Joe Rogan and William von Hippel on the Strangeness of the Octopus

So one of the really lovely things that you can do is look for the past and then say, well, how does that manifest itself today? And one of my favorite examples is the whites to your eyes. So chimpanzees have brown eyes, the sclera around the cornea, and ours are white. Why would you do that? Well, it advertises the direction of your gaze. Why would you advertise the direction of your gaze? Because what that says is that on average, as a human, when I look over there and see something, I want you to know that I saw it. You and I are probably going to cooperate to help us achieve whatever the goal is that I just encountered. A chimp wants to hide it from its fellow chimps because it's competitive, right? On average, whatever the hell's over there, you're not going to help me get it, right? Yeah, exactly. You're going to make it harder for me to get it. Yeah, the chimps ever do that one. I look over at Jamie and go, hmm. Amazingly, groupers and octopi hunt together and they do that. Whoa, groupers and octopi. They work together. So the grouper will be over the Great Barrier Reef and the fish has gone in and he goes to the octopus and he goes right there. No way. He doesn't give a shit about the octopus, of course, but if the octopus goes to get it and doesn't get it, it's going to come out and the grouper's got it. Cooperation always works better than working on your own, right? Wow. So is there real evidence that shows that the whites of our eyes developed in order to indicate which way we're looking? Well, in all these cases, all we can do is say, let's do a little phylogenetic analysis. Who's got it and who doesn't? We're the only great ape with whites to their eyes. So 90, so the chance. Here we go. We're going to look at this. Here's an octopus that's chilling and ... Is that a grouper? No. That's a good looking grouper. Yeah, it's a spotted, I guess. I don't know fish very well. Beautiful. Look how pretty it is. It's really pretty. It looks like a coral trout to me. Oh, man. But what do I know? Look how pretty that octopus is, too. Yeah, they're really ... I fucking love octopi. And they can change colors like that. I know. Yeah, we've gone down massive rabbit holes with these things for hours at a time. Look at this. Changing right now as we're watching him. So he's sitting there waiting and the fish tries to get out and the other fish grabs it. Got you. Yeah. That's fascinating. It's a good sense to work together. Look at the octopus. It's mad. He's getting dark. Look how happy you are. Look how cool his skin is, how it just changes and morphs as you're looking at it. That is so bizarre. What a great ... I didn't know that they could do this until my friend Remy Warren came on the podcast and he had a television show called Apex Predator. On the show they would study the various ways these animals would hunt and the way they would ... All their different adaptation to their environment, all the different ways that they would use the environment. He would try to mimic those different ways. One of the things they studied was octopus and ... What's that other fish that's like it? The cuttlefish, which is also ... What is this? Octopus is using a clamshell. What is he doing? He's lounging? Yeah, he found it. He picked it up. He's using it to hide. Oh my God. This is crazy. Oh my God. The octopus is climbing inside a clamshell and then he closes it. That is bananas. That's wild. There's a BBC Blue Planet where it shows the octopus picking up all that random shrapnel when there's a shark coming after it and it covers itself like a big ball and the shark keeps going. Wow. They're super smart octopi. Yeah. Well, they eat sharks. You ever see that one? There was a video where they found this aquarium was having an issue where sharks were disappearing and they couldn't figure out what was going on. They put a camera inside the aquarium and it turned out that the octopus was waiting, just chilling on the rocks until the sharks came by and they would snatch him and eat him. Watch this. It's really cool to watch. He's like, doo doo doo doo. Don't bother with me. I'm just a piece of coral. I'm just hanging out here being coral bitch. I got you. He looks exactly, even in texture like the coral, which is so fascinating. But when they found this, they were stunned. They had no idea that octopus could do that. Not only that they could do that, but that they would eat a shark. Yeah. That's a big fight. Fuck man. It's not though. You want to squeeze the thing's mouth shut first, but it's an easy fight. It looks like he's the thing about octopus though, too. They could sacrifice a tentacle and it just grows back. Yeah. Yeah. It's really no big deal. It's annoying, but yeah. Yeah. I don't even know if it's annoying. I mean, we're just guessing, right? So there's a fascinating animal. There's a river. Look at that shit. Look at him twisting them up. There's an amazing case in Australia where a coolant brown is a biologist had cuttlefish in his tank and they can signal like an octopus. Yes. They can do whatever color. And in this tank, he's got a bunch of females on one side, a bunch of males on the other. So male goes in between them and he signals two different sides of his body. He shows the females he's male, but he shows the males that he's female. So they want to attack him for a side and then up to the females. Yeah. How smart is that? It's weird. It's weird that they split off from us hundreds of millions of years ago, right? Yeah. They're like as closely related as celery basically. Yeah. It's crazy. But they're so smart and their eyes are similar to ours. And like in the development. Actually, it's the opposite. So our eyes are poorly designed. Those are very well designed. So our eyes have all the detecting stuff is in its own way. It's backwards. And so the light comes in and has to pass all the cellular bodies before it can get picked up by the detectors. There's aim in the proper direction so that the shit isn't in the way. And we have this blind spot because the big thing, the nerve connection, they don't. There's comes in from the back where it belongs. So what that tells you is that, yeah, we both start out with some kind of random light sensitive spot and there's happened to work much better if you want to turn it into an eyeball than ours did. Because evolution can always, it only can start with what you've got. Right. But does theirs work better because they can see in water? I mean, is that a factor? Well, no. I mean, I think it's purely random that they don't have, we do a great job of getting rid of the cellular bodies that are in our way. So what your eye does is it wiggles all the time. And so if anything's retinal stationary, it's wiggling equally with your eyeball, you ignore it. And so you don't even know you have your own blind spot, you fill it in, your brain does amazing things to fix the problem. So if you have a piece of lint on your eye or something like that. If they were literally attached eventually would disappear. And because your brain says, oh, that's irrelevant. And so you can't see your own blind spot unless you close one eye and then you sit there with a neutral background, you move your thumb across and literally your thumbnail disappears. Because that spot is just being filled in by whatever the background is. And what happens with the octopus? It doesn't have that problem because our nerve ending creates a blind spot by being on the wrong side. There's comes in from the back. And so the whole thing works beautifully. They don't have to deal with the blind spot. Would that be as effective though in the world that we live in? Yeah, it's a water area relevant. It's purely a happenstance that with the light sensitive pit that they had started to get innervated properly from the back and ours didn't. And then as ours evolved into an eye, I mean, of course, we don't know. But as ours evolved to an eye, we just had to find ways around the problem that all the fancy structures that we now need in front of it are in the way. Does anything have an eye like an octopus that lives on land? Great question. I don't know. I don't think so. See, I've read something about eyes that they think that I got shit information. No, you'll probably have an amazing memory. All these shows that you still throw away. That's too many shows, man. I don't have any memory anymore. So it's like full. Yeah. I'm like a hoarder. My house is filled with boxes of shit that I don't need. That's how brains work. I'm afraid. It is how brains work.