What Chimpanzees Reveal About How We Connect and Divide with Aaron Sandel

24:42And they would be quick to give these nervous chimps a pat on the back, pat on the butt, hand to the mouth. You know, like in old movies when someone gets nervous and they bite their fist? Yeah, yeah. I think that's a vestige of probably this ape behavior where you're nervous and you want someone else to put their hand in your mouth. So chimps will do this.

25:05Brené Brown:Oh, I saw that. They reassure each other by putting a hand in the other's mouth or putting a hand on their genitals or something like that. And that calms them down. So these are sort of the neighborhoods. And the interesting dynamic is Jackson, who grew up in the West, this young adult male now sort of in his early 20s. he's rising in the hierarchy. This is like 2013, especially 2014. But he's rising really fast. And then in 2014, it was my third summer, I've decided, the prior summer I decided to quit field parametology. My PhD advisor sort of called my bluff and I was like, all right, fine, I'll do it.

25:47I'll just go out. I'll study adolescent, young adult male social relationships. And I, you know, develop various strategies where I think I could potentially succeed in doing this fieldwork. So I'm like, I'm going to be here for 15 months studying these chimps.

26:01Brené Brown:Jeez. We get there that summer in 2014. And we realize after a few weeks that five of these older adult male chimps have died. They were in there around age 40, which for a chimp is sort of old for a male. I think that they all died within around a month of each other, suggesting some of them at least died from a disease. And these were old males who were really well-connected. And I haven't run the social network analyses on this because it's sort of a difficult question to answer, but they were certainly well-connected with a lot of the other chimps. Some of them even seeming like bridges between the eastern and central neighborhood or bridges between the central and western neighborhood.

26:40It's like the mafia. So these sort of disappear. And you don't know at first because chimpanzees, like humans, they're never all together in the same place at the same time. It's like a village where you're mixing in part. Like, yeah, you have friends and family spend more time together, but throughout the day, they're intermingling. They can go days or weeks without seeing each other. So as researchers, we're going weeks without seeing some of these chimps. We're like, where's Pinsir? Where's Berg? Where's Dolphy? Where's Webster? Where's Mingus? And then after a couple of months, we realize they're gone.

27:08They're gone forever. They died. And I don't think we realized at first that this likely had a big impact. I think the neighborhoods became now more distinct. There used to be three neighborhoods that were really well connected by a handful of individual chimps. Those are now gone at the same time that Jackson is shooting up in the dominance hierarchy. And then I go there for, I'm there for a year, finally learn all the chimps. And I have this research project that's motivating me. And I've sort of learned the forest, become really competent at recognizing the chimps, knowing what's going on. At the end of that year, Jackson finally takes his chance and charges Miles, and a month later, Miles Pant grunts to him.

27:56And that was like the takeover. And it was this day in June in 2015 that that happened, and John Matani, who's been studying these chimps for, at that time, it had been 20 years, that was 2015, he saw, he was the only one that saw Miles grunt in submission to Jackson. So now Jackson is essentially the alpha. He still has to sort of establish himself over the subsequent weeks. And Miles has to retain his high ranking position unless he's going to fall. And it was that afternoon though, I was with chimps from the Western neighborhood and it was the end of the day and I was alone with them, we were in the middle of the territory and they hear other chimps and it must be chimps from the central neighborhood, Miles, Jackson, those other chimps.

28:46They're just an earshot. And the chimps that I'm with, rather than sort of approaching them and reuniting in typical chimpanzee fashion, they become quiet, they become nervous, they start grimacing, they're embracing each other, touching each other in reassurance. They're acting like they're hearing outsiders. And then when they see the central chimpanzees approach, rather than reunite, they run. And the central chimpanzees then chase them. And this was the first time we'd really seen like avoidance among chimps from the same community. And then they avoided each other for six weeks and nothing like that had ever been observed before.

29:24And I think, you know, knowing then learning at the end of the day that, oh, Jackson had finally of got Miles to pancrunt to him. I think the Western chimps must have heard in the vocalization some, you know, heightened tension. And it had been, there's a risk to every reunion, even on a normal day. And I think it was like the Western chimps were like, there's too much tension. It's not worth the risk. They ran. And which I can sort of understand because Miles was sort of a hothead for a while afterwards. He was being more aggressive than normal. Jackson was being more aggressive, establishing themselves.

30:00So it makes sense, but I think they planted the seed of polarization. So, I mean, that we can debate then to what extent the question about the us versus them, do you need them for an us? But the Western neighborhood had already sort of been a cohesive unit, I think. They were already pretty cohesive. They had the six weeks of avoidance after which they all came back together. Things seemed to return to normal. I finished my fieldwork for my PhD. But then as I was gone writing up, other researchers were there, but they slowly became more and more polarized.

30:35Brené Brown:I want to tell you, so if you're listening and you're going to watch Chimp Empire, I'm going to give you a spoiler here. One thing I didn't want on the initial Border Patrol thing, I didn't want Gus to go. I mean, I knew he had to go, but I didn't want him to go. I wanted him to stay safe and I definitely didn't want Pork Pie to go and Pork Pie didn't he got scared and he went home right during this border like he left but I had to tell you about the bad guys in this show Adam are you laughing at me like I I had to wait a long time between one and two because I was distraught I called my husband crying And he's like, you can't watch animal documentaries.

31:27For the Western chimpanzees to sneak into a territory and kill someone in their own territory, that was brutal. It's brutal, but it is a typical part of chimpanzee behavior. It's not so common, but around, I mean, chimpanzees will do these territorial patrols. They'll get a large group of especially adult males, some adult females, and usually a few adolescent females will go to the edge of their territory sometimes, but also often they'll then do these deeper incursions into the outsider's territory. and it's still unclear exactly what sort of the chimps are thinking when they're doing these.

32:15Some, I think, sometimes it is they're trying to find a fig tree or certain fruit trees that are near the border. And so to feel safe eating there, they need to go deeper, make sure there's no other chimps from the outsider group because at the border, there may be some trees that are shared by two groups. Other times, I think certain individual chimps in particular are motivated to go on territorial patrols. Some are motivated to attack and kill chimps from other groups. And they can even try to rally. And how they do this, we do not know, because chimps, they have vocalizations, they have gestures, but they have nothing like human language, spoken language.

32:53They're somehow coordinating, I think, all of this through nonverbal, really subtle bodily cues and context and things that are sort of the next big questions, I think for chimpanzee research, but they will attack and kill. I think, I mean, for me, it feels almost like when chimpanzees are doing this, like, because across chimpanzee sites, they attack and kill chimps from other groups. And we've learned this over the last, you know, 50 years of people sending chimps, but usually they're killing a stranger, a stranger to them. It's adult males because adult males are born in the group. They stay in that group their whole lives.

33:35So any adult male chimp that they see that they don't know is from this other group. So it's a stranger. And it seems like adult male chimps are sort of xenophobic. They have this fear of strangers. And then so when they see one from another group, they'll run if they're outnumbered or they'll go and try to attack and kill them. Yeah, it's brutal, but it's a familiar phenomenon. I mean, from the human perspective too. But with the Ngogo chimps, these are two groups that used to be one they they're not strangers to each other there were one group that finally became two groups at the end of 2017 they had finally split and then it was in 2018 that we saw the first lethal attack by chimps from the western group against a chimp from the central group wow and that was i finished my phd i went back to uganda it for eight months to sort of especially track this polarization.

34:33And I got there and I realized right away, it's like, whoa, this has really changed. Not only are they socially distinct, they've really divided the territory. Now the Western chimps stay in the West, Central chimps stay in the Central. There was one old male BF who was sort of more a Westerner. He was with the Centralers. He was the last chimp that would go back and forth. I remember following him in this plateau in the middle of the forest where there's a lot of different fruit trees. And he was just traveling there alone. It was the center of the territory. Now it's this borderland. And I was expecting, you know, when is he going to go back to join the Westerners?

35:11And then it was in January 2018, we started seeing more and more territorial patrols against these former group members. The central ships would patrol the West. The Western ships would patrol Central. and then it was it was 2018 when the westerners killed this young adult male errol and that was like for me witnessing that it really like shifted my perspective i was like oh wow this split is real they're treating these chimps as outsiders and then i was sort of learning alongside the chimps these shifting dynamics because i think errol showed up to this part of not realizing that the Western chimps would really see him as an outsider and that they would kill him.

35:54Aaron, the parallels to human conflict, they're smacking you right in the face, right? You have a perceived slight or insult or aggression on the part of a former friend or group member. And all of a sudden, now we're locked in some kind of in-group, out-group dynamic. And it almost doesn't matter where it started because each side can point to the other and say, They're dangerous. They're a threat. They did this to us. And therefore we need to defend ourselves. And then the line starts to blur between like offense and defense. Like you protect yourself by attacking. How do you make sense of that?

36:32And how do you think about getting out of it? I think when the conflict started, I mean, a lot of these questions are hard to answer scientifically, but I mean, what I'm really interested is that shift. Like when did the new group identities really emerge and then override prior relationships. And there was always this ambiguity there because the first chimp that we saw killed, Errol, he was 16. He was sort of a loner even within the central group. So when he met the Westerners, it made sense that they would sort of see him more as an outsider. And this was still a time when, you know, they were, they accepted BF.

37:16They accepted this old male who they had a really close relationship to. And so there's this emergence of in-group, out-group dynamic. But there is still plausible deniability. I think the senior professors didn't want to accept that the group was splitting. I mean, it took us a long time. We wrote this paper that was just published in April in the journal Science, just sort of describing what happened and using this long-term data to analyze it, but combined with the more qualitative accounts. It took us so long to write it, partly because it's a huge team effort. We have all these professors, graduate students, Ugandan staff, people who've been working there for decades and decades, and then wanting to do it in a really clear way, but also scientifically, statistically rigorous way.

38:09It was this huge effort. But I think it also took so long because it was really hard for the researchers to admit that the split was happening and then even to think about it, even to analyze the data. I mean, I now want to write a book about this, but I think part of my writer's block is like this emotional toll of watching chimps being killed and watching also the killers, which in that regard, I'm actually, I don't really hold it against them, which is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. But why not? I don't know. I think, I mean, because I saw Errol killed. Errol was a 16-year-old.

38:52He'd been the subject of my dissertation. He was one of the 18 young males that I focused on. So I was looking at him, you know, for 15 months. He was one of the main chimps that I was looking at, writing down who he was interacting with. He was an orphan. He had a close relationship to his much older brother, Dizzy. They were both the smallest chimps in the whole community. And I remember even him before my dissertation, my real dissertation research in 2012, 2013, watching him. He was a little shy, this little loner adolescent orphan with these two older brothers. One brother died in 2014, and then his older brother died in 2017.

39:31There was a disease outbreak. So it was really sad to watch Errol be killed and die. I was in the moment. I still have this, which is almost troubling. I look at the video footage that I took and can hear, you know, I'm narrating it with this objective voice. Rewatching it, it's sad to watch and it's also almost troubling. I'm curious about my own mental state at the time. I remember though that night, once the day was over, Errol had died. We got a vet in to sort of assess the body and the wounds. and then we buried his body so that we could collect the bones later because that's an important rare scientific opportunity to have the skeleton of a wild chimp.

40:20And then that night, emailing the senior professors to tell them that this had happened, it was really, that was like, you know, I'm sitting on the porch in the dark in this cabin in the middle of the forest. And that's when like the emotions sort of come and I cried and reflecting more on the emotion. Because these are chimps that, it's weird. We have this one-sided relationship with all of them. We're just following them around in the forest. They ignore us, but we learn about their lives. And Errol was certainly someone I knew really well. And yet, I don't hold it against the chimps who were attacking him.

40:56And I almost have grace for them because I'm motivated to understand what caught, like, why did the group split? I'm motivated to understand even the sort of psychology underlying lethal aggression in chimps. And partly, I mean, they're chimps, so I don't have the same, you know, moral standard, of course, that I would have for a human. But it just, to me, it seems like this more, I want a systemic understanding of what's happening. And I don't know what it is, but I do seem to have this sort of grace for the individual chimps. Wow. Wow. Aaron, it sounds like demonizing them would stand in the way of understanding them.

41:38I think it could, yeah. I think it could stand in the way of understanding them and understanding what's going on. And it's like, again, I'm a scientist watching this dynamic unfold. There's something to be said for, you know, objectivity and distance, but I'm also really wanting to understand the phenomenon and it's like i can't stop it for many reasons like i mean it wouldn't be safe these are chimps like like there's no way to intervene really but also there's something to be said out of respect for the chimps to let this unfold yeah and then just to see how can we understand it yeah i think like i and there may be a lesson here also for deepening our sort of understanding of conflict and aggression and violence and war in humans, I wonder to what extent we should focus our attention more on sort of the causes and the context and maybe less demonization of the individuals who are perpetrating these horrible things.

42:37Of course, with humans, you have to hold people accountable for what they do, but maybe the demonization gets in the way. I mean, I think that's probably true.

42:47Brené Brown:I just, one thing I've learned is, and I probably knew it going into this conversation, I definitely know it now, I would be the absolute worst. I would be the worst at your job of anybody in the whole world. Because I would be armed. And if you came against the people that I have named and that I love and that I have, I know their story and their narrative. You know, and it's also, I think the thing that's hard is like I was with my family and I was telling them about this and they're like, stop talking about the chimps. And it reminded me of when we would interview people asking them, what is vulnerability?

43:27Brené Brown:How many hundreds, if not thousands of people said to us in these interviews, any animal dying in a film is absolute vulnerability and the people who do it should go straight to hell. Like just the reaction that we have that I think if I were one of the senior researchers, it would take me a long time to write that paper too because I would want something different for them than what we have for us. I would want something pure and better and less susceptible to what makes humans so hard. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the one thing to note is that in this case, the chimps who are during the killing are also chimps that, you know, we've known that researchers have named and we know their stories too.

44:26So it does create the more, it's a bit more of a complex picture than typical intergroup aggression where you don't know the chimps who might be attacking chimps from your group and you find a dead body of a chimp, presumably killed by the outsider group. It's different, I think.

44:42Brené Brown:But you don't immediately go like, here are these chimps that killed this person that I've been studying. And now in my scientific narrative, they are the bad guys moving forward. A crippling cruelty has taken over the Western group. like you like yeah i i would i empath i empathize with the sentiment and i think some of the i would bet that if i bet i think a lot of our team feels that way to some extent i think some of them do yeah i think some of the researchers do feel that way yeah and i think you know it's like what we talk about at the dinner table that's where we do more anthropomorphizing which is still based in our like observation.

45:27So it's like when professional primatologists are anthropomorphizing, it's grounded in, if not in like quantitative data, it's grounded in our experience of watching the chimps and knowing their relationships. And I mean, so much of animal behavior and anthropology is sort of having a vibe about what's happening. And then if you're a good scientist, articulating the vibe. And like with chimps, it took me so long to learn what are they going to do. next? Like, what are they possibly thinking and feeling? Most of that's still a vibe. I mean, it's based on context. Where am I in the forest? Oh, they're at this fig tree that they were at a couple of years ago.

46:07They usually take this path. They go there, they'll likely patrol. It took me a decade to get to the point where I'm like, okay, I think this is what I'm noticing about them. These are the subtle movements. These are subtle behaviors. Yeah. I mean, it's, for me though, I don't know why I just really don't hold it against the ones who are doing the attacking and part of it is so much of that dynamic, we see that dynamic unfolding. We see it emerging and then unfolding and there's sort of this positive side to a lot of those dynamics. On a territorial patrol, it's an amazing opportunity

46:44Brené Brown:for bonding and mentorship. it's like two of the often the instigators of patrols in the West, Rollins and his younger brother Damien. Damien was this adolescent male whose mother had died in this disease outbreak in 2017 and he and his younger sister, this little juvenile, were sort of adopted by their much older brother Rollins and it was like they were on patrols together and Damien grew up and he was like really motivated I think to go on territorial patrols himself, but he had his older brother, a sort of role model, this mentor. And in the West, because of the patrolling, I think there's a lot more almost egalitarianism across age and dominance rank.

47:31And it does lead to more cohesion. That's again, where you definitely see, I get why so often we think you need a them for an us because that happens for sure. but the West already had this sort of cohesion beforehand, but I think it is bolstered by these territorial patrols. I mean, it's amazing. Sometimes you also will see these long-term bonded individuals going on territorial patrols more often than, you know, with others. And I think it's like, if you're with your friend, you're more, you're braver and you're able to like go on the front lines. There was one time, there was one time that the Western chimps were patrolling and they were going, pushing in 2021, further and further east.

48:16They had moved in. This was probably in the weeks before they killed Pork Pie. And I was with the Western chimps and they get to this sort of further east than they typically went before. They start calling the Central chimps. We can hear them. They're calling. And the Western chimps I'm with, they decided to give up. They turn around, but they sort of scatter. And I wasn't sure if some had gone ahead. So I rushed ahead to other calls, these screams and the chimps will bang on trees, the buttresses, the sort of roots of trees. And I get not very far away. And it's these two young adult males, Hayden and Booker from the central group.

48:56They are like on the front lines calling, like sort of defending their territory. Most of the central chimps are hundreds of meters behind them. But I think they were like, these are small, low ranking chimps. But they were like, I think emboldened by their bonds with each other. That Booker is Gus's older brother. So it was like this interesting little family there. But yeah, there's beauty and sort of cooperation and there's empathy. There's so many of the positive dynamics that you see at play even in the midst of this aggression and violence. Aaron, at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned you were curious about do they have friendships and how do they form them?

49:38Where are you on that? I hear you talking about, it sounds like chimps are bonding through grooming. It sounds like they're bonding through going on these sort of patrols. Are they friends? How do they become friends? How do you know?

49:55Brené Brown:If you're going to say they're not friends, I need some kind of disclaimer. No. Because you're going to break my heart, Aaron. There's the scientific caution about using terms that are commonly used by us in everyday speech and that are so defined by, I think, the human experience. And I think friendship is one of them. Primatologists have been debating to what extent you can use that term to describe the relationships of other animals for years. I think that some chimps definitely are friends with each other. But I also, I mean, I think it still deserves a more sort of deeper understanding of what we mean by friendship.

50:36And for that, we have to think about what we mean by friendship in humans. I don't think we have the best understanding of this yet. And I mean, until recently, and there's been, I think, a lot of good work. And Adam, I know you've been thinking about this a lot, but there wasn't a great scientific understanding of friendship. So often we would have to go back to Aristotle to sort of even get the framework. And I think to some extent, there are two important points, I think, when I think about chimps. One is there's an important distinction between a friend and an ally.

51:11Brené Brown:Oh, for sure. So often, like with Jackson, it was hard for me to know, are these his friends? or are these his allies? Was Miles his friend or his ally? Was Basie his friend or his ally? Like, I think a friend, there's like a real emotional connection. You want to spend time together. You sort of are calm when you're with them or excited when you see them. Whereas an ally is someone who will come to your aid, but it might be for more utilitarian purposes. So it might be that Miles was an ally to Jackson. I'm not sure. But when circumstances change, maybe it would be easier to break that tie. Yeah, Renee?

52:02Brené Brown:I mean, Cass, I can tell you for sure 100 % that Miles was friends with Jackson. And here's my empirical evidence. Because when Abrams was trying to fight his way up and was grooming Miles, and Jackson couldn't see, Miles would not groom Abrams back. He let him pick all the bugs off of him. And then he just came a look and he was like, you're not my friend. And then, yes. That would be my hypothesis. Yeah, it's a good hypothesis. And I think those looks are actually what's key. Like we can't, I don't, I mean, there's from behavior alone, from these sort of broad measures of behavior, you cannot, I don't think, determine friendship from grooming alone or how much time they spend sitting near each other alone.

52:54I think it has to be partly a much more detailed, subtler depiction of almost like facial expressions or these other patterns that are extremely difficult to determine in a chimp. And I mean, I think they're, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they're really difficult for humans. Like we don't necessarily have the system. Yeah.

53:16Brené Brown:It's impossible. But we as people are so good at sort of almost unconsciously picking up on this with humans, with each other. Yes. I mean, that's where the vibe, these gut feelings, vibes. And then if you're really good at it, you become a good therapist or a poker champion. Yes. Or a psychic or something. I hope not. You're a psychic. Yeah, you're lost. I'm not talking. I don't mean like East Village, like little kiosk. I mean, like, really, like, my great grandmother was a sort of faith healer, Sephardic, Kabbalistic faith healer. So I'm a little... I do believe in that, 100%. Yeah. She was reading, like, coffee grounds and having meetings about people's numerology and stuff.

54:07So I might have a little bias for my name in my blood. But yeah, I think we're really good at picking up on it. And finally, after like a decade of studying chimps, I started picking up on these subtleties. Some of my colleagues, like Retch Nareddy, who studies these chimps, she like from day one, she was picking up on the subtleties. It took me 10 years. But now I'm like, oh, I think these chimps are friends based on the way they're grooming each other, the way they're looking at each other.

54:35Brené Brown:Miles looked at him like, I appreciate the grooming. I understand what you're doing. Not only am I not going to participate in this with you, be very clear that I love Jackson. It's possible, yeah. I mean, but I even remember, I remember, you know, seven years before that happened, like, this is another just, this is not, I mean, relationships, of course, can also change. For chimps, they might, these friendships or alliances or both typically last like around three years, but sometimes they can last a decade. Sometimes they can last over a decade. I think those cases are like for sure friendships.

55:23But the other reason I'm hesitant to use the term friend to describe the relationships in chimps is I wonder if friendship doesn't actually fully capture the strength of the relationship. Sometimes it's like, you know, you're just friends. sometimes like with friendship that we have today, it's like a lower, it's considered a lower category than other types of bonds, a bond with a partner, a romantic partner or something or family bonds. So that's why I'm leaving open the possibility that these are certainly sometimes social bonds that might be even stronger than what we typically call friendship, especially if these relationships, you know, might be better understood as a mentor-mentee relationship.

56:06Like sometimes we may not call that friendship, but it's this really important bond. So that's my other hesitance. Like it was like this whole journey of what are these, a scientific study of friendship. I'm like, okay, maybe they do have them. But I'm like, wait, maybe that doesn't even be, that doesn't fully capture the intensity and the emotional sort of power of some of these relationships. And I will say like for the relationships that last a decade, these are, I mean, there's the strongest bonds for chimps. number one is mother and their kid. They stay with their mom for the first 10 years of their life through middle, early adolescence.

56:44They can maintain a relationship even though they spend less time with her for their entire life. Where these even adult males, where they don't spend a lot of time together, when they are together, they'll groom each other.

56:55Brené Brown:Can I just ask this last question? It'll be my last question about my friends. And then go, shut up, Adam. How is that true for two reasons? I feel like Christine did Nadine dirty. Like, so, listen. You're watching Real Housewives, Chimp Edition. No, listen. No, Christine is the mom. and then she has the baby that they don't name in the beginning of the show but later you find out it's Isabel so cute and mischievous a little too mischievous for my taste because it was a dangerous situation because of the men eye roll but Nadine was Isabel's older sister and the narrator who I'm sure had to get past the scientist said that Nadine was ignored because now there's a baby in the family and seven-year-old Nadine is being ignored.

57:50Brené Brown:And then my other question, and I know this has to be the last one, but I cannot believe that they send unprotected female adolescents out of their community on their own. Like, Adam, they are shoved out, teenage girls, shoved onto the streets. Not okay with that. So explain to me how the motherhood bond must end because Nadine was ignored. I felt so bad for her. She's like in human fifth grade. Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, the one thing is when there's a new baby, when there's a new infant, this is true across, I think, mammals, that there's more attention on this new infant, less attention on the juvenile.

58:43but and I think it's hard for Nadine it probably was hard but she still maintained a close relationship she's still traveling constantly with Christine she but it is a it's a rough transition she's not the sole focus of Christine's attention and I think we see this again probably with humans and with chimps it's interesting because like humans they it's not just where most mammals, soon after weaning, the kid becomes completely independent. In group living animals, including many primates, it's actually usually the females that stay. So they can have an opportunity. The relationship shifts. And actually, surprisingly, we know less about the development of these relationships.

59:26This is something I'm working on with one of my PhD students in gorillas and also another PhD student with chimps. How do these relationships sort of shift during this juvenile period after weaning, before puberty. It's a really interesting dynamic into what is the mother-offspring relationship like. The thing with chimps is, first of all, it's important to note that, yeah, at adolescence, in chimps and bonobos, the females typically leave the group. They leave the area that they've known. They leave the chimps that they've known. But it's unlikely. It doesn't seem that they're kicked out, which is interesting.

1:00:02They seem to go on their own accord. So around adolescence, late adolescence, maybe around 11, 12, 13, female chimps become more independent of their mother. They spend more time in the entire group. And often they'll join the adult males and a few other adult females on these territorial patrols. Part of it is because they're socializing with the adults in the group. And so the males will go off on a patrol. They're like, all right, let's go. But part of me wonders if they're almost using that opportunity to survey the other groups and the other territories. And to me, I feel like there's a lot of agency in what's going on for these young females.

1:00:45They are brave. I mean, talk about vulnerability. They're going out into the unknown. I couldn't believe it. They're alone walking out. And I think part of it might be because at adolescence, you know, fear can become thrill. So I think for some of these females, it's like they're going out into the unknown. And sometimes they stay. Sometimes they stay, but go into a different neighborhood, especially at Ngogo, where there's a big, huge chunk of forest. Sometimes they can go and that's an easier transition. Other times it's like, wow, and we don't know what goes on because it's hard to follow them.

1:01:21And it can be rough transitioning into a new group. so it's not that it's like an easy life but it's like a very interesting and impressive thing that happens for these chimps, these female chimps but if on occasion an adolescent female stays in her community and she stays in the neighborhood with her mom then those are the strongest bonds in the world they can just stay with their mom sometimes they like stay in the group but don't have a relationship with her but sometimes they stay and it's like this lifelong bond

1:01:52Brené Brown:that's what I would pick yeah and that's beautiful but then the other and that's the strongest bond that exists for chimps but then one of the other strongest bonds is between adult males these ones that can last 5, 10, 12 years and for me those relationships which they'll be with maternal brothers will form these strong bonds but some of the most enduring are just between unrelated adult males This is why, and these are the males who are hunting together and sharing meat and going on border patrols. To me, I think friendship might not even fully capture the nature of these relationships. Like brotherhood.

1:02:32Yeah. It's like brotherhood or it's almost like the closest thing I've seen in the animal kingdom to romantic love. Wow. It's like a pair bond. Like we often think about pair bonds as occurring between a male and a female that are mating together and often raising offspring together. But if you think about what really is a pair bond, that's about the relationship. Like whether they're monogamous or not is another question. Whether they are raising an offspring together is another question. The pair bond is about a really strong social relationship, cooperation, distinct behaviors, preferences for each other.

1:03:08and if you sort of go check off the list of what makes a pair bond which we often think about you know some birds and you see some primates like gibbons and you know owl monkeys and tt monkeys habits if you start going through the list of what actually makes a pair bond i feel like some of these adult male pairs are actually pair bonds it reminds me my dad and his best fishing buddy

1:03:32Brené Brown:who've been friends for 50 years you know i mean and they're not patrolling territory i mean the Gulf Coast, but they have a bond that it's like lasted divorces. And, you know, I mean, they just like, they say things to each other like they didn't want to live without each other. Like they're, you know, but they're a few words, but I can see it actually. It'd be so much better for human guys to have pair bonds with other men and develop more vulnerability and empathy and those kinds of things. And it's just hard to do it around nonviolent things sometimes. Okay, I'm super aware of time. Adam, before we go to our lightning round, do you have any?

1:04:22Brené Brown:I have gotten three out of my 30 questions, but that's okay. I know where you work. Barely scratched the surface for me too, but I think it's time for lightning. Yeah. I will say that my daughter, who's getting her PhD in emotion studies, was like, make sure you ask him about the otter gang wars in Singapore. And I was like, I don't think he studies the otter. She's like, but he's got to know about the otter wars because otter is her favorite animal. And she was so devastated to learn about these gang wars between otters and Singapore. But yeah, it's genetic. She's got a genetic problem from her mom.

1:04:59Brené Brown:All right. One thing that you are deeply curious about right now. What are emotions and can we really scientifically study this across animals? Speaking my love language. Okay. You get to design the weirdest and wildest thing, just single item to put inside of a curiosity shop. What would it be? My God. Yeah. I would want to be a wearable device that would like a wire snare that you would catch an animal with, but that has a safety device on it. So it turns into a bracelet and then it has like a GPS and Bluetooth and stuff. So you could just put it out and get it on wild animals and then it would track them.

1:05:56and maybe non-basically monitor their behavior. I don't know if that, we could put that in the curiosity shop. We could, for sure. It's a primatology curiosity shop, for sure. Yeah. Or I don't know if that's a thing. It could also be like a chimp testicle and tickling and formaldehyde that I collected in 2015. I would be for that. That was not on my bingo card for today. I have to ask, Aaron, And one of the things I'm so curious about that I think can be done lightning style is what's the most surprising way that chimps are similar to humans?

1:06:33Brené Brown:I love that. I think it's in the I mean, there's these big conceptual things like these relationships that seem to hint at things like love and war. But it's also for me, the subtlest things, the gestures. one thing that um really stuck with me is um the way they uh will just swipe at their nose sometimes it seems to be when they're a little more activated they'll swipe at their nose and this is something humans do all the time it's like you know when someone's a little anxious nervous or really thinking about something they swipe at their nose we don't notice it though No one notices. So I'm like, this is where I can become sort of the psychic.

1:07:17I'm like, chimps are doing it. I see it across primates. Humans are doing it too. It's like the same thing or even just little gestural things, the way you rest your ankle on your knee when you're, you know, sitting down, chimps do this. So much of what we think of as human is not because we're human. Yes, it's important part of, of being human, but it's because we're apes.

1:07:41Brené Brown:damn okay and i'm gonna leave with this question because i just have to this is i am so anti-meta glasses but would it be cool for primatologists that if you looked and you got the read on let's say gus my guy gus and you're like in your meta glass and then when you were wearing them you would be like, Caroline, Isabel, Sam, Gus, would that be helpful or not helpful? So helpful, especially for training new researchers. So helpful. And that's sort of what we are now, the experienced researchers. The one problem, I mean, this is an easy solution, but the one problem is we're staying always like 25, 30 feet away from the chimps to make sure just for our safety, their safety, especially their safety, we can give them a common cold and they would die from that.

1:08:35So that's the biggest priority is like, we're wearing face masks, we have hand sanitizer, we're keeping a distance. So we need binoculars. Even like when they're on the ground, sometimes you don't want to use binoculars. So if we could have like super magnification, video recording glasses, that would be really nice that sort of had this automatic recognition of individuals and behavior. For the last few years, I was doing a lot more like camcorder footage or I even just would wear like a lapel mic and dictate everything I'm seeing. Because historically with animal behavior, it's like you're writing down in a notebook.

1:09:11I've been looking at my old like writing the rain notebooks from 2012 where I'm like writing down these little notes of what they're doing. But then I switched to an app on my phone where I'm like entering really quickly what's happening. It automatically records the date and the time, GPS location, stuff like that. But yeah, that would be like the Metaglass style thing. It would be so good, but the problem is really just methodological. There's a bunch of vegetation. There's sometimes 150 feet up in a tree. They're running around, but that would be great.

1:09:45Brené Brown:I'll work on it for you. Okay, but if you see me in your class, just be cool. Yeah. You be cool, Renee. That's going to be the hard part. No, there's no way I can be cool. I'm going to ask myself. I expect you in the front row for sure. No doubt. That's where I always sit. I just have to say, I'm so glad you didn't give up on your guerrilla dream, Aaron. Same. Yeah. I think the work you're doing is so fascinating. And I think it's so much easier to see the things that we take for granted that are problematic in human interactions. I think you're holding up a mirror and allowing us to look at that and say, wait a minute, that doesn't have to happen.

1:10:24Brené Brown:That's beautiful, Adam. Yeah. Dream come true. um really just really important and amazing and i love it so much i'm still not a fan i'm still not not i'm a fan i just i think they are us and we are them and i think that's a little scary but love what you do parallels are the parallels are hard but yeah thank you so much it's great discussing this with you so fun thank you for joining us aaron was this everything you dreamed of yes i don't think he softened me on the western group at all just to be honest with you like i am but maybe i am the problem maybe like maybe i am promoting the us and themness of it but i didn't get to know them i mean i just didn't have a soft spot well there was there's a tough killing in the first in the first episode and i just never got past it I don't think I would get over that either.

1:11:26It's striking to me how strong your parasocial relationships are with these chimps. Me? Yours. Yeah, I mean, his too. But yours just from watching the doc.

1:11:35Brené Brown:Well, you know, documentaries are, you know, nature documentaries, especially. I mean, had we not been doing this podcast, I would never have watched one because I find that kind of stuff really tough to see and really tough to watch. And the vulnerability of animals, I think, is really hard. But I kept saying, I can't watch it. I'm going to watch it. I can't watch it. I'm going to watch it for the prep. But then I just got bought in. And there were some very serious – it's really hard when you see them and their little ears and their eyes. And they look like us. And so I just knew them. And they have such fun personalities and not all of them.

1:12:14But I don't know. I left – I would be so bad at this job.

1:12:19Brené Brown:Could you imagine anyone worse at this job than me? I could. Yes, I could. No, because I'm just such about the story and the emotional narrative. And he seems like it's so funny. He goes right to the edge of that and then science pulls him back. Did you notice that? Consistently. Yeah. Every time he got attached, he would kind of pull back and say, well, that's an interesting hypothesis. Right. I'm like, no, I'm not hypothesizing. this is exactly what happened between these two chimps. I can tell you right now that Miles looked at this guy and said, try again. I'm not, you know, like, so I think I was really grateful too about the honesty of the struggle that you can start dreaming of doing that kind of research, but that kind of research is tough and isolating and scary.

1:13:14Yeah. It, you know, it captured for me, what is a challenge for a lot of people of pursuing what they think is a calling career-wise. You have this image, especially if you fall for it when you're young, and it seems like it's going to be nirvana. And then you get there and it's a job. And you have all these, to your point, isolating tasks, menial tasks, the boredom, just to observe and try to figure out what's going on. And I think a lot of people experience a honeymoon hangover effect there where I feel like, oh, no, this is my life now.

1:13:49Brené Brown:Yeah. Yeah. Because I don't think anyone dreams about the preparation, the part of the career that makes it that thing. Like, you know, the hundreds of hours of, you know, mosquito bites and every chimp looks the same and you can't see them because they're in the canopy. And, you know, I just, I don't think that's what we, and certainly if you grow up on media, that's promoting some career, that's not what they're showing in the documentary. They probably have a gajillion hours and we see four 40 minutes series, you know? I think it's so easy to, this is true for any job. It's so easy to fall in love with the purpose of it and have no idea whether the process is a good fit for you or not, which is why it's, it boggles my mind that people don't shadow jobs before they take them.

1:14:42People commit to careers without actually knowing what they're going to be doing day in and day out. I think in our world, I'm so curious about how you do this. When we have people who are thinking about doing a PhD, my first advice to them is go read four articles in our academic journals. And if you're still awake on number four, you have found your calling.

1:15:04Brené Brown:Yeah. No, I think it's three things. I think it's purpose versus process versus romanticized understanding. So a lot of people want to be, it was like if you track some of the research around how many people got interested in medicine because of Grey's Anatomy. That's such a good example. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so I think just the real behind the scenes, I don't think a second year medical student is thinking, this is exactly, you know, like that moment when Meredith Gray fell in love with McDreamy, you know, it's, they're thinking I have 7 ,000 flashcards and I remember three of them.

1:15:50And I think I have all three of those diseases. Oh no.

1:15:53Brené Brown:Oh God, for sure. Yeah. Having been married to, from someone through medical school and residency. Um, yeah. Yeah. I just think it was an interesting conversation on every level, not just the chimps, but his own experience as a researcher and a scientist. And yeah, I think it was beautiful. Me too. You know, one thing I was left thinking about, I just, I have to ask you about this because I don't know what to make of it. I think one of the things I'm grappling with right now is as for as long as I can remember, I've thought about what makes us uniquely human is language, our ability to communicate with sophisticated words, not just gestures to be able to tell stories.

1:16:34And yet Erin was talking about all the planning and coordination and even bonding and connection, even thinking, right, without words. How do they do that? Is language as important as I thought it was? Where are you on that?

1:16:51Brené Brown:I think you'll help me find a more graceful way to say this. I think if language is in the picture, it's critically important. If language doesn't need to be in the picture for communication, but if language is a variable, then it becomes, I think about Ludwig Wittgenstein, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. And so I think because in a human species, we do, we are kind of socially built around language I think it's excruciatingly important. But can things exist without it? Yes. But I think if it's a variable, then you really need emotional granularity, a strong vocabulary. I think those things become, especially because our research, we started it maybe 15 years ago, asking folks, please make a list of every emotion that you can recognize when you're feeling it.

1:17:55Brené Brown:And the mean number was three, happy, sad, and pissed off. And so imagine if you are shoving every experiment, every experience you have as a human being into one of those three buckets. So where is awe? Where is wonder? Where's anguish? Where's despair? Where's joy? You know, like you're just, it's so crude. the buckets are so crude that it literally does change your lived experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really well put. You know, it, it reminds me of the, the research by Paula Niedenthal and colleagues on historical migration patterns and emotional expressiveness and body language and, and tone.

1:18:40Do you know this work?

1:18:41Brené Brown:No, I don't. Oh, I've, I've found this so interesting and you just, you just connected dots for me on this. So basically they look around the world and they want to know why are some cultures more emotionally expressive than others? And I think the basic, if you look at their map of emotional expressiveness, like why are the Americas doing so much with their arms and their faces and with their tones? And you go to Japan and it's much more reserved. Right. And in a couple of their studies, they show that basically how many different languages came together to form the country is a clear predictor of how emotionally expressive their region is.

1:19:26In Japan, everyone spoke the same language, and so they didn't need the gestures and the tones and the body language. And in the Americas, okay, even Spanish versus Portuguese, we've got to do more to try to convey what we're expressing. And the dot you just connected for me was, this is exactly what chimps are doing. They don't have the words. They don't have the extensive, they don't have the nuance of spoken language. Right, right, right. And so they've gotten really good at the subtle gestures and the tones that substitute. Yeah.

1:20:04Brené Brown:And you can see, like in the documentary, I was so interested to see some of those gestures seemed just kind of from birth with the babies, but some of them you could see were being taught. You know, some of the calls, some of the gestures were being taught. And so, yeah, I think it's so interesting to me. Okay, I might have to watch. Yeah, I think, especially now, knowing Aaron, I think you would love to watch it. Yeah. I'm like you. I don't want to see some of those events. I will tell you - Animals being hurt? It's their very, they don't show it. Okay, good. No, no, there's nothing graphic about it at all.

1:20:47Brené Brown:Oh, I would have never made it. No. Yeah. This was a good one. I loved it. Thank you for have my chimpanzee dream come true here. It was long overdue. And we didn't even talk about the bridge that he built between us because he did his doctorate at Michigan and he teaches at UT Austin. Hook him. Go Blue. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brene Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+.

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1:22:25Brené Brown:Today on The Curiosity Shop, you're going to meet some interesting characters. You're going to meet Gus, an awkward teen who's having a tough time finding his way with some of the tougher guys in the group. You're going to meet Christine, who has a new baby named Isabel, and an older daughter named Nadine. You're going to see Nadine's frustration. We're going to talk about that, about having a little baby in the neighborhood now who's getting all the attention. We're also going to talk about Jackson, the 31-year-old alpha of the group who is currently being challenged by a new, very aggressive male.

1:23:03Brené Brown:Who are these folks? These are members of one of the largest chimpanzee communities in the world. And on the Curiosity Shop this week, we're talking to anthropologist and primatologist Dr. Aaron Sandell about what he and his colleagues have learned about alliances, social structures, and the violence that can tear communities apart. The story of the N 'Gogo chimps is the subject of the Netflix documentary Chimp Empire. Today, as humans navigate war, polarization, and growing distrust, we'll ask Aaron what we might be able to learn from the chimps in N 'Gogo about how social bonds are built, how they break, and why they're so critical to holding communities together.

1:23:40Welcome to The Curiosity Shop, a show from the Fox Media Podcast Network.

1:23:50So today, Adam and I are both excited.

1:23:54Brené Brown:I'm losing my mind. We have Dr. Aaron Sandell. He's an associate professor in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is co-director of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project. He received his PhD in anthropology from, I'm gonna have to give this to Adam, the University of Michigan. There you go, I'm giving it to you. He studies our closest ape relatives to understand social bonds and the emotions that animate them. Since 2012, he has studied wild chimpanzees at Ngogo in Uganda. We're excited he's here. Let's bring him on. First of all, welcome. Thank you. And I hope you've cleared your calendar.

1:24:33Brené Brown:Because I am in full, look at, I can't even take it. I'm in full on five-year-old kindergartner mode. I have questions about questions. Perfect. I mean, Brene, you've been talking about chimps and wanted to do an episode on chimps since before we had a podcast together. Okay, so let's start with what's on your website. I love this. So on your website, you write, we are facing crises of loneliness, polarization, and conflict. Why? Part of the problem is that we don't fully understand the nature and importance of the social bonds that hold communities together. You write, I study our closest ape relatives to understand social bonds and the emotions that animate them.

1:25:15Brené Brown:I have studied chimpanzees in Uganda since 2012, including a rare violent conflict between chimpanzees. I am expanding my research now to mountain gorillas and humans. I love this. You write,

1:25:57Yeah, Abrams in the central group. He should be still the alpha. Yeah, he took, he fully became the alpha because Chimp Empire was filmed mostly around 2021. And that was right as he was sort of trying to establish himself. I don't want to give spoilers. I mean, there's going to be a lot of spoilers that we discussed today for those who haven't seen Chimp Empire. But yeah, he became the alpha of the central group. And there's not a lot of competition there. So he's been able to hold that position.

1:26:30Brené Brown:I had an over-under on Gus coming out and whooping some Abrams ass and taking over. Because, look, I had to call my husband like five times and he's like, get off the chimp empire. No, I love that. Yeah, Gus, great chimp. Didn't have a chance at Alpha though. In my opinion, great. He's sensitive, grooming. He was a great older brother. He was a good younger brother. But yeah, doesn't have the same suite of traits, I think, that would lead someone to become alpha. Okay, wait a minute. Back up, Aaron, because I think I'm the stand-in for the audience today. I have not seen Chimp Empire. Who are Abram and Gus?

1:27:18What am I missing? And these are some of the young adults and adolescent male chimps in one of the chimpanzee groups at Ngogo, which is this population of chimpanzees in the middle of Kibale National Park in western Uganda. This is a huge chunk of forest, especially for anywhere in Uganda or East Africa. It's this big chunk of forest. It's been really well protected. The Uganda Wildlife Authority has been protecting this chunk of forest. And it's been a national park for over 30 years. And the Ngogo chimpanzees are in the middle of that park. So they're surrounded on all sides by other forests.

1:27:58They're surrounded by other chimpanzee groups. So we really get to see a lot of their natural behavior as they would interact with each other, but also with chimps from other outside groups. And we will discuss, I think this will come up a lot, is the dynamics among these two groups adding go-go. But Chimp Empire follows these two neighboring chimpanzee groups. Abrams was this young adult male who was rising in the dominance hierarchy in the central group. Gus was this adolescent male. He was sort of living his best life in the central group.

1:28:35Brené Brown:I just feel like the documentary and what you're studying explains so much. I got to ask you this. When you think there are lessons about loneliness and polarization and conflict that we as humans can learn from primates, I think, did you set out to study, did you set out to be a primatologist so you could learn about us from them? Or did you observe, was this a a priori kind of thing? Or did you observe them and like, oh man, we've got some lessons we can learn here? It's a good question. I'm a sort of, on the one hand, a rare case, but sort of common, I think, in animal behavior and primatology where this was a lifelong dream to study apes in the wild.

1:29:20Since I was five, I wanted to study gorillas. It was like childhood dream, age five, got a stuffed animal gorilla, got hooked, completely hooked at age five. All my sort of creative energy since age five was going into thinking about wild apes. Wow. And so then this, and I mean, my classmates in second grade, they called me gorilla. Even my teacher let me like sign my name on my papers as gorilla. I was obsessed. And then, so like fast forward in college, I sort of got more interested in human evolution and ape evolution. But really at that point, I was interested in gorilla behavior just because I had this lifelong passion for gorillas.

1:30:07And I'd spent time at the zoo throughout high school in Boston. So I developed this interest in gorillas just for their own sake, just the sort of beauty of the natural world, the complexity of their lives, even in their subtleties. And then, so I was really almost interested in humans insofar as they could help me understand gorillas.

1:30:29Brené Brown:Yeah. It was like a little flip from the typical biological anthropologist evolutionary sort of framework where we're trying to understand humans. It was flipped for me, but then I got interested in humans too. I thought, I mean, humans are fascinating, obviously. And I got really excited by thinking about humans and our closest relatives, chimps, gorillas, bonobos. And then I really got interested in chimps. I think it was college where I shifted. I got interested in more of these questions of social bonds, cooperation, aggression to some extent, dominance relationships. and then I did that for my PhD studying chimps at Ngogo and I got on this sort of chimp track and started studying their social relationships.

1:31:14They're sort of asking, initially it was asking the question, do they have what we can really call friendship? That was the main motivation and how did these relationships develop? And then in studying that, I became more interested in these broader themes of emotions, loneliness, and conflict. And I would say just the connection to emotions in particular was when thinking more deeply about friendship. Like, how do we define friendship in chimps? We have to figure out how we define it in humans. These are concepts that we borrow from understanding our own lives. And I came to realize, really, the way to understand a social bond or a friendship is about how we feel in those relationships.

1:31:57It's not necessarily just based on behavior alone. I don't think you could usually figure out or two people friends based on that. It's about their emotions. So then I said, okay, this is sort of fast forwarding to where I'm at now. I'm like, how do we study emotions then in chimps? And then I was like, oh, let me just go to the psychologists and figure out how we study in humans. And then I realized that that's maybe a complicated question, even just for humans. So I've been excited by thinking, how do we actually study emotions across species? but it's really this back and forth. I think I'm always still interested in what can I learn about humans from studying chimps?

1:32:39What can I learn about chimps from thinking more about humans? How many questions do you have right now, Brene?

1:32:45Brené Brown:Oh my God. I want you to write an atlas of the heart for the chimpanzees. I'm thinking, okay, here's what I'm thinking. Let me get focused. I'm so excited. Okay. You know why we had you on now? This is crazy. We had you on now because huge World Cup fans, we watched all of it, and then we interviewed a lot of people about the World Cup. And one of the things that happened with Raj Bennett, with Rebecca Lowe, with John Green, the author, is we got to this question with the World Cup every time, can there be a we without a them? and is the strength of the we and the sense of belonging and community, does it require an enemy?

1:33:28And so, you know, like my enemy from this past weekend would be Newcastle,

1:33:34Brené Brown:where I ended up with the draw as a Liverpool fan. So this is why I wanted to talk to you. And what I'm really mad about, to be honest with you, is they have plenty of fruit, the Western and the Central, have plenty of fruit. this is like authoritarianism to me. Plenty of fruit, plenty of space. They do not need to go all alpha male all the time. It is an inherently broken part of human. I mean, something is wrong. Can I just build on that? So I have, I guess, the same puzzle, which is we normally think about conflict emerging from resource scarcity and two groups fighting over something that they both want.

1:34:14But to Brene's point, that's not the case here. Why are these chimps at war? Right. These are great questions. The us versus them. And then why did these chimpanzee groups, why are they engaged in this lethal conflict that's been going on since 2018, essentially? I think, I mean, this is again where I think chimpanzees can inform some of these questions about human behavior. Okay. And I would say, I mean, my sort of hot take based on analyzing data on chimpanzees, watching chimpanzees and really studying this conflict, which we should talk about because Chimp Empire is one of this amazing documentary.

1:35:02It's probably the most accurate wildlife documentary ever made that I've seen because it's just really just telling the true story. In some cases, they simplify things because there's no way you could tell in four episodes the complexity of the story. They make a few simplifications for the viewer, but it's just really following the lives of the chimps. And it's not, but in the documentary, one thing that's important to note, it's talking about the conflict between the Western group and the Central group. What it doesn't really emphasize is that this used to be one group. I mean, in the documentary, they don't feature that prominently.

1:35:40So it's an even more complex dynamic when we see that they're fighting and the Western chimps are attacking and killing chimps from the central group. So there's an interesting thing there. My hot take is I don't think you need an enemy to build community. I don't think you need a them for an us. And this is something, this is sort of a hypothesis I have from watching the chimpanzees. And we can, I think, unpack that later. But the main thing, I mean, there's the dominance dynamics. Those are all within a group. Whether you like Abrams or Jackson and the Damasarchi, that's the within-group dynamics.

1:36:16And then there are the between-group dynamics. And it's not necessarily clear how these are directly related. Because usually, despite competition within a group, they all come together. They sort of put aside their differences to patrol the borders of their territory, defend it against outsider chimp groups, and even to go on the offensive and go into the outsider group territory. But the main interesting dynamic for me is that the Western and Central groups used to be one community. They were one group for decades and decades, as long as they've been studied since 1995, 93. They were one group.

1:36:56And we only really saw signs of this polarization occurring around 2015. And then they became two separate groups in 2018. Why? Why? Yeah, what happened? Men, boys, males. Well, this is where I think on the one hand, there's definitely something about the dominance hierarchy that's relevant here. Just one thing important to note with chimps, the adult male chimps form a dominance hierarchy. And they tend to be higher ranking than all the adult females. This is something that sort of happens during adolescence. and it's not exactly clear what the point of being an alpha is for a chimp. I mean, in a small group, the alpha male gets sort of priority in mating.

1:37:48He can keep other males away when he wants to mate with a certain female. Female chimps certainly have some choice in who they mate with, but they also are sort of pressured by the adult males often to mate. But the main sort of, it seems the main reason a chimp would become the alpha is he doesn't have to defer to any other male chimp. And then if you're high ranking, you know, you have to defer to the alpha or, you know, the second ranking, you don't have to defer to anyone else. And by defer, this really means if you see another chimp through the course of the day, you'll give a little grunt maybe to indicate your deference or your submission, the pant grunt.

1:38:29and there could be a little, you know, aggression that still occurs, slapping, chasing, but it's mostly these bluffs. And the one, I would say the one, I'm sort of an advocate to some extent for the dominance hierarchy because it can potentially reduce aggression because you sort of know where you fall. It's not strictly sort of this negative thing on the one hand. But then the other important thing to note with chimps, it doesn't, the alpha is not the leader. The alpha is not necessarily one who is, you know, rallying the group together or leading the hunts or leading territorial patrols. It's just the fact that in this one domain, he doesn't have to grunt in deference to other males.

1:39:11Okay.

1:39:12Brené Brown:Oh my God. I have so many. Okay. So I really dislike this about humans. I have to say, I really dislike this about humans and about the chimps. Because here's the story I was making up. And this is coming from someone who studies human emotions. I'm making up the story that everything's okay until Jackson is like, we have to patrol the border. And then he's a shit starter. And he's like, everyone comes, everybody goes with him. And he's putting them at risk. It's like what I see in politics today. You're giving us an enemy and keeping us in fear to maintain your position. Like you're manufacturing conflict that doesn't exist.

1:40:10Brené Brown:Like take Caroline. Caroline's got this new baby, right? And I thought I was very - Christine, yeah. Christine, very offended that she wasn't named for a year because they die so often, right? The babies. But Adam, guess what puts the babies in peril often? The men going and fighting. No, just the men, just the men swaggering around and doing these displays of, like, nobody's after them. They're just running through, knocking down limbs and shit and looking tough. And then the baby gets caught in that. So think about this politically right now. A fragile ego leader goes around stomping on things to prove that he's tough and there are innocent casualties.

1:40:58Brené Brown:Now, is that true or not, Erin? And am I signing too much? No, I love the, these are great hypotheses. Maybe it's worth just trying to give you the sort of really brief overview of what happened. I sort of started talking about this, but then there's so much stuff that is exciting to talk about. So the background, like before Chimp Empire, you had this one group of chimps at N 'Gogo. And the alpha at the time was Miles. As long as I've worked, like when I started working there in 2012, it was Miles was the alpha. He was the former alpha before Jackson. Miles, Jackson's sidekick, Miles? Yeah, because Miles was this huge, really bulky, big adult male.

1:41:41And he sort of, it seems he became the alpha because he was huge. He was just like, not necessarily as political. Before Miles, the alpha was Bartok, who was this more smaller, average-sized male, but really had these social bonds, these long-term alliances. He was able to attain that status and maintain it because of those relationships. Chips. Miles came in. Miles was actually really good at grooming other chimps. He would groom kids. He'd groom adults. He was, you know, I think a good alpha in that regard. He wasn't necessarily the best leader, but this was a time in 2009, 10, 11, right before I started working there.

1:42:21The Ngogo chimps, this is when the central and Western groups were still one community. It's a huge group. It's the biggest group of chimps known to scientists. 150 to 200 chimps, because they had so many males, adult males especially, they were really successful in territorial interactions, these territorial patrols, attacking and killing chimps from other groups, infants and adults. And they expanded their territory. They expanded largely to the Northeast, but they were really good at defending and even increasing the size of the territory. More females came in. You saw an increase in fertility females with the bigger group probably were able to have more kids.

1:43:02The group is growing largely because of females and kids. You have these sort of neighborhoods that always exist, the central, eastern, western neighborhoods, but they still are always intermingling. And you have Miles as the alpha over all of them, just like Bartok had been the alpha over all of them before. And then my first two summers there in 2012, 2013, I mean, if you want to talk about vulnerability. It was so hard learning 200 chimps. This was like the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Learning 200 chimps, learning the forest, figuring out a research project, a childhood dream, like confronting that, like having to realize the childhood dream was the hardest thing that's ever happened to me.

1:43:46And there are plenty of times I was thinking about quitting and I could still be a primatologist, but I was like, I can't study wild chimps. It's boring. It's hard. How am I going to learn 200 chimps?

1:43:58Brené Brown:Were you scared too? Not so scared. I probably should have been. I mean, I was scared of this losing a part of my identity. I was gorilla boy. I was this person who'd blown out birthday candles for 20 years, wishing to become a gorilla scientist. Now here I am studying chimps. So it's like childhood dream already, not quite there, but it's pretty close. One gene is off, but it's hard and boring. Wow. And a lot of that is because I just don't know all the individuals. I can't recognize them in an instant because to understand, you know, what makes, you know, I think any life interesting, like what makes chimpanzee life interesting is you see the, you can recognize them.

1:44:40You can tell what's happening. I mean, these documentaries that have these amazing footage, you know, zoomed in, they're still, you know, synthesizing a lot of stuff with the narrative. But when you're actually there with binoculars and the chimps in a tree, like 100 feet up in a big fig tree, it's hard to keep your neck craned and looking through the leaves and seeing who's doing what. I mean, it's really demoralizing. So while all this is happening, I'm learning, slowly learning the chimps. And Miles is the alpha in the entire community. He's from the central neighborhood. Jackson was born in the western neighborhood.

1:45:16and he as a young adult moved to the central neighborhood because I noticed that there were sort of these distinct I think almost personalities in the three different neighborhoods the central neighborhood was your classic like chimpanzee group you would find in East Africa like Uganda or Tanzania where the highest ranking males are all sort of traveling together following around whatever female is ovulating trying to mate with her the adolescent males are sort of on the periphery, tagging along. That's sort of the textbook chimp behavior. In the Western neighborhood, it was more like chimps actually in West Africa, where the males and females are actually more cohesive with each other.

1:45:59So there's still like high-ranking males. There's still aggression, but males are grooming females a lot. A lot of times, you know, high rank, if you're high-ranking, you're more likely to have a kid. But also males and females that spend more time together are more likely to have kids together. So it was like this slightly different, I don't know, dynamic. Maybe like the central group was more like football players and the Western group was more like soccer players or something. I'm just trying to think of.

1:46:27Brené Brown:No, I'm totally getting it. Like total players in the central and couple-y relationship. So sweet. Boy, but I'm anti-Western, so I don't know how this is panning out for my narrative, but go ahead. And then in the East, those are more the Freaks and the Geeks. Those were, uh, males and females were sort of cohesive still, but they're real, some of them were really emotionally reactive, like almost a little anxious. Uh, they would be quick to get nervous and grimace and, uh, but they would give each other these reassuring touches. They were quick to reassure each other. And there were two males in there who were very chill and very sweet, uh, Dexter and Mulligan who were like very calm, not reactive.

1:47:08And they would be quick to, you know, give these nervous chimps a pat on the back, pat on the butt, hand to the mouth. They do, you know, like in old movies when someone gets nervous and they bite their fist. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a vestige of probably this ape behavior where you're nervous and you want someone else to put their hand in your mouth. So chimps will do this.

1:47:31Brené Brown:Oh, I saw that. They reassure each other by putting a hand in the other's mouth or putting a hand on their genitals or something like that. And that calms them down. So these are sort of the neighborhoods. And the interesting dynamic is Jackson, who grew up in the West, this young adult male now sort of in his early 20s. He's rising in the hierarchy. This is like 2013, especially 2014. But he's rising really fast. and then in 2014 it was my third summer I've like decided despite like the prior summer I decided to quit field primatology my PhD advisor sort of called my bluff and I was like alright fine I'll do it I'll just go out I'll study adolescent young adult male social relationships and I you know developed various strategies where I think I could potentially succeed in doing this field work so I'm like alright I'm going to be here for 15 months studying these chimps Jeez.

1:48:28We get there that summer in 2014, and we realize after a few weeks that five of these older adult male chimps have died. They were in there around age 40, which for a chimp is sort of old for a male. I think that they all died within around a month of each other, suggesting some of them at least died from a disease. And these were old males who were really well-connected. and I haven't run the social network analyses on this because it's sort of a difficult question to answer, but they were certainly well connected with a lot of the other chimps. Some of them even seeming like bridges between the eastern and central neighborhood

1:49:03Brené Brown:or bridges between the central and western neighborhood. It's like the mafia. So they sort of disappear. And you don't know at first because chimpanzees, like humans, they're never all together in the same place at the same time. It's like a village where you're mixing in part. Like, yeah, you have friends and family spend more time together, but throughout the day they're intermingling. they can go days or weeks without seeing each other. So as researchers, we're going weeks without seeing some of these chimps. We're like, where's Pinsir? Where's Berg? Where's Dolphy? Where's Webster? Where's Mingus?

1:49:31And then after a couple of months, we realize they're gone. They're gone forever. They died. And I don't think we realized at first that this likely had a big impact. I think the neighborhoods became now more distinct. There used to be three neighborhoods that were really well-connected by a handful of individual chimps, those are now gone at the same time that Jackson is shooting up in the dominance hierarchy. And then I go there for a year, finally learn all the chimps, and I have this research project that's motivating me, and I've sort of learned the forest, become really competent at recognizing the chimps, knowing what's going on.

1:50:11At the end of that year, Jackson finally takes his chance and charges Miles. And a month later, Miles Pant grunts to him. And that was like the takeover. And it was this day in June in 2015 that that happened. And John Matani, who's been studying these chimps for, at that time, it had been 20 years. That was 2015. He was the only one that saw Miles grunt in submission to Jackson. So now Jackson is essentially the alpha. He still has to sort of establish himself over the subsequent weeks. And Miles has to retain his high-ranking position unless he's going to fall.

1:50:55Brené Brown:Right. Right. And it was that afternoon, though, I was with chimps from the Western neighborhood. And it was the end of the day, and I was alone with them. We were in the middle of the territory. And they hear other chimps, and it must be chimps from the central neighborhood, Miles, Jackson, those other chimps. They're just an earshot. And the chimps that I'm with, rather than sort of approaching them and reuniting in typical chimpanzee fashion, they become quiet, they become nervous, they start grimacing, they're embracing each other, They're touching each other in reassurance. They're acting like they're hearing outsiders.

1:51:28And then when they see the central chimpanzees approach, rather than reunite, they run. And the central chimpanzees then chase them. And this was the first time we'd really seen avoidance among chimps from the same community. And then they avoided each other for six weeks and nothing like that had ever been observed before. and I think you know knowing then learning at the end of the day that oh Jackson had finally got Miles to pancreate to him I think the western chimps must have heard in the vocalization some you know heightened tension and it had been there's a risk to every reunion even on a normal day and I think it was like the western chimps were like there's too much tension it's not worth the risk they ran and which I can sort of understand because Miles was sort of a hothead for a while afterwards.

1:52:21He was being more aggressive than normal. Jackson was being more aggressive establishing himself. So it makes sense. But I think they planted the seed of polarization. So, I mean, that we can debate then to what extent the question about the us versus them, do you need them for an us? But the Western neighborhood had already sort of been a cohesive unit, I think. They were already pretty cohesive. They had the six weeks of avoidance, after which they all came back together, things seemed to return to normal. I finished my fieldwork for my PhD, but then as I was gone writing up, other researchers were there, but they slowly became more and more polarized.

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1:54:29Brené Brown:Shop now at palmolive.com. I want to tell you, so if you're listening and you're going to watch Chimp Empire, I'm going to give you a spoiler here. One thing, I didn't want on the initial border patrol thing, I didn't want Gus to go. I mean, I knew he had to go, but I didn't want him to go. I wanted him to stay safe, and I definitely didn't want Pork Pie to go. And Pork Pie didn't – he got scared and he went home, right, during this border – like he left. But I had to tell you about the bad guys in this show. Adam are you laughing at me like I keep going I had to wait a long time between one and two because I was distraught I called my husband crying and he's like you can't watch animal documentaries for the western chimpanzees To sneak into a territory and kill someone in their own territory, that was brutal.

1:55:38It's brutal, but it is a typical part of chimpanzee behavior. It's not so common, but around, I mean, chimpanzees will do these territorial patrols. They'll get a large group of especially adult males, some adult females, and usually a few adolescent females will go. to the edge of their territory sometimes, but also often they'll then do these deeper incursions into the outsider's territory. And it's still unclear exactly what sort of the chimps are thinking when they're doing these. Some, I think, sometimes it is they're trying to find a fig tree or certain fruit trees that are near the border.

1:56:18And so to feel safe eating there, they need to go deeper, make sure there's no other chimps from the outsider group. because at the border, there may be some trees that are shared by two groups. Other times, I think certain individual chimps in particular are motivated to go on territorial patrols. Some are motivated to attack and kill chimps from other groups. And they can even try to rally. And how they do this, we do not know because chimps, they have vocalizations, they have gestures, but they have nothing like human language, spoken language. They're somehow coordinating, I think, all of this through nonverbal, really subtle bodily cues and contexts and things that are sort of the next big questions, I think, for chimpanzee research.

1:57:03But they will attack and kill. I think, I mean, for me, it feels almost like when chimpanzees are doing this, because across chimpanzee sites, they attack and kill chimps from other groups. And we've learned this over the last 50 years of people studying chimps. But usually they're killing a stranger, a stranger to them. It's adult males because adult males are born in the group. They stay in that group their whole lives. So any adult male chimp that they see that they don't know is from this other group. So it's a stranger. And it seems like adult male chimps are sort of xenophobic. They have this fear of strangers.

1:57:43And then so when they see one from another group, they'll run if they're outnumbered or they'll go and try to attack and kill them. Yeah, it's brutal. but it's a familiar phenomenon, I mean, from the human perspective too. But with the Ngogo chimps, these are two groups that used to be one. They're not strangers to each other. There were one group that finally became two groups at the end of 2017. They had finally split. And then it was in 2018 that we saw the first lethal attack by chimps from the Western group against a chimp from the Central group. Wow. And that was, I finished my PhD. I went back to Uganda for eight months to sort of especially track this polarization.

1:58:29And I got there and I realized right away, it's like, whoa, this has really changed. Not only are they socially distinct, they've really divided the territory. Now the Western chimps stay in the West, Central chimps stay in the Central. There was one old male BF who was sort of more a Westerner. He was with the Centralers. He was the last chimp that would go back and forth. I remember following him in this plateau in the middle of the forest where there's a lot of different fruit trees. And he was just traveling there alone. It was the center of the territory. Now it's this borderland. And I was expecting, you know, when is he going to go back to join the Westerners?

1:59:07And then it was in January 2018, we started seeing more and more territorial patrols against these former group members. The Central ships would patrol to the West. The Western ships would patrol Central. And then it was 2018 when the Westerners killed this young adult male, Errol. And that was like, for me, witnessing that, it really like shifted my perspective. I was like, oh, wow, this split is real. They're treating these chimps as outsiders. And then I was sort of learning alongside the chimps these shifting dynamics. Because I think Errol showed up to this part of not realizing that the Western chimps would really see him as an outsider and that they would kill him.

1:59:50Aaron, the parallels to human conflict are, they're sort of, they're smacking you right in the face, right? You have a perceived slight or insult or aggression on the part of, you know, a former friend or group member. And all of a sudden, now we're locked in some kind of in-group, out-group dynamic. And it almost doesn't matter where it started. because each side can point to the other and say, they're dangerous, they're a threat. They did this to us, and therefore we need to defend ourselves. And then the line starts to blur between offense and defense. You protect yourself by attacking. How do you make sense of that?

2:00:28And how do you think about getting out of it? I think when the conflict started, a lot of these questions are hard to answer scientifically, But I mean, what I'm really interested in is that shift. Like when did the new group identities really emerge and then override prior relationships? And there was always this ambiguity there because the first chimp that we saw killed, Errol, he was 16. He was sort of a loner even within the central group. So when he met the Westerners, it made sense that they would sort of see him more as an outsider. and this was still a time when you know they were they accepted bf they accepted this old male who they had a really close relationship to and so there's this emergence of in-group out-group dynamic um but there was still like plausible deniability i think the the senior professors didn't want to accept that the group was splitting i mean the reason it took us a long time we wrote this paper that was just published in April in the journal science, just sort of describing what happened and using this long-term data to analyze it, but combined with the more qualitative accounts.

2:01:45It took us so long to write it partly because it's a huge team effort. We have like all these professors, graduate students, Ugandan staff, people who've been working there for decades and decades, and then wanting to do it in a really clear way, but also scientifically, you know, statistically rigorous way. It was this huge effort. But I think it also took so long, because it was really hard for the researchers to admit that the split was happening, and then even to think about it, even to analyze the data. I mean, I now want to write a book about this, but I think part of my writer's block is like this emotional toll of watching chimps being killed and watching also the killers, which in that regard, I'm actually, I don't really hold it against them, which is an interesting phenomenon in its own right.

2:02:40But why not? I don't know. I think, I mean, because I saw Errol killed. Errol was a 16-year-old. He'd been the subject of my dissertation. He was one of the 18 young males that I focused on. So I was looking at him, you know, for 15 months, he was one of the main chimps that I was looking at writing down who he was interacting with. He was an orphan, he had a close relationship to his much older brother, Dizzy. They were both the smallest chimps in the whole community. And I remember even him before my dissertation, my real dissertation research in 2012, 2013, watching him, he was a little shy, this little loner adolescent orphan with these two older brothers.

2:03:22One brother died in 2014, and then his older brother died in 2017. There was a disease outbreak. So it was really sad to watch Errol be killed and die. I was in the moment, I still have this, which is almost troubling. Like I look at the video footage that I took and can hear, you know, I'm narrating it with this objective voice. re-watching it, it's sad to watch, and it's also almost troubling. I'm curious about my own mental state at the time. I remember, though, that night, once the day was over, Errol had died. We got a vet in to assess the body and the wounds, and then we buried his body so that we could collect the bones later, because that's an important, rare, scientific opportunity to have the skeleton of a wild chimp.

2:04:16And then that night, emailing the senior professors to tell them that this had happened, it was really, that was like, you know, I'm sitting on the porch in the dark in this cabin in the middle of the forest. And that's when like the emotions sort of come and I cried and reflecting more on the emotion. Like, because these are chimps that, um, it's weird. They're like, we have this one-sided relationship with all of them. We're just following them around in the forest. They ignore us, but we learn about their lives. And Errol was certainly someone I knew really well. And yet I don't hold it against the chimps who were attacking him.

2:04:53And I almost have grace for them because I'm motivated to understand what caught, like, why did the group split? I'm motivated to understand even the sort of psychology underlying lethal aggression in chimps. And partly, I mean, they're chimps, so I don't have the same moral standard, of course, that I would have for a human. But to me, it seems like this more, I want a systemic understanding of what's happening. And I don't know what it is, but I do seem to have this sort of grace for the individual chimps. Wow. Aaron, it sounds like demonizing them would stand in the way of understanding them.

2:05:34I think it could, yeah, I think it could stand in the way of understanding them and understanding what's going on. And it's like, again, I'm a scientist watching this dynamic unfold. There's something to be said for, you know, objectivity and distance. But I'm also really wanting to understand the phenomenon. and it's like I can't stop it for many reasons like I mean it wouldn't be safe these are chimps like there's no way to intervene really but also there's something to be said out of respect for the chimps to let this unfold yeah and then just to see how can we understand it yeah I think like and there may be a lesson here also for deepening our sort of understanding of conflict and aggression and violence and war in humans, I wonder to what extent we should focus our attention more on sort of the causes and the context and maybe less demonization of the individuals who are perpetrating these horrible things.

2:06:34Of course, with humans, you have to hold people accountable for what they do, but maybe the demonization gets in the way. I mean, I think that's probably true.

2:06:44Brené Brown:One thing I've learned is, and I probably knew it going into this conversation, I definitely know it now. I would be the absolute worst. I would be the worst at your job of anybody in the whole world because I would be armed. And if you came against the people that I have named and that I love and that I know their story and their narrative. You know, and it's also, I think the thing that's hard is like I was with my family and I was telling them about this and they're like, stop talking about the chimps. And it reminded me of when we would interview people asking them, what is vulnerability? How many hundreds, if not thousands of people said to us in these interviews, any animal dying in a film is absolute vulnerability and the people who do it should go straight to hell.

2:07:37Brené Brown:Like just the reaction that we have that I think if I were one of the senior researchers, it would take me a long time to write that paper too because I would want something different for them than what we have for us. I would want something pure and better and less susceptible to what makes humans so hard. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. The one thing to note is that in this case, the chimps who are doing the killing are also chimps that we've known, that researchers have named, and we know their stories too. So it does create the more, it's a bit more of a complex picture than typical intergroup aggression where you don't know the chimps who might be attacking chimps from your group and you find a dead body of a chimp.

2:08:34presumably killed by the outsider group. It's different, I think.

2:08:38Brené Brown:But you don't immediately go like, you know, here are these chimps that killed this person that I've been studying. And now in my scientific narrative, they are the bad guys moving forward. A crippling cruelty has taken over the Western group. Like you, like. Yeah, I empathize with the sentiment. And I think some of the, I would bet that if, I think a lot of our team feels that way to some extent. I think some of them do. Yeah. Really? I think some of the researchers do feel that way. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's like what we talk about at the dinner table. That's where we do more anthropomorphizing, which is still based in our like observation.

2:09:23So it's like when professional primatologists are anthropomorphizing, it's grounded in, if not in like quantitative data, It's grounded in our experience of watching the chimps and knowing their relationships. And I mean, so much of animal behavior and anthropology is sort of having a vibe about what's happening. And then if you're a good scientist, articulating the vibe. And like with chimps, it took me so long to learn what are they going to do next? Like, what are they possibly thinking and feeling? Most of that's still a vibe. I mean, it's based on context. Where am I in the forest? oh, they're at this fig tree that they were at a couple of years ago.

2:10:03They usually take this path. They go there. They'll likely patrol. Like, it took me a decade to get to the point where I'm like, okay, I think this is what I'm noticing about them. These are the subtle movements. These are subtle behaviors. Yeah, I mean, it's for me, though, I don't know why I just really don't. I don't hold it against the ones who are doing the attacking. And part of it is so much of that dynamic, we see that dynamic unfolding. We see it emerging and then unfolding. And there's sort of this positive side to a lot of those dynamics on a territorial patrol. It's an amazing opportunity for bonding and mentorship.

2:10:44it's like two of the often the instigators of patrols in the West, Rollins and his younger brother Damien. Damien was this adolescent male whose mother had died in this disease outbreak in 2017 and he and his younger sister this little juvenile were sort of adopted by their much older brother Rollins and it was like they were on patrols together and Damien grew up and he was like really motivated I think to go on territorial patrols himself, but he had his older brother, this sort of role model, this mentor. And in the West, because of the patrolling, I think there's a lot more almost egalitarianism across age and dominance rank.

2:11:27And it does lead to more cohesion. That's again, where you definitely see, I get why so often we think you need a them for an us because that happens for sure. but the West already had this sort of cohesion beforehand, but I think it is bolstered by these territorial patrols. I mean, it's amazing. Sometimes you also will see these long-term bonded individuals going on territorial patrols more often than, you know, with others. And I think it's like if you're with your friend, you're more, you're braver and you're able to like go on the front lines. There was one time, there was one time the Western chimps were patrolling and they were going, pushing in 2021, further and further East.

2:12:12They had moved in. This was probably in the weeks before they killed pork pie. And I was with the Western chimps and they get to this sort of further East than they typically went before. They start calling the Central chimps. We can hear them. They're calling. And the Western chimps I'm with, they decided to give up. They turn around, but they sort of scatter and I wasn't sure if some had gone ahead. So I rushed ahead to other calls, these screams and the chimps will bang on trees, the buttresses, the sort of roots of trees. And I get not very far away. And it's these two young adult males, Hayden and Booker from the central group.

2:12:52They are like on the front lines calling, like sort of defending their territory. Most of the central chimps are hundreds of meters behind them. But I think they were like, these are small, low ranking chimps. But they were like, I think, emboldened by their bonds with each other. That Booker is Gus's older brother. So it was like this interesting little family there. But yeah, there's beauty and sort of cooperation and there's empathy. There's so many of the positive dynamics that you see at play, even in the midst of this aggression and violence. Aaron, at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned you were curious about, do they have friendships and how do they form them?

2:13:35Where are you on that? I hear you talking about, it sounds like chimps are bonding through grooming. It sounds like they're bonding through going on these, these sort of patrols. Like, are they friends? How do they become friends? How do you know?

2:13:51Brené Brown:If they're, if you're going to say they're not friends, I need some kind of disclaimer. No, because you're going to break my heart, Aaron. I was, you know, there's the scientific caution about using terms that are commonly used by us in everyday speech and that are so defined by, I think, the human experience. And I think friendship is one of them. Primatologists have been debating to what extent you can use that term to describe the relationships of other animals for years. I think that some chimps definitely are friends with each other. But I also, I mean, I think it still deserves a more sort of deeper understanding of what we mean by friendship.

2:14:32And for that, we have to think about what we mean by friendship in humans. I don't think we have the best understanding of this yet. And I mean, until recently, and there's been, I think, a lot of good work. And Adam, I know you've been thinking about this a lot, but there wasn't a great scientific understanding of friendship. So often we would have to go back to Aristotle to sort of even get the framework. And I think to some extent, there are two important points, I think, when I think about chimps. One is there's an important distinction between a friend and an ally.

2:15:07Brené Brown:Oh, for sure. so often, like with Jackson, it was hard for me to know, are these his friends or are these his allies? Was Miles his friend or his ally? Was Basie his friend or his ally? Like, I think a friend, there's like a real emotional connection. You want to spend time together. You sort of are calm when you're with them or excited when you see them. Whereas an ally is someone who will come to your aid, but it might be for more utilitarian purposes. So it might be that Miles was an ally to Jackson, I'm not sure. But when circumstances change, maybe it would be easier to break that tie. Yeah, Brene.

2:15:58Brené Brown:I mean, Cass, I can tell you for sure 100 % that Miles was friends with Jackson. And here's my empirical evidence. Because when Abrams was trying to fight his way up and was grooming Miles, and Jackson couldn't see, Miles would not groom Abrams back. He let him pick all the bugs off of him, and then he just came to look, and he was like, you're not my friend. And then, yes. That would be my hypothesis. Yeah, it's a good hypothesis. And I think those looks are actually what's key. Like we can't, I mean, from behavior alone, from these sort of broad measures of behavior, you cannot, I don't think, determine friendship from grooming alone or how much time they spend sitting near each other alone.

2:16:50I think it has to be partly a much more detailed, subtler depiction of almost like facial expressions or these other patterns that are extremely difficult to determine in a chimp. And I mean, I think they're, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they're really difficult for humans. Like we don't necessarily have the system. Yeah.

2:17:12Brené Brown:It's impossible. But we as people are so good at sort of almost unconsciously picking up on this with humans, with each other. Yes. I mean, that's where the vibe, these gut feelings, vibes. And then if you're really good at it, you become a good therapist or a poker champion or a psychic or something. I hope not. You're a little psychic. Yeah, you're a lot of stuff. I don't mean like East Village, like little kiosk. I mean like really like... Oh, yeah, yeah. My great-grandmother was a sort of faith healer, Sephardic, Kabbalistic faith healer. So I'm a little... I do believe in that, 100%. Yeah, she was reading like coffee grounds and having meetings about people's numerology and stuff.

2:18:03So I might have a little bias for my eating in my blood. But yeah, I think we're really good at picking up on it. And finally, after like a decade of studying chimps, I started picking up on these subtleties. Some of my colleagues, like Retch Nareddy, who studies these chimps, she like from day one, she was picking up on subtleties. It took me 10 years. But now I'm like, oh, I think these chimps are friends based on the way they're grooming each other, the way they're looking at each other.

2:18:31Brené Brown:Miles looked at him like, I appreciate the grooming. I understand what you're doing. Not only am I not going to participate in this with you. be very clear that I love Jackson. It's possible, yeah. I mean, but I even remember, I remember, you know, seven years before that happened, like, this is another just, this is not, I mean, relationships, of course, can also change. For chimps, they might, these friendships or alliances or both typically last like around three years, but sometimes they can last a decade. Sometimes they can last over a decade. I think those cases are like for sure friendships.

2:19:20But the other reason I'm hesitant to use the term friend to describe the relationships in chimps is I wonder if friendship doesn't actually fully capture the strength of the relationship. Sometimes it's like, you know, you're just friends. sometimes like with friendship that we have today it's like a lower it's considered a lower category than other types of bonds a bond with a part a romantic partner or something or family bonds so that's why i'm leaving open the possibility that these are certainly sometimes social bonds that might be even stronger than what we typically call friendship especially if these relationships you know are might be better understood as a mentor mentee relationship Like sometimes we may not call that friendship, but it's this really important bond.

2:20:06So that's my other hesitance. Like it was like this whole journey of what are these, a scientific study of friendship. I'm like, okay, maybe they do have them. But I'm like, wait, maybe that doesn't even be, that doesn't fully capture the intensity and the emotional sort of power of some of these relationships. And I will say like for the relationships that last a decade, these are, I mean, there's the strongest bonds for chimps. number one is mother and their kid. They stay with their mom for the first 10 years of their life through middle, early adolescence. They can maintain a relationship even though they spend less time with her for their entire life.

2:20:46Where these even adult males, where they don't spend a lot of time together, when they are together, they'll groom each other.

2:20:51Brené Brown:Can I just ask this last question? It'll be my last question about my friends. and then go, shut up, Adam. How is that true for two reasons? I feel like Christine did Nadine dirty. Like, so listen, Christine has - You're watching Real Housewives, Chimp Edition. I love it. No, listen, no, Christine is the mom. And then she has the baby that they don't name in the beginning of the show, but later you find out it's Isabel. So cute and mischievous. A little too mischievous for my taste because it was a dangerous situation because of the men. Eye roll. But Nadine was Isabel's older sister. And the narrator, who I'm sure had to get past the scientist, said that Nadine was ignored because now there's a baby in the family and seven-year-old Nadine is being ignored.

2:21:46Brené Brown:And then And my other question, and I know this has to be the last one, but I cannot believe that they send unprotected female adolescents out of their community on their own. Like, Adam, they are shoved out, teenage girls, shoved onto the streets. Not okay with that. So explain to me how the motherhood bond must end because Nadine was ignored. I felt so bad for her. She's like in human fifth grade. Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, the one thing is when there's a new baby, when there's a new infant, this is true across, I think, mammals, that there's more attention on this new infant, less attention on the juvenile.

2:22:39but and I think it's hard for Nadine it probably was hard but she still maintained a close relationship she's still traveling constantly with Christine she but it is a it's a rough transition she's not the sole focus of Christine's attention and I think we see this again probably with humans and with chimps it's interesting because like humans they it's not just where most mammals, soon after weaning, the kid becomes completely independent. In group living animals, including many primates, it's actually usually the females that stay. So they can have an opportunity. The relationship shifts. And actually, surprisingly, we know less about the development of these relationships.

2:23:22This is something I'm working on with one of my PhD students in gorillas and also another PhD student with chimps. How do these relationships sort of shift during this juvenile period after weaning, before puberty. It's a really interesting dynamic into what is the mother-offspring relationship like. The thing with chimps is, first of all, it's important to note that, yeah, at adolescence, in chimps and bonobos, the females typically leave the group. They leave the area that they've known. They leave the chimps that they've known. But it's unlikely. It doesn't seem that they're kicked out, which is interesting.

2:23:58They seem to go on their own accord. So around adolescence, late adolescence, maybe around 11, 12, 13, female chimps become more independent of their mother. They spend more time in the entire group. And often they'll join the adult males and a few other adult females on these territorial patrols. Part of it is because they're socializing with the adults in the group. And so the males will go off on a patrol. They're like, all right, let's go. But part of me wonders if they're almost using that opportunity to survey the other groups and the other territories. And to me, I feel like there's a lot of agency in what's going on for these young females.

2:24:41They are brave. I mean, talk about vulnerability. They're going out into the unknown. I couldn't believe it. They're alone walking out. And I think part of it might be because at adolescence, you know, fear can become a thrill. So I think for some of these females, it's like they're going out into the unknown. And sometimes they stay. Sometimes they stay, but go into a different neighborhood, especially at Ngogo, where there's a big, huge chunk of forest. Sometimes they can go and that's an easier transition. Other times it's like, wow, and we don't know what goes on because it's hard to follow them.

2:25:18And it can be rough transitioning into a new group. so it's not that it's like an easy life but it's like a very interesting and impressive thing that happens for these chimps, these female chimps but if on occasion an adolescent female stays in her community and she stays in the neighborhood with her mom then those are the strongest bonds in the world they can just stay with their mom sometimes they like stay in the group but don't have a relationship with her but sometimes they stay and it's like this lifelong bond

2:25:49Brené Brown:that's what I would pick family unit. Yeah. And that's beautiful. But then the other, and that's the strongest bond that exists for chimps. But then one of the other strongest bonds is between adult males. These ones that can last five, 10, 12 years. And for me, those relationships, which they'll be with maternal brothers will form these strong bonds. But some of the most enduring are just between unrelated adult males. This is why, and these are the males who are hunting together and sharing meat and going on border patrols. To me, I think friendship might not even fully capture the nature of these relationships.

2:26:27Like brotherhood. Yeah. It's like brotherhood or it's almost like the closest thing I've seen in the animal kingdom to romantic love. Wow. It's like a pair bond. Like we often think about pair bonds is occurring between a male and a female that are mating together and often raising offspring together. But if you think about what really is a pair bond, that's about the relationship, like whether they're monogamous or not is another question. Whether they are raising an offspring together is another question. The pair bond is about a really strong social relationship, cooperation, distinct behaviors, preferences for each other.

2:27:04And if you sort of go check off the list of what makes a pair bond, which we often think about, you know, some birds and you see some primates like gibbons and, you know, owl monkeys and TT monkeys have this. If you start going through the list of what actually makes a pair bond, I feel like some of these adult male pairs are actually pair bonds.

2:27:26Brené Brown:It reminds me of my dad and his best fishing buddy who've been friends for 50 years. You know what I mean? And they're not patrolling territory. I mean, the Gulf Coast, but, um, but they have a bond that it's like lasted divorces. And, you know, I mean, they just like, they, they, they say things to each other, like they didn't want to live without each other. Like they're, you know, but they're, they, they're a few words, but I can see it actually. It'd be, it'd be so much better for human guys to have pair bonds with other men and develop more vulnerability and empathy and those kind of things.

2:28:06Brené Brown:And it's just hard to do it around nonviolent things sometimes. Okay. I'm super aware of time. Adam, do you have, before we go to, before we go to our lightning round, do you have any, I have like, I have gotten out of three out of my 30 questions, but that's okay. I know where you work. Barely scratched the surface for me too, but I think it's time for lightning. Yeah. I will say that my daughter, who's getting her PhD in emotion studies, was like, make sure you ask him about the otter gang wars in Singapore. And I was like, I don't think he studies the otter. She's like, but he's got to know about the otter wars because otter is her favorite animal.

2:28:46Brené Brown:And she was so devastated to learn about these gang wars between otters in Singapore. But, yeah, it's genetic. She's got a genetic problem, like, from her mom. All right. One thing that you are deeply curious about right now. What are emotions and can we really scientifically study this across animals? Speaking my love language. Okay. You get to design the weirdest and wildest thing, just single item to put inside of a curiosity shop. What would it be? My God. Yeah. I would want to be a wearable device that would like a snare, a wire snare that you would catch an animal with, but that has a safety device on it.

2:29:41So it turns into a bracelet and then it has like a GPS and Bluetooth and stuff. So you could just put it out and get it on wild animals and then it would track them. and maybe non-basically monitor their behavior. I don't know if we could put that in the curiosity shop. We could, for sure. It's a primatology curiosity shop, for sure. Yeah. Or I don't know if that's a thing. It could also be like a chimp testicle and tickling and formaldehyde that I collected in 2015.

2:30:15Brené Brown:I would be for that. That was not on my bingo card for today. I have to ask Aaron, And one of the things I'm so curious about that I think can be done lightning style is what's the most surprising way that chimps are similar to humans? I'd love that. I think it's in the I mean, there's these big conceptual things like these relationships that seem to hint at things like love and war. But it's also for me, the subtlest things, the gestures. one thing that um really stuck with me is um the way they uh will just swipe at their nose sometimes it seems to be when they're a little more activated they'll swipe at their nose and this is something humans do all the time it's like you know when someone's a little anxious nervous or really thinking about something they swipe at their nose we don't notice it though No one notices.

2:31:10So I'm like, this is where I can become sort of the psychic. I'm like, chimps are doing it. I see it across primates. Humans are doing it too. It's like the same thing or even just little gestural things, the way you rest your ankle on your knee when you're, you know, sitting down, chimps do this. So much of what we think of as human is not because we're human. Yes, it's important part of, of being human, but it's because we're apes.

2:31:37Brené Brown:Damn. Okay. And I'm going to leave with this question because I just have to, this is, I am so anti-meta glasses, but would it be cool for primatologists that if you looked and you got the read on, let's say Gus, my guy Gus, and you were like, in your metaglass. And then when you were wearing them, you would be like, Caroline, Isabel, Sam, Gus, Would that be helpful or not helpful? So helpful, especially for training new researchers. So helpful. And that's sort of what we are now, the experienced researchers. The one problem, I mean, this is an easy solution, but the one problem is we're staying always like 25, 30 feet away from the chimps to make sure just for our safety, their safety, especially their safety, we can give them a common cold and they would die from that.

2:32:31So that's the biggest priority is like we're wearing face masks. We have hand sanitizer. or we're keeping a distance. So we need binoculars. Even like when they're on the ground, sometimes you don't want to use binoculars. So if we could have like super magnification, video recording glasses, that would be really nice that sort of had this automatic recognition of individuals and behavior. For the last few years, I was doing a lot more like camcorder footage or I even just would wear like a lapel mic and dictate everything I'm seeing. because historically with animal behavior, it's like you're writing down in a notebook.

2:33:08I've been looking at my old writing the rain notebooks from 2012 where I'm writing down these little notes of what they're doing. But then I switch to an app on my phone where I'm entering really quickly what's happening. It automatically records the date and the time, GPS location, stuff like that. But yeah, that would be like the Metaglass style thing would be so good. But the problem is really just methodological. There's a bunch of vegetation. There's sometimes, you know, 150 feet up in a tree. They're running around. But that would be great. I'll work on it for you.

2:33:44Brené Brown:Okay, and if you see me in your class, just be cool. Yeah. You be cool, Renee. That's going to be the hard part. No, there's no way I can be cool. I'm going to ask myself. I expect you in the front row for sure. No doubt. That's where I always sit. I just have to say, I'm so glad you didn't give up on your guerrilla dream, Aaron. Same. Yeah. I think the work you're doing is so fascinating. And I think it's so much easier to see the things that we take for granted that are problematic in human interactions. I think you're holding up a mirror and allowing us to look at that and say, wait a minute, that doesn't have to happen.

2:34:20That's beautiful, Adam.

2:34:22Brené Brown:Yeah. Dream come true. um really just really important and amazing and i love it so much i'm still not a fan i'm still not not i'm a fan i just i think they are us and we are them and i think that's a little scary but love what you do parallels are the parallels are hard but yeah thank you so much it's great discussing this with you so fun thank you for joining us aaron Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt.

2:35:16Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13.

2:35:50Since 1900.

2:36:20more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Was this everything you dreamed of? Yes.

2:36:27Brené Brown:I don't think he softened me on the Western group at all, just to be honest with you. Like I am, but maybe I am the problem. Maybe like, maybe I am promoting the us and themness of it, but I didn't get to know them. I mean, I just didn't have a soft spot. Well, there was, there's a tough killing in the first, in the first episode and I just never got past it. I don't think I would get over that either. It's striking to me how strong your parasocial relationships are with these chimps. Me? Yours. Yeah, I mean, his too. But yours just from watching the doc. Well, you know, documentaries are, you know, nature documentaries, especially.

2:37:05Brené Brown:I mean, had we not been doing this podcast, I would never have watched one because I find that kind of stuff really tough to see and really tough to watch. And the vulnerability of animals, I think, is really hard. But I kept saying, I can't watch it. I'm going to watch it. I can't watch it. I'm going to watch it for the prep. But then I just got bought in. And there were some very serious – it's really hard when you see them and their little ears and their eyes. And they look like us. And so I just knew them. And they have such fun personalities and not all of them. But I don't know. I left – I would be so bad at this job.

2:37:46Brené Brown:Could you imagine anyone worse at this job than me? I could. Yes, I could. No, because I'm just such about the story and the emotional narrative. And he seems like it's so funny. He goes right to the edge of that and then science pulls him back. Did you notice that? Consistently. Yeah. Every time he got attached, he would kind of pull back and say, well, that's an interesting hypothesis. Right. I'm like, no, I'm not hypothesizing. This is exactly what happened. between these two chimps. I can tell you right now that Miles looked at this guy and said, try again. I'm not, you know, like, so I think, I was really grateful too about the honesty of the struggle that you can start dreaming of doing that kind of research, but that kind of research is tough and isolating and scary.

2:38:40Yeah, it, you know, it captured for me what is a challenge for a lot of people of pursuing what they think is a calling career-wise. Like you have this image, especially if you fall for it when you're young and it seems like it's going to be nirvana. And then you get there and it's a job and you have all these, to your point, isolating tasks, menial tasks, the boredom just to observe and try to figure out what's going on. And I think a lot of people experience a honeymoon hangover effect there where they're like, oh no, this is my life now? Yeah.

2:39:16Brené Brown:Yeah. Because I don't think anyone dreams about the preparation, the part of the career that makes it that thing. Like, you know, the hundreds of hours of, you know, mosquito bites and every chimp looks the same and you can't see them because they're in the canopy. And, you know, I just, I don't think that's what we, and certainly if you grow up on media, that's promoting some career, that's not what they're showing in the documentary. They probably have a gajillion hours and we see four 40 minutes series, you know? I think it's so easy to, this is true for any job. It's so easy to fall in love with the purpose of it and have no idea whether the process is a good fit for you or not, which is why it's, it boggles my mind that people don't shadow jobs before they take them.

2:40:09People commit to careers without actually knowing what they're going to be doing day in and day out. I think in our world, I'm so curious about how you do this. When we have people who are thinking about doing a PhD, my first advice to them is go read four articles in our academic journals. And if you're still awake on number four, you have found your calling.

2:40:31Brené Brown:Yeah. No, I think it's three things. I think it's purpose versus process versus romanticized understanding. So a lot of people want to be, it was like if you track some of the research around how many people got interested in medicine because of Grey's Anatomy. That's such a good example. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so I think just the real behind the scenes, I don't think a second year medical student is thinking, this is exactly, you know, like that moment when Meredith Gray fell in love with McDreamy, you know, it's, they're thinking I have 7 ,000 flashcards and I remember three of them.

2:41:17And I think I have all three of those diseases. Oh no.

2:41:20Brené Brown:Oh God, for sure. Yeah. Having been married to, from someone through medical school and residency. Um, yeah. Yeah. I just think it was an interesting conversation on every level, not just the chimps, but his own experience as a researcher and a scientist. And yeah, I think it was beautiful. Me too. You know, one thing I was left thinking about, I just, I have to ask you about this because I don't know what to make of it. I think one of the things I'm grappling with right now is as for as long as I can remember, I've thought about what makes us uniquely human is language, our ability to communicate with sophisticated words, not just gestures, to be able to tell stories.

2:42:01And yet Erin was talking about all the planning and coordination and even bonding and connection, even thinking, right, without words. How do they do that? Is language as important as I thought it was? Where are you on that? I think you'll help me find a more

2:42:23Brené Brown:graceful way to say this. I think if language is in the picture, it's critically important. If language doesn't need to be in the picture for communication, but if language is a variable, then it becomes, I think about Ludwig Wittgenstein, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. And so I think because in a human species we do, we are kind of socially built around language, I think it's excruciatingly important. But can things exist without it? Yes. But I think if it's a variable, then you really need like emotional granularity, a strong vocabulary. I think those things become, especially because our research, we started it maybe 15 years ago, asking folks, please make a list of every emotion that you can recognize when you're feeling it.

2:43:22Brené Brown:And the main number was three, happy, sad, and pissed off. And so imagine if you are shoving every experiment, every experience you have as a human being into one of those three buckets. So where is awe? Where is wonder? Where's anguish? Where's despair? Where's joy? where, you know, like you're just, it's so crude. The buckets are so crude that it literally does change your lived experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really well put. You know, it reminds me of the research by Paula Niedenthal and colleagues on historical migration patterns and emotional expressiveness and body language and tone.

2:44:07Do you know this work?

2:44:07Brené Brown:No, I don't. Oh, I found this so interesting. And you just connected dots for me on this. So basically, they look around the world and they want to know why are some cultures more emotionally expressive than others? And I think the basic, if you look at their map of emotional expressiveness, like, why are the Americas doing so much with their arms and their faces and with their tones? And you go to Japan and it's much more reserved. Right. And in a couple of their studies, they show that basically how many different languages came together to form the country is a clear predictor of how emotionally expressive their region is.

2:44:52In Japan, everyone spoke the same language, and so they didn't need the gestures and the tones and the body language. And in the Americas, okay, even Spanish versus Portuguese, we've got to do more to try to convey what we're expressing. And the dot you just connected for me was, this is exactly what chimps are doing. They don't have the words. They don't have the extensive, they don't have the nuance of spoken language. Right, right, right. And so they've gotten really good at the subtle gestures and the tones that substitute. Yeah.

2:45:31Brené Brown:And you can see, like in the documentary, I was so interested to see some of those gestures seemed just kind of from birth with the babies, but some of them you could see were being taught. You know, some of the calls, some of the gestures were being taught. And so, yeah, I think it's so interesting to me. I could have taught - Okay, I might have to watch. Yeah. I think, especially now, knowing Aaron, I think you would love to watch it. Yeah. I'm like you. I don't want to see some of those events. I will tell you. Animals being hurt. It's, they're very, they don't show it. Okay, good. No, no, there's nothing graphic about it at all.

2:46:13Brené Brown:I would have never made it. No. Yeah. This was a good one. I loved it. Thank you for, thank you for have my chimpanzee dream come true here. It was, it was long overdue. And we didn't even talk about the bridge that he built between us because he did his doctorate at Michigan and he teaches at UT Austin. Huck him. Go Blue. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brene Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

2:46:52Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu. Now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports.

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