Animals rescue people all the time, but not like this. In this episode, first aired more than a decade ago, Jim Eggers is a 44-year-old man who suffers from a problem that not only puts his life at risk—it jeopardizes the safety of everybody around him. But with the help of Sadie, his pet African Grey Parrot, Jim found an unlikely way to manage his anger. African Grey Parrot expert Irene Pepperberg helps us understand how this could work, and shares some insights from her work with a parrot named Alex.And one quick note from our producer Pat Walters: Jim considers Sadie to be a “service animal,” a designation under the Americans with Disabilities Act that protects the rights of individuals with disabilities to bring certain animals into public places. The term service animal sometimes is legally limited to include only dogs and miniature horses. Jim disagrees with those limitations, but the local bus company, regardless of definitions, said they’ll make an exception for Sadie.
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Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. So recently, you may have seen just a rash of headlines about people using artificial intelligence for their mental health. There are all these therapist bots and just even people using regular chatbots to help them find solutions to their problem, to calm them down, to just looking for somebody even just to listen. And... I don't know.
I'm not sure what to think of any of it for a lot of different reasons, but partially because the AI doesn't know anything. It's just taking an unimaginable amount of our words, scrambling them up and generating something relevant and helpful and maybe even intelligent seeming, but it doesn't actually know what any of those words mean.
Ultimately, all it's doing is parroting our language back at us. And yet, I know a lot of people find it very helpful to talk to. All of that got me to thinking about a very different story that we made here at the show years ago. A story where, similarly, a person who needs help is helped by something. And it's unclear if that something really knows how it's helping or whether it's helping.
Okay.
All right. You're listening to Radiolab. from WNYC Rewind
Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, the podcast. And we're going to St. Louis. Yeah. Nice. Nice and direct. This comes from our producer, Pat Balters. It's the story of a rescue. A double rescue, really. It's one we've been wanting to tell for a while. Pat Balters.
So a few months ago, I went to St. Louis because I'd heard this story about a guy who had this pet that basically saved his life. And the pet...
is a bird it's about this guy named jim eggers oh you're recording yeah yeah yeah i'm gonna record and in 2005 jim was living by himself in a little apartment in st louis working in a halloween industry it was the winter so jim had just finished up his latest season at the local haunted house i've known the halloween stuff for 19 years what do you do
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