12:00

learn from your grandmother because she's probably

12:02

done it before. Ooh, stop

12:05

with that, because the role of

12:07

grandparents was super interesting

12:09

to me, because we know

12:11

in the studies of early

12:13

man that the grandmother

12:16

effect for the survival of

12:18

the species was long underrated

12:20

and is now acknowledged as

12:22

an important part of why

12:24

we thrived as humans. Sure,

12:26

I mean I think if the cetaceans

12:28

show us anything, it's the power of

12:30

strong female leadership. Whether that's a killer

12:32

whale grandmother or a sperm

12:34

whale grandmother, we had the great honor

12:36

of being there for when Rounder

12:39

in family A gave birth

12:41

last summer and she was there

12:44

with her mother and the grandmother of

12:46

the new baby as well as all

12:48

her cousins and aunties and even one

12:51

of the young males who had started

12:53

to leave. These are very strong families

12:55

because fundamentally in the vastness of the

12:57

deep ocean where it's dark all the

13:00

time, the only consistent thing

13:02

is your family. When

13:04

I say that it's not the two-way

13:06

conversation between whale and human that drives

13:08

the science that we're doing, what

13:11

I mean by that is despite

13:13

these fundamental differences, the

13:15

mission of learning from someone fundamentally

13:17

different from us still has yielded

13:20

such strong lessons about ourselves. It's

13:22

not about wanting to interact with

13:25

a whale to change its behavior.

13:27

It's about understanding what's important to

13:29

a whale and then asking how

13:31

does that affect what I do. So

13:34

one of the questions we often get is like,

13:36

well, if you learn a warning call, do you

13:38

think you could just play it out in front

13:40

of all the boats to make sure that no

13:42

whale ever gets hit by a boat again? And

13:45

I think that reverses the understanding.

13:47

It sort of does a disservice to what I

13:49

think is the most important takeaway from this kind

13:51

of work. Fundamentally, if we

13:53

understand that and we do now to

13:55

some extent, that there's a crisis of

13:57

these animals interacting with the ships. but

13:59

also the noise that's created. The

14:02

solution to that isn't by putting more noise

14:05

into the ocean, even if it carries meaning

14:07

that the animals may be able to interpret.

14:10

What it means is that we need to learn how

14:12

to change our behavior in order to protect what's important

14:14

to them. That's the bigger vision

14:16

here beyond the science. Now,

14:19

SETI's research on the language

14:21

of sperm whales is deeply

14:24

intertwined with the movement

14:26

to protect and to preserve whales.

14:28

And so we can't really talk

14:30

about that without referencing the late

14:32

Roger Payne, who discovered

14:35

that humpback whales sing. How

14:38

did the general public perceive

14:40

whales before Payne's research? You

14:44

know, it fundamentally changed the way

14:46

people thought about whales and maybe

14:48

even all of wildlife. When

14:51

he discovered humpback whale song and

14:55

shared that with the world, and it

14:57

got put onto a golden record that we

15:00

then shot off outside of our solar system.

15:03

We were still actively killing whales

15:05

by the thousands for dog

15:08

food, grease, and oil.

15:11

We had long passed their economic

15:13

importance in terms of

15:15

powering the economy of the world.

15:18

They were still publishing papers about

15:21

here's how we do science with

15:23

literally without killing them in the

15:25

title. So this came about at

15:28

a time where our

15:30

relationships to whales were

15:32

pretty tragic. What

15:34

it did was inspired people

15:36

to realize how amazing these

15:38

animals truly are. I

15:41

think National Geographic produced two or three

15:43

floppy records ever. One is

15:45

the moon landing audio, and then the other

15:47

is the humpback whale song. It

15:50

ignited one of the largest environmental movements

15:52

of our time, certainly until the climate

15:54

change action that we're seeing in the

15:56

recent years. And that's

15:58

just because people...