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What Has the Whale to Say? · New Thinking for a New World

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to New Thinking for a New World, a Tilburg Foundation podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: I am Alan Stoga, your host.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Each week I bring you conversations with people who think differently about the great issues that are shaping our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Geopolitics, disruptive tech, mass migration, the changing climate, culture wars, all of it is grist for our mill.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy listening.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: I also hope you will let me know what you think.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: and that you join the conversation at tellbergfoundation.org.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: And now for today's episode of New Thinking for a New World.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: The whale has no voice, Herman Melville wrote, but then again he went on, what has the whale to say?
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Fast forwarded the twenty-first century and the answer turns out to be quite a bit.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Sperm whales are humongous.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Males can be eighteen meters long and weigh forty-five tons.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Think something the weight of an industrial dump truck, but twice as long.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: But they apparently are quite sociable and spend a lot of time chatting with each other.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: What are they saying?
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: That's the question that my guest today has committed an enormous amount of academic expertise, effort, and money to answer.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: David Gruber organized and leads Project SETI, which stands for Cestation Translation Initiative.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Welcome, David, to New Thinking for New World.
• 1:28
  Speaker 0: Thanks, Alan.
• 1:30
  Speaker 0: It's really a pleasure to be here today with you.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: I should probably begin by apologizing for using a Melville reference, but it struck me as a wonderful if unfortunate summary of the inherent bias about whales and more generally about anything other than humans by humans.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: What is it about these amazing mammals that so interest you as a marine biologist and a technologist?
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: What is it about these amazing mammals that so interest you as a marine biologist?
• 1:58
  Speaker 0: God, I'm super fascinated with whales.
• 2:00
  Speaker 0: I mean, I'm interested with so many different types of marine life.
• 2:06
  Speaker 0: And I started out my career more really looking at the microbiology and the origin of life in the ocean and the interactions of the tiniest, the bacteria and the protozoa.
• 2:17
  Speaker 0: And in the last few decades, I've really worked my way up.
• 2:20
  Speaker 0: So now moving into whales, I mean, one of the things I kind of stayed away from whales because they were the charismatic megafauna, and I was more interested in these kind of weird microbial forms of life that really do much of the ecosystem processes.
• 2:41
  Speaker 0: But now that I'm kind of looking at sperm whales, they are fascinating.
• 2:45
  Speaker 0: You bring up Melville, and I recently went back and read Moby Dick, and I just love Melville's interest in cetology, and there's a whole chapter there.
• 2:57
  Speaker 0: and the fascination with whales.
• 2:59
  Speaker 0: And it's the same thing even today, you know, in the eighteen hundreds.
• 3:03
  Speaker 0: That book was actually inspired by a, I actually have a copy over here.
• 3:08
  Speaker 0: It's called the biology of the sperm whale by Thomas Beale.
• 3:12
  Speaker 0: And it has Melville's notes in it.
• 3:14
  Speaker 0: I found it at the at the Harvard Houghton Library, a copy of it.
• 3:18
  Speaker 0: And I can see how they've captured the imagination.
• 3:22
  Speaker 0: I mean, here's this, here's this marine mammal.
• 3:25
  Speaker 0: So it's a mammal like us.
• 3:27
  Speaker 0: It breathes air, it needs to surface to breathe, but yet it's essentially over the last tens of millions of years to become a deep sea creature.
• 3:38
  Speaker 0: And it takes that breath of air and then it dives down over a mile.
• 3:43
  Speaker 0: And what it's doing down there, we know it's obviously eating quite a few squid, but how it's doing it and how it's so successful and how it slowly began this descent.
• 3:55
  Speaker 0: and become almost a deep sea creature.
• 3:57
  Speaker 0: And yet they do things similar to us.
• 4:02
  Speaker 0: They give live birth at the surface, they breastfeed, they sleep at the surface.
• 4:09
  Speaker 0: So they've had to figure out everything that we do as a mammal, but they do it in the water, twenty four seven.
• 4:17
  Speaker 0: So for me, they're just like, they tap into this kind of dream center of possibility.
• 4:25
  Speaker 0: And unlike like a dog or a cat or domesticated animals that are around us all the time, like.
• 4:30
  Speaker 0: it's not that easy to have a relationship with a sperm whale.
• 4:34
  Speaker 0: They live in deep water.
• 4:35
  Speaker 0: I see you laughing there.
• 4:36
  Speaker 0: What are you thinking about that?
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: I'm thinking that no one's ever said that before, speculated on the difficulty of having a relationship with a sperm whale.
• 4:45
  Speaker 0: It's challenging.
• 4:47
  Speaker 0: And I think, you know, this is one of the things I realized that having lived in life, getting to know different marine creatures, how fortunate that is.
• 4:56
  Speaker 0: I've spent hundreds of hours, even with just jellyfish, just getting to know them, just watching them, just seeing how they live their life.
• 5:07
  Speaker 0: But a jellyfish, we could keep it in an aquarium tank and just stare at them all day.
• 5:13
  Speaker 0: That's one of the beauties about sperm whales and one of the challenges is that it's almost impossible to keep a sperm whale captive.
• 5:20
  Speaker 0: They're diving a mile down to eat squid in the deep sea.
• 5:26
  Speaker 0: There's been very, very few, thankfully, examples of any sperm whales in any form of captivity.
• 5:34
  Speaker 0: So you really have to go out into their world to get to know them.
• 5:38
  Speaker 0: And now to kind of trace back a little bit, like the history of humans getting to know sperm whales, you bring up Melville, and our first interaction with them was just... hunting them and seeing them as food and seeing them as oil.
• 5:53
  Speaker 0: the spermaceti oil in their head Was was like a pre pre industrial form of oil to light lamps and and candles.
• 6:04
  Speaker 0: and the
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: head is something like one third of the body.
• 6:07
  Speaker 0: Yes, it is one of the one of the one of the largest when one third of the body is the head and a big part of that is this fabulously intricate sound producing organ.
• 6:21
  Speaker 0: And even just to think about it, I think a lot about how this all happened.
• 6:24
  Speaker 0: So one nostril rolled over the head and became the blowhole, and they're using that to breathe.
• 6:31
  Speaker 0: And then the other nostril is part of this sound producing apparatus.
• 6:36
  Speaker 0: So they're using these things called phonic lips, and they're snapping air back and forth.
• 6:42
  Speaker 0: Then the sound travels backward through the back of the head, bounces off the back, and then goes through a series of waxes.
• 6:49
  Speaker 0: It's called the Bent Horn Hypothesis because it's still not even confirmed how they're making sounds, unlike a bird that you could put in an MRI machine and really see how the sound producers happen.
• 7:03
  Speaker 0: Here, we're just kind of still in the theory stage, but they make sound, they call it biosonar, a biosound.
• 7:11
  Speaker 0: that's some of the loudest made in the animal kingdom.
• 7:14
  Speaker 0: It could be almost twice as loud as an airplane taking off.
• 7:18
  Speaker 0: But imagine you going underwater and trying to make a sound that loud like even just do that as an exercise now like pretend you're.
• 7:25
  Speaker 0: hold your breath Go underwater in your bathtub or wherever this vision is and try to make a very loud sound.
• 7:33
  Speaker 0: You'll see it's very challenging, you know, but this is something that Tens of millions of years of evolution has allowed sperm whales to come up with this very sophisticated complex vocal apparatus.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: But it's not just sounds.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: You are convinced that they're communicating with each other.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: It sounds with a purpose.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: We'll get to what language is in a minute, but they're to use to be a metaphor.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: They're talking to each other.
• 8:01
  Speaker 0: Oh, they're definitely talking to each other.
• 8:03
  Speaker 0: I mean, if you watch them or spend time with them, you hear the sounds and you hear it going back and forth.
• 8:11
  Speaker 0: And that's been well studied in the last several decades.
• 8:15
  Speaker 0: You know, but even kind of to pace it back to Melville though, in Melville's time they didn't know they were making these sounds.
• 8:21
  Speaker 0: It wasn't until like in the nineteen fifties that they recognized that sperm whales are making these clicks.
• 8:28
  Speaker 0: And they were able to say that they they are vocalizing.
• 8:31
  Speaker 0: And then later they found out that they're making two different types of vocalizations.
• 8:36
  Speaker 0: One more at the surface called codas.
• 8:39
  Speaker 0: These they call them stereotypical types of clicks that they're using in more social settings.
• 8:45
  Speaker 0: But when they start diving down and they're hunting and they're looking for squid, they change into a different type of sound, which is their echolocation clicks, which are much more like a metronome.
• 8:56
  Speaker 0: And as they're kind of getting closer in on the prey, they get faster and faster and faster.
• 9:01
  Speaker 0: So it's like they're using sound, they're sending out a signal, and in this huge brain, an eighteen pound brain that they have, the largest brain that we know of in the universe, is processing these echoes in ways that we really don't understand yet.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: So let's take a second and listen to some of that sound.
• 9:59
  Speaker 0: This is from a very well-documented unit of whales in Dominica.
• 10:05
  Speaker 0: And they are, you'll hear this typical, they call it the one, one, three.
• 10:10
  Speaker 0: Click, click, click, click, click.
• 10:13
  Speaker 0: And you'll hear this conversing back and forth.
• 10:16
  Speaker 0: But if you listen closely, you'll notice that those spaces aren't all perfectly.
• 10:21
  Speaker 0: You can't just say every one of those localizations is just a one, one, three.
• 10:25
  Speaker 0: Sometimes they're a little faster.
• 10:27
  Speaker 0: So there's variations in tempo.
• 10:30
  Speaker 0: There's variations in rhythm.
• 10:31
  Speaker 0: There's variations in Roboto.
• 10:33
  Speaker 0: And then sometimes there's actually one extra click in there.
• 10:39
  Speaker 0: And that actually symbolizes what we call an ornament.
• 10:42
  Speaker 0: And these... variations are used in both contextual, depending on the context of the situation, and they can combine them, much like a human could combine words like, I went to the store and then the market and then the, you know, and then to the movie theater and keep going on and on and on.
• 11:04
  Speaker 0: And so this was a discovery that we had found just last year, and it's called the sperm whale phonetic alphabet.
• 11:13
  Speaker 0: And it kind of showed this vast complexity space in the sperm whale communication system.
• 11:19
  Speaker 0: that kind of put them in a different level than they'd previously been thought of.
• 11:24
  Speaker 0: Previously, they just thought, oh, there's these groups and they do have regional accents.
• 11:29
  Speaker 0: So there is like a British and a Scottish accent among the clans.
• 11:33
  Speaker 0: And you could tell them apart by their accents.
• 11:36
  Speaker 0: But they didn't know there was this much going on in the kind of nuances and how they're talking.
• 11:43
  Speaker 0: And in the coming week, we're actually, there's a linguist on the team, Gasper Begas.
• 11:48
  Speaker 0: And he had just carefully been listening to these clicks.
• 11:53
  Speaker 0: And there was a key kind of moment where we hold a conference once a year at UC Berkeley, the Simons Institute of the Theory of Computing.
• 12:03
  Speaker 0: We call it Decoding Communication and Non-Human Species Workshop.
• 12:07
  Speaker 0: And we bring all these other folks that are working with other animal species.
• 12:11
  Speaker 0: And we brought Joyce Poole and Mickey Pardo that are working with elephants.
• 12:16
  Speaker 0: And it was in that talk that Gasper kind of pieced together that timing is very important.
• 12:21
  Speaker 0: For instance, with an elephant, they may say something and it may take fifteen minutes for the other elephant to respond to the conversation.
• 12:28
  Speaker 0: But that's very unlike our old world primate way of communicating.
• 12:33
  Speaker 0: And in that way of thinking about timing, Gasper was able to kind of think about the timing of the sperm.
• 12:38
  Speaker 0: well clicks in a different way.
• 12:40
  Speaker 0: And if he took out the spacing in between and he compressed them, he started to see what looked like vowels amongst that.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: That's the obvious question.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Do you think, and your colleagues, think of this as language with all that implies?
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Obviously, there's communication going on.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Communication systems are one thing, language is another thing, although perhaps not a continuum.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: I'm not a linguist, obviously.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: But is it a continuum?
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: and where do you think, where do you and your colleagues think of the sperm whales on that continuum?
• 13:15
  Speaker 0: That's a great question.
• 13:16
  Speaker 0: And to preface it, I'm not a linguist either.
• 13:19
  Speaker 0: And that's one of the beauties of Project SETI is that we really rely on domain expertise.
• 13:24
  Speaker 0: Like I'm a marine biologist and I'm good at putting together interdisciplinary teams, but we have AI experts, we have cryptographers, we have underwater acousticians.
• 13:33
  Speaker 0: We have people that specialize in network science.
• 13:37
  Speaker 0: And we have people that really specialize in linguistics.
• 13:39
  Speaker 0: So I leave these kinds of deeper debates in the linguistic community to the linguists, but my take on it is we're getting, it's kind of interesting, like we as a human species came up with the word language and we kind of set this very rigid criteria for it that only we could jump over that bar because we made it up and it applies to us.
• 14:03
  Speaker 0: So it depends on how you define it.
• 14:07
  Speaker 0: And if you put these rigid terms in place, no one else could ever jump over this fence and have language.
• 14:16
  Speaker 0: But if you see language as more you said at the continuum of like, it's not a hard rigid thing and it could be seen along a suite of lines.
• 14:28
  Speaker 0: And I think for this, we keep seeing there's more and more sophistication to their communication system.
• 14:38
  Speaker 0: And they're doing things more and more like humans do.
• 14:42
  Speaker 0: So that's a great question.
• 14:45
  Speaker 0: Like, when does it pass the threshold?
• 14:46
  Speaker 0: And when do us humans agree?
• 14:48
  Speaker 0: I've kind of decided to wait out of that battle because if you say, oh, sperm whales have a very sophisticated communication system, like nobody gets upset.
• 14:59
  Speaker 0: But if you say sperm whales have language, like it's like touching the third rail.
• 15:04
  Speaker 0: And all of a sudden, you know, there's a big argument over the word language.
• 15:08
  Speaker 0: So for the time being, like, I'm just kind of, you know, just happy to be continually showing the sophistication and the nuance and the complexity of sperm whale vocalizations and their communication system.
• 15:24
  Speaker 0: What do war lessons from Gaza, rethinking education, peace in Ukraine, and visionary leadership have in common?
• 15:32
  Speaker 0: They are all themes from recent episodes of this podcast.
• 15:36
  Speaker 0: Check out more episodes on tellbergfoundation.org or on a platform of your choice.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: I have so many directions I'd like to take this.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: Maybe the most immediate one is what you're probing, obviously, is non-human communication.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: And that is a question that can apply in lots of different spaces in nature.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: As you think about what you're doing, David, are you developing protocols, understandings, technologies that
• 16:11
  Speaker 0: are,
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: in the first instance, of course, aimed at the sperm whale, but have other implications?
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: How do you keep your team focused on the sperm whale as opposed to other things where, obviously, there's potential implications?
• 16:26
  Speaker 0: That's a great question.
• 16:28
  Speaker 0: And first, I want to go back to this year.
• 16:32
  Speaker 0: You're an observation that we call ourselves CETI and we're the Citation Translation Initiative, but we're really an homage to SCTI.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I absolutely love it.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: I absolutely love it.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 16:44
  Speaker 0: Here I'm sitting here with like an original copy of Carl Sagan's Contact and the SETI pioneers.
• 16:52
  Speaker 0: Scientists talk about their search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
• 16:55
  Speaker 0: I think in one sense, I'm really inspired by this search.
• 17:01
  Speaker 0: For extraterrestrial but as a marine biologist like my career has been honed inward.
• 17:08
  Speaker 0: So we're interterrestrial exploration and there's millions of species that we inhabit the planet with and Many of them we'd not even known or even described yet.
• 17:19
  Speaker 0: So while I'm fully supportive of like the idea that there's ten to the thirty stars out there and there's probably a very high chance that there's some sophisticated communication system in like form in another galaxy.
• 17:35
  Speaker 0: Here we are on this planet right now and there is incredible animals that are doing things and communicating in ways that we've just now been provided the tools that we could actually look at this.
• 17:52
  Speaker 0: So if we were to ever, imagine if we found a sperm whale and something that communicates the way it does on some distant planet.
• 18:04
  Speaker 0: I mean, humans would go crazy, but do we have the tools yet to even understand how we might do it?
• 18:11
  Speaker 0: No, this is what we're doing.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about those tools because you are a technologist and the technology you're using allows you to do things that a moment ago were unimaginable.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: One of the things I've heard you talk about what you call very gentle robots, which is a fabulous description.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: What's a very gentle robot?
• 18:36
  Speaker 0: Well, this is a field of robotics that I was introduced to by Robert Wood, who's a professor of engineering at Harvard University, and he had the Harvard Microrobotics Lab.
• 18:50
  Speaker 0: We met at National Geographic in in And I was showing a video where I was in a submarine using one of these like five function manipulator arms, like the kind that you see at a carnival to like pick up a stuffed animal to try to interact with the deep sea life.
• 19:08
  Speaker 0: And he was like, wow, this is clunky and invasive.
• 19:11
  Speaker 0: Had you heard of the field of soft robotics?
• 19:14
  Speaker 0: And we began on this journey, which is continuing today of like developing some of the most gentle robots in the world.
• 19:21
  Speaker 0: We have a kind of, Rob and I also were incredibly good friends, which is important in scientific collaborations too, because you're spending so much time with your collaborators.
• 19:31
  Speaker 0: And we meet at a bar in Cambridge called Charlie's.
• 19:37
  Speaker 0: And there was in one of these meetings there where we were talking about a Stephen Hawking quote.
• 19:44
  Speaker 0: where Stephen Hawking was saying that the full-blown development of AI and robotics was going to lead to the human extinction and making this prophetic statement.
• 19:55
  Speaker 0: And we sat there being like, we're the scientists inventing this stuff.
• 19:58
  Speaker 0: Why would we invent something that is going to bring our species to extinction?
• 20:05
  Speaker 0: Why would we do this?
• 20:06
  Speaker 0: So our form of protest was like, well, we're going to see this from the other side.
• 20:11
  Speaker 0: We're going to try to work on making some of the most gentle, empathetic, caring robots in the world.
• 20:17
  Speaker 0: And that's kind of that.
• 20:19
  Speaker 0: We've really taken that ethics with us in the formation of Project SETI, where Rob is now making all the various robots that are being used for this project.
• 20:31
  Speaker 0: And one of the suction cups that we're using is inspired by clingfish and suckerfish, because they're able to adhesive... adhere to things without harming.
• 20:42
  Speaker 0: And so we're kind of looking to nature for some of the most gentle forms of interaction.
• 20:49
  Speaker 0: One of our really like fun projects that we did is we designed, they're called ultra-gentle, soft robotic fingers, affectionately called linguine fingers.
• 21:00
  Speaker 0: And we did an experiment where we went to the New England Aquarium and we had them interact with jellyfish and we were able to show that these ultra-gentle fingers didn't even stress a jellyfish.
• 21:14
  Speaker 0: And now they're being used to like pick strawberries in other forms of very gentle robotic manipulation.
• 21:20
  Speaker 0: But yeah, we're really proud of the fact that we've come up with a robot that could interact with life with one-tenth of the pressure of your eyelid resting on your eyeball.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: And clearly you're using large language models to analyze the sounds that you're collecting.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: which, again, wasn't possible a moment ago and now is incredibly sophisticated and change, it becomes more sophisticated every day, that has to be critical to the translation process.
• 21:53
  Speaker 0: True.
• 21:55
  Speaker 0: If you think about it with AI now, this is one of the craziest, most impactful tools, technologies, that has landed on our species in our lifetimes.
• 22:07
  Speaker 0: and has the potential to really shift and shake everything up for the good and the bad.
• 22:16
  Speaker 0: And I think anytime a new technology is presented, it should be really treated with caution and care.
• 22:24
  Speaker 0: But I think in our case, we're really looking for the positive way that it can be used.
• 22:28
  Speaker 0: How can we use all this amazing new AI in a way that actually brings us closer to nature?
• 22:35
  Speaker 0: But to step back a little bit, when this project started in twenty eighteen, I was doing a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard and across the hall was a cryptographer, Shafi Goldwasser.
• 22:46
  Speaker 0: And she was working on translation.
• 22:49
  Speaker 0: Much of the AI today of large language models kind of has its roots in translation, Google Translate.
• 22:55
  Speaker 0: And some of the tools that they were using in translation were taking languages and looking at them in multi-dimensional space, you know, like.
• 23:04
  Speaker 0: several hundred dimension and seeing patterns on how words are associated.
• 23:11
  Speaker 0: And that was kind of giving us, and that's essentially the early days of chat.
• 23:14
  Speaker 0: GPT is about predicting the next word.
• 23:18
  Speaker 0: And so we took some of these technologies and began applying them to sperm.
• 23:24
  Speaker 0: well vocalizations and essentially just seeing like, could we predict the next click?
• 23:31
  Speaker 0: And we started to see, wow, some of these tools that are designed for humans actually work really well with sperm whale clicks.
• 23:40
  Speaker 0: And that kind of really began us on the journey.
• 23:42
  Speaker 0: But one of the things to point out is it's definitely not plug-and-play.
• 23:46
  Speaker 0: You cannot just take an off-the-shelf human language model and be like, oh, I'm going to just let this translate whale communication.
• 23:53
  Speaker 0: It's been hard because so much of our AI is designed with one singular focus for one species.
• 24:01
  Speaker 0: Homo sapien and our language and all the books we've written and all the texts we have, but it's not really just yet been used for other species.
• 24:11
  Speaker 0: Like I just heard your dog barking.
• 24:13
  Speaker 0: And there are some companies that are looking at that, but we already know you are communicating with your dog.
• 24:19
  Speaker 0: Like you don't really need a translator in between you and your dog.
• 24:23
  Speaker 0: You're already having a very deep interspecies relationship.
• 24:28
  Speaker 0: That might not be possible with other animals.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Let's go back to the sperm whale for a moment.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: I'm thinking about that eighteen pound brain.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: Now, you've been working with whales not for a long time, but for a while.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: And can you see, is there learning going on?
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: Is there... Obviously, there's intelligence.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: By definition, have a brain, you have intelligence.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: I remember a neuroscience friend told me once that what he can do to a mouse's brain, he can do to my brain because they're just scaled up.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: They're the same thing, just neural systems.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: How do you think about a sperm whale's brain and intelligence and capacity?
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Does that question even make any sense?
• 25:10
  Speaker 0: No, of course it makes sense.
• 25:12
  Speaker 0: And I'm trying to think of the best way to kind of dive into that.
• 25:16
  Speaker 0: And I think in one sense, it's a complex question.
• 25:21
  Speaker 0: And for one size doesn't necessarily matter.
• 25:26
  Speaker 0: Same thing goes with genome sizes, like there's amoebas that have much larger genomes than humans do.
• 25:33
  Speaker 0: There's dinoflagellates in the ocean, these single celled animals that have wildly complex genomes, even more than the human genome.
• 25:40
  Speaker 0: And when it gets to brain, there's some things you look at, like they call it encephalization quotient.
• 25:47
  Speaker 0: So it's not just like the size of the matter, and there's, you know, it could separate it out into cleol and neurons and density, but I didn't want to get kind of trapped in that.
• 25:56
  Speaker 0: And I think The fact that it's a very large brain, the fact that it's developed independently than terrestrial mammals, the fact that it's processing echoes and being very successful, they're living very communal lives.
• 26:16
  Speaker 0: Sperm whales live in matrilineal societies, so it's grandmothers, mothers, and kids.
• 26:21
  Speaker 0: Matrilineal means that there's not a single matriarch, which is the dominant female, that they share the leadership.
• 26:27
  Speaker 0: And the males, when they get to a certain age, they leave and they'll become world travelers and go from pole to pole.
• 26:35
  Speaker 0: And sometimes they come back.
• 26:37
  Speaker 0: So little is known.
• 26:38
  Speaker 0: I mean, there's so much, you know, story.
• 26:40
  Speaker 0: and just like my hat goes to.
• 26:42
  Speaker 0: the amount of information that we even have at present is from like careful observations of a few scientists that kind of made these observations and got to know certain groups of whales, including Shane Garrow and Hal Whitehead, which are.
• 26:56
  Speaker 0: Shane is the lead whale biologist for SETI, and he was trained by Hal Whitehead, who was actually trained by Roger Payne, who was my mentor.
• 27:04
  Speaker 0: And Roger Payne discovered in the nineteen seventies that whales have song.
• 27:11
  Speaker 0: And the fact that, and this is more from humpback whales, and the fact that they were singing inspired this entire environmental movement to save the whale movement, which is one of the most successful environmental movements in history, and it led to the saving several whale species from extinction.
• 27:28
  Speaker 0: But even Roger and I, as you bring back the size, like Roger, when I was reaching out to a whale biologist in the beginning, he was one of the first ones that was like, took my phone call because I wasn't a whale biologist.
• 27:40
  Speaker 0: So everyone was like, you know, why is this guy that studies sharks and sea turtles suddenly interested in whales?
• 27:47
  Speaker 0: But Roger, you know, was so welcoming and kind of opened the idea.
• 27:53
  Speaker 0: But at the same time, He really wanted this project to be about humpback whales because he spent his career getting to know and love humpbacks.
• 28:02
  Speaker 0: But we chose this more because the sperm whale vocalizations are being done both by males and females, and they're doing it as a communication system.
• 28:14
  Speaker 0: So it had more amenable to machine learning.
• 28:18
  Speaker 0: Whereas with the humpback, it's more about singing a certain song.
• 28:24
  Speaker 0: It could be twenty, thirty minutes long, at certain times of the year, related more to mating.
• 28:29
  Speaker 0: So, while it is a form of communication, we were much more attracted to these clicks of the sperm whales, the codas.
• 28:36
  Speaker 0: They're more like ones and zeros.
• 28:39
  Speaker 0: And I think we doubled down on one species in the beginning, because if you go off and try to do everything at once, and you brought up mice too, and how you might know a lot about mice, and how that relates to humans.
• 28:54
  Speaker 0: Mice are some of the most studied animals in the world.
• 28:59
  Speaker 0: The reason is because they're an analogy to the human brain.
• 29:07
  Speaker 0: It's not easy to study a human brain, but unfortunately, we've sacrificed millions of mice to learn about our own brain for therapeutics and treatments.
• 29:22
  Speaker 0: So that kind of showed the focus of going very deep in a model organism to learn a lot.
• 29:29
  Speaker 0: Rare as you could take a more of a buckshot approach and just try to study every animal once.
• 29:36
  Speaker 0: And I think we took this approach of we went really, really deep with one species.
• 29:42
  Speaker 0: And now we're coming up five years later with a lot of new understandings, a lot of new findings.
• 29:49
  Speaker 0: And noticing that a lot of these findings could be translated across other species.
• 29:53
  Speaker 0: And so it'll be much easier now to begin to kind of use this model of translation of non-human communication to others once the kind of roadmap and flag posts exist.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: Which leads to the ultimate question, which is, where does this go in your mind?
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: This has been a five-year journey.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: with a long antecedent before it, you're hitting an important inflection point.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: Where are you five years
• 30:27
  Speaker 0: from now?
• 30:28
  Speaker 0: That's a great question.
• 30:29
  Speaker 0: Where we want to be?
• 30:30
  Speaker 0: I mean, the real motivation for me at the core of doing this project was really related to climate change and in the degradation that I witnessed personally of marine environments, especially coral reefs, like I would go back to corals that I'd studied.
• 30:48
  Speaker 0: several years ago, and they would just be completely demolished and gone.
• 30:52
  Speaker 0: And I had gotten to know those species that live on the reefs and those communities.
• 30:57
  Speaker 0: And I felt like this was happening under the sea, and so few humans kind of knew what was happening.
• 31:03
  Speaker 0: And it was very hard to kind of relay that message above the water to people.
• 31:08
  Speaker 0: So I think that whales are, they're really like a vector and a connector.
• 31:16
  Speaker 0: They're this amazing magical animal that have the ability to captivate so many humans.
• 31:22
  Speaker 0: And the real goal here is just like kind of posing the hypothesis, can technology bring us closer to the natural world?
• 31:30
  Speaker 0: These tools that some people are saying are going to lead to us all, you know, floating down the river into a cesspool together.
• 31:36
  Speaker 0: Can they be used in these really positive, magical ways?
• 31:42
  Speaker 0: And I think there's just a lot of what ifs here.
• 31:45
  Speaker 0: So the goal of where we want to be in five years is a much deeper understanding.
• 31:50
  Speaker 0: We're working deeply with NYU School of Law's More Than Human Life program to think about the legal ramifications of this research.
• 32:00
  Speaker 0: What will it mean if we can very accurately translate that the whales are being tortured by underwater noise?
• 32:10
  Speaker 0: What will that mean in the legal system?
• 32:15
  Speaker 0: admissible and also thinking about the guide rails like we're the first to be doing this.
• 32:22
  Speaker 0: But there's generations coming behind us much like I'm the generation coming behind Roger Payne and how will they approach this and how will this be used.
• 32:30
  Speaker 0: So if this is approached in a kind of form of kindness and empathy and always asking the question like does this benefit the whale.
• 32:40
  Speaker 0: it could be very beautiful.
• 32:41
  Speaker 0: And there's an author Karen Backer that wrote a book, The Sounds of Life, and she was a close friend of mine who unfortunately passed away untimely.
• 32:51
  Speaker 0: Kind of posing, there's two roads we can take with this technologies.
• 32:55
  Speaker 0: One could be very connective, beautiful possibilities, and some of them could be rather dark and dystopian.
• 33:02
  Speaker 0: So I think the goals here are to continue posing the beautiful possibilities that could happen.
• 33:10
  Speaker 0: And that's kind of really the hope of the next five years, is just continue our understanding and continue to get people engaged.
• 33:17
  Speaker 0: And even the fact that you're asking Alan what a whale might be saying, we already feel that that's a high degree of success that we're asking the question of what a whale might be saying and thinking.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: What I find amazing about your work is that you're not trying to, in the caricature that I've read in some of the interviews with you, you're not trying to figure out a way to talk to the whales.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: You're trying to figure out what are they saying to each other?
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: How are they communicating?
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: And that is
• 33:52
  Speaker 0: a
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: far more interesting question.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: It takes us, the human, out of the center.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: It's all about us.
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: And where you are with this and where you're going with this, which has to be the approach to other species, to other life forms, perhaps to how we interact with the machines, has to be to understand their communication as communication in and of itself, not just relevant to us, not relative to us.
• 34:22
  Speaker 0: No, I love that.
• 34:23
  Speaker 0: I completely agree.
• 34:24
  Speaker 0: It reminds us a lot of what Copernicus did.
• 34:29
  Speaker 0: showing that we're not the center of the universe.
• 34:31
  Speaker 0: The Earth is not the center of the universe.
• 34:33
  Speaker 0: And in this, this is showing that we share a planet where there's other animals with really rich communication and communal lives.
• 34:43
  Speaker 0: And we've just now we're beginning to understand it.
• 34:46
  Speaker 0: So I think there's real treats in store for us, in lessons.
• 34:52
  Speaker 0: And I think some of them are to be coming out in the near future, including a witness we saw of a sperm well-giving birth with the assistance of eleven whales and thinking of the kind of care and collaboration and coordination that that took for a fellow mammal to give birth to a newborn that would sink to the bottom of the ocean and just the amount of effort and care.
• 35:24
  Speaker 0: and that they showed there.
• 35:28
  Speaker 0: So yeah, I feel that's a really strong lesson that we could learn from.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: Absolutely amazing.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: I can't imagine what we could add to just the image that you created for us.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: So thank you very much, David, for this conversation.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: And we will stay in touch over the years.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: I want to learn more as you learn more.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 35:49
  Speaker 0: Thank you, Alan.
• 35:50
  Speaker 0: Such a pleasure to be here.
• 35:51
  Speaker 0: Thank you.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this episode of New Thinking from New World.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: I'm Alan Stoga, podcast host, and I look forward to your joining our next conversation.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: Remember, tell us what you think at tellbergfoundation.org.