Hello

Hey, this is Radio Lab, I'm left to fenasar. Over the last year, there has been a cascade of headlines about scientists trying to use AI to translate animal languages into a form we can understand. At this very moment, brilliant scientists and sophisticated algorithms are trying to decipher the snuffles of pigs, the honks of geese, the squeaks of mice, the barks of dogs, the caws of crows, the moose of cows, the clucks of chickens, the chirps of fruit bats, the meows of cats, and the songs of sperm whales. Those are just the ones that have been reported in the last year or so, but, it turns out, people have been trying to listen and talk across the species divide for way longer than that.

Today, we bring you a Radio Lab story originally broadcast in 2014 about what is, I would argue, the greatest and most shocking of these stories, and what's even better is, it's told by a human in the first person, someone who is right there. Might not be appropriate for younger kids or more sensitive listeners. With that warning, here you go. Hello from Radio Lab.

That's how you say enjoy in Dolphanes. I think. You're listening to Radio Lab. From WNYC.

Rewind. Hello, this is Lynn. Someone on the other side of us. Hey!

So, a couple months ago, our producer Lynn Levy did an interview with this woman. Yeah, her name is Margaret Lovett. Yes. And this was Margaret's first time doing a radio interview.

That magic voice. This is so fun. But this was definitely not her first time talking into a microphone. One, two, three, four, this is a yellow mic.

I think it's three, four, this is the orange mic. Almost exactly 50 years ago. The following recording was made on November 19, 1964. Margaret was at the center of this amazing, weird experiment.

Yeah. Who were you at that time? Like, what were you like? Well, I've always had a bit of, if everybody's going left, I'll go right.

She tried college for a while to Lynn University for a year. But she dropped out and I was 20 or 19 or something at that point. And moved to St. Thomas in the Caribbean.

I'd never been to an island. Got a job at this hotel. Did menus check people in and out. And one day she hears about this strange research facility on the other side of the island.

And I thought I wonder what that is about. And I asked a few people and they said, oh no, no, no. They don't like people there. Can't go there.

And I was told not to go there. So I went there. And that's how it all started. And that's how we're going to start the show.

I'm Chad Ebonron. I'm Robert Krollich. Today on Radio Lab, producer Libby brings us a couple of close encounters. Although not with aliens.

It's not an outer space. Right. Because it's much closer to home in this case. Although they are kind of alien-like.

Yes, alien-like. Not out there. Yes, that's. Show us about dolphins.

Yay. We're calling this hour. Hello. So when Margaret got to this mysterious place there were dolphins there.

And what happened was she ended up becoming roommates with a dolphin. Do you mean in the like, best day one bedroom apartment sense? Sort of. Yeah, she did end up living with a dolphin for many months in this apartment.

I E A E. The apartment apartment? Mm-hmm. Had a little desk, had a little kitchen area with a stove.

I think it was a little tubern or stove or something. And a pot and a tea kettle. But the thing that's a little bit weird about the apartment is that the whole apartment was filled with water. It was completely filled?

Well, I wasn't submerged. But I was in water. Mid-5. Sort of.

It was just flooded with water. So she could share it with this dolphin. A young male, Peter. Peter was a ten foot long bobble-nosed dolphin young adolescent male.

And he lived there with Margaret and like he would, you know, he could like swim under the desk. And there was a balcony that like, swin out onto the balcony. The balcony was flooded too. The balcony was also flooded.

Yeah, it's really cool. And what was the idea? I mean, to try and study the dolphin? To study the dolphin, first of all, and take a lot of notes.

Extensive notes. Did you have waterproof paper? No. I had a typewriter on this board hanging from the ceiling.

They also had microphones everywhere. And specifically the tasks she was given was to teach Peter to speak English. I E A E. And she was supposed to teach the dolphin English?

Yep. Really? John Lilly's project. Just for some context, you know how people get all like a little bit crazy these days about dolphins?

They have like, you know, shirts with dolphins and necklaces with dolphins and everybody has like dolphin hair bands, dolphin blacklight posters, right? So this all kind of sort of comes from this guy, John Lilly, who was a scientist, a researcher starting in the 40s. A total right stuff, physics major, kind of guy out of Caltech. Man's man, according to Grand Burnett.

I'm a historian of science. But then, according to Grand, John Lilly has this biphony. During the Second World War. At the time, people just weren't thinking that much about dolphins in general.

Like, there was not this idea that they were sort of extraordinary beings. They were just like big dumb fish. You know, they were shot for sport. So John Lilly is doing this research about brain mapping and he ends up working with dolphins.

And the story that he's told goes that he was experimenting on these dolphins and as he's working with them, you know, kind of like shoving things into their brains, they make noises as would anyone. And when he listens back to the noises, which he's recorded, it sounds to him like the dolphins are trying to speak to him. To say something to him in not in a, not in a dolphin-y way, but in a human way. Like trying to speak English to him.

Really? Yeah. What did he say that dolphin was trying to say to him? I don't think that we know that.

But it sounded to him enough like human speech that he thought like something's going on here. This is important. According to Grand, he said later that it made him realize like we are not the only intelligent organisms out there. Like we have company.

That maybe humans are what happens when high intelligence evolves in an animal that also has hands. And dolphins are what happens when comparably, if not still more extravagant intelligence evolves in an animal without hands. What do hands get you? Well hands basically get you an appetite for punching people in the head.

It makes us tool users, but the distance between the hammer that you use to knock open your coconut and the hammer that you use to knock open the head of that other chromagnon you were never that keen on is in fact zilch. There's no difference at all. By the time you got to the 60s with peace and love. It was exciting to think that the dolphins and the whales have these huge brains, but they're not after anything.

They're not doing anything with it. They're not trying to anybody. They're not building cities. They're just like being, man.

And keep in mind this is on the verge of the Vietnam War, where you have all this anxiety about overpopulation, environmental destruction. What have they done to our fair system? So very quickly the dolphins become like this vision. Of how we might ourselves be so different than we'd come to feel we were tragically.

Something's done. So John Lilly was one of the first people to get swept up in all this. He quits his government job, moves to the Caribbean and sets up this lab. John Lilly's communication research institute to try to talk to dolphins, which is where Margaret ended up.

My feeling was this, everybody was talking about how bright they were and how smart they were. It was the office, the office, the office, and then it was the hot topic. And yet every day everybody at that building would get in their car and go home. I don't know what is that.

So she volunteered to stay. Her bed was on this wooden platform in the middle of the apartment. I was maybe two and a half, three inches above the water. And Peter was right there.

And Peter could flip me a little water and wake me up at any point. And that was the whole point of it. I mean, this wasn't just sleep all night and then, excuse me, work in the day and then sleep again all night and then do some work in the day. I might as well go home.

I eventually, I didn't really shave my head, but I buzzed it. Whatever it's called now, really close. Because any, you know, the hair getting wet thing in the middle of the night was very annoying. Yeah, of course.

So I just got rid of the hair and that was helpful. And then when Peter would come and squirt some water or want to play or throw something at me, then I could just roll off the elevator into the water and be with him and do whatever. She says he was fascinated by the things she brought with her. The piece of cloth, a tea bag.

Tea bag was a fascinating thing. I drank tea and the tea bag would fall into the water. And he would come and get it. And so gnar at this creaking noise they make on their sonar and he'd look at it and take the string over his beak and sort of whim around very proudly with his tea bag.

And then he'd throw it up against the wall and it would stick. And then he'd squirt water on it and it would come back down into the water and he would play this tea bag. Eventually, of course, he would bite it. He has very sharp teeth and it would break.

And that was a very exciting thing when the tea bag finally broke open. It had babies as it were. There's billions of tea leaves floating around and he was so gnar them all in one account every single one of them. And what did you think you would find out?

I didn't know. I was not coming at this from a science point of view. That's not what I was bringing to the table. I had no idea.

I was programmed by John to work on the speech. A-E-I-O. He had sort of declared that they could probably speak. A-E-I-O.

Look, when you're trying to have a conversation with someone. Yes. Can you listen? One person speaks and the other one listens.

And then you speak and I listen. And people sort of normally do that back and forth. When you start with a dolphin making airborne sounds, once they get the idea of this, a lot of screaming at those. They're very show-offy and they want to over-line you.

So you have to spend a lot of time getting it down to, I'm talking now. I can't speak now. And now it's your turn. I can speak now.

And yet if he's upset about something, he'll over-line you. Oh, Peter. And it's annoying. Now listen again.

Hey, what's this? Come on Peter. One, two, three. Three.

Now start again. One, two, three. Yes. But he learned very quickly to listen to me.

One, two, three, four. And not to pick up my instructions. If I would say no, no, no, Peter. I don't want you to do that.

I want you to do this, this, this, this. He would give me back this, this, this. Parrot will often say no, no, probably want a cracker. They will peat the whole thing of whatever you said.

But Peter would pick up what I wanted when he was being a good student. And he was a good student. There seemed to be with this one dolphin anyway. That's before all of them, an interest in, in what we were doing.

He wanted to practice. He wanted to get it right. He, there was a mirror. And he would spend long periods of time, by himself, didn't want me to be part of it.

And he would practice, whatever it was we had been doing in the lesson that day. Over and over and over and over. He wanted to get it right. And he would work at that for no reason.

He's not getting fished. I'm not interacting with him. He just wants it right like doing homework like homework and after a few months of this one Peter did start to sound really different one two one two three Paul he kept getting better. It's extremely difficult for them.

They just have a blowhole. They do have the apparatus to be S's are almost impossible. I would feed him my name And M is very hard. He would eventually roll over almost into the water with the blowhole to muffle a mow The thing really you're saying he would he would use the water as a way to help him make the sound yes with that word and And he knew that was your name But nevertheless we were a pretty good match He I knew his mood his temperament and he knew mine He knew when I was sick and I would get sick and you're in the water all the time You're bound to get a cold or something he he just loved my anatomy He wanted to know what my knees were doing He would go behind my knee and sonar and look at it and feel it and push it and find out which way it wouldn't Go he just and I gave him the time Because I wasn't going home To look at my knee to look at my feet.

He was enormously interested Oddly enough in the space between my fingers really not the fingers so much But he would I mean you know he could just barely fit there But he wanted to put in between each finger and see what that was all about the same with the toes He didn't have any spaces anywhere. You know he had solid flippers, but no space in between them Do you think he was so interested in your fingers and toes because he didn't have any yes, I do Margaret and Peter ended up spending about nine months living together But towards the end things kind of started to unravel first of all there weren't really results from this experiment They never were able to publish any scientific papers and there were other problems Lily got very involved in drugs Especially LSD. He did bring it down. He did Give LSD he says he did I believe him to to two of the dogs I would not let him give LSD to Peter.

I wouldn't allow that why would he give him LSD? Well, it's not 100% clear But it seems like he was trying to find a way to get the dolphins to open up to connect maybe to talk In any case by 1965 66 his funding had started to dry up and when people heard about Margaret's work They tended to focus on like one particular part of the story You don't have to answer but a lot has been made of your sort of sexually engaging with Peter and I just want to ask You don't seem like a shrinking violet. I just want to ask is there anything you want to say about that? What would I like to say about that?

I think The sensational side of it is here's what Margaret told me Peter was a young dolphin He was horny and he would hump her leg a lot kind of like a dog might do which was getting in the way of their work So eventually I just said the heck with it and she used her hand to you know And it would quickly satisfy and then we could go back to doing what we were doing And I never really gave it another thought I never thought oh don't let anybody know I never thought oh there shouldn't be But because of details like this and the drugs this experiment became extremely controversial Almost untouchable people didn't want to be associated with Lily nobody wanted to fund anything that sounded like Lily It just got this like aura of don't go there Don't go there even people who wanted to do really rigorous work with human dolphin communication had a tough time getting any funding And that lasted for a long time and the thing is even though there are so many reasons to disapprove of this experiment When you talk to Margaret you can't help but want to be in that apartment with them He would come over and when he was in what I call his sweet mood and Peter had a lot of very very sweet mood to him He would sink to the bottom and take my foot in his mouth And he wasn't so gnarring and he wasn't looking anything It was almost like a little kid comes just once to hold your hand and he would just sink to the bottom and close his eyes and just hang on to my foot And then you'd have to come up and Breathe and then you go back down and you just grab my foot and he would do this for a good while We'll be back in a moment with another encounter Radio lab is supported by adio the aicrm for modern businesses close deals twice as fast prep for calls and minutes effortlessly spin up handoff Breathes that used to take hours get pipeline intelligence without building a single dashboard How ask adio adio is the aicrm that keeps teams ahead of the pack it connects to your email calendar calls product and billing data and more Creating a complete picture of your entire business while others are waiting through multiple tools to find information teams are using adio to surface insights And get answers on their go-to-market data instantly powered by universal context adios intelligence layer adio searches updates and creates across your data to accelerate your workflow Ask more from your crm ask adio try adio for free by going to adio.com That's a Ttio.com com Radio lab Each story you hear on planet money starts with a question what happens if we refund tariffs why or grocery so expensive? An npr we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see Follow NPR's planet money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing how the economy really works Hey, I'm jad Aben Rod. I'm Robert Croweich. This is radio lab and today.

Hello. Yes, or is it often might say I would often say I don't know Well, and you know what that is exactly kind of the question of this next segment I mean the dream that a human being can talk to a dolphin or any animal really getting their heads across that gap This is a dream that humans have had since like forever Yeah, same Francis of CC goes way back now and so far as dolphins are concerned after the John Lilly's situation Researchers did get a little teppin. Yeah, but they didn't stay tepid as you say for long No Because long came this one doctor Denise Hersey director of the wild dolphin project They said decided to take John Lilly's experiment and flip it rather than have the dolphin speak English Let's have the human speak dolphin or the very least. Let's create a shared language where humans and dolphins can speak Or at least whistle well, you know, it's about finding finding a place you can meet back to producer than leaving Okay, so for Denise this dream of finding that meeting spot it goes back to when she was a little girl Well when I was 12 years old I used to page through the Encyclopedia Britannica in the days when we had books And I would always stop at the whale and dolphin page look at the dolphins and go wow I wonder what their brains are like cuz they've evolved in the water when you were 12 I was I was a total nerd in fact I entered this contest in Minnesota like what would you do for the world if you could do something?

And I actually wrote I would build a human animal translator so we could figure out what was going on in the mind's animal So yeah, I don't know I got the bug early and here I am you have a lot of fantasy about what you might learn Would you hurt a fantasy? No, I was just curious. So I don't know you look in their eyes There's definitely something behind there. You just want to know what it is fast forward many years Denise got a boat and I went out to The Bahamas she was like if I'm gonna study these dolphins.

I'm gonna do it in the wild That's where they live so she tracked down a pod of wild dolphins. Yep, and she just tried to blend in I actually anchored the boat in one spot most of the time This spot in the Bermuda triangle in the middle of I call it the dolphin highway where dolphins come and go they could come by if they wanted to And if they didn't they didn't they didn't when they would come by she and her team would just slip into the water and behave ourselves Just sort of watch paying attention to who's who which dolphin had a crooked fin which one didn't and when they leave we'd get out And that's really how we operated for the first five years and it worked five years She spent five years just watching not doing anything else. Yes doesn't just take an enormous amount of patience Well sure I mean but after about five years they started realizing well these guys aren't gonna grab us and focus and produce So they started just going about their own business like feeding mating nursing and talking or at least making a lot of noises Which in her team would record Wow, that's all dolphin Yeah like that like there's like a clicking kind of tweaking sound that they make Yeah, they make like whistles that are more kind of distinct and then they make sounds they're like longer and Weirder and do you have any sense that each of these sounds means something different? Well, that's exactly what we don't know I could tell you what kind of sounds are correlated with fighting and with mating or discipling a calf What we don't know is are there detailed kind of words in there?

Is there more kind of encoded information? But what they do know is that each dolphin seems to have its own kind of signature whistle Just basically a name every individual has its own name Peter had a name. Nobody's ever asked me that here's Margaret again his name was Really it was almost saying Peter here, right? So I can call you Lynn by your whistle and you Robert by your whistle so I could be a dolphin going Do they do that they do Not only that apparently dolphins will use the names of other dolphins who aren't even around like they can't see them They'll talk about each other behind their backs.

Yes, maybe well that means that they're Using representations of things which aren't in front of them Which is sort of like the beginning of language if that's what they're doing and we don't know but if that's what they're doing Then yeah, that's kind of like the edge of language So, you know, it gives us hope that there's probably more information going on there than we know and now finally She has that device Which device the magical, you know, human animal translator device that she was dreaming of writing about when she was 12 Yeah, she has this box that can generate dolphin noises and it can recognize dolphin noises And if it works the way that you know that she's dreaming it'll work It could be the first like real two-way back and forth conversation between a human and a wild animal So we're looking forward to the summer and getting on getting more data and really exercising the boxes and see what happens Yeah, we're ready. So I beg my way aboard everybody good see sick bills Left on July 8th from Florida and headed for the Bahamas to see this pod that she's been following kind of forever almost 30 years now But is called the RV Stenella Stenella is the scientific name for this particular type of dolphin the spotted dolphin. Have you seen this out of dolphin? I've never seen one in person What is this boat like it's like not a tiny boat, but it's not a big boat and it was just absolutely full of humans And who who are your human?

Well, there's Denise obviously and you got a captain I'm an obscure Smith first mate and y'all research assistants. I was in Myers Les Mason Bethany earlier Nathan's Check volunteers. There's a acoustic expert which is often for a long time I couldn't even figure out where we do sleeping because the boat seems so small It's like there's not room for all these people on this boat behind you. That's not hot soldering iron next to the fridge I haven't even gotten to this guy.

He his name is bad starner. So you didn't have like any dolphin experience before this right? Oh, hell no. He's one of the guys who invented Google Glass.

I became a computer programmer So I'd never get to leave air conditioning, right? And I'm out here in was this hundred-degree weather to do what so his job on the boat is to he's in charge of these these boxes This boxes probably cost a hundred K at this point. We're looking for money. We're finding so he's the tech whiz when he came down to visit my lab I was telling about the two way work and the difficulty with underwater stuff And he said oh, I build wearable computers.

No, can you build me an underwater? Well, that's what shouldn't be hard four years later. What does this machine look like? It looks like what a toaster like one of those fancy chrome toasters except you wear it on your chest Are they silver?

They are silvery they have a bunch of sort of knobs and buttons and speakers on them It's got three programmed whistles in it. I can punch a key and it projects whistle eight. There was a B Here was a C. She's programmed in signature whistles of some of the dolphins rat.

How it's he's you and we made signature whistles for ourselves. Oh She can call their names and they can call her names That's what she's saying. That is the idea Yeah And and if they do call her name this name that she's made for herself Then the box should be able to recognize it and can tell her that she's been called by name It'll actually say into her ear in English Denise This is real time I call it real time sound recognition, but it's real time whistle recognition underwater How does if she's made up this name for herself? How is it that they're gonna know that that's her name?

Well, the idea is that they're learning so she gets into the water over and over and she says, you know If the equivalent of hi, I'm Denise Hi, I'm Denise over and over and over and they learn it, you know, they develop this like maybe they'll just start to use it and call her Yeah, so you hope you hope they call you I'd be really sad if they didn't call my name, but I guess at the very least you could call their names and see how they react See that would be a eureka moment I think if you hit the Lolita button and Lolita suddenly turned and looked right at you with a shock exactly What the heck Wow that human called me by my signature was low. Has that happened yet? It hasn't happened yet And this is something I just did not appreciate for a while I was on this but I was like why is this so hard like this seems like it should be these people are so smart Like this should be easy, but they're just like constantly being defeated by the ocean basically Which I the ocean is like a worthy foe, but it's like the first year first year was complete disaster I'm trying to get the car to work. What happened?

Everything broke. It was leak city Basically the boxes just kept shutting down as soon as they would get in the water. That's not good It's not good. That's sort of not what you want No, and last year we had the boxes working, but then we put in the dolphins The dolphins just disappeared.

Where did they go? You know, they went 100 miles away to another location They don't know why I got up with my side of the other days your dolphins stood you up Gee and one of the reasons I was on the boat is it felt like everybody was thinking like this is it This is the year we're gonna go out there. We're gonna find some dolphins and we're gonna make some history You ready? Now Any minute now Okay, it turns out.

It's not that easy to find these dolphins. They're not tagged You know, they're wild dolphins So you just like you go to where you think they might be you know that song you stare at the water and you wait For the first three days pretty much I would we were just driving around In circles like literally in circles, you know, I feel like I had like a like a five-hour conversation about Game of Thrones I've never even seen an episode of Game of Thrones. Any dolphins anywhere? No, there's nothing else to do.

Dolphins come on dolphins. We need you now come on dolphins come on dolphins See if you see we don't look like a dolphin Wave that looks like a dolphin. I just say that I'm like everything looks like a dolphin to me right now There are days like that All of a sudden out on the water we see one fin two fins three fins five six seven eight nine There's so many of them in there so cool and we're all standing there watching them Denise turns to me and she goes You want to go in? I don't know do you recommend it and I was not prepared for to say that and also I was holding recording equipment everything And so I just I ended up just having to go in like in my clothes like Like my shorts and like a bra and I like all modesty aside like a throne aside.

They're like you can go in and I was like okay, okay, okay Okay, good. She starts here goes. We'll be right back Each story you hear on planet money starts with a question What happens if we refund tariffs why or grocery so expensive and NPR we stand for your right to be curious because the forces Shaping our world can be hard to see follow NPR's planet money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing how the economy really works Hey, I'm Janet Boon Ron. I'm Robert Croweich.

This is Radio 11 today the show's called hello back to Lynn I mean it's a total sensory shift The temperature changes everything goes quiet It almost feels like this like the classic through the looking glass moment Where you like you go through the looking glass and like everybody's walking on the ceiling Huh, and I jumped in and there were two pretty big dolphins coming right at me Like a maybe two feet from my head and staring at me and I was like I don't know what did you do I stayed very still I Pretty much froze now how far were they from two feet? Oh my god? Yeah, yeah dolphins are not small And they were looking at me in a way that was like we see you and also there they make these Sort of clicking sonari sounds which are like they were talking to you or just talking about well No, I mean what I think they were doing is It's it's so not anything sort of looking at me with their with sound I mean my head was vibrating I mean they can see not just body shape. They can see your bones They can see into you like you really feel looked at it was heart-stopping I was unbelievable It was so cool.

I thought when I was like the trip in and out and I go home happy You know everybody was like calm down those weren't even the right dolphins. Well, those were bottlenose dolphins in these studies spotted Oh, but the next day alright onward for spotted spotted for bust we set out again go for a few hours Bethany does this dolphin dance And You saw them right there. Yeah, there we go Then everybody's like you know, it's like all hands on deck situation everybody's like strapping on the boxes and strapping on headphones There's so so much It's like a fire drill now I'm putting on my box Here's the problem is I'm just testing unlike a captive dolphin wild dolphins They have other things to do they have you know fish to catch you kind of have to entice it into having a conversation Otherwise, it'll just swim away, but how do you do that when you don't know its language? Well turns out dolphins are just crazy for scarves scarf high Scar flow when you throw them a scarf They sweep it up with their tail thin and then they let it go and it wafts through the water and another dolphin comes up and Swoops it up with their rostrum.

So the idea is use the scarf as kind of like a bridge Denise and another diver will get in the water with a scarf We'll get in the water and we'll just start passing it back and forth human to human like hey look at this Splend thing we're doing let them watch if they want to get in the game We let them in the game sometimes we'll take the toy over to him show it to him and press the word for scarves Hey, hey, this is a scarf. They just made up a whistle for scarf Yep, and ideally and this is the key the dolphins will pick up the word and use it to ask for the scarf if and when they do that Then you've got like a tiny bit of common ground that you can build on Okay, we got yeah for spotted office. Yeah, little candidates Alex yes Just before they jump in Denise walks another diver through the game plan. Oh, you're gonna hold it and you're not gonna give it to him You're gonna entice it with him.

You're gonna be like oh Down with it and like wave it or yeah, let's start at the surface and just really get them with you moments later Good already Denise jumps in followed by three other divers Were you in the water the stem? No, I actually had to watch the whole thing from the deck and like you can see from the surface Three or four adolescents off and see Denise is right up next to one of them You see the back of her head and her little snorkel. That's good. She's surrounded right now.

I really do right there sure They're kind of like twisting around each other. I will say this she is Tremendously graceful in the water. She gets in the water and she's like totally at home So maybe she is a dolphin she might secretly be a dolphin going like around and around she goes under and what is happening under there? This is what it sounds like underwater.

This is the actual sound from the scarf dance. They record everything that goes on under there I mean a lot of that is the dolphins just doing whatever they're doing But some of it is nice with box making this scarf whistle over and over like scarf not the scarf Yeah, it's our she's like trying to get a dolphin to say the word right? Yeah Eventually she in the dolphin's surface and He's got the scarf one of the dolphins is holding the scarf. Hey, it's like this flash of red And then they all go back under Denise comes back up with it.

That's real good. All right. We can see After about a minute she surfaces. I think Denise has it now She dies one more time a minute later dolphin has the scarf And this one on and on they were passing it back and forth so fluidly that I thought maybe the dolphin has begun to ask for the scarf by name Eventually, Denise gets these socks all back up onto the boat And we all just sort of gather around like well well Yeah, the two juveniles pick up the scarf right away and Play some secret whistles and play some scarf whistles and then some sarcasm paint flying by a piece of seaweed So to man play the sargass with us all you think you got any moment nothing that triggered the system, but you know, see what it looks like Exhausting but you shouldn't get anything well.

I mean nothing the box recognized as a match You know nothing that indicated the dolphin like learned a word. Oh So like they were right there But there was this one thing that happened she said that when she addressed one of the dolphins by its name The dolphin turned around and looked at her and kind of cocked its little dolphin head really yes Wow also there was this moment where that and Celeste were looking at the data later And they saw that right after Denise made her signature whistle. Is that somebody's calling with a signature whistle another dolphin made its signature whistle Sweet. You mean like she said hi and it said hi back.

Yeah, that's amazing. Well, maybe I mean the thing is dolphins make their signature Whistles all the time. So it could be nothing or it could be this moment I mean, she's a very rigorous scientist like she wants that to happen another 30 times before even starting to take it seriously But still it does make you think about the possibilities. What do you want to ask?

Like what I'd like to know what their lives are like when we're not around. I mean how do you spend your day? You know do they think about things? I mean do they think about the future do they think about the past?

I mean we know they have long-term memories, you know, do they remember their calves from ten years ago Do they think about death? Yeah, I certainly see it. It'd be anything you'd ask your friends, right? Although part of me wonders like, are they even gonna even get there?

What I mean? Well, it's the goal is to have a conversation and you can't do it this way where you're in the wild and you can't touch them And you've got a verify every whistle 35 times. Well, are they ever actually gonna have a conversation? Because it's like they want of the language lesson.

I get it But like don't you feel like Margaret was all the problems with that experiment aside Which she was actually getting somewhere with Peter like they were actually having a real exchange in the moment perhaps but thinking forward I believe that what you can accomplish by talking by having a two-way conversation is just infinitely greater And I totally agree But if it's taking her 30-something years to get to a maybe hello, I don't even know if she got to haloia and If all she has such a limited amount of time with these dolphins every summer then 50 more times I'm gonna take 50 more years and I was like oh god the plan is gonna be 17 degrees warmer by that point dolphins are gonna All migrate it to some other spot. It just feels like come on just getting a pool and hold let the dolphin hold your foot She's already got the hello going for her maybe so that's like a start and then yes in 50 years Should me have moved past hello to a three-word sentence. How's your mackerel today? Yeah, I think that too a three-word sentence.

Yes, I would put money on a three-word sentence in 50 years The question is do we ever get to the point of exploring death? Yeah, I don't know Lindy you have faith I have faith that if Denise continues with what she's doing that we'll be able to talk about Concrete things we'll be able to talk about seaweed and we'll be able to talk about Coral and we'll be able to have a scintillating conversation about scarves. I do believe that and that is not nothing I mean that is pretty impressive in its own way big. Thanks to sourdough our producer Lindy.

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