September 5, 2025 • 64 mins
People have attempted to communicate with other animals since before the dawn of recorded history. Today, almost every pet owner feels they have deep, communicative bonds with their pets -- but what about wild animals? In the second chapter of this two-part series, Ben, Matt and Noel discover how 'AI' may soon allow humans to speak directly with multiple other organisms. (We also absolutely wrecked our search history with phrases like "sperm whale phonetic alphabet.")
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noel.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
They called me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the
Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you argue you are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Cacall marow well keyes click click click, and some sort
(00:51):
of tippish infrasound. We're back with the second chapter in
our series on human to animal communication.
Speaker 5 (00:59):
Damn going to say conversion and that was all in.
No communication is super interesting too.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
I like the chimera reference, that is the chimerath and
we already did that one this So I think it's
fair to save folks that our research here for this
series has inspired all of us to look at our
pets and non human friends a little bit differently. Matt
would love to throw to you, I think you what
(01:26):
were you telling our soft Are you met a deer?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah, I performed a recent experiment with a bit of
animal communication We've talked about trying to communicate with crows, ravens,
other birds like that. We've talked about attempting to talk
with our pets and stuff. But I was hanging out
at my grandparents' house in ye old coming as we
will all be excited about.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Never not hilarious, right, sorry, yep.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I look down in the backyard when I'm standing up
kind of on the in the carport area, and there
is a tiny little baby deer just laying down, staring
right at me with its ear out alerted and nervous
but still.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Your heart it melts immediately into your chest a bit.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah, for sure, there's a little bit of melting, but
mostly curiosity as to why it would just sit there
and stare at me and not move, not do anything.
It was just there so as.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Scared of you. Is it curious about you? Like what's
going on? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
So I started using my human voice and words to
talk to us. I said, hey, little what, hey, little baby,
what do you do? And it was just sitting there
staring at me still, And I got my girlfriend to
come out and it was still there. We were looking
at it, and we started pulling up YouTube videos of
mother deer's calling to their baby, to their babies, right idea,
(02:44):
just to see what would occur and would it recognize
those sounds? Are you know, does this mother deer sound
like this other mother white tailed deer? And and played
some and we watched as its ears just began, you know,
making movements as though it appears that the deer either
recognizes a similarity to it or is hearing something in
(03:05):
there that we imagined would be like listening to someone
saying words to that recreate the same.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Thing with crows. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Interesting. Crows are so cool to me in that respect
because I've always understood that they've got such complexity and differences.
Are there? Is there s?
Speaker 5 (03:23):
I mean, yeah, gosh, that wasn't on this episode. It
was on it was on Ridiculous History. Recently, Ben played
this poem that was in Chinese that used a single sound,
like an alphabet sound, and it did it like fifteen
different ways with like upward and downward inflections and stuff.
And I imagine stuff like that is you know, very
important in the animal can.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Yeah, and I think we've all started to look at
our animals differently, maybe real quickly throw to our pal Dylan, uh,
Dylan has our previous exploration on talking with animals. Has
it changed the way you're talking to your pets?
Speaker 6 (04:01):
Man, I'm definitely thinking about it more. You know. It's
it's interesting because I'm like, how many phrases it does
my dog know? And how much is it about my
intonation because there's definitely that she knows the difference between
do you want to go out, which means go in
the backyard, and do you want to go on a walk,
which means going through the front door, things like that.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Yeah, dude, I've been I've been trying it on mine too,
just same deal, trying to figure out is it actually
the language or just.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
The tone for sure? And I mean, was it Ben?
Speaker 5 (04:27):
I think on the last episode you pointed out to
me with my cat complaints that yes, in fact, studies
show that cats do know when you're calling their name,
they just don't care. So then it becomes like, what
is it about cats versus dogs that makes that reaction different,
you know, because cats don't react the same kind of
talk that dogs do, if.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
They react at all. Frankly, and by the way, Vanessa
did come back.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
I had some construction going on at my house and
the cat didn't show up for like a whole day,
and I started to get a little scared, but she
she turned up once the construction melee was cleared.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
What a perfect description, construction melee. That's beautiful. We do
hope that you have found this exploration as fascinating as
we do. We're going to pause for a word from
our sponsors that are currently not using large language models
to speak crow or cetacean. We'll be right back. Here
(05:31):
are the facts, all right. Previously we explored this whole
bag of badgers. It's the thing called communication in general,
and speech, the organized vocalization to convey a specific concept
is only one very small part of that huge umbrella term.
And I think we all agreed in chapter one that
(05:55):
every living animal has some form of communication. Right, Maybe
we're anthrocentric.
Speaker 5 (06:03):
Yeah, oh well yeah, I mean I think that's the
crux of this whole question. I think we said at
the very top of the first episode is like the
antro centric nature of the question, can we talk to animals?
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
And it goes back to this concept that's been around
for a long time that potentially most noises that animals
make are an alert of some form or another, and
that's it. And it's generally to alert other animals within
their pod, within their group, within their whatever it is,
their pack, or at least most sounds are for that
(06:38):
unless you get into some of the things specifically that
mothers make. There there are generally soothing sounds that are
out there. But are there actual do animals call each
other by name? Which is something really cool we're going
to find out today, and do animals well yeah, well yeah,
at least we know of a few species that have names, right,
(06:59):
But then you know, is that across the board and
we just don't understand it yet.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Right, And that's a great point, because every animal has
some complex form of communication, even if it's not, you know,
speaking the King's English. Oh, I forgot they got a
king again? Right, good on you United Kingdom. I keep
forgetting they have a king.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Why wasn't the Why wasn't it the United Queendom for
you know a long time?
Speaker 2 (07:30):
There?
Speaker 4 (07:31):
These are the questions. So every every animal having this stuff. Uh,
some of these communication or communicative channels are genuinely incomprehensible
to the unaided human.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
They just they just don't have the hardware to rock.
What's happening.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Maybe an analogy here if we walk it out a
little bit, walk it out, walk it out is uh.
Let's say an octopus is a postal worker. Right in
an octam goes around and delivers letters. They're great at
it because they have eight arms. And in this analogy,
the octopus wants to deliver a letter, but our human
(08:11):
recipient doesn't have a mailbox, so there's no way for
this message to cross the chasm of interspecial differences.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
I think a film that does a good job of
portraying this disconnect.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Is a rival with the just golf.
Speaker 5 (08:28):
I guess between the way humans communicate and the alien
species that is, you know, featured in the film and
then I saw you do it, not because I think
you've brought this up too. It has more to do
with like is it a sound based it's not sound based,
or there's something inherently like the square peg in a
round whole situation about the way the species communicates versus
(08:50):
you know humans.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
I don't want to spoil anything, but the key to
their language is time. One of the best movies ever made.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
It isn't great.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
I need to revisit it because I'm obviously I'm a
little foggy on the details.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
But isn't that right though? The way that that.
Speaker 5 (09:02):
That's it does do a good job of portraying that.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, the whole movie is about how to figure out
how to communicate right, and communication is key, guys. I've
learned that through therapy.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Okay, sure, self awareness is a big one.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
Communication is the greatest. I want to say, this octopus
we're talking about here and who's working for the mail
I think we should put that octopus in the letter
sorting room. That's where he's I love.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
That's working for the mail. I don't know that maybe, laugh,
you're right. Can you picture the cartoon version of where
you chucking letters left and right and just like a blur.
Speaker 5 (09:38):
You know of like arms and paper flying, like he's
in the mail room shooting things up, shoots to be
delivered to the executives in the c suite like in
the fifties.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
You know, that would have been a fantastic addition to
the always Sunny episode where Charlie Day works in the
mail room. Oh yeah, if they come up with the
idea that they got to bring an octopus in, all right,
get at us, Get at us.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Rob Glenn and Charlie.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
He's just got it in a tank in the room
and he's like trying to explain to Mac that he's
you know, we're working and we're working on it.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
Yeah, this guy doesn't stop this octopus?
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Can he read? All right? Moving on? H Yeah, so
sweet is the question. That's the question. Wait, but also
does he need to read?
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Because if you just train it based on the right thing,
then maybe that doesn't even matter. Per the story of
Clever Hans, you know in the previous episode.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
Yeah, exactly press it there. We know that the point
about anthrocentrism bears repeating because a lot of people throughout
history made these very well intentioned, valid assumptions that were
still assumptions. They said, hey, look at us, we're humans.
We can talk. Other animals are also smart, so maybe
(10:57):
they can learn to talk like us instead of us
meeting them where they are at communicatively.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
I mean, we even do that within our species in
terms of like everybody ought to know English. But you know,
we can't be bothered.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
It just encouraged to me the other day, how like
some bad people will make a big point about how
certain immigrants don't speak good English, but they speak English
way better than you speak Mandarin, my friend, I will tell.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
You that right now. And that's I don't know.
Speaker 5 (11:27):
It always occurs to me how thoughtless and egotistical that
kind of stuff is.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
It's very self centered because look, you know, you run
into someone who is making the effort to speak to
you in your lingua franca and they don't get everything right.
Remember they were a polyglot and you.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
May not be.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
So they walked a lot further to get to that
conversation that you did. And I think that's a brilliant comparison, Noel.
I mean, like you said, clever Haun's the math horse.
From there, all the way up to the modern day
public and scientists alike have been accused of sort of
seeing what they wanted to see, or perhaps hearing what
they want to hear. And we talked about this a
(12:09):
little bit. Researchers are still going back and forth over
whether certain animal experiments did result in actual conversation or
was Alex the African gray parrot or Coco the Lowland
gorilla where they just mimicking the behavior and responding to
the cues of the people quote unquote training them and
(12:33):
previously we mentioned Matt, you mentioned lightly the astonishing orangutang,
right Arangton, and we got to give them one more
quick shout out. Have you guys seen the various videos
of these forest dudes, as the name translates, Have you
(12:54):
guys seen the videos of them like figuring out solutions
to problems or getting people to show them their human babies,
all that cool stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Oh yeah, yeah, And we also talked about some of
the chimps that were taught sign language and other types
of language, uh before even before them, some of the
great apes that Jane Goodall was directly, you know, associated with.
She was not associated with cocoa, by the way. I
think I mentioned that specifically, or I had a thought
that she was, but she was not.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
But like you pointed out, she was.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
She was aware, and I believe I read a quote
of hers, but that where it was preserving to a
lot of the things that she believed.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
For sure, Yeah, and you did share that quote. We
also know that oragatons are specifically associated with a closely
related cryptic over in their part of the world, the
wrong pendict, which we have we have talked about a
little bit in the past anyway it could be. It
(13:55):
can feel like kind of a bummer to hear someone say, oh, no,
actually you're not talking with non human animals, But we
got to remember this is how scientific progress works. Pretty
much everybody was not a sociopath, at some point has
felt a bond and understanding some sort of communicative connection
(14:17):
with a non human animal. And I think one of
the biggest unexpected conspiracies we found at play here is
that it turns out for quite some time, other animals
have been trying to talk to humans like ardently and
a good faith and humanity is just now maybe figuring
(14:40):
out how to receive those messages. So it's kind of
weird to say it, but despite all the human cognitive superpowers,
it turns out that humanity may have been the dumb
kids in the class the whole time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Really, imagine your cat mewing at you now and thinking
your cat is just going trying to speak slowly to
get you to understand my.
Speaker 5 (15:05):
Cat mew and me plays on a loop in my
mind at all times. It is, it is haunting me.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
It programs you right, Like how if you play Tetris
too long you dream of Tetris and you're really good
at packing U hauls. Yes, yes, here's where it gets crazy.
All right, what if we pick up where we left
off with more examples of human to animal communication in
specific species. Hate to sound like a broken record, but folks, cephalopods, cephalopods.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
Cephalopods, So we're talking octopuses, squid. What else fits in there?
Speaker 4 (15:47):
Cuddle fish maybe, cuddlefish, mollusk the well, there are type,
there are a class of mollusks. Also, the aliens id
arrival are very much inspired by cephalopods.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yes, but also like a human hand this giant but
also cephalopod. It's very strange. The spoilers. Sorry, sorry, this
a great moment where they get revealed. These things are incredible.
Have you guys seen them take the tests that they
give to kids where they can put, you know, a
specifically shaped box into a specifically shaped hole and somehow
(16:24):
they understand that's what you want them to do, or
match colors or I do the again. Uh myx wife
was a cognitivehavioral therapist, so I watched these tests happen,
and specifically with young children, attempting to work out what
it is that you're supposed to do and how to
do it. But then somehow these creatures that live deep
(16:46):
within the ocean can just figure it out.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
And the unendiedly hilarious part is, as researchers have found
time and time again, these octopuses in specific will only
play your reindeer games if they like you, right, If
they don't like you, they will beat me here Yl,
They'll be like this guy in particular, and they'll squirt
(17:11):
ink or they'll throw the puzzle at you.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Sure.
Speaker 5 (17:14):
Yeah, famously depicted in Finding Nemo Too. Oh yeah, I
think there's an octopus that is bouncing around in that movie.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
If I'm not mistaken from an aquarium. Isn't Finding Nemo
to the one that involves an aquarium?
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Is it called Finding Nemo Too?
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Well, it's it's called Finding Dory.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Ah Okay, now now I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
I mean it's Finding Nemo too.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
Finding My ears prick up every time I see uh
Dylan go off mute because he's about to deliver the
mail on us on this Yeah.
Speaker 6 (17:51):
That was Finding Dormy was when the octopus kept trying
to escape, right.
Speaker 5 (17:57):
But he squorts somebody in the eyes with ink at
some point. If I'm not and he does have he
you know, kick Star does a good job with this
anthrope homorphization while staying true to like some of the
original you know, like things that the actual creatures do
in there.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
Day based on real world events.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
Right and based on you know, relatively good science. They
seem to be into that stuff.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
The octopus paids plus octopus, puscapades, piscopades.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
That's where you're saying, guys, it is unrelated. Did you
see toy story five is actually happening.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
You know, unhappy about that. Quentin Tarantino, he's awesome.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
He's got some hot takes, he says, No, I refused
it ended perfectly.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
He actually doesn't even like four. He's very four. Well,
he's a very big fan of three.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Look, I'm super excited because Forky is still around and tight.
My whole family loves Forky. And isn't it sporky, No,
it's Forky. Isn't he a spork though he's a fork
He was Forky okay, okay on Disney Plus and look
at shorts Forky Testy.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
Look listen, I don't have monicles. Really.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Wow, I'm so excited because Conan O'Brien is going to
be a character named Smarty Pants, and there's an interview
he did, I think with Deadline or somewhere else where.
He talks, it's just Conan O'Brien. I'm sorry, I'm a
big fan.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
It's going to be a lot.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
I don't think you should apologize for enjoying the work.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Pixie of a creature And there's a celebrity for him.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
And we know how, you know, we get it, but
it's he He is so funny in the way he
approaches uh you know, his attempts to first get the
roles of Woody and Buzz and like how you know
it was astonishing that they wouldn't give him those roles.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Do you know?
Speaker 5 (19:44):
He has a really small part in the Death Stranding
sequel that like weird ass like video game that uh
Kajima does with the Norman. They call it The Walking
See I'm playing the first one, but the second one
is out, and I believe there is. He appears a
the hologram or something and he talks about going in
to shoot it with mo Cap at Kojima's studios.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
And how he had no idea what he was supposed
to be doing or what the story was about.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
That that's a radically different video game right to the
usual genre, just like the octopus is a radically different creature.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Genius, genius chance the rest of the world.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Guys, I am so sorry, and I don't know how
this happened or why, and I don't think I have
a bunch of them in my house, but I very
well might. A cockroach just crawled across my screen and
I grabbed it. It is currently in my hand. I'm
going to you can eat it. No, I'm gonna go
take it and throw it outside really fast. Amazing, guys,
(20:39):
I'm from outside. It's it's I don't want to open
my hands, so he'll get out.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Thanks for coming, man, Thanks for tuning in.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Yeah here here can you hear that dude holding railing around?
Oh yeah, it's wadling around a lot.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
You're a bold mofo, my friend.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
This is very so I'm gonna go take this outside
and you know what, We'll be right back after a
word from our human sponsors.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
And we have returned. Yes.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Just like Death Stranding was a radically different game in
the milieu of video games before it, The cephalopods in
general the octopus in specific, are so incomprehensibly different to
surface life that you could consider them an alien organism
(21:36):
that just happens to share our same galactic address they have.
They're very smart, they have immense mental abilities. They also
have way cooler physical superpowers. Like the octopus dreams, its alls, puzzles,
it recognizes, it remembers individual humans that it likes or
(21:57):
doesn't like. We're talking off air. They can rearrange or
edit their own are in a on the fly, and that.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
What allows them to change color and stuff or is
that made up? Don't some of them? They can?
Speaker 3 (22:09):
They can blend in yes, oh yes, camouflage the.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
Chromatophores, which are also a way that they communicate, right,
Like the bee communicates through dance, the octopus will communicate
with color. They also have very sensitive ocular hardware. So
it sounds like if you were if we were all
aliens and we were getting gain some vacation time on Earth,
(22:40):
and we got a little pamphlet that said Earth, you'd
read about the octopus, and you would think these guys
are at.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
The top, Which is funny. I mean, it makes a
lot of sense.
Speaker 5 (22:50):
I guess that so many aliens are depicted as cephalopod
esque you know, for for better or worse. I mean,
oftentimes they are to it as antagonistic, you know, especially
the Cuthulhu type. You know mythos of the cosmic horror,
you know that HP Lovecraft put out.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
But yeah, that's that's I.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
Think it's just like the most alien thing that we
can see here on Earth that looks squiggily and creepy
and otherworldly.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
It's a great point. Uh, as we continue forward, we're
gonna talk about these guys. Then we're gonna go on
land for a bit and then go back into the ocean.
But it does make me imagine another intelligent life coming
to this planet, which is largely a water planet, and
checking out the water first, because I mean, there's it's
mostly water. So let's go there and you find these
(23:39):
guys and cetaceans and whales and some of those some
of the other more intelligent creatures that exist out there,
and you may very well imagine that they're the ones
responsible for all the stuff floating around, you know, all
the satellites that you encounter on your way in. That
would make a lot of.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Sense, right there would be another well intentioned assumption, yet
an assumption nonetheless, the thing is the octopus kind of
made what we will call a Fausti embargain. Evolutionarily speaking,
they got all these superpowers, chromatophores out the wazoo. There's
(24:18):
just nuts. They're like if Cursive was a living thing.
But they do have a curse upon them, not cursive,
but a curse. They've got very short lifespans in comparison
to other animals of their cognitive ability. They also have
what we've talked about in the past, a hard hormonal
(24:39):
kill switch. It means that if you are an octopus,
you are driven to reproduce, and when you reproduce, you
will die.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
They're also crazy efficient hunters, but no bones or very
few bones.
Speaker 5 (24:57):
Bones come on, there's just a liability always breaking them
and stuff.
Speaker 4 (25:01):
There we go, it's octopus insurance policies. But also they
come up in a very different environment. You know, think
about it this way, Maybe how could an underwater creature,
regardless of intelligence, figure out how to do some of
humanity's greatest hits like tame fire. The closest you could
(25:22):
get is an undersea vent that you would sort of
worship like a god.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Hmmm, yeah, but you got bioluminescence. Man like, right, screwfire,
We're just gonna make ourselves glow.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Why do we need to cook? You know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (25:40):
And there there's also the question of environmental pressures. What
environmental pressures exist for the octopus that would create something
the surface dwellers would recognize as culture, right, Corvid's whales
they all have some kind of mechanism and humans sorry
for passing knowledge through generations, right, they have deep oral history,
(26:05):
some birds and some whales and some humans.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Sorry, And well, you know, if they can edit there RNA,
I wonder if there's anything you could do with that
to pass down knowledge of something to your young Like
you edit your own RNA somehow, which it isn't the
same as editing your DNA, but you know, you edit
yourself in some way so that the next version of
you now has that thing that creating.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Yeah, epigenetic changes, just like a Neil Stevenson's seventies spoilers.
This is weird because evolution is history's most brutal editor, right,
Like you know we always hear the thing kill your darlings.
Evolution invented that. So maybe the octopus just never needed
(26:53):
to create some kind of intergenerational culture. Maybe it never
had the evil lutionary opportunity up till now to do so.
But they're just oh my god, such an octopus stand
they would call it. I'm like, they're my favorites right right.
Speaker 5 (27:13):
There are a lot of people refuse to eat them
because I mean, it's probably obvious, there are a lot
of people know this, but because they are so sentient
that even people that eat other, you know, seafood, refuse
to eat to eat.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Octopus very much.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
So.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
My son and I used to go to the sushi
place all the time before the recent orthodonist unpleasantness, you know,
but but pleasant well, and octopus was one of his
favorite things and and I you know, i'd let him
eat if he wanted to eat it. But then we
had a whole conversation about these guys and what they
mean and how they operate and what they might represent,
(27:50):
and we just decided, no, we're not gonna do that anymore.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Yeah, or you know, just go the sith version and say, okay,
we'll eat humans too. Not yet, not yet. That's a
different sushi restaurant, and I hope it's not the States.
I mean, look, the octopus can do object permanence right,
and we pointed this out earlier.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
They do seem to enjoy pranks.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
There are cases of an octopus in an aquarium that
will break out of a place, do a little heist,
and then go back to its own aquarium and literally
lower the lid and close the latch such that no
one knows what's happening. Or they can escape back to
(28:40):
the sea, you know, free our boys, or they'll just
squirt ink at people, not because they're scared, because they
seem to think it's funny.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Kind of cool, right, kind of cool.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
I mean, so we could say we can't humans cannot
talk with our watering. What'd you say it, don't love
crafty of brethren from the debts? Yeah, okay, but we
can establish a type of connection, a little bit of
rude amentary communication through positive reinforcement. But they're just so different.
(29:15):
We don't know how the octopus processes concepts like friendship
or kinship.
Speaker 5 (29:21):
Have you seen what is it My Octopus Teacher documentary?
Or we're a diver naturalist. I can't remember exactly what
his background is. You know, has an octopus friend who
he spends a lot of time with, and it's I
haven't seen it entirely. I've seen moments of it, but
it's apparently quite moving and really demonstrates how that, you know, uh,
species interra species relationship can be very meaningful or at
(29:45):
least seem that way.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
Agreed, Absolutely love it. Please do watch that documentary. It's
a banger. And also tell us if you have befriended
one of our cephalopod pals before we do that trigger
warning for any people with emotive responses to the concept
of birds. Noel, is it okay talking about Is it
(30:08):
okay if we talk about birds for a second?
Speaker 5 (30:10):
Yeah, But can I just say I saw an AI
generated like horror clip online yesterday that was these just
giant predatory birds just tearing apart flesh and you know
how fed up some of that AI stuff looks, and
it was it really got to me. It was like
the first time my bird phobia sort of kicked in
or I was like, uh uh no, no, thank you.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
It's going way back to that whole epigenetics thing where no,
I'm just kidd we weren't around with the dinosaurs, but
I was gonna imagine, you know, human flesh. One time
our ancestors saw human flesh being torn open by giant
alligators and sharks, which is you.
Speaker 5 (30:47):
Know, and now we fear them even if it's not
necessarily something that's a threat to us.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
I got to there is a prival response to the reptilion.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yeah, but we just we weren't exactly around at least
we have no humanity of any sort that would be
a descendant was around at that time.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
Yes, right, so far we want to believe it is
a true story that for about I think a very
brief period of ancient history, flightless large birds were the
apex predator for a lot of earth.
Speaker 5 (31:27):
Oh yeah, doesn't a flightless bird just seem like they
really kind of lost the genetic lottery, Like, what's the
point of being a bird if you can't fly? And
maybe that's very reductive, but flightless bird just seems like
a real bummer.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Ask the penguins, dude, The penguins are having a good
old time, you know.
Speaker 4 (31:44):
Okay, you're right, but they can slide. At least they
got well theirs. Their version of flight is swimming, right.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
See this guy and.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
An ostrich and an emu. They're out there, man. They
run fast as the wind.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
So it's like flying right at a shoe bill looks
like it will stalk you on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
They just got it. They've got a very intense theare.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
I know, we're jumping too. Birds, guys. There's one last
point I want to make about the cephalopods there. Because
they don't have a vocalization at least that we are
aware of, you cannot study them at least their language
if you put that in quotations or their communication in
the same way that you can study something like birds, right,
or like some of these other even underwater mammals that
(32:32):
do speak, they have they make vocalizations, but these cephalopods
generally don't. So you're really looking at their communication with
the things we outlined there, the other ways they're the
way they're changing color and all those things. It just
makes it it's a different task, right if you're going
back to the arrival, you know example, you're not. It
(32:52):
is more of a visual understanding of what they're communicating
rather than auditory.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
Mm hmmm, one hundred percent, you know. And and with birds,
they're also quite visually based, right, similar to the octopus,
but they're even more strongly driven depending on the type
of bird you're talking about by auditory cues, right, so
this makes them a little closer to primates and how
(33:18):
they vibe. We already did the terrifying observation of what
bird song really means in chapter one. They're just shouting
out age, sex, location.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Not always this is my tree.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
Yes, if it's a COVID, they're yelling screw owls.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
You know what I mean, that.
Speaker 4 (33:39):
Kind of stuff. It's very graffiti esque. But a ton
of birds can mimic all sorts of sounds in the
natural world, up to an including human speech. Like the
whole reason we have Starlings in the United States is
a crazy story about a guy who wanted to get
(33:59):
all the birds words mentioned in the works of Shakespeare
and bring them to the US.
Speaker 5 (34:05):
Yeah, in the same way that Japan has an invasive
raccoon problem because of a children's cartoon. Yeah, people love
to and dumb stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
It's so weird.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Starlings are a funny example for us because Starling's mimic
a lot of the noises that you, as a human.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Do not care for.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
Sirens, alarm, clocks, gunfire, all all the stuff that you
are evolutionarily or behaviorally primed to dislike. Right, Starling will
just run up and you know, run up behind you
and be like.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
Whoop, whoop.
Speaker 5 (34:42):
What is it just trying to spook you, trying to
spook you out, like as a as a defense mechanism.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
What is the purpose for this? They just hear it.
They that's true ambient sounds.
Speaker 5 (34:53):
Yeah, that is interesting too, because I mean that's such
a symbiotic reflection of like our world, and they wouldn't
be doing that if we didn't have all that noise pollution.
And we've certainly talked about stories of how noise pollution
can affect like migratory patterns and.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
That this very interesting.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, But the thing is we can't decode the other
stuff fully that's being said by these birds between the mimicry, right,
So we don't know maybe even motivation that we're we're
thinking about right now, What is the motivation of doing
that mimicry? What is the motivation? Well, we can't talk
to them to fully understand that yet. The hope here, though,
is that through studying the bird songs, and you know,
(35:32):
there are companies that we're gonna be talking about very
soon that are attempting to analyze every single type of vocalization.
The pauses between those vocalizations and all, like all of
the complexity of it and figure out exactly what each
one of these things is conveying or attempting to convey.
And you know, the big question is is it as
(35:53):
complex as human speech patterns where we are just missing
We're missing all those peace to understand. Oh, well it
is there. It sounds like they're saying the same thing,
but the pattern that they set it in is actually
saying something different.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
Yeah, well said like the pickle of it is the
concept of communication versus mimicry, right, Like, yes, you can
teach certain birds to say all sorts of stuff such
as two for twenty five. You can also teach them
to say a vocalization like religion is control, but that
(36:32):
does not automatically mean the bird in question has really
thought through the concept of metaphysics and is now telling
you they're an atheist.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Well, unless you sit them in front of the TV
and make them watch Heretic twenty four to seven for
like two weeks, then maybe that.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
Movie ruled heretic is. I got this wronged off, Mike.
I thought we were talking about hereditary but no, heretic is.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, Hugh Grant is like this. It's really interesting. I
watch it a couple of times.
Speaker 5 (37:02):
Because it's about religious syncretism and the way a lot
of the things we talk about on the show. There
are parts of it that are a little heavy handed,
and the plot twists aren't amazing, but I really.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Liked it at its heart a lot. I think it's
an interesting food for thought kind of.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Movie and based on around the Book of Mormon, at
least largely for the scenario we get to.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
See, rated five out of five by bird reviewers on
birch Fork.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Yeah, the comment section just says religion is.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
Control exactly over and over. And this gets weirder when
we notice. The idea of communication with avians gets even
more labyrinthine when we think about how some birds do
provably bond incredibly closely with human partners, even to the
(37:52):
point of self harm. Right, some of these birds live
sixty plus human years, and when their partner disappears or
passes way, they're plucking out their feathers. They're not eating,
They're quite distressed. They have lost something they loved.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
I keep thinking about Alex, the African gray parrot.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Do you guys think he.
Speaker 4 (38:13):
Knew what he was saying when he said I love you.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (38:18):
I mean, love is such a construct kind of like
of metacognition, it doesn't seem I don't know, because we
certainly see affection between you know, members of other species
and the animal kingdom. But then you start to think,
like is it all purely functional? Is it all just
like a reproduction drive? Like is there any sentimentality wrapped
(38:40):
up in it?
Speaker 2 (38:40):
You know what I mean? Like that's how we experience it.
Speaker 5 (38:43):
I mean, I'm not trying to say it's trite or
like to dismiss the feelings of love or the concept,
but it does seem inherently a product of the way
we think about it within these other kind of structures.
Speaker 4 (38:54):
We could also ask the same questions about humans, you
know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Absolutely, Oh, in this specific case, doesn't it go back
to this question of mimicry versus understanding of what that is?
Because isn't is that not a phrase that somebody that
cares about that parrot would say when they have to
leave for the day, Like that exact set of phrases
like you.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Say to your partner right or to your kid or something.
Speaker 5 (39:19):
You know, I don't not to say nobody could love
a parent, but that's just not true. That's my inherent bias.
Please love your parents.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Well, if you can love a kid or the intelligence
of a human child, then you could arguably love an
African gray and it could love you back, because repeated
cognitive tests bias aside, proves they have the mental acumen
of a four to six year old human child, which
means also old enough to develop personality.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
Yeah, well, okay, So this is why I think the
efforts of companies like the Earth Species Project are really
actually cool and important. While I'm they not fully agree
with a lot of the things in there, I think
the work is going to be important. This is a
company you can read about all over the place. They
are attempting to build a large language model of some sort,
(40:13):
or maybe a series of them, but at least starting
in one large, unified one that can study the vocalizations
of all kinds of animals and fully understand them. So,
using AI and some of these things that are so
exciting right now in the zeitgeist, to look at all
of the language that has been recorded of an African
(40:35):
gray parrot, right, and then really study that stuff. And
then get deeper into other like individual studies where you're looking.
You know, you've got an African gray parrot and you
are working specifically with that parrot to understand all the communication,
building these huge data sets that can hopefully one day
do that kind of magic thing where you know, on
(40:58):
your phone, Google can do some of this right right now,
at least a little bit. If you go outside and
you open a certain app and you just let your
microphone go for a while, you can discover the different
types of species of birds that are in your backyard
or something right or at a nature preserve. But imagine
being able to actually put that on do that thing
(41:18):
and then get a feedback of what specific species are
attempting to communicate in that part of a forest or something.
It's super cool. And not just with birds. They're trying
to do it with absolutely everything, like all animal communications,
but specifically bioacoustic data, so vocalizations.
Speaker 5 (41:39):
Heck, yeah, that sounds fascinating, all right, So I think
we are going to move onto another member of the
animal kingdom. You know, some of our floppy ears and
nosed friends from Africa, you know, and elsewhere and Disney movies.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
I'm talking about elephants.
Speaker 5 (41:57):
We're going to take quick break here wor from our
sponsor and then be back with more.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
And we have returned.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
How dare you call him Dumbo?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Disney? It is offensive and that movie is a bummer.
Speaker 4 (42:14):
Yeah, the elephants are the opposite of dumbos. In addition
to being physically huge, they are mental titans. Yeah. They
can't talk the same way your human friends can, but
they can understand human words and commands and respond to
certain cues if trained. They have a crazy complex vocabulary.
They trumpet, they roar, they growl. Side note, I didn't
(42:37):
know elephants can growl. It is pretty frightening to imagine
that you're just standing around an elephant and it doesn't
like you, and it goes.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Interesting. I could see that more as like, I am
not amused.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
You know, they're one of only a handful of species
that we have observed mourning their dead, right, that's white
a huge deal because it implies empathy, which, oh my gosh,
like that is there anything more human than that?
Speaker 5 (43:10):
So that's so cool that you brought that up, because
that was sort of my question about like love and
I mean, mourning and empathy is it's a form of
love and implies loss and like you know, being attached
to somebody beyond just a functional reason. So I think
you just answered my questions. That's yeah, I forgot about
elephants mourning the.
Speaker 4 (43:29):
Dead, the object permanence, knowing that something, some mind or
soul was inside of physical frame and that thing has
left the building.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
The software is God.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
This happens also with Corvid's. This happens with a lot
of other animals as well, including humans. The elephant squeaks,
the elephants snorts get this, which I think we're all
surprised alert. They also communicate through infrasound. That is correct,
friends and neighbors, the same stuff that explains the human
(44:05):
experience with.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
Ghost Yeah, it's that stuff that's super low.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
It's too low of a vibration for us to hear.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Pretty cool. It makes sense though, those giant ears and
those really cool trumpets they got that they could make
some kind of cool sounds. Although I doubt that their
nose has anything to do with the infrasound. I think
it's probably the more guttural throat stuff.
Speaker 4 (44:28):
Right, I'm going to say it with due respect and affection.
They have very big ears.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
Yeah, absolutely, but means they can probably pick up some
stuff that maybe we can't.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
Right, Right, So, in both African and Asian elephants, you
will find infrasound used for long distance columns. For the
African elephants, it's going to be something between fifteen to
thirty five hurts, and for the Asian elephants it's going
to be fourteen to twenty four hurts. And as fellow
(45:01):
sound nerds, can we talk a little bit about how
infrasound works and like what, how can it move so
far like six miles or so? How can it function
as a communication thing that humans don't clock?
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (45:18):
I guess it just it doesn't dissipate because of its
frequency range, so it's able to just like move through
materials even sort of the way.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Low frequencies. This is a super low freak, right, isn't
that the deal?
Speaker 6 (45:31):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (45:31):
That's crazy. Yeah, fourteen Yeah, that's like und It's.
Speaker 5 (45:38):
Just energy, right, I mean, it's just energy that's moving
through a medium.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, it's a very long wave that just kind of
keeps going.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
And and wow, it is fascinating because again, if you
open up a dog or something and you open up
an equalizer and you go to the very far left
side when you're looking at it, that's where you're going
to get to the low frequencies. And you'll see you when,
like when a really popular song is going to come
out on the radio or something. Often and correct me
if I'm wrong here, Noel, that very far left side
(46:08):
over there with the super low sounds, you often have
to duck that just a little of bring it down
just a little bit, or hit a threshold with it,
because it can actually like break speakers if you have
too much low frequency stuff going on and it's too heavy.
Speaker 5 (46:23):
It's sareally cam, but it also just muddies up a
mix real bad, like you can't hear it. But once
it stacks on top of other things, it can like
really cause like build up.
Speaker 2 (46:33):
They call it, like low frequency build ups.
Speaker 5 (46:34):
So a lot of times when working in a digital
audio workstation kind of software, people will roll off the
low low end of a thing, or even microphones will
have a switch on them that's a high pass or
a low cut, which basically just subtracts those sounds even
from the capturing.
Speaker 4 (46:50):
And we don't know if elephants are aware of this,
but we do know. Essentially, this is one of the
big reveals. Elephants have an organic infrasound version of a
group chat thread, and the unaided human cannot hear this,
cannot participate, So you've got to wonder what they talk about.
They may have their own complex proto language, and we
(47:13):
recently discovered that elephants have been trying to quote unquote
talk with humans for a long time, an untold time.
They are capable of what is called goal directed intentionality.
This is why we mentioned the orangutan earlier. Elephants can use,
or have been documented using thirty eight distinct gesture types,
(47:38):
sometimes quite elaborate, to convey their goals and desires to humans.
So we might see a massive breakthrough in human to
elephant communication. We just don't know how complex that hybrid
system may become. Again, love to say it. You meet
people where they're.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
At, oh for sure. Well, we also only really get
to hang out with elephants and a lot of these
creatures that we're attempting to study when they're in some
form of captivity, whether that's on a nature preserve, in
a zoo and an aquarium, you know, somewhere where they're
controlled enough so that humans can have that continued interaction
with them. And the big question there is how much
(48:17):
does that affect the stuff they're trying to communicate, right,
or how much does that affect what they're thinking and
feeling when we get into those situations.
Speaker 4 (48:27):
Yeah, which makes me personally sad that we're not going
to be able to talk about Peter the Dolphin today.
But you can find probably one of the best parables
about that kind of communication wherever in your search browser
of choice. Just look up Peter lsd Dolphin and tell
(48:48):
us your thoughts about that.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
Well we can. Well, let's bring it down like it's
It was that situation that we talked about before, right
where there's Dolph. There's a dolphin or dolphins in captivity
and some weird stuff happened.
Speaker 5 (49:00):
I just remember they're talking about talking animals and pop
culture too, and that showed sequest. They had like a
tank that was fitted with you know, communication translation tools
that allowed them to talk to the dolphin that was
in the on the on the ship.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
Yeah, so do check out that story.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
We we couldn't leave you without a dop citation beat
to step two. So after you're reading about this amazing
story of dolphin communication. Check out the whales. We can't
mention dolphins without mentioning whales, even in twenty twenty five.
They're super mysterious. Now it may ruin your search history
(49:38):
to look up things like sperm whale phonetic alphabet, but
it's gonna be worth it. Whales communicate through what you
could roughly call songs. It's pretty beautiful stuff, but just
like Tom Waits, it's maybe not for everyone, or it's
no square pusher.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
It's a little bit slower.
Speaker 4 (49:57):
But up until recently, humanity wasn't sure how to classify
whale songs. They've been described as sounding like I'd love
to hear what we think about this, sounding like a
combo of Morse code and popcorn popping.
Speaker 3 (50:12):
Yes, it's series of clicks, twenty one different click patterns,
and they call them codas, which was really cool.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
I like that.
Speaker 4 (50:21):
Yeah, we owe a lot of this to Project SETI,
the Cetacean Translation Initiative. The humans were asking for a
long time. They said, well, are the whales doing the
maritime equivalent of bird vocalizations, which are all pretty much
horning mating calls, territorial remarks, cries of distress. Was there
(50:42):
something more a play? So SETI did this amazing thing.
From two thousand and five to twenty eighteen, they recorded
four hundred different sperm whales, largely in the Caribbean, and
they leveraged large language models, pattern wreck ignition algorithms, and
they said, oh my gosh, guys, these whales aren't just
(51:04):
mindlessly clicking to pass the time. They have a They
have their own pattern. So maybe we go to the Smithsonian.
The Smithsonian sums this up perfectly. I just love rubato.
Speaker 5 (51:18):
Sperm whales rattle off a series of rapid fire clicks
that researchers have named codas. Each coda consists of between
three and forty clicks. In addition to changing the number
of clicks they make in quick succession, whales often speed
up or slow down the tempo of each coda. Researchers
call this rubato. Sometimes they add an extra click at
(51:39):
the end of a coda, which scientists call ornamentation.
Speaker 3 (51:43):
Yeah, dude, cool, pretty cool. It is so much like
Morse code. Ben because they also noticed you could. They
will sometimes put a click at the front too, so
depending on who is listening, and then you know who
is sending the message. They will put those on either
end as like that whole you know, what is the
(52:04):
official like ham radio signal when it's like, oh, you
say over when you're done, or you say.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
Out when you got a breaker breaker whatever. Yeah, this team,
with the leveraging this LLM model or this algorithmic approach,
they identified at least one hundred and fifty six distinct
CLICKI click codas. And so the current idea or the
(52:32):
dream is that if you add these together and you
create some sort of undersea Rosetta stone, you can find
something very much like language, like these clicks and their pattern,
their cadence may indicate syllables, words, indeed, even concepts and sentences.
Is this language? Is this music? That's one of the
(52:59):
big questions. If we go with the music comparison, then
people would argue this conveys emotion without necessarily conveying specific information.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
It's crazy because we know these whales use these types
of codas in communication when they're hunting, right, they use
echolocation to hunt in the same way. If you imagine
a bat, you know, sends out a signal, and the
way it knows where stuff is is by as that
signal returns, it can identify stuff. These whales do that
same thing with these clicks and with some of the
(53:29):
sounds they make. And then they're also clicking to each
other when they're hunting because they don't hunt alone often
they're hunting together at a pod or what is a whale?
A group of whales? Is it a pod?
Speaker 2 (53:40):
The same idea?
Speaker 3 (53:41):
Okay, okay, so we can understand that stuff. But it's
incredible that you've got a group like this SETI the
what is it cetace Translation initiative, not to be.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Confused with the uh monitoring of space?
Speaker 5 (53:57):
Yes, yeah, although they're doing similar stuff in an interesting
way as above so.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Below, I guess.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
Yeah, But just knowing that there's a group out there trying, again,
trying to use AI or something like this in a
large language model type thing for this to then decode
all those things and to be able to understand what
the whales are communicating. Guys, I don't know if there
is a better use of AI out there that's actually
positive and cool.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Agree, I mean, it's certainly a good one.
Speaker 4 (54:26):
Yeah, you know, this is the question. If this is
indeed a language from our cetacean friends, that does mean
logically it can be decoded. That further means that it
would be possible to create a kind of translation process,
meaning that if everything works out, we may be capable
of speak into Wales directly within your lifetime, you specifically
(54:50):
you as you're listening to this show. And if that
is the case, get ready humanity is going to have
a lot of explaining to do, especially about the submarine.
Speaker 5 (55:00):
But I guess that's the thing, right, Like, even if
we can translator, we can't speak to them. We're not
going to have anything in common. Like how are we
going to bridge their understanding of the natural world like
with ours and all of the terms and stuff. Like
little nature of communication is sort of based on like
those things being on an equal footing, And I just
(55:20):
don't think they are discovering commonality, right, But maybe that
would allow that to happen.
Speaker 2 (55:26):
Maybe that's the thing that's the hope.
Speaker 3 (55:28):
Yeah, imagine a world, guys where this goes to its
logical conclusions. And we've got these apps now on our
phone that can both listen to an animal and like
give you a Google translation, right, and then you can
then type in something and then it spits out whatever
clicks or you know, sounds that could be made and
(55:49):
you can communicate back to that animal. That's incredible. But
then also imagine that you're attempting to talk to creatures
that are living close to humanity in one of our
metropolitan areas. And as you said, like the things we
need to be ready for, ben like what they're going
to be complaining about the stuff that's going on underwater
If you're talking to a whale. What about you know,
all of the other animals. What about the animals that
(56:11):
we use for food? Right? I mean, what happens when
we can actually communicate with these animals? And how's that
going to change how we interact and use animal species
across the board?
Speaker 1 (56:23):
Right?
Speaker 2 (56:23):
Right?
Speaker 4 (56:24):
The human experiment still suffers from the controversial idea of
Dumbar's number. So what happens if you add billions of
other organisms into the mix. This leads us brilliantly and
terrifyingly to the future, a world of amazing scientific progress
occurring at a breakneck case, even as the world is
(56:44):
imperiled by pollution, changing climates, the ever present cartoonish threat
of civilization ending in war. I love the mention you
made their matts of the concept of an app. So,
just like apps that can identify the species of bird
making a bird song. There are friends at ESP have
(57:06):
something called nature LM Audio, the first LLLM for animal sounds.
And this sounds sounds pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
What you do with it? You're into it?
Speaker 4 (57:19):
Okay, Oh yeah, here's what happens, all right. Lllms are
definitely imperfect, but being made by humans who are great
at recognizing patterns, lms are phenomenal pattern recognition, maybe not
so much synthesis, but yeah, now.
Speaker 2 (57:36):
That makes sense.
Speaker 3 (57:37):
Yeah, and if you are looking for some of them,
like an app like this as we've described today that
you can just use right now, well, I guess we
would recommend Merlin, which is a really cool app from
Cornell Lab, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They've got It's
one of those things where you take it outside and
it identifies bird species. Pretty simple but also incredibly complex
(57:59):
and cool. It's just it's not going to do the
kind of things that the Earth Species Project is trying
to do with nature LM. But but it's you know,
it's one of those things that's a stepping stone towards
that kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (58:11):
And that's the progress. Yeah, the nature LM models, the
things powering it. They get fed huge amounts of data
from patterns of human speech, then music, and then they
get fed data from recordings and observation of non human animals.
So yes, bird vocalizations, yes, whale songs, also the behavior
(58:32):
of jumping spiders. They go pretty fricking deep.
Speaker 3 (58:36):
Can you imagine it gets confused though, and it starts
spitting out stuff like, oh, that is a cardinal and
it's doing pearl jam.
Speaker 2 (58:44):
Yeah, crap.
Speaker 4 (58:45):
Well, another precedent for this would go would be go
to Google Translate, say something that is universal, like excuse me,
may I please have a casadia? Write that in English,
translate it to Japanese, translate it to German, and then
translate that phrase back to English. So is there a
(59:06):
world where is there a world where we can have
a whale and a crow make a podcast? What's their
podcast about? Your sky is My Sea?
Speaker 2 (59:17):
Or c is My Sky?
Speaker 3 (59:19):
Oh dude, well, you know, nature LM Audio is supposed
to come out this year, sometime in twenty twenty five.
I'm gonna go ahead and say it's probably gonna be
next year or in the year after that, But they're
doing their best to get it out this year, all
the good folks over there.
Speaker 4 (59:33):
The only deadline is the end of the world, right, Hey.
Speaker 3 (59:36):
And we have two thousand days according to some experts,
until the whole what do they call that thing, the
singularity occurs.
Speaker 2 (59:44):
Yeah, it was a good run, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (59:46):
We did okay?
Speaker 4 (59:47):
So yeah, humanity three out of five? So how do
we feel though about an ad driven Doctor Doolittle world?
Speaker 2 (59:57):
Right?
Speaker 4 (59:57):
Is it possible that this and similar initiatives might just
like a not quite ethical un translator? Is it possible
apps like this might squeeze in some concepts that humans
don't clock, you know what I mean? Like one day
you're using this technology to interact with your local tiger
(01:00:17):
and the LM accidentally or by design, inserts communication that
you have neither consented to nor agreed with.
Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
Dude, you got blue jays out there doing ads for
wild harvest universal blend bird seed.
Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
Exactly, and they're and you know how stupid will this
make humans?
Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
Look?
Speaker 4 (01:00:38):
You think you're saying, whoa, what's it like to fly?
Why are you so pissed at ravens or pissed at owls?
And instead what they're hearing. Are those questions interspersed by ads?
Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
Yeah, subscribe to Hulu today exactly.
Speaker 5 (01:00:57):
A thing of the past. It's getting subsumed by Disney Plus.
Or maybe it's Disney Plus is getting subsumed by Hulu.
I forget.
Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
It's so hard to keep trying. It is one way
or the other. It's definitely like either. Hulu's going away.
Speaker 5 (01:01:10):
Disney Plus was kind of considered to be a bit
of a flop, and they own so much IP that
they're gonna like smush it all together and call it
something else.
Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
They need to make Disney for the animals, you know
what I mean that that's the next step.
Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Maybe Hulu is getting integrated and it Disney.
Speaker 4 (01:01:27):
That makes way more sense because the krill doesn't eat
the whale. But the thing is, maybe humans can't yet
talk to non humans in the same way humans like
to talk to each other, or at the same level.
But that might be set to change and sooner than
we think. So with this, guys, fair to say we
(01:01:49):
cannot wait to hear other animal's favorite conspiracy theories. Do
you imagine talking to an octopus? The translation works and
you're like, hey, man, what's the stuff they don't want
you to know down there in the deep.
Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Don't get me started and wrong.
Speaker 5 (01:02:10):
Exactly people, right, have you all seen in your Naked
Gun movie, by the way.
Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
I have not. It's hilarious. It's like just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke.
Speaker 5 (01:02:20):
And there's this one bit in a meeting, like a
joke like kind of like a boardroom meeting where someone
just keeps talking about.
Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
Fish people and I love it. It's hilarious.
Speaker 4 (01:02:28):
Speaking of density of writing, I started rewatching thirty Rock
saying it's just a banger, uh stem distern. So shout
out to the writers on that one. Shout out to
the legendary Tina Fey, Shout out to you folks for
tuning in human non human animal alike. We'd love to
hear your thoughts. Please join us later on in a
(01:02:49):
few days as we're continuing our AI exploration with the
role of government and a I. You can drop us
an email all the time, and you can call us
on the phone and you can find us on the lines.
Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:03:03):
Also, Taco Bell and AI just I was sorry, I
was just looking at BBC in this headline.
Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
I think it's hilarious.
Speaker 5 (01:03:08):
Taco bell rethinks AI drive through after man orders eighteen
thousand waters.
Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
I want to know more. Sorry I had to bring
it up.
Speaker 5 (01:03:17):
You can find this in the antic conspiracy stuff where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group. Here's where
it gets crazy, on x FKA, Twitter, and on YouTube
with video content for you to peruse and enjoy. On
Instagram and TikTok or conspiracy Stuff show and there's more.
Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
Sorry, sir, we don't have that much water. You could
call our number. It is one eight three three std WYTK.
It's a voicemail system. When you call in, give yourself
a cool nickname like Akiva Daniel Shabbar Shaffer. That's a
great nickname. Let us know if we can use your
name and message on the air. Within the message, and
(01:03:53):
if you got more to say, if you got I
don't know, links, maybe attachments, anything you want. Just use
your mind and then translate that into an email. We are.
Speaker 4 (01:04:08):
Here in the dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:04:29):
Stuff they Don't Want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
A production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noel.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
They called me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the
Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you argue you are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Cacall marow well keyes click click click, and some sort
(00:51):
of tippish infrasound. We're back with the second chapter in
our series on human to animal communication.
Speaker 5 (00:59):
Damn going to say conversion and that was all in.
No communication is super interesting too.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
I like the chimera reference, that is the chimerath and
we already did that one this So I think it's
fair to save folks that our research here for this
series has inspired all of us to look at our
pets and non human friends a little bit differently. Matt
would love to throw to you, I think you what
(01:26):
were you telling our soft Are you met a deer?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yeah, I performed a recent experiment with a bit of
animal communication We've talked about trying to communicate with crows, ravens,
other birds like that. We've talked about attempting to talk
with our pets and stuff. But I was hanging out
at my grandparents' house in ye old coming as we
will all be excited about.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Never not hilarious, right, sorry, yep.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I look down in the backyard when I'm standing up
kind of on the in the carport area, and there
is a tiny little baby deer just laying down, staring
right at me with its ear out alerted and nervous
but still.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Your heart it melts immediately into your chest a bit.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah, for sure, there's a little bit of melting, but
mostly curiosity as to why it would just sit there
and stare at me and not move, not do anything.
It was just there so as.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Scared of you. Is it curious about you? Like what's
going on? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
So I started using my human voice and words to
talk to us. I said, hey, little what, hey, little baby,
what do you do? And it was just sitting there
staring at me still, And I got my girlfriend to
come out and it was still there. We were looking
at it, and we started pulling up YouTube videos of
mother deer's calling to their baby, to their babies, right idea,
(02:44):
just to see what would occur and would it recognize
those sounds? Are you know, does this mother deer sound
like this other mother white tailed deer? And and played
some and we watched as its ears just began, you know,
making movements as though it appears that the deer either
recognizes a similarity to it or is hearing something in
(03:05):
there that we imagined would be like listening to someone
saying words to that recreate the same.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Thing with crows. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Interesting. Crows are so cool to me in that respect
because I've always understood that they've got such complexity and differences.
Are there? Is there s?
Speaker 5 (03:23):
I mean, yeah, gosh, that wasn't on this episode. It
was on it was on Ridiculous History. Recently, Ben played
this poem that was in Chinese that used a single sound,
like an alphabet sound, and it did it like fifteen
different ways with like upward and downward inflections and stuff.
And I imagine stuff like that is you know, very
important in the animal can.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Yeah, and I think we've all started to look at
our animals differently, maybe real quickly throw to our pal Dylan, uh,
Dylan has our previous exploration on talking with animals. Has
it changed the way you're talking to your pets?
Speaker 6 (04:01):
Man, I'm definitely thinking about it more. You know. It's
it's interesting because I'm like, how many phrases it does
my dog know? And how much is it about my
intonation because there's definitely that she knows the difference between
do you want to go out, which means go in
the backyard, and do you want to go on a walk,
which means going through the front door, things like that.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Yeah, dude, I've been I've been trying it on mine too,
just same deal, trying to figure out is it actually
the language or just.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
The tone for sure? And I mean, was it Ben?
Speaker 5 (04:27):
I think on the last episode you pointed out to
me with my cat complaints that yes, in fact, studies
show that cats do know when you're calling their name,
they just don't care. So then it becomes like, what
is it about cats versus dogs that makes that reaction different,
you know, because cats don't react the same kind of
talk that dogs do, if.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
They react at all. Frankly, and by the way, Vanessa
did come back.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
I had some construction going on at my house and
the cat didn't show up for like a whole day,
and I started to get a little scared, but she
she turned up once the construction melee was cleared.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
What a perfect description, construction melee. That's beautiful. We do
hope that you have found this exploration as fascinating as
we do. We're going to pause for a word from
our sponsors that are currently not using large language models
to speak crow or cetacean. We'll be right back. Here
(05:31):
are the facts, all right. Previously we explored this whole
bag of badgers. It's the thing called communication in general,
and speech, the organized vocalization to convey a specific concept
is only one very small part of that huge umbrella term.
And I think we all agreed in chapter one that
(05:55):
every living animal has some form of communication. Right, Maybe
we're anthrocentric.
Speaker 5 (06:03):
Yeah, oh well yeah, I mean I think that's the
crux of this whole question. I think we said at
the very top of the first episode is like the
antro centric nature of the question, can we talk to animals?
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
And it goes back to this concept that's been around
for a long time that potentially most noises that animals
make are an alert of some form or another, and
that's it. And it's generally to alert other animals within
their pod, within their group, within their whatever it is,
their pack, or at least most sounds are for that
(06:38):
unless you get into some of the things specifically that
mothers make. There there are generally soothing sounds that are
out there. But are there actual do animals call each
other by name? Which is something really cool we're going
to find out today, and do animals well yeah, well yeah,
at least we know of a few species that have names, right,
(06:59):
But then you know, is that across the board and
we just don't understand it yet.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Right, And that's a great point, because every animal has
some complex form of communication, even if it's not, you know,
speaking the King's English. Oh, I forgot they got a
king again? Right, good on you United Kingdom. I keep
forgetting they have a king.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Why wasn't the Why wasn't it the United Queendom for
you know a long time?
Speaker 2 (07:30):
There?
Speaker 4 (07:31):
These are the questions. So every every animal having this stuff. Uh,
some of these communication or communicative channels are genuinely incomprehensible
to the unaided human.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
They just they just don't have the hardware to rock.
What's happening.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Maybe an analogy here if we walk it out a
little bit, walk it out, walk it out is uh.
Let's say an octopus is a postal worker. Right in
an octam goes around and delivers letters. They're great at
it because they have eight arms. And in this analogy,
the octopus wants to deliver a letter, but our human
(08:11):
recipient doesn't have a mailbox, so there's no way for
this message to cross the chasm of interspecial differences.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
I think a film that does a good job of
portraying this disconnect.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Is a rival with the just golf.
Speaker 5 (08:28):
I guess between the way humans communicate and the alien
species that is, you know, featured in the film and
then I saw you do it, not because I think
you've brought this up too. It has more to do
with like is it a sound based it's not sound based,
or there's something inherently like the square peg in a
round whole situation about the way the species communicates versus
(08:50):
you know humans.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
I don't want to spoil anything, but the key to
their language is time. One of the best movies ever made.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
It isn't great.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
I need to revisit it because I'm obviously I'm a
little foggy on the details.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
But isn't that right though? The way that that.
Speaker 5 (09:02):
That's it does do a good job of portraying that.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, the whole movie is about how to figure out
how to communicate right, and communication is key, guys. I've
learned that through therapy.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Okay, sure, self awareness is a big one.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
Communication is the greatest. I want to say, this octopus
we're talking about here and who's working for the mail
I think we should put that octopus in the letter
sorting room. That's where he's I love.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
That's working for the mail. I don't know that maybe, laugh,
you're right. Can you picture the cartoon version of where
you chucking letters left and right and just like a blur.
Speaker 5 (09:38):
You know of like arms and paper flying, like he's
in the mail room shooting things up, shoots to be
delivered to the executives in the c suite like in
the fifties.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
You know, that would have been a fantastic addition to
the always Sunny episode where Charlie Day works in the
mail room. Oh yeah, if they come up with the
idea that they got to bring an octopus in, all right,
get at us, Get at us.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Rob Glenn and Charlie.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
He's just got it in a tank in the room
and he's like trying to explain to Mac that he's
you know, we're working and we're working on it.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
Yeah, this guy doesn't stop this octopus?
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Can he read? All right? Moving on? H Yeah, so
sweet is the question. That's the question. Wait, but also
does he need to read?
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Because if you just train it based on the right thing,
then maybe that doesn't even matter. Per the story of
Clever Hans, you know in the previous episode.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
Yeah, exactly press it there. We know that the point
about anthrocentrism bears repeating because a lot of people throughout
history made these very well intentioned, valid assumptions that were
still assumptions. They said, hey, look at us, we're humans.
We can talk. Other animals are also smart, so maybe
(10:57):
they can learn to talk like us instead of us
meeting them where they are at communicatively.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
I mean, we even do that within our species in
terms of like everybody ought to know English. But you know,
we can't be bothered.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
It just encouraged to me the other day, how like
some bad people will make a big point about how
certain immigrants don't speak good English, but they speak English
way better than you speak Mandarin, my friend, I will tell.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
You that right now. And that's I don't know.
Speaker 5 (11:27):
It always occurs to me how thoughtless and egotistical that
kind of stuff is.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
It's very self centered because look, you know, you run
into someone who is making the effort to speak to
you in your lingua franca and they don't get everything right.
Remember they were a polyglot and you.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
May not be.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
So they walked a lot further to get to that
conversation that you did. And I think that's a brilliant comparison, Noel.
I mean, like you said, clever Haun's the math horse.
From there, all the way up to the modern day
public and scientists alike have been accused of sort of
seeing what they wanted to see, or perhaps hearing what
they want to hear. And we talked about this a
(12:09):
little bit. Researchers are still going back and forth over
whether certain animal experiments did result in actual conversation or
was Alex the African gray parrot or Coco the Lowland
gorilla where they just mimicking the behavior and responding to
the cues of the people quote unquote training them and
(12:33):
previously we mentioned Matt, you mentioned lightly the astonishing orangutang,
right Arangton, and we got to give them one more
quick shout out. Have you guys seen the various videos
of these forest dudes, as the name translates, Have you
(12:54):
guys seen the videos of them like figuring out solutions
to problems or getting people to show them their human babies,
all that cool stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Oh yeah, yeah, And we also talked about some of
the chimps that were taught sign language and other types
of language, uh before even before them, some of the
great apes that Jane Goodall was directly, you know, associated with.
She was not associated with cocoa, by the way. I
think I mentioned that specifically, or I had a thought
that she was, but she was not.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
But like you pointed out, she was.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
She was aware, and I believe I read a quote
of hers, but that where it was preserving to a
lot of the things that she believed.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
For sure, Yeah, and you did share that quote. We
also know that oragatons are specifically associated with a closely
related cryptic over in their part of the world, the
wrong pendict, which we have we have talked about a
little bit in the past anyway it could be. It
(13:55):
can feel like kind of a bummer to hear someone say, oh, no,
actually you're not talking with non human animals, But we
got to remember this is how scientific progress works. Pretty
much everybody was not a sociopath, at some point has
felt a bond and understanding some sort of communicative connection
(14:17):
with a non human animal. And I think one of
the biggest unexpected conspiracies we found at play here is
that it turns out for quite some time, other animals
have been trying to talk to humans like ardently and
a good faith and humanity is just now maybe figuring
(14:40):
out how to receive those messages. So it's kind of
weird to say it, but despite all the human cognitive superpowers,
it turns out that humanity may have been the dumb
kids in the class the whole time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Really, imagine your cat mewing at you now and thinking
your cat is just going trying to speak slowly to
get you to understand my.
Speaker 5 (15:05):
Cat mew and me plays on a loop in my
mind at all times. It is, it is haunting me.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
It programs you right, Like how if you play Tetris
too long you dream of Tetris and you're really good
at packing U hauls. Yes, yes, here's where it gets crazy.
All right, what if we pick up where we left
off with more examples of human to animal communication in
specific species. Hate to sound like a broken record, but folks, cephalopods, cephalopods.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
Cephalopods, So we're talking octopuses, squid. What else fits in there?
Speaker 4 (15:47):
Cuddle fish maybe, cuddlefish, mollusk the well, there are type,
there are a class of mollusks. Also, the aliens id
arrival are very much inspired by cephalopods.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yes, but also like a human hand this giant but
also cephalopod. It's very strange. The spoilers. Sorry, sorry, this
a great moment where they get revealed. These things are incredible.
Have you guys seen them take the tests that they
give to kids where they can put, you know, a
specifically shaped box into a specifically shaped hole and somehow
(16:24):
they understand that's what you want them to do, or
match colors or I do the again. Uh myx wife
was a cognitivehavioral therapist, so I watched these tests happen,
and specifically with young children, attempting to work out what
it is that you're supposed to do and how to
do it. But then somehow these creatures that live deep
(16:46):
within the ocean can just figure it out.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
And the unendiedly hilarious part is, as researchers have found
time and time again, these octopuses in specific will only
play your reindeer games if they like you, right, If
they don't like you, they will beat me here Yl,
They'll be like this guy in particular, and they'll squirt
(17:11):
ink or they'll throw the puzzle at you.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Sure.
Speaker 5 (17:14):
Yeah, famously depicted in Finding Nemo Too. Oh yeah, I
think there's an octopus that is bouncing around in that movie.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
If I'm not mistaken from an aquarium. Isn't Finding Nemo
to the one that involves an aquarium?
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Is it called Finding Nemo Too?
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Well, it's it's called Finding Dory.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Ah Okay, now now I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
I mean it's Finding Nemo too.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
Finding My ears prick up every time I see uh
Dylan go off mute because he's about to deliver the
mail on us on this Yeah.
Speaker 6 (17:51):
That was Finding Dormy was when the octopus kept trying
to escape, right.
Speaker 5 (17:57):
But he squorts somebody in the eyes with ink at
some point. If I'm not and he does have he
you know, kick Star does a good job with this
anthrope homorphization while staying true to like some of the
original you know, like things that the actual creatures do
in there.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
Day based on real world events.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
Right and based on you know, relatively good science. They
seem to be into that stuff.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
The octopus paids plus octopus, puscapades, piscopades.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
That's where you're saying, guys, it is unrelated. Did you
see toy story five is actually happening.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
You know, unhappy about that. Quentin Tarantino, he's awesome.
Speaker 5 (18:34):
He's got some hot takes, he says, No, I refused
it ended perfectly.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
He actually doesn't even like four. He's very four. Well,
he's a very big fan of three.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Look, I'm super excited because Forky is still around and tight.
My whole family loves Forky. And isn't it sporky, No,
it's Forky. Isn't he a spork though he's a fork
He was Forky okay, okay on Disney Plus and look
at shorts Forky Testy.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
Look listen, I don't have monicles. Really.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Wow, I'm so excited because Conan O'Brien is going to
be a character named Smarty Pants, and there's an interview
he did, I think with Deadline or somewhere else where.
He talks, it's just Conan O'Brien. I'm sorry, I'm a
big fan.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
It's going to be a lot.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
I don't think you should apologize for enjoying the work.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Pixie of a creature And there's a celebrity for him.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
And we know how, you know, we get it, but
it's he He is so funny in the way he
approaches uh you know, his attempts to first get the
roles of Woody and Buzz and like how you know
it was astonishing that they wouldn't give him those roles.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Do you know?
Speaker 5 (19:44):
He has a really small part in the Death Stranding
sequel that like weird ass like video game that uh
Kajima does with the Norman. They call it The Walking
See I'm playing the first one, but the second one
is out, and I believe there is. He appears a
the hologram or something and he talks about going in
to shoot it with mo Cap at Kojima's studios.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
And how he had no idea what he was supposed
to be doing or what the story was about.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
That that's a radically different video game right to the
usual genre, just like the octopus is a radically different creature.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Genius, genius chance the rest of the world.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Guys, I am so sorry, and I don't know how
this happened or why, and I don't think I have
a bunch of them in my house, but I very
well might. A cockroach just crawled across my screen and
I grabbed it. It is currently in my hand. I'm
going to you can eat it. No, I'm gonna go
take it and throw it outside really fast. Amazing, guys,
(20:39):
I'm from outside. It's it's I don't want to open
my hands, so he'll get out.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Thanks for coming, man, Thanks for tuning in.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Yeah here here can you hear that dude holding railing around?
Oh yeah, it's wadling around a lot.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
You're a bold mofo, my friend.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
This is very so I'm gonna go take this outside
and you know what, We'll be right back after a
word from our human sponsors.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
And we have returned. Yes.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Just like Death Stranding was a radically different game in
the milieu of video games before it, The cephalopods in
general the octopus in specific, are so incomprehensibly different to
surface life that you could consider them an alien organism
(21:36):
that just happens to share our same galactic address they have.
They're very smart, they have immense mental abilities. They also
have way cooler physical superpowers. Like the octopus dreams, its alls, puzzles,
it recognizes, it remembers individual humans that it likes or
(21:57):
doesn't like. We're talking off air. They can rearrange or
edit their own are in a on the fly, and that.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
What allows them to change color and stuff or is
that made up? Don't some of them? They can?
Speaker 3 (22:09):
They can blend in yes, oh yes, camouflage the.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
Chromatophores, which are also a way that they communicate, right,
Like the bee communicates through dance, the octopus will communicate
with color. They also have very sensitive ocular hardware. So
it sounds like if you were if we were all
aliens and we were getting gain some vacation time on Earth,
(22:40):
and we got a little pamphlet that said Earth, you'd
read about the octopus, and you would think these guys
are at.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
The top, Which is funny. I mean, it makes a
lot of sense.
Speaker 5 (22:50):
I guess that so many aliens are depicted as cephalopod
esque you know, for for better or worse. I mean,
oftentimes they are to it as antagonistic, you know, especially
the Cuthulhu type. You know mythos of the cosmic horror,
you know that HP Lovecraft put out.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
But yeah, that's that's I.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
Think it's just like the most alien thing that we
can see here on Earth that looks squiggily and creepy
and otherworldly.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
It's a great point. Uh, as we continue forward, we're
gonna talk about these guys. Then we're gonna go on
land for a bit and then go back into the ocean.
But it does make me imagine another intelligent life coming
to this planet, which is largely a water planet, and
checking out the water first, because I mean, there's it's
mostly water. So let's go there and you find these
(23:39):
guys and cetaceans and whales and some of those some
of the other more intelligent creatures that exist out there,
and you may very well imagine that they're the ones
responsible for all the stuff floating around, you know, all
the satellites that you encounter on your way in. That
would make a lot of.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Sense, right there would be another well intentioned assumption, yet
an assumption nonetheless, the thing is the octopus kind of
made what we will call a Fausti embargain. Evolutionarily speaking,
they got all these superpowers, chromatophores out the wazoo. There's
(24:18):
just nuts. They're like if Cursive was a living thing.
But they do have a curse upon them, not cursive,
but a curse. They've got very short lifespans in comparison
to other animals of their cognitive ability. They also have
what we've talked about in the past, a hard hormonal
(24:39):
kill switch. It means that if you are an octopus,
you are driven to reproduce, and when you reproduce, you
will die.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
They're also crazy efficient hunters, but no bones or very
few bones.
Speaker 5 (24:57):
Bones come on, there's just a liability always breaking them
and stuff.
Speaker 4 (25:01):
There we go, it's octopus insurance policies. But also they
come up in a very different environment. You know, think
about it this way, Maybe how could an underwater creature,
regardless of intelligence, figure out how to do some of
humanity's greatest hits like tame fire. The closest you could
(25:22):
get is an undersea vent that you would sort of
worship like a god.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Hmmm, yeah, but you got bioluminescence. Man like, right, screwfire,
We're just gonna make ourselves glow.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Why do we need to cook? You know what I mean?
Speaker 4 (25:40):
And there there's also the question of environmental pressures. What
environmental pressures exist for the octopus that would create something
the surface dwellers would recognize as culture, right, Corvid's whales
they all have some kind of mechanism and humans sorry
for passing knowledge through generations, right, they have deep oral history,
(26:05):
some birds and some whales and some humans.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Sorry, And well, you know, if they can edit there RNA,
I wonder if there's anything you could do with that
to pass down knowledge of something to your young Like
you edit your own RNA somehow, which it isn't the
same as editing your DNA, but you know, you edit
yourself in some way so that the next version of
you now has that thing that creating.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Yeah, epigenetic changes, just like a Neil Stevenson's seventies spoilers.
This is weird because evolution is history's most brutal editor, right,
Like you know we always hear the thing kill your darlings.
Evolution invented that. So maybe the octopus just never needed
(26:53):
to create some kind of intergenerational culture. Maybe it never
had the evil lutionary opportunity up till now to do so.
But they're just oh my god, such an octopus stand
they would call it. I'm like, they're my favorites right right.
Speaker 5 (27:13):
There are a lot of people refuse to eat them
because I mean, it's probably obvious, there are a lot
of people know this, but because they are so sentient
that even people that eat other, you know, seafood, refuse
to eat to eat.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Octopus very much.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
So.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
My son and I used to go to the sushi
place all the time before the recent orthodonist unpleasantness, you know,
but but pleasant well, and octopus was one of his
favorite things and and I you know, i'd let him
eat if he wanted to eat it. But then we
had a whole conversation about these guys and what they
mean and how they operate and what they might represent,
(27:50):
and we just decided, no, we're not gonna do that anymore.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Yeah, or you know, just go the sith version and say, okay,
we'll eat humans too. Not yet, not yet. That's a
different sushi restaurant, and I hope it's not the States.
I mean, look, the octopus can do object permanence right,
and we pointed this out earlier.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
They do seem to enjoy pranks.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
There are cases of an octopus in an aquarium that
will break out of a place, do a little heist,
and then go back to its own aquarium and literally
lower the lid and close the latch such that no
one knows what's happening. Or they can escape back to
(28:40):
the sea, you know, free our boys, or they'll just
squirt ink at people, not because they're scared, because they
seem to think it's funny.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Kind of cool, right, kind of cool.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
I mean, so we could say we can't humans cannot
talk with our watering. What'd you say it, don't love
crafty of brethren from the debts? Yeah, okay, but we
can establish a type of connection, a little bit of
rude amentary communication through positive reinforcement. But they're just so different.
(29:15):
We don't know how the octopus processes concepts like friendship
or kinship.
Speaker 5 (29:21):
Have you seen what is it My Octopus Teacher documentary?
Or we're a diver naturalist. I can't remember exactly what
his background is. You know, has an octopus friend who
he spends a lot of time with, and it's I
haven't seen it entirely. I've seen moments of it, but
it's apparently quite moving and really demonstrates how that, you know, uh,
species interra species relationship can be very meaningful or at
(29:45):
least seem that way.
Speaker 4 (29:47):
Agreed, Absolutely love it. Please do watch that documentary. It's
a banger. And also tell us if you have befriended
one of our cephalopod pals before we do that trigger
warning for any people with emotive responses to the concept
of birds. Noel, is it okay talking about Is it
(30:08):
okay if we talk about birds for a second?
Speaker 5 (30:10):
Yeah, But can I just say I saw an AI
generated like horror clip online yesterday that was these just
giant predatory birds just tearing apart flesh and you know
how fed up some of that AI stuff looks, and
it was it really got to me. It was like
the first time my bird phobia sort of kicked in
or I was like, uh uh no, no, thank you.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
It's going way back to that whole epigenetics thing where no,
I'm just kidd we weren't around with the dinosaurs, but
I was gonna imagine, you know, human flesh. One time
our ancestors saw human flesh being torn open by giant
alligators and sharks, which is you.
Speaker 5 (30:47):
Know, and now we fear them even if it's not
necessarily something that's a threat to us.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
I got to there is a prival response to the reptilion.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yeah, but we just we weren't exactly around at least
we have no humanity of any sort that would be
a descendant was around at that time.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
Yes, right, so far we want to believe it is
a true story that for about I think a very
brief period of ancient history, flightless large birds were the
apex predator for a lot of earth.
Speaker 5 (31:27):
Oh yeah, doesn't a flightless bird just seem like they
really kind of lost the genetic lottery, Like, what's the
point of being a bird if you can't fly? And
maybe that's very reductive, but flightless bird just seems like
a real bummer.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
Ask the penguins, dude, The penguins are having a good
old time, you know.
Speaker 4 (31:44):
Okay, you're right, but they can slide. At least they
got well theirs. Their version of flight is swimming, right.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
See this guy and.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
An ostrich and an emu. They're out there, man. They
run fast as the wind.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
So it's like flying right at a shoe bill looks
like it will stalk you on Instagram.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
They just got it. They've got a very intense theare.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
I know, we're jumping too. Birds, guys. There's one last
point I want to make about the cephalopods there. Because
they don't have a vocalization at least that we are
aware of, you cannot study them at least their language
if you put that in quotations or their communication in
the same way that you can study something like birds, right,
or like some of these other even underwater mammals that
(32:32):
do speak, they have they make vocalizations, but these cephalopods
generally don't. So you're really looking at their communication with
the things we outlined there, the other ways they're the
way they're changing color and all those things. It just
makes it it's a different task, right if you're going
back to the arrival, you know example, you're not. It
(32:52):
is more of a visual understanding of what they're communicating
rather than auditory.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
Mm hmmm, one hundred percent, you know. And and with birds,
they're also quite visually based, right, similar to the octopus,
but they're even more strongly driven depending on the type
of bird you're talking about by auditory cues, right, so
this makes them a little closer to primates and how
(33:18):
they vibe. We already did the terrifying observation of what
bird song really means in chapter one. They're just shouting
out age, sex, location.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Not always this is my tree.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
Yes, if it's a COVID, they're yelling screw owls.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
You know what I mean, that.
Speaker 4 (33:39):
Kind of stuff. It's very graffiti esque. But a ton
of birds can mimic all sorts of sounds in the
natural world, up to an including human speech. Like the
whole reason we have Starlings in the United States is
a crazy story about a guy who wanted to get
(33:59):
all the birds words mentioned in the works of Shakespeare
and bring them to the US.
Speaker 5 (34:05):
Yeah, in the same way that Japan has an invasive
raccoon problem because of a children's cartoon. Yeah, people love
to and dumb stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
It's so weird.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Starlings are a funny example for us because Starling's mimic
a lot of the noises that you, as a human.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Do not care for.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
Sirens, alarm, clocks, gunfire, all all the stuff that you
are evolutionarily or behaviorally primed to dislike. Right, Starling will
just run up and you know, run up behind you
and be like.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
Whoop, whoop.
Speaker 5 (34:42):
What is it just trying to spook you, trying to
spook you out, like as a as a defense mechanism.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
What is the purpose for this? They just hear it.
They that's true ambient sounds.
Speaker 5 (34:53):
Yeah, that is interesting too, because I mean that's such
a symbiotic reflection of like our world, and they wouldn't
be doing that if we didn't have all that noise pollution.
And we've certainly talked about stories of how noise pollution
can affect like migratory patterns and.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
That this very interesting.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Yeah, But the thing is we can't decode the other
stuff fully that's being said by these birds between the mimicry, right,
So we don't know maybe even motivation that we're we're
thinking about right now, What is the motivation of doing
that mimicry? What is the motivation? Well, we can't talk
to them to fully understand that yet. The hope here, though,
is that through studying the bird songs, and you know,
(35:32):
there are companies that we're gonna be talking about very
soon that are attempting to analyze every single type of vocalization.
The pauses between those vocalizations and all, like all of
the complexity of it and figure out exactly what each
one of these things is conveying or attempting to convey.
And you know, the big question is is it as
(35:53):
complex as human speech patterns where we are just missing
We're missing all those peace to understand. Oh, well it
is there. It sounds like they're saying the same thing,
but the pattern that they set it in is actually
saying something different.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
Yeah, well said like the pickle of it is the
concept of communication versus mimicry, right, Like, yes, you can
teach certain birds to say all sorts of stuff such
as two for twenty five. You can also teach them
to say a vocalization like religion is control, but that
(36:32):
does not automatically mean the bird in question has really
thought through the concept of metaphysics and is now telling
you they're an atheist.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Well, unless you sit them in front of the TV
and make them watch Heretic twenty four to seven for
like two weeks, then maybe that.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
Movie ruled heretic is. I got this wronged off, Mike.
I thought we were talking about hereditary but no, heretic is.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, Hugh Grant is like this. It's really interesting. I
watch it a couple of times.
Speaker 5 (37:02):
Because it's about religious syncretism and the way a lot
of the things we talk about on the show. There
are parts of it that are a little heavy handed,
and the plot twists aren't amazing, but I really.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Liked it at its heart a lot. I think it's
an interesting food for thought kind of.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Movie and based on around the Book of Mormon, at
least largely for the scenario we get to.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
See, rated five out of five by bird reviewers on
birch Fork.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Yeah, the comment section just says religion is.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
Control exactly over and over. And this gets weirder when
we notice. The idea of communication with avians gets even
more labyrinthine when we think about how some birds do
provably bond incredibly closely with human partners, even to the
(37:52):
point of self harm. Right, some of these birds live
sixty plus human years, and when their partner disappears or
passes way, they're plucking out their feathers. They're not eating,
They're quite distressed. They have lost something they loved.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
I keep thinking about Alex, the African gray parrot.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Do you guys think he.
Speaker 4 (38:13):
Knew what he was saying when he said I love you.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (38:18):
I mean, love is such a construct kind of like
of metacognition, it doesn't seem I don't know, because we
certainly see affection between you know, members of other species
and the animal kingdom. But then you start to think,
like is it all purely functional? Is it all just
like a reproduction drive? Like is there any sentimentality wrapped
(38:40):
up in it?
Speaker 2 (38:40):
You know what I mean? Like that's how we experience it.
Speaker 5 (38:43):
I mean, I'm not trying to say it's trite or
like to dismiss the feelings of love or the concept,
but it does seem inherently a product of the way
we think about it within these other kind of structures.
Speaker 4 (38:54):
We could also ask the same questions about humans, you
know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Absolutely, Oh, in this specific case, doesn't it go back
to this question of mimicry versus understanding of what that is?
Because isn't is that not a phrase that somebody that
cares about that parrot would say when they have to
leave for the day, Like that exact set of phrases
like you.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Say to your partner right or to your kid or something.
Speaker 5 (39:19):
You know, I don't not to say nobody could love
a parent, but that's just not true. That's my inherent bias.
Please love your parents.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Well, if you can love a kid or the intelligence
of a human child, then you could arguably love an
African gray and it could love you back, because repeated
cognitive tests bias aside, proves they have the mental acumen
of a four to six year old human child, which
means also old enough to develop personality.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
Yeah, well, okay, So this is why I think the
efforts of companies like the Earth Species Project are really
actually cool and important. While I'm they not fully agree
with a lot of the things in there, I think
the work is going to be important. This is a
company you can read about all over the place. They
are attempting to build a large language model of some sort,
(40:13):
or maybe a series of them, but at least starting
in one large, unified one that can study the vocalizations
of all kinds of animals and fully understand them. So,
using AI and some of these things that are so
exciting right now in the zeitgeist, to look at all
of the language that has been recorded of an African
(40:35):
gray parrot, right, and then really study that stuff. And
then get deeper into other like individual studies where you're looking.
You know, you've got an African gray parrot and you
are working specifically with that parrot to understand all the communication,
building these huge data sets that can hopefully one day
do that kind of magic thing where you know, on
(40:58):
your phone, Google can do some of this right right now,
at least a little bit. If you go outside and
you open a certain app and you just let your
microphone go for a while, you can discover the different
types of species of birds that are in your backyard
or something right or at a nature preserve. But imagine
being able to actually put that on do that thing
(41:18):
and then get a feedback of what specific species are
attempting to communicate in that part of a forest or something.
It's super cool. And not just with birds. They're trying
to do it with absolutely everything, like all animal communications,
but specifically bioacoustic data, so vocalizations.
Speaker 5 (41:39):
Heck, yeah, that sounds fascinating, all right, So I think
we are going to move onto another member of the
animal kingdom. You know, some of our floppy ears and
nosed friends from Africa, you know, and elsewhere and Disney movies.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
I'm talking about elephants.
Speaker 5 (41:57):
We're going to take quick break here wor from our
sponsor and then be back with more.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
And we have returned.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
How dare you call him Dumbo?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Disney? It is offensive and that movie is a bummer.
Speaker 4 (42:14):
Yeah, the elephants are the opposite of dumbos. In addition
to being physically huge, they are mental titans. Yeah. They
can't talk the same way your human friends can, but
they can understand human words and commands and respond to
certain cues if trained. They have a crazy complex vocabulary.
They trumpet, they roar, they growl. Side note, I didn't
(42:37):
know elephants can growl. It is pretty frightening to imagine
that you're just standing around an elephant and it doesn't
like you, and it goes.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Interesting. I could see that more as like, I am
not amused.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
You know, they're one of only a handful of species
that we have observed mourning their dead, right, that's white
a huge deal because it implies empathy, which, oh my gosh,
like that is there anything more human than that?
Speaker 5 (43:10):
So that's so cool that you brought that up, because
that was sort of my question about like love and
I mean, mourning and empathy is it's a form of
love and implies loss and like you know, being attached
to somebody beyond just a functional reason. So I think
you just answered my questions. That's yeah, I forgot about
elephants mourning the.
Speaker 4 (43:29):
Dead, the object permanence, knowing that something, some mind or
soul was inside of physical frame and that thing has
left the building.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
The software is God.
Speaker 4 (43:43):
This happens also with Corvid's. This happens with a lot
of other animals as well, including humans. The elephant squeaks,
the elephants snorts get this, which I think we're all
surprised alert. They also communicate through infrasound. That is correct,
friends and neighbors, the same stuff that explains the human
(44:05):
experience with.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
Ghost Yeah, it's that stuff that's super low.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
It's too low of a vibration for us to hear.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Pretty cool. It makes sense though, those giant ears and
those really cool trumpets they got that they could make
some kind of cool sounds. Although I doubt that their
nose has anything to do with the infrasound. I think
it's probably the more guttural throat stuff.
Speaker 4 (44:28):
Right, I'm going to say it with due respect and affection.
They have very big ears.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
Yeah, absolutely, but means they can probably pick up some
stuff that maybe we can't.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
Right, Right, So, in both African and Asian elephants, you
will find infrasound used for long distance columns. For the
African elephants, it's going to be something between fifteen to
thirty five hurts, and for the Asian elephants it's going
to be fourteen to twenty four hurts. And as fellow
(45:01):
sound nerds, can we talk a little bit about how
infrasound works and like what, how can it move so
far like six miles or so? How can it function
as a communication thing that humans don't clock?
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (45:18):
I guess it just it doesn't dissipate because of its
frequency range, so it's able to just like move through
materials even sort of the way.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Low frequencies. This is a super low freak, right, isn't
that the deal?
Speaker 6 (45:31):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (45:31):
That's crazy. Yeah, fourteen Yeah, that's like und It's.
Speaker 5 (45:38):
Just energy, right, I mean, it's just energy that's moving
through a medium.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, it's a very long wave that just kind of
keeps going.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
And and wow, it is fascinating because again, if you
open up a dog or something and you open up
an equalizer and you go to the very far left
side when you're looking at it, that's where you're going
to get to the low frequencies. And you'll see you when,
like when a really popular song is going to come
out on the radio or something. Often and correct me
if I'm wrong here, Noel, that very far left side
(46:08):
over there with the super low sounds, you often have
to duck that just a little of bring it down
just a little bit, or hit a threshold with it,
because it can actually like break speakers if you have
too much low frequency stuff going on and it's too heavy.
Speaker 5 (46:23):
It's sareally cam, but it also just muddies up a
mix real bad, like you can't hear it. But once
it stacks on top of other things, it can like
really cause like build up.
Speaker 2 (46:33):
They call it, like low frequency build ups.
Speaker 5 (46:34):
So a lot of times when working in a digital
audio workstation kind of software, people will roll off the
low low end of a thing, or even microphones will
have a switch on them that's a high pass or
a low cut, which basically just subtracts those sounds even
from the capturing.
Speaker 4 (46:50):
And we don't know if elephants are aware of this,
but we do know. Essentially, this is one of the
big reveals. Elephants have an organic infrasound version of a
group chat thread, and the unaided human cannot hear this,
cannot participate, So you've got to wonder what they talk about.
They may have their own complex proto language, and we
(47:13):
recently discovered that elephants have been trying to quote unquote
talk with humans for a long time, an untold time.
They are capable of what is called goal directed intentionality.
This is why we mentioned the orangutan earlier. Elephants can use,
or have been documented using thirty eight distinct gesture types,
(47:38):
sometimes quite elaborate, to convey their goals and desires to humans.
So we might see a massive breakthrough in human to
elephant communication. We just don't know how complex that hybrid
system may become. Again, love to say it. You meet
people where they're.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
At, oh for sure. Well, we also only really get
to hang out with elephants and a lot of these
creatures that we're attempting to study when they're in some
form of captivity, whether that's on a nature preserve, in
a zoo and an aquarium, you know, somewhere where they're
controlled enough so that humans can have that continued interaction
with them. And the big question there is how much
(48:17):
does that affect the stuff they're trying to communicate, right,
or how much does that affect what they're thinking and
feeling when we get into those situations.
Speaker 4 (48:27):
Yeah, which makes me personally sad that we're not going
to be able to talk about Peter the Dolphin today.
But you can find probably one of the best parables
about that kind of communication wherever in your search browser
of choice. Just look up Peter lsd Dolphin and tell
(48:48):
us your thoughts about that.
Speaker 3 (48:49):
Well we can. Well, let's bring it down like it's
It was that situation that we talked about before, right
where there's Dolph. There's a dolphin or dolphins in captivity
and some weird stuff happened.
Speaker 5 (49:00):
I just remember they're talking about talking animals and pop
culture too, and that showed sequest. They had like a
tank that was fitted with you know, communication translation tools
that allowed them to talk to the dolphin that was
in the on the on the ship.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
Yeah, so do check out that story.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
We we couldn't leave you without a dop citation beat
to step two. So after you're reading about this amazing
story of dolphin communication. Check out the whales. We can't
mention dolphins without mentioning whales, even in twenty twenty five.
They're super mysterious. Now it may ruin your search history
(49:38):
to look up things like sperm whale phonetic alphabet, but
it's gonna be worth it. Whales communicate through what you
could roughly call songs. It's pretty beautiful stuff, but just
like Tom Waits, it's maybe not for everyone, or it's
no square pusher.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
It's a little bit slower.
Speaker 4 (49:57):
But up until recently, humanity wasn't sure how to classify
whale songs. They've been described as sounding like I'd love
to hear what we think about this, sounding like a
combo of Morse code and popcorn popping.
Speaker 3 (50:12):
Yes, it's series of clicks, twenty one different click patterns,
and they call them codas, which was really cool.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
I like that.
Speaker 4 (50:21):
Yeah, we owe a lot of this to Project SETI,
the Cetacean Translation Initiative. The humans were asking for a
long time. They said, well, are the whales doing the
maritime equivalent of bird vocalizations, which are all pretty much
horning mating calls, territorial remarks, cries of distress. Was there
(50:42):
something more a play? So SETI did this amazing thing.
From two thousand and five to twenty eighteen, they recorded
four hundred different sperm whales, largely in the Caribbean, and
they leveraged large language models, pattern wreck ignition algorithms, and
they said, oh my gosh, guys, these whales aren't just
(51:04):
mindlessly clicking to pass the time. They have a They
have their own pattern. So maybe we go to the Smithsonian.
The Smithsonian sums this up perfectly. I just love rubato.
Speaker 5 (51:18):
Sperm whales rattle off a series of rapid fire clicks
that researchers have named codas. Each coda consists of between
three and forty clicks. In addition to changing the number
of clicks they make in quick succession, whales often speed
up or slow down the tempo of each coda. Researchers
call this rubato. Sometimes they add an extra click at
(51:39):
the end of a coda, which scientists call ornamentation.
Speaker 3 (51:43):
Yeah, dude, cool, pretty cool. It is so much like
Morse code. Ben because they also noticed you could. They
will sometimes put a click at the front too, so
depending on who is listening, and then you know who
is sending the message. They will put those on either
end as like that whole you know, what is the
(52:04):
official like ham radio signal when it's like, oh, you
say over when you're done, or you say.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
Out when you got a breaker breaker whatever. Yeah, this team,
with the leveraging this LLM model or this algorithmic approach,
they identified at least one hundred and fifty six distinct
CLICKI click codas. And so the current idea or the
(52:32):
dream is that if you add these together and you
create some sort of undersea Rosetta stone, you can find
something very much like language, like these clicks and their pattern,
their cadence may indicate syllables, words, indeed, even concepts and sentences.
Is this language? Is this music? That's one of the
(52:59):
big questions. If we go with the music comparison, then
people would argue this conveys emotion without necessarily conveying specific information.
Speaker 3 (53:09):
It's crazy because we know these whales use these types
of codas in communication when they're hunting, right, they use
echolocation to hunt in the same way. If you imagine
a bat, you know, sends out a signal, and the
way it knows where stuff is is by as that
signal returns, it can identify stuff. These whales do that
same thing with these clicks and with some of the
(53:29):
sounds they make. And then they're also clicking to each
other when they're hunting because they don't hunt alone often
they're hunting together at a pod or what is a whale?
A group of whales? Is it a pod?
Speaker 2 (53:40):
The same idea?
Speaker 3 (53:41):
Okay, okay, so we can understand that stuff. But it's
incredible that you've got a group like this SETI the
what is it cetace Translation initiative, not to be.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Confused with the uh monitoring of space?
Speaker 5 (53:57):
Yes, yeah, although they're doing similar stuff in an interesting
way as above so.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Below, I guess.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
Yeah, But just knowing that there's a group out there trying, again,
trying to use AI or something like this in a
large language model type thing for this to then decode
all those things and to be able to understand what
the whales are communicating. Guys, I don't know if there
is a better use of AI out there that's actually
positive and cool.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Agree, I mean, it's certainly a good one.
Speaker 4 (54:26):
Yeah, you know, this is the question. If this is
indeed a language from our cetacean friends, that does mean
logically it can be decoded. That further means that it
would be possible to create a kind of translation process,
meaning that if everything works out, we may be capable
of speak into Wales directly within your lifetime, you specifically
(54:50):
you as you're listening to this show. And if that
is the case, get ready humanity is going to have
a lot of explaining to do, especially about the submarine.
Speaker 5 (55:00):
But I guess that's the thing, right, Like, even if
we can translator, we can't speak to them. We're not
going to have anything in common. Like how are we
going to bridge their understanding of the natural world like
with ours and all of the terms and stuff. Like
little nature of communication is sort of based on like
those things being on an equal footing, And I just
(55:20):
don't think they are discovering commonality, right, But maybe that
would allow that to happen.
Speaker 2 (55:26):
Maybe that's the thing that's the hope.
Speaker 3 (55:28):
Yeah, imagine a world, guys where this goes to its
logical conclusions. And we've got these apps now on our
phone that can both listen to an animal and like
give you a Google translation, right, and then you can
then type in something and then it spits out whatever
clicks or you know, sounds that could be made and
(55:49):
you can communicate back to that animal. That's incredible. But
then also imagine that you're attempting to talk to creatures
that are living close to humanity in one of our
metropolitan areas. And as you said, like the things we
need to be ready for, ben like what they're going
to be complaining about the stuff that's going on underwater
If you're talking to a whale. What about you know,
all of the other animals. What about the animals that
(56:11):
we use for food? Right? I mean, what happens when
we can actually communicate with these animals? And how's that
going to change how we interact and use animal species
across the board?
Speaker 1 (56:23):
Right?
Speaker 2 (56:23):
Right?
Speaker 4 (56:24):
The human experiment still suffers from the controversial idea of
Dumbar's number. So what happens if you add billions of
other organisms into the mix. This leads us brilliantly and
terrifyingly to the future, a world of amazing scientific progress
occurring at a breakneck case, even as the world is
(56:44):
imperiled by pollution, changing climates, the ever present cartoonish threat
of civilization ending in war. I love the mention you
made their matts of the concept of an app. So,
just like apps that can identify the species of bird
making a bird song. There are friends at ESP have
(57:06):
something called nature LM Audio, the first LLLM for animal sounds.
And this sounds sounds pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
What you do with it? You're into it?
Speaker 4 (57:19):
Okay, Oh yeah, here's what happens, all right. Lllms are
definitely imperfect, but being made by humans who are great
at recognizing patterns, lms are phenomenal pattern recognition, maybe not
so much synthesis, but yeah, now.
Speaker 2 (57:36):
That makes sense.
Speaker 3 (57:37):
Yeah, and if you are looking for some of them,
like an app like this as we've described today that
you can just use right now, well, I guess we
would recommend Merlin, which is a really cool app from
Cornell Lab, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They've got It's
one of those things where you take it outside and
it identifies bird species. Pretty simple but also incredibly complex
(57:59):
and cool. It's just it's not going to do the
kind of things that the Earth Species Project is trying
to do with nature LM. But but it's you know,
it's one of those things that's a stepping stone towards
that kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (58:11):
And that's the progress. Yeah, the nature LM models, the
things powering it. They get fed huge amounts of data
from patterns of human speech, then music, and then they
get fed data from recordings and observation of non human animals.
So yes, bird vocalizations, yes, whale songs, also the behavior
(58:32):
of jumping spiders. They go pretty fricking deep.
Speaker 3 (58:36):
Can you imagine it gets confused though, and it starts
spitting out stuff like, oh, that is a cardinal and
it's doing pearl jam.
Speaker 2 (58:44):
Yeah, crap.
Speaker 4 (58:45):
Well, another precedent for this would go would be go
to Google Translate, say something that is universal, like excuse me,
may I please have a casadia? Write that in English,
translate it to Japanese, translate it to German, and then
translate that phrase back to English. So is there a
(59:06):
world where is there a world where we can have
a whale and a crow make a podcast? What's their
podcast about? Your sky is My Sea?
Speaker 2 (59:17):
Or c is My Sky?
Speaker 3 (59:19):
Oh dude, well, you know, nature LM Audio is supposed
to come out this year, sometime in twenty twenty five.
I'm gonna go ahead and say it's probably gonna be
next year or in the year after that, But they're
doing their best to get it out this year, all
the good folks over there.
Speaker 4 (59:33):
The only deadline is the end of the world, right, Hey.
Speaker 3 (59:36):
And we have two thousand days according to some experts,
until the whole what do they call that thing, the
singularity occurs.
Speaker 2 (59:44):
Yeah, it was a good run, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (59:46):
We did okay?
Speaker 4 (59:47):
So yeah, humanity three out of five? So how do
we feel though about an ad driven Doctor Doolittle world?
Speaker 2 (59:57):
Right?
Speaker 4 (59:57):
Is it possible that this and similar initiatives might just
like a not quite ethical un translator? Is it possible
apps like this might squeeze in some concepts that humans
don't clock, you know what I mean? Like one day
you're using this technology to interact with your local tiger
(01:00:17):
and the LM accidentally or by design, inserts communication that
you have neither consented to nor agreed with.
Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
Dude, you got blue jays out there doing ads for
wild harvest universal blend bird seed.
Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
Exactly, and they're and you know how stupid will this
make humans?
Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
Look?
Speaker 4 (01:00:38):
You think you're saying, whoa, what's it like to fly?
Why are you so pissed at ravens or pissed at owls?
And instead what they're hearing. Are those questions interspersed by ads?
Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
Yeah, subscribe to Hulu today exactly.
Speaker 5 (01:00:57):
A thing of the past. It's getting subsumed by Disney Plus.
Or maybe it's Disney Plus is getting subsumed by Hulu.
I forget.
Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
It's so hard to keep trying. It is one way
or the other. It's definitely like either. Hulu's going away.
Speaker 5 (01:01:10):
Disney Plus was kind of considered to be a bit
of a flop, and they own so much IP that
they're gonna like smush it all together and call it
something else.
Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
They need to make Disney for the animals, you know
what I mean that that's the next step.
Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Maybe Hulu is getting integrated and it Disney.
Speaker 4 (01:01:27):
That makes way more sense because the krill doesn't eat
the whale. But the thing is, maybe humans can't yet
talk to non humans in the same way humans like
to talk to each other, or at the same level.
But that might be set to change and sooner than
we think. So with this, guys, fair to say we
(01:01:49):
cannot wait to hear other animal's favorite conspiracy theories. Do
you imagine talking to an octopus? The translation works and
you're like, hey, man, what's the stuff they don't want
you to know down there in the deep.
Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Don't get me started and wrong.
Speaker 5 (01:02:10):
Exactly people, right, have you all seen in your Naked
Gun movie, by the way.
Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
I have not. It's hilarious. It's like just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke.
Speaker 5 (01:02:20):
And there's this one bit in a meeting, like a
joke like kind of like a boardroom meeting where someone
just keeps talking about.
Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
Fish people and I love it. It's hilarious.
Speaker 4 (01:02:28):
Speaking of density of writing, I started rewatching thirty Rock
saying it's just a banger, uh stem distern. So shout
out to the writers on that one. Shout out to
the legendary Tina Fey, Shout out to you folks for
tuning in human non human animal alike. We'd love to
hear your thoughts. Please join us later on in a
(01:02:49):
few days as we're continuing our AI exploration with the
role of government and a I. You can drop us
an email all the time, and you can call us
on the phone and you can find us on the lines.
Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:03:03):
Also, Taco Bell and AI just I was sorry, I
was just looking at BBC in this headline.
Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
I think it's hilarious.
Speaker 5 (01:03:08):
Taco bell rethinks AI drive through after man orders eighteen
thousand waters.
Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
I want to know more. Sorry I had to bring
it up.
Speaker 5 (01:03:17):
You can find this in the antic conspiracy stuff where
we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group. Here's where
it gets crazy, on x FKA, Twitter, and on YouTube
with video content for you to peruse and enjoy. On
Instagram and TikTok or conspiracy Stuff show and there's more.
Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
Sorry, sir, we don't have that much water. You could
call our number. It is one eight three three std WYTK.
It's a voicemail system. When you call in, give yourself
a cool nickname like Akiva Daniel Shabbar Shaffer. That's a
great nickname. Let us know if we can use your
name and message on the air. Within the message, and
(01:03:53):
if you got more to say, if you got I
don't know, links, maybe attachments, anything you want. Just use
your mind and then translate that into an email. We are.
Speaker 4 (01:04:08):
Here in the dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:04:29):
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