This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
REID:
Hi. So the conversation you’re about to hear is a conversation Aria and I had on stage at the Masters of Skills Summit with Aza Raskin, who is the CEO and co-founder of the Earth Species Project. If the Earth Species Project was successful, we might have this intro in, you know, beluga whale or dolphin or something else. But we’ll show you part of the reason why this conversation was so magical and why we want to share it with you.
ARIA:
Reid and I have known Aza for a long time, and I think you can hear it in the podcast episode that we are just so delighted to hear everything from crows to beluga whales to elephants to dolphins. So I’m excited for everyone to listen. So here is our episode with Azar Askin.
REID:
Welcome. It’s awesome to be doing this at the Master Scale Summit of having our Possible podcast. And I can’t think of literally a better guest and subject than Aza and the Earth Species Project. We won’t need an AI to understand this conversation. Tell us about the Earth Species Project. What is it?
AZA:
The Earth Species Project, we are sort of the frontier of interspecies understanding. The question is, can we use Frontier AI to understand the other languages and cultures of Earth? And what most people don’t know, for instance, is that whales and dolphins, they have cultures. They have languages. They have distinct dialects. They’ve been passing down their culture for 34 million years, as far as we can tell. So that’s 85 times longer than the human species has existed. And in the last 20 years, science has progressed a lot in understanding these incredible other beings–that they have cultures is now fully documented, but almost no progress has been made–in fact, no progress has been made– on the communication of orcas. And one really interesting side tidbit: orcas have fashion fads.
AZA:
I don’t know if you know this. A couple–I think it was in the 90’s– it was first documented that an orca killed a salmon and started wearing it as a hat. Other orcas started following suit. And then for like a season or two, there was a whole salmon thing that was going on.
ARIA:
I love how, like, salmon’s ‘in’ this season–
AZA:
Yeah, exactly.
ARIA:
–next month, it’s gonna be aqua – get ready.
REID:
And we will have salmon hats merch.
AZA:
Reach underneath your chairs. Yeah, so that’s what we’re up about. And it’s sort of like, there are two portions of this project. There’s the science portion – and this is, like, build the tools. Right now, there’s a scientific revolution, obviously, happening in every human domain. But that hasn’t been brought to the non-human domain yet. And so there’s a power of scientific revolution and that’s what we’re building–these large scale foundation models, NatureLM, things like that–to do that. But then the even bigger goal is sort of create a Copernican Revolution. Which is to say that when we start to learn the language or the culture of another human group, it takes that group from being something that’s like “out there”, and it brings them into your heart a little bit. And it changes how you act.
AZA:
And I think it’s the same thing for animals. As we learn that animals actually have rich language and deep culture, it takes them from like nature “out there” and it pulls them into our heart, and it changes who we are.
ARIA:
So when I hear a dog bark, I hear a dog bark. And when you go to the zoo, you hear a lion roar. But you guys are decoding animal communication. Can you just give us some examples of that animal communication and what you are seeing with these animals?
AZA:
Yeah. All right, so let’s play a guessing game. Does anyone know which animal makes these sounds? (animal sounds play) Not bat. It is a kind of whale. Not an orca. Good guess, though. Beluga. Yes. Nice work. So these are a couple beluga communicating while hunting. And what I love about this is that, most people, like, we sort of know humpback whale song. But this sounds to me like an alien modem. And in fact all that digital high pitched noise, that wasn’t digital stuff. That was them communicating. And so it seems like they may actually communicate in modem-like packets. They include their name.
REID:
Have you done a baud rate?
AZA:
That’s a great question.
REID:
Yes.
AZA:
Did you guys–I’m sure you’ve played a lot with dial-up.
REID:
Oh yeah, of course, yeah. Back in bulletin board days. We left our walkers outside.
AZA:
I feel like if I ever have to do an un-talent show, it’s the ability to do like (vocal whistle trill), which is how I’m going to communicate with AI, really.
REID:
Exactly. Or, how it might communicate with you.
AZA:
Yes, that’s right. But what’s interesting about this, right– so here’s an interesting puzzle. Orcas can communicate up to 150 kilohertz. Okay. We can hear up to 20 kilohertz. But in water, high frequencies don’t go very far. So why are they communicating at such high pitch? And the answer is: we don’t know yet. But theory is that because they are often communicating in close call, like intimate calls. And they’re moving around each other, they’re often touching each other. This is a thing you and I were talking about backstage, but we’re doing work with University of Lyon on these incredible crows. And they have their own unique culture where they do collective child rearing. So they sort of form a little commune or kibbutz or something.
REID:
Yeah, it’s not a murder of crows. It’s a commune of crows.
AZA:
That’s gonna over great these days. They have their own dialect. They’ll take outside adults in, teach them their new dialect or language, and their crows will start participating in the communal child rearing thing. And so we work with the university, they have little backpacks on the crows. And that means we get to record what they’re saying all the time. And one of the things that we have been finding is around 70% of the calls that they make are actually quiet, intimate calls. Calls they make to each other. And when we brought these to the scientists and biologists that we’re working with, they were like, “We haven’t seen these calls before.” It appears that something like–and again, this is all preliminary, so, you know, science–but 70% of the calls that crows make, science hasn’t really touched or been aware of.
AZA:
And so we’ve been trying to understand the language of another species by only listening to its shouts. That would be like trying to understand humans by only listening to Twitter.
ARIA:
You’re only listening to Jim Cramer being really loud.
AZA:
Right. And the same thing, the same tools that we’re now building for crows, to your point about scale; these methods can scale. And most people say, like, “Well, you’re starting with just a couple species, right?” Like, actually, no. The way AI works is that learning about one species teaches you about all species. If I learn in human language by teaching AI German and French and Japanese, it actually can learn very quickly Esperanto and Aramaic, because each language has a kind of pattern that matches. And the same thing is true of the animal kingdom. And so we’re building these tools that work across the entire tree of life. And we’re heading into these what we think are going to be AlphaFold moments.
AZA:
We’re going to be able to show that many species have names, or many species have compositional language, or many species have abstract thinking–going from abstract to specific. And that’s where we are.
REID:
Yeah. And one of the things that I learned from early days when you kicked off the Earth Species Project, and it’s like about a year in, is you had discovered these trainers who had trained these two dolphins to do an original aerobatic trick.
AZA:
Yes.
REID:
So, describe this a little bit. Because by the way, this begins to give you a lens of– that there are definite communication and thought that we very much undercount as human beings–because we are not yet in dialogue with them. Part of what you were just saying is: if we can get in dialogue, there are all kinds of other things that come. So, talk a little bit about the dolphins.
AZA:
Yeah. So, this was a 1994 University of Hawaii study, and in this study they were teaching dolphins gestures. And the first gesture they taught the dolphin was: do something you’ve never done before. Which is to say, innovate. I think it’s a gesture Reid is trying to do it here.
REID:
It was Jeff’s yoga pose.
AZA:
And interestingly enough, the dolphins can understand the concept of “innovate,” of “do something new.” And already that requires an immense amount of cognitive capacity, because that requires remembering everything you’ve done before. Understanding the concept of negation–not one of those things–and then invent whole cloth, some new behavior, some new trick. That’s already cool. But then, the researchers had this brilliant idea which is, “We’ll teach them a second gesture: do something together.” And then they would say to the dolphins, “Do something you’ve never done before, together. Innovate together.” And the dolphins would go down, exchange sonic information, come up, and do the same thing they had never done before, at the same time.
ARIA:
I mean, I couldn’t even do that with a human. If I went under the water like you and me, it would be a disaster.
AZA:
We should try this. Yeah. This is actually going to be like the ice breaking game for Masters of Scale next year.
REID:
Yes, exactly.
AZA:
Yeah.
ARIA:
So, I think it’s so interesting that you can—again, these species are so different. You’re learning from crows, which are tiny, to dolphins that are in the water, to—I feel like we’ve all seen that beautiful, heartbreaking meme of the elephant who, every year, returns to the spot where their mother died. That teaches us there’s so much more going on than we think.
So when it comes to elephants, what have you learned about both communication but then also social group dynamics within the elephant—within the crew?
AZA:
Yeah, so I don’t know how many people know this, but elephants, they can communicate infrasonically—so sub like our ability to hear. They will shake the ground, actually transmit sound through the ground, and get picked up by other elephants through their feet. So, there’s a lot going on with elephants. One of our partners, Joyce Poole, who runs the Elephant Listening Project, pointed out that when elephants communicate, they communicate on top of each other. They overlap. So, with humans, we do turn taking. I speak, you speak, I speak. Well, except if you’re a New Yorker, I guess.
REID:
I did not bribe him for the New York comment.
ARIA:
Constantly in New York vs San Francisco battle.
AZA:
But elephants do the opposite. It seems like, roughly 90% of the time, when one communicates, the other starts to communicate. And so Joyce has this hypothesis, which is that maybe there’s a kind of communal grammar—that, in order to say a sentence, it actually requires all of us. And we don’t know if this is true yet, but I love it as a thought experiment. Because if it is true, that means there is a harmonization happening—not in music, but in meaning. And that’s a way that the more of them that speak, maybe the greater coherence they have. And that’s a lesson humanity needs to learn.
REID:
Well, actually, speaking of kind of humanity lessons, one of the things—when we opened yesterday with Fei Fei—she was like, “Okay, there’s more to the world than language and language models,” so, spatial intelligence. But here’s another thing: what do you think we might imagine about how we’re learning about language and human language by also exploring the languages of all these other species? I’ve never asked you this question before, but I know you’re philosophical, so what are some glimmers of possibility there?
AZA:
Well, I think this one with elephants is one—that maybe you don’t need to do sequential turn-taking to come up with meaning. Maybe there’s a way. It’s a little bit like music, right? When human beings play music, there’s an emergence that happens and a way of creating meaning that is more communal. I think that is one.
I think the real answer is: we just don’t know. And often people ask us, “What is the first thing you want to say to an animal?” And actually, that’s already the wrong way to think about it. We’re very careful—we don’t say, “break the interspecies communication barrier.” We say, “break the interspecies understanding barrier.” Because I think it’s when we listen that we change. It’s not when we speak.
So that’s the real goal. And just to give you a couple examples—what might animals’ communication–
REID:
So I think we’re going back to the slide
AZA:
For just a second—and this is, I’ll just give two of these kinds of examples. So, these are dolphins looking in mirrors. Do people know about the mirror test? How do you tell whether something is self-aware, like a being? Well, one way of doing it is: you take an animal, you paint a dot on them in a place that they can’t see, you show them a mirror, and if they start trying to get the dot off, well, that means they’ve done something very important. They’ve associated that thing in the mirror—that image—that is me.
And a number of different animals pass. Elephants, for instance, do. But researchers thought for the longest time they didn’t, and that’s because they were using small mirrors. It’s, like, so human.
AZA:
And so these are—you can see what happens when dolphins look at themselves in a mirror. They open it up, and they have what is maybe the most universal mammalian experience: you look in the mirror, and you check out your abs.
And so the realization here is that—like—what might animals communicate about? Well, they’re clearly having the experience of self-awareness. So that’s one of the most profound things. And actually, dolphins have names they call each other by, even in the third person. Elephants have names—that was discovered by Joyce Fuller and her partners in the last two years. Belugas do. They also include clan identity.
So, identity is just—parents actually spend the first couple of weeks of the chick’s life leaned over, whispering a unique name into each of their chick’s ears, which they will then use again for the rest of their life. What’s more core to identity than a name? So, if they’re communicating, they may be communicating out one of the most profound things that we have.
And just to give one other example—these are lemurs taking hits off of centipedes. So, they bite down on centipedes, they enter these trance-like states, they get very cuddly. This is perhaps where Burning Man originally came from. And it turns out a lot of animals do this. Dolphins will intentionally inflate pufferfish and pass them around in a circle to get high off of their venom—which is the original “puff, puff, pass.”
AZA:
Recently it was discovered that chimps—so chimps will communicate by banging on tree trunks and strangler fig trees. And they’ll use this to communicate for kilometers. And actually, human beings have drum languages—speaking of, like, what might we learn? They have drum languages where they can communicate over many kilometers just by drumming and say something very specific.
But recently discovered that the name of the researcher just escapes me—but that chimpanzees will go inside of hollowed-out baobab trees, like the males will, and they’ll start drumming. And this was confusing. Why are they doing that? Well, it’s confusing because—well—they go in, and it seems that they’re doing some kind of trance ritual. They’re hooting, they’re panting. We obviously don’t know really what’s going on, but it’s this very fascinating behavior.
REID:
So one of the things, actually, also that I remember from an earlier one—and I think I’ll get this right—we also had an ability to have a kind of, almost like, the mathematical proof that we’re having a conversation with corvids. Say a little bit about what that discovery was. I know we didn’t know what was being said, but there was a conversation happening.
AZA:
Yeah. So this was not with corvids. This is with another songbird called zebra finch.
REID:
Got it. Yep.
AZA:
And we’re just at the place now where we can start investigating conversation—where we can model how, like, a bird responds to another bird, replace the bird with an AI, and start to see how do those conversations shift. And you know, the interesting thing—and this is sort of like the plot twist of the whole project—is that we are able to communicate fluently, have a fluent conversation, before we are able to understand what we’re saying.
REID:
Yes.
AZA:
It’s sort of like the ability—
REID:
By the way, there’s a certain amount of human beings that also have that.
AZA:
Yes, it’s true. I don’t know if you feel this way, but sometimes I feel like human beings—I’m like, I think you’re sort of like an LLM with your temperature turned up too high.
REID:
Yes, exactly. It’s like, “Well, the temperature switch doesn’t work.”
AZA:
Yeah, yeah. But the thing that we’re really discovering—this goes back to the crows and also the belugas, right—is, like, 70% of crow communication, your science has never heard. Beluga communication is sort of the same thing. That is, when we’re working with some of the best researchers, like Dr. Valeria Vergara, who did the work to discover that belugas seem to have names, she has tags on whales—or whaleables, if you will.
ARIA:
That’s good.
AZA:
I’ve totally never used that one before. But she can’t use a lot of her data because there are multiple whales that are overlapping at the same time, and she can’t figure out who’s saying what. And so she’s only able—she has to throw away 97% of her data. Right?
This is where your ears should really perk up, because this is the most vocal underwater species, with what appears to be the largest vocabulary. And we’re only able to look at 3% of the data. As science, like the ocean, is 5% explored—beluga is 3% explored. That’s why we think animal language processing is the next frontier.
And we view this moment, philosophically, sort of like the invention of the Hubble Telescope—where, you know, in 1995, I think it was December 18th, astronomers pointed the Hubble Telescope at an empty patch in the sky.
AZA:
And it was a big scientific gamble. And of course, what they discovered was not nothing. What they discovered was the most number of galaxies that we had ever seen in one spot before. And I think this is the general principle: when we have a scientific revolution, we get a new tool that can see at greater depths and greater perceptive abilities than ever before. Science then points it at a space we thought was empty—and what we discover is not nothing. What we discover is everything.
REID:
Yeah.
ARIA:
So I could imagine two criticisms coming sort of from opposite ends of the spectrum. And one could be, like, “Why are you messing with animals? Why are you trying to understand them? Why are you communicating? Maybe you’re introducing some negative thing by sort of…” And on the other end, I could imagine someone saying, sort of like, “So what? Like, why? Like, okay, who cares? We know about animal communication. Like, we have so many problems—why are we even worried about that?” So what do you do when people say those two things? How do you respond?
REID:
By the way, before Aza responds, I think my response to the first one is, “Woof.”
AZA:
(bird whistles)
REID:
Yes. Yes, exactly.
AZA:
Come back to this a little bit. So, like, encryption—and we’ll tell you what it is later. Well, if I want to go a little provocative for just one second, before I say–
ARIA:
Please!
AZA:
The way we treat animals is the way AI will treat us. So we need to increase our sphere of care as fast as we possibly can.
And I do think there are these moments in history where we get a shift in perspective, and that changes more than just policy. It changes, deeply, our identity as a species. Right? So Jane Goodall was, like, a hero, I think, of mine. I know you spent time—
REID:
Yeah, we had her on Possible. Awesome.
AZA:
And she just passed away, right? And she was able to show that chimpanzees use tools—and that really changed who we thought we were as a species. We were always “man, humans, the toolmakers.” And now we’re really like, what really feels like uniquely identifies us? It’s—we’re humans, the language users. Like, we’re building our digital gods in our image, coming out of language.
And when, in history, we’ve really encountered and taken a species from out there and into our hearts—I think of it as when Songs of the Humpback Whale came out. And this is Roger and Katy Payne. It’s this album where we got to hear, as a Western society, for the first time, the culture of another species. And it goes on Voyager 1 after—on the Golden Record.
AZA:
It gets played in front of the UN General Assembly, becomes a multi-platinum album—I think like three times platinum.
REID:
Became the anchor for Star Trek 1.
AZA:
Exactly. Go back in time, save the whales.
REID:
Yes.
AZA:
So it changes culture, and it’s the reason why we have minke whales and humpbacks today. We go to the moon, get those incredible images—Earthrise, Blue Marble—and that doses all of humanity with the overview effect. And we get the EPA, modern environmental movement, NOAA—that was in the Nixon era.
So there are these moments where a shift in perspective changes us. And I think that’s what we’re really after. And I just want to come back to the “Are we messing with animals?” We have to be really careful, and we have to think about the responsibility of what making new technology does.
So, whenever we invent a new technology, we invent a new class of responsibility—or uncover it. Right? We didn’t need the right to be forgotten until the Internet could remember us forever. We didn’t have privacy written into US Law.
AZA:
It didn’t exist until—or that need wasn’t there—until Kodak started to produce the mass-produced camera. And then Brandeis, one of our most brilliant legal minds, created this idea of the right to privacy. So, same thing for communicating with animals.
Give one example: Katy Payne, one of the people that discovered, actually, that elephants communicate masonically, did Songs of the Humpback Whale. At some point, she played back the call of a matriarch for an elephant tribe that had already passed away. And all of the elephants came running over to find her, and they spent the next couple of days in distress because they’re like, “Where is she? Where is she?”
Humpback whales—for whatever reason, the Australian humpback whales—are the K-pop singers of the world.
REID:
Are they demon hunters as well?
AZA:
I see a franchise for them.
REID:
Yeah.
AZA:
And their song will go viral. And sometimes, if it’s a particularly good song, much of the world population will start singing it within a couple of generations. And if we’re not careful, and we just take a synthetic whale and put it in the ocean and have it sing, we might create viral memes—whale QAnon.
We don’t want to be like the Sora 2 of the underwater world. And so there is real responsibility that comes with the new power. And that’s why we really focus less on communication and much more on understanding.
ARIA:
Amazing.
REID:
Well, we got to two of the 30 questions that we had, right? But as you can all see, what Aza and Earth Species Project are doing is magical. Thank you, thank you.
AZA:
Wait, wait—before this, I just want also a round of applause, and just a deep thank you to you, Reid. Because Reid, we’ve known each other since I was at Mozilla, for many– you were the first person I came to talk to about Earth Species. Most people at that point—this was before Transformers, anything else—would have just sort of been like, “That’s nice,” pat me on the head. And Reid has supported from the very beginning. It’s the reason why we’re able to do what we do. So I just want to say thank you—please give a round of applause.
ARIA:
A big thanks to Dan Nielen, Eve Troeh, Bryan Pugh, Aaron Bostinelli, Jeff Berman, and the awesome teams at WaitWhat and Earth Species Project.