Episode 283: When Elephants Podcast

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, Dave Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing

[00:00:14] my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] Pretending to strongly believe in something that you don't is great preparation for

[00:00:20] being like a lawyer or a stepdad.

[00:00:23] You just have to stuff down your feelings and stop believing in anything.

[00:00:27] The great and us has spoken!

[00:00:33] Pay no attention to that man behind you.

[00:00:49] I'm a very good man.

[00:00:50] Good brains than you have.

[00:00:59] Anybody can have a brain.

[00:01:07] You're a very bad man.

[00:01:10] I'm a very good man.

[00:01:13] Just a very bad wizard.

[00:01:17] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:20] Dave, my new puppy Trixie is starting to settle in and I already love her so much, like desperately.

[00:01:28] But am I being disloyal to Chucky and Omar?

[00:01:31] You know, it's a good question.

[00:01:35] I've had friends who one of the parents dies and like the other parent started dating

[00:01:41] so fast that you're just like, were you thinking about it before?

[00:01:43] Was this somebody you had lined up?

[00:01:46] They're like, I don't think you had Trixie lined up, you know?

[00:01:50] Definitely not.

[00:01:52] It wasn't even my idea to go get her.

[00:01:55] I feel like you would get their blessing, like they're looking down on you, like we

[00:01:59] said from Jedi heaven, nodding like an approval.

[00:02:02] I forget if I said this on something, maybe a Patreon, but Jen believes that Omar sent

[00:02:11] Trixie to us because Trixie was born soon after.

[00:02:15] Did I say that already?

[00:02:16] Yeah, I don't remember if you said it on air.

[00:02:18] Like hardcore rationalist atheist Jen Summers thinks that, I mean she's not like a hardcore

[00:02:25] atheist but she rolls her eyes at all my shit about ghosts and Buddhism.

[00:02:32] Good for her.

[00:02:34] But yeah, she's like, when it comes to that, she thought Tessie, our previous

[00:02:38] dog contacted Omar and said follow them home and now she thinks Omar is paying

[00:02:43] that forward.

[00:02:44] Right.

[00:02:45] You know, there can be, you could be, there can always be an exception to your worldview.

[00:02:49] Like there is nothing supernatural except for this one thing.

[00:02:54] Yeah, jinxing too.

[00:02:56] Right.

[00:02:57] But I like, I feel like my loyalty to Charlie and Omar is unimpeachable.

[00:03:02] Like I love those dogs.

[00:03:04] It's a sign that you feel guilty at all.

[00:03:08] It's a sign of your loyalty.

[00:03:09] So if you were just like, oh yeah, like, oh yeah, I guess I used to have two other

[00:03:13] dogs recently.

[00:03:14] I think the thing that actually made me feel bad is what you said about like the husband

[00:03:21] whose wife dies and then is on match.com.

[00:03:26] I know a few people like that, like before the soil is dry, you know?

[00:03:33] I remember when my first marriage ended, like I told my dad and it was tough.

[00:03:39] It was like a tough conversation with my parents.

[00:03:41] You know, I'd been like holding onto it and trying to find the right time to do it

[00:03:45] and finally tell him and like I was probably in tears, you know?

[00:03:48] And he goes, like he paused after a while and he's like, yeah, I'm sorry.

[00:03:53] What about your friend so-and-so?

[00:03:57] That's awesome.

[00:03:58] I was like, dude.

[00:04:03] We have a kid.

[00:04:04] I'm like crying.

[00:04:09] Do you think that indicated that maybe he had had some reservations in the first place?

[00:04:14] You know what I think it indicated is that he always thought that this other woman was

[00:04:17] like a good match for me.

[00:04:19] And like, swole.

[00:04:20] And kind of hot.

[00:04:21] Exactly.

[00:04:22] That's so funny.

[00:04:27] My mom was on the line too and she was like, alejo.

[00:04:30] Like she was just like, what?

[00:04:35] It's just too much to ask someone to not live with the dog when you could live with the

[00:04:40] dog.

[00:04:41] Well, especially given that you are saving a dog from a potential either death or terrible

[00:04:47] life.

[00:04:48] Yeah, definitely death.

[00:04:49] Like nobody else wanted her at the SPCA.

[00:04:52] I joked that like when we got her, actually brought her out of the SPCA, they were

[00:04:57] all kind of laughing and patting each other on the back like used car salesmen

[00:05:01] after they unload that one car that they couldn't get rid of on some sucker.

[00:05:06] I love the tricks.

[00:05:09] But yeah, anyway in the second segment, speaking of species that are better than

[00:05:15] humans, we will be talking about elephants, elephant souls, elephant consciousness, elephant

[00:05:22] grieving, all things elephant.

[00:05:26] And a great article, like a wide ranging article on elephants and the debate surrounding

[00:05:32] them and just animals in general.

[00:05:34] Animals in general.

[00:05:35] That's right.

[00:05:36] Yeah.

[00:05:37] But first, let's put on our spectacles, throw on some bratwurst onto the Barbie.

[00:05:45] Pour us a lager.

[00:05:49] Watch them shy as they pour.

[00:05:53] So this was my idea.

[00:05:54] I'll just cop to it right now because I don't know if it's going to work or not.

[00:05:59] So either blame or credit me.

[00:06:01] But we've had some criticisms of Germans.

[00:06:04] I've had some bad things to say about Germany in general, but it's undeniable that they

[00:06:11] are unparalleled at coining words for human experiences.

[00:06:16] Just champions at coining words.

[00:06:18] Yes.

[00:06:19] You know, Schadenfreude is obviously the prime example of this.

[00:06:22] It's Schadenfreude, the glee at another one's misfortune.

[00:06:26] It is an undeniable fact that some humans experience Schadenfreude.

[00:06:32] Maybe all humans.

[00:06:33] I'm not sure.

[00:06:34] Maybe that's going to be the thing that separates us from elephants.

[00:06:37] That's why we're better, because we've experienced Schadenfreude.

[00:06:41] I bet you they feel it.

[00:06:42] Yeah, they might feel it.

[00:06:44] I hope so.

[00:06:45] But it's not exhaustive.

[00:06:47] They didn't capture all human experiences with a single word.

[00:06:51] So we are going to come up with a few ideas of words that capture something, like a phenomenon

[00:06:59] that we don't have a word for and that really only the Germans could come up with a single

[00:07:04] word to describe this phenomenon.

[00:07:06] Right.

[00:07:07] And by way of extra preamble, there is something about the German language and its

[00:07:11] ability to put words together to make new words that I feel makes it one, a

[00:07:16] great philosophy language because its ability to capture concepts.

[00:07:21] And I think once you do, you are more likely to notice those experiences.

[00:07:26] And, you know, English kind of allows for it, but it's just not officially part of our language.

[00:07:31] So we're coming up with some German quote.

[00:07:34] And I should say that I think David took this a little more seriously in trying to match, like,

[00:07:41] the roots of the word with the phenomenon he's describing.

[00:07:45] But I know no German and know none of the roots except only vaguely.

[00:07:50] And so these are made up words on my part.

[00:07:53] And if the German dictionaries choose not to include these words, that's up to them.

[00:08:00] It's entirely their right.

[00:08:01] I'm not telling Germans what they need to put in their dictionary.

[00:08:04] But I think these are good words.

[00:08:08] It will be to their detriment if they don't choose to have this.

[00:08:11] It's up to them.

[00:08:12] You know?

[00:08:14] All right. You want to lead off?

[00:08:16] It's even worse that I tried to look up the German words because, like, I might have just

[00:08:21] gotten the wrong version of the word completely.

[00:08:24] Like, it's actually going to be embarrassing.

[00:08:26] But it doesn't matter.

[00:08:27] The first thing that I want to coin is a phenomenological concept that English

[00:08:32] doesn't have a good word for.

[00:08:34] That I don't know if you feel it because I think that there's a particular kind of

[00:08:38] personality that feels it.

[00:08:40] I don't know how to describe it other than a mild OCD discomfort at small degrees of

[00:08:47] disorder.

[00:08:48] So let me explain what I'm talking about.

[00:08:50] So I definitely don't feel that.

[00:08:54] Imagine that you had, like, a row of number two pencils that were all, like,

[00:08:59] perfectly in order and one of them was just slightly off.

[00:09:01] And you look at it and you're just like, oh, like you get this, like...

[00:09:05] The example that my friend used to give is you remember those cars that had maybe

[00:09:08] some of them still do?

[00:09:09] The trunk key, you like slide the logo of the car in order to access the trunk key.

[00:09:15] And you see one of those driving around and it's a super nice car but that thing

[00:09:18] is open.

[00:09:19] And you're just like, all you want to do is just like pull the guy over and

[00:09:21] like have them close that because it bothers you.

[00:09:24] OK, so...

[00:09:25] Don't feel that.

[00:09:27] You don't.

[00:09:29] I was trying to figure out how to say discomfort, like obsessive discomfort.

[00:09:34] Do you not feel any of this?

[00:09:35] Like if you see a really nice kitchen that's all clean but one of the

[00:09:37] cabinets is like propped open.

[00:09:39] Like it just bothers you.

[00:09:40] You don't feel any of this?

[00:09:42] I wish I felt it more, honestly.

[00:09:45] That's a great example because I hit my head on open cabinets all the time.

[00:09:48] Like the corner of them has like torn up like parts of my skull.

[00:09:53] OK, so it's...

[00:09:54] Sorry, German people.

[00:09:55] Bessessen ubenhagen.

[00:09:57] It's discomfort.

[00:10:01] Bessessen ubenhagen.

[00:10:03] Nice.

[00:10:04] I'm totally on board with you actually trying to come up with something.

[00:10:09] I'm making a mockery of that.

[00:10:11] I apologize to all Germans.

[00:10:13] All right, that's a good one.

[00:10:15] I feel like that's a really good one.

[00:10:16] All right.

[00:10:17] All right, so my first word, I'm going to give the word first.

[00:10:22] Verdandeschicht.

[00:10:25] Verdandeschicht.

[00:10:26] So this is when you're just kind of dug into an utterly indefensible position,

[00:10:33] usually publicly, but this can also be private.

[00:10:36] And you can't go back.

[00:10:39] It's like you're too dug in.

[00:10:40] You're too committed.

[00:10:41] It's too much now a part of who you are.

[00:10:45] And maybe like a tiny part of you knows that what you're claiming and saying is indefensible.

[00:10:52] But instead of trying to just retreat, you have to double down.

[00:10:57] You have to even escalate it to the point where even the people who are defending

[00:11:02] the view that you're defending, the utterly indefensible view, are embarrassed by you.

[00:11:07] And you're carrying news on like Brett Weinstein, kind of an obvious example.

[00:11:12] He went Verdandeschicht in like 2018, probably somewhere around there.

[00:11:17] But your boy, Shai Davi Dai.

[00:11:20] Oh, my God.

[00:11:21] Such an example of this just descended into just pure insanity,

[00:11:26] just a lunatic thing that even the most staunch pro-Israel people are now trying to like disassociate himself with.

[00:11:34] This is the Columbia professor who is, I don't know, like I know that you know him or whatever.

[00:11:42] I not only know him, but I love him as a person.

[00:11:45] So I will will like bow out of saying anything other than he has dug in his heels in a way that I think is damaging.

[00:11:53] Definitely.

[00:11:54] How many things can you compare to Nazi Germany?

[00:11:58] Just utterly innocuous things.

[00:12:00] Can you compare to that?

[00:12:01] He really has like alienated even the people who would be most likely to support.

[00:12:08] There was a funny tweet that showed sort of like the various people from completely opposite perspectives,

[00:12:14] were like, really? Like, wait, what?

[00:12:15] That was when he said, this is Columbia University right now.

[00:12:19] And it was just like a bunch of people praying, like doing a very peaceful Muslim prayer.

[00:12:24] Right.

[00:12:24] And like even like the right wing crazy people were like, what's wrong with that?

[00:12:31] You know, that's Verdandeschecht, like clear Verdandeschecht.

[00:12:35] Today, some people on Twitter are saying I might be Verdandeschecht, but I don't think, you know.

[00:12:41] Well, part of Verdandeschecht is that you can't admit that you're Verdandeschecht.

[00:12:45] It's true. But, you know, I'll let the listeners judge for themselves whether objecting to like Texas

[00:12:51] sending in like over 100 state troopers and police for an utterly peaceful protest at UT Austin

[00:13:00] is objecting to that defensible.

[00:13:02] I mean, I think it is, but, you know, it could be Verdandeschecht.

[00:13:05] I guess you never know.

[00:13:07] Always watch out.

[00:13:08] Friends look out for friends.

[00:13:10] Verdandeschecht.

[00:13:11] Yeah, exactly.

[00:13:12] Okay, good.

[00:13:13] I like it.

[00:13:14] Okay, I'm going to go with your convention of saying the word first.

[00:13:17] I think that's more effective.

[00:13:19] This one is half made up.

[00:13:22] Half German.

[00:13:23] Versist altragé.

[00:13:25] This is altragé is a made up word of mine.

[00:13:27] It's just outrage.

[00:13:31] You're good at this.

[00:13:32] Thank you.

[00:13:32] This could be a recurring segment.

[00:13:34] So this is something we've talked about and I just don't think there's a word that

[00:13:39] captures it because there is like a real specific kind of moral outrage at minor

[00:13:46] infractions.

[00:13:47] So like righteous indignation, we've talked about shopping carts, like when people

[00:13:51] don't replace their shopping carts or whatever.

[00:13:53] Or like you get that feeling when you see somebody cut in line, like when

[00:13:57] you're at the airport and you're like, wait, are they just scamming me and

[00:14:00] pretending they have family up front?

[00:14:02] And like every ounce of my like Rawlsian sort of like intuition just crashes down

[00:14:09] on my psyche.

[00:14:10] And I'm like more outraged by that than I am by like the discourse around

[00:14:14] Israel for that moment.

[00:14:16] The brazenness of it and you're just kind of incredulous.

[00:14:19] Like why would you do that?

[00:14:21] You know?

[00:14:21] Right.

[00:14:21] And all things considered, it's a stupid thing that like, it doesn't

[00:14:24] matter that much, but it's just like a violation of like this contract that

[00:14:28] we have that like these little things matter.

[00:14:30] You know, like there goes society.

[00:14:33] And I feel like the phenomenology of it is it comes crashing down on you very

[00:14:37] fast when you see somebody doing one of these things and it can dissipate

[00:14:41] pretty fast.

[00:14:42] So how do you use that in a sentence?

[00:14:44] I felt resist altrager when I saw them cutting in line.

[00:14:47] Yeah, I like that.

[00:14:49] Yeah.

[00:14:49] The little just little outrages, like why would you do that?

[00:14:53] I don't think it's like you're more outraged than you are about the

[00:14:56] thing.

[00:14:56] No, it's just like disproportionate.

[00:14:58] Yeah.

[00:14:58] It's just disproportionate to what it is.

[00:15:00] It's like when you stub your toe and for a second, you swear that is the

[00:15:04] worst pain a human being could ever feel.

[00:15:06] And you know that it's not.

[00:15:07] Yeah.

[00:15:08] That's like when I hit my head on the corner of the cabinet.

[00:15:10] Then I left up.

[00:15:13] You need some possessive oomphagin.

[00:15:17] All right.

[00:15:18] My next one is, and again, I want to stress this is not based on any

[00:15:23] knowledge of German or German roots or the Germanic language.

[00:15:27] Weltzernachten.

[00:15:29] Weltzernachten.

[00:15:32] This is about something that you care about so much for a kind of defined

[00:15:40] period of time, but then one day inexplicably just stop caring about

[00:15:46] that thing.

[00:15:48] One of my favorite examples of this is the first season of serial where

[00:15:53] it was like everyone was so locked in on this case with Adnan and his trial

[00:15:59] and is he innocent?

[00:16:01] And there were all these witnesses that they were still interviewing

[00:16:04] and stuff like that.

[00:16:05] And it ends in a very uncertain place.

[00:16:09] And while it's going on, everybody is just, at least I was one of these

[00:16:15] people.

[00:16:15] I never listened.

[00:16:16] You never listened.

[00:16:17] Yeah.

[00:16:17] I was one of these people who like said all I wanted to talk about,

[00:16:21] like in retrospect, it might be embarrassing, but this is how it was.

[00:16:25] And I don't think I was alone.

[00:16:26] Once it ended, what was funny is a lot of stuff is up in the air, a lot

[00:16:31] of shady shit about the way the crime was prosecuted and a witness's

[00:16:35] statement.

[00:16:36] The case was still going on.

[00:16:37] It was such a phenomenon that like it brought a lot of public profile to

[00:16:41] what was happening.

[00:16:42] And so the story was still developing and they would even kind of give

[00:16:46] updates on serial, but nobody cared.

[00:16:49] There was this one witness, I hadn't even looked this up, but it was named

[00:16:53] Paul.

[00:16:54] And there was like an interview with Paul that was published somewhere

[00:16:57] else.

[00:16:57] And someone said to me, did you see that they had an interview of

[00:17:01] Paul and he answered some of those questions from serial?

[00:17:03] I was like, oh yeah, I heard that.

[00:17:05] Never bothered to even check what it was.

[00:17:07] And this was something that I was so invested in, the mystery of it.

[00:17:12] And I just think this is a real phenomenon.

[00:17:15] I think it could also be about like, you know, a girl or a guy that you're

[00:17:19] into.

[00:17:20] I was about to say it's like infatuation for ideas or things like

[00:17:25] akin to romantic infatuation.

[00:17:27] Akin, yeah.

[00:17:28] But it's just weird the way it's such an abrupt change.

[00:17:33] So I feel like we had this for Mr.

[00:17:36] Robot.

[00:17:37] Yes.

[00:17:37] Not so much because like, yeah, it wasn't so much because there was

[00:17:41] like shit ending or like whatever.

[00:17:43] One day we just stopped caring to talk about it.

[00:17:46] And maybe some of it is because the show's ideas weren't as compelling

[00:17:51] to us, but it didn't feel like we were so dissatisfied.

[00:17:55] It just was like, I have, I think maybe a mini version of this, like

[00:17:59] a lot.

[00:18:00] So I'll get into like two, three, four week spells of watching YouTube

[00:18:05] videos that are all about one topic.

[00:18:07] So I'll just be like martial arts.

[00:18:09] Right?

[00:18:09] Like I'll just be like four weeks watching videos about martial arts.

[00:18:12] And then one day it'll just stop.

[00:18:15] Like it's not, there's no rational, you didn't realize something about it.

[00:18:19] You just don't care about it.

[00:18:21] It just went weltzer nachten.

[00:18:26] I think nacht is night, right?

[00:18:29] Oh, it just, it just went to the night.

[00:18:31] It went to the night.

[00:18:32] It went gently into the night.

[00:18:35] So that was the one where I put a word that I knew into it.

[00:18:38] Yeah, no, totally.

[00:18:39] That's a great example.

[00:18:40] Just stuff you get into on YouTube and then it's like, oh, whatever.

[00:18:45] You know?

[00:18:45] All right.

[00:18:46] Yeah.

[00:18:46] Yeah.

[00:18:46] Yeah.

[00:18:47] It happens a lot.

[00:18:47] Mr.

[00:18:48] Robo is a really good example because it's not that I think it was bad.

[00:18:52] It was just, I stopped caring about it at all.

[00:18:54] Like the best things aren't vulnerable to veldt.

[00:18:58] Like I think most things we could be vulnerable to weltzer nachten, but

[00:19:03] like the best things aren't like twin peaks, deadwood.

[00:19:06] There's no weltzer nachten.

[00:19:08] Literally right before we started recording, we were talking about

[00:19:11] art that gets better.

[00:19:12] This like multiple, multiple watches or listens or whatever.

[00:19:16] Like for me, the rap of MF doom, like it can't lose that.

[00:19:19] Like it can never.

[00:19:20] Uh, question dark weltzer nachten or nine weltzer nachten?

[00:19:26] I felt like you remember, I felt like it jumped the shark.

[00:19:30] So I felt like I had more reason to lose enthusiasm, which I

[00:19:34] don't think is the, the weltzer nachten.

[00:19:36] I agree.

[00:19:37] Right.

[00:19:37] Not weltzer nachten.

[00:19:39] All right.

[00:19:39] My third and last one is vergun, vergnugen kringe.

[00:19:47] Where kringe is just cringe.

[00:19:49] Yeah.

[00:19:49] And that is something that other people have pointed out before.

[00:19:52] I don't think there's a word for it.

[00:19:54] It's not like hate watching or hate reading.

[00:19:57] It's when there's just some cringe thing that you just can't help but read.

[00:20:02] So we have, I'm not going to say who is it is, but there is a particular

[00:20:06] Twitter account that you and I sometimes text each other about that it's like,

[00:20:10] why am I continuing to follow this?

[00:20:12] Like it makes me mad every time this person posted this corny crew.

[00:20:17] I actually kind of like, well, clearly I like it in some way, but,

[00:20:23] but it bothers me.

[00:20:24] Like I morally am judging this person for doing it.

[00:20:27] Yeah.

[00:20:27] And there's some meta pleasure that I'm getting out of hating, but it's not hate.

[00:20:32] It's different than hate watching.

[00:20:33] Like it's milder.

[00:20:34] Much milder.

[00:20:35] Yeah.

[00:20:36] So what's the word?

[00:20:37] Vergnugen Kringe.

[00:20:39] The enjoyment of cringe.

[00:20:40] So in a sentence, it would be like, Oh man, he's really gotten Vergnugen Kringe.

[00:20:46] But like, like that would be indicating that you can't quit it even though.

[00:20:50] Yeah.

[00:20:50] Yeah.

[00:20:51] Right.

[00:20:51] Although I might describe that Twitter account as a Vergnugen Kringe account.

[00:20:56] Yeah.

[00:20:56] Because it like, people.

[00:21:03] All right.

[00:21:04] My last one.

[00:21:06] Brach meinenscheidt.

[00:21:08] Brach meinenscheidt.

[00:21:13] Brach meinenscheidt.

[00:21:14] What's that?

[00:21:15] That's when, that moment when you realize something that you previously

[00:21:20] liked actually sucks.

[00:21:24] We're prone to that I guess.

[00:21:26] I guess we could be in this.

[00:21:28] I don't think so though.

[00:21:30] I think we could be more Weltrenacht than this.

[00:21:33] Right.

[00:21:34] I'm hoping we're more like him.

[00:21:35] Yeah.

[00:21:35] Like, and I'm distinguished.

[00:21:36] I want to need to distinguish between these two things.

[00:21:39] Like the first one it's like, it doesn't suck.

[00:21:41] It's just you don't care about it anymore.

[00:21:45] Whereas this you realize actually is not good.

[00:21:48] So I think like the whole nation experienced this with Ted Lasso, you

[00:21:53] know, and it wasn't just, Oh, the second season or the like, it was just

[00:21:56] like, Oh wait, maybe this whole thing actually sucks.

[00:21:59] Right.

[00:22:00] I haven't tried to rewatch season one for fear of feeling.

[00:22:03] Yes.

[00:22:03] For feeling.

[00:22:05] Feeling.

[00:22:05] Brachmein and shite.

[00:22:09] Lin-Manuel Miranda, I feel like some people thought was Brachmein and shite.

[00:22:15] They had that.

[00:22:16] It was like, wait, I loved him.

[00:22:17] Like all I did was sing Hamilton lyrics and wait, does he suck?

[00:22:23] You know, you were on the vanguard of like, you couldn't feel

[00:22:27] Brachmein and shite.

[00:22:29] Not for that.

[00:22:29] Not for that, but other people could.

[00:22:31] Wait, is this a collective emotion?

[00:22:33] Cause like Ted Lasso and Lin-Manuel Miranda are still beloved by some, you

[00:22:37] know, um, so it doesn't have to be dual realization.

[00:22:40] Yeah.

[00:22:40] It could be just an individual realization.

[00:22:43] I do think like, like though I use those examples because other, you

[00:22:47] know, I think some percentage of people experienced Brachmein and

[00:22:51] shite regarding those two things.

[00:22:54] Like I feel like people might end up feeling that way about Taylor Swift.

[00:22:57] I have that in my notes and this is going to infuriate my assistant editor,

[00:23:05] but, uh, I think maybe we are entering a Brachmein and shite moment right

[00:23:11] now for Taylor Swift, but I don't think so.

[00:23:14] I think it'll be more like, uh, Mr.

[00:23:17] Robot where it's like, okay, I'm kind of done with this right now for

[00:23:21] now anyway, you know?

[00:23:23] But yeah.

[00:23:24] Yeah.

[00:23:24] I'm trying to think of some other good examples of like a, because it does

[00:23:28] feel like there is sometimes this collective, like, uh, yeah, really?

[00:23:32] Yeah.

[00:23:32] What were we thinking?

[00:23:34] And I certainly experienced this a lot.

[00:23:36] If you're a teacher, for example, and you've been assigning papers

[00:23:40] for a while in some class, and then you just go back and reread it in

[00:23:44] preparation for teaching it this year.

[00:23:46] Sometimes you're like, Oh wait, this paper actually isn't good.

[00:23:50] I feel that way for, you know, I went to a small school and in, in like our

[00:23:56] junior high and high school, there were certain people who just were

[00:23:59] like somehow were agreed on to be attractive, like they were the

[00:24:03] attractive ones.

[00:24:05] And at some point I realized they were never attractive.

[00:24:08] There was something about them that's like somebody with some pull

[00:24:12] decided that they thought they were attractive and then everybody like,

[00:24:15] you know, smoked the collective crack pipe.

[00:24:17] Yeah.

[00:24:18] And then just like the fog was lifted and then you're like, wait,

[00:24:21] what we thought that was attractive.

[00:24:23] Yeah.

[00:24:24] Yeah.

[00:24:24] I think with people brought, you experienced Brahman and

[00:24:27] shite quite a bit, like somebody that you really like, respect, like

[00:24:32] think is fun to hang out with.

[00:24:34] Like at a certain moment it can do, Oh wait, no, this person sucks.

[00:24:39] They, they're not good.

[00:24:40] There needs to be an additional, uh, a companion word for the

[00:24:44] feeling of disappointment when you realize it.

[00:24:46] Yeah.

[00:24:47] Yeah.

[00:24:47] Right.

[00:24:48] Right.

[00:24:48] This is just the phenomenon of experiencing it, but then also like,

[00:24:52] yeah, cause there's some self-examination.

[00:24:54] What was wrong with me that I, I love.

[00:24:57] Yeah.

[00:24:57] Like when you first said maybe season one of Ted lasso wasn't good.

[00:25:01] I hadn't really thought about it.

[00:25:02] Like I was just like, well, clearly there was a drop in quality.

[00:25:05] But then when you said like, maybe we were all just lonely and COVID

[00:25:08] and we needed like something to, you know, and it turns out to be,

[00:25:10] and I was like, ah, like maybe.

[00:25:13] No, that's right.

[00:25:14] Like I think it might be that.

[00:25:16] It wasn't just that they completely lost all their talent and ran out of ideas.

[00:25:21] It was just like, we were in a bad place collectively.

[00:25:26] But I don't know.

[00:25:26] I haven't gone back and watched it.

[00:25:28] And I like, I immediately jumped ship.

[00:25:32] I felt that very strongly with Ted lasso during season two.

[00:25:35] I was like, wait, like it takes like two episodes maybe for you.

[00:25:38] Wait, I hate this actually.

[00:25:40] This is so bad.

[00:25:41] Yeah.

[00:25:42] This is so bad.

[00:25:43] Yeah.

[00:25:43] And I was looking it up like, did they lose writers?

[00:25:46] No.

[00:25:46] Yeah.

[00:25:47] No, like yeah.

[00:25:48] All right.

[00:25:49] Well, you German listeners.

[00:25:51] Thank you Germans.

[00:25:53] Thank you for coming up with these words and please don't do, please

[00:25:57] don't email me corrections to the language I know.

[00:25:59] I know already.

[00:26:01] Definitely don't email me.

[00:26:03] Someone's going to email me a correcting of pronunciation for my

[00:26:06] made up words and I'm just going to double down.

[00:26:10] Yeah.

[00:26:10] That's what you should do.

[00:26:11] Right.

[00:26:11] You would get Verdanderschicht.

[00:26:13] I'm going to say in the original Germanic.

[00:26:18] In the Prussian saga.

[00:26:21] In the proto Germanic language of the.

[00:26:24] Yeah.

[00:26:25] All right.

[00:26:25] We'll be right back to talk about elephants.

[00:26:43] Eight.

[00:26:43] It's like a number eight.

[00:26:52] That's kind of a weird thing to be selling.

[00:26:54] Listen, you take this eight.

[00:26:58] It's very useful.

[00:27:01] Buy it.

[00:27:06] Why should I buy an eight and hang it on the wall?

[00:27:08] Welcome back to very bad wizards.

[00:27:10] This is the time where we like to take a moment and thank all of our listeners

[00:27:15] who support us, who get in touch with us and all the different ways that you do.

[00:27:19] But first we have a little request.

[00:27:22] A long time listener, a long time friend of the show, Farid on Vare.

[00:27:28] Also kind of a fellow skeptic on scientific measurement.

[00:27:33] His wife.

[00:27:35] I hope I'm not pronouncing this incorrectly.

[00:27:38] Yana or Janna on Vare is her family is in Gaza.

[00:27:45] She has a lot of family right now in Gaza, five siblings and a lot of their family.

[00:27:53] And all their homes have been destroyed and they are desperate to leave Gaza right now.

[00:28:01] Malnutrition is starting to set in.

[00:28:03] And so there is a GoFundMe that was started to help them get out of Gaza

[00:28:11] to safety temporarily.

[00:28:13] So if you can drop a few euros into that GoFundMe,

[00:28:21] if you so choose, we'll put a link out there.

[00:28:25] Help a long time listener of the podcast out, Farid on Vare and his wife and her family.

[00:28:33] He's a good dude. He's also social psychologist.

[00:28:35] Yes.

[00:28:37] Whether that works in one direction or the other.

[00:28:39] We also have another somewhat important announcement, not on the same level of scale.

[00:28:47] Yeah, it sort of brings things into perspective.

[00:28:49] Yeah.

[00:28:49] But we are, we have decided to go ad free for the indefinite future.

[00:28:57] This has been sort of a decision like that we've been pondering for a long time,

[00:29:01] but we've just felt for a while now that it's better to move to completely listener supported.

[00:29:08] And I think, yeah, I'll just feel better about that.

[00:29:11] Yeah. And, you know, we decided also that if we're, you know, for the extra time that we do have,

[00:29:18] we'd rather put that into putting out bonus content and just making our Patreon

[00:29:24] and that community, which is already, I think, a fairly thriving community that we're very proud of.

[00:29:30] So we are going to try, there's going to be some changes there in the Patreon,

[00:29:34] maybe a new tier and we'll keep you updated about that.

[00:29:38] That's still, that's still in flux for right now.

[00:29:42] I do want to say, I got to say right now, there's crackdowns at UT Austin,

[00:29:46] two of the last like five or six days and 100, over 100 people were arrested yesterday.

[00:29:52] And my daughter's, one of my daughter's good friends is in jail right now.

[00:29:57] She's in jail trying to wait for him.

[00:29:59] There's no info as to whether he'll be released or not,

[00:30:02] but just so unbelievably unacceptable, just open authoritarianism from UT,

[00:30:09] maybe surprisingly and also and certainly Abbott and the state police.

[00:30:14] So we might start some GoFundMe bail.

[00:30:19] It's so infuriating. It really is.

[00:30:21] It's just so outrageous.

[00:30:24] Anyway, if you would like to get in touch with us

[00:30:28] and maybe you will now, you can email us at verybadwizards.gmail.com.

[00:30:35] You can tweet at us at P's or at Tamler or at verybadwizards.

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[00:31:07] Is that the price? The price you have to pay.

[00:31:09] It's ironic, you know, like

[00:31:12] you Gen Z kids love irony, right?

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[00:31:55] The dollar and up will be more like you guys just telling us you want to throw

[00:31:59] us a couple of bucks, but you also get my compilation of beats.

[00:32:02] But just for a couple of dollars more at two dollars and up per episode,

[00:32:06] you get access to our back catalog of bonus content and stuff that we're

[00:32:11] continuing to create, including our Ambulator's podcast that

[00:32:16] we have one more season, half a season to go.

[00:32:19] We have like eight more episodes, I think.

[00:32:21] Part of what we'll do is maybe just use our tears to solicit stuff

[00:32:27] to talk about once we're done with that, because we will need ideas.

[00:32:31] At five dollars and up, you get all of the bonus content

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[00:32:50] and at ten dollars and up, you get all of that.

[00:32:53] Plus, you get to ask us anything once a month.

[00:32:56] The audio of that ask us anything is available to all bonus content tiers.

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[00:33:22] But we really appreciate the support that you guys give.

[00:33:26] Yeah, and we just put out a call for questions, by the way, for ask us anything.

[00:33:31] We'll probably record that this weekend.

[00:33:33] Yeah, the episode today came out of

[00:33:35] suggestions from our Patreon supporters, so thank you for that.

[00:33:38] Yeah, thank you everybody for doing that.

[00:33:42] We have the denial of death.

[00:33:43] That was the winner.

[00:33:44] I don't know if we announced it, but that was the winner

[00:33:46] officially of the listener selected episode.

[00:33:50] And so we got sitting on my dresser.

[00:33:52] The book is sitting on my dresser,

[00:33:53] staring at me every night before I go to bed, causing me all kinds of insomnia.

[00:33:59] All right. Thanks, everybody.

[00:34:00] Let's get back to the episode.

[00:34:02] All right, let's dive into our main topic, elephant souls.

[00:34:06] So this is an article actually from 2013 called Do Elephants Have Souls

[00:34:12] on the Evidence for Non-Human Intelligence, Awareness and Emotions by

[00:34:16] Katrin Kuyper in The New Atlantis.

[00:34:20] So, OK, so this is a very long article, but very good.

[00:34:25] She takes a deep dive into the minds of elephants asking some real fundamental

[00:34:30] questions about the nature of their cognition, their emotion, their culture,

[00:34:34] maybe even their spirituality, their morality.

[00:34:38] It's I think use this word sprawling,

[00:34:41] sort of, but in a good way, like a very broad take on what turns out to be just,

[00:34:47] I think, a fascinating topic, and I think it's beautifully written.

[00:34:51] It draws on scientific research,

[00:34:54] anecdotal evidence from people who've interacted with elephants and even some

[00:34:57] literature to really describe in great detail these majestic creatures,

[00:35:04] these elephants, their psychology, their society,

[00:35:06] and really whether they have anything that we might consider a soul.

[00:35:10] And I think even though this isn't the main point of her article,

[00:35:14] I think by the end, I realize that what this also does is make us

[00:35:18] question in a fundamental way what it means to be human by comparing these

[00:35:24] creatures to us. Yeah.

[00:35:25] And I don't think we come out very good in the comparison.

[00:35:28] No.

[00:35:29] You know, like elephants really are a rare species that just seem

[00:35:36] undeniably, like uncontroversially better than us.

[00:35:41] With chimpanzees, you know, they're extremely violent.

[00:35:44] Dolphins, I guess, can engage in some terrible violence.

[00:35:49] But elephants, it's just like, oh, wait, these are superior creatures

[00:35:54] in almost every way without sacrificing just the sophistication

[00:36:00] and complexity of their social and intellectual life.

[00:36:06] Like, it's kind of amazing.

[00:36:07] Yeah. I like cringing at my own use of the word majestic.

[00:36:10] But like, I think it's just apt.

[00:36:12] It's in comparison to us.

[00:36:14] It's just you texted me earlier that you were like emotional reading this.

[00:36:17] Yeah. Like there were times like I read it twice and there were times

[00:36:20] where I was like kind of fighting back tears.

[00:36:22] Yeah.

[00:36:23] I don't know how you felt about it.

[00:36:24] I felt that too.

[00:36:25] And I also felt the richness of the way they experience

[00:36:29] this life is not what we imagine a non-human animal is capable of.

[00:36:38] You know what I was just like, I couldn't shake the feeling by the end

[00:36:43] of this is with all of the cognitive,

[00:36:47] communicative, emotional abilities that they seem to have and living

[00:36:53] in the world that they do where humans have become the dominant species.

[00:36:57] I can't help but think like they must all be a little sad.

[00:37:02] Yeah, yeah.

[00:37:03] And that's hard for me to like get.

[00:37:05] I can't rid myself of this feeling that just makes me really sad.

[00:37:08] I feel very sad about that too.

[00:37:10] I also felt a little like, you know,

[00:37:13] in 12 monkeys destroying humanity in order to let these incredible,

[00:37:19] magnificent creatures actually inhabit the earth without being trained

[00:37:24] and put into circuses and poached for their ivory and all of that shit.

[00:37:29] Wouldn't be the worst thing if the elephants could just have free reign.

[00:37:32] They're not going to take over the world.

[00:37:34] They're not even really predators or especially violent, except when they get

[00:37:39] like the high testosterone teenager.

[00:37:42] Yeah, right.

[00:37:44] I can picture them all sort of like in West Side Story,

[00:37:47] switchblade knife fights, you know,

[00:37:50] dripping urine from their from their penises.

[00:37:54] Yeah. And it just raises so many interesting

[00:37:57] questions about like the taboo against anthropomorphizing animals,

[00:38:04] even for the well-intentioned people, for the people who aren't like Descartes

[00:38:08] and thinking that they're just like mechanisms.

[00:38:11] Yeah, high level machines.

[00:38:13] You know, still us trying to understand

[00:38:17] an elephant experiences is problematic in all sorts of ways because

[00:38:23] they have a completely different way of interacting with the world that we do,

[00:38:27] which isn't to say that they don't have any way of interacting with the world.

[00:38:30] But it's just very different from Mars.

[00:38:32] Yeah, there's this interesting balance.

[00:38:34] And I think that's a good place to start where well, there's two things.

[00:38:37] OK, one, I think that there is a very deep cultural tradition.

[00:38:41] I don't know if it's particularly Christian, Judeo-Christian.

[00:38:45] And maybe that influenced this.

[00:38:46] But I think that there is at least an independent or perhaps parallel

[00:38:50] strain of thinking that that has always been deeply suspicious of attributing

[00:38:55] any human like traits, desires, motivations, goals to animals,

[00:39:00] especially in the scientific study of animals.

[00:39:02] And this came to its peak in behaviorism in mid century,

[00:39:08] 20th century, where you were ridiculed if you even dared to speak of

[00:39:15] like the inner mental state of animals.

[00:39:17] Yeah.

[00:39:18] And because all of their research was so much with like pigeons and rats

[00:39:23] and other animals and focused on behavior, it was just straight up taboo.

[00:39:29] Like you said, are unscientific to in your theorizing to have a role for an

[00:39:34] intermental state for people too, but especially.

[00:39:37] Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

[00:39:38] It's almost somewhat consistent from the behavior since they would apply that

[00:39:43] to people as well.

[00:39:44] However, implausibly, at least it wasn't trying to set human beings apart in that way.

[00:39:51] Yeah, that's right.

[00:39:52] And like I've always like I was trained explicitly in this way that we should

[00:39:57] never attribute these mental states to animals or at least that should be the

[00:40:02] stance that we go into it with, right?

[00:40:04] Like you should go into the study of these creatures assuming that they're

[00:40:09] like Cartesian robots, unless you really have evidence otherwise.

[00:40:14] I think that's some of that started to change with the neuroscience of like

[00:40:19] emotion, like affective neuroscience, where we realized that animal models

[00:40:24] of understanding human emotion were pretty good.

[00:40:27] And so we could people became a bit more comfortable saying like animals have

[00:40:31] fear and anger.

[00:40:34] Now, I remember reading like a while ago, a nice defense of anthropomorphizing

[00:40:38] animals that sort of changed my mind about this.

[00:40:41] And they were pointing out that the term

[00:40:44] anthropomorphism originated with a warning for humans to attribute

[00:40:50] human like traits to the gods.

[00:40:52] That's what the sin of anthropomorphism is.

[00:40:55] Right?

[00:40:56] Like, don't dare think that the gods have have like what we have.

[00:41:01] That's wrong.

[00:41:02] And then we sort of like pushed it down

[00:41:05] and said that this is we shouldn't do this to animals.

[00:41:09] I think it's really weird that we have so much reluctance if you've been around

[00:41:14] animals for any amount of time, it seems so fucking weird to think

[00:41:18] that they're that they don't have a mental life.

[00:41:20] Yeah, no, it's crazy.

[00:41:21] And it feels like that should be the default.

[00:41:24] I mean, like we have evolutionary ties with a lot of these animals.

[00:41:30] You know, it gets a little complicated

[00:41:31] if you're talking about like an octopus or something like that.

[00:41:34] But when you're talking about apes and you're talking about

[00:41:36] mammals in general, dogs, it's like there's this anecdote in the essay where

[00:41:44] this woman, Daphne Sheldrick, describes her involvement in writing articles

[00:41:48] about animal behavior for the wildlife clubs of Kenya schools,

[00:41:52] where they have a lot of elephants, and then she reads the literature.

[00:41:55] And it just turns out to be convoluted

[00:41:58] because they're committed to this mechanistic and like rigorously

[00:42:03] unanthropomorphizing and not even just anthropomorphizing,

[00:42:07] but just attributing mental states to these animals.

[00:42:09] They're so committed to rejecting that,

[00:42:11] that to try to explain behavior becomes very difficult.

[00:42:14] She says, I attributed this to the fact

[00:42:17] that science precluded researchers from interpreting animal behavior

[00:42:21] in an anthropomorphic way, and as such, they came up with

[00:42:24] complicated explanations as to why an animal was behaving in a certain way,

[00:42:28] when in fact the answer was pretty simple.

[00:42:30] One simply had to compare it to the likely response of the human

[00:42:34] animal if subjected to the same set of circumstances.

[00:42:37] So, you know, the Dennett intentional stance.

[00:42:40] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Rest in peace.

[00:42:42] Yeah. Rest in peace, Dan Dennett.

[00:42:44] But his view on the intentional stance was it is a extremely useful way.

[00:42:51] And he was talking about this with humans of explaining the behavior

[00:42:56] of humans, and if you go mechanistic or try to explain it at the level

[00:43:00] of neurons, it's just not going to be as explanatory as if you take

[00:43:04] the intentional stance and assume that they have mental states.

[00:43:07] It's exactly the same for animals or at least certain animals.

[00:43:11] And of course, you could get it wrong,

[00:43:12] but you can get it wrong for humans too.

[00:43:14] There's no clear dividing line.

[00:43:16] And so it's like even scientifically from just a purely descriptive

[00:43:21] and explanatory way of trying to understand the phenomenon,

[00:43:25] it seems utterly misguided.

[00:43:27] Yeah. And I feel like we've sort of agreed as in behavioral science

[00:43:31] that there are different levels of explanation where you can just say,

[00:43:33] OK, like I'm interested in like the neural mechanisms of behavior.

[00:43:38] And so when I'm studying that,

[00:43:40] I'm not going to be concerned with desires and goals or whatever.

[00:43:44] But that feels like that's very clearly doesn't mean that most

[00:43:49] of those people think that humans don't have that.

[00:43:51] I suspect that language is the huge thing

[00:43:54] that is what prevents us from doing this.

[00:43:56] But I still think that that's fairly thick headed,

[00:43:58] like just because an animal can't tell you.

[00:44:00] They still react in the same way that a person who's not speaking,

[00:44:05] you can read their emotions and their behavior and their facial expressions.

[00:44:13] And you can predict because of that how they might behave.

[00:44:17] You can do that with these other animals.

[00:44:20] And the best way of describing why you can do that is through a kind of intentional stance.

[00:44:27] I do think that one of the big reasons why it seems obvious to some people

[00:44:34] that these animals have complex emotions and desires and goals

[00:44:38] and behaviors and memories and all of that stuff is simply like they've

[00:44:44] actually lived with these animals, like the people who have the richest

[00:44:48] understanding of the behavior of elephants specifically.

[00:44:51] Clearly, there are people who have spent a lot of time around them.

[00:44:53] And there's something about the scientific method that requires a distancing.

[00:44:58] And we don't really have with obviously a lot of exceptions like Jane Goodall

[00:45:02] being a huge exception, but there is no real anthropology for animals

[00:45:06] in the same way that there is for other cultures.

[00:45:08] And I think that people like Jane Goodall are often kind of like people

[00:45:13] laugh about them behind their back because they think that they're

[00:45:16] exaggerating the mental life of these animals.

[00:45:19] Like this guy, Wesley Smith that we're going to talk about.

[00:45:22] You want to talk about the villain?

[00:45:24] Voldemort of like bioethicists.

[00:45:27] But yeah, let's say that.

[00:45:29] So toward the beginning, she writes,

[00:45:31] animals are often celebrated for virtues that they seem to embody.

[00:45:34] Dogs for loyalty, bears for courage, dolphins for altruism and so on.

[00:45:38] But what does it really mean for them to model these things?

[00:45:40] When people act virtuously, we give them credit for well-chosen behavior.

[00:45:43] And animals, it's presumed, do so without choosing.

[00:45:46] From a religious anthropocentric perspective,

[00:45:49] it might be said that while animal virtues do not entail morality for the animals

[00:45:52] themselves, they reveal to us the goodness in creation.

[00:45:55] As the medieval theologian Johannes Skotis Eriudgina wrote,

[00:45:59] In a wonderful and inexpressible way, God is created in his creatures.

[00:46:02] From a more biological view,

[00:46:04] it might be noted that people mostly do not choose their dispositions either.

[00:46:07] The behavioral tendencies are more determined than we like to tell

[00:46:09] ourselves, and the blame and credit for such things are often misspelled

[00:46:13] in human context, too.

[00:46:14] But the latter idea that humans, although capable of conscious

[00:46:17] self-direction, are as mutely carried along by the forces of selection

[00:46:20] as your friendly neighborhood amoeba, simply elides the question.

[00:46:23] While the former raises many more,

[00:46:25] the tiger is as much God's creature as the lamb.

[00:46:27] In any case, the capacity for choosing is a binary conceit

[00:46:30] that gestures at something much fuller, an inner realm of awareness,

[00:46:34] selfhood and possibility. In other words, a soul.

[00:46:36] And here's where she talks about what she means by soul.

[00:46:39] Like she's not talking here about a soul

[00:46:40] in any spiritual, you know, dualistic way or in or at least not a religious way.

[00:46:45] But rather, she says what we mean when we say soul, like when we say

[00:46:50] what it means for someone to bear it, for music to have it,

[00:46:52] for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved.

[00:46:56] And that's the beginning of the picture that she's trying to build

[00:46:59] of these complex creatures.

[00:47:02] What is really preventing us from thinking of them

[00:47:05] just as rich terms as we think of humans who who we believe

[00:47:10] have a soul?

[00:47:11] I often wonder who are the outliers here?

[00:47:14] Because, like you said, people who interact with these animals

[00:47:19] don't seem for the most part, unless they're like

[00:47:23] too science-pilled to allow their just normal emotions

[00:47:29] and way of processing experience to influence them.

[00:47:34] But like most people, I think, I mean, if you think about

[00:47:37] how people act about their dogs, right?

[00:47:41] Like there's nobody thinks this about dogs who has a dog.

[00:47:46] There might be people who work with dogs

[00:47:49] who try to spin some deflationary account of why they behave the way.

[00:47:55] And it's they don't actually love you.

[00:47:57] They don't they're not actually loyal to you.

[00:47:59] They're not. But but normal people don't do that, I think.

[00:48:02] I wonder if normal people even do it about elephants.

[00:48:07] Yeah, I think you're right.

[00:48:08] I think that they don't.

[00:48:09] And I think that as evidence, you can see how easy it is for people

[00:48:14] to act in a way that seems like they're attributing

[00:48:17] mental states to machines.

[00:48:20] I think it's very easy for people to view all kinds of things

[00:48:23] as intentional agents.

[00:48:24] Maybe that's the source of the scientific skepticism.

[00:48:27] She talks about Nagel's What is it like to be a bat?

[00:48:30] And I think she's fair to say, like, it's not like we shouldn't be concerned

[00:48:33] that we can get out of control in attributing these things.

[00:48:35] Like these animals really do have different perceptual mechanisms.

[00:48:40] Right. So she says the elephants have like shitty vision

[00:48:43] and a really good sense of smell.

[00:48:45] And so trying to understand their phenomenology,

[00:48:49] like we probably should be a little bit wary of over attributing

[00:48:52] the human experience to them because they really are different.

[00:48:56] In the same way that anthropologists might say people from radically

[00:48:59] different cultures, you should be a little bit wary of attributing

[00:49:02] your concepts or whatever.

[00:49:03] So it's healthy, I think, to be at least a little bit controlled in this.

[00:49:09] We should distinguish two different things.

[00:49:10] There's the not wanting to attribute specifically human

[00:49:16] characteristics like maybe jealousy, romantic jealousy or something

[00:49:20] like that to an elephant.

[00:49:22] And then there's just denying that they have these experiences at all

[00:49:27] and that it isn't just a complex mechanism

[00:49:31] acting in ways that kind of trick us into thinking

[00:49:35] that they have minds and souls and emotions and sentience.

[00:49:41] What's crazy is that if you think that, right,

[00:49:44] which I think some scientists genuinely do, then it's a damn amazing trick.

[00:49:50] There are a lot of things that have been said to be uniquely human.

[00:49:55] Yeah. Yeah. So like there's a great quote about this.

[00:49:58] Someone says man has called himself, among other things,

[00:50:01] the rational animal, the moral animal, the consciously choosing animal,

[00:50:04] the deliberately evil animal, the political animal, the tool making animal,

[00:50:08] the historical animal, the commodity making animal, the economical animal,

[00:50:12] the foreseeing animal, the promising animal, the death knowing animal,

[00:50:15] the art making or aesthetic animal, the explaining animal,

[00:50:17] the cause bearing animal, the classifying animal, the measuring animal,

[00:50:21] the counting animal, the metaphor making animal, the talking animal,

[00:50:24] the laughing animal, the religious animal, the spiritual animal,

[00:50:26] the metaphysical animal, the wondering animal,

[00:50:29] man it seems is the self-predicating animal.

[00:50:34] Yeah, that's great, right?

[00:50:35] Like when you look at some of the literature on,

[00:50:37] or just even psych textbooks, you'll hear like,

[00:50:39] you know what's weird is that humans are the only animal

[00:50:42] that sheds tears.

[00:50:44] Humans are the only animal that laughs.

[00:50:46] Or like, this is the uniquely human trait.

[00:50:49] And it's like we're constantly looking

[00:50:51] for the one thing that separates us.

[00:50:53] And the truth is when you

[00:50:55] at least take the animal kingdom writ large,

[00:50:58] other than language,

[00:50:59] I don't think that there's anything left.

[00:51:02] Yeah, and maybe even not language

[00:51:04] if defined broadly enough.

[00:51:06] If defined broadly.

[00:51:08] But I do think it's important to distinguish

[00:51:10] the kind of anthropomorphizing

[00:51:13] that you should be a little skeptical of,

[00:51:15] but yeah, the other alternative isn't

[00:51:18] to just not attribute anything to them.

[00:51:21] So she goes through the reasons

[00:51:24] for the taboo against anthropomorphism.

[00:51:28] Yeah, she mentions three that we've sort of talked

[00:51:31] about a couple of them.

[00:51:33] So the one that it's hard to know

[00:51:35] even what another human being experiences.

[00:51:37] And so animals with different biology

[00:51:40] might have like a radically different phenomenology.

[00:51:42] Like, you know, the bad thing,

[00:51:44] which seems reasonable.

[00:51:45] Yeah.

[00:51:46] The unscientific, right?

[00:51:49] The behavioral science that tried

[00:51:51] to be as rigorous as possible,

[00:51:52] that landed on some version of behaviorism

[00:51:54] that said behavior is the only thing

[00:51:56] that ought to be studied because it's objective,

[00:51:58] kind of worked its way

[00:52:00] into behavioral science in general.

[00:52:01] And so the unscientific nature

[00:52:03] of maybe positing mental events

[00:52:07] in non-human animals

[00:52:09] that can never be objectively rigorously tested.

[00:52:12] Yeah.

[00:52:13] So you might get left out of the building.

[00:52:15] And then the last one,

[00:52:17] which I think really accounts for a lot of this,

[00:52:19] like maybe at the heart of the motivation

[00:52:22] to keep up these ways of thinking

[00:52:24] is that somehow the view that in elevating animals

[00:52:30] to the status of human in many of these abilities

[00:52:34] is to debase humans.

[00:52:35] It's actually bringing humans down.

[00:52:37] And that somehow seems threatening,

[00:52:39] whether it's threatening religiously

[00:52:41] or existentially or something.

[00:52:43] But the feeling that we're special

[00:52:45] seems to be driving a lot of anti-anthropomorphic thinking.

[00:52:50] Which is so like, I have so little sympathy

[00:52:53] with that view on every level.

[00:52:56] If that's the motivation for anybody engaging

[00:52:59] in like anti-scientific approaches

[00:53:03] and attitudes towards non-human animals,

[00:53:06] it's like fucking Ressentiment or something.

[00:53:09] It's just, it's weak.

[00:53:11] It's pathetic that we have to try to like raise ourselves

[00:53:15] above the animals by like failing to notice

[00:53:18] obvious things about them.

[00:53:20] Yeah.

[00:53:21] And it's one thing if it's explicitly motivated

[00:53:24] by a belief that like God created humans

[00:53:27] to have like a soul and animals

[00:53:28] not to have a soul or something like that.

[00:53:31] Then I just think you're wrong about that.

[00:53:33] But this is the vibe you get like throughout,

[00:53:36] she talks about poachers

[00:53:37] or people who have engaged in hunting.

[00:53:39] When she talks about killing elephants,

[00:53:41] people like Teddy Roosevelt,

[00:53:42] who are just like, yeah, I got to like keep these tusks.

[00:53:46] It just seems like, yeah, I guess your view

[00:53:50] that you have dominion over the animals

[00:53:52] and that you're superior to the animals

[00:53:54] is either so strong that it's allowing you

[00:53:56] to turn off a moral sense

[00:53:59] or you are purposefully turning off the moral sense

[00:54:03] in order to be able to engage in this kind of behavior.

[00:54:04] I don't know which it is,

[00:54:05] but in both cases, I think it is pitiful.

[00:54:07] Yeah.

[00:54:08] I think that when he talks about the fact

[00:54:09] that he wants to shoot an elephant,

[00:54:10] he's not pretending that it's because

[00:54:14] of our exalted status within the universe.

[00:54:18] Maybe he did, I don't know.

[00:54:20] But it seems like he just wants to shoot elephants

[00:54:23] because of the challenge of it.

[00:54:24] And it's horrible.

[00:54:25] I think it's like, it's horrific to wanna do that.

[00:54:29] But it's a little different from the people

[00:54:31] who keep trying to come up with all the different ways

[00:54:36] that we are superior to these creatures.

[00:54:38] And it's like, we're being defensive about it.

[00:54:44] We're just like, except that we are who we are,

[00:54:46] we're one part of the animal kingdom,

[00:54:49] like all these other animals.

[00:54:51] And the idea that scientists would try to do this

[00:54:55] seems very anti-science.

[00:54:57] It's very much like we are continuous with nature.

[00:55:00] That's the whole point.

[00:55:02] Except for those who take it to that next level,

[00:55:06] like the behaviorists,

[00:55:07] who also just do that with other human beings.

[00:55:10] And then they're consistent.

[00:55:12] It's psychopathic, but it's consistent at least.

[00:55:15] If that's their conception of science,

[00:55:17] as it really has to be this view from nowhere.

[00:55:21] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[00:55:23] Should we go through some of the...

[00:55:25] It's hard to communicate the richness

[00:55:28] that you have by the end of reading this.

[00:55:30] But I think it's at least worth going through

[00:55:32] some of the things that these elephants do

[00:55:35] that you might just not think that they do.

[00:55:39] Like mourning their dead.

[00:55:40] Like the huge significance

[00:55:42] that they seem to put on the dead

[00:55:47] was like striking and eerie,

[00:55:49] and eerily spiritual.

[00:55:51] Burial rituals.

[00:55:53] Yeah, so like they bury to the extent that they can.

[00:55:56] They'll put like leaves and dirt on top of their dead.

[00:56:00] They'll sit with them sometimes for a long time,

[00:56:04] like a day just next to the dead body.

[00:56:07] Whenever they come up on even the bones of elephants,

[00:56:14] they will have moments of silence.

[00:56:17] It's crazy.

[00:56:19] Clearly they're recognizing something about death

[00:56:22] that other animals might not recognize

[00:56:25] and that I would have thought as human.

[00:56:27] Which made me really think,

[00:56:29] do they have a fear of death?

[00:56:31] Yeah, I mean they might.

[00:56:34] In the interview I did in the Very Bad Wizard book

[00:56:37] with Franz de Waal,

[00:56:38] I lead the introduction to the interview goes like this.

[00:56:42] Two elephants walk at night.

[00:56:45] There's heavy rain

[00:56:46] and the older elephant slips and falls in the mud.

[00:56:49] She's unable to get up.

[00:56:50] The younger elephant, unrelated to her companion,

[00:56:53] stays with her for most of the night.

[00:56:55] The next day a group of mahouts,

[00:56:57] the elephant caretakers,

[00:56:59] which we learn about in this article too,

[00:57:01] try to hoist the elephant up from her feet

[00:57:04] with braces and ropes.

[00:57:05] In all the commotion a crowd has gathered,

[00:57:08] the younger elephant remains

[00:57:10] by the side of her fallen friend.

[00:57:12] The mahouts and the crowd shout for her

[00:57:14] to move out of the way

[00:57:14] so that they can get better leverage,

[00:57:16] but she won't budge.

[00:57:17] Instead she burrows her head under the body

[00:57:19] of the other elephant and tries to lift her up.

[00:57:21] She does this several times,

[00:57:23] risking injury in the attempts.

[00:57:25] Incredibly the elephant appears to recognize

[00:57:27] that the mahouts want to help rather than hurt her friend.

[00:57:31] She times her pushes, or so it seemed to me,

[00:57:34] with the hoisting of the mahouts.

[00:57:36] And I remember that one of its grad students

[00:57:38] showed me this video and I was so blown away by it,

[00:57:41] I was so moved by it.

[00:57:43] It was absolutely beautiful.

[00:57:45] I don't know how you don't call something like that

[00:57:49] moral when you're risking your own life

[00:57:52] to save a non-relative, which they do.

[00:57:56] They're very communal and they take care of their own.

[00:57:59] They take care of their young

[00:58:00] and they educate their young

[00:58:03] and instruct them of the norms of the community.

[00:58:07] And yeah, it's very hard to think of that as non-moral

[00:58:13] even if it is not exactly in the way

[00:58:16] that we conceptualize morality.

[00:58:19] And again, I was just arguing,

[00:58:22] I have a student who seems to not believe

[00:58:25] in anything like altruism in humans.

[00:58:27] So okay, if you don't believe that even humans

[00:58:30] are doing anything for the sake of another, then fine.

[00:58:34] You're being consistent.

[00:58:38] But there are plenty of anecdotes

[00:58:39] of elephants helping humans.

[00:58:42] Birds, there's this thing.

[00:58:44] Yeah, that thing about birds.

[00:58:46] Go ahead if you have that up.

[00:58:48] Yeah, staff members at the elephant sanctuary

[00:58:51] told me of an incident with one of their girls

[00:58:54] who spotted a fallen bird outside her barn

[00:58:57] and ran right over to it utterly distraught.

[00:58:59] She crooned and stroked it

[00:59:01] and did not settle down

[00:59:03] until it had been properly laid to rest.

[00:59:05] What did this mean to her exactly?

[00:59:07] We don't know, but she was clearly very moved

[00:59:09] by a fellow creature's woe

[00:59:11] and had no trouble seeing it for what it was.

[00:59:14] Different life forms though they were.

[00:59:16] How sad when we quote,

[00:59:18] higher animals who share this gift

[00:59:21] convince ourselves to dull it.

[00:59:23] That's a key line, right?

[00:59:26] We can do this.

[00:59:27] We can feel sad when we see a fallen bird,

[00:59:29] but we're like dulling that part of ourselves

[00:59:33] by refusing on unprincipled grounds

[00:59:38] to attribute that to other complex mammals.

[00:59:43] Yeah.

[00:59:44] One of the things that I think has to be convincing

[00:59:47] for the hardcore science heads

[00:59:50] is the brain of an elephant is huge.

[00:59:57] They similarly are born with brains

[01:00:00] that are a third the size of the mature brain.

[01:00:03] They have to be nurtured for the first couple of years

[01:00:05] and their brains get to be big and complex.

[01:00:08] And that just has to be clearly tied.

[01:00:14] Like that alone makes me think,

[01:00:17] just like murdering these guys in cold blood.

[01:00:21] Like how could you think that these animals don't suffer

[01:00:24] and that they don't care?

[01:00:25] Because of people like Wesley Smith,

[01:00:29] who is I guess a bioethicist,

[01:00:33] just pure evil,

[01:00:35] like whose whole identity and career

[01:00:40] is based on exactly what you're talking about,

[01:00:43] which is refusing to and mocking the people

[01:00:47] who attribute emotions and complex behavior

[01:00:52] and even moral behavior to animals.

[01:00:56] So he talks about Matthew Scully's book,

[01:00:59] which is like this kind of religious Bush X speech writer

[01:01:04] like George W. Bush speech writer

[01:01:07] who wrote this book about the evils of factory farm,

[01:01:11] but from a kind of Christian perspective

[01:01:13] where it's like if we have dominion over the animals,

[01:01:18] like we're not supposed to treat them like this.

[01:01:20] And so she writes that this guy characterizes,

[01:01:26] Scully's book is outrageously anthropomorphic,

[01:01:29] literally talking about like pigs on factory farms

[01:01:32] being tortured and saying like, that's bad

[01:01:35] and describe some of the writings of Jane Goodall

[01:01:38] as pure figments of her imagination.

[01:01:42] Goodall almost screeches as she anthropomorphizes away.

[01:01:46] She's like shrill about her anthropomorphizing.

[01:01:51] She's laid and labile.

[01:01:52] Just like this guy, unbelievable.

[01:01:56] And so she writes in Smith's view,

[01:01:58] Scully and Goodall go wrong

[01:01:59] by inferring emotional states

[01:02:01] from animals observable behavior.

[01:02:04] Smith also criticized an elementary school primer

[01:02:07] on farm animals as propaganda

[01:02:10] for anthropomorphically aimed items such as this.

[01:02:14] Cow fact, mother cows separated from their calves

[01:02:17] by offense will moo loudly and seem very upset.

[01:02:21] They'll wait through hunger, cold and bad weather

[01:02:23] to be with their calves.

[01:02:25] Smith does not dispute that the mooing takes place.

[01:02:28] If there's anything about animal psychology

[01:02:29] that would seem to be pretty well established

[01:02:32] is mother's attachment to their young.

[01:02:34] But apparently the suggestion that this behavior indicates

[01:02:37] the presence of recognizable emotions

[01:02:40] is a dangerously anthropomorphic idea

[01:02:42] to be putting in the heads of children

[01:02:44] because then they're not gonna think

[01:02:46] that it's okay for them to just kill all these animals

[01:02:49] for no reason, for pleasure,

[01:02:51] like fucking Teddy Roosevelt, right?

[01:02:53] Right, and for McDonald's.

[01:02:54] And for McDonald's.

[01:02:56] No, it's hard not to read sometimes

[01:02:58] like a systems justification view of what's going on here.

[01:03:03] Yes, it's hard not to read that in a lot of things.

[01:03:05] In a lot of domains of contemporary life.

[01:03:10] Okay, like some other things that elephants clearly do

[01:03:15] is well for one they pass the Rouge test,

[01:03:19] the mirror test of self recognition

[01:03:21] which some other animals seem to pass,

[01:03:23] but that's basically.

[01:03:24] But it's hard, like dolphins,

[01:03:25] chimpanzees, baby dogs, but it's a little unclear I think.

[01:03:29] Humans of only a certain age.

[01:03:32] And the most simple version of this is you,

[01:03:35] it's called the Rouge test because you put some makeup

[01:03:37] like a red dot on the cheek of say a child

[01:03:41] and you put a mirror in front of them

[01:03:43] and if they reach for their own face

[01:03:46] to try to get rid of it,

[01:03:48] it shows that they recognize that that's them.

[01:03:51] Which is a hard thing to pass.

[01:03:53] Tool use, right?

[01:03:56] There's no evidence that elephants are making tools

[01:03:59] and handing them down, like they don't have wrenches.

[01:04:01] But they clearly are doing things

[01:04:03] like they're making use of things in their environment

[01:04:05] like sticks or like there was one story

[01:04:07] about elephants plugging up a bell,

[01:04:11] like a warning, like what was it?

[01:04:13] Like a bell that alerted that they were leaving

[01:04:17] whatever their enclosure was.

[01:04:18] So they would plug it up so that it wouldn't ring.

[01:04:20] Yeah, they'd plug it up with mud, yeah.

[01:04:23] With mud.

[01:04:24] And then there's the communication stuff, right?

[01:04:26] Which is mind blowing.

[01:04:28] Yeah.

[01:04:29] I think we're just scratching the surface.

[01:04:30] I'm sure.

[01:04:31] Like that's the thing is we're just scratching

[01:04:33] the surface.

[01:04:34] They're probably doing stuff at a level of sophistication

[01:04:38] that we can't conceive of

[01:04:39] because they are different kinds of creatures.

[01:04:42] Still, that doesn't mean it's any less complex

[01:04:44] even if we are barred or at least it's very difficult

[01:04:48] for us to kind of discern exactly what the experience is

[01:04:53] and maybe even impossible.

[01:04:55] Yeah.

[01:04:56] Yeah.

[01:04:56] And it took us a while to even figure out

[01:05:01] that elephants were vocalizing in this wide range.

[01:05:07] I remember, like it blew my mind when I first heard it.

[01:05:09] So they make sounds that are audible to our ears

[01:05:13] but they make a bunch of sounds

[01:05:15] that are like subsonic for us, like infrasonic.

[01:05:18] So they're at a much lower frequency

[01:05:22] than the human ears can hear, right?

[01:05:24] We're limited to somewhere between like 20 hertz

[01:05:29] and 20 kilohertz or something like that.

[01:05:31] And elephants are communicating in tones

[01:05:34] that are so low that we can't hear.

[01:05:36] Crazily, I guess some people can feel it

[01:05:39] like in the air, right?

[01:05:40] Like it's a...

[01:05:41] It's not that crazy but if you lived there

[01:05:44] you probably could.

[01:05:45] Oh, I'm sure.

[01:05:46] Yeah.

[01:05:46] You know?

[01:05:47] It's like...

[01:05:48] You can feel a lot of things that we don't understand.

[01:05:49] Yeah, I mean, it's definitely vibrating the ground.

[01:05:51] Apparently it's vibrating through the ground

[01:05:52] and they're picking up on that.

[01:05:54] So it took us a long time to recognize

[01:05:56] that they were doing that.

[01:05:59] Like the 80s, right?

[01:06:01] Before somebody realized that.

[01:06:02] Let alone trying to like crack the code

[01:06:06] of what it is they're communicating, right?

[01:06:08] Which takes a lot of work, right?

[01:06:10] We're doing it with dolphins.

[01:06:12] I guess we're doing it with elephants.

[01:06:14] It really paints this portrait of a complex psychology.

[01:06:18] One that's just unshakable to realize

[01:06:22] that with all of that put together,

[01:06:23] their memory, their emotional responses,

[01:06:26] their ability to communicate,

[01:06:28] their mourning of the dead, their use of tools.

[01:06:31] I am convinced that these are persons.

[01:06:34] Okay, so this is Lyle Watson's fascinating 2002 book

[01:06:41] Elephant Moms is devoted to exploring

[01:06:45] this sort of not intrinsically unreasonable event

[01:06:47] that verges on the uncanny.

[01:06:49] There was a ranger in South Africa.

[01:06:52] There's a line of elephants

[01:06:54] that are distrustful of human beings

[01:06:57] and there was an effort to repair a fence

[01:06:59] that had a mother and baby being stranded

[01:07:02] on the opposite sides of it.

[01:07:04] They were both getting agitated as workers approached

[01:07:07] and the ranger said that the cow stopped,

[01:07:09] put her trunk through the cables to calm the calf

[01:07:12] and seemed to be thinking about our next move.

[01:07:14] He said he could not prove what happened next

[01:07:16] nor did the other rangers believe him

[01:07:18] but this is what he saw.

[01:07:20] She talked to that kid.

[01:07:21] She told him exactly what to do

[01:07:22] and without any further fuss he did.

[01:07:24] He turned away from her and the fence

[01:07:26] and went into the deep shade of a tree 20 yards away

[01:07:29] where he stood motionless becoming virtually invisible

[01:07:32] and as the truck appeared she raised a huge cloud

[01:07:35] of dust stamping and blowing making short charges

[01:07:38] at the vehicle frightening the crews sufficiently

[01:07:40] to get them to back off and go away.

[01:07:42] When the noise and confusion was at its height

[01:07:44] the calf in camouflage made his move.

[01:07:47] He sidled over the fence, slipped quietly through the gap

[01:07:50] and went over to wait in the cover of the succulent forest.

[01:07:53] I was certain then that the cow's entire performance,

[01:07:56] cow meaning the mother elephant,

[01:07:58] had been a brilliant diversion beautifully executed

[01:08:01] for as soon as she was sure he had made good his escape

[01:08:04] she ignored the truck and its occupants

[01:08:06] and turned her back, sashing in satisfaction,

[01:08:08] back to join her calf in the safety of the park.

[01:08:12] I love this story and then she has such a great

[01:08:17] discussion about what to do

[01:08:19] when you're trying to communicate this and she says,

[01:08:22] pain rights of a conversation she had with a senior scout

[01:08:25] from Nataba Mangue Park in which she asked him

[01:08:28] how he speaks of events that seem

[01:08:29] to be outside normal experience.

[01:08:31] And this is all caps, you just tell what happened

[01:08:34] he surprised her with a shout and burning stare.

[01:08:36] You just tell what you saw.

[01:08:38] You must simply tell what happened,

[01:08:39] he repeated quietly as she sat there in shock.

[01:08:41] Only God knows what it means.

[01:08:43] Yeah.

[01:08:44] I love the humility of that.

[01:08:46] Yeah, yeah, totally.

[01:08:48] You just, yeah, you don't have to explain it to tell it.

[01:08:51] All you're doing is trying to convey the facts.

[01:08:54] I can already anticipate some people calling me a sucker

[01:08:57] or something for accepting these cognitive abilities

[01:09:03] but I'm convinced that this is trivially easy.

[01:09:07] Like I think that what it requires

[01:09:09] seems to be a great deal.

[01:09:10] Like it's communicating to her calf a plan

[01:09:14] and it is a blatant attempt at deception

[01:09:17] that requires that you know that other people

[01:09:20] have beliefs that can be deceived.

[01:09:23] Clear theory of mind.

[01:09:24] A clear theory of mind.

[01:09:26] I don't doubt for one second that they have this.

[01:09:30] Like I, you know, I'm like,

[01:09:33] let me give you an example of something

[01:09:35] I was utterly convinced by

[01:09:36] and again maybe I'm a sucker.

[01:09:37] Like I saw a video of a herd of elephants

[01:09:41] crossing a road and cars stopped

[01:09:45] so that they could cross safely.

[01:09:47] And you see this one elephant at the end

[01:09:51] when all of the other elephants

[01:09:52] including the little calves have crossed,

[01:09:54] the elephant sort of like turns back

[01:09:57] and gives a little like wave with their trunk

[01:10:00] to the car at the front.

[01:10:03] And you can't help but think

[01:10:04] that that was like a little thank you that she gave.

[01:10:07] And I just don't, I don't have any doubt

[01:10:10] that they're capable of that.

[01:10:11] And like the only thing that perplexes me

[01:10:14] is how you could communicate such a complex

[01:10:18] sort of sequence of events.

[01:10:20] To the calf.

[01:10:21] If you don't have, yeah, if you don't have a grammar

[01:10:24] but who the fuck knows?

[01:10:26] Yeah.

[01:10:27] You know, like I don't know what words they have.

[01:10:30] These things are smart.

[01:10:31] Like it is a tragedy.

[01:10:34] I think it's a tragedy for all animals

[01:10:35] that their inability to communicate linguistically

[01:10:39] with humans prevents humans from ever really treating them

[01:10:45] fully as agents or as even morally valuable.

[01:10:51] I've gotten actually, okay

[01:10:52] I wanna know what you think about this.

[01:10:53] So Paul and I have often argued about

[01:10:58] whether or not eventually people are going to realize

[01:11:01] like are we in a hundred years gonna look back

[01:11:04] and say we were moral monsters

[01:11:05] for killing and eating animals?

[01:11:07] And he, I think is an optimist.

[01:11:10] He thinks that the moral circle is expanding.

[01:11:12] He says, you know, we used to think poorly

[01:11:15] of other human beings that weren't part

[01:11:17] of our tribe or race or whatever.

[01:11:20] And now we think of them as all worthy of protection.

[01:11:24] And he doesn't see why we're not going

[01:11:25] to keep expanding this to animals.

[01:11:28] I'm a deep pessimist about this.

[01:11:30] I actually don't think we ever will.

[01:11:32] And I think that the difference is

[01:11:33] that humans can communicate.

[01:11:37] They can write books, they can write poems.

[01:11:40] They can ask you, you know, in the times of slavery

[01:11:43] a slave could communicate to you like, please let me go.

[01:11:46] Like there was a point at which I think it was impossible

[01:11:51] to ignore that people had moral rights

[01:11:56] just because they were able to communicate

[01:11:58] all of those feelings that they had.

[01:12:00] And we could see that they're the same as ours.

[01:12:02] I think that without language,

[01:12:04] we'll always find a way to keep thinking

[01:12:06] of animals as inferior and not really moral rights.

[01:12:08] But it's not like they just figured out.

[01:12:09] Like slavery has been a part of like the human race

[01:12:12] for thousands of years.

[01:12:14] And like, it's not like they just figured out,

[01:12:16] oh wait, they can communicate.

[01:12:18] I think that a huge part of it

[01:12:19] was the written communication.

[01:12:22] Like that we could actually, like that-

[01:12:23] We could read books.

[01:12:24] We could read like Frederick Douglass' autobiography.

[01:12:27] And that the slaves could write books.

[01:12:30] When could slaves write ever?

[01:12:31] I mean, Epictetus was a slave that could write-

[01:12:34] Yeah. Well, I'm talking about the African slave trade.

[01:12:37] Regardless, like I think that the ability to speak

[01:12:39] on your own behalf is hugely important.

[01:12:43] It might not be necessary or even sufficient

[01:12:45] but I think it played a huge role

[01:12:47] in people's opinions about slaves,

[01:12:50] especially people who weren't the slave owners

[01:12:52] who were in the North and read like these accounts

[01:12:54] that slaves themselves wrote.

[01:12:55] They might never have seen that perspective.

[01:12:58] All I'm saying is that animals will never have that.

[01:13:00] Like that tool won't be available to them.

[01:13:02] It allows the ideas to get more widely spread,

[01:13:08] especially among the people who aren't,

[01:13:10] like their moral identity isn't wrapped up

[01:13:13] in denying them these rights.

[01:13:16] But you know, it might be a difference in kind

[01:13:18] but it might also be a difference of degree.

[01:13:21] Like there's a reason why people don't want videos

[01:13:24] of factory farms getting out into the world.

[01:13:27] And it's not that they're writing about their experience.

[01:13:30] You can just fucking see it.

[01:13:31] You can see that they're suffering

[01:13:33] and they don't have to describe it in words.

[01:13:37] They just have to describe it.

[01:13:38] And if you stifle that-

[01:13:39] I think though that we've been,

[01:13:42] you know, factory farms is a particular kind of evil

[01:13:45] but we have been slicing the throats of animals

[01:13:48] for thousands of years,

[01:13:49] looking them in the eye and doing it.

[01:13:51] I think there would be a genuine difference

[01:13:53] if they turned to you and said, please don't do this.

[01:13:57] I don't know.

[01:13:57] Like you were more optimistic than me.

[01:14:00] No, I'm a pessimist.

[01:14:01] We're like doing that to like people,

[01:14:03] like this is happening all over the world now

[01:14:06] to other humans who we know are literally telling you,

[01:14:09] please don't bomb my entire family and our like hospital.

[01:14:15] I'm not saying it will be the key

[01:14:17] that like once you have language,

[01:14:19] we don't do horrible things.

[01:14:20] Like obviously I'm saying like one reason

[01:14:22] like I think it will be so easy to never even think

[01:14:26] is that they can't turn to you and be like,

[01:14:28] please don't do this.

[01:14:29] Like I think that's actually about,

[01:14:30] like of course you can stifle that, right?

[01:14:32] We do as you say,

[01:14:33] we do this to other human beings all the time.

[01:14:35] It's just, I think harder.

[01:14:37] It's another excuse to like turn off your empathy.

[01:14:41] Right.

[01:14:43] And there's not gonna be a Martin Luther King

[01:14:45] or Malcolm X for elephants.

[01:14:47] Like there won't be a great communicator

[01:14:48] who can try their hardest

[01:14:50] to speak on behalf of the plight of their people.

[01:14:52] I don't know, isn't Jane Goodall that

[01:14:54] for chimpanzees and bonobos?

[01:14:56] It's true, she's not one of those,

[01:14:59] but you can speak on behalf.

[01:15:00] I think it's more about just raising awareness.

[01:15:04] Right, like we've been trying to raise awareness

[01:15:05] for a long time.

[01:15:06] My only claim is that if an elephant all of a sudden

[01:15:09] was unlocked the power of English grammar

[01:15:12] and wrote a book,

[01:15:14] that would really like cause a lot of people like us.

[01:15:17] I was kind of convinced before,

[01:15:19] but like these are people.

[01:15:22] I like the A.G., the James A.G. great writer, novelist,

[01:15:28] also wrote Night of the Hunter,

[01:15:30] an amazing Charles Lorton movie.

[01:15:32] Yeah.

[01:15:33] Oh, I didn't know that.

[01:15:34] So apparently he suggested another movie idea

[01:15:36] in the last letter he wrote.

[01:15:39] And this is that idea.

[01:15:40] At the beginning,

[01:15:41] elephants converge from all over Africa

[01:15:44] towards a disembodied voice,

[01:15:46] the voice of God,

[01:15:47] which addresses them roughly as follows.

[01:15:49] My children, you know that you are my chosen people.

[01:15:52] You know that to you alone, I have given my secret.

[01:15:55] I do not regard myself as omnipotent.

[01:15:58] I gave up when I gave to man the will to love me

[01:16:02] or hate me or merely to disregard me.

[01:16:04] So I can promise you nothing.

[01:16:05] What little I can tell you

[01:16:07] is neither encouraging nor discouraging.

[01:16:09] Your kind is already used for work

[01:16:11] and the men who use you are neither markedly improved

[01:16:14] nor disimproved by contact with you.

[01:16:16] Nor have you been improved nor disimproved

[01:16:18] in that process.

[01:16:19] But now a new age begins.

[01:16:21] Soon you will be taken to be looked upon,

[01:16:24] to be regarded as strange and wonderful.

[01:16:26] And forgive me my dear ones, as funny.

[01:16:30] As I said, I'm not omnipotent.

[01:16:32] Like the God is like,

[01:16:33] again, I'm not omnipotent.

[01:16:35] It's not my fault.

[01:16:37] Take on this God, come on.

[01:16:39] As I said, I'm not omnipotent.

[01:16:41] I can't even prophecy.

[01:16:42] I can only ask this.

[01:16:44] Be your own good selves always faithfully,

[01:16:47] always in knowledge of my love and regard.

[01:16:50] And through so being you may convert those heathen,

[01:16:53] those barbarians where all else has failed.

[01:16:56] During this admonition and blessing,

[01:16:58] the oldest elephant sadly leaves the assembly

[01:17:00] and walks away to the great secret elephant cemetery

[01:17:03] and dies there.

[01:17:04] Soon after men come among the elephants

[01:17:06] and capture them for circuses.

[01:17:08] And then it ends in like a Balanchine ballet.

[01:17:13] And it's like, I think it's very,

[01:17:14] it shows that like humans have always

[01:17:17] at the same time of denying them mental states,

[01:17:19] also attributed like spiritual kind of elevation to elephants.

[01:17:24] Like they're the ones that are talking to God.

[01:17:27] Yeah, I love that little story.

[01:17:30] Also was one of the things that just made me want to cry.

[01:17:33] Maybe this is a good place to end

[01:17:34] because the story that she ends with

[01:17:36] is one of those heartbreaking stories I've ever read.

[01:17:40] It gets very existential towards the end.

[01:17:42] Yeah, it really does.

[01:17:43] I really read this.

[01:17:44] I strongly urge our listeners to read this.

[01:17:47] Absolutely, like it's just well done.

[01:17:50] Without any like preaching this, I guess.

[01:17:52] Like I just want to say, like there's no,

[01:17:54] you definitely, you can tell that we're convinced

[01:17:56] about this by the time you're done reading it,

[01:17:58] but you're not, at least I didn't feel,

[01:18:01] I felt like she was taking me sort of through a journey.

[01:18:03] And it's meandering.

[01:18:04] Like it just kind of goes from one place to the other

[01:18:07] and then back, but not in a way

[01:18:09] where you feel like it's scatterbrained.

[01:18:11] It's like very pleasant to go on this journey.

[01:18:13] Exactly, yeah.

[01:18:14] This wandering journey through like the history

[01:18:17] and philosophy and psychology

[01:18:21] and like science of elephants and their plight.

[01:18:24] Yeah, yeah.

[01:18:26] And that last bit is she's talking about

[01:18:30] the outlook for elephants is not very good.

[01:18:34] Like it's unclear what their future is.

[01:18:36] And so she tells this story from Lyle Watson

[01:18:42] who was walking around the coast, I guess in Africa

[01:18:48] and saw this interaction.

[01:18:51] There was a sole surviving elephant, female elephant

[01:18:56] from the park, like the last elephant.

[01:18:58] And she walked over to the coast.

[01:19:03] Standing there in the shade of the tree was an elephant,

[01:19:05] a fully grown African elephant facing left,

[01:19:07] staring out to see a female with a left tusk

[01:19:09] broken off near the base, looking for all the world

[01:19:12] like the stub of a large cigar.

[01:19:13] I had never seen this elephant before

[01:19:15] but I knew who she was, who she had to be.

[01:19:17] I recognized her from a color photograph

[01:19:18] put out by the Department of Water Affairs

[01:19:20] and Forestry under the title,

[01:19:21] the last remaining Knessena elephant.

[01:19:23] This was the matriarch herself,

[01:19:25] but what was she doing here?

[01:19:26] She was here because she no longer had anyone

[01:19:29] to talk to in the forest.

[01:19:30] She was standing here on the edge of the ocean

[01:19:32] because it was the next nearest

[01:19:34] and most powerful source of infrasound.

[01:19:36] The under rumble of the surf

[01:19:38] would have been well within her range,

[01:19:39] but she was a soothing balm for an animal

[01:19:41] used to being surrounded, submerged

[01:19:43] by low and comforting frequencies,

[01:19:45] by the life sounds of a herd.

[01:19:46] And now this was the next best thing.

[01:19:48] My heart went out to her.

[01:19:49] The whole idea of this grandmother of many

[01:19:51] being alone for the first time in her life was tragic,

[01:19:54] conjuring up the vision

[01:19:54] of countless other old and lonely souls.

[01:19:57] But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow,

[01:19:59] something even more extraordinary took place.

[01:20:01] The throbbing was back in the air.

[01:20:03] I could feel it and I began to understand why.

[01:20:05] The blue whale mentioned previously,

[01:20:08] the blue whale was on the surface again,

[01:20:09] pointed inshore, resting her blowhole clearly visible.

[01:20:13] The matriarch was here for the whale.

[01:20:14] The largest animal in the ocean

[01:20:16] and the largest living land animal

[01:20:17] were no more than a hundred yards apart.

[01:20:19] And I was convinced that they were communicating

[01:20:20] an infrasound in concert,

[01:20:23] sharing big brains and long lives,

[01:20:25] understanding the pain of high investment

[01:20:27] in a few precious offspring,

[01:20:28] aware of the importance and the pleasure

[01:20:30] of complex sociality.

[01:20:31] These rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating

[01:20:33] over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore,

[01:20:36] woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch,

[01:20:38] the last of their kind.

[01:20:39] I turned, blinking away the tears and left them to it.

[01:20:41] This was no place for a mere man.

[01:20:43] Yeah.

[01:20:43] Yeah.

[01:20:44] I'm glad that you're very moved by this,

[01:20:47] because you know.

[01:20:48] Yeah, because you thought I was just like cold.

[01:20:50] clinical science.

[01:20:53] I mean, like you said,

[01:20:54] I think science needs to come to terms,

[01:20:57] honestly with what the capacity

[01:21:01] for not only cognition and communication,

[01:21:04] but for suffering and for joy that these animals have.

[01:21:08] And it's a great tragedy.

[01:21:10] It's an evolutionary stroke of luck

[01:21:13] that human beings were the species that became dominant.

[01:21:17] I think probably because of language,

[01:21:20] that's a moral luck that I think we need to,

[01:21:23] that comes with great responsibility for us.

[01:21:26] I like what she says about that story right after

[01:21:28] that it's oddly reminiscent of the search

[01:21:31] for extraterrestrial intelligence.

[01:21:33] The signals piped out over the border

[01:21:35] from one domain into another as alien as it is infinite

[01:21:39] with such poignant hopefulness

[01:21:40] that they may be heard at all, much less understood.

[01:21:43] Out of great loneliness,

[01:21:45] the elephant went to the edge of her world

[01:21:47] and poured her soul into the void

[01:21:50] and out of great providence,

[01:21:51] someone was there to answer.

[01:21:53] It does sound like the same impulse,

[01:21:56] a kind of loneliness,

[01:21:58] a kind of utter disillusionment with life

[01:22:01] and this world.

[01:22:02] And so you're reaching out to see if there's somebody

[01:22:05] that you can connect with that isn't part,

[01:22:08] like that's in a total,

[01:22:10] because think about it from the elephant perspective,

[01:22:12] they don't understand what a whale is.

[01:22:15] It is like an alien to an elephant

[01:22:17] and yet it's something,

[01:22:21] it's some way of connecting in a world

[01:22:25] that has let her down.

[01:22:27] And this beautiful essay,

[01:22:30] there's a lot of stuff in here

[01:22:31] that we didn't even talk about, I feel sad.

[01:22:36] I feel like the elephants must be sad

[01:22:39] because they're like, why can't humans understand?

[01:22:41] Like we've been trying to tell them,

[01:22:43] don't do this, but they're not listening

[01:22:45] and this one last elephant is going out

[01:22:47] talking to a whale.

[01:22:49] If only they could podcast, then they would.

[01:22:52] Long form podcasting from an elephant

[01:22:54] would actually change the world.

[01:22:56] That would be, I would definitely listen to that.

[01:23:01] Speaking of long form podcasting, we should wrap up.

[01:23:05] Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:23:07] Look way down!

[01:23:33] More brains than you have.

[01:23:41] Anybody can have a brain.

[01:23:48] I'm a very good man.

[01:23:49] Just a very bad wizard.