Godie, one of the members of
the tribe that had broken away and took up in
the south, was just sitting there eating fruit and six
Caskela males ambushed him and I had to get away,
and they got him and they beat him to death
over a period I think about ten minutes, and that
(42:07):
kicked off the what are known as, like you said,
the Gombi Chimpanzee War.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah, and then other wars had been documented since then
in different areas between different groups, and like I said,
you know, part of the reason was they were being
sort of choked out by human development. Part of it
was because there was a more stressful atmosphere though, with
people there watching and observing and doing what she was doing.
(42:33):
So I don't I'm not going to say that really
charnished her work. If anything, it did show that they
observed something else that they didn't know had previously happened,
which is they could be very territorial and go to
war like this. But since that time she has just
been a tireless advocate for animals over the ensuing decades,
(42:55):
like you said, into her early nineties now with the
Jane Goodall Institute that is based in Virginia, has twenty
offices around the world, and she continues to write books
and speak and do ted talks, and she's just still
kicking it.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yeah. She had a podcast called the jing Goodall Hope
Cast that she launched during the pandemic, and then as
soon as she could stop, she stopped. The last episode
came out in twenty twenty two. She's very famously her
quote was that sucked.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Yeah. By the way, when I said she's still kicking it,
I meant kicking, but like not just kicking it on
the couch. That's what kicking it really kicking. Yeah. Now
she's just still very active, and I just have a
lot of respect for the lady. She's awesome.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Yeah, she is an awesome person, and yeah she gets
criticized by people in academia still, But like I said
at the outset, she's just the world loves her, like
she's done so much good that whatever missteps she has
or whatever weird side she takes in moral quandaries, like
(44:01):
the world just forgives her. It's like it's Jane Goodall.
She does good for the planet and has the whole
time essentially agreed. If you want to know more about
Jane Goodall, there's a lot to read about her and
by her, and you can listen to her hope casts.
I presume they didn't erase all of the episodes. And
in the meantime, while you're looking all that stuff up,
(44:23):
let's go ahead and kick it old school with listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Let me call this the Ballad of grit, because that
is what Ed calls it, Okay in the subject line,
Hey guys, I'm a self described band of great I
should say I've never considered myself a conscientious person to
the full meaning of the word. However, I do consider
one of my strengths is being responsible. My opinion is
(44:49):
that it's an insult for a gritty person to be
confused with being conscientious. Conscientiousness is a luxury for the
already bright minded person. In my opinion, I believe most
intelligent people who are successful are equally gifted with conscientiousness. Grit,
on the other hand, is the ugly twin of conscientiousness.
It's the path less travel to success. It's how I
(45:11):
got through college during an engineering degree, even though I
graduated with a low GPA, barely scraping by in many
classes and had to retake some because I didn't pass
to begin with. My road was less traveled than it
was a tough one. I worked forty hours a week
for five years while I supported myself in college, and
I was compared to my peer graduates with whom I
(45:31):
lived at home with her parents, who had the funds
to build proper projects for courses. Grit is invisible, guys.
It can't be measured. Comes from within. Grit is what
you have when you succeed without conscientiousness. I love the
show that is from ED.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
I think ED is a pseudonym for Angela Duckworth. I
think this is Angela Duckworths writing in it. Good email, Yeah,
this is a good email. Good for you for persevering.
Hats off to you, man, for sure, I admire anybody
who worked and put themselves through college. That's really something
I like me. Yes, I admire you for that.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Oh, the first part was paid for and then I
was on my own.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
Hey man, even a little bit still counts like that.
That's hard to do.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
You know that was fine? Waited tables whatever.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
Shate it, all right, just forget it. I'll direct my
comments toward Ed only then.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
All right, No, I appreciate it. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
If you want to be like ED and give us
an email to argue over, we love that kind of thing.
You can get in touch with us via stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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