Jane Goodall: All Good
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know Podcast. How you doing? I'm good. I'm good. You? I'm sweepy. Oh, are you? Yeah. I'm a little beat myself. Is it just life, or did you stay up till 5 a.m. drinking?

No, it's just hitting right around the old nap time. So, you know. I'm with you. Do you ever doze off while you're studying? No, but I, you know, I still try and catch a short nap every day. And on recording days that sometimes happens. But today I was not able to. Gotcha. Well, we'll retire eventually. Just hang in there. I'll sleep when I retire. Hey, so what do you want to talk about today?

I mean, I prepped for a show on Jane Goodall. So did I. And she's the best. She is. She is. She is widely, roundly, basically globally, universally, probably seen as essentially a great person. Yeah, I think she's cherished and

For good reason. Did you watch the documentary for this at all, by the way? No, I didn't. The feature one from 2017, Jane? Yeah. Yeah, no, I didn't. It's great. It sounds great. I read a lot about it, as I do, but I haven't seen it yet. I'll have to watch it still. Yeah, it's really good. Highly recommended if you're listening and if this hearing about her inspires you to learn more at all because it's a great documentary of –

uh footage beautiful beautiful color film stock from back then when she was doing her studies and it's not uh it's not like a narrate it's it's narrated just by her thoughts and this beautiful score and it just shows it it's just really really lovely the way it plays out that's awesome i heard the car chase in the middle is really great yeah didn't expect it but very good

So, drive, drive, drive. Yeah. So, we're talking Jane Goodall. For those of you who don't know who Jane Goodall is, she is one of the world's foremost renowned primatologists. And she did it the old-fashioned way by going out into the jungle and learning as she did. It's called the School of Hard Knocks, I think. Yeah. That's the thing about Jane Goodall. She had a high school education.

when she started. She did not go to college, not for a while. And a guy named Louis Leakey, a famous anthropologist, took a gamble on her on purpose because he was looking for somebody who could, who was not trained, purposely not trained so that they weren't bringing a bunch of preconceptions to them to study chimpanzees. And Jane Goodall fit the bill, as we'll see. She's loved animals since she was a kid. And

After just a few months, started excelling at it and eventually changed how the world sees chimpanzees. We didn't know much about them before. We had a lot of assumptions about them. And Jane Goodall showed that they were just, let's just turn those on their heads. Yeah. How's that for an intro, baby? That's pretty good. Thank you. Do we, I mean, do we get more specific even?

Oh, I thought we'd get specific as we went along, but sure. Go ahead. Yeah. So she was born in 1934 in England, uh, to her mother, Margaret and her father Mortimer. Uh, go ahead and forget. I even said father Mortimer because he was not around. Uh,

much and he does not figure much in her story. He divorced when Jane was but 16. But especially after watching this documentary, if we're going to salute Jane Goodall, we are going to have to salute her mother because her mom was the one who

Who was like, hey, you want to figure something out? Then go figure it out and go learn it and go do instead of talking about something. Go out and do it because no one else is going to do it. Yeah. Unless you do it. And who cares that it's the 1940s and 50s? Who cares that you're a young girl? Just go out and do it, Jane. By God. And she did. Yeah.

She very famously encouraged her to go dance on the rain, feel the rain in her skin because no one else will do it for you. That's right. And like you said, and this is,

What maybe set her apart from other scientists at the time, she loved, loved, and loves animals. Like capital L-O-V-E. And that sort of flew in the face of the dispassionate history of how you study animals. Yeah. Biologists typically approached animals totally detached, totally unemotional. They were aware. They're kind of supposed to.

That was how they were trained to. And it makes sense in a way because there was a widespread fear, and there apparently still is, among, you know, hardcore biologists and other ologists that study animals, that we humans have just a great propensity for anthropomorphizing animals.

And how can you study animals if you're just essentially presuming that they're behaving like humans? You can't, if they're doing something that's actually not human-like and you're just misinterpreting it, you're being misled by your anthropomorphism. So there was a real...

The workaround that they figured out was to just look at them dispassionately. They're just animals. I don't care what their names are. I don't care anything about them. I'm just going to study them as dispassionately as possible in the hopes of preventing from anthropomorphizing. That was the predominant view. And again, it still kind of is. It's complete hogwash.

The idea that there's just no inner lives to animals. And apparently there's still some academics that cling on to that. But it does make a little bit of sense where if you're worried about projecting your own feelings and values and emotions and thoughts onto the animals you're studying, then just don't get attached to the animals. And that's what she entered into. You know what you said? What? That they don't care what their names are.

Well, I'm sure they have names like Ragnor the Conqueror is probably a pretty regular name for a cow. I would think so.

But you're right. But she flew in the face of that. She loved animals as a child. She would just spend hours and hours and hours as a young girl drawing animals, talking about animals, writing about animals. And not just, you know, birds are fun because they fly, like observing them like a little miniature scientist. Okay.

So she had recollections about bringing worms to bed when she was a toddler, like one of her first memories. Another was when she went to watch a hen laying an egg and like document that whole process. Spent five hours in a hen house as a young girl and her parents couldn't find her. And her mom, you know, called the cops. They thought she had wandered off.

Yeah, and I saw very pivotally when she was younger. I'm not sure what age, but she was a young kid still. She was fascinated with the pigs that she saw in the English countryside, and she wanted to hang out with them, but they would always run away. So she taught herself to be super patient and to sit and get them to come closer to her and eventually feed them and won their trust that way. And that would later serve her very well when she started to study chimpanzees.

Yeah. And in fact, that patience in the documentary, you know, you mentioned Louis Leakey. He was a very famous paleontologist and anthropologist who gave her her break in the 1950s when she met him in Kenya. I guess we should say she got there because she graduated from high school and was like, you know what, I'm not going to we can't afford college. I'm going to go get a couple of jobs.

hustle, save money so I can go to Africa and study on my own. But she got there and Leakey, she said part of the reason she got the job was because he wanted someone with monumental patience, i.e. somebody who would sit there for what ended up being five months before she even saw chimpanzees, basically. Man.

That guy would be like a senior VP at ZipRecruiter just based on that one pick he made. Yeah, for sure. If he were around today.

Did you like that? That was a little buzz marketing for one of our advertisers. They haven't been around in a while, so maybe they'll come back. So, yeah, Louis Leakey, apparently she started out as a secretary for him, right? Yeah. And then I guess he found out that she wanted to do animal studies and he said, okay, here's your chance. I'm going to send you to Tanzania to study chimpanzees. We don't know much about chimpanzees. We want you to go find out all about them.

And so at age 26, in 1960, she arrived in Tanzania with her mom because the Tanzanian government, I believe it was still a colonial government at the time, if not then at least a transitional government still, they required a chaperone for someone in her position. So she brought her mom along who'd been a great supporter and booster all her life, like you said. And they also very importantly had a cook who was a local named Dominic. And

And within a very short amount of time, both her mom and she came down with malaria. And they were very fortunate to have Dominic from what I saw because he helped nurse them back to health.

Yeah, for sure. He was a big, he's kind of like part of the family from what I gathered. That's what I gathered too. This is at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, which is now the Gombe Stream National Park. And her mom didn't stay too long. She was there about four months. But while her mom was there, she helped set up a, either set up or work with a medical camp there.

to help provide, you know, medical services to locals. So her mom was getting in there, getting her hands dirty. Eventually would leave to go back to England. And Jane stayed there. You know, she

She was not with Leakey. He he didn't like stay there with her. He set her up with his job. Also, apparently was, you know, making passes at her because Jane Goodall and this kind of popped up throughout her career was a very pretty young scientist at a time when that was fairly unusual, I think, especially where she was located. And she was like, no, thank you.

Dr. Leakey, I'm not interested, but I appreciate you entrusting this position to me at least. But hands off. He said that's just what I wanted to hear. Yeah, I'm sure he wanted to hear just that.

So apparently she got set up with six months of funding initially, and she started to get really worried because at least three months passed. And she was spending all day every day with a couple of locals who were walking her around the jungle, pointing out this would probably be a pretty good place for chimps to show up. This tree has a bunch of fruit on it. They'd sit around.

The chimps wouldn't show up. They did show up. They were covered up by leaves. She couldn't see what they were doing. If she got if she moved to get a little closer so she could get a better view, they would all run away. That was when she saw them like she was. Her research was in great jeopardy. She was you have to have chimps to study to get more funding and continue your research. So she was starting to get worried by month three or four.

And I guess finally she won the trust of at least one group enough.

that they wouldn't run off when she would just kind of show up and hang out and feed or watch them feed. And I saw that one of the reasons or one of the ways that she won the trust of the chimpanzee groups that she was observing was by kind of behaving like them. Like she ran around barefoot everywhere. She would hang out in the trees for long periods of time and just kind of tried to treat them or behave as if they were her peers rather than study subjects or test subjects.

Yeah, I mean, at one point in the documentary, she was talking about the dangers of where she was and these poisonous snakes everywhere and all manner of ways in which you could die out there doing what she was doing. And it didn't sound naive either. She just said, you know, I felt like I was supposed... And she's got that great British accent too, so everything sounds so great. But she said she felt like she was supposed to be there and that if she just...

tread it carefully and

and respected the land and the creatures around her, then they would like allow her to stay there. Like these snakes were not going to come bite her and send her away because she's like, I was, I'm supposed to be here. And it was really kind of a lovely thing. She really seemed like she fit in such that finally five months in with time running out, a chimp named David gray beard, uh, obviously she's giving them these names and he had a kind

kind of looked like me a little bit. He had this little gray beard, trusted her. He was the first one of that group, allowed her to get closer and closer and closer. He eventually stole some bananas, came back for more bananas. And he was the one that said to the other chimps, hey, this lady, she's not too bad. Look, look at her. She's over there in a tree. She's hanging out. And the footage of her

And we'll get to whether or not this was the correct thing or not later, but the footage of her dead still holding bananas out in her hand and seeing these very large chimpanzees coming up and taking them from her hands and the way she's acting is...

It's breathtaking because nobody had done that before. Yeah, I was going to say today you could see somebody doing that. And the reason why you could see someone doing this because Jane Goodall was the first to do it. Exactly. She had no idea. She had no frame of reference for whether they were going to be violent toward her or whether they were going to throw their poop at her or whatever. She had no idea. So that was a real risk that she was taking by interacting with them that directly. Yeah.

And then in addition to it being risky, it was driving any academic who was aware of her work completely batty. Bananas? Because that is – nice, man. That's not at all what you do. Not only do you not, like, get attached to them, you certainly don't feed them. You don't interact with their infants either.

You don't give them names. That was another one. David Greybeard. Yes, I'm going to go with you and assume that that wasn't his actual name, that she gave him that name. And that was driving academics crazy. She was doing everything wrong, and yet it was starting to really pay off in aces.

Yeah. They're like, you're not supposed to name chimps. And she's like, have you ever petted a chimp? Chump? Right. It's like, it's working. Yeah. It really, and it really did work. Like thanks. Largely thanks to David Greybeard, at least at first.

who, like you said, said, this lady's all right. And then her patience. And then her feeding them an endless supply of bananas. All those three combined to win over the trust of large groups and families of chimpanzees. Should we take a break? I think we should. All right. We'll be right back with more on Do You Know Who? right after this. Do You Know Who?

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Come on in, grab a cold one, get fitted by a pro and shop the latest dials. Visit Decovas.com. That's T-E-C-O-V-A-S.com. And don't go gently, y'all. Okay, Chuck. So Jane Goodall is feeding chimps bananas at this point. She's named them, names all of them. I mean, she really kind of had to get very creative with the names because she would identify a family lineage by like a letter.

So like the F family, all of the members for generations all had first names that began with F, like Flo or Flossie or Fabian or Freud. And that's how she kept track of them. But again, other academics would have just given them numbers. Like maybe they all started with the same number or something like that, but certainly not names. And from observing them that closely, and I guess –

I guess interacting with them probably had a lot to do with it, but interacting with them allowed her to get that close. And by interacting that closely, she was able to see things that up to that point, people had no idea chimpanzees were capable of. One of the first things she realized is that they have a huge, intricate, complex social system.

with hierarchies, like I said, families, alliances, territories, like all sorts of stuff that people just did not realize chimps were capable of engaging in. Yeah, big time. Communication-wise, she found out there were at least 20 different sounds that they were making to communicate. And that's in addition to any kind of body language or behaviors they may exhibit toward one another. She was the first person that said, hey,

These guys aren't just eating bananas and berries and things. They are omnivores. They're eating birds. They're eating insects. They're eating baby baboons. Sometimes she would figure this out later, much to her dismay. They would eat other chimps.

But the big finding that she came out with that kind of shook science to its core was that she observed chimpanzees engaging in object modification, which is basically sort of proto tool making when they would take blades of grass and sticks and things and strip them down or bend them or clump blades of grass together and shape them in certain ways to stick into anthills or

most effectively and efficiently to draw out ants to eat them. And she was like, hey, wait a minute, like the big differentiator up until this point in

And the history of evolution between us and them is that we use tools. That's all everyone talked about was that we use tools and animals don't. And that's what makes us different. She's like right here in front of my face. They are using object modification, which is basically a tool. Yeah. Like you, you just, you said it, it shook the scientific world to its foundations. Like that was amazing.

Just such a huge finding that Louis Leakey declared very famously that we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans. Like, that's how big of a deal it was. A little dramatic. It was, but I mean, up to that point, like you said, people just...

Tools made a human. Anything that could make a tool technically qualified as human, everything else couldn't make tools. So it was a big deal. And then on top of that, to me, even more groundbreaking is that they realized that different groups of chimps use the same tool in different ways.

And that like, say one, one group would use the short stick to get termites on it, um, to eat them one by one. Another group would use the longer stick to let a bunch of them walk on and then eat it like a corn cob probably. Um,

And that they would pass how to do that down to different generations. And that's culture at its most basic definition that qualifies as culture. And I saw it compared to how Westerners use forks, but people in Asia use chopsticks. They're both the same tool. They're used to either implement to get food to your mouth.

But they're just different and they're passed down through the culture, their cultural differences. And that's the same thing with the different ways of using a termite stick, right? And that is culture. So she discovered that chimps have cultures as well. And some of them open their presents on Christmas Eve. Some of them waited till Christmas morning or all kinds of things she observed. Yeah, that was a big surprise too. They're terrible at wrapping presents too. They're so sloppy.

Another big surprise. Well, they just use the funny papers from Sunday, which can you blame them? Another big surprise was in 1962 when National Geographic, the Nat Geo Society, that is, sent a filmmaker, a Dutch filmmaker named Hugo van Lawick there to film her work. She was not thrilled at this idea. She said,

really enjoyed her solitude there. She did not want some dude mucking up the works and kind of quite honestly spoiling her scene.

that she had going on there. She really enjoyed climbing trees and being alone and not having to deal with some jerk with a camera, but she knew that's where the funding came from. They needed this footage if she was going to continue to get funding. She put up with this guy chain smoking and throwing his cigarette butts around in the jungle, which upset her very much. But she was like, "This guy really loved animals.

He was also handsome. And she said it became pretty obvious pretty soon that I was also the subject of his films. Long story short, they fall in love and make a baby. Right. That they nicknamed Grub. Did you see anywhere why they nicknamed their kid Grub? I could not find it. I would assume because of a grub worm.

But what did he do? Like, did he was he famous for writhing around in the dirt or something like that? Why would you name your kid Grub? Well, I mean, this kid was raised in the jungle. I imagine all he did was writhe around in the dirt. OK. I mean, there's footage of him. He's.

He was literally raised in a jungle in a cage. Sounds bad, but it was a big pin that they had previously used for animals, and she decorated it all up for her son just to keep him safe. It was very large. It was like a large, you know, pin, less than a cage, but technically it was a cage. And the other thing she said, too, was that having her own human baby really –

Helped her research it it made her understand the how chimpanzee mothers behaved and vice versa and she said it really just added a lot to her her understanding of the the family groups. That's pretty neat. So around this time so what that was the early 60s I think.

that her husband showed up and her son was born in the late 60s, 1967. Okay. And I think in 1963, National Geographic essentially told the world that Jane Goodall existed and what she was doing. There was an article, cover article called My Life Among the Wild Chimpanzees. And she was starting to recount, this is the thing that she would become, you

most advanced at, in addition to chimpanzee studies is telling the rest of the world about chimpanzees in order to, um, get the world to keep from driving chimpanzees and other animals into extinction. That was her kind of second love. Yeah, for sure. Uh, and again, they started, you know, her, the fact that she was, uh, an attractive young woman came up in the press and the articles were framed as, you know, beauty and the beast. Uh,

and Nat Geo cover girl and stuff like that, which it bothered her some, but she did realize that that got more attention and that that inspired young women to develop interest in science and stuff like that. And so she was like, it's fine. This is what we're dealing with here in the 1960s, and it's bringing attention to my cause. Right. Yeah, she would have a really good...

Kind of a feel for that. And I keep speaking of her in the past tense. She's not dead. She just turned 90 in April and she seems to be doing just fine. Her foundation says she still travels about 300 days a year doing speaking appearances on behalf of chimpanzees and nature and earth in general. A good example of...

Her kind of figuring out or knowing a good PR piece when she sees it, her opportunity when she sees it came in 1987. Gary Larson, who did The Far Side, one of the great comic strips of all time, you know? Oh, yeah. They're great.

That's going to be a subject soon. Okay. So he did a Farside one comic panel or one panel comic of a female chimp grooming a male chimp. And the caption is the female chimp saying, well, well, another blonde hair conducting a little more research with that Jane Goodall tramp.

And the Jane Goodall Institute found out about this and sent Gary Larson a cease and desist letter. And that's where everything ended. No, no, no. Of course not. You're just being coy. Goodall was out of town. Apparently she got back in town, heard about it, thought it was very funny, said, Gary, you can tear up that cease and desist letter and book your ticket.

For Africa. You're going and you're going and you're going. And that's what happened. She reached out to him. He came out there. He actually gave the Institute permission to use the cartoon on T-shirts for fundraising. She wrote a preface for one of his book collections. And it turned into like this cool friendship. Yeah.

So prior to that, we kind of jumped ahead a little bit. But prior to that, she, in addition to that National Geographic cover story, less than 10 years later, she released her first book, In the Shadow of Man.

And this is around where she really became like a science communicator, which she's been forever. She was one of the early ones, pre-Sagan even. I mean, she released this book in 1971 and it was telling the world again about all of the stuff she had found about chimpanzees and really just revolutionizing our understanding of chimpanzees and animals in general. And her work was so significant that remember, she only graduated high school in

Cambridge University came a knocking and said, hey, you want a PhD? Because we got a seat for you here. Come take it. And she thought about it a while, consulted Gary Larson. He said, hey, I haven't met you yet. This doesn't make any sense. And finally agreed. Sure, I'll get your I'll take a PhD course with you guys, Cambridge. That's right. She got a degree in the study of animal behavior. That's ethology in 1966. Now we're all over the place with the timeline.

It's fine. I hope everyone gets what is following the story. Sure. For about five years, she worked at Stanford as a visiting professor in psychiatry, also became a visiting professor of zoology at Tanzania's University of Dar es Salaam. While all this is going on, though, she's not like, oh, by the way, I'm just leaving Gambia for years and years at a time. She was busy.

basically there from 1960 to 75. It was her home. It was her emotional home, her spiritual home. She felt very, very...

tied to Gombe into that specific area. And, you know, that was where she started a family and was raising a son. It was her place. So I didn't see the documentary. Did they cover why she left? Was it because of her son? Because I saw that she was conflicted and realized she had to decide, raise a son or study chimps. Yeah, he had to be schooled, formally schooled in England and

But also there was the issue of her marriage, and we might as well talk about it now. She started to travel some with her husband to other places,

for him to film because he didn't get all his work through Nat Geo. Eventually, his work with them completely dried up. So he had no reason to be there other than the fact that his wife was there and loved her work. But it was at a time, and he was one of these guys where he was like, hey, you know, work comes first and I hope you can support me. She did that for a little while. And then she said by that time in a very English way, she said, we had begun bickering. And

That seemed to be the kindest way to say that, you know, their marriage was kind of on fragile ground. And they would eventually part ways because of that and because of life and work. And it just seemed like it didn't work out. Gotcha. So five years after she started, she established the Gombe Stream Research Center, again, in the Gombe Wildlife Preserve, Game Preserve, which means you can go hunt there.

She very fortunately met and married a member of parliament in Tanzania named Derek Bryson. And he happened to direct the country's national parks and went presto chango and turned the game reserve into a national park protecting Gambia and its inhabitants. Pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Unfortunately, he passed away from cancer five years later. And from that point on, Jane Goodall was a swinging solo lady. Yeah.

That's right. And, you know, I'm sure it was a tragedy for her life, but she sort of ended up being married to her work and seemed very happy to be. She spent decades and decades at the Gombe Center publishing hundreds of papers, all kinds of articles.

Researchers and doctoral students have done fieldwork there, gotten their PhDs through there. She is still very active, like you said, as part of the Jane Goodall Institute, which is basically run by Tanzanians and has just, you know, she's.

And it's easy to think now, like you said, like you see so many documentaries and so much footage of people doing research and just no one had done this stuff to that degree at the time as far as just living among the animals. And it's just it can't be overstated how revolutionary this idea was, this 26 year old animal.

you know, young British woman was just like, yeah, that's what I want to do. I want to climb a tree and be with them. Yeah. And Louis Leakey had a knack for picking the right people for this kind of work. He also hired two other young women over the years, Diane Fossey, who studied gorillas in Rwanda, who is very memorably played by Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist. Yeah. And another woman named Barute Galdikas, who studied orangutans in Borneo. Yeah.

And when you put Diane Fossey and Berute Galdikas and Jane Goodall together, you had the group that were known as the Trimates. Pretty funny. We just couldn't not mention that. It was just too great. I mean, we didn't give them that name. No, no. Okay, I just want to make that clear. Yeah. So, Chuck, we're starting to have a little too much fun. I say we need to take a break and recompose ourselves, come back, and just get serious again. All right.

Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasin', featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today. ♪

I feel so lucky to collaborate with Megan and how perfectly she put my experience into words. Listen to Chasen from my new album, Infinite Icon, on iHeartRadio or wherever you stream music. Don't forget to visit InfiniteIcon.com to pre-save my album. Sponsored by 1111 Media.

In every pair of Tecova's boots, you can expect handmade quality, first-wear comfort, and timeless Western style. Tecova's boots are always made from premium bovine and exotic leathers, and with occasional re-solving, they will last a lifetime. The best way to shop for boots is at your local Tecova's store, where you'll be greeted by the smell of fresh leather and a friendly smile.

Come on in, grab a cold one, get fitted by a pro, and shop the latest dials. Visit Decovas.com. That's T-E-C-O-V-A-S.com. And don't go gently, y'all.

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Right. Where she, you know, this is how she named and cataloged these groups and these families, and it would help her keep track of things. And we're going to tell you a little story that Livia dug up about the F family led by Flo, who was the mama to her young children.

And Flo was pretty instrumental in Goodall's understanding of just how these chip families worked. And then later through the just beyond the family, the whole group and local culture of that family.

Right. And the whole group that they studied that Flo and her family were members of was the Cacicala. And there were other groups that ended up being studied, if not by Goodall, but by other research scientists and doctoral students who showed up over the decades. But Cacicala was the group that

that she kind of made her name on and did her research on originally. And like you said, from studying these, these families so closely, she watched like how generations interacted sometimes with their own kin group. Like Flo had a son named Fabian who overthrew his younger brother, who's overthrown by his younger brother, Fegan to become the dominant male. And she noticed like,

becoming a dominant male of your family or of your group, I should say, um, there's not one set way to do it. Some do it by, some chimpanzees do it by, um, being kind and calm in the face of aggression. Others do it through sheer force and bullying. Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's like Game of Thrones up in there, basically. Yeah. You had Flo's daughter, Fifi. She became the dominant female. She gave birth to nine kids, one of which was a daughter named Flossie. So this is Flo's grandbaby.

And Flossie ended up leaving that group for a neighboring community called the Matumba community. Another one of her children was Freud, born in 71. Freud grew up and then along with Fifi and Fegan helped him rise within that hierarchy, even though he was like not really cut out for the job.

Became the dominant male in 1993. So like families are leaving communities, joining up with others who had previously left the community. They're kind of grooming successors and and like propping up other chimps is like helping them become the leader and the dominant male or female. And it's just it's just fascinating for her to sit there and like document all this stuff. Yeah, it's very Machiavellian.

Totally. Now we have to talk about Frodo, who was one of Fifi's sons, one of Flo's grandsons. He was born in 1976.

And he is one of the more famous chimpanzees of all time because he was bad to the bone. He was, if you believe in chimps having an internal life and empathy and awareness of others' experiences, then you would consider Frodo a murderer, straight up murderer. Totally. For real, I've seen it argued that he should be considered a murderer. He was just that bad.

Yeah. I mean, he killed people. He did. So he deposed his brother Freud back in 1997. And he was one of the, he was the one I was citing when I said some of them do it just through sheer force and intimidation. That was Frodo. He didn't have a lot of friends. He didn't have many alliances. He was just the biggest chimp and the meanest chimp ever.

And he, from a young age, he started bullying Jane Goodall. I think, I don't want to anthropomorphize here, but I'm quite certain, 100% certain in fact, that

that he noted Jane Goodall was the person in charge of the humans. And he targeted her specifically. He attacked other humans over the years. But Jane Goodall, they said that he would have a certain look on his face that he reserved just for her. And he put her in for some of the worst treatment. He almost broke her neck once.

And she said kind of famously that she was alive because he wasn't trying to kill her, that he was just trying to show her who his boss and that if he wanted her dead, she would be dead right now. Which, you know, again, not to use the A word, but it sounds like he had respect for her.

Yeah. Yeah. In a way, like a kind of a backhanded way, I would say. He allowed her to live. Right. I guess so. Or maybe he needed her. He let Gary Larson live in 1988 when Gary Larson got his arm yanked.

uh, giving him a legit injury. So that happened as well. Uh, but very sadly, um, Frodo was probably most well known, uh, for killing a toddler, a 14 month old in 2002. It was the daughter of a park attendant who was visiting with his wife and he, he killed this 14 month old and partially ate this 14 month old. And, uh,

People spoke up and were like, hey, you need to kill this chimp and take him out. And Jane Goodall went to bat for him. And it's like, basically, it's a chimp being a chimp. And we're the ones that are here. And, you know, there's cars killing kids all over the place. You know, go out and take all the cars away. That's called a straw man argument. It is. There's a thing, though. Remember I said I saw it argued that, like, he was a Frodo should be considered a murderer or certainly could be?

I think the same person who made that argument had been a researcher at Gombe and argued like, yes, we need to kill Frodo. He's a murderer. He knew what he was doing. He's a murderer. We need to put him down. And she argued that they intervened when the chimps were starving. They intervened when they needed medical attention.

But they're not going to intervene when a chimp murders a human baby. It just seemed like a pretty good argument, I think. At the same time, though, if you're Jane Goodall and you're like, well, chimps are kind of like humans and humans are kind of like chimps. We don't kill Frodo when he eats chimp babies, which they do. So why would you do that for a human baby? Seems a little out of touch to me with, you know, human society in general. But I guess I get both sides in that case.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things we should talk about, I guess, is that later in her career, she, you know, she basically said, hey, if I had it to do over again, I would do it differently. We probably should not have been feeding these things bananas. We probably shouldn't have been. I shouldn't have been holding baby chimps like they were human babies and petting them and stuff.

Uh, and I should have maybe been a little more dispassionate in my work. Uh, because if you want, you know, really accurate, uh, data and results, like again, you shouldn't be handing them food and stuff. So, you know, she, she came clean about the things that she felt like she had her missteps over the years as a researcher. So I take my hat off to her for that. Um, and very sadly, it looks like, you know, it's possible at least that they're,

Stay there, their interactions, they're just merely being there could have been one of the factors in what was known as the Gombe chimpanzee war. When in 1971, there was there was kind of a full on war between two groups of chimpanzees that played out right in front of our eyes.

Yeah. So the dominant male of the Cascadilla group died. And I guess he was holding the glue together. This guy was like Tito or something. And the group splintered. I think nine adults and their kids said, we're going to form our own group. And they took over the southern half of the range. And the original Cascadilla or the remaining Cascadilla, they stuck to the northern part of the range at first.

I think over the years, the males started making aggressive sounds and gestures to one another. And it became clear that they were no longer treating them as a kin group. These were no longer friends, even though they had been super tight friends when they lived together. These were now enemies and trespassers and encroachers. And the whole thing came to a head starting in 1974 when Godi, one of the members of the

was just sitting there eating fruit. And six Cacicala males ambushed him. And he tried to get away. And they got him. And they beat him to death over a period of, I think, about 10 minutes. And that kicked off what are known as, like you said, the Gombe chimpanzee war.

Yeah, and then other wars had been documented since then in different areas between different groups. And like I said, you know, part of the reason was they were being sort of choked out by human development. Part of it was because there was a more stressful atmosphere, though. Right. With people there watching and observing and doing what she was doing. So I don't, I'm not going to say that really tarnished her work. If anything, it did show that, yeah,

They observed something else that they didn't know had previously happened, which is it could be very territorial and go to war like this. But since that time, she has...

Just been a tireless advocate for animals over the ensuing decades, like you said, into her early 90s now with the Jane Goodall Institute that is based in Virginia, has 20 offices around the world. And she continues to write books and speak and do TED Talks. And she's just still kicking it. Yeah, she had a podcast called the Jane Goodall Hopecast that she launched during the pandemic.

And then as soon as she could stop, she stopped. The last episode came out in 2022. She's very famously, her quote was that sucked. Yeah. By the way, when I said she's still kicking it, I meant kicking, but like not just kicking it on the couch. That's what kicking it really kicking in old school. Yeah. Now she's just still very active. And I just have a lot of respect for the lady. She's awesome.

Yeah, she is an awesome person. And yeah, she gets criticized by people in academia still. But like I said at the outset, she's just the world loves her. Like she's done so much good that whatever missteps she has or whatever weird side she takes in moral quandaries, like the world just forgives her. It's like it's Jane Goodall. She does good for the planet and has the whole time essentially. Agreed.

If you want to know more about Jane Goodall, there's a lot to read about her and by her. And you can listen to her Hopecast. I presume they didn't erase all of the episodes. And in the meantime, while you're looking all that stuff up, let's go ahead and kick it old school with Listener Mail. We call this the Ballad of Grit because that is what Ed calls it.

In the subject line, hey guys, I'm a self-described man of grit, I should say. I've never considered myself a conscientious person to the full meaning of the word. However, I do consider one of my strengths is being responsible. My opinion is that it's an insult for a gritty person to be confused with being conscientious.

Conscientiousness is a luxury for the already bright-minded person, in my opinion. I believe most intelligent people who are successful are equally gifted with conscientiousness. Grit, on the other hand, is the ugly twin of conscientiousness. It's the path less traveled to success. It's how I got through college to earn an engineering degree, even though I graduated with a low GPA, barely scraping by in many classes, and had to retake some because I didn't pass to begin with.

My road was less traveled and it was a tough one. I worked 40 hours a week for five years while I supported myself in college. And I was compared to my peer graduates with whom I lived at home with their parents who had the funds to build proper projects for courses. Grit is invisible, guys. It can't be measured. It comes from within. Grit is what you have when you succeed without conscientiousness. Love the show. That is from Ed.

I think Ed is a pseudonym for Angela Duckworth. I think this is Angela Duckworth writing in. That's a good email. Yeah, that is a good email, Ed. Good for you for persevering. Hats off to you, man, for sure. I admire anybody who worked to put themselves through college. That's really something. Oh, like me? Yes, I admire you for that.

The first part was paid for. Then I was on my own. Hey, man. Even a little bit still counts. Like, that's hard to do. You know? That was fine. Weighted tables. Whatever. I appreciate it. All right. Just forget it. I'll direct my comments toward Ed only then. All right? No, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. If you want to be like Ed and give us an email to argue over, we love that kind of thing. You can get in touch with us via Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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