I agree with your analysis but I understood the (totally lost to time) podcaster as saying something slightly different.

Again, I’m rehashing something I vaguely remember, so take it as you will, but we can imagine some base level, instinctual things that humans do that might be bad or anti-social but also primal: you hit me, I’ll hit you back. But there’s a point at which that switches into something that requires more intelligence, like, “he broke up with me so I’m going boil his cat and crap in his furnace.” This sort of hopped-up malice is a thing beyond simple retribution or power dynamics and the speaker talked about it as if it were a malign spirit. Maybe another example might be “mass shooters” who seem to communicate to each other through time and from beyond the grave. I’m not going to say this isn’t wishy-washy mambo-jumbo, but I do believe that people operate on levels of reality that transcend the mundane, for example symbolic or archetypal. We don’t have to attribute consciousness or intent to something like an archetypal intelligence and it seems perfectly reasonable that things like this could evolve naturally from an ape with social qualities you describe. Anyway, this isn’t meant to convince anyone but rather open the window a bit on thinking about very different intelligences and how they might appear and be understood.