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

Primatologist Aaron Sandel has spent over a decade studying the Ngogo chimpanzees, witnessing one of the largest known chimp communities split into two factions. In this episode, Aaron joins Brené and Adam to explore what chimpanzees can teach us about friendship, conflict, belonging, and human nature. He shares what he learned from watching these chimps show affection, navigate dominance hierarchies, and face the effects of division within their own community. Aaron also reflects on what it was like to watch chimps he knew by name turn against one another, while exploring the surprising depth of bonds between chimpanzees. Together, they explore the parallels between chimpanzee behavior and the ways we harmonize, polarize, and build communities in our own lives. Prof. Aaron Sandel – Aaron Sandel, aaron-sandel.com The Ngogo Chimpanzee Project – Watts, D., et al., ngogochimpanzeeproject.org Male-Male Relationships and the Transition to Adulthood in Chimpanzees – Sandel, A., 2017, University of Michigan (PhD Dissertation) First Clearly Documented Split in World’s Largest Known Chimpanzee Community Leads to Deadly Violence – Erin Walters, April 9, 2026, UT Austin News Lethal Conflict After Group Fission in Wild Chimpanzees – Sandel, A., et al., 2026, Science Hunting Behavior of Chimpanzees at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda – Watts, D. & Mitani, J., 2002, International Journal of Primatology Is a chimp a monkey? – Catherine Annau & Tatiana Hayek, January 4, 2017, Jane Goodall Institute Canada Chimp Empire – Directed by James Reed, narrated by Mahershala Ali, April 19, 2023, Netflix (Documentary Series) Chimp Empire | Mahershala Ali | Official Trailer – Netflix, March 22, 2023, YouTube (Video) Conflicted Opinion: Yale Chimpanzee Expert Weighs In on 'Chimp Empire' – Mike Cummings, June 8, 2023, YaleNews Which Chimp Is Which in Chimp Empire? – Netflix, April 26, 2023, Netflix Tudum What Happened to the Chimps in ‘Chimp Empire?’ – Netflix Tudum, May 2, 2023, Netflix Kibale National Park – Google, Google Maps (Map) Kibale National Park – Kibale Chimpanzee Project, Harvard University Uganda Wildlife Authority – Uganda Wildlife Authority, ugandawildlife.org Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience – Brené Brown, 2021, brenebrown.com (Book) The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time – Brewer, M., 1991, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin How Was Chimp Empire Made? – Netflix Tudum, May 2, 2023, Netflix Male Chimpanzees Form Enduring and Equitable Social Bonds – Mitani, J., 2009, Animal Behaviour My Life Among the Apes – Mitani, J., 2020, American Journal of Primatology Rise of the Warrior Apes – James Reed (Director), 2017, KEO Films (Film - Prequel to Chimp Empire) Most VIOLENT Chimpanzee Society Ever Discovered | Rise of the Warrior Apes – Discovery Australia, February 16, 2018, YouTube (Video) What a Chimpanzee ‘Civil War’ Can Teach Us About How Societies Fall Apart – Nathan Rott, April 13, 2026, NPR Lethal Aggression in Pan Is Better Explained by Adaptive Strategies Than Human Impacts – Wilson, M., et al., 2014, Nature Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers: Evaluating the Chimpanzee Model – Wrangham, R. & Glowacki, L., 2012, Human Nature UT Researchers Find Polarization, Lethal Conflict Among Chimpanzees – Khoi Nguyen, April 21, 2026, The Daily Texan Adolescent Male Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) Form Social Bonds With Their Brothers and Others During the Transition to Adulthood – Sandel, A., et al., 2020, American Journal of Primatology Glimpses of Fatherhood Found in Non-Pair-Bonding Chimps – University of Texas at Austin, January 15, 2020, ScienceDaily Human Respiratory Viruses Continue to Spread in Wild Chimpanzees – University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, January 2019, UW-Madison Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead – Brené Brown, 2012, brenebrown.com (Book) Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial: Consistency in Our Thinking About Humans and Other Animals – de Waal, F., 1999, Philosophical Topics Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? – Frans de Waal, 2016, W. W. Norton (Book) Constraints on Relationship Formation Among Female Primates – Barrett, L. & Henzi, S., 2002, Behaviour The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle – Aristotle, translated by F. H. Peters, 1893, Project Gutenberg (Book) Think Your Adolescence Was Hard? Try Being a Chimp – Harvard Gazette, May 21, 2026, Harvard University Social Relationships Between Chimpanzee Sons and Mothers Endure but Change – Reddy, R. & Sandel, A., 2020, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Puberty Initiates a Unique Stage of Social Learning and Development Prior to Adulthood: Insights From Studies of Adolescence in Wild Chimpanzees – Reddy, R., et al., 2022, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Male–Male Relationships in Chimpanzees and the Evolution of Human Pair Bonds – Sandel, A., 2023, Evolutionary Anthropology Romantic Love in Humans May Have Evolved From Same-Sex Friendship – Lauren Macknight, June 7, 2023, Phys.org ‘It’s Like ‘Game of Thrones’’: Otter Clans Wage War Over Space in Singapore – Maina Chen, October 25, 2021, Yahoo News Conservation – The Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, ngogochimpanzeeproject.org Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance – Donald Horton & R. Richard Wohl, 1956, Psychiatry 19(3):215-229 Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know – Adam Grant, 2021, adamgrant.net (Book) Callings – Amy Wrzesniewski, 2010, September 1, 2010, The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship Unpacking Emotion Differentiation: Transforming Unpleasant Experience by Perceiving Distinctions in Negativity – Kashdan, T., et al., 2015, Current Directions in Psychological Science How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain – Lisa Feldman Barrett, 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Book) Does Language Do More Than Communicate Emotion? – Lindquist, K., et al., 2015, Current Directions in Psychological Science Brené Brown Says You’re Doing Feelings Wrong – Dan Harris, April 2022, Ten Percent Happier (Podcast) Ancestral Diversity – Niedenthal Emotions Lab, University of Wisconsin–Madison Great Ape Gestures: Intentional Communication With a Rich Set of Innate Signals – Byrne, R., et al., 2017, Animal Cognition Towards a Great Ape Dictionary: Inexperienced Humans Understand Common Nonhuman Ape Gestures – Graham, K. & Hobaiter, C., 2023, PLOS Biology Learn more about your ad choices. 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• 1:15Brené 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. Who are these folks? These are members of one of the largest chimpanzee communities in the world. And on The Curiosity Shop this week,

• 1:59Brené Brown?

  we're talking to anthropologist and primatologist, Dr. Aaron Sandel, about what he and his colleagues have learned about alliances, social structures, and the violence that can tear communities apart.

• 2:11Adam Grant?

  The story of the Ngogo 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 Ngogo about how social bonds are built, how they break, and why they're so critical to holding communities together.

• 2:30Brené Brown?

  Welcome to The Curiosity Shop.

• 2:32Adam Grant?

  A show from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 2:40Brené Brown?

  So today, Adam and I are both excited. I'm losing my mind. We have Dr. Aaron Sandel. 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 going to 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.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 3:20Brené Brown?

  And I hope you've cleared your calendar, because I am in full-- look, I can't even take it. I'm in full-on five-year-old kindergartner mode. I have questions about questions.

• 3:34Speaker 05

  Perfect.

• 3:35Adam Grant?

  I mean, Brene, you've been talking about chimps and wanted to do an episode on chimps since before we had a podcast together.

• 3:40Brené Brown?

  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. 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, "I draw from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology, and I use a range of tools, including network analyses,

• 4:25Brené Brown?

  machine learning, and endocrinology to understand how social bonds are formed, maintained, and sometimes fall apart." Let me ask you this question. I have so many questions. Like, I want to know if Abram's still leading the pack over there, or if he ever really fully took his role as the alpha. Can we just start there?

• 4:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, Abram is 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.

• 5:20Brené Brown?

  I had an over-under on Gus coming out and whooping some Abram's ass and taking over, because, look, I had to call my husband like five times, and he's like, "Get off the Chimp Empire."

• 5:34Speaker 05

  No, I love that. Yeah, Gus, great chimp, didn't have a chance at the 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.

• 5:59Adam Grant?

  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? What am I missing?

• 6:10Speaker 05

  These are some of the young adults and adolescent male chimps in the-- one of the chimpanzee groups at Ngogo, which is this population of chimpanzees in the middle of Kibali 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 forest. They're surrounded by other chimpanzee groups. So we really get to see a lot of their natural behavior

• 6:55Speaker 05

  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 at Ngogo. But Chimp Empire follows these two neighboring chimpanzee groups. Abram's 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.

• 7:25Brené 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"?

• 7:58Speaker 05

  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. Since 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.

• 8:28Adam Grant?

  Wow.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  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, because 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. And 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--

• 9:13Speaker 05

  so I was really almost interested in humans insofar as they could help me understand gorillas.

• 9:19Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  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. They're sort of asking--

• 10:05Speaker 05

  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 then 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.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  It's not necessarily just based on behavior alone. I don't think you could usually figure out are 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, what can I learn about chimps from thinking more about humans?

• 11:32Adam Grant?

  How many questions do you have right now, Renee?

• 11:34Brené 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?

• 12:18Brené Brown?

  And so, you know, like, my enemy from this past weekend would be Newcastle, where I ended up with a 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.

• 12:51Adam Grant?

  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. But to Renee's point, that's not the case here. Why are these chimps at war?

• 13:08Speaker 05

  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.

• 13:31Brené Brown?

  Okay.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  And

• 13:33Brené Brown?

  Great.

• 13:34Speaker 05

  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, it's probably the most accurate wildlife documentary ever made that I've seen, because it's just really just telling the true story. It's, in some cases, they simplify things because there's no way you could tell in four episodes

• 14:06Brené Brown?

  Right.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  The complexities of the story. They make a few, you know, 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, but it doesn't really emphasize that this used to be one group. I mean, in the documentary, they don't feature that prominently, so it's 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 needed them for an us. And this is something, this is sort of a hypothesis I have from watching the chimpanzees,

• 14:50Speaker 05

  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, the dominance hierarchy, that's the within-group dynamics, and 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.

• 15:32Speaker 05

  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, and we only really saw signs of this polarization occurring around 2015. And then they became two separate groups in 2018.

• 15:54Brené Brown?

  Why?

• 15:55Speaker 05

  Why?

• 15:56Adam Grant?

  Yeah, what happened?

• 15:57Brené Brown?

  Men, boys, males.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  Well, this is where, 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. He can keep other males away when he wants to mate with a certain female.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  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, 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. And there could be a little, you know, aggression that still occurs, slapping, chasing, but it's mostly these bluffs.

• 17:26Speaker 05

  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.

• 18:00Brené Brown?

  Okay. Oh, my God, I have so many, okay, so

• 18:04Speaker 05

  Same.

• 18:05Brené Brown?

  Okay, so, I really dislike this about humans, I have to say, I really dislike this about us human, 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, 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 shitstarter, 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.

• 18:49Brené Brown?

  You're giving us an enemy and keeping us in fear to maintain your position. Like, you're manufacturing conflict that doesn't exist. Like, take Caroline. Caroline's got this new baby, right? And I thought, I was very

• 19:05Speaker 05

  Christine, yeah.

• 19:06Brené Brown?

  Christine.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:08Brené Brown?

  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?

• 19:17Adam Grant?

  The men going and fighting.

• 19:20Brené Brown?

  No, just the men, just, 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. Now, is that true or not, Aaron? Am I assigning too much?

• 19:51Speaker 05

  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 Ngogo, 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.

• 20:21Brené Brown?

  Miles, Jackson's sidekick?

• 20:24Brené Brown?

  Miles?

• 20:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, because Miles is huge, really bulky, big adult male. And 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. 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,

• 21:09Speaker 05

  right before I started working there. The Ngogo chimps 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.

• 21:20Brené Brown?

  Wow.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  Hundred and fifty, 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.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  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. The group is growing largely with, because of females and kids. You have these sort of neighborhoods that, 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,

• 22:24Speaker 05

  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.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  And there were 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?

• 22:48Brené Brown?

  Were you scared, were you scared too?

• 22:50Speaker 05

  Uh, not so scared. I probably should have been of, of, I mean, I was scared of this, losing a part of my identity.

• 22:55Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  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. You know, one gene is off, but it's hard and boring.

• 23:13Brené Brown?

  Wow.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  And I, 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, you 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, 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, it's really demoralizing. So while all this is happening, I'm learning, slowly learning the chimps.

• 23:57Speaker 05

  And Miles is the alpha of the entire community. He's from the central neighborhood. Jackson was born in the western neighborhood. And he, as a young adult, moved to the central neighborhood. Cause I, 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.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  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.

• 24:48Brené Brown?

  Hmm.

• 24:49Speaker 05

  So 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.

• 25:17Brené Brown?

  No, I'm totally getting it. Like total players in the central and couple-y relationship. So sweet.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:24Brené Brown?

  Boy, but I'm anti-Western, so I don't know how this is paying out for my narrative, but go ahead.

• 25:28Speaker 05

  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. 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. Dexter and Mulligan, who were like very calm, not reactive. And 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 put, they bite their fist.

• 26:09Brené Brown?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  I think that's a vestige of probably our, this ape behavior where you're nervous and, uh, you want someone else to put their hand in your mouth. So chimps will do this.

• 26:21Brené Brown?

  Oh, I, I saw that.

• 26:22Speaker 05

  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 twenties, he's rising in the hierarchy. This is like 2013 and especially 2014. And, but he's rising really fast. And then in 2014, it's my third summer, I've like decided despite like, decide, I was, the prior summer I decided to quit field primatology. My PhD advisor sort of called my bluff and I was like, all right, fine, I'll do it. I'll just go out. I'll study adolescent, young adult male, social relationships.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  And I, you know, developed various strategies where I think I could potentially succeed in doing this field work. So I'm like, I'm going to be here for 15 months studying these chimps.

• 27:17Brené Brown?

  Jeez.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 27:56Brené Brown?

  It's like the mafia.

• 27:56Speaker 05

  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 and 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 Pincer? Where does Berg, where's Dolphy? Where's Webster? Where's Mingus? And then after a couple of months, we realize they're gone. They're gone forever. They died. And I don't think we realized that at first, but 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.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  Those are now gone at the same time that Jackson is, 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 gets, um, charges Miles. And a month later, Miles pant grunts to him. And that was like the takeover.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  And it was this day in June in 2015 that that happened. And John Matani, who's been studying these chimps for, uh, at that time, it'd been 20 years. He's, that was 2015. He saw, he was the only one that saw Miles grunt and submission to Jackson. So now Jackson is essentially the alpha. He still has to sort of establish himself over the, you know, subsequent weeks. And Miles has to, you know, retain his high-ranking position if he, unless he want, he's going to fall.

• 29:45Brené Brown?

  Right.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  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.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  And they hear other chimps and it must be chimps from the central neighborhood, Miles, Jackson, those other chimps. They're just in 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.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  And I think, you know, knowing then, learning at the end of the day that, oh, Jackson had finally got Miles to pant grunt 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 himself. So it makes sense that 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,

• 31:25Speaker 05

  do you need a 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 field work 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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• 34:07Brené Brown?

  I want to tell you, so if you're listening and you're going to watch Chimp Empire, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you a spoiler here.

• 34:17Brené Brown?

  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, 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, for the Western chimpanzees.

• 35:02Brené Brown?

  To sneak into a territory and kill someone in their own territory. What? That was brutal.

• 35:13Speaker 05

  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's, 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, and so to feel safe eating there, they need to go deeper, make sure there's no other chimps from the outsider group.

• 35:58Speaker 05

  Because at the border, there may be some trees that are shared by two groups.

• 36:04Speaker 05

  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, they have nothing like human language, spoken language. They're somehow coordinating, I think, all of this through nonverbal, really subtle, subtle bodily cues and contexts and things that, 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,

• 36:48Speaker 05

  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 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, 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.

• 37:31Speaker 05

  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 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. And I got there and I realized right away, it's like, whoa, this has really changed. They, not only are they socially distinct, they've really divided the territory.

• 38:14Speaker 05

  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, there's a lot of different fruit trees. And he was just traveling there alone. It was the center of the territory, now it was this borderland. And I was expecting, you know, when is he going to go back to join the Westerners? And then it was in January 2018, we started seeing more and more territorial patrols against these former group members. The Central chimps would patrol the West, the Western chimps would patrol Central.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  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.

• 39:25Adam Grant?

  Aaron, the, the parallels to human conflict are, they're sort of, they're smacking you right in the face, right? You have a, a perceived slight, or insult, or aggression on the part of, you know, a former friend or a 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? And how do you think about getting out of it?

• 40:06Speaker 05

  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 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.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  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.

• 40:52Speaker 05

  And so there's this emergence of in-group, out-group dynamic.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  But there is still plausible deniability. I think 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 of 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 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, in a statistically rigorous way. It was this huge effort, but

• 41:42Speaker 05

  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. He'd been the subject of my dissertation.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  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. There was a disease

• 43:03Speaker 05

  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. Rewatching it, it's like, it's sad to watch, and it's also almost troubling. Like, I'm curious about my own mental state at the time. I remember, though, that night, like, 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

• 43:46Speaker 05

  an important, rare, scientific opportunity to have the skeleton of a wild chimp. And 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, 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

• 44:26Speaker 05

  who were attacking him. And 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.

• 45:02Adam Grant?

  Wow. And it sounds like demonizing them would stand in the way of understanding them.

• 45:09Speaker 05

  I 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 that, 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.

• 45:44Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 05

  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. Of course, with humans, you have to hold people accountable for what they do, but maybe the demonization gets in the way.

• 46:16Brené Brown?

  I mean, I think that's, I think that's probably true. 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. We, and it reminded me of when we would interview people, asking them, what is vulnerability?

• 46:59Brené 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, they're just, like, just the, the reaction that we have, that I think if I were one of the senior researchers, researchers, it would take me a long time to write that paper, too, because I would want something different for them than we have, 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?

• 47:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the one thing to note is that in this case, the chimps who were doing the killing are also chimps that, you know, 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, you know, a dead body of a chimp, presumably killed by the outsider group. It's different, I think.

• 48:13Brené Brown?

  But you don't immediately go, 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.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would, I empathize, 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.

• 48:45Brené Brown?

  Really?

• 48:46Speaker 05

  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, observations. So 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.

• 49:21Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 49:22Speaker 05

  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. They 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

• 50:07Speaker 05

  and then unfolding, and there's sort of a, this positive side to a lot of those dynamics. On a territorial patrol, it's an amazing opportunity for bonding.

• 50:17Brené Brown?

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 05

  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, this sort of role modelist mentor. And in the West, because of the patrolling, I think there's a lot more almost egalitarianism

• 51:00Speaker 05

  across age and dominance rank, and 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. 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

• 51:45Speaker 05

  further and further east. They were, you know, had moved in. This was probably, um, you know, in the weeks before they killed pork pie. And I was with the Western chimps and they get to this sort of further east and 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.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  They are like on the front lines calling, like sort of defending their territory. Most of the central chimps are hundreds of meter behind them, but I think they were like, these are small, low ranking chimps.

• 52:38Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 05

  But they were like, I think emboldened by their, their bonds with each other.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  That Booker is Gus's, was Gus's older brother. So it's like this interesting little family there. But, um, 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 violence.

• 53:03Adam Grant?

  Aaron, at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned you were curious about, do they have friendships? And how do they form them? Where are you on that? I, 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.

• 53:23Adam Grant?

  Are they friends? How do they become friends? How do you know?

• 53:26Brené Brown?

  If they're, if you're going to say they're not friends, I need some kind of disclaimer.

• 53:31Speaker 05

  No.

• 53:31Brené Brown?

  Cause you're going to break my heart, Aaron.

• 53:34Speaker 05

  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, of other animals for years. I think that some chimps definitely are friends with each other.

• 54:00Speaker 05

  But I also, I mean, I think it still deserves a more, more sort of deeper understanding of what we mean by friendship. And, and 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.

• 54:18Speaker 05

  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.

• 54:42Brené Brown?

  Oh, for sure.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  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 is 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, you know, Miles was an ally to Jackson, I'm not sure.

• 55:24Speaker 05

  But when circumstances change, maybe it would be easier to break that, that, that tie. Yeah. Renee?

• 55:34Brené Brown?

  I mean, 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.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Well, I think even.

• 56:09Brené Brown?

  That would be my hypothesis.

• 56:10Speaker 05

  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 the, 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. I think it has to be partly a much more detailed, subtler depiction of how like, of almost like facial expressions or these other patterns that are extremely difficult to determine in a chimp. And they're, 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 at, yeah.

• 56:47Brené Brown?

  It's impossible.

• 56:48Speaker 05

  But we as people are so good at, at, at sort of almost unconsciously picking up on this with humans, with each other.

• 56:57Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  I mean, that's where the vibe, these gut feelings, vibes. And then if you're really good at it, you get, become a, a good therapist or a poker champion.

• 57:06Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 57:06Speaker 05

  Or a psychic or something.

• 57:09Adam Grant?

  I hope not.

• 57:11Brené Brown?

  You're a psychic.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're lost. I'm not talking, I don't mean like East Village, like little kiosk. I mean, like really like.

• 57:18Brené Brown?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 05

  My great grandmother was a, a sort of faith healer, Sephardic, kabbalistic faith healer. So I'm a little.

• 57:30Brené Brown?

  I do believe in that 100%.

• 57:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. She was reading like coffee grounds and giving, having meetings about people's numerology and stuff. So it's, there might, I might have a little bias from my, in my blood. But, uh, 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 Retchner Eddy, 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.

• 58:06Brené Brown?

  Miles looked at, 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.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  It's possible, yeah. I mean, but I even remember, I remember, you know, uh, seven years before that happened.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  Like, uh, 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. But 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.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Sometimes like with friendship that we have today, it's like a lower, it's considered a lower category than other types of bonds.

• 59:17Brené Brown?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 05

  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

• 59:30Speaker 05

  call friendship, especially if these relationships, you know, are, might be better understood as, as a mentor, mentee relationship. Like 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. And 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.

• 1:00:16Speaker 05

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

• 1:00:26Brené Brown?

  Can I just ask this last question? And it'll be my last question about my friends and then, and go, shut up, Adam. How is that true for two reasons? I felt like Christine did Nadine dirty. Like, so listen, Christine has.

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  You're watching Real Housewives Chimp Edition. I love it.

• 1:00:45Brené Brown?

  Listen, no, Christine is the mom.

• 1:00:50Brené Brown?

  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. 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

• 1:01:34Brené Brown?

  their community on their own. Like, do you, Adam, they are shoved out, teenage girls, shoved onto the streets.

• 1:01:45Adam Grant?

  Not okay with that.

• 1:01:47Brené Brown?

  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.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  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. But, 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, 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.

• 1:02:42Brené Brown?

  Right.

• 1:02:43Speaker 05

  In group living animals, including many primates, the, 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. This 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. And what is the mother offspring relationship like? The thing with chimps is, first of all, it's important to note that, yeah, at adolescence, and chimps and bonobos, the females typically leave the group. They leave the area that they've known, they leave the chimps that they've

• 1:03:27Speaker 05

  known. But it's not, it's unlikely, it doesn't seem that they're kicked out, which is interesting. They seem to go on their own accord. So, in, 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.

• 1:03:50Brené Brown?

  Got it.

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  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. They, and they are, and they are brave. I mean, talk about vulnerability. They're going out into the unknown.

• 1:04:22Brené Brown?

  I couldn't believe it.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  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, a 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's, what goes on because it's hard to follow them. And it can be rough transitioning into a new group. So it's, 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

• 1:05:05Speaker 05

  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, 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.

• 1:05:24Brené Brown?

  That's what I would pick.

• 1:05:25Speaker 05

  Family unit. Yeah.

• 1:05:26Brené Brown?

  That's what I would pick.

• 1:05:27Speaker 05

  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, 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.

• 1:06:02Brené Brown?

  It's like brotherhood.

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's like brotherhood, or it's almost like the closest thing I've seen in the animal kingdom to romantic love.

• 1:06:11Adam Grant?

  Wow.

• 1:06:11Speaker 05

  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, you know, distinct behaviors, preferences for each other. And 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

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  pair bond, I feel like some of these adult male pairs are actually pair bonds.

• 1:07:01Brené Brown?

  It reminds me of my, 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, but they have a bond that it's like lasted divorces and, you know, I mean, they just, like, 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, 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. And

• 1:07:41Brené Brown?

  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, I have gotten three out of my 30 questions, but that's okay. I know where you work.

• 1:08:01Adam Grant?

  Barely scratched the surface for me too, but I think it's time for lightning.

• 1:08:04Brené Brown?

  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 in Singapore. But, yeah, it's just genetic. She's got a genetic problem, like, from her mom. All right. One thing that you are deeply curious about right now.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  What are emotions? And, and can we really scientifically study this across animals?

• 1:08:44Brené Brown?

  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?

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  Oh, my God. I would want to, it would 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. 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 cap, get it on wild animals, and then it would track them and, and maybe non-invasively monitor their behavior. I don't know if that, we could put that in the curiosity shop.

• 1:09:35Brené Brown?

  We could, for sure.

• 1:09:36Adam Grant?

  Primatology curiosity shop, for sure.

• 1:09:38Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 05

  Or, I don't know if that's a thing. It could also be like, you know, a chimp testicle and pickling and formaldehyde that I, that I collected in 2015.

• 1:09:50Brené Brown?

  I'd be for that.

• 1:09:51Adam Grant?

  That was not on my bingo card for today. I have to ask, Aaron, one of the things I'm so curious about that I think could be done lightning style is, what's the most surprising way that chimps are similar to humans?

• 1:10:04Brené Brown?

  Hmm, I'd love that.

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  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 really stuck with me is the way they 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. I'm like chimps are doing it.

• 1:10:50Speaker 05

  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 an important part of, of being human, but it's because we're apes.

• 1:11:11Brené 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 were 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?

• 1:11:43Speaker 05

  So helpful, especially for training new researchers. So helpful. And that's sort of what we are now, the like 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 the common cold and they would die from that. So 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 see binoculars, use binoculars. So if we could have like super magnification, video recording glasses, that would be really

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  nice, that sort of had this automatic recognition of individuals and behavior.

• 1:12:29Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 1:12:30Speaker 05

  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. Cause historically with animal behavior, it's like you're writing down in a notebook. I'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, 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, the meta glass 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

• 1:13:15Speaker 05

  around, but that would be great.

• 1:13:16Brené Brown?

  I'll work on it for you. Okay. And if you see me in your class, just be cool.

• 1:13:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Adam Grant?

  You be cool, Renee. That's gonna be the hard part.

• 1:13:26Brené Brown?

  No, there's no way I can be cool. I don't, I'm gonna ask myself.

• 1:13:28Speaker 05

  I expect, I expect you in the front row for sure.

• 1:13:31Brené Brown?

  No doubt. That's where I always sit.

• 1:13:33Adam Grant?

  I just have to say, I'm so glad you didn't give up on your gorilla dream, Aaron.

• 1:13:37Brené Brown?

  Same.

• 1:13:38Adam Grant?

  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.

• 1:13:54Brené Brown?

  That's beautiful, Adam.

• 1:13:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:57Brené Brown?

  Dream come true. Really, just really important and amazing and I love it so much. I'm still not a fan. I'm still not, not, it's 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.

• 1:14:19Speaker 05

  The parallels are, the parallels are hard, but yeah, thank you so much. It's great discussing this with you.

• 1:14:24Adam Grant?

  So fun. Thank you for joining us, Aaron.

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• 1:16:45Adam Grant?

  Was this everything you dreamed of?

• 1:16:46Brené Brown?

  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 them-ness 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.

• 1:17:10Adam Grant?

  I, I don't think I would get over that either. It, it's striking to me how strong your parasocial relationships are with these chimps.

• 1:17:17Brené Brown?

  Me?

• 1:17:18Adam Grant?

  Yours. Yeah. I mean, his too, but yours, just from watching the doc.

• 1:17:22Brené Brown?

  Well, you know, documentaries are, you know, nature documentaries especially, I mean, like I, had I, we not been doing this podcast, I would never have watched one. Cause I'm, 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, I kept saying, I can't watch it, I'm gonna watch it. I can't watch it, I'm gonna 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 it's, they look like us. And so I just knew them and they have such fun personalities and not, not all of them, but I don't know. I, I left, I would be so bad at this job.

• 1:18:07Brené Brown?

  Could you imagine anyone worse at this job than me?

• 1:18:08Adam Grant?

  I could. Yes, I could.

• 1:18:11Brené Brown?

  No. I, cause I'm just such about the story and the emotional narrative. And he, 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?

• 1:18:25Adam Grant?

  Consistently. Yeah. Every time he got attached, he would, he would kind of pull back and say, well, that's an interesting hypothesis.

• 1:18:34Brené Brown?

  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 the sky 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.

• 1:19:00Adam Grant?

  Yeah. 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, if you fall for it when you're young and it seems like it's gonna 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, to observe and, 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.

• 1:19:36Brené Brown?

  Yeah. Yeah. Cause I don't think anyone dreams about the preparation, the, 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?

• 1:20:14Adam Grant?

  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.

• 1:20:29Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 1:20:30Adam Grant?

  Like that people 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.

• 1:20:52Brené Brown?

  Yeah, no, I think it's, I think it's three things. I think it's purpose versus process versus romanticized understanding.

• 1:21:04Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Brené Brown?

  So, you know, 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.

• 1:21:15Adam Grant?

  That's such a good example.

• 1:21:16Brené Brown?

  You know what I mean? Like, yeah, and so I think just the real behind the scenes, like, I don't think of a second year medical student is thinking, this is exactly, you know, like that moment when Meredith Grey fell in love with McDreamy, you know, it's, they're thinking, I have 7,000 flashcards and I remember three of them.

• 1:21:38Adam Grant?

  And I think I have all three of those diseases. Oh, no.

• 1:21:40Brené Brown?

  Oh, God, for sure. Yeah. Having been married to, from someone through medical school and residency. Yeah.

• 1:21:48Brené Brown?

  Yeah, I just think, I 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.

• 1:21:59Adam Grant?

  Me too. You know what? One thing I was, I was left thinking about, I just, I have to, I have to ask you about this because I, 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, 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. And yet, Aaron 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?

• 1:22:39Brené Brown?

  I think you'll, you'll help me find a more graceful way to say this.

• 1:22:47Brené Brown?

  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 if, if, can things exist without it? Yes. But I think if it's a variable, then you really need like emotional granularity, a strong vocabulary.

• 1:23:29Brené Brown?

  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. And the mean number was three, happy, sad and pissed off. And so, you know, 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.

• 1:24:13Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15Adam Grant?

  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. Do you know this work?

• 1:24:28Brené Brown?

  No, I don't.

• 1:24:30Adam Grant?

  Oh, I've, I've found this so interesting and you just, you just connected dots for me on this. So basically, they, they look around the world and they want to know, why are some cultures more emotionally expressive than others? And I think the, the basic, if you look at their map of emotional expressiveness, like, why are the Americas like doing so much with their arms and, and their faces and like with their tones? And you go to Japan and it's, it's much more reserved.

• 1:24:59Brené Brown?

  Right.

• 1:25:00Adam Grant?

  And in, in a couple of their studies, they show that basically, how many different languages came together to form the country is a, is a clear predictor of how emotionally expressive their region is. In Japan, everyone spoke the same language and so they didn't need the gestures and the tones.

• 1:25:17Brené Brown?

  Oh, my God, that's interesting.

• 1:25:18Adam Grant?

  The body language. And in the Americas, okay, even Spanish versus Portuguese, like we've got to do more to try to convey what we're expressing. And I, the dot you just connected for me was, this is exactly what chimps are doing. They don't have the, like, they don't have the words, they don't have the extensive, they, they don't have the nuance of spoken language.

• 1:25:43Brené Brown?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:25:44Adam Grant?

  And so they've gotten really good at the subtle gestures and the tones that substitute.

• 1:25:51Brené Brown?

  Yeah, and, 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, it's so interesting to me. I could have taught.

• 1:26:12Adam Grant?

  Okay, I might have to watch.

• 1:26:13Brené Brown?

  Yeah, I think, especially now, knowing Aaron, I think you would love to watch it. Yeah.

• 1:26:22Adam Grant?

  I'm like you, I don't want to see some of those events.

• 1:26:25Brené Brown?

  I will tell you that.

• 1:26:26Adam Grant?

  Animals being hurt.

• 1:26:27Brené Brown?

  It's, it's, they're very, they don't show it.

• 1:26:31Adam Grant?

  Okay, good.

• 1:26:31Brené Brown?

  You know, no, no, there's nothing graphic about it at all. Oh, I would have never made it. No. Yeah.

• 1:26:38Brené Brown?

  This was a good one. I loved it. Thank you for, uh, thank you for have my chimpanzee dream come true here.

• 1:26:45Adam Grant?

  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.

• 1:26:54Brené Brown?

  Huck 'em.

• 1:26:55Adam Grant?

  Go Blue.

• 1:26:57Brené Brown?

  The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.

• 1:27:07Adam Grant?

  We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

• 1:27:14Speaker 06

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 1:27:43Speaker 07

  It's Monday at midnight. A competitor outranks you in AI search, three of your best pages stop getting cited, and two AI platforms start misquoting your prices. Luckily, Profound's AI marketer catches it all. It drafts content to win back visibility, refreshes those pages, and writes outreach to correct your pricing at the source. By morning, it's ready for your review. This is why Walmart, Figma, and Cursor rely on Profound. For AI-powered marketing, go to profound.com.

• 1:28:14Speaker 07

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion-dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money.

• 1:28:41Speaker 07

  Learn more at Bloomberg.com.