# The Smartest, Dumbest, And Weirdest Animals - A Collection

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Joe Scott
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1FMViCd6I4
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/42790

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

Well, Zoe found out that I'm doing a compilation of animal videos, and she insisted on being in it because I don't I don't make any decisions around here. Uh, but no, I wanted to start off 2026 with something kind of light. The world's kind of crazy right now, and I kind of realized that a lot of the compilations that I've been doing are in some really heavy subjects like horrible disasters and existential threats and true crime, stuff like that. So, you know, hey, how about a fun one about animals? I don't know where she's looking. Now, what's interesting is I'll be able to see by how well this video performs. You know, just what a bunch of sick freaks you people are. What are you looking at over there? She was looking at the exit. Somebody needs to get fed, huh? Is that the deal? So, to kick things off before I go feed Zoe here, we got a double header of videos about the smartest and dumbest animals in the world. So, my wife and I spent this Thanksgiving at home this year for obvious reasons, but that just meant that we got to have our Thanksgiving dinner sitting on the couch watching the Westminster dog show. And uh those poodles, those poor, poor poodles. I don't know how they got stuck with this look, but it always makes me think of barf and spaceball armor. But poodles are actually one of the smartest dog breeds. They just have the dumbest hairstyle. Yeah, some dog breeds are just generally smarter than other dog breeds. That's a known thing. They talked about that on the dog show as I was watching it. And it always cracks me up whenever people talk about dog breeds being a certain level of smart. If people who have a dog that is not considered as smart as these other dog breeds, they always get really offended by it. And that cracks me up, you know, because they think their dog is special. Their dog's super smart. Like I mean, would you love your dog any less if it wasn't smart? You know, are you gonna be disappointed if it doesn't get into a good college? Like, hey, do you want to see the dumbest dog in the world? That dog. That dog right there. As many of you already know, this is Jake. Jake's been with us for a while. He's getting up there in the years, getting kind of old, getting kind of skinny. I love Jake with every molecule of my heart and he might be the dumbest dog that's ever walked the planet. Aren't you? For example, at night I usually sit on this chair and do some work and I usually let the TV run. So, I close this door so I don't wake up my wife who is in bed upstairs. But the dog will come down the stairs and then he'll whine at this door asking me to let him go through that door. Not knowing somehow after 12 years he has not figured out that you can just walk around 12 years. He also doesn't understand that I can't open the door if he's standing right in front of it, dude. So yeah, he's an idiot and he's my idiot. I love him. But other animals are not idiots. In fact, some of them are so disturbingly smart that it kind of makes us have to rethink what intelligence actually is. Extraterrestrial beings descend on Earth in Ted Chang's 1998 novella, Story of Your Life, which was later reimagined as the movie Arrival. They arrive in these giant pods and kind of float there and scientists are brought in from all over the place to try to figure out how to communicate with them. And the process this alien species is extremely difficult and I think realistic because the aliens language mimics their own brains which do not work in a linear fashion. For them, time is cyclical or you might call it a flat circle. All right. All right. And for all we know, that's how millions of life forms right here on this planet see it, too. But we don't know because we can't communicate with them. I mean, it's easy to see that Earth's creatures have their own communication system. Just open your window and listen to the birds on a sunny day or try to sleep to whale sounds sometime. The only intelligence we really understand is human intelligence. And even that is far from complete. We often evaluate a species intelligence through the prism of our own brain power. And that's not really the best way to go about it. In fact, we're starting to understand that animals have their own kind of intelligence that might be completely unrecognizable to us. So, how do we define intelligence when it comes to animals? Well, there are three aspects that most researchers look at. Self-awareness, self-control, and memory. One way to measure self-awareness is with what's called the mirror test. Mirror self-recognition is a type of self-awareness indicator that's been used on children, apes, dolphins, and elephants. Researchers place a mark, like a red dot, on the subject's face and then show it a mirror. If the subject touches the mark on the mirror, that indicates it doesn't recognize itself. If it touches the mark on its own face, that suggests that it has some idea of self-awareness. Human infants usually take between 12 and 18 months to figure out the self-awareness with a mirror test. Bottle-nosed dolphins do it in 7

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

months. Other methods scientists use to measure animal intelligence include problem solving experiments, tool use, facial recognition and memory, and brain size. Determining an animal's smartness requires separating two very distinct things: intelligence and mechanization. Intelligence is how information is processed and the inference is made from that. Mechanization is instinctual or automatic responses to specific stimuli. I mean for example, does an octopus change its color by choice or is it just instinctual? Or does it even matter? As Philip Sofur asked in an article in the Atlantic, he said, quote, "Ascribing such importance to design, visualization, and inference is incredibly arbitrary. Within this context, intelligence is really an indicator of how similar an animal is to humans. " Now, all that to say that animal intelligence sometimes is exhibited in ways that we don't even recognize as intelligence according to our own understanding of it. So, with that in mind, let's take a look at some of the smartest animals in the world based on our understanding of intelligence. First up is the octopus. I did a video a few months back earlier this year about sephopods, which included octopuses. I'll put a link up here and down in the description. You should go check it out. It's an excellent video. It's one of the best written episodes I've ever done. just clearly exemplary writing. Hands down some of the best stuff that has ever appeared on this channel that — um it should win a Pulitzer Prize. Why is that in the script? Why did Jason write that into this? Did he write the sephalopod script? Hang on. He did. Jason wrote the Oh, Jason. He pulled a sneaky. Anyway, in that episode, I asked why octopuses are considered so intelligent. Well, one thing that helps is that they have one of the largest brains out of any invertebrate in the world. There's over 500 million neurons in the octopus. 350 million of them are in their arms. And this is what's so fascinating about octopus intelligence because basically every arm has a little mini brain in it. So, it doesn't just have a brain like we do. It has more of a hierarchy of brains. But just to compare their 500 million neurons to us, we have like 100 billion neurons in our human brain. But still, hundreds of studies have shown how intelligent octopuses are. We've learned they can do such things as screw a lid off a jar from the outside and inside, navigate through mazes, solve problems, build stone defensive structures, make tools out of shells and coconuts, and even play. One study even showed that they can tell the difference between different people. Researchers had two different people stand in a room with an octopus, one of which acted really friendly toward the octopus, and the other one acted standoffish and indifferent. And when they returned to the room later on, the octopus paid a lot more attention to the friendly person and kind of ignored the person who had ignored it. Cuz I guess octopuses hold grudges. And octopuses are clever, too. One might say downright devious. There's an anecdote about how fish in a lab kept going missing. So, the staff at this lab put up a camera to see what was going on. And what they found when they watched the footage later was an octopus in a different tank. Got out of that tank, went over to the other tank, opened the lid, got the fish, got out of the tank, closed the lid, and then got back into its own tank. It actually covered its own tracks. And they've also been shown that they have the ability to plan ahead of time for things. The coconut octopus actually carries coconut halves around with it wherever it goes before eventually getting inside of it and closing the two sides around itself for protection. Jennifer Matther's been studying octopuses since the 1980s and she thinks that the fact that they carry these shells around with them uh instead of just using them when they find them is super important. She told Life Science, quote, "That's using the environment, but it's much more important. It's predicting what you're going to need for the future and taking the actions now, planning for what you're going to have to do later. " And that along with a million other things makes octopuses super cool. Seriously, you should go check out that video that I did. Jason thinks it's the best thing I've ever made. Next up is elephants. Elephants are kind of famously known for having a great memory and they have earned that reputation. But it's not just being able to memorize things. They also use tools. They actually clean their own food and they can follow human commands. And they're also incredibly social and empathetic, not just to other animals, but to other species as well. Empathy is considered a really big signal of intelligence. And those who have worked with and interacted with elephants often talk about how smart they are. But exactly how smart are they? One study conducted by researchers at the University of Sussex and Brighton in the UK found that elephants are able to understand language differences. They can also know if it's a woman, a man, or a child talking. And the reason they know that is because there are only certain tribes in Africa that hunt elephants. The researchers played recordings of the Massi who actually hunt the elephants and recordings of the comda who don't to see how differently those elephants would react to them. And sure enough when they played recordings of the massi the elephants reacted fearful and you know created some distance moved away from it. When they played recordings from the conda they didn't really react in any way. So they decided to dive a little bit further into it and played different recordings of massi men, women and children talking to see if they would react differently to those. And sure enough, when they heard men's voices, they reacted more fearful.

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

They didn't really react the same way with the women and the children because the men are the ones that do the hunting. So, the elephants are not just smart enough to understand that humans could be a threat to them. They actually understand the different languages that the humans are speaking and know which one of those to be afraid of. With their large bodies, they also have very large brains. And they use these large brains in these social situations to work together, to cooperate, and to solve problems. In one experiment, for example, two elephants worked together to drag ropes attached to either side of a table that held two food bowls because one elephant wasn't strong enough to pull it. There's even been instances of elephants mimicking human voices. Researchers discovered that an elephant named Koshik in the Everland Zoo in South Korea could actually speak six different Korean words and could do it well enough for people to understand it. Koshik would place his trunk inside of his mouth, modulating his vocal track shape to create the sounds. Wow. — And that's really cool. Um, but it's also kind of sad because uh apparently they think the reason why it's doing this is it's trying to communicate with people because it's lonely. Basically, it didn't have any other elephants around it growing up. So, this is its attempt to communicate with people, which is cool. Also, just a little bit sad. Sad, but that just kind of shows you how emotional and social these animals are, which is really kind of amazing when you think about it. Next up is the goat. Today, when you call something the goat, it usually means greatest of all time. And maybe the goat is actually the greatest of all time. I mean, look, you might be a cat person, dog person, but if you're a dog person, you might actually be a goat person because some research has shown that goats are pretty similar to dogs when it comes to intelligence. A paper published in biology letters showed that goats actually will gaze at a human to help them solve a problem if they can't figure out the solution themselves and then their responses to that person change depending on the person's behavior. For example, in this experiment, they train goats how to open a box to get a treat that's inside. And then at the end of the test, the final part of the test was they made that box inaccessible. They moved it up where the goats couldn't get to it and then recorded their reactions. And their reaction was to look over at the people, some of which were facing the goats and some of them were looking away. And they found that the goats paid more attention to the people that were looking toward them. So they were clearly asking for help. Study author Christian Narwh said, "Goats gaze at humans the same way dogs do when asking for a treat that's out of their reach, for example. Our results provide a strong evidence for a complex communication directed at humans in a species that was domesticated primarily for agricultural production and show similarities with animals bred to become pets or working animals such as dogs and horses. Goats can also figure out how to use tools to their advantage. In one study from Australia, they set up a contraption that made the goats have to perform multiple steps, including pulling on a lever and opening up another thing with their mouth in order to get to that treat. And nine out of the 12 goats figured out how to do it after four tries. Even more impressive, 10 months later, they tried this again, and the majority of the goats figured out how to get to the treat. This shows that they have real long-term memory. And can I just say, uh, if you ever get a chance to go to a goat farm, go. They're really cool and baby goats are the cutest thing that's ever existed. I'm just saying. Next up is a dolphin. So, octopuses aren't the only water dwelling animal that's super intelligent. Dolphins are crazy smart. They're kind of like the human equivalent in the water, some people think anyway. But they're also incredibly social. And this is one of the reasons why they're so popular at, you know, aquariums, but also in the wild, because they seem to have fun with each other. They play around and they jump and they swim and they just have a good time. And one other sign of intelligence in dolphins is that they have a really complex language that we're only beginning to understand. They can use tools and learn behavioral commands from trainers. Female dolphins remain with their offspring for years, teaching them what they need to know to survive. And like I said before, they ace the mirror self-recognition test even earlier than humans do. Neuroscientist and animal expert Lori Marino said, quote, "These mammals recognize themselves in the mirror and have a sense of social identity. They not only know who they are, but they also have a sense of who, where, and what their groups are. They interact and comprehend with the health and feelings of other dolphins so fast it's as if they're online with each other. Yeah. One cool thing that might help with that dolphins do that has always fascinated me is that they get around with echolocation. But what that means is that they can actually direct a sound an echolocation sound to another dolphin that they can interpret visually. So they really can almost communicate telepathically in a way. Yes, it's done with sound waves. It's not telepathy obviously, but they can just transmit through sound a visual image. Marino also said that dolphins can imitate human postures, what she calls cognitively demanding. And they have huge brains. In fact, their brain to body ratio is second only to you and me and the rest of humanity. I'm not saying that just you and I have big brains, although I'm sure yours is. You got a nicely sized brain. Dolphin brains also have a specialized type of brain cell called spindle neurons which are associated with such abilities as reasoning, communicating, recognizing, remembering, perceiving, adapting, problem solving, and understanding. Another cool

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

thing about dolphin brains that I've always appreciated is that they sleep hemispherically. So basically the way dolphins sleep is they just turn off one half of their brain and the other one is still functioning so it can continue to swim and breathe and all that kind of stuff, which I really wish we could do cuz I would be a lot more productive that way. And they also have a super complex limbic system, far more complex than even our own. And again, that goes back to the whole social aspect of dolphins. According to Marino, a dolphin alone is not really a dolphin. Being a dolphin means being embedded in a complex social network, even more so than with humans. And clearly, they're really good with the social thing cuz they seem to have a lot of fun together. Next up are crows. Have you ever seen a crow and been afraid of it? No. You should be. Crows or corvids are uh ridiculously smart and will probably take over the world someday. Consider this example. Crows that live in urban areas will pick up nuts and put them out in the street, waiting for a car to drive by and drive over them to crack them open for them and then eat what's been inside the shell. Work smarter, not harder, people. They actually have location specific dialects and gestures. They use tools. They'll actually even play tricks and games on each other. One study tested their intelligence by giving people and crows the same puzzle. It was a toy that floated on top of the water inside of a tall glass that was too narrow for a bird's beak or a child's hand to get into. Children that were younger than 8 years old couldn't figure out how to get the toy out. Crows, though, drop pebbles into the glass, displacing the water so that the toy would rise to the top and they could grab it. Corvids understand water displacement and they actually hold grudges and have ways of letting other crows know that they have a grudge against them. And you better not get on a crow's bad side because not only do they hold grudges, they gossip. In one 2011 study, some researchers wore masks while they went in and started grabbing and tagging crows, basically creating a stressful and negative situation for those crows. When the researchers went back to that area two weeks later, some of them wore these masks and some of them didn't. And the ones that wore the masks were caught at and scolded by 26% of the birds. They did this again a year and a half later and this time 30% of the crows were cing and scolding at these people. And then 3 years later they tried it again. They hadn't done anything in between. They hadn't been wearing these masks giving them negative or positive feedback. Just that one time. 3 years later they came back. Some of the researchers had masks. Some of them didn't. And this time, 66% of the birds were scalding at them. In other words, the birds had somehow told other birds that weren't even there the first time about these people in the masks and they and they did not like it. One of the researchers of the study wrote, quote, later recognition of dangerous masks by lone crows that were never captured is consistent with horizontal social learning. Independent scolding by young crows whose parents had conditioned them to scold the dangerous mask demonstrates vertical social learning, which is a fancy way of saying they were talking some serious Another sign of their intelligence is that they actually hold funerals for their dead and investigate how they died. Researchers say they do this in order to understand the dangers around them. In a study published in animal behavior in 2015, they said, quote, "Our results support previous findings that crows learn places associated with conspecific death and further demonstrate that crows can learn and remember people who appear complicit in these events. " But it's not all negative. Studies have also shown that crows can remember people who were good to them and obviously they like those people. They've also been known to like resurrect dead band members from the dead so that they can avenge their girlfriend's deaths. That might have been a movie. Keeping with our feathered friends, there's the parrot. Parrots are good at problem solving. They can also use tools and famously can mimic human speech. In fact, the staff at a UK wildlife center had to separate five birds from each other because they were teaching and encouraging each other to swear at the guests. I'm hoping they learn different words within colonies. Park chief executive Steve Nichols told the BBC News. But if they teach each other bad language and I end up with 250 swearing birds, I don't know what we'll do. You'll make a ton of money is what you'll do. What are you kidding? Now, we know that parrots can mimic human speech, but it's starting to look like they actually kind of understand what they're saying. An African gray parrot named Alex is a perfect example of this. He was purchased from a Chicago pet store in 1977 and was trained by Dr. Aren Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeise University in Harvard. And he was remarkable because he possessed more than 100 vocal labels for different actions, colors, and objects. According to Dr. Pepperberg, he could identify objects by their materials. He even showed math skills, able to infer the connection between written numerals, object sets, and number vocalization, and understood the concept of zero. And there's a reason why parrots and birds in general are so smart. In 2018, researchers in Canada examined 98 samples of bird brains that included parrots, but also hummingbirds, chickens, and owls. What they were looking for was large pontene nuclei, which are neural circuits that move information from the cortex to the cerebellum. Humans and primates have

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

large pontene nuclei and it's considered a major factor in higher level intelligence and they did not find it in the birds. It turns out this area is actually really small in birds. What they did have though is a large medial spyroform nucleus which is something that mammals don't have. And it turns out that in birds this serves the same purpose as the large pontene nuclei. According to Christian Gutierrez Ibanz, the SPM is very large in parrots. It's actually two to five times larger in parrots than in other birds like chickens. Independently, parrots have evolved in a large area that connects the cortex and the cerebellum, similar to primates. But this raises the question of why that SPM is so large in parrots when it's not any bigger in say intelligent birds like crows. They don't know the answer to this. And this is where the next level of the research is going. And last, but definitely not least, is the chimpanzeee. Chimps are often called our closest animal relative, and that is definitely true when we talk about intelligence. Like most other animals on this list, they can solve problems and use tools, but they can also communicate with people through sign language and remember people's names even after decades apart. But one of the most intelligent things they can do is use symbols in place of objects and then combine those symbols in a sequence to convey an idea. In a 2007 study, researchers presented identical cognitive tests to college students, adult chimps, and adolescent chimps. Both the humans and the chimps saw the numbers on the screen for less than a second before being asked to point out where those numbers had been. The humans and adult chimps performed pretty much the same, but the adolescent chimps were far more accurate in remembering each number's location. They basically have a type of photographic memory. But the best one at this, the goat if you will, was a young chimpanzeee named Aumu. He remembered the correct order of a number series that randomly appeared for only 210 milliseconds on a touchcreen monitor. That's faster than a blink. Probably the best sign of intelligence, though, is that they laugh when they're tickled. I don't know if that's a sign of intelligence or not, but it's cute. Now, there's actually a lot more animals that we could include on this list, but it would go on forever. So, here's a quick list of honorable mentions. Like pigeons with their ability to recognize hundreds of images even after many years have passed. Squirrel's cunning ability to hide food from potential thieves. Pigs cleverness and out competing native species. Orangutans forming strong social bonds. Raccoon's lockpicking skills. Rats ability to solve mazes and their empathy. Cow's ability to display complex spatial memory. domestic dogs ability to understand emotions and symbolic language and domestic cats disinterest and uh well just that their disinterest alone is proof that they're pretty dang smart. There's a scene in the book Weather by Jenny Oll where a self-help speaker is speaking to an audience about human intelligence and the speaker says that the only reason we are at the top of the evolutionary food chain is because we decided what's important. For example, the speaker said that if we prioritize sense of smell then dogs would be considered more evolutionarily advanced than we are. Or if we thought longevity was most important, then bristle cone pines would be the most important species on the planet. Or if we thought that sex was the most important trait, then banana slugs would be the most important because they can change their sex. They're hemaphroditic and they have sex about three times a day. They know how to party. All this to say that intelligence has no one-sizefits-all measurement. You know, it all depends on circumstance and privilege. It could even be said that it's impossible to determine which species is the most intelligent because we have a very myopic view of intelligence. We can only gauge intelligence through the senses that we have. You know, other species might have thought the same thing about us, that we're not as intelligent as them because we perceive the world differently than they do. And today with artificial intelligence and complex algorithms, there's a new kind of intelligence that you have to kind of factor in. And you have to imagine that someday when artificial intelligence becomes super intelligent, they'll probably look at us the same way we've looked at other animals for thousands of years. But talk about yourself in the comments. What animal do you think is the smartest? Which ones do you have? Or share a story or an experience of an animal doing something spookily smart. We've all got pets. I'm sure we've all got a lot of cool stories about there. Share them in the comments. I want to see them. All right, that's it for now. You guys go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week. Stay safe and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care. Nature, a perfectly balanced masterpiece of unimaginable complexity. The great dance of life, where every creature, great and small, plays a pivotal role in Whoa, that guy's having a bad day. Sorry, where was I? Oh, yeah. Every creature, great and small, plays a pivotal role in the great ecological story. From the majestic elk to the elusive and cunning. Oh, that's going to leave a mark. Okay, maybe not every animal is majestic, but there is a purpose and an intelligence behind every Okay. Okay. Bad example, but animals are way more intelligent than we Except for that guy. I guess he didn't have his echo of this. Oh, and that one, too. Oh my goodness. Nature is having a day. Oh. Oh, that poor

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

— Animals are stupid. About a year ago or so, I did a video on the world's smartest animals where I talked about how some animals like corvids and octopuses show a level of intelligence that's uh weirdly human. Like for example, when a crow dies, its group will actually come together and sort of investigate what happened. Kind of like a corvid CSI or something. Looks like this case is for the birds. Yeah. And actually regarding octopuses, uh a recent plan that a guy had in the Canary Islands to build a farm for octopuses to raise them for food. Uh it's come under severe backlash lately because, you know, they're kind of known as such intelligent creatures now. It sort of feels wrong because in our minds as humans, we regard intelligence as a virtue. Maybe the highest of all virtues. We rank an animals importance by how smart they are, how much they're, you know, like us. It's a little narcissistic when you think about it because when it comes down to it, intelligence is just an evolutionary adaptation just like all animal traits. You know, you wouldn't look down on one bird because it's a different color than another bird. But when it comes to intelligence, we do exactly that. So for some animals, the environments that they evolved in, the predators that hunted them, or the prey that they hunted meant that nature selected for intelligence, and they got smarter. But for some other animals, the opposite is true. Intelligence played little to no part in their survival. In fact, for some, a bigger, more energyintensive brain would just take resources away from other parts of the body that really needed it. So, let's flip the script in this video. So instead of showering the A students with all the glory, let's give some love to the underachievers. It feels safe to say. So first of all, we kind of need to establish what exactly we mean when we say an animal has uh intelligence or that an animal is dumb for that matter. I mean, we're looking at this through human eyes. After all, it's not necessarily brain size. I mean, a wasp has a brain about the size of the ball and a ballpoint pen, but it's still smart enough to chase me around the yard. It cut off roots to my back door, leaving me stranded in the yard for hours. Hate wasps. Oh, and look at the jellyfish. They don't have a brain at all. I mean, does smart and dumb even apply to them? Now, you could apply the word dumb to mean animals with weird or useless body parts, like the T-Rex and its stupid little arms, but there's a lot of cases of weird anatomy that aren't necessarily dumb. I mean, great gray owls are born with claw-like structures at the rest of their wings that have no use whatsoever, or hell, the human appendix for that matter. Some animals might be considered dumb because they can only survive in a very specific environment. Congratulations, dummy. You're the apex predator in a tiny cave. And sadly, many of these animals are dying out because that one very specific niche that they've filled is now changing because of human encroachment or changing climate or whatever. And they've evolved so specifically that they can't figure out how to continue their species when it changes. sad, but still dumb. The point is, there's a lot of different metrics we can use to define what a dumb animal is. So, the ones on this list, to be fair, are not really apples to apples comparisons. Regardless, these keep making list after list for being the dumbest of the dumb. So, here we go. Let's start with cockapose, which I'm pretty sure I'm saying wrong. Ironic in a video about dumb animals. These are nocturnal flightless parrots found in New Zealand, and they're adorable. They're actually like super really cute, but the thing is they evolved in a place with no predators and plenty of food. So, they didn't really develop any kind of defensive strategies. So, if you were to walk up and say scare a cocka, it would just kind of sit there, just freeze, stand completely still, or it might climb up a tree and jump out, which is a problem because it can't fly, so it just kind of falls to the ground. They rarely mate, and the males are known to go around and just basically hump anything that moves when it can't attract a female. They were abundant in New Zealand before the humans arrived, but the numbers decreased over time because the animals that the humans brought with them were able to catch the birds really easily because they just kind of stood there and froze. And by animals, I mean cats. I'm talking about cats. Conservation efforts began in 1894, which has helped keep them around. But there's really only about 294 cockapo alive today. Now, I should say that some places that I looked for information on this say that they're actually fairly intelligent. They are parrots, and parrots in general are intelligent. Apparently, they all have very distinct personalities, which kind of is a sign of intelligence, but they kept coming up on all these list of dumbest animals that we found, so we included it here. Next up is sloths. Cockapos aren't the only animals that can hold themselves completely still? That's also kind of the sloth thing. Are they cute? Yes. Does Kristen Bell have an unhealthy fascination with them? Yes. Are they dumb? Very. Sloths are found in tropical

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

rainforests where they spend about 8 to 10 hours a day sleeping in trees. And about once every eight days, they make their way to the ground to defecate. And when it crawls back up the tree, they can often fall to the ground and die. And the whole thing about sloths moving slowly is no joke. They move with top speeds of 1. 8 to 2. 4 m per minute. Just uh for reference, that's four times slower than a tortoise. You know how you're always winding up behind some 90-year-old going 20 mph on the interstate? That's a sloth. They are so slow and lazy that one of the seven deadly sins is named after them. That's a good movie for the kids. All sloths go to hell. They move so slowly, in fact, that algae and fungus collects in their fur. But this is actually a good thing. It's actually helpful to them because their main predator is the harpy eagle, which no sloth could ever outrun. So, its algae kind of camouflages them and their stillness makes them kind of blend in with the trees, which is kind of smart. They're so dumb they're smart. Speaking of lazy animals, let's talk about pandas. Like pandas kind of became the symbol of the conservation movement because they're endangered and they're cute, but they're kind of a terrible symbol because they're so dumb. Pandas are the worst. There, I said it. This is the part that's going to piss everybody off, but I don't care. Can we please be done with these ridiculous animals? First of all, I don't think they even want to exist. Have you ever noticed it's like global news? Every time a panda cub is born, that's how little interest they have in continuing as a species. Pandas adapted to just kind of barely get by in one very unique place in the world. And then when that place changed, they were basically just like, I guess I'll die. I mean, let's be honest, the only reason they're still around is cuz they're cute. If they weren't cute, we would have let them go years ago. Need more convincing? Okay, they're not smart enough to keep their own kids alive. Seriously, it's very common when pandas have twins that they'll basically just pick one of them and let the other one die. That's a known thing they do. And the one they keep, they're prone to either sitting on it or rolling over on it or just forgetting they have a kid and letting it starve. That's why whenever a new cub is born in captivity, the caretakers take it away immediately because it's actually less safe with the mother than anywhere else. Oh, and they eat bamboo. I'm sorry, I said that wrong. They only eat bamboo. And you know what? As carnivores, they're not designed to eat bamboo. As Jacob Lince, co-author of the book The Animal Review, says, quote, "They're not supposed to eat bamboo. Their bodies are not adapted to digest cellulose, but they hang in there with the bamboo. But the result of that is that they have to eat a ton of bamboo, and they don't have a lot of energy to do things like, you know, mate. " That could be nature kind of hinting around the fact that they should collectively shuffle off this mortal coil. Thank you. Do you have any idea the extreme efforts that zookeepers and conservationists have to go through to get these animals to perform the simple act of mating? I mean, we could be on Mars right now if we weren't spending so much time just trying to get these two bears to each other. They're not that cute. Moving on. Turkeys. Everybody loves turkeys, especially around Thanksgiving. They are delicious, but they are not smart. So, so get this. This is one of the dumb things that it does. If it's raining, they'll stare up at the sky with their mouth open until they drown. Okay, the drowning thing is a little bit more of a myth, but the reason that they stare up at the rain is because of this inherited genetic condition that's called a titanic tortoicolor spasm, but they are still stupid. Like, like male turkeys have been known to basically hook up with headless female turkeys. So, they're the opposite of pandas, basically. But maybe the dumb turkeys are our fault when it comes down to it. As Lince wrote in the Animal Review blog, quote, "In short, the turkey has gotten a bum wrap. Most of it due to people's decisions to domesticate a great number of them. These soft, sad birds are like obese teenagers who look lazy, shiftless, and weak. But the truth is that the fault lies with us. We gave them too many calories and stopped expecting them to toughen up or exercise and then mock the result when we really are just angry with ourselves. Another bird that's considered to be five beers short of a six-pack is the ostrich. Ostriches are giant birds. If you've never been around one, they're just in insane freaking dinosaurs. They can grow up to be 2. 7 m tall. That's 9 ft tall, weigh up to 136 kg, and achieve a sustained speed of 65 km/h. That's 533 times faster than a sloth. Those slender legs that help it run fast are also weapons. A powerful kit from an ostrich can knock down huge attackers like lions. Not to mention that giant, huge velociaptor claw at the end of their feet. And yet, despite being one of the fastest animals in the world, despite having that, their main defensive move when they get attacked is to uh just lay down. So, it's actually a misconception that ostriches bury their head in the sand, but they do put their heads on the ground and close their eyes. And it's thought that they do that because they think it makes them invisible. Yes, that invisible 9- foot tall bird. If that theory is true, I guess they basically never develop object permanence, which is something that human babies do at about 8 months. I guess they think that if they can't

### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00]

see anything, then nobody can see them. I don't know. That's It's pretty dumb. Makes me think of the guy in Mystery Men who could turn invisible, but only when nobody was looking at him. — Maybe you should put some shorts on or something if you want to keep fighting evil today. — Next, let's talk about lemmings. Another animal that has a dumb fighting tactic is the Norwegian lemming. Or maybe they're just overconfident. Lemmings are known to attack other animals and are much bigger than them. And their only weapon is their teeth, making for very close combat, which is not good when you're a tiny little rodent. Now, you may think that they're stupid because they commit mass suicide by jumping off of cliffs. That is actually a myth that was perpetuated by Disney. Yes, you heard that right. Uh Disney is responsible for the death of hundreds of lemmings. In a 1958 documentary titled White Wilderness, the filmmakers captured dozens of lemmings and they used Disney magic to make it seem like many more and then they chased them off a cliff. Now, it's true that limmings sometimes fall off of cliffs and drown during their migration season, but not altogether. Like what they did was a complete fabrication. But like many myths that were created by Disney back in the heyday, uh yeah, it stuck around, but it's not true. So that's a dumb myth. Busted. All right. So, all of these animals are stupid in their own ways. Um, especially compared to the superb human intellect, but one can only stand in awe at the king of dumb in the animal kingdom. It's the koala. Look, the koala is cute. That's nice, you know, but it literally has the lowest brain to body mass ratio of any mammal in the world. And this is actually a survival tactic because much like the pandas, their diet consists of one thing. One item. one item with very low caloric value. In their case, it's eucalyptus leaves. The Australian mimologist Tim Flannry had this to say about their brain. Quote, "Its hemispheres sit like a pair of shriveled walnut halves on top of their brain stem and contact neither with each other nor the bones of the skull. " Here's another thing about their brains. There's not a wrinkle in sight. Okay? So, most of the processing that's done in the brain is actually done on the surface. And that's why ours have all those wrinkles and folds in it. It kind of provides more surface area. That's why calling somebody a smooth brain is an insult. Koala brains are literally smooth. They're so dumb that they only recognize these eucalyptus leaves when they're on the trees. So if you pluck them off the tree and offer it to them, they won't eat it. Even if they saw you pick it off the tree. And since eucalyptus is so low energy, it's all about energy conservation with these guys. To that end, they sleep 18 to 20 hours a day. That's most of the day. Actually, another thing about eucalyptus, it's not just low calorie, it's also toxic. So, they have to spend a lot of extra amount of energy just digesting their food. They move slowly and they haven't adapted very well to cars or highways. And they seem to not know what rain is. Like, a lot of animals will find some kind of shelter when it starts to rain, but not the koala. It just sits there in the rain. They also don't seem to care about fire or maybe even know what it is. They've been known to be found sitting at the bottom of trees when bush fires approach, which is actually kind of sad when you think about those Australian wildfires a few years ago. Anyway, sympathy over. They're also kind of They fight constantly, especially over territory. And each koala kind of insists on having a whole tree to themselves. Although because of their low energy levels, their fighting is basically just whining and grappling. And get this, almost half of Australia's koalas have chlamydia. It is a different strain from the kind of chlamydia that humans know, but a koala can transmit it to you if it urinates on you, which is a good reason not to walk under a tree with a koala in it. All right, now that I've picked on a bunch of cute, defenseless animals, let's go back to my premise at the beginning of this video, which was all these animals are perfectly adapted for where they evolved. Their dumbness isn't a bug, it's a feature. Besides, who are we to judge? I mean, look at what we're doing and the problems we've caused. I mean, it makes me think of that joke about the aliens discovering that, you know, we've developed nuclear weapons and one alien asks the other one if they should be scared and the other alien says, "No, they're pointing at it themselves. " So, yeah, intelligence is relative. All right, that's it for today. Thank you guys for watching and go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week, and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care. as sort of an update on that last video. Um, there is a new species that's been discovered that's considered one of the dumbest in the world. It's only a decade or so old, but it's a species that seems to enjoy making itself miserable, and it's called doomscricus unlinus. It seems to have a pathological need to subject itself to stressors, to always be in fight or flight mode. You know, it's like an itch they just can't scratch. Luckily, researchers who have been studying Dion Linus have found a way to hack this behavior to teach it new skills and ideas. Basically, help it to get smarter. And they named this breakthrough brilliant. org. If you or someone you know is a doomscus on Linus, there is hope for you. Because Brilliant is a learning platform that just works

### Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00) [40:00]

differently from other apps and websites because it doesn't just give you information, it trains your brain to think and perform better while giving you information. Humans are natural problem solvers. It's our superpower. It's how we rose above all the animals we're talking about in this video. We are hardwired to solve problems. So, what Brilliant does is it kind of hacks that problem solving superpower to teach math and science concepts, computer coding and engineering to just give you a better understanding of your world. And the cool thing about it is that you actually retain the information uh better than you normally would because you learned it in a way that makes sense to you. So, it's the beginning of the year. You may be trying to create some new habits. One of my new habits that I'm trying to do is just spend a few minutes a day on Brilliant. That's what I'm doing. I invite you to join me and it's super easy to start right now because they're offering a 30-day free trial if you sign up at my link down below or scan the QR code on screen. And I would recommend you take advantage of this because they don't always offer the 30-day free thing. Anyway, Brilliant's great. Don't be a D on Linus. Get smarter in just a few minutes a day. Links down below. Whales are huge. Incredibly huge animals. Easily the biggest animals alive today. The blue whale possibly the biggest animal that has ever lived. Bigger than any dinosaur. This is easy to understand in the abstract, but actually to stand next to one of these animals is a really humbling experience. So, imagine you're walking along a beach and you see a dead whale that has washed up onto the beach. And as you get closer, it just keeps getting bigger and you're just in awe at the size of this thing. You've never seen anything like it before. Like, it's almost impossible to believe this is an actual living creature. It's dead and it stinks, but you're just drawn to it like a moth to a flame. You just got to get closer to this amazing creature. And then you get out your phone to take a picture and put it up on Instagram. And then, okay, it might not explode that bad, but there is kind of a thing about dead whales exploding. It happens a lot, actually, and it's just as bad as it sounds. Now might be a good time for those out there who might be a little bit more squeamish about this kind of thing to let you know that this is going to be a video about dead exploding whales. So uh you've been warned. So why whales and not other animals? Do they naturally produce nitroglycerin? Do they live in a Michael Bay world? Actually the same process that causes this in whales takes place in all dead animals. When animals die, including us, bacteria in our guts start to sort of decompose our tasty inards. And when they do so, they produce gas. The gas specifically is methane. And it builds up inside the body and it causes the belly to kind of swell a little bit, which is why sometimes when you see a dead animal on the side of the road, it looks all because it's bloated and swollen. Now, for most animals, this process doesn't produce enough gas to actually cause it to explode just because they're smaller animals, but also because they're um their holes are looser. And here I thought this couldn't get any grosser. Land animals don't have to worry about keeping water out of their orififices at all times. Whales do. And many whale species dive to incredible depths and there's incredible pressures down there. So they have to have, you know, pretty tight holes. But also, these whales are really heavy. So when they're beed and they're in a place where they're not really supported by water the way their bodies are meant to be supported, that pressure against the ground causes their orififices to kind of seal shut. Plus, whales have thick layers of blubber underneath their skin. So, even if it does start to get eaten away by scavengers, it takes a lot to get down underneath that skin to where the gas is built up. Long story short, you've got a gigantic animal that builds up a lot of pressure in there with really thick skin and really tight orififices. It's just the perfect opportunity to get all explody. So, when a whale dies, its body becomes food for hundreds of animals in the sea. And in fact, the carcass can sink down to the bottom of the ocean and create its own little ecosystem down there for the bottom dwellers. But maybe because they have air left in their lungs or because the decomposition process has already built up some gas inside of them, some whale carcasses float up to the top of the ocean and then ocean currents can just lead them onto a beach somewhere. Now, there's also the phenomenon of live males beaching themselves, sometimes in mass. We don't really know why this happens. One theory is that uh one whale might get beached or become distressed and they'll send out a signal and then a bunch of other whales will come to try to help them and then they wind up getting beached too. Now smaller whales aren't that big a deal. Scavengers can usually break them down pretty quickly and if they need to be taken back out into the ocean. It's not that big of a job. But larger whales like sperm whales can weigh up to 100,000 lbs and this can become a logistical nightmare. Often the solution is to just cut them into pieces. This might be your last resort. But as you can see from this video from the Pharaoh Islands in 2013, a little cuddy can lead to a little explody explody. The thing that sticks out to me about this video every time I see it is the steam coming out of this whale. That's

### Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00) [45:00]

that's so gross and insane. Now, the marine biologist in this video later told reporters that he did expect that this could happen, which might explain his fashionable attire. But where was this guy in 2004 when a 50-tonon sperm whale washed up on a beach outside of Tynan in Taiwan? Because they had a different idea of what to do with it. They decided they wanted to move it to the Shiho Natural Preserve in order to study it and maybe even preserve the body for educational purposes. So, they hauled it onto a trailer, which by the way took three cranes to lift this thing, and sent it on its way. The problem is on its way to the preserve meant passing through the middle of town. So they were slowly driving this whale through the town and of course hundreds of towns people came out to see this thing. There were even like vendors selling snacks and hot food to the people that were gathering to watch this. As somebody who comes from a small town myself, I can imagine the kind of crowd that would turn out to see a 50-tonon whale being rolled through the street. But you can probably see where this is going. Unfortunately, they couldn't. Yeah, the whale exploded uh right in the middle of town. It showered on lookers and storefronts and cars in blood and guts. It was disgusting. It made international news. Luckily, there was not a video of it that I could show you, but the pictures kind of tell the whole story. But none of these stories come close to the exploding whale in Oregon in 1970. This is actually one of the most watched videos in internet history, literally. But in case you've been living in the carcass of a dead whale at the bottom of the ocean, in 1970, a giant sperm whale washed up on the beach outside of Florence, Oregon. It was way too heavy to move. They didn't know what to do with it. So, the state highway division decided to get rid of it in the most American way possible. Blow it up. So, this wheel didn't explode on its own, but man, did it explode. The idea was that uh they were going to put so much dynamite underneath this whale that it would blow it up into tiny pieces that could then be picked away by scavengers and the birds that were already gathering around it. It's not the worst idea, but it just went so incredibly wrong. Even though they made a point to put all the explosive on the land side of the whale, hoping it would blow it into the ocean, massive chunks of blubber and whale guts just showered the crowd of onlookers that had formed to watch the explosion, even though the police had kept them a quarter mile away. A coffee table- sized chunk of whale actually caved in a car. And the whole plan that the scavengers and seagulls would take care of the bits of the whale didn't work for two reasons. One, the blast scared them all away. And two, most of the whale was still there. It didn't even budge. So, the road crews had to haul it away anyway. They had to do all the things they were trying to avoid by blowing it up. It was just such a wy coyote Dukes of Hazard solution to this thing. It just immediately became an internet classic. So, all right. Let's say you're walking along and you come across a giant dead whale. What do you do about that? Well, if you're like me and you live in Dallas, you freak out because what? But if you are in a beach and it makes sense for a whale to be there, uh the first thing you want to do is not get too close to it or for the love of God, don't climb on it. Not only is there the potential that the whale might explode, according to Jack Lawson at the Canadian Fisheries Department, there's also the possibility that you might fall inside the whale and get stuck. According to an article in the Atlantic, he said, "The skin is starting to lose its integrity, and if someone were to walk along, say, its chin that is all full of that gas, they could fall into the whale. The insides will be liquefied, and retrieving them would be very difficult. " He went on to say, "I've fallen into the side of a whale up to my chest. It's not very nice. " Yeah, understatement of the year, dude. Now, if you're in the United States, the next thing that you want to do is call the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because according to law, stranded mammals on a beach is kind of their responsibility. Noah has offices all along the coast. They'll probably send a marine biologist out there to take some samples and to study the whale because a dead whale carcass is kind of a gold mine to those guys. They study whales all the time, but most of the time the whales are out in the ocean and they're just kind of hard to get to. Now, after that, if the whale is stranded on a remote beach, far from any towns or homes or anything like that, they'll probably just leave it there for scavengers to pick it apart. Just like whale carcasses can feed thousands of animals in the sea, same is true on the land. It might take months, but eventually nature's going to do what nature do. But if that whale is near where people live and it's literally coating every square inch of everything with oily whale stench, well, there's a few things you can try. One option is to bury the whale, which presents its own set of challenges because you literally have to dig like two stories down into the beach to make sure it stays there. Another option is to drag it back out to sea, which might not be an option for larger whales or for whales that have already decomposed too much. Besides, the ocean currents can always wash it right back up onto the beach. And last, but horrifyingly not least, the option is to butcher the whale into smaller pieces and haul it away to the landfill piece by rotting dry heaving piece. So, next time you're walking along a beach and see one of nature's most majestic creatures laying there before you, the

### Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00) [50:00]

best option really is to just keep walking. Unless you want that majesty all over your face. I know some of you are thinking dirty thoughts with that last one. Stop. All right, that's it for now. Thanks again for watching. You guys go out now. Have an eye opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday. Love you guys. Take care. Hey there kiddos. Gather around and let me tell you the story of Old Rip. Old Rip was a horny toad or as my lawyers have informed me to call it, a horned frog. Horn frogs are these flat little lizards you find around here and all these parts. They got spikes all over them and horns on their heads. They're ornies as all get out, but they're cute. Kids love to catch them and try to keep them as pets. Hell, Texans love them so much we named them the state lizard. Well, in 1897 in Eastland, Texas, they was building them a new courthouse and they thought it might be a good idea to put a time capsule in the wall so the people from the future could learn something about it. So, a fellow named Ernest Wood gathered up some documents and a newspaper and a Bible. And last but not least, a live horn frog. And he sealed that up in a time capsule and they put that Wait, hold on a second. Wait. A live horn frog. They put a live animal in a time capsule. What the frog? So yeah, they sealed a live horny toad in a time capsule and they bricked it into the keystone of this courthouse. And I don't know how long they were supposed to leave it there, what time open it up, but about 30 years later, they were doing some construction on the courthouse. They were putting an addition on there and yeah, they had to take the time capsule out. So they opened the box and what they found inside was, you know, some documents and a newspaper and a Bible and of course a dead horn frog. Or so they thought. Yet in a matter of seconds after opening the box, the horn frog's legs started to kick and it just woke up and went about trying to find some ants to eat. This horn frog was named Old Rip after Rip Van Winkle and it immediately became famous. It was adopted as a town hero. It actually went through a legal custody dispute for a while. It actually got to meet President Culage. And then after all the hubbhub old Rip lived for another year before he passed away and yeah, they put him on display at the Eastland Courthouse. You can go there right now and see it yourself. So, growing up here in Texas, I knew all about old rip. I actually have some family that live out near Eastland. It's definitely a big part of like local Texas lore and everything, but I was always fascinated with it growing up. The idea that, you know, a frog could just sleep for 30 years. As I got older, I became more skeptical. Obviously, I've become more skeptical about most things. But, uh, as it turns out, ORIP is not alone. There's actually a lot of stories out there about frogs and lizards that have been found in rocks. It's happened so much that the phenomenon actually has a name, entombmed animals. So, have you ever been up late at night and some random memory from your childhood popped into your brain and then you got on the internet, started searching around and you just fall down a rabbit hole of crazy? That's how this video got started. No, I was procrastinating getting some work done one day and yeah, the memory of old Rip popped into my head and I was like, "What was that all about? " So, I get on the internet and I start looking around and I just find story after story that are just like this. And yeah, I here we are. And yeah, I know you're skeptical about this. I know it already, but let me just go down the list here. In 1719, the French Academy of Sciences had a report of a thick tree that when felled contained a quote, a live toad, middlesized but lean and filling up the entire vacant space. In 1733 in one Lingabo, Sweden, two quarry workers reported that they split a block of sandstone and inside the boulder, they found a frog covered with a yellow membrane. The rock was from the Carian Hamra Formation and believed to be 410 million years old. In 1770, a live toad was found in the wall of a castle that was being demolished. In 1818, a minologist named Ed Clark claimed that he found three salamanders in an old rock. In 1821, a stonemason named David Virture claimed to find a lizard in a solid block of limestone and that it took some time to revive, but it eventually did come back to life. In 1825, a professor named William Buckland decided to actually test this phenomenon. So, he sealed up 24 toads in a block of limestone and 24 in sandstone and buried them for a year. Frog genocide for science. So yeah, when he dug them up, he found that some of them had survived, but he had also found some cracks in the blocks that, you know, um, something might have gotten in there, air, water, maybe. Anyway, he sealed them all up and they all died. In 1856, two London rail workers were digging a new tunnel and claimed that they found a boulder and open it up and a pterodactyl flew out, but immediately died and turned to dust. That one may have been a lie. In the early 1900s in Devonshire, England, a gas fitter named Eric G. Mley claimed to find 23 frogs encased in the concrete walls of a home, saying, quote, "The meter houses were brickwalled, but rather massively concrete floored, and the concrete had to be broken up to allow me to get to the pipes for the extension. " My mate was at work with a sledgehammer when he dropped it and suddenly said, "That looks like a frog's

### Segment 12 (55:00 - 60:00) [55:00]

leg. " We both bent down, and there was the frog. The sledge was set aside, and I cut the rest of the block carefully. We released 23 perfectly formed, but minute frogs, which all hopped away into the flower garden. In 1943, a British soldier stationed in Algeria was crying stone for a road construction, and he found both a toad and a lizard living inside a rock that had been dug out from 20 feet below the ground. Even Benjamin Franklin claimed to have studied a pair of frogs that had been cut out of a limestone boulder in Paris in 1782. Now, let's get real for a second. Yes, a lot of these could have been mistaken. It's very possible that there was a crevice in the rock or the boulder that the, you know, the frog or the lizard had gotten into and then when it cracked open it looked like they were in the middle of the thing. That's possible. It's also possible they were just, you know, around the rocks and trees and then when they split open it just kind of looked like they were in there. And this does kind of have the makings of a fad. It seemed to be something that was reported a lot back then. You know, fads are nothing new. We didn't create those. And like the pterodactyl story, some of them were probably just made up. But maybe some of them are true. I mean, after all, the animal kingdom has adopted some amazing survival abilities over the years. So, for example, one way to survive your environment is just to get out of that environment by hibernating. So, we're all familiar with the idea of hibernation. Uh you're probably thinking of bears that stuff themselves in the fall and then find a cave in the winter and just sleep it off the whole thing. But, of course, it's more complicated than that. So, yeah, hibernation is a term for an animal that lives off of its fat stores throughout the winter. Um, the bear thing, for example. But there's another form of hibernation that's more specific to animals in dry environments called estavation. And this is where they actually slow their metabolic rate down to near death in order to survive. This is kind of nuts actually because it's like a gray area between life and death. Like the metabolism slows down so much that it's technically not alive, but it's not quite dead either. It's like, you know, nature hits the pause button on it. One animal that's the champion of this is the wood frog. There's nothing that special about the wood frog for most of the year, but as winter starts to approach, it does something interesting. It stops peeing. Yeah, it just lets the pee build up inside of itself. And at the same time, the liver starts creating large amounts of glycogen, which gets converted into glucose. And so the pee and the glucose gets mixed up in its blood and creates sort of an anifreeze. And this makes it so that the frog can have 65% of its body freeze completely solid and survive. It doesn't breathe. It has zero synaptic brain activity. It's in a state known as cryptobiosis. And then in the spring, it thaws out, starts hopping around just like nothing ever happened. Now, theoretically, if it stayed in that unthawed state, it could probably stay that way for years, decades, even. And by the way, it's not just lizards and cold-blooded creatures. The Arctic ground squirrel can actually lower its body temperature to -3° C and it can stay in that state for up to 8 months of the year. It slows its heart rate down to just like a couple beats a minute. It's one of the most extreme hibernators in the world. I mean, even humans can survive freezing to a surprising level. In 2015, a kid named John Smith, apparently that's his actual name, survived being underwater and frozen for 15 minutes. And his breathing had stopped for over an hour before they finally brought him back to life. And he survived just fine. And there are other animals that develop protections against the cold like Greenland shark and the anarctic toothfish that both have antifreeze in their blood in the form of ammonia and glyoproteins. Crocodiles have protection against both the heat and the cold. If it gets too hot, they can go into an estavation state where they can go 3 to four years without food. And if it gets too cold, they can do a woodf frog thing and just allow themselves to freeze with their snouts above the frozen water so they can breathe. And then there's the lungfish, which as the name implies has evolved lungs so they can breathe outside the water. They can write out droughts by burrowing into the ground and making a little nest there. It coats itself in mucus that kind of dries into a leathery bag of sorts and then just waits it out. Its bodily functions come to a virtual standstill and it feeds off of its own muscle, basically consuming itself in very slow motion. And it can do this for up to 5 years and when the rains come back, they reanimate, go on with their lives like nothing ever happened. But of course, if you want to get into some real extrema files, you got to go a lot smaller. And one of the most notable ones is one that was actually kind of a popular pet for a long time. Remember sea monkeys? Because I'm just ancient enough to remember it. Sea monkeys were a popular toy/ educational tool that were around and sold through comic books in the 60s and 70s. And yeah, it was this toy where like the kids would buy these kits and they would pour water into it and add these like magic crystals and then boom, out of nowhere would be these little swimming things. Of course, they were not monkeys of any kind. And they were actually a type of brine fish. They had been sort of genetically altered through selective breeding. So they could only survive in this particular solution that they sold along with it. The whole story is kind of crazy, but brine shrimp are crazy uh in and of themselves because they also have a very extreme form of cryptobiosis. Yeah. When they dry out, they enter this form of suspended animation and basically can stay that way indefinitely until they're rehydrated and then they reanimate

### Segment 13 (60:00 - 65:00) [1:00:00]

again. And this is basically how they became a thing, their ability to kind of dry themselves out and survive that way long enough so they could ship these sea monkey kits all around the world. And it was also kind of almost like a magic trick for kids. You know, you pour it in there and then just like watch these things come to life. But they're fascinating creatures and they're really tough. They actually did experiments on them in two Apollo missions. So brain shrimp are cool, but it's in the microscopic world where you find the real extreme survivors. Enter the peranium bacteria. Now, we started this whole journey talking about things being found alive in rocks. This one takes the cake. The Perian bacteria were found in a cavern near Carlsbad, New Mexico. And they were found deposited on some salt crystals that were embedded in a rock. And now the reason why they're called the Perian bacteria is because that particular rock dated back to the Perian era. And if you don't have a geological calendar in front of you, the Perian era was 250 million years ago. And they came back to life. Now, it does need to be said that this is hotly disputed just like some of those toad stories. Some people say it might be possible that there was a tiny fissure in the rock that allowed that bacteria to get in there. So, it's actually from a more modern origin, all that stuff. But there was a study in 2006 that um analyzed the DNA and the fatty acids in this bacteria and determined that it is different enough from modern bacteria that it seems to be legit. Other studies have suggested that it's not different enough from modern bacteria to actually be that old. So, the debate continues. Science going to science. But last but not least, you can't talk about amazing animal survivors without talking about the Superman of the microbiological world. Tardigrades. Yeah, some of you knew this was coming. I know. Yeah, there's a ton of videos that have been done on tardigrades. I'll link to some of them down in the description if you want to check them out. But let's just go down some of the crazier facts about tardigrades, shall we? They can live up to 10 years without food. They can remove all water from their bodies and survive. Their metabolism can drop to 01% of normal. They can survive the vacuum of space and the radiation of space. They can survive radiation in general by swapping out their water with sugar to prevent ionization. They can survive temperatures as high as 7° C. That's 158° F. And when they enter cryptobiosis, they enter a state called a ton. And this makes them virtually indestructible. Pretty much if whatever is keeping them alive begins to cease, they have a way around it. Tardigrades are so hearty and impossible to kill that some people have actually speculated that they came here on a meteorite that they're actually like an alien species, panspermia, if you will. Now, that's not true. They have sequenced the genome of the tardigrade and have been able to determine that they are similar enough to animals from planet Earth that they didn't come from somewhere else. But they might be the first Earth creature to colonize other worlds. The beer sheet lander that crashed on the moon in 2017 had some sample tardigrades on it to do some experiments on the moon. So there are tardigrades on the moon right now and they're probably doing fine. We do know that they can survive the vacuum and radiation of space because did an experiment back in 2007 with some tardigrades where they were totally exposed to space and cosmic rays and everything and uh yeah it did nothing. If you've heard of the breakthrough star shot program, the idea of actually putting little tiny light sails that can ride a beam of laser light to a nearby star. There are plans and talks of actually putting tardigrades on one just because I guess so. Yeah, frogs and rocks. Yay or nay? What do you think? Was old rip just an old fraud? Now, I didn't mention this before, but when they actually found Old Rip in the time capsule, it wasn't just some guy that got it out and went around telling everybody that he found this frog. It was actually part of a little event. They made a little event out of opening up this time capsule. So, when they pulled this frog out, it came to life in front of many people. So, on one hand, that kind of makes you think maybe it was real. But then you might also say, who knows? They could have switched it out beforehand and it was all just a big publicity stunt. And if that's the case, well, it worked. But still, it's a fun piece of Texas lore and uh, you know, a good jumping off point to looking at the way nature has come up with survival abilities over the last billion years or so. And who knows, maybe there's something we can learn from these species that we can use in some medical advances, ways to boost our own survival, possibly. All right, that's it for now. You guys go out there, have an eye opening week, stay safe, and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care. So, the story of old RIP I just talked about in that video. Um, I've known about that since I was a kid cuz I grew up in North Central Texas. We drove through Eastland to go to my grandma's house all the time. So, I grew up with the story of Old Rip. That whole idea of entombed animals always, you know, fascinated me. That's why I did a video on it. And that's why I included it in the book of mysteries, which I released a few months back. Like, I've always said that we took the most popular mystery topics from the channel and put it in this book. That is true. But there are also some random subjects like this one that I insisted go in there because when I was growing up, I love those old like time life mysteries, the unknown books that my aunt kept at her house. Uh I've even got one back here. Yeah. Right there. And it had all the fun stuff in it like spontaneous human combustion, UFOs, ball lightning

### Segment 14 (65:00 - 70:00) [1:05:00]

you name it. I ate all that stuff up. Like I really do think that you could probably um draw a parallel like a straight line between those books and what I do now cuz they just sparked a curiosity in me. I wanted to know more about the world. I wanted to find the answers to these mysteries, you know. So, I covered a lot of those topics over the years and now it's all kind of coming full circle. I've got my own book about it. So, if you've bought one, thank you. Please tell me what you think in the comments. And if you haven't, I invite you to check it out. I hope that it could, you know, spark the same curiosity in you that I had when I was growing up. You can just scan the code here on screen or I'll link it down in the description. Now, let's keep the mystery vibe going with some cryptids and aliens. So, in Monday's video, I kind of started off with a weird rant about air pressure and sci-fi movies and how they never really account for air pressure because they just land on planets and the air pressure is always just fine. And it look it was weird and random. And I just wanted to take a moment before I started this video to u totally double down on that because, you know, something else that I always see in sci-fi movies that drives me nuts is that alien species always look just like us. Okay, maybe not just like us, but you know, built in the same way. Bilateral symmetry, two arms, two legs, a face with a bunch of holes in it. I mean, think about how many different combinations you could make just out of those parameters. I mean, who says that the arms have to be at the top of the body? Who says that the mouth has to be below the eyes? I mean, just look at the variety of life that sprung up on this one planet, all the different form factors that came up with the specific conditions that we have here. And then you think you're going to travel the galaxy and see planets with different gravities, different temperatures, different radiation levels, different atmospheric compositions, and the only thing that's going to be different about them is they're going to have pointy ears or wrinkled foreheads. And you really think if they visit here that the only thing that's going to be different about them is that they're going to be bald and short and still never figured out clothes. If or when we ever discover intelligent alien life, it's going to look and sound so different from us, we're not even going to know what we're looking at. That's why the movie Arrival is so great. Like that's what it would be like. Just to understand them would be a herculean effort. And look, I get why sci-fi movies and TV shows do it like that. You want to be able to empathize with the aliens and identify with them. You want them to be able to express themselves in ways that we can understand. And the best way to do that is to have them look at least a little bit like us. And you know, shows like Star Trek are just thinly veiled examinations of our own society anyway. And not to mention, just budget-wise, it's a lot cheaper to just put some prosthetic makeup on an actor instead of rigging up some monstrous thing. I get it. That's just one of the many reasons that I love the movie Galaxy Quest, you know, because they were able to have it both ways. They have these thermians that they look just like us, but then it's actually revealed that they're actually weird tentacled, slimy creatures, but they disguise themselves to look like us so they wouldn't scare us. Smort. But then, how do they not understand the concept of lying when they literally are lying about what they look like? The point is, nothing screams alien and not of this earth more than tentacles. And yet, there's an entire class of animals right here on this planet that have exactly that morphology. very intelligent animals, no less that seem to have evolved completely differently from all the other animals on the planet. So much so that some people believe they could actually be aliens from Earth. From the dawn of time is a super lame way to start talking about something. That's actually one of the ways that I know that somebody's an amateur is when they start a video or an essay or a presentation with from the dawn of time. It's just something that only newbies do and they all do it and ain't no judging. I've done it. You know, you've done it. But to talk about sephopods, you really do kind of have to go back all the way to the beginning. Maybe not the dawn of time, but definitely the dawn of life on this earth, which they call epigenesis. Miriam Webster defines epigenesis as the development of a plant or animal from an egg or spore through a series of processes in which unorganized cell masses differentiate into organs and organ systems. When it comes to evolution, organisms that are related to each other often share a lot of the same DNA because they come from a similar common ancestor. But an octopus or seephalopod is different because they actually have hundreds of genes that don't come from any other animals. How could this have happened? Could seeopods have actually evolved at a different time than all the other animals? Could they actually be from another planet? In 2015, some scientists suggested exactly that in a study that they published. In a press release, co-senior author Clifton Ragsdale said, "The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even though other mllisks in its apprehensible arms, the large brain, and its clever problem solving capabilities. The late British zoologologist Martin Wells said the octopus is an alien in this sense. " Then, our paper describes the first sequence genome from an alien. And of course, that was just the kind of clickbait material that many media outlets couldn't resist throwing on their headlines. And it didn't help when a paper published in 2018 suggested that some of the life on Earth may have been seeded from life that was brought to Earth by comets. Living organisms such as space resistant and space hearty bacteria, viruses, and more complex ukarotic cells, fertilized ova and seeds may have been continuously delivered to Earth and served as one important driver of further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind. Now, there's a lot of cracks in this theory, but before we get into that, let's just talk about

### Segment 15 (70:00 - 75:00) [1:10:00]

sephalopods for a minute and why they're considered so otherworldly to us. Seephalopods are some of the Earth's most ancient creatures. They first showed up in the fossil record 485 million years ago. And for contrast, dinosaurs only showed up 250 million years ago. The name seephopod means headfoot in Greek because it looks like a head on a foot. Greeks had weird feet. So, what makes a sephopod a sephalopod? Well, for one thing, they don't have any bones, like at all. So, there's that. The only hard structure on their bodies is their beak, which they use to crush up food. So, they can squeeze themselves into pretty much any space as wide as their beaks, which is how a giant Pacific octopus that spans more than 3 mters can squeeze through a hole as small as a quarter. Cuz they live in the ocean floor and withstand enormous pressures tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. They just don't need bones. Bones probably couldn't handle that pressure anyway. And if you ask people how many tentacles an octopus has, about 100% of them would say eight. I mean, it's right there in the name, octopus. But that would be wrong because technically octopuses don't have any tentacles. They have arms. Gotcha. Great. I'm one of those YouTubers. Now, what's the difference? Well, arms have suction cups the whole length of the limb. Tentacles only have suction cups at the end of the limb to grab prey. And octopuses generally don't have tentacles. They just have arms. Other sephopods do though. Seephopods also move by inflating their heads with water and then shooting it out with a jet to move forward. They're the only animals that move through propulsion with the exception of my dog Zoe when she farts. She just flies right off the bed. And if they don't sound alien enough yet, they actually have blue blood. Seriously. I mean, just make it acid and get it over with. Now, their blood uses copper to move oxygen around the same way our blood uses iron. And that copper in their blood kind of turns it a blue color. There are four types of sephalopods: octopus, squid, cuttlefish, and nautilus. While they all belong to the same film, mlesca, there are similarities and slight differences among them. The octopus has eight arms, no tentacles, and three hearts. And there are approximately 300 different types of octopus in the ocean. Squid have eight arms and two long tentacles. Like with the octopus, there are more than 300 types of them in the oceans around the world, and they use the tentacles to grab prey. Cuttlefish also have eight arms and two tentacles, and they have a very large brain compared to their body size. Anautilus can have up to 90 or more arms, but they have no suction cups on them. And there are six different types, and they can't retract into their external shells. Compared to octopuses, they don't have very good memories. By the way, the plural of octopus is octopuses and not octtopi, which means that I've been saying it wrong for a really, [snorts] really long time. Yeah. At one point the grammar police did change it to octopi, but then they realized that that's a Latin conjugation and octopus is a Greek word. So technically, if they wanted to keep it in the Greek style, it would be octopota. But by this point, they decided that octopus was an English word. So they just applied the English plural conjugation to it, which makes it octopuses. So that's something you know now. But speaking of ancient Greeks, Aristotle wrote about sephalopods all the way back in 330 AD. He was impressed by the way they could investigate their environments and learn from their mistakes in the past and change color. But yeah, let's talk about the color changing thing real quick because of all the weird things about sephalopods, this one takes the cake because they don't just use it to disguise themselves for both hunting and to avoid predators, but they also use it for communication. For example, the male Caribbean reef squid will change colors to attract mates. They'll turn red to attract females and they'll turn white to repel other males. And sometimes they can split themselves right down the middle so that the side facing the female will be red and the side facing a male will be white. The homebolt squid has been seen to change its color when around other squid to communicate to them. We just don't know what they're saying. But the cuttlefish beats them all because it actually uses its coloranging ability to hypnotize its prey, which is just straight up next level. But beyond that, they seem to actually have like a visual language that they communicate through their skin. Like imagine how efficient we would be if we could convey complex ideas without actually having to use words. We could just flash that idea at somebody through our skin. That's basically what they do. And they do this with chromataphores, color changing cells into the surface of the skin. Nerves and muscles expand or contract sacks underneath the skin to control how much color is visible. So imagine they have millions of cells like this covering their bodies. Only every cell has multiple colors of pigment inside of them like red, black, orange, brown, or yellow. By the way, I did run into an interesting demonstration as to how exactly these chromophores work using this. It's not as weird as it looks. So, all this is basically is a white balloon and inside of it I've got a little bit of blue pigment. So, basically the way chromophores work is when the skin is at regular strength, it's not being stretched or anything, it looks white. But then you stretch it, you get a little pop of blue. It's because the surface is now thinner and you can see through it and see the pigment underneath. So this is basically the way chromophores work is they flash it like

### Segment 16 (75:00 - 80:00) [1:15:00]

this except the difference is there's millions of them all over their bodies and each one of these can create multiple different colors. So yeah, you can imagine this works kind of the same way the pixels work in a TV where you have the red, blue, and green pixels and they light up according to where it needs to create the whole, you know, image on the screen. Except in an octopus, every single pixel can display multiple colors. And some sephalopods have added cells called aritaphores and lucapores. Iritaphores are reflecting plates of cells that create iridescent blues, silvers, greens, and golds. And lucapors are cells that reflect the colors of the environment around them. But that's not the only trick they've got up their eight sleeves. They can also change the texture of their skin using structures in the skin called peple. These radiate out from a central spot in a sort of a spiderweb pattern. And when they contract, they pull the skin up into little pointy spikes and even branching structures. So think about that for a second. Think about the jumble of nerves that are required to organize and manage millions of chromataphores, thousands of these paplet, not to mention just basic touch and movement, but also a sense of taste because they can taste with those suckers. Their arms and tentacles are packed with so many nerves that three-fifths of the neurons in an octopus's body are in its arms. So each arm is kind of like its own separate brain and works independently of each other while coordinated by the central brain. So octopuses don't just have a brain, they have a hierarchy of brains. And the end result of this weird structure is one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. There are countless stories of how they find novel ways of escaping enclosures and problem solving, using tools, recognizing faces, and even playing. Some have suggested that they should be considered conscious just like us, only they have a kind of intelligence that we can't even conceptualize. Which kind of brings me back to the central question of this video? Sephopods clearly had an intelligence evolution that was way different from any other animal on the planet. But the question is, how different? Could they actually be aliens from another planet? That 2018 study I mentioned before didn't actually suggest that seephalopods or any species on this planet are actually alien. It kind of suggested that viruses could have been carried on comets and landed here on Earth. And those viruses may have accelerated the mutation of genetic material and actually created the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion refers to the Cambrian era which began about 541 million years ago. Basically all life before this point was very simple, just colonies of cells. But in a period about 25 million years, it evolved into complex organisms that were the precursors to everything around us today. So that viruses on comets theory, which I have to say has been mostly panned by the scientific community, wouldn't account for sephalopods specifically. And even if it did, it wouldn't make them alien necessarily. But what if they were aliens from Earth? I talked at the beginning of this video about epigenesis, the idea that life was created by the random collision of organic molecules over time. life that eventually evolved into more complex organisms, including Luca. Luca being the last universal common ancestor, the organism that all the plants and animals on this planet can trace their lineage back to. This is how we understand that life began on this planet. But the planet is big and it's been around for a really long time. So, could life have started twice? Could see or any other animal for that matter be the product of a second epigenesis? There are many scientists that think this is not totally implausible that life might have started not just once or twice but several times throughout Earth's history. Now, this does require a more broad definition of life to include molecular machines that replicate themselves like DNA or more specifically RNA. According to Cambridge professor Philip Hollinger, biology has a memory. Chemistry does not. To me, the origin of life is really the origin of information. And in May of 2016, a team of biomolelecular chemists in Germany were able to recreate the building blocks of RNA using very basic lab stuff in the conditions in the early Earth. And they did it pretty easily. In other experiments from the University of Colorado and Boulder were able to replicate a strand of DNA by combining it in a slurry of RNA bases that formed a replica using the first one as a template. Now, we're still a long way from a living cell dividing and going on to form everything. But in the primordial soup of Earth over billions of years, the idea that this could happen more than once isn't too crazy. But the likelihood that one of those led to seeopods is actually impossible because we've looked at the DNA. And while yes, octopuses have hundreds of genes that you don't find in any other species on the planet, they have thousands of genes that they do share with other molllesks and flies and even us. Meaning that we all did somehow come from a common ancestor. Turns out evolution has a much better imagination than we do. Well, there is one more weird sephalopod fact that might help to explain their weird evolution, and that's the fact that they can edit their RNA. RNA plays an important role in coding proteins for gene expression. So, by editing the RNA, you can edit the way a gene is expressed. Now, all animals have the ability to edit their RNA, but for most animals, it's very limited. Humans, for

### Segment 17 (80:00 - 85:00) [1:20:00]

example, have 20,000 genes, but only a few dozen RNA editing sites. Squids have about 20,000 genes, but they have 11,000 RNA editing sites. They can actually edit half of their genes. They're still trying to figure out exactly what purpose this serves, but some researchers think that octopuses can edit their RNA to sort of adapt to different temperatures. There's probably many other reasons as well. This is active manipulation of their genetic code. Now, how this affects their evolution over time, we don't really know, but it might be one of the reasons why they came out so weird and intelligent and alien. With that, I'm going to say goodbye. You guys go out there, have an eye opening week, or stay indoors and week. Be safe and uh I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care. Somehow, I have never done this on this channel before, but I'm going to do it now. I'm going to pitch you a screenplay idea. Many of you may know I have a background in film, screenwriting, uh, specifically, but I've got this idea for a movie. It's been floating around for a while. Thought I would share it with you. I think it's kind of great. All right, here it goes. Okay, it's about a teenage boy who discovers that Bigfoot is real, and he's one of them. He transforms into a Sasquatch under a full moon just like a werewolf, right? And the title Wearfoot. I know this is basically a punchline so far, but seriously, hear me out. It gets better. Okay, so the kid grows up in, let's say, the Pacific Northwest. That's kind of a squatchy area. And growing up, he has this memory of playing in the woods and seeing a Bigfoot. Like, he totally sees a Bigfoot. Of course, nobody believes him, but he grows up just obsessed with Bigfoot. and his favorite show is this over-the-top ghost adventure style show with this crazy uh Bigfoot hunter guy. This dude is just like hardcore obsessed with catching and killing a Bigfoot. Like his goal in life is to have a Bigfoot head like mounted on his wall. And he like generates controversy because some of the traps that he sets up could actually kill something if they fell into it. This guy could be a popular YouTuber actually. Anyway, our young protagonist, he's a huge fan of this guy. He's really entertaining and everything, but he contacts him and tells him this story about seeing a Bigfoot in these woods when he was growing up. And the guy's like, "Sure, I'll come investigate that. " So, they schedule a hunt together. So, the kid's super excited. Obviously, he's going to meet his hero and everything. But before that hunt uh happens, there's a full moon and the kid transforms into a Sasquatch in this really terrifying, scary way. And this is where things get a little bit Teen Wolf. He rushes home. He tries to make it stop, but he can't make it stop. and he transforms and his dad winds up seeing him. But what he finds out is that his dad is a Sasquatch, too. It's like this family thing. And that's why he saw Bigfoot when he was a kid. It was his dad the whole time. And this is also why nobody's ever found any Bigfoot remains because they just turned back into normal people. So now he's got to learn how to control it, what he can do in that state, what he can't. Of course, he would have, you know, super strength, probably some heightened senses and whatnot. By the way, this is the part of the movie that they call the promise of the premise. The premise is that this kid can now transform into this sort of super being and he has these abilities that he doesn't normally have. And there's some upsides and he has a lot of fun with it on one side, but there's downsides too, like the fact that he can't really uh go out during a full moon. So, he has to kind of get used to this for about a month. He kind of gets to where he likes it. He sort of accepts that this is who he is and everything. But then this Bigfoot hunter shows up for the hunt. And of course, it just happens to be under a full moon. And he tries to get out of this thing, but now he can't. And now this crazy Bigfoot hunter guy is there with cameras and crews and guns and knives and now he's like about to transform into a Sasquatch and he's trying to keep it from happening but he can't. And so now his hero is hunting him and he's got to find some way to survive for the next few nights. I mean that's, you know, it's not the worst idea I've ever had. I actually just looked up the wordfoot to see if it's ever been used and there's a band here in East Texas. I'm going to have to go see him. Anyway, today's video is about cryptids. — Cryptozoolology is the study of unknown animals, also known as cryptids, things like unicorns, werewolves, Bigfoot, or wereoot. Cryptozoolology is generally dismissed in most scientific circles, although the search for cryptids can turn up some interesting stuff that we didn't know before. For example, a film crew that was investigating the Yeti in 2013 found some bone and fur samples that they got analyzed by a geneticist to see if maybe it came from a yeti. And uh it did not come from a yeti. It was actually from a Himalayan black bear. But when they did some mitochondrial DNA testing on it, they actually found out some stuff about the black bear population in that area that they didn't know before. They were able to figure out that 650,000 years ago, a single population of bears got split in two by a glacier that formed in between there. And those two different groups became different subspecies after a while. One became the Himalayan black bear and one became the Tibetan brown bear. So yeah, I mean, thanks to a guy who was researching Bigfoot, we now have more information about bears in a certain population. I mean, it's not going to change the world, but knowledge is

### Segment 18 (85:00 - 90:00) [1:25:00]

good. I think people are interested in cryptos just because of the whole unknown animal thing, like the monster thing. Like, that is some primal stuff that is deep down in there. I mean, obviously in the caveman days, there were like literal monsters that could kill you if you weren't looking in the right direction. But even up to like 200 years ago or so, the nighttime was that was some mysterious I mean, before we had electric light, you pretty much couldn't do anything in the night time. I mean, especially if there wasn't a full moon. It was just completely dark out and there could be anything in those woods. I mean, like even today, I have family that lives out in the country and whenever I go out there and see them, I you know, look out into the woods and I mean, what could that I mean, what was that? I just saw something. What was that? So, it's really no surprise that our stories and our fables are littered with dragons and unicorns and elves and stories spread wildly about the Sasquatch and lake monsters and the kraken. These creatures are usually misidentified in some way, but and this happens more often than you think, sometimes they turn out to be real, like the platypus or the gorilla or the kraken. I mean, giant squid. And these are just a few of the monsters that turned out to actually be real. So, there's plenty of potential for some of these other cryptids out there to actually be out there somewhere. And here's five of the most likely ones. The Orang Pend. The orang pend is a human-like primate that's thought to be found in Sumatra, specifically in the Karini Simblad National Park. According to people who have seen it, orang in the Indonesian language stands for short person, and it's thought to be around 2 and 1/2 to 5t tall. It's covered in golden brown or gray hair, and it walks upright on two legs, just like a person. And the kicker is apparently it has a very human-like face. There's a possibility that this is simply an orangutang, but most orangutans use their arms when they walk. And also none of them have been spotted in this particular national park where the ring pend is thought to be. But still very recently a new orangutang species was discovered on Somatra. It's called the Tapani and it was discovered near Lake Toba. So it's not impossible to think that there's another rarer species of orangutang out there that walks upright. Looks a little bit like us. It's possible. The Nunda. A great cat the size of a donkey is rumored to be found in Tanzania and East Africa. The first recorded mention of it was from a Swahili song in the year 1150. So this goes way back. Uh the nanda or the un as it's called in the Swahili language is thought to have big huge giant claws and be super scary and uh oh kill people. It's been described by witnesses as having brindled fur and having claws uh on their paws the size of lions. And it supposedly never roars, but it does purr. But yeah, it was blamed for several attacks on people in the 1920s because some of the bodies were found with uh gray hair clutched in their hands, meaning that they might have tried to fight off this thing. And they think that gray hair came from the nunda. But was it purring during the attack? Naughty nunda. There's also the possibility that it's just a hybrid offspring or a subspecies of tigers or leopards or something like that. Some cryptozoolologists though think it might just be an abnormal version of the African golden cat, the profilis arata. The doparu otter are very cute animals. Have you seen the otter that lay on their back and hold hands while they sleep? Because they hold hands, so then they don't tip over and it's cute because they're helping each shut up. But cross an otter with a large hellhound and you get Ireland's doaru known as the Irish crocodile. This creature is reportedly 7 feet long. It can travel over land and in the sea and it's very bloodthirsty. And also like otter, they hunt in pairs, except instead of holding hands, they hold intrails. Sightings of this creature go back to 1684, and they're often found in lakes around Ireland, especially Shrain Low in the county Mayo Mayo. I don't know Irish. But if you want to see a picture of one, just go to the Cornwall Cemetery in Drummonds. There, carved in the gravestone of Grace Connelly is a picture of the Dobar shoe that reportedly killed her in 1722. Adobar shoe is one of many water cryptids which isn't really surprising considering even to this day we've only explored like 10% of the ocean. And there is something about the underwater world. You know, it's an environment that we can't live in. You can only see so far down. So, it's not surprising that there's a lot of legendary cryptids that come from there. But we're also always finding new species down there. Some that used to be cryptids like the before mentioned giant squid. The chupacabra. The chupacabra is easily the most famous crypted on this list. that was first reported in Puerto Rico in 1995. Although there were stories of some weird creature killing livestock in the US Southwest all the way back to the 1970s. At its extreme, it's described as a reptilian creature with greenish grayish skin and giant spikes sticking out of the back. It's thought to be 3 to four feet tall, hops around like a kangaroo, and kills animals by draining it of its blood. Or according to some people, it's really more like a hairless dog. In fact, one theory is that it's literally just coyotes with

### Segment 19 (90:00 - 95:00) [1:30:00]

mange. Studies have shown that coyotes that are suffering from mange often just hunt the easy prey like livestock, hence the name Chupacabra, which means goat sucker. And as for why it was originally described as being kind of reptilian, there's actually a theory that that's simply because the movie Species came out in 1995 in Puerto Rico and that just kind of got into everybody's subconscious, at least according to National Geographic. Way to go, Ben Kingsley. Way to go. And last but not least, the Akarinis. Finally, we get to a crypted that we can all identify with because uh it's a human. The Akarinis are said to be an indigenous people located in the Amazon rainforest. What sets these apart from other indigenous people in that area is that they are apparently very European looking, pale skin, blonde hair, that kind of thing. They were first reported in the 16th century by Spanish missionaries, but these were also thought to be the inspiration for Percy Faucet to go look for the lost city of Z. A bit more recently, they were spotted in 1924 by uh surgeon and explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice. In a New York Times article in 1925, he described them as a tribe of white Indians at the headarters of the Perema River who spoke a language entirely their own and ate cocaine as a relish for their diet of wild plantains. Oh, they're stock brokers. South America is home to many unconted tribes, as I mentioned before, but the Akarinis are thought to possibly be the Aay from Paraguay. Early descriptions of them talked about their white skin, their pale eyes, and their blonde beards. So maybe it's them. The irregularity of crypted sightings kind of raises the question, what is a minimum population that must be present in order for a species to be viable? This is a tricky question to answer because it depends on a lot of specific variables about the environment and the life history of that species. And it's kind of hard to evaluate the life species of an animal when it hasn't been, you know, discovered yet. There are computer simulations that can help sort of determine uh what a minimum viable population of a species might be. And researchers use it to look at the natural history of a species, the reproduction behavior and movements of individuals amongst a population. But once again, you kind of have to have access to a species in order to really understand it in that way. One quick shorthand is what they call the 50500 rule. And what it basically means is that you need about 50 members of a species for short-term survival and 500 long-term survival that can survive, you know, outbreaks and calamities and stuff like that. So, if you play this rule to say the logness monster, uh that would mean you would need about 50 of those in that lake, which is kind of hard to imagine there being 50 in that one lake and only getting just rare sightings of it. And not to mention never finding any remains whatsoever. And this is one of the reasons that most experts rule out the possibility of there actually being a Lochness monster. So sorry Nessie fans, but even this rule isn't foolproof. There are species that have dropped below that number and still survive like the cheetah and the European bison. So who knows? But you could also apply that rule to the Sasquatch and ask, "Is there enough untamed forest land out in the Pacific Northwest that a population of 50 to 500 of these humanoid creatures could live without being spotted even by all the imaging that's out there today and no remains being found? " I'll let you guys debate that down in the comments. Of course, if you ask me, I think it's just a species of Wefoot. So, yeah. What do you guys think? This was obviously just five of them. There's many more out there. Do you have a favorite crypted? something that you think could possibly uh be out there that we haven't discovered yet. Have you seen something that you swear is real and nobody will believe you? Let nobody believe you in the comments. This should be fun. All right, that's it for now. Thanks again for watching. You guys go out now. Have an eye opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday. Love you guys. Take care. Old school viewers know that there's a running gag on this channel that anytime octopuses or sephalopods are mentioned that my writer Jason always sneaks in a comment into that script about how it was the greatest video of all time because Jason wrote it. Jason. But I guess he didn't write this script because he would have he would have put it in the right what I'm saying. Anyway, hey, have you checked out my merch site laughsmarter. com? Because here comes the obligatory plug. Not that kind of plug. Get your head out of the gutter. Lastmotor. com is where you can find all the shirts that I wear in all of these videos, including this one right here. It's where we have all the designs in t-shirt form, mug form, stickers, you name it. And uh and from time to time, we do limited edition merch drops like the Roman Decaedron, etc. Which, by the way, if you want to keep up with all that, you can sign up for my monthly newsletter right here. Hey, double plug. Don't Google that. Anyway, buying merch does obviously help to support the channel, but it also gives you something that you can hold in your hand and wear and show off. That's always nice. So, that's laughsmarter. com. I'll see you over there. But first, let's take a look at some mythical creatures from history. There's a lot we know about the universe and the world around us. But we also keep learning new stuff all the time. Uh

### Segment 20 (95:00 - 100:00) [1:35:00]

like, did you know we only have explored 5% of the oceans? And we keep finding new species every year. In fact, last year in 2020, the California Academy of Sciences added 213 new plant and animal species to their tree of life. They include 101 ants, 22 crickets, 15 fishes, 11 geckos, 11 sea slugs, 11 flowering plants, eight beetles, eight fossil einoderms, seven spiders, five snakes, two skinks, two aphids, two eels, one moss, one frog, one fossil amphibian, one seahorse, one fossil scallop, one sea biscuit, and one fossil sea lily, and one coral, and one partridge in a pear tree. Okay, so now imagine you were living in ancient times and you ran across the skeletal remains of an animal and you didn't know what we now know about all the different species around the world. Or maybe you heard about an animal thirdand from some traveler. You're trying to make sense of what you're seeing or what you're hearing with the limited amount of knowledge that you have. So you do what humans are great at. You justify. You create a story. You develop a myth. You find a reason for this thing to have the appearance that it has. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It might give you comfort or entertainment or religious guidance or moral support. The legends and myths that we've built around mythical creatures serve a purpose, or at least they once did. Today, we can easily take a look and try to figure out exactly what it was that they were looking at and created these myths around. And this isn't just fun and interesting. It also helps us to understand cultures around the world and gives us a little insight into what makes humans the way we are. For this episode, I want to look at mythical beasts that were based on real life animals and in some cases real life animals that were once considered mythical beasts. So, some of these animals were totally legit animals that we know very well today. And then others were maybe just kind of conjured up after seeing a few skeletal remains. A few skeletons and an endless imagination can go a long way. And I'm going to rate them on what I'm calling the underwear scale. uh in the sense that an old pair of underwear uh stretches a lot whereas a new pair of underwear might be a bit more tight. So basically the more of a stretch the explanation is the older the underwear. You get it? Because science. The first creature on our list is dragons. Daenerys rode one. King Gdora fought Godzilla. Puff was magical. Yep. We're going to talk about dragons. Those mythical beasts that fill our fairy tales and fantasies. Interestingly, almost every culture around the world has some kind of legend about dragons in their history. Uh the first appearances of it came up in Mesopotamian and Greek writings. For example, the moosh kushu is a scaly dragon with feline fourlegs, eagle talons and hind legs, a tail, a long neck, a horned head, and a serpentine tongue that appears in the Ishtar gate in the city of Babylon from the 6th century B. C. E. In the Bible, there's a Leviathan, a sea serpent that spits fire from its mouth. King Agamemnon in the Iliad is a blue dragon on a shield. Because of their serpent type bodies, dragons are often perceived as representing evil. Or at least in the Middle Eastern and Western worlds. In some Eastern Asian myths, dragons are beneficent creatures representing heaven and masculinity. No matter which culture they appear in, dragons are almost always reptilian. Anthropologist David E. Jones suggests in his book, An Instinct for Dragons, that it's an amalgam of three primal fears: snakes, predatory birds, and big cats. Now, another mythological creature that includes two of those fears anyway is the griffin. It's a mixture of a lion and an eagle. It's often depicted with the back legs, body, and tail of a lion and the head of an eagle. Some griffins have wings and eagle talons in their four feet, while others don't. Since it was one part king of all beasts and birds, it was sort of king of all creatures entirely. Griffins are found in mythologies around the world from the Middle East and Northern Europe. And they're known to guard treasures and tombs. Some legends say their feathers can cure blindness. But were dragons and griffins real? If you were a Scythe living near the Black Sea in ancient times, then yes. at least if you ran across their skeletal remains. Skeletal remains that today we would recognize as the bones of a protoeratops. Protoeratopats was a sheep-sized herbivore from the Cretaceous period that would look very familiar to people like us that were brought up on Jurassic Park. But if you were back in ancient times and you had no concept of deep time and no idea what dinosaurs were and you ran across bones that look like this, I could see it. At least that's a hypothesis put forth by Adrianne Mayer, a folklorist and historian of ancient science at Stanford University. I mean, the modern field of paleontology is only a couple hundred years old, but those bones didn't just show up 200 years ago. They've been there this whole time. So, yeah, it's not unfeasible to think that somebody in ancient times might have run across those bones and come to some pretty interesting conclusions. Not everyone agrees with this hypothesis, though, like Dr. Mark Whitten, who believed that the Greeks came up with their version of griffins from living animals and not fossils. Whiten wrote in 2016, "The fact that living animal anatomies can easily account for all elements of ancient Griffin depictions, there seems no need to invoke protoeratops as part of griffin anatomy. The mainstream view of griffins being simple chimeas of living animals has to be considered a far simpler and thus more likely interpretation of their form. For Whitten, griffins were just a

### Segment 21 (100:00 - 105:00) [1:40:00]

product of our human imagination. There are other theories like whale bones in the past may have also been mistaken as proof of dragons before people knew what they were actually looking at. And then there are other animals like the Nile crocodile which may have lived in a wider geographic area in ancient times. It's the largest crocodile species with adults measuring up to six meters long and weighing almost up to one ton. Also, it can do this thing that they call a highwalk where it walks with its trunk off the ground and when it walks towards you when it lumbers towards you and to some people, you know, that could be interpreted as a type of dragon. A gana is a species of monitor lizards found in Australia. They're predators with razor sharp teeth and claws and can grow up to 2 m long. They also have venom glands, can climb trees, and can quickly sprint on their hind legs. So, it's thought that in Australia that might be a source for dragon folklore. Finally, there's another type of monitor lizard that could be a candidate for the source of dragon miss. In fact, it's considered such a likely possibility that uh well, they actually named it a dragon. The Komodo dragon in Indonesia is an apex predator first discovered by Europeans in 1910. They're the world's largest living lizards and can reach up to three meters in length and weigh an average of 70 kg. They have long tails, agile necks, and their tongues are forked in yellow. Couple of fun facts about the Komodo dragon. When it's threatened, it can throw up its stomach contents to reduce its weight in order to flee. Komodo also cannibalize their young. So, young Komodo often roll around in feal matter, coating themselves in a scent that adult komos are wired to avoid. A vomit spewing poop smelling beast. Cool dragon. But in terms of the underwear scale, uh, how likely is it that dragons were based off of living creatures? Um, I'd probably say it's a pretty good fit. It's not that much of a stretch considering that there were dragon legends all around the world and there are lizards all around the world. So, I'd put it at uh, I'd say maybe like brand new boxer briefs. Next up is the Cyclops. The singer Chev Woolly scored a hit in 1958 with a song about a cyclops, specifically about a oneeyed, one-horned flying purple people leader that came to Earth and wanted to join a rock band. And Ziggy Stardust thought that he was the first alien rock star. You don't even eat people, Ziggy. Do better. By the way, I've always wondered, is it a purple people eater or eater? Because if it's the latter, he probably would have been really hungry. Unless he found the blue fug gates of Kentucky. Annie fish cyclops are featured in Greek mythology, most notably by the poets Homer and Hessi. In Homer's Odyssey, the hero of the story, Odysius, encounters a cyclops named Polyphimas, who's the son of Poseidon. Polyphimas lives in a cave, raises sheep, and eats men. In the story, he devours several of Odysius's men before the hero and the rest of his crew escape using trickery and wine. You know that old trick of getting somebody drunk, and then stabbing them in their one eye. that thing. In Hessia's Theogyny, the Cyclops and the Titans were the offspring of Gaia and Uranus. Uranus kept all the children in prison inside Gaya. But Cronis, a Titan, successfully overthrew his father with Cyclops's help. And their reward for helping, Cronis imprisoned the Cyclops in the Greek underworld. But then they helped Zeus, the son of Cronis, overthrow his father and become the ultimate ruler of the cosmos. I remember that soap opera. One meaning of the word Cyclops is circle eye. And the creature is always depicted as a person with only one eye in the center of their forehead. So could an animal be responsible for the Cyclops legend? So like many ancient creatures, the Greeks understood their world through mythb building. If they found something in nature that they couldn't explain, they created a myth around it to explain how that came to be and why the world is the way that it is. According to Thomas Strasser, a professor of ancient art and archaeology at Providence College in an interview with National Geographic, quote, "The idea that mythology explains the natural world is an old idea. The ancient Greeks were farmers and would certainly come across fossil bones like this and try to explain them. With no concept of evolution, it makes sense that they would reconstruct them in their minds as giants, monsters, sphinxes, and so on. " So, that's the basis for one hypothesis around the cyclops. Austrian paleontologist Althenio Ael came up with the idea in 1914 that the Greeks came up with the Cyclops myth based off of prehistoric dwarf elephant skulls. Why? Because they look like this. They were first found on the islands of Cree, Cypress, and Sicily. And they're about twice the size of a human skull. And so it's easy. Oh my god. Yeah. I see it. That's not an eye socket, by the way. That's a central nasal cavity for the trunk. But again, if you're an ancient Greek dude and you run across this in a cave somewhere, I mean, yeah, I could see why you would think that after you clean your toga. Another possibility is the Dinotherium Gigantium, whose fossils were also discovered on Cree. It was one of the world's largest animals that ever walked the Earth, measuring 4. 6 m tall at the shoulder and displaying tusks that were 1. 3 m long. The animal is a distant relative to today's elephants, but unlike the modern elephant, the dantherium's tusk grew out of its lower jaw and curved downward and back up instead of up and out. And it also had a

### Segment 22 (105:00 - 110:00) [1:45:00]

cavity in its skull for its pronounced trunk. Or to paraphrase Shoolly song, maybe that's where it was playing rock and roll out of the hole in its head. So the underwear scale for this one, I mean, the cyclops is a Greek creature, a Greek myth, and these bones were found on Greek islands, and I can see it. That looks like something that would only have one eye. And I Yeah, I'm going to give this one some tidy whies. Next up is the Kraken. It could devour an entire ship's crew with one bite. It was 1,600 m long. It was so big that many crew members would mistake it for an island. And when it went to feed, it would emit a strong and peculiar scent, which may have just been poop. I'm talking about the Kraken, the largest and scariest ocean creature man's ever invented. The earliest known mention of the kraken comes from King Spe in Norway in 1180 when he listed it as one of several sea monsters lurking in the waters around Greenland and Norway. A 13th century Icelandic saga called Orvar Odor mentioned a mythical creature too named the Huffgufa with a description strikingly similar to the Kraken and over time the Kraken myth became more and more terrifying. Carlenius the father of modern taxonomy even included it in his first edition of systemma nature in 1735. Then in 1853, an animal washed ashore on a Danish beach. Naturalist Yapodus Steamstrip took the animal's beak and scientifically described it as a giant squid, architects. Squids are one of four types of sephalopods, which are considered to be very intelligent. You know what else is intelligent? Uh my previous episode on sephalopods. It it's just a it's a phenomenon of writing. It's so good that Aaron Sorcin, yes, that Aaron Sorcin, uh, called me up after he saw it and said that he was not going to do his master class anymore because after seeing that video, he knew that he was a sham writer. Whoever wrote that episode is just the greatest writer ever. I had to put Aaron on hold, though, because I got a call from Phoebe Wallerbridge, who wanted to take the same idea and turn it into a movie or maybe a limited series about a squid that helps a detective solve marine-based crimes and call it Cracking the Case. I'll put the sephopod episode link down in the description below if you want to watch it. And yes, Jason wrote this script, too. So, was the giant squid the creature that these sailors had mythologized all those years ago? Based on its size, probably. So, because not only is a giant squid quite large, but they're also rarely seen, which kind of helps build the myth around them. The largest giant squid ever documented by scientists was 13 m long and probably weighed more than a ton. And because they do mostly live in the lowest depths of the ocean where there's very little light down there, they have gigantic eyes. They're 30 centimeters across. They have eyes the size of dinner plates. In 2005, two Japanese researchers photographed Narcatia swimming 900 meters deep off the Ogawara Islands in the North Pacific Ocean. And in 2012, oceanographer Edith Witter filmed the first footage of a live giant squid in its natural habitat. — It was absolutely breathtaking. And had this animal had its feeding tentacles intact and fully extended, it would have been as tall as a two-story house. — But as I said at the beginning of this video, only 5% of the ocean has been explored. So the Kraken could be explained as a giant squid, or maybe there's something bigger going on down there. There is, by the way, another species of squid called the colossal squid, which um has more mass than a giant squid, but isn't as long as a giant squid. In terms of the underwear scale on this one, it's pretty tight. I think this one's pretty locked in and it's aquatic, so speedos. Next up is gorillas. Africa is a huge continent. It's got creatures tall and small, and we're still finding new ones all the time. And back in the day, there were stories of this huge animal human-like hairy creature with a bad temper that European explorers would come back to Europe and regail with tales of this crazy man beast that they found in the jungles of Africa. Audiences would ooh and awe about it and scientists would just dismiss the story as nonsense. This creature was the gorilla. The first reported gorilla sighting from outside of Africa was from Hano the Navigator, a fifth century Carthaginian explorer. After arriving in a bay called the Horn of the South, he found an island populated with what he called savages. Supposedly, his crew tried to chase them down. Uh but they weren't able to catch any of them because the males were able to climb up trees and they threw rocks at the crew. Actually, they were able to catch a few females who bit and clawed at them, but over time they got to be cool with each other and they all lived happily ever after. No, of course, they flayed and killed the gorillas and took their skins back to Carthage. The next known sighting took place in the 16th century when British explorer Andrew Battel visited parts of West Africa. He described the animals as hairy monsters that look like humans that were completely vegetarian. But still, the gorilla was considered a myth by Western scientists until the mid 1800s. That's when American physician and missionary Thomas S. Savage found some gorilla bones in Liberia and had them shipped back home. He partnered with Jeffre Wyman, who was an anatomist at Harvard, to examine the bones in more detail. And then they presented their findings at the Boston Society of Natural History in 1847. The scientific name that they gave to it was

### Segment 23 (110:00 - 115:00) [1:50:00]

Troglodites gorilla, which was sort of a nod to Hano's discovery back in the fifth century because the word gorilli in Greek stands for tribe of hairy women. It would be another decade before a Paul de Sheru became the first European explorer to see a living gorilla. But yeah, gorillas once upon a time were a cryptozoological thing. They were on the same level as Sasquatch, which is something that Sasquatch enthusiasts love to point to. I also feel like it needs to be noted that gorillas were only a myth to Europeans. The African natives that lived there were well aware of their existence. So, if I'm going to put this one on an underwear scale, I mean, it can't get any tighter than that. We know it's a real thing. So I mean a thong. And last but not least is a syosphali. The Andaman Islands are located in the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern Indian Ocean. And according to explorer Marco Polo, a curious creature lived on the islands. As he wrote in his essay travels, quote, I assure you that all the men of this island of Amagandhian have heads like dogs and teeth and eyes likewise. In fact, in the face, they are all just like big mastiff dogs. He described them as living on quote flesh and rice and milk and that they would eat everybody that they came across. Interestingly, he wasn't the only person who described a race of people with dog heads. Around 400 B. CE, the Greek physician Cecius, who also wrote about unicorns, wrote about men and women in India, quote, whose clothing is the skin of wild beasts and who bark like dogs. Heroditus claimed to have seen them in Libya. Alexander the Great said that he fought them in India. Ply the Elder included them in his book natural history writing that quote they live by hunting and catching birds. A Chinese Buddhist missionary Hay Shen said that he spotted them on an island east of Fusang in 499 AD. And according to legend St. Christopher was a man with a dog's head who wanted to be a human and eventually got his wish. So what the hell was the Sosafali? Like what creature could have possibly inspired this idea? One theory is that they could have been baboons or macox whose long faces kind of give them the appearance similar to that of a dog. Another theory suggested by Bernardman's in his 1955 book on the track of unknown animals is that in Africa anyway they may be from sightings of an injury lemur. The injury is a large species of lemur and he suggested that they could look like a tiny human with a big dog head. In his book he wrote quote three feet high and with no tail but an inconspicuous stump. The injuries is an astonishingly like a man in outline. Like other lemurs or half monkeys it has a fine and pointed muzzle which makes its head more like a foxes or a dog's. He also speculated that the lionet tailed macak or wanderoo as it's called could explain the legends in India. Even Sir David Attenboroough suggested that the injury could be an explanation for the sinoal in his 1961 docu series Zooquest. The proportions of their body with their very long legs were strangely human. And I remembered once again Marco Polo's dogheaded men. — So yeah, ancient myths, they all come from somewhere. And I got to be honest, I did not see some of these explanations coming when I started working on this video. And that's it for now. You guys go out there, have an eye openening rest of the week. Stay safe and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care. You know, if you think about it, what I'm doing right now is kind of magic. My lungs inflate with air. And then as I push that air out of my lungs, I tighten some muscles in my throat that push together a couple of flaps of cartilage that those vibrate at certain frequencies. And then I manipulate the shape of my mouth with my jaw, my lips, my tongue to create a series of different sounds. And then when you hear those sounds, your brain organizes those sounds in a way that creates images, ideas, thoughts, concepts, even feelings. We can leave out the part where a microphone picks up the vibrations in the air and transcodes them into digital signals and then sends them all around the world. We don't need to go there. But the point is, human communication is insanely complex and kind of a fundamental part of the human experience. You know, like anthropologists kind of consider the birth of language to basically be the birth of human intelligence. Communication is so tied in with the idea of intelligence that the word dumb was originally used to describe someone who is non-verbal. Yeah, there are many things that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But language might be right at the top of that list. Or so you might think. Just because we're the only animals that communicate this way doesn't mean communicate. Animals communicate all the time. some in simple ways, but some in ways that are so complex it's basically like magic to us. And with the progression of AI tools, we're getting closer than ever to understanding these forms of communication to the point that we might have a future where we're actually able to literally talk to animals and the animals can talk back. Sounds crazy, but there's a lot of things we do today that sounded crazy maybe even 20 years ago. So look, today we're going to take a deep dive into the world of animal communication and the technologies that might soon bridge the gap between us and our best friends. Thank you.

### Segment 24 (115:00 - 120:00) [1:55:00]

We are so excited to share with you that we have developed a technology that allows us to communicate with animals. Yes, thank you. But why tell you about it when you could see it yourself? — Hi Joe. I'm standing here at Dean Farms excited to find out what our furry friends have to say. Hey fella, is there anything you'd like to say? — No way. Ah, cool. It's cute how much you guys need us. That ball throw thing you do. I don't know why you keep throwing it when I just bring it back to you, but uh seems to make you happy. So, — and your name is? — It's Lulu. — Thank you, Lulu. — May I sniff your anus? — Ladies and gentlemen, the future. — Anything you have to say? — Oh, you can hear me? — That's right. — Stupendous. Finally, someone can tell those hens to shut the hell up. Every day I got to listen to those birds. Morons. I swear one more day I'm going to set this barn on fire. Hey, want to hear a joke? Why' the chicken cross the road? — I don't know. Why? — To go that dirty donkey at the neighbor's farm. Hey, I'm not a donkey. I'm a mule. — Ew. No. — You Rainbow Dash. Can I come over later? — No, — Oh, hey, the technology does work. Can we move on to someone else? — Hello, ladies. Is there anything you'd like to say? — Have we analyzed chickens yet? — We have. Okay. — I saw you talking to the sheep and the horse, and I figured you were on their — I'm sorry, side. You know the hairy animals. Animals with hair. Oh, did you smell how gross they are? — It's wool. — It's disgusting. You are all the same. Low lives. I want to hear what you have to say as much as I WANT TO HEAR THE SOUND OF MY OWN CHICKEN HITTING THE HEAD. — $50 million on this. 20 $20 million. — How does it feel to know that the humans eat your babies every day for breakfast? Wait, is that true? I mean, — you Hey, go for yourself. We're done. — Shut it down. — Your mother's a horse. I got you. — My you — Joe, — I've talked about animal intelligence before on this channel. In fact, I did a video on the smartest animal species and dumbest animal species. The smartest animals video did really well and the dumbest animal videos kind of bombed. So, uh, yeah, let's talk about how smart animals are in this video. So, there's all types of ways that animals communicate. Some verbal like howls, barks, meows, squeaks, and some non-verbal like bioluminescence, scent marking, visual cues, and posturing. For example, fireflies use bioluminescence, ants use chemical cues, and peacocks use visual displays. Researchers narrow down animal communication to four types: auditory, visual, tactile, and chemical. We tend to think mostly about auditory communication because that's mostly how we do it with the mouth magic I was talking about earlier. But even in that category, there's a wide variety in the animal kingdom. Like animals of the same species that live in different regions might have different dialects just like we do. And it's kind of like birds from one area saying pop while birds from another area say soda and birds in another area say cola. And the birds from Texas say Coke even though they drink Dr. Pepper. There are even examples of birds that live kind of on the border between two different dialects that learn to adapt their dialect depending on who they're talking to, like bilingual birds, basically. Now, animals can also communicate through sounds, but in sounds that we can't hear, like dolphins that communicate through ultrasonic frequencies that are too high for us to hear. And then on the flip side of that are like African elephants that can communicate through infrasound that's too low for us to hear. And the cool thing about that one is that it can travel extremely long distances, like up to 281 kilometers away. And even cooler, uh, it's thought that they can actually not just hear it through the air, but also through their feet, like picking up vibrations from the ground. And by the way, auditory communication doesn't necessarily mean vocal communication. Take the male peacock spider. It kicks out a beat with its legs, hoping to attract a female. And then once it does, it performs a little dance, and if the lady spider likes it, she'll start dance, too. Naughty. And that starts to get into visual communication. Now, obviously, there's a lot of different ways that animals use their, you know, body language to communicate, to attract a mate, to ward off rivals, to point out threats or food. This can take the form of them, you know, puffing themselves up to look bigger and more threatening or show off plumage to attract a mate, or

### Segment 25 (120:00 - 125:00) [2:00:00]

in the case of bees, they're doing a little, you know, shimmy pattern in the hive to communicate a source of pollen. Which, by the way, that's always fascinated me that something with a brain the size of a grain of sand can communicate not just what something is or how far away it is, but also what direction it is just by dancing. I that's just that's always that's insane to me. Then you have sephopods who can change colors to communicate and not just change colors, but create flashing patterns of colors and even textures. Like I said before, like just imagine if people could just flash what they're thinking and words on their skin. That would be crazy. Seephopods are crazy and they're also the subject of the best written script in the history of this channel. I still can't believe that episode didn't win any awards like the Nobel Prize. That script was deserving of a Nobel Pri Who wrote did Jason write this? Ah, I got Jason. But anyway, seephalopods change colors to attract mates or to repel predators or to camouflage themselves or just to make us lose our minds. They're freaking aliens. Now, we talk about tactile communication. And that can be everything from touch to form bonds between pairs or family members to aggressive mock attacks to sort of establish a pecking order in a pack. There's also kind of a slight crossover between tactile and auditory communication. Uh like I was talking about the African elephants earlier, kind of feeling sound through their feet. Another example of that kind of thing is the African demon mole. Yeah, cuz mole rats aren't freaky enough. Now there's demon mle rats. They live their lives underground and bang their heads against the tops of the tunnels. And how quick and hard those thumps are indicates the different things to other demon mle rats. Finally, there's chemical communication. And this can be everything from pherommones to attract a mate to ants leaving chemical trails for other ants to follow, sometimes resulting in a death spiral or just smell. Like we've all seen dogs, you know, sniff each other's butts. That's just a way for them to gather information about each other. That's basically chemical communication. In fact, many animals use their poop for exactly that purpose. Like white rhinos have communal poop areas called mittens that can be up to 3 meters wide. These mittens basically relay social and biological information to other white rhinos. It's kind of like a rhino Twitter. That's a very apt metaphor actually. When humans and animals try to communicate with each other, it's usually through auditory, tactile, and visual cues. You know, think of your dog barking or maybe your cat rubbing itself against your leg or maybe you got a bird to dance to a song. All that's great and surprisingly effective. I mean, anybody out there with a dog, you know, when they're hungry, when they need to go out, when they're interested in something, or when they're not feeling well. There's a reason we bond with them so strongly. And like me, I'm sure many of you carry on full-on conversations with your dog. — Hello, Jojo. Oh, you get kind of crazy. It's not the time you think it is. She like, I know you're saying something, but I don't know what. But these conversations are pretty one-sided, and there's a lot of projecting and anthropomorphizing on our part. The real dream is for animals to talk back using words just like we do, which did actually happen for the first time in 1967. That's when the husband to wife team of Allen and Beatatrix Gardner had the idea of teaching sign language to primates. This makes sense because their vocal structures just don't have the ability to, you know, create the same sounds we do. But chimpanzees and gorillas often communicate visually through gestures. They tried this on a chimpanzeee named Wo and found some moderate success. And this prompted Dr. Francine Penny Patterson to try this with a gorilla in 1972. a gorilla named Koko. Koko is by far the most famous talking animal of all time. She was able to not just ask for food or for toys, which she did all the time, but she also seemed to be able to convey complex emotions and concepts. There's actually a story that I heard where uh somebody asked her what happens when you die, and she responded comfortable by that makes me feel weird things. She also apparently struck up a friendship with Robin Williams when he visited her one time. Uh, I think she had seen him on TV a lot and was just like really excited to see him. Anyway, it's really heartwarming. It's thought that Koko had developed the vocabulary of up to 1100 signs before she died in 2018. It does need to be said though that there are some um language and animal experts that don't think that Koko really understood what she was saying. They think she was just kind of mimicking what the humans were doing. Just full disclosure, there is a debate around it. Then you have those videos that some of you may have seen of dogs using soundboards to communicate with their owners. I know it's amazing. It's adorable and it's wholesome and uh of course I'm going to throw cold water on it because I'm the actual worst. But for one, the dog may be pressing a button without knowing or understanding the word. Like BF Skinner's rats didn't talk, but they knew which button to press for the food. The dog could also just be reacting from clues from its owners, like you know, body posture or looks, just a little micro expressions. The owner is probably doing it unintentionally, but dogs are really, really good at picking up even the smallest signs in our body language. You know, when your communication is primarily visual, you become hyperattentive to these kinds of things. And sure, they may have some kind of understanding of what the words mean in the sense that, you know, they know if they press X button, it'll make Y sound and get Z reaction from us. And of course, if it's a reaction that they like, they'll keep doing it. Like the

### Segment 26 (125:00 - 130:00) [2:05:00]

dog might press I love you, but it's not necessarily because it understands the word love and the concept that entails. It's just that they can tell that it makes us happy and we smile and we pet them and we play with them when they do it. You know, again, they press a button and they get a thing that they like. And you know, I'm just going to say dogs are manipulative liars. Okay? My old dog, Jake, hurt his leg one time and then he saw how much attention he got from us whenever he limped. So yeah, from that point forward, he'd literally fake a limp to get sympathy from us. And yes, it worked every time. And there are some other issues with the videos. I don't need to go into all of them, but you know, they are edited, so you don't know how many times a dog may have typed nonsense into the board that got cut out of that video. Maybe for every, you know, intelligent interaction, there were 99 nothing burgers. And also, again, cold water. Um, according to an article that I'll link down below, the people who made those videos are kind of participating in a study that's being funded by the makers of the soundboard. So, it's kind of a marketing thing. Just to be super clear, I'm not saying there's nothing to this. It's just that, well, like everything on the internet, skepticism is warranted. And look, I totally get why people love these videos. Of course, we want to be able to talk to our pets. We love them. We have a bond with them. We share our homes and even our beds with them. And especially when they're sick or hurting. It's just super frustrating that they can't just tell us what's wrong. Being able to talk to animals and understand their thoughts and feelings might even help us better understand our own cognitive abilities as humans. It might also help us take better care of them in zoos and sanctuaries because they'll be able to let us know what they want or what they need. Quick sidebar, would we still keep them in zoos and sanctuaries if we knew what they were thinking, but it could also help us to develop deeper and more interactive relationships between animals and their caregivers. You know, maybe help reduce anxiety in both. And look, this might be a bold statement, but who knows? Maybe communicating with animals would help us to become more empathetic beings ourselves, not just with each other, but with the planet as a whole, which could impact conservation efforts and give us a real incentive to protect it from unnecessary abuse and exploitation. And to my knowledge, there's really only one thing that can truly do that. will align the planets and bring them into universal harmony, allowing meaningful contact with all forms of life from extraterrestrial beings to common household pets. So, let's go with this idea. What would the world look like if we could actually talk with animals? Well, the nonprofit Earth Species Project wants to find out. According to its website, quote, "We believe that an understanding of non-human languages will transform our relationship with the rest of nature. " and they want to use AI to decode animal communication and to actually talk to animals. They plan to use machine learning systems to help decipher animal communication. And they'll do that by identifying patterns and then analyzing data to understand them. And then they hope to link back the communication patterns to figure out what they could mean. The analysis includes data from bio acoustics, which is a recording of individual animals, and then eco acoustics, which is recordings of whole ecosystems. To measure this, they established a benchmark for machine learning algorithms in October 2022. It uses 10 data sets of different animal communications to create a baseline for AI classification. And it's called the benchmark of animal sounds or beans. No offense to the Earth Species Project, but I reject this acronym. That is the worst acronym I've ever heard. The data sets include recordings from amphibians, birds, elephants, insects, and primates. Cats and dogs are being studied, too. But it's marine animals like whales and dolphins that show the most promise. As CEO Katie Zakarian said, quote, "Sitations are particularly interesting because of their long history. 34 million years as a socially learning cultural species and because as light does not propagate well underwater, more of their communication is forced through the acoustic channel. And it's thought that this type of research could help with conservation efforts. For example, AI analysis helped create mobile marine animal protection areas off the west coast of the US. By the way, this doesn't just help with research and conservation efforts, it can also help endangered species. One of those examples is a Hawaiian crow, which went extinct in the wild in early 2000s. Yeah, some of the last remaining birds were brought into captivity as part of a sort of a conservation breeding program, but reintroducing them back into the wild has been challenging. But the Earth Species Project wants to help out with this by basically studying the bird's vocabulary and creating a catalog of all of its calls. Then it'll compare that to historical recordings of wild Hawaiian crows to see if those calls have, you know, changed while being in captivity. That's kind of interesting because the thinking here is that, you know, maybe one of the reasons why they're having trouble reintegrating into the wild is that maybe they've, you know, lost important calls in captivity, like mating calls or warnings about predators. And if so, maybe they could retrain them through these recordings and give them a leg up in future reing efforts. And if successful, this could be repeated with hundreds of other threatened species around the world. Now, that's super cool and it's obviously a noble cause, but uh let's be honest, you're just here cuz you want to talk to your dog. But machine learning may help out with that as well by finding subtle differences in dogs posture and expressions that they use to convey information. And one of the people working on that is Dr. K Labikov. He's a professor emeritus of biology at Northern Arizona University and the author of Chasing Dr. Doolittle

### Segment 27 (130:00 - 135:00) [2:10:00]

learning the language of animals. He wants to create an AI model that'll translate a dog facial expressions and barks. And he's coming at this after spending over 30 years studying prairie dogs who actually have a sophisticated language of their own. For example, they have predator warning calls, but they also have specific calls depending on the type of predator. He's even documented them changing their call to let other prairie dogs know the color of a person's clothing, which kind of makes me wonder if they think that people in different clothes are different species. Why wouldn't they think that? But he wanted to learn more. So, he worked with a computer scientist to create an algorithm that turns animal vocals into English. And he was surprised at what the prairie dogs were actually saying. — Alan. Alen. Alan. Alan, — he formed a company called Zu Lingua and they're currently focused on translating what dogs communicate to us. In an interview with the CBC in 2013, Slobachikov said that he imagines having something the size of a cell phone that could translate a woof or meow into I want to eat chicken tonight or my litter box is filthy. Please clean it. He believes that if dogs and humans could understand each other better, it would maybe cut down on the number of animals euthanized due to misunderstood behavior. And just knowing that animals have complex thoughts could create more empathy in people toward them. As he told the CBC, quote, "When people realize that prairie dogs and other animals as well can talk, suddenly they see these animals with a new perspective. They're actually thinking, breathing things not that much different from us. " AI could also help farmers and ranchers identify which animals are sick or in pain by looking at micro expressions in their faces. Dr. Christa McClennon teaches animal behavior at the University of Chester in England. And one of the common concerns that she's heard from sheep farmers is that they have a hard time recognizing pain in their sheep. So she created a pain scale based on the animals facial expressions like folded ears or retracted lips. Then Dr. Peter Robinson at the University of Cambridge turned that scale into an AI algorithm and then trained it on hundreds of sheep photos. And yeah, this technology actually worked. It actually proved to be faster and better than a human at identifying sheep in pain. As Mlullen told Euro News in 2018, quote, "We're looking at pain because that's the most significant in terms of welfare, but there's nothing stopping us from looking at other emotions as well. What does a happy sheep look like? What does a sad sheep look like? But there's still a lot of work that needs to be done and more work is continuing. But before we get too excited, there are some pretty major obstacles to overcome, both technological and ethical. Because one of the major problems that we have as humans is kind of what I was saying earlier about the dogs and the soundboards. We tend to sort of project what we think they're saying or what we want to think that they're saying. It's a pretty major bias. And it's one of the issues that we learned with AI models over the last few years, especially the LLMs, is that they can actually pick up on those biases. One of the efforts to get around that was created by neurobiologists Yasi Yoo and Od Rashavei from Tel Aviv University in Israel. They created what they call the Dr. Dittle challenge. They published this idea in the August 2023 issue of Current Biology. And in there, they cited three obstacles that need to be overcome by AI, including it has to use an animal's communication signals and not learn new ones. It has to use the signals in several different behavioral contexts. And the animal has to produce a measurable response like it was communicating with a similar animal and not a machine. So scientists have created a robotic honeybee that mimics a real bee's waggle dance to let other bees know where the food is. You know that thing that I was so impressed by. So this covers points one and three in the Dr. Do a little challenge, but it only works in one context. We still can't ask a bee or a dog or a cat or a whale what it's actually feeling. But even if we could increase AI's power to understand animal communication, we'll still run into some of these same obstacles. As they write in the paper, quote, "Even if we will never be able to talk to animals in the human way, understanding how complex animal communication is and attempting to tap into it and mimic it is a fascinating scientific endeavor. It's an endeavor that has to consider ethical concerns, too. For example, poachers already use recordings of mating sounds to entrap animals. So, imagine what they would do if they could use AI to communicate specific messages to those animals. which let's just be honest they will absolutely do that like all AI tools they are just an accelerant good people will use it to do bigger and better things not so good people will be extra not so good with it also what about consent I mean if understanding communication from animals gives us an enlightened insight into their status as sensient creatures I mean you kind of would then have to respect the possibility that maybe they don't want to talk to us I mean if you were an animal, would you want to talk to us? You also have to ask if interacting with humans would affect social dynamics or natural behavior. Kesakarian from the Earth Species Project thinks that it's definitely a conversation worth exploring to stop anything bad happening. But she also believes that the benefits are huge for conservation efforts and for installing more empathy in humans towards animals. As she told Discover magazine in June 2023, quote, "Humans need to dramatically shift the way we are relating with the rest of nature. " And I certainly won't argue with that. Now, whether being able to communicate with animals will get us there, I don't know. Like, it's funny to me. We always talk about what it would take to communicate with aliens and what a paradigm shift it would be if we could, you know, find alien signals and decode

### Segment 28 (135:00 - 140:00) [2:15:00]

them and whatnot, like the movie Arrival and, you know, how it would make us rethink our entire place in the universe and all that. Um, but we currently live on a planet with millions of different species that we do communicate with in a way and it doesn't seem to have really changed anything. For me, it's just fascinating as a look into how intelligence works. You know, what intelligence means, how every different species has different ways of doing it. And as we're developing AI tools to solve the problem, well, AI is just kind of another kind of intelligence. It all gets very squishy. But serious question, do you think that real communication with animals is possible? Do you think that if we could, it would be this big redefining moment for us as a species? And what have been some experiences that you might have had where it feels like an animal has communicated with you? The freakier the better? Talk amongst yourselves. I'm going to get some coffee. Anyway, that's it for today. You guys go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week. Stay safe and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care. I've wanted to be a filmmaker pretty much my whole life. So, the first time I ever went to Los Angeles, the first place I went was obviously the Labraa tarpits. Clearly, my nerd dumb trumps my filmmaker dumb. The tarpets are awesome, by the way. If you ever get a chance to go, do it. Definitely. It's it's a really cool insight into a specific time in history when humans were around, but there were still monsters. Like you go to a museum and you see a T-Rex skeleton. And that's cool, mind-blowing, all that, you know, but you also know that was like way before humans. Like none of these things ever ate a human. No human ever interacted with any of these things. No human being ever laid eyes on these things. But Smileadon saber-tooth cats, you're carrying jeans from someone who got eaten by one of those. And the mammoth they found there and the giant sloths, those were hunted by human beings just like you and me. Like some people theorize that the reason that children fantasize about monsters and seeing monsters in their closet and under the bed and stuff like that is from just instinctual genetic stuff that's been handed down for thousands of generations that came from that time period when there really were monsters to be afraid of. I don't know if that's been proven, but it's an interesting concept. And today, genetic science has advanced to the point that maybe we could bring some of these creatures back. But is this a good idea or is it a great idea? In 1507, Portuguese sailors landed on the island of Maitius in the Indian Ocean. And it was there that they came across the dodo bird. And the sailors thought this bird was hilarious. It couldn't fly. It was weird and round and awkward. When it tried to run away, it would wobble and drag its belly on the ground. Yeah. Yeah, the Dodo didn't have any defenses against predators because there weren't any on the island. And this made the sailors think it was kind of dumb and lazy. That can happen. That's why I made a predator clone. — Now I'm in the best shape of my life and my mind's sharper than ever. Thanks, Predator Clone. But back to the dodo. Over the years, ships from other countries started to show up, like Britain and the Netherlands, and they found the dodo to be amusing as well, but they also found it to be well delicious. They were easy to hunt and they probably tasted like chicken. And when their food supplies went low, well, Dodd was on the menu. The Dutch ended up colonizing Maitius in 1644 and they brought with them other animals like cats, dogs, pigs, and monkeys. These animals invaded the woods where the dodo lived. They'd wind up trampling or eating the bird's eggs and the young. And due to all the above, the dodo went into complete extinction in 1681. This is an example of a man-caused extinction. But there's a company that wants to reverse this error, and they're called Colossal Biosciences. Their theory is that by reing extinct species, they could improve or restore habitats that have missed the animals over the years. As CEO Ben Lamb told Dallas Innovates in January 2023, quote, "Our guiding vision is to restore extinct species and protect endangered species that play integral roles within their ecosystems. Returning extinct keystone species to their original habitats can help restore ecosystems impoverished by their absence and add to biodiversity. And they're not stopping with the dodo. They also want to revive the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. But that brings up a good question, like what are the pros and cons of bringing back animals from extinction? I mean, we know the cons. The cons being, of course, that they

### Segment 29 (140:00 - 145:00) [2:20:00]

could ruin our kitchens. But what about the pros? I mean, outside of it just being cool to maybe, you know, see one in a zoo or something like that, could they actually restore lost ecosystems or bring nature back into balance? And maybe even more interesting, is there some great new advancement that we could learn along the way? Let's start by defining exactly what we mean by extinction. According to the Encyclopedia Bratannica, extinction occurs when a species is diminished because of environmental forces like global change, natural disasters, overexloitation, or habitat fragmentation. A species can also go extinct because of evolutionary changes like poor reproduction, genetic inbreeding, or just a general decline in population numbers, a decline all the way down to zero. Presumably, it's estimated that dozens of species go extinct every day. By 2050, 30 to 50% of all species may be extinct. Yeah, they don't call this the sixth great extinction for nothing. So, if we're going to bring back extinct species, it feels like we should have some very specific criteria in place. So, what kind of criteria can we use to justify bringing animals back? One of the first criteria to consider is just, you know, how easily a species can be brought back to life. Now, this depends on several things, but maybe the most important is just the simple how long has a species been gone? Because the further along it's been gone, the less likely we are to find an intact genome. Yeah, DNA's limit of survival is around a million years. So, we probably have a better chance of bringing Sexy back than the dinosaurs. And yeah, I researched this. Sexy went extinct in 2015. Now, a second consideration is determining whether or not the original cause of extinction could be avoided this next time around because there's no use bringing them back if they're just going to go extinct again. For example, the southern gastric brooding frog went extinct because of a kitrid fungus. So, if it was revived, it's possible that same fungus could kill it off again. And then you have to think about if you know humans caused these animals to go extinct because uh I mean we're not really known for correcting our bad behavior. So who's to say we won't wipe it out again? The third thing is that there should be some kind of consideration for whether or not there's an availability of the species natural habitat. As professor of history Dolly Jurgensson wrote in a paper published in bioscience in 2013, quote, "The International Union for Conservation of Nature developed guidelines that suggest background studies to allow identification of species habitat requirements. Evaluation of potential sites within the former range of the species should be addressed before reintroduction proceeds. And a fourth criterion should consider the impact the species would have on the environment where it'll be reintroduced. I mean, we assume it would be positive, but what if it's not? I mean, if you think about it, it would be kind of the ultimate invasive species. It would be an invasive species across time. It's kind of a wild thought. All of this depends, of course, on whether or not we can actually do this. So, how would deextinction work? In a lot of ways, it's basically just like cloning. And yeah, we can clone an animal if we have wellpreserved cells with intact nuclei. And then those cells can grow in a petri dish. And through a little science magic, we can make them act like embryionic cells. Since the cell's nucleus has genomic DNA, we can transfer an intact nucleus into a donor's egg whose nucleus has been removed. And then we can implant that egg into a surrogate mother and hope that it grows into a healthy baby. Both the donor egg and the surrogate mom would have to be from closely related living species. And this has totally been done before. It was actually first done in 2003 with a pyan ibex. Um they were able to do it with some frozen skin samples. It worked, but it did die within minutes after birth. But a healthy Javin Banting calf was cloned from a frozen skin sample later that year. Uh the Banting isn't extinct, but the experiment showed that de-extinction through cloning is possible. And there are a few different companies working on deextinction projects. One of them is called Revive and Restore Out of California. They're a wildlife conservation group that uses biotechnology for conservation practices. And according to its website, their vision is to quote, "revive biodiversity and restore ecosystems for millennia to come. " Yeah. The company had its first public meeting on deextinction in 2013. Um, the woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon would be the first on their list. For the woolly mammoth, they talked about combining a whole suite of technologies, including bio-engineering, cellular resources, genome research, and reproductive techniques. And they're applying similar tools to the passenger pigeon, but their main focus is on endangered species that need genetic rescue, like the Blackfoot Feric, and Shabbolski's horse. In 2021, they handed off their mammoth project to another company, Colossal Biosciences. Actually, Colossal is based right here in Dallas, right here in my backyard. And yeah, they've gotten a lot of press lately ever since they said that they were going to revive the woolly mammoth. But we got to back out for a second because what Colossal wants to create is not going to be a true woolly mammoth. According to their website, it will be quote more specifically a coldresistant elephant with all the core biological traits of the woolly mammoth. It'll walk like a woolly mammoth. It'll look like one, sound like one, but most importantly, it'll be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth's extinction. Yeah, the DNA in a woolly mammoth is 99. 6% identical to an Asian elephant. That's according to the Mammoth Genome Project. And to fill that last point4% gap, Colossal Scientists are using crisper genome editing. And according to them, the DNA sequence differences shouldn't matter that much, and it won't affect the proteins produced. So yeah, like Colossal said, they're not really looking to recreate 100% accurate woolly mammoth. They're just kind of modifying an Asian elephant's DNA to produce a

### Segment 30 (145:00 - 150:00) [2:25:00]

hybrid animal with mammoth-like traits. But yeah, even with all the technology at our disposal today, we're still looking at like 10 years out before we see a hybrid woolly mammoth. Colossal has several goals for reviving the woolly mammoth, including slowing down the melting of the Arctic perafrost, drive advancement in multiplex genome editing, and saving modern elephants from extinction. So, there are a lot of good reasons to do this. We talked about the pros earlier, but there's still the big question of whether it's ethical or not. Like, there are some scientists that argue that it would be a lot more beneficial to focus on preventing extinction, that we should focus our efforts on climate change and pollution and habitat destruction and overh harvesting. As scientists Paul and Anne Erlick wrote in Yale Environment 360 in 2014, quote, "Spending millions of dollars to try to de-extinct a few species will not compensate for the thousands of populations and species that have been lost due to human activities. " To say nothing of restoring the natural functions of their former habitats. They go on to suggest that the reintroduction of surviving endangered species is already a pretty intensive effort um and that more should be allocated to that than in laboratory created resurrections. Humans are constantly transforming Earth. So reintroducing an extinct species may not be successful at all. And there are other risks like possibly some species could turn out to carry plagues or retroviruses in their genomes. Yeah, that's what we needed, another plague. But for the earliest, the biggest problem is what they call the moral hazard. That's actually a term from economics for when someone's more willing to take a risk when others will be responsible for the costs. And yeah, for some scientists, the moral hazard just far outweighs the benefits and instead we should be focusing on reducing our impact on the environment. Somebody who's looked really deeply into the issue of deextinction is Beth Shapiro, who's a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She's also the author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of Dextinction. In an interview with Smithsonian magazine in 2015, she suggested that deextinction might not be the right answer for our biodiversity crisis. But the technologies being developed for de-extinction could become new tools for conservation efforts. as she told the Smithsonian, quote, "Why not provide populations a little bit of genomic assistance so they can survive in a world that's changing too quickly for natural evolutionary processes to keep up? " You know, it's that famous quote from Jurassic Park that says, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think they should. " But for some of the anti- deextinction scientists, which kind of makes it sound like they're pro-extinction, but anyway, a more fitting quote for um the subject might actually come from the third movie, which is, "Some of the worst things imaginable have been done with the best intentions. " But maybe not. You know, like Bash Shapiro said, deextinction progress could help with other species, including ourselves as we survive in an increasingly hostile world. One really cool example of this came from the University of Pennsylvania's machine biology group. They recently resurrected molecules with antibiotic properties, and they got it from our extinct relatives, the Neanderthalss and Denosovians. Yeah, this is a new thing called molecular deextinction. What they did was they sequenced genome data collected from bones and artifacts from Neanderthalss and denosovians and then they trained an AI model to predict which molecules would make most effective antibiotics. They then created those molecules in a lab and tested them on mice and they found that the molecules were great at fighting off bacterial infections. If these tests are clinically successful in human, this could be a watershed moment because we actually desperately need new antibiotics right now. As you probably know, antibiotic resistant bacteria has become a bit of a problem. In fact, a UN report in 2019 said the death toll from drugresistant infections may rise to 10 million by 2050 if we don't solve the problem soon. Seriously, who would have thought that reviving a woolly mammoth would lead to solutions for antibiotic resistant bacteria? And those are just the potential spin-off benefits that we can think of. I mean, who knows what kind of breakthroughs would come out of it. And honestly, for me, that's a good enough reason to go for it. I mean, I make this argument about the space program all the time that our lives are immeasurably better because of the spin-off technologies that came from the space program. And that's why I'm generally, not always, but generally in favor of these kinds of big scientific swings. You know, you just never know what kind of amazing things could come out of it. I mean, really, what bad thing could possibly come from DNA editing and cloning technology? — [groaning and screaming] — Zoe, you saved me. That's a good girl. Hey, let's go finish the video. that was close. All right, thank you so much for watching. Now, go down below and tell me what species you'd like to see brought back. I want to see some real fights over this. Come on, go do it. Real quick, I want to thank some of our newest Patreon supporters. We've got Dave Schmincki, uh Gail McQueen, Richard Williams, Christa Morgan, Nylin, and Peter Antil. Thank you guys so much. Uh if you would like to join them, get early access to videos and all the cool stuff, and just be part of a really awesome community, you can go to patreon. com/anserswithjo. All right. So, this is actually the last

### Segment 31 (150:00 - 155:00) [2:30:00]

video of the year and I just want to say thank you to all of you from the bottom of my heart for sticking with me this year. Um, it's been a year of big changes that you can see and a lot of them that you can't see. We got some really cool stuff on the way for 2024 and I can't wait to share it with you. And whatever holiday you celebrate, I hope you have a great one. Um, I believe this video is coming out on Christmas Day. So, if you're guzzling egg dog while watching this, merry Christmas. So, now I'm going to go share my Christmas with my savior, Zoe. Yeah, that's you. You're my savior. You showed that predator clone who's the biggest predator in this house, didn't you? That's you. You're the biggest predator in this house. Okay, so this next video is about the history of animals that have traveled to space. And here's the thing about this video. Um, it bombed. Like one of the biggest bombs I've ever made on this channel. And I think the reason is because when I was putting this whole idea together, I was looking at it like, oh, animals in space. That's cute. People like animals. People like space. Home run. But then I realized as I was making it that um well a lot of these animals didn't quite make it back from space. Yeah. The vin diagram of animals that have been to space and animals that have died in space is almost a circle. There's a reason why we were sending animals instead of people. But I still like the video because these heroic animals deserve to be remembered. And if you're the type of person that doesn't like hearing about that kind of thing, you might want to just skip to this point in the video. It's a fair warning. Just a heads up. But if you do stick around, let's celebrate the animal heroes that made our current space race possible. On March 15th, 2009, during launch preparations for SDS19, a free tailed bat, injured and frightened, latched onto the foam insulation of the Space Shell Discovery's fuel tank. It clearly had no idea what was about to happen. As the solid rocket boosters roared to life, ground control noticed a little dark spot against the orange fuel tank. But it was too late to do anything about it. As the shuttle lifted off the pad, they watched the intrepid little bat hold on for dear life, rising higher and higher into the atmosphere. They never saw this bat fall off the fuel tank. It's very possible that it did, but the general belief is that the bat hung on until it eventually ran out of oxygen, slipped the surly bonds of Earth, and echolocated the face of God. Spacebat, as it came to be known, spawned millions of memes and drawings all across the internet. This pluckucky little cave dweller that went out on the wildest ride any bat has ever experienced touched the hearts of nerds around the world. Space bat was not the first animal to get to space, though. There have actually been many animals that have been to space over the years. Um, Space Bat's the only one that did so by choice. So, I thought it'd be cool to do a video where I look at all the animals that have gone to space. You know, we all know about some of the animals that went up in the early days when they were just testing and stuff. I thought it'd be cool to tell their stories. And um there were two things that I learned looking into this. One, there have been a lot of animals that have gone to space. Like, it's actually kind of impossible to get an accurate number. So, I did my best to make a complete list. Some of this is going to have to be estimates uh for reasons I'll get to here in a minute. And second, this is gonna be a much sadder video than I thought I was going to make. Yeah, a lot of these animals didn't make it. So, if you're an animal lover, which I consider myself to be a bit of an animal lover, this might not be the easiest video to get through. The goal here, of course, is to celebrate the lives of these animals and not, you know, dwell on the bad stuff, but still consider that a content warning, I guess. So, humans have been using animals to test aerospace vehicles really from the very beginning. Um, you might remember from my airship video, the Mongolier brothers. They tested their first balloon with a duck, a chicken, and a sheep on board. So, of course, before we put people into space, we did it first with animals. The most famous of which was Leica the dog. Leica was literally a stray on the streets of Moscow when she was found in 1957. She was about 3 years old, possibly a husky terrier mix. She was one of many stray dogs that were brought in based on their size and temperament. Yeah, being that this was going to be a one-way trip, they probably assumed it would be easier to just find a stray dog than, you know, ask someone to give up their pet. But yeah, through the training process of these dogs, Leica kind of rose to the top by being the easiest to work with, the most calm and compliant in the little capsule they build, and eventually got picked for the Sputnik Tube mission. By the way, her name wasn't originally Leica. Uh they called her Little Curly at first, but during a radio interview with one of her trainers, um she kind of went into a bit of a barking fit in the background. So after that, they started calling her Leica. Um, Leica means barker in Russian. So, they trained her by getting her used to smaller and smaller compartments over time. Um, and the idea was that they were going to feed her through an automated feeding device for about a week or so until her oxygen ran out. And

### Segment 32 (155:00 - 160:00) [2:35:00]

of course, during that time, they would monitor her vital signs and stuff to gather data. This is kind of cute. The trainer later confessed that he actually took her home with him the night before the liftoff just to kind of play with her and give her, you know, one nice night before the sendoff. Sputnik 2 with Leica on board. Launched on November 3rd, 1957 on board an intercontinental ballistic missile. Leica became the first living creature to orbit the Earth and her image and name were printed on the front pages of newspapers all around the world. She was and still is one of the most famous dogs of all time. Sadly, the story of her, you know, zooming around the world, eating kibble, having the time of her life was a lie. Fact is, it came out about 50 years later. She actually died within hours of reaching orbit. The cause of the death was overheating. And lie was, you know, the space race. A month earlier, Russia just shocked the world by launching Sputnik one. They didn't want to lose face over a dog. So they lied. [sighs] — There's a dead dog in space. — So yeah, like I said before, it's tragic, but Leica paved the way for human habitation of space. There's a monument for her in Moscow, and she's included on the monument for lost cosminauts at Star City. So, Leica was the first animal to reach orbit, but she was not the first animal that we put in space. That distinction goes to fruit flies. Way back in 1947, scientists wanted to know what cosmic radiation would do to DNA. So, they took a V2 rocket that they had acquired from Germany after the war and put a little compartment on top of it filled with fruit flies. The reason they went with fruit flies um technical term drosphilia melanagaster was because just a year before Herman Joseph Miller had won the Nobel Prize for discovering how to mutate the flies with X-rays. So yeah, why not see if cosmic rays would do the same thing? So on February 20th, 1947, the flies were launched past the Carmen line and parachuted back to Earth. They made it down without incident. Don't get used to that. Anyway, it turned out that the radiation was mostly harmless to fruit flies. Um or so it seemed. It turned out later studies showed higher levels of genetic mutations as well as an impaired immune systems. How they tested these flies immune systems, I don't know. Um maybe tiny masks were involved. But yeah, fruit flies were aerospace pioneers. They weren't the last either. Many fruitfly experiments have gone to space. In fact, there's a fruitfly lab on the International Space Station right now with thousands of test subjects. Yeah, fruit flies have been used in biological and genetic tests for a long time now because they reproduce quickly. So you can see generational changes in a short amount of time. So it's not really any surprise that they'd be using biological tests in space. So after the successful fruitfly launched, scientists decided to make a significant jump in scale. And in June 1948, a monkey was sent to space almost. It was a 9-pound Reese's monkey named Albert. Uh this one fell a bit short, just reaching 63 km, which is sad. Even sadder, Albert didn't make it. He suffocated in the crapped cabin, uh possibly before it even launched. One year later, they tried again with his successor, cleverly named Albert 2. On June 14th, 1949, Albert 2 launched on a V2 and a Roomier capsule. Uh, this vehicle reached 133 km, making him the first primate in space. But on descent, his parachute failed to open and Albert 2 was killed on impact. The good news, if you want to call it good news, was that the health monitors did work all the way up to the end. So, the experimenters were able to prove that, you know, primates could survive a trip to space. So, there's that. A few months later, they did a similar launch on a V2 with a crab eating Macock. This time, this one named Albert 3. Why Albert? I don't know. This one uh unfortunately exploded before it reached Apogee, which ended the short career of Albert 3. Albert made it to space in December 1949, also on a V2, but the parachute failed and he died. In 1950, they flew the last V2 mission, this time with just a mouse on board because I guess they ran out of monkeys. But this mouse reached space, came back down, learned how to cook, and took over the operations of a French restaurant. Except no, its parachute failed, and it also died. Excuse me just a second. I love you. I would never let anything happen to you. I love you so much. From here, the US did their tests on Aerob rockets, which are basically our version of a V2. The first launch was another monkey. This one went by Albert 5. New rocket. Apparently the same shitty parachutes because they failed and he also didn't survive. Just so I'm clear, the only animal that survived so far were fruit flies. That's the one that worked. Okay. So while the US was lowering the worldwide population of monkeys, the Soviets were experimenting with dogs. Yeah. Leica was the first dog to go into orbit. There were other dogs before her that were suborbital. The first two were named Desic and Zigan. Uh they were launched together on July 22nd, 1951 and a Soviet R1V rocket, which is basically their version of a V2. They reached an altitude of 110 kilometers. And guess what? They actually survived. Both of them. That's right. The godless commies actually brought them home alive, making

### Segment 33 (160:00 - 165:00) [2:40:00]

them the first mammals to survive a trip to space. Saen became the pet of a Russian diplomat, but Desi went back up on a launch just a week later, this time with a dog named Lucy, making it the first mammal to go to space twice. But they did both die in a parachute accident. Back in the US on September 20th, 1951, they launched a monkey called Yoro into space. Uh they started to name it Albert 6, but then Wisely decided maybe it was time to retire that name because of all the, you know, dying. But yeah, Euro went up this time with 11 mice tagging along. And the name change must have worked because finally, finally the parachute worked. And after ascending to 72 km, York and his 11 mouse friends landed safely in the New Mexico desert and then died by overheating in the sun before the rescue people got to them. On May 21st, 1952, two crab eating Makox named Patricia and Mike went up on an Aerob rocket. They only reached 26 km, but the parachutes actually worked and they actually survived finally. Okay, so jump forward about 5 years. Uh, there have been some more tests, some more successful than others. The Soviets have gotten Leica into orbit, and the space race is really heating up. Under pressure to match the Soviets, the US started testing on Jupiter missiles. And on December 13th, 1958, a squirrel monkey named Gordo flew on a Jupiter AM13 to an altitude of 500 km. And no, the parachutes didn't work. Gordo died. A little over 6 months later, on May 28th, 1959, a similar launch took place that included a Reese's Makok named Abel and a squirrel monkey named Miss Baker. They went up to 500 km. And this time, guys, they lived. They lived even though they experienced a mind-blowing 38 gs at launch. Humans pass out at around 9 G's. So, yes, they survived the launch. Sadly, Abel did die soon after from a complication. Um, they had implanted sensors in both of them, health sensors, and when they went to remove them, Abel suffered some complications from the anesthesia. Miss Baker, however, lived another 25 years. She was a popular attraction at the Naval Aerospace Medical Center in Florida and later the US Space Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. She didn't die until 1984 and was possibly the oldest recorded squirrel monkey ever. Total badass. And if you're ever in Huntsville, there's a monument for Miss Baker where you can pay your respects by leaving a banana. Shortly after Abel and Baker's flight, the Soviets launched a rabbit into space named Marfuchia. She flew with two dogs, plus some other animals and a Soviet R2A rocket. Marfuchia and the pups made it home safe. Finally, these animals are going to start surviving. We're past the worst of it. In fact, the first animals to orbit the Earth and live were, of course, launched by the Soviets. It was a pair of dogs named Belela and Stroka in August of 1960. Actually, that was a whole menagerie of animals on that flight, including a rabbit, 40 mice, two rats, 15 flasks of fruit flies, some plants, and a partridge in a pear tree. Fun fact, later on Nikita Kruef, the Soviet premiere, gave one of the puppies of Stroka to Caroline Kennedy. Um, apparently the descendants of those puppies are still out there somewhere, but I couldn't track them down. I thought that would be fun, but I couldn't find them. Streulka herself along with Bela lived a long and fruitful life, and after they died, their bodies were preserved and put on display at the Moscow Cosmonics Memorial Museum. Okay, so this is where things start to really heat up uh between the Soviets and the Americans. They're preparing to launch people into space. And in the US, this meant testing the Mercury Redstone rocket. So in January of 1961, the US flew a chimp named Ham on a Mercury Redstone 2, making him the first great ape in space. So Ham had been trained to uh manipulate a series of levers and buttons and stuff to see if he could still perform those while he was weightless. Uh and this was a 16-minute flight. They noticed only a half second delay, which actually proved that people would be capable of controlling craft in space. That sounds like kind of a duh statement today, but up to this point, all the animals that had gone up to space were just kind of cargo basically with electrodes all over him and stuff. Ham was the first one that was actually doing things up there. Ham was on a suborbital flight. It went up to 252 km and thank the gods, his parachute worked and he survived. Uh, this time it was a splash down in the sea, which also might have been a first. In fact, there's a photo where he famously shook hands with the naval commander that rescued him. — Ham lived out a long and happy life in zoos and he died in 1983. So a few months after Ham's flight in 1961, the Soviets launched Sputnik 4, one of the craziest space stories ever uh with a dog on board named Chernooka or Blackie. But Chernooka had a very interesting co-pilot. It was a mannequin that they named Ivan Ivanovich. It was wearing a prototype space suit loaded with sensors obviously to test out the rigors of the suit and the stresses that a human would feel. And inside the limbs of this suit, they stuff samples of human blood, which makes sense, but also um 80 mice, several guinea pigs, and various reptiles like you do. Even wilder, they ejected Ivan from the capsule on the way down.

### Segment 34 (165:00 - 170:00) [2:45:00]

So yeah, this was one of the options that the Soviets were considering in returning the cosmods down to Earth. They didn't know if it would be safer to just land them in the capsule or to have them sort of yeet it out and parachute down like a skydiver or a paratrooper. So, they tested both on Sputnik 4. Uh, Trinouska came down with a capsule and Ivan and his animal stuffed limbs came down separately and they all survived. Oh my god, the Americans were just splatting so many monkeys and the Russians were literally throwing animals out of their capsules and they still survived. I've officially gone from, "Oh my god, so many animals died to, oh survived. " One last little cherry on top of the story is that um Ivan actually came down on farmland that were owned by some locals and so they rushed out thinking he was a real person to help him and then they got warned off by paratroopers that were nearby. Like imagine if they got to him and opened up his space suit and literally like hundreds of animals spilled out. This funding for was bonkers. So a few weeks later they basically repeated that exact same mission uh this one under the name Vastto one. And instead of filling the space suit with a bunch of random animals, they filled it with Yuri Gaggeran. And the era of human space flight was officially begun. And I think the ultimate takeaway here is that, you know, you hear all about the first humans in space and how far we've come in human space flight and whatnot. U you know, how far we've come since then and everything, but we rarely hear how much testing was needed to get there. I mean, this literally went back decades before the first man missions. And who would have thought that of all the technical wizardry involved in rockets that it takes to get to space that one of the things they struggled with the most was the parachutes. It took a lot of sacrifices by some extraordinary animal astronauts to get us there. So the next time you watch in awe as a crew heads out to the ISS or on the next moon missions, just take a minute to give thanks to our intrepid animal friends and the path that they carved so that we can live out our dreams. There's so many more though. A second chimp named Enus went up on November 29th, 1961. This one actually went into orbit, making him the only chimp to actually orbit the Earth. So like if Ham was the Simeon Allen Shepard, then Enus was the Simeon John Glenn. Enus was scheduled to orbit the Earth three times, but was de-orbited after two. Um, unfortunately, this accomplishment kind of got overshadowed by the fact that Gagarin and Ted off had already gone up. The first cat in space was launched by France in 1963. It was a launch performed by God help me deer medicine — or Surma. I'll stick with Surma. 14 strays were drafted into the program. Uh they were tested for fitness before one cat was picked to fly. And she was given the name Pheliset. And what they were most concerned with was learning how the brain responded to microgravity. So they surgically implanted electrodes into her brain. On October 18th, 1963, Feliset took to the skies in a Veronique AGI sounding rocket over Algeria. And she performed like a champ. Panic would have made her brain scans useless, but she stayed chill for the entire 15-minute ride. It took her up to 160 km. And yes, the parachutes worked. She totally survived the trip. Unfortunately, Cerna really, really wanted to know what was going on inside of her brain. So, they euthanized her to run some tests. In 2019, a statue of Felicette was installed at the International Space University in Strasburg, France. A second cat was sent to space by Surma on October 24th, 1963, but the flight ran into some difficulties and prevented her recovery. The first frogs in space were launched by the USSR in 1961. The first animals to circle the moon were two Russian step tortoises along with an assortment of worms and flies. This was on the Zand 5 mission which splashed down in the Indian Ocean and all the inhabitants were recovered alive. Those Russian tortoises beat the Americans on Apollo 8 by just a few months. Um, the Zand 5 mission is kind of considered by many to be the last time the USSR beat the US in the early space race. The first spiders in space went up on Skyab in 1973 to see how well they spun webs in zero gravity. And if you're curious, the answer is uh not so great at first, but they got the hang of it. And that experiment was actually suggested by a high school student. So that's cool. The spiders were named Arabella and Anita. Uh, and if you want to see them, you're in luck. They were preserved and are on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Chantelli, Virginia. Speaking of bugs, let's talk about nematodes. Nematodes are little wormlike creatures with really short lifespan. So, they're ideal for testing the effects of multiple generations of life in space. And because of that, they've become kind of legendary in space flight research. The first ones to go into space were actually on the Apollo 17 mission along with bacteria, sea monkeys, and five mice named Fi, Fo, Fum, and Fooy. Those didn't actually land on Apollo 17, by the way. They went around in orbit with the command module. Uh but yeah, nematodes have been used in countless space experiments over the years. One of the most famous ones was actually the last flight of Colombia in 2003. Yeah, they actually found living nematodes amongst the wreckage after Colombia broke apart in the sky. That's how hearty these things are. Now, mind you, they were not the nematodes that went up on the shuttle. They were either the great or great grandchildren of the originals. That's how fast they reproduce. More recently, in 2017, nematodes were named as one of the two animals that could become the first

### Segment 35 (170:00 - 175:00) [2:50:00]

interstellar travelers. Now, Professor Philip Luben of UC Santa Barbara discussed sending frozen nematodes on a future laser propelled space trip outside our solar system. Cuz not only can these guys survive freezing and thawing, most can fertilize their own eggs. Whether or not it's cool to send living creatures outside of our solar system across the universe is another question. It's a bit yikesy for me. The other animal professor Luben suggested uh should be a surprise to absolutely no one. Tardigrades, also known as water bears. As most of you already know, they were first singled out as candidates for space research back in 1964. It wasn't really till 2007, though that multiple tardigrade experiments got started. The best known of these experiments involved actually exposing tardigrades to the vacuum of space. Uh 3,000 water bears went into a vacuum on an ISA satellite. Now, ultraviolet radiation did kill some of them, but most of them survived. Tardigrades are crazy. And in 2019, a privately funded lunar lander named Barachet set out with a payload that also included tardigrades. Um, a computer error caused it to crash into the moon, unfortunately. But according to analysis of the crash, they may have survived. They had been dehydrated before the launch. And when that happens, they enter almost like a spore state um that makes them almost indestructible. It also makes them, to the best of my knowledge, the first non-human animals on the moon. and they suffered the fate of many of the first animal astronauts on Earth. It's great liftoff, but didn't stick the landing. And we'll find out someday if they survived once we've successfully colonized the moon. Maybe a hundred years from now, some future astronauts will make their way to the bear sheet wreckage and find out once and for all if these tardigrades made it through. And when they do, they'll know that the only reason they got to that point were thanks to Leica, multiple Alberts, and many other animals that came before. And there's so many more, guys. Literally hundreds of animals have gone to space. And you haven't. This was such a rabbit hole that I wasn't expecting. Um, I left a lot out of this. I kind of do a quick rundown of some more interesting ones over on Nebula. I always put extra stuff in the videos over there. Um, thankfully after a certain point, most of these animals survive, but in the beginning, yeah, yikes. Animal testing, of course, is not restricted to the space industry. In fact, you'd kind of be hardressed to find any industry that's completely free of it. And it's a hotly debated topic. You know, some people will say that no amount of animal testing is okay because they can't consent to it. Others will say it's just, you know, a necessary evil that's benefited all of us whether we agree with it or not. But yeah, I'm curious to hear what you guys think in the comments. You know, was it all worth it? Could we have gotten the same data in more ethical ways? Talk about it down below. All right, that's it for now. You guys go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week, stay safe, and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care. — The Marvel superhero Daredevils, a story of a mildmannered lawyer named Matt Murdoch who is blind but can see through the power of echolocation. I'm sorry. Shouldn't this be Batman's Thing? There's nobody over there. Anyway, in the comics and the TV shows, it gives him a supernatural ability to perceive the world around him, and he uses that to fight crime and to hook up with She-Hulk. Well done, sir. Well, it might sound impossible to believe, but this is an actual thing that some blind people can do. Maybe not the fighting crime and she-hul stuff, but the echolocation. Yeah. One great example is Daniel Kish. U this is a guy who makes clicking sounds with his tongue when he's walking around or with a cane, and he kind of uses what he hears coming back to him to interpret the space around him. He can even ride a bike and navigate through his neighborhood this way. And this isn't just some like superhuman ability that only he can do. He actually teaches this to blind children. uh he does it through this organization called World Access for the Blind. And this, of course, is a method of seeing that many animal species use like the aforementioned bat. Animals definitely have a different way of perceiving the world, and we've kind of learned over the years how to use their abilities to heighten our own perception. So, today, let's take a look at some of the weirdest animal senses that you just don't have. You know, sometimes I get why some people hate science. I do. I get it because it's constantly revealing things that we can't see. and reminding us of how narrow our perception is. From small things like bacteria and viruses and atoms to gigantic things like galaxies and dark matter and your mom. The fact is we can see, hear, touch, sense, smell, whatever, just a fraction of the world around us. Visible light is the most obvious answer. You know, we know that light is just a small part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, right? But the narrowness of that spectrum is it's even more amazing when you think about it because technically the size of the wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, they go from infinitely small to infinitely huge. And out of that infinity, the range of what we can see is only 320 nmters wide. Luckily, we got this here gelatinous blob that can brainificate real good. And we've been able to construct instruments that go beyond our sense of sight as well as our other senses to give us a more complete picture of the world. But many animal species in the world don't need to brainificate. They can sensificate things that we can't.

### Segment 36 (175:00 - 180:00) [2:55:00]

Here are some of the weirdest examples. Since we've already been talking about it, let's start with echolocation. Bats are famous for it, as well as dolphins and other tooth whales who produce sounds to help them navigate. And these sounds are loud, like they have to travel really long distances and carry enough energy to bounce all the way back to the animal and still be heard. Heard by a sense of hearing that's obviously very, very sensitive. So, that actually raises a really interesting question. How can they make such loud sounds mere centimeters, even millimeters away from these really sensitive ears without actually hurting them? Well, bats anyway, it turns out, uh, they actually have a mute button in their inner ear. It's a muscle that pushes against one of the inner earbones to keep it from vibrating when it chirps. Thus, protected, they're able to pinpoint prey from a distance of up to 10 m. Sperm whales do the same thing, but their echolocation range is closer to 500 meters. Norwalls that are basically a tooth whale with one really, really long tooth. Um, they can actually echoloccate vertically to find open water in regions that are covered with ice. This is important because they have to surface so they can breathe. Echolocation can provide a sort of x-ray vision as well, uh, especially underwater. As I'm sure you've heard your whole life, we are 60some% water. So, if a dolphin's echolocation signals are traveling through water, then they can travel through you a little bit. Dolphins use this trick to find fish that are hiding in loose sand. But I think the craziest thing about dolphin echolocation is that they might be kind of telepathic. There's a long-standing theory that dolphins can recreate the images they see with their echolocation using their own mouth clicks and pulses. If that's true, they might be able to transmit images to another dolphin. At this point, the theory is highly speculative. Um, you know, it's kind of hard to brain scan one dolphin, let alone two. But they have been observed communicating with each other using the same vocalizations they echoloccate with. So maybe, but seriously, how cool is that? I mean, like instead of having to describe something that you saw with, you know, words or trying to draw it to somebody, you could just blast sounds at someone and they just see it. And who knows, maybe one day we could brainificate a device that would be able to decipher their clicks into a hologram or something that we could see. That'd be cool. So, if echolocation is seeing with sound, tremor sense might be hearing with touch. So, I mentioned the ability of elephants to communicate with low frequency vibrations before. Um, the more highbrow of you might recall my video about the brown note. Well, what I didn't catch in my research way back then was that elephants can actually hear these vibrations through their feet. As we all know, sound waves travel faster through solids than through air. So, while elephant calls can travel great distances over the air, they can travel even further and faster through the ground. So yeah, elephants developed really sensitive feet that can hear through the ground. Yeah, researchers have actually seen elephants kind of striking poses that allow for better tactile listening. They'll some sort of pause and then sometimes raise a leg or touch a leg or a toe to the ground just for a moment to kind of listen. And this gives them a little extra time to prepare for a threat. Um, for example, if they hear another elephant warn of a predator with their ears, they'll just flee and get out of there because they know they don't have much time. But if that warning comes through the dirt, they'll figure that they've got a little bit of extra time and just kind of huddle close together instead. The tremor sense works through clusters of specialized nerves around the feet. These are processed in the same parts of the brain that process touch, but some of the vibrations are also carried all the way through the skeletal system to the inner ear, which processes it as sound. This is kind of how bone conducting headphones work, except it's conducting all the way from your feet. And there are some correlations that can be found in the brains of deaf and deaf blind people. Deaf blind people have the ability to sort of hear finger movements because their brains have moved that processing to the auditory module of the brain. And because you and me baby ain't nothing but mammals. Elephants use this form of communication to find mates. Sort of a an underground tremor based tinder. Trembler sounds like a serial killer dating app. Next up is heat sense. So obviously we can all sense heat. Um, one of the very first things that any parent teaches a kid is not to touch a hot stove or in my case, it's a lesson that you learn on your own once. Well, the reason that we feel heat is because the signals that travel through ion channels in our nerves. Now, we have different channels for different sensations. And one heat sensing channel that we have is called TRPV1. By the way, the reason that we feel heat when we eat chili peppers and that kind of thing is because the capsain in the chili peppers um activate that same pathway, that TRPV1 pathway. And if you've ever wondered why mint feels cold, it's because it activates a different receptor called TRPV8. TRPV8, as you might have guessed, detects cold. So there you go. And these ion channels do more than just send signals to the brain and can also activate your immune system. In fact, some studies have shown that activating that TRPV1 channel with capsain can actually kind of prime your immune system to fight cancer. It's complicated and not all the studies agree, but it does hint at some more health benefits of spicy foods, which is pretty cool. Anyway, when it comes to sensing heat, the human TRPV1 channels have a threshold of 43 degrees

### Segment 37 (180:00 - 185:00) [3:00:00]

C or 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Obviously, that's useful for preventing burns, but animals with a more precise heat sense find it even more useful. Take vampire bats for instance. They have extra sensitive TRPV1 receptors in their nose. Those activate at 30° C. This is cooler than the temperature of blood. What this means is that they can literally see blood vessels underneath the skin. It's kind of like a natural stud finder. Bloodfinder. — Certain snakes also use heat sensing to find food. Vipers, pythons, and boas have pits in their faces that are equipped with ion channels to map thermal radiation, basically allowing them to see in the dark. And their TRPV1 ion channels can detect temperatures of 28 degrees C and higher. They basically have predator vision, which is appropriate because they are predators. But hey, now you know how to be invisible to a snake. Mudbath. Now for a really cool one. Electroensing. Electric shocks are uh annoying to human beings mostly, but some animals use electricity to see in ways that we can't. Sharks are a famous example. In 1935, a scientist observed a shark reacting negatively to a rusty wire. Uh this reaction occurred even when the shark was blindfolded, which by the way, apparently you can blindfold sharks. Anyway, a biologist and physicist named Adriana Common worked out that sharks and other animals like fish can actually sense electromagnetic fields. The sense was eventually pinned down to these organs in their snout called ampuleta of Laurenini. These are basically pores filled with a kind of jelly and then nerves in those pores respond to changes in electrical potential which then helps them to find prey in murky water. The m salamander does this in a similar way. Um are essentially blind so they just use electro sensing to locate obstacles in their environment. Another animal that uses electro sensing is the duck build platypus because of course it does. Just throw that on the massive pile of weird things around the platypus. And finally, bees are thought to be able to sense the electrical fields of flowers. Yeah, bees can tell the difference between real flowers and fake flowers because of their electrical charge. And they can also make a flower positively charged, which kind of works as a dinner bell for other bees. Bees, by the way, are the first animal that scientists have noticed that have used electro and dry air. Um, all the other animals that we're talking about here are underwater or in areas of high humidity at the very least. And some think that this opens the door to other nonbe insects to have a similar sense, but research is ongoing. And while we're talking about bees, another cool thing they can do is they have built-in natural compasses. Bees can orient themselves to the Earth's magnetic field thanks to granules of iron in their abdomen. This gives them the ability to accurately navigate up to 12 km from the hive. The blind salamander I mentioned earlier can also orient itself to the Earth's magnetic field. Some bacteria can too. And then there's the birds. Some bird species migrate thousands of miles every year. Um, the Bartailed Godwit for instance, it travels 30,000 kilometers in a trip that takes it from Alaska to New Zealand and back. So, like how do they navigate that? This gets weird. There are some studies that are suggesting that they do it through quantum entanglement. Yeah. Okay. So, bear with me here. There's a type of protein called a cryptochrome. And cryptochromes are known to create pairs of entangled particles when it interacts with light. Well, when they create these particles, the spin state of these particles is affected by magnetic fields. And they found several types of cryptochromes in the eyes of birds. So, in theory, the Earth's electromagnetic fields could possibly impact the spin state of these entangled pairs, and those changes could be detected by the retinal nerves, which would allow the birds to effectively see the Earth's magnetic fields. I imagine it would be like seeing a super highway in the sky that's made up of auroras all the time. What's even crazier is that human eyes contain more than enough cryptochrome to actually do this ourselves. What we lack is the neural hardware to interpret these magnetic effects and possibly a chemical that activates the cryptochrome. But it's thought that birds do have that. And um yeah, it's it's still a bit speculative, but it's an interesting answer to a big natural mystery. Okay, we know that dogs have a great sense of smell, but it turns out that dogs can actually diagnose disease. This is amazing. Dogs have five times as many oldactory receptors as we do, and their brains have 40 times the smell processing power. And this is why dogs can be trained to sniff out scent trails, bomb materials, a bag of weed stuff to weigh down your backpack, or so I'm told. Well, since 1989, scientists have been studying the ability of dogs to smell cancer. They've been able to correctly detect everything from skin, lung, and other cancers from urine samples. And they can also smell cancer on a patient's breath. The rates of detection tend to vary from study to study, but they're routinely above the 50% that you would expect if it was random chance. An August 2021 study reported lung cancer detection rates of 78% from breath and 87. 8% from urine. When breath and urine samples were used together, the sniffer dogs had a 97. 6% detection rate. According to a research group working on this called Insichu, training dogs to detect cancer is actually pretty complicated because the smells are made up of around like 4,000 volatile organic compounds uh compared

### Segment 38 (185:00 - 190:00) [3:05:00]

to, you know, maybe one or two that a bomb sniffing dog has to pick up. Studies are still ongoing. Dogs aren't like used as diagnostic tools in hospitals just yet because, you know, well, CT scans are still way more accurate and uh well, let's just be honest, there's more money to be made with it. Insichu recommends teams of five highly trained dogs to detect cancer. Um, I'm not sure if the whole team of highly trained dogs would cost less than a CT scan, but maybe I find this really interesting, but I'm not really sure exactly, you know, like how it would work in practice. I mean, if you're at the point that you're, you know, going to the doctor because you're worried you might have cancer, um, you're probably going to want a definite answer at that point more than the word of a dog. But if we can isolate and detect some of the chemicals that dogs are responding to, we might be able to include smell samples as part of a regular physical, you know, just increase the chance of catching diseases before the symptoms show up. Uh there's actually a video on the way on this exact topic. Um it's a thing that's in the works and uh no, it's really cool. So yeah, um the fact that dogs can smell cancer, super interesting. And last on our list, we come to an animal with the best sense of taste in the entire animal kingdom. And the reason it has such an amazing sense of taste is because it basically tastes with its whole body. The answer, a catfish. Yeah, I really didn't expect that one when I started this. A catfish is basically a giant tongue with fins. Its body is covered with 175,000 cheoceptors, which are basically taste buds. For comparison, you have around 10,000 on your tongue. What it doesn't have all over its body are scales, which is kind of weird for a fish, but catfish is a weird animal. The chemo receptors are especially packed into those whiskers that give it its name. Those whiskers are actually called barbells, by the way, which makes a lot less sense to me than whiskers, but whatever. It uses these barbells and the chemoceptors all over its body to navigate and hunt down live prey in murky water where there's not much light. Yeah, catfish have a reputation as being carrying eaters, but they mostly eat live prey like insects and small fish and sometimes people. From 1998 to 2008, there were reports out of India of a man-eating catfish. The legend has it that the fish got a taste for human flesh after consuming a body that was um a leftover remains from a seaside funeral p. But uh who knows? I mean, maybe it got a taste from just sniffing somebody's leg when they were waiting through the water. Either way, there are three known cases with eyewitnesses of people getting dragged into the water by a giant catfish, and their remains were never found. That is a thing that happened. Siri, cancel my noodling trip. Okay, so all this is cool, but um what does that mean to us? How can we use these super senses to our advantage? Well, I talked about the cancer sniffing dogs, but there are other things scientists are using like echolocation to find cracks in structural beams. Yeah, finding hairline cracks in the supports of an oil rig is especially challenging. Um not only are the cracks underwater, they're usually buried in sand. So yeah, using the example of dolphins hunting fish in the sand, they use echolocation to find fractures that they otherwise wouldn't be able to see. The elephant's ability to hear trimmers has possible applications for hearing aids. Yeah, remember how elephants hear partially by bone conduction? Well, modeling elephant earbones could help improve the clarity of hearing aids that kind of work in a similar way. Heat sensing ion channels are being studied for pain relief. Um, we're actually figuring out how to chemically block those signals thanks to studying the heat pits on snakes. And finally, the tasting powers of catfish have been studied for their insight into animal behavior, especially regarding food. Kind of sounds strange, but studying catfish has actually led to a greater understanding of how different tastes encourage animals and humans to eat a healthy diet. In a way, we're using animal super senses to amplify our own senses, just like all the instruments we've created over the years. I love these stories cuz it just it never it just shows that you never know where a breakthrough is going to come from. Like you always hear about these studies where somebody's trying to figure out if snails prefer Mountain Dew or Sprite or something, you know, random like that, and you're always like, why are people studying this? This is why. because there's always something that you can learn in it and you never know what problem that's going to fix. And I for one think that's pretty cool. Any I missed? Are there any animal senses that you know about that I didn't cover here? Talk about it in the comments. I'd love to hear about it. All right, that's it for now. You guys go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week. Uh stay safe and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care. Okay. Uh ladies and gentlemen, this is Zoe. Zoe is a French bulldog, which is a breed that really shouldn't exist. It's a combination of a Boston Terrier, a pug, and a English bulldog. It's kind of a franken dog. And uh they were designed really for only one purpose, and that is to look cute, and she's good at it. What she's not good at is breathing. This squat nose of hers is what they call brachiophalic, which means that she winds up snoring throughout the night like a freaking chainsaw. And also because of her uh bratwurst shaped body, she can't actually get down to clean herself after she does her business. So I have to do that for her lest little bits of nastiness wind up in our, you know, our bed in our clothes. In fact, because of the way that they're built, French bulldogs can't actually have sex. So the

### Segment 39 (190:00 - 195:00) [3:10:00]

only way to breed them is through artificial incimination, which is why they're so expensive. But who cares? So, what if they can't, you know, reproduce or clean themselves or breathe? They weren't designed for that. They were designed to be companion dogs. And for that, they are incredibly good. Zoe all the ways just wants to be right next to me. Except for when I'm trying to record a video, clearly. All right, you can go. And now I have dog hair all over me. Dogs have been bred for all kinds of purposes, from hunting to protection to hurting, getting moles out of the garden, even racing. Over thousands of years, we've transformed wolves into helpful, even life-saving companions. That we've changed dogs over time is no surprise. What might be a surprise is how much they've changed us. Along the way in our evolution from advanced primates to hairless advanced primates, there have been several technologies that have helped speed things along. our ability to harness fire, our ability to communicate through language, our ability to make weapons out of stone and metal. But perhaps the thing that set us apart from all the other animals most was our ability to use other animals for our benefit. Human beings are only so strong. We're only so fast. We can only perceive so much through our senses. So, there's only so much that we can achieve. But we eventually realize that if we harness the abilities of other animals, we could achieve so much more. We could be as strong as an ox. fast as a horse. And we could be as perceptive as a dog. Dogs are a technology. One of our very first technologies. Dogs and humans go way back, long before anything resembling recorded history, which means we have no record of there ever being a time without dogs. It's believed that domestication of dogs began around 30,000 years ago. This is when we first start to see dog bones being buried alongside human bones, or at least in proximity of human bones. So, the theory goes that humans were hunter gatherers and wolves at the time weren't just seen as a competitor, but a threat. They hunted in packs. They were smart. They hunted the same prey we did. They also hunted during the day like we did. But along the way, some of these wolves realized that picking off the scraps that the humans leave behind is a lot easier way to get food than hunting on their own. And these were probably some of the more docile wolves that didn't want to have to fight the other wolves for food. These docsile wolves grew to trust the humans and vice versa. Over time they began to rely on him. It became sort of a symbiotic relationship. And the pack mentality shared by both species kind of helped them become sort of one integrated family of sorts in a in a social sense. You know, these wolves would protect the humans from other predators and the humans would provide food and shelter. And eventually they learned how to hunt together. And over time, humans learned that if you bred the more docsile dogs with other more docsile dogs, you would create even more docsile dogs. So they started breeding for this and other traits. So that by the time we actually started writing things down, we had specialized, intelligent, loyal breeds of dogs that made our life completely different. It was only after we domesticated dogs that we were able to domesticate other animals. humans began to realize that instead of chasing after that big beef machine or hunting down and killing that thing that grows our clothes, we could just, you know, put a thing up around them. Of course, putting them inside of a thing made it impossible for them to escape predators, which means that you would have to watch them all the time, which would be especially difficult at night. Dogs made that possible. They not only protected the herds, they also kept them in line and ran runaways back in there. A well-trained team of dogs could do the work of dozens of people, freeing them up to do more important things. Thanks to dogs, we went from hunter gatherers to farmers and ranchers. Of course, the agricultural revolution led to the rise of cities and trade routes, money, mathematics, and language to keep track of all that stuff. It led to civilization. Now, would we have gotten there without dogs? Maybe. But then, maybe not. Once upon a time, we were just a fledgling species trying to eek out our survival just like any other species. I've talked in videos before about how we almost went extinct a couple of times. It was pretty precarious. Without this beneficial partnership, who knows? We actually partner with and lived with dogs for so long that some people actually think that both of our genetics have been changed because of it. It's led to a connection with dogs that we just don't have with any other species. To the point that many people think that their dogs can read their minds. But can they actually read our minds? Or are they just so attuned to our behavior and our micro expressions that they can tell what we're thinking before we outwardly express it? For example, my dogs always seem to know when I'm going to leave the house to go take a meeting or go to work or go do something. Uh when I get up in the morning, even if I'm not doing anything different, you know, I stumble out of bed, I throw on some clothes, I put them outside, I put some food in their bowl. I'm not doing anything different, but I can tell they're acting differently toward me. They can tell something's up. And of course, I'm so attuned to their micro

### Segment 40 (195:00 - 200:00) [3:15:00]

expressions that I can tell that they can tell what's going on. You know, I can I can see the sadness in their face when they can tell that I'm going to be going away for a while. And I can see the anticipation and the excitement when they can tell that they're going to be going to the park. In fact, a recent study in the journal Scientific Reports shows that dogs make more facial expressions when a human is looking at them than when a person is looking away, even if there's no food or treat reward involved. And this indicates that it's not some kind of subconscious movement on the dog's part. It's actually a way for them to communicate with us. And dogs have one of the most expressive faces in the animal kingdom. It could be argued that our faces and their faces kind of co-evolved to be able to read each other's expressions. And dogs also seem to be particularly attuned to our gestures in ways that other animals aren't. There's sort of a famous experiment called the object choice task that some researchers have done where basically a person points to a cup and the dog knows that the person is pointing to that cup. In other words, they're asking does the dog know what we mean when we point at the cup? And it turns out that they do sort of genuinely have an instinctive knowledge that we are pointing at an object. It's not about our finger. hand. It's a symbolic gesture to something else. Not many other animals actually pick up on this. Not even chimps, our closest genetic relative. And according to champion dog trainer Kale McCann, sometimes a look is all it takes. — Because we know dogs are masters at reading body language, we utilize these responses to teach our dogs basic things like sit or lie down or even more advanced things like highlevel competitive agility training. If I turn my head to my left, my dog will run to my left side. If I turn my head to my right, my dog will run to my right side. And I can even use that head change to teach her to go back and forth to either side of my body. — But some people say just the fact that the dogs can bond with us so strongly that they can, you know, guess our gestures so well shows that there's a lot of co-evolution that's happened here. There's a really interesting article about it. I'll link to it in the description. Now, one last point about the human dog connection that I think is interesting is the fact that we haven't really needed dogs for work purposes in general for quite some time, but there's still dogs around. In fact, there's more of them than ever before. And yes, some of them are still working dogs that serve a special purpose. But most of them are just pets, just dogs that we keep around just because we have this instinctual feeling that our lives are better with them in it. And maybe part of this reason is oxytocin. When humans and dogs interact with each other, we both produce this hormone called oxytocin, which is often called the cuddle hormone. It produces feelings of love and closeness. we actually have a physiological response to each other. Okay, so this is where the cat people are probably pulling their hair out and screaming at their phones because I'm kind of making it sound like dogs are the only animals that people have a connection with. And of course, that's not true. In fact, a lot of the things I'm saying about dogs could also be applied to cats. You know, cats were very useful back in the day, especially on sailing ships and in cities where they were mousers and rers, if it wasn't for cats, we would probably be overrun with rodents and snakes. And yes, of course, we formed a bond with them that for many people has ever been as strong as a connection that a human could have with a dog. I have a cat myself, actually. He's not here. He's out probably sitting on a window sill somewhere being a cat. All of which brings me to one last point, which is that the whole human dog connection thing, the whole symbiotic relationship that we have isn't unique to humans and dogs. It's not even unique to humans. We've worked with and bonded with horses, the aforementioned cats, many different types of beasts of burden, even birds of prey. But it turns out this is not that uncommon. You know, we like to think of nature as a well, a dog eat dog world where every species is battling each other out for supremacy. But in fact, inner species relationships and partnerships are common and quite vital. Birds often partner with crocodiles to clean their teeth for them. Lampres clean out the gills of sharks. And crabs often carry sea urchins on their back for protection. But humans have bonded more strongly with more animals than any other animal in the world. And maybe that's what made all the difference. Maybe our ability to harness the advantages of other animals is what set us apart. Maybe the lesson here is that instead of being competitive, being cooperative yields the best results. Maybe it's that side of our nature that actually helps us out the most. Cuz if dogs have taught us anything, it's that doing things together is a lot more fun. So I'll put the question to you. Do you have a dog? Do you ever feel like it can read your mind? Do you feel like you have a special connection with a dog or a cat or any other kind of animal? Talk about in the comments. All right, thanks again for watching. You guys go out now. Have an eye opening week and I'll see you on Monday. Love you guys. Take care. Now, on that note, I think that's a good place to end this compilation. Now, if you're using this extra long video the way I think most of you are, then it's probably like 3:00 a. m. right now and you're fast asleep. in which case um you are strong. You deserve love. You can do hard things. People are proud of you. Keep going.

### Segment 41 (200:00 - 200:00) [3:20:00]

Stop chewing your nails. But if you're still up, let's keep this fruit salad going with a strawberry emoji in the comments. We'll do strawberries this time. Uh you know, just to show you watch the whole thing, which is an accomplishment. This was definitely a longer one. As always, thanks for all the support. We got a lot of really fun uh new videos coming down the pipes and cool topics on the way. I hope you enjoy them. But until next time, go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week, stay safe, and I'll see you on Monday. Love you guys. Take care.