When you think about the Cold War, you immediately think about whale songs right? Okay, maybe not everyone makes that connection, but in a delightfully random way, the political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s had a lot to do with the discovery of the beautiful whale song, and ultimately, the collapse of the commercial whaling industry altogether.
Back in the 1950s, the United States had gone gangbusters with submarines. Travelling under the Arctic Ocean, they were set on going the longest, the deepest, the hardest. But they were worried about other countries doing it too… particularly the Soviets.
They knew they couldn’t stop them, but they at least wanted to know where the Red subs were. That’s when Frank Watlington was tasked by the US Navy to develop hydrophones (microphones they could stick in the ocean) to listen for submarine sounds.
So Watlington set off to Bermuda and got to work. One day he dropped his hydrophone 1,500 feet into the ocean and heard strange, eerie sounds coming from the deep. For the Navy, these sounds were just annoying distractions from detecting the Commies, but for Watlington, well, they were captivating.
Ditching his original task of detecting Soviet submarines, Watlington became obsessed with the ethereal sounds he had recorded. He played them to anyone who would listen, including at a local square dance (not sure how that went down - the music wasn’t really a polka vibe). Eventually he showed some local fishermen who confirmed to Watlington that these mystical sounds were indeed whale song.
Around the same time, bioacoustics researcher, Roger Payne, had developed an interest in whales. He had once seen a dead porpoise (whale-ish) washed ashore on the coast near Boston and some idiot had chopped off its flukes and stuffed a cigar butt in its blowhole. Disturbed by this inhumane treatment of the wild world, Payne decided he wanted to do something about it. He set off to Bermuda with his wife, Katie, to see the whales and was introduced to Watlington, who played him his whale song recording.
From the moment he heard the tapes, Payne believed that Watlington held the secret to stopping the massacre of these beautiful creatures. See the whaling industry was really booming at the time. While people might think of whaling as a 19th-century phenomenon (Moby Dick and all that) it was actually far more of a 20th-century thing. In the 1960s, 82,000 whales were being killed every year, 50 times what it was in 1900. And why? Well, mainly for soap, oil and pet food. Yep, let’s massacre the largest animals that have ever lived to feed pets. It was literally a dog’s breakfast.
Payne and his wife were transfixed by the whale sounds. Curious to see if there was a discernible pattern, Katie got spectrograms of the recording and discovered that the sounds weren’t just random. The whales were repeating melodies, rhythms and rhymes, confirming that this giant meat blubber killed for pet food was indeed a highly intelligent being whose captivating song was about to change the world forever.
Roger and Katie published their findings in the scientific journal, “Science”, in 1971 and released a record, Songs of the Humpback Whale. They played it in schools, churches, on TV talk shows, and even at the UN. They sent copies to big-name musicians like The Beatles, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan - and then it went viral. In the initial run, the Humpback Whale record sold 125,000 copies, becoming the biggest nature recording of all time. To this day, it still holds the record of being the largest single pressing in recording history.
But more than that, support to save the whales came with the foundation of Greenpeace in 1972 and in 1986, the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling for all species. More recently, researchers have documented that whales not only adopt new songs locally, but transmit them gradually across whole oceans.
SOURCES:
'It always hits me hard': how a haunting album helped save the whales, The Guardian
It Took A Musician's Ear To Decode The Complex Song In Whale Calls, NPR
Listening to Whales by Douglas Allchin in The American Biology Teacher
Number of whales killed, World, Our World In Data
Whale song: A grandfather's legacy, CBS News
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[00:00:00] Will: Rod, without looking at the name of the track here, I just want you to identify the musician artist playing here.
[00:00:06] Rod: Okay. Yeah, it's, yeah. Jethro Tull. Jethro Tull. Drinking the bathwater. Second track of their fourth studio album.
[00:00:18] Will: All right, give me your serious, scholarly, knowledgeable answer.
[00:00:21] Rod: It's fucking whale, bro. Fucking whale. Fucking whale, bro.
[00:00:24] Will: Beautiful sound of Humpback Whale.
[00:00:27] Rod: Well, I feel like they sound like manipulated farts.
[00:00:31] Will: That's unfair. They probably put a lot of work into it.
[00:00:33] Rod: That's not an insult, that's a good thing. But it does sound like, you know, If you recorded farts and then wiggled the tricky knob on the sound deck. That's what it would sound like.
[00:00:41] Will: So how many people do you reckon know that sound?
[00:00:45] Rod: I reckon probably literally everyone I know would know it.
[00:00:48] Will: It is so close to everyone. Like, if you played this sound, like, listen, is there anyone who doesn't know it? They're a toddler, or a baby, or they'd have to be a woods person not to know that sound. It's so famous now. Like, everyone knows the sound of whale song but that's a recent thing. It's only been, I don't know, in the last few decades, there was a time not that long ago when no one knew the sound of whale song. And then we went through a moment where it was like, Oh, this is what they sound like? That's what I'm going to tell you about today as I dive down the rabbit hole.
[00:01:35] Rod: Welcome to the Wholesome Show.
[00:01:37] Will: The podcast in which two academics knock off early for a beer and a dive down the rabbit hole.
[00:01:43] Rod: Welcome. I don't have a rabbit hole, but I have the beer.
[00:01:45] Will: I'm Will Grant.
[00:01:46] Rod: I'm Rod Lambert.
[00:01:48] Will: I just want to start from a page that's not about whale sounds. It's about whaling as an industry. I know I've mentioned this before, but when most people think about whaling and as an industry, they think about Moby Dick, you know, 19th century sort of, you know, old timey whaling people.
[00:02:03] Rod: I think about people who make bespoke clothing for whales, like on Etsy. That's the whaling industry that interest me.
[00:02:08] Will: But well, the weird thing is whaling is not really a 19th century industry. It's 20th century.
[00:02:14] Rod: Yeah.
[00:02:14] Will: They killed whales in the 19th century, but like at the end of the 19th century, beginning of 20th century, there was like I don't know, 1500 whales killed per year. when do you reckon whaling got to its maximum?
[00:02:24] Rod: I'm going to say mid 20th. I was at a Mega abandoned base on South Georgia Island down near Antarctica a year or so back. And it was a fucking industry. Like it was huge, the rendering vats and stuff. So I'm going to say like tens of thousands.
[00:02:37] Will: Yeah high end tens of thousands. So, whaling peaked in 1964, like it grew throughout the 20th century. This was a 20th century.
[00:02:45] Rod: Why the fuck are they whaling in the sixties? Like, you know, electricity being discovered and piped around.
[00:02:49] Will: Well, they needed soap and oil and pet food. Obviously.
[00:02:54] Rod: Pet food. Pet food. Pet food. Can I have the whale free dog chow?
[00:02:59] Will: So in 1964, Whaling peaked at 82, 000 whales killed every year. And yeah, for pet food, in case your dog needed some whale.
[00:03:06] Rod: But the upside is they went from whale to tuna. Let's slaughter like, like schools and schools of tuna.
[00:03:12] Will: It just blows my mind to think that, you know, majestic beasts of the ocean. And you're like, okay, pet food. It's not even, I can get, it's a delicacy that you might say
[00:03:23] Rod: slow moving meat beasts.
[00:03:26] Will: That's what they were thinking. Let's go get some slow moving meat beasts to put in my dog. So the story of the end of whaling is a cold war story. It's one of those great stories that I love.
[00:03:39] Rod: Wait. Related to, or at the time of?
[00:03:40] Will: Absolutely related to. Absolutely related to. Not just the time of, but it's that one of those stories that I just love that's the fusion of Cold War and hippies. And they met together and they went, you know what? Wales. So back in the 1950s the U. S. had gone gangbusters with submarines. Nuclear submarines. They're doing all these things. They're going the longest time underwater, traveling under the Arctic ocean
[00:04:04] Rod: the deepest, the biggest, the longest, the hardest
[00:04:06] Will: all of them. They were doing all of those there. But they were worried about other people doing it too, particularly Soviets.
[00:04:11] Rod: Really? This is news to me.
[00:04:13] Will: Yeah. And so they were like, okay, we can't stop them, stop them. But we want to know where they are. Microphones. So in the 1950s the U S Navy set up a whole bunch of hydrophones. So microphones underwater, they got a special name hydrophone.
[00:04:28] They're experimenting with them in the 1950s and this was literally the first time the people started to hear these whale sounds. Well, actually maybe not quite the first time. I'll come to that in a sec. So Frank Watlington was tasked by the U. S. Navy. I don't think, I don't think he was the only one, but he was the one that crops up in this story by the U. S. Navy to develop these hydrophones that he can Trail off a boat or
[00:04:49] Rod: so what'd he say? So it's going to take me three months and cost 40 million and he basically gets a plastic bag, sticks in a thing from radio shack under water. Done.
[00:04:58] Will: I'll need the really long mic cord.
[00:05:00] Rod: Yeah and he's got a really good, what do they call it, sound wrap?
[00:05:03] Will: So he's working in Bermuda.
[00:05:06] Rod: And I'm going to need to work in Bermuda. And cocktails, I'm going to need cocktails
[00:05:10] Will: it's a nice place to do your research. No one says I want to work in the shittiest Southern Ocean. The Soviets aren't going there. The Soviets might be going near Bermuda.
[00:05:17] Rod: Bermuda. We all go to Bermuda on cocktail and long shorts with many colors.
[00:05:21] Will: You know, they might. So anyway one time when he's working off Bermuda on his boat, trialing these different hydrophones, he drops his microphone down and it goes down fair, a fair way, 1500 feet.
[00:05:30] Rod: How many fathoms is that?
[00:05:31] Will: Fathom. I think the editor might put that in later. Yeah, there it is right there on the screen. It's that many fathoms. It's there or there in fathoms. Yeah. I'll do it in meters for you. 500 meters. So it's deep enough. It's getting deep. And he starts hearing these strange eerie sounds from the deep.
[00:05:47] And I just want to, you know, we know what these sounds are now, but if you didn't, you're like, what's going on down there?
[00:05:55] Rod: So they literally were like we had no expectation, no idea. And then he
[00:05:59] Will: no expectation, no idea. Like they're listening for Soviet subs. They're like, okay, we might hear air bubbles, maybe a volcano. Maybe snippy crabs. If this was a Soviet sub,
[00:06:12] Rod: so mind blowing.
[00:06:13] Will: So the Navy is a little bit like, oh, they're annoying cause we're trying to listen for, you know, actual submarines and Frank Watlington is he's employed by the Navy, but he's like, I actually, I like these sounds more. So he went off piste and he got the recordings and he played them everywhere he could go. He played him to his friends. He played them at a local square dance in Bermuda in the fifties.
[00:06:35] Rod: So hang on, do we have any footage? Take your partner by the fin, breathe through your head and
[00:06:42] Will: It's not square dancing music. I can imagine a trance rave or something like that.
[00:06:46] Rod: But even then very late in the, like three days in no sleep, lots of eat.
[00:06:50] Will: But not a square dance.
[00:06:50] Rod: No, not even a bit. Dosey doe and diggy boo. And then he goes, hang on a minute. I got one.
[00:06:56] Will: Maybe it's lovely. Maybe it's lovely.
[00:06:57] Rod: It's just not very square dance.
[00:06:58] Will: Eventually he played them to some local fishermen and I think this is one of those lessons of science over and over again. If you ask the locals first, maybe you'll learn something.
[00:07:08] Rod: Maybe they've known about it for generations.
[00:07:09] Will: And yeah, they had known about it for a while. I don't know how they knew. I don't, and maybe there are times when whales sing closer to the surface and they can hear it, but so fishermen said, look, these are some whales, man. So he's like, all right, this is awesome. And about the same sort of time, a guy named Roger Payne was doing research on bioacoustics. He was looking at like bat sonar.
[00:07:29] Rod: Yeah. You got to get these two kids together.
[00:07:31] Will: Yeah, we do. And pain was already, he was already a bit of a hippie environmentalist. Like he was doing biology research and he wanted to save species and things like that. And he'd seen a whale one time. The first time he'd seen a whale was one washed up on a beach.
[00:07:43] Rod: And did he know what it was?
[00:07:45] Will: Uh, It was a porpoise and he went down, it was late at night and raining when he found the body. He'd heard it was there. He's like, I want to go and have a look.
[00:07:51] Rod: A porpoise is whales.
[00:07:52] Will: Think so. Cetacea anyway. Some bozo had chopped off its flukes and somebody else had stuffed a cigar butt in its blowhole. He recalls, I thought to myself, is this the only interaction that can occur between people in the wild world?
[00:08:05] I sat there soaked to the bone and deciding it'd be wonderful to do something about this. I had no chance at that moment, but a chance slowly appeared.
[00:08:10] Rod: What's a fluke?
[00:08:11] Will: It's like the flappy bits. I think the flukes are your side panels of a whale. Yeah, the stabilisers. Cause your dorsal's up the top.
[00:08:17] Rod: That's where I keep mine.
[00:08:18] Will: If whales have dorsals?
[00:08:19] Rod: And if I was going to smoke a cigar, I'd be able to do it out the top of my head.
[00:08:22] Will: I don't think the whale wanted to smoke a cigar.
[00:08:24] Rod: It was dead and it was a Cetacea, not a whale. My God.
[00:08:27] Will: Anyway, 1967, Roger Payne traveled down to Bermuda with his wife, Katie, to go and see whales. And I don't know if he went to the square dance or a friend said buddy, you should check out this guy. He's got some, he's got some whale noise. A friend of theirs said, go and look up Watlington. He's keen on whale. Go and have a go, have a chat. And Payne says, we had no idea we were gonna hear anything.
[00:08:48] And he went on the Watlington's boat and straightaway is like, you wanna hear something cool? I don't suppose you've ever heard the sounds these animals make. And so he played it for them in the boat and apparently this is the thing pain reckons from here on people would play them and they're all just a little bit transfixed. His wife's like, Oh my God, tears flowed down from our cheeks. We were just completely transfixed and amazed because the sounds are so beautiful, so powerful.
[00:09:14] Payne at that point is like, you know, there's something powerful in this. There's something, maybe we can use this.
[00:09:22] Rod: But it's true though. Right. I mean, I don't remember the first time I heard one, but instantly, you kind of go, Ooh, there's something that kind of grabs you. You feel it in your waters.
[00:09:29] Will: I think as a sort of sound object that had never been heard before, it's weird. It's compelling. And you hear what it is and you think, Oh, okay. I'll listen a bit longer. There's something listenable about it.
[00:09:40] Rod: It always makes me think of the big Lebowski, the dudes in his bathtub. He's smoking a J and he's got his little Sony Walkman headphones on. He's listening to whale songs and just going like having the best day of his life. Just
[00:09:52] Will: come to this in a sec. Cause, as soon as Payne heard it, he was like, Oh, we need to get this out here. So bit of a sidebar. Of course they did science. Roger Payne did a bunch of research with Watlington and some other people and with his wife, Katie at the time. Basically they did they looked into these and of course, Animals making vocalizations had been heard before, you know, we've heard bird song. We've heard all sorts of things like this. But Katie says she was taking care of their four children at the time and she was at home and she was like, often I would just put the whale songs on and just listen to them. She's got the recording
[00:10:23] Rod: and the kids grew up missing chromosomes
[00:10:26] Will: no with extra flappy bits with extra dorsal flukes, extra flukes, but she put them on and she was like, I need to see these sort of sketched down like in musical notation.
[00:10:35] So she got the spectrographs and she started sketching them and she's like, like, there's patterns going on here. And so clearly she showed after a little while that actually there's songs that we can call a song. It's a repeating song. Not only that, there's sort of, rhyming portions, like rhythmic bits to them.
[00:10:52] And they evolve between the different speakers, like there's the sort of the pod of whales, the boys in the pod will have a sort of song and then it will evolve over time, changing over time. And later they showed that this spreads throughout whole oceans and things like that.
[00:11:07] Rod: The first time they heard repetition, they must've had their minds blown, particularly if it was over a long span.
[00:11:11] Will: Yeah. Not just random, but this is actually something.
[00:11:13] Rod: You're not just going, look what I can do.
[00:11:14] Will: Oh, but as a conservation message, they're like, okay, we've got to get it out there. So they published their scientific findings in the science journal in 1971, the science journal, like science
[00:11:28] Rod: the journal of science
[00:11:29] Will: but they put it on an album and sent that out in 1970.
[00:11:32] Rod: Well, most of the people who write to appear in science also put out albums.
[00:11:36] Will: Also put it out an album. Yeah, that's true.
[00:11:37] Rod: I've done some biophysiology and here's my death beats, my sick tracks.
[00:11:42] Will: And they played it every chance they got. They put the album out Roger Payne would play it in schools, in churches, on TV talk shows, he played it at the U. N. eventually. He sent it to a whole bunch of singers.
[00:11:52] Rod: Did he acknowledge the traditional owners of the songs?
[00:11:54] Will: Well, it's in the title, Songs of the Humpback Whale. He didn't say which one, he said of the, he said Whales. He sent it to a whole bunch of singers, musicians, politicians, other scientists, and he reckons that there was this consistent response for the first 30 seconds.
[00:12:09] Rod: Fuck off hippie.
[00:12:10] Will: Well, yeah, first 30 seconds there's mumbling, sometimes awkward giggling as the audience gets used to the deep rumbling groans and high pitched squeaks. And I think that's the bit where they're like, okay, hippie.
[00:12:19] But leave it longer, and this is a little bit of a test. I mean, we can't do it in podcast time because, like after five minutes or so, ideally half an hour, I reckons which I struggled to listen to half an hour of whale songs, but maybe if the night was right
[00:12:33] Rod: you struggle to listen to anything for half an hour, unless you're doing 12 other things at the same time.
[00:12:37] Will: In that time, the audience would go totally silent.
[00:12:39] Rod: It's not like they're going to sing along.
[00:12:41] Will: You can't, there's no clap along to this. Get your lighter out and do the, you're one of unaware that there was anybody in the room. And then when he kills it at the end, after 30 minutes, there's this kind of, everyone takes a big breath. people come out of a trance, like they're just sucked into this trance. And he was like, this is changing people's lives and that's how it's going to make a difference. He published it in an album, as I said, songs of the humpback whale, and it went super viral. It's the biggest nature recording of all time. In its first run, it sold 125, 000.
[00:13:12] Rod: What's the competition? Squawk of the meerkat? and that sold 10.
[00:13:17] Will: Yeah. Okay, fair enough. So it's all 125, 000 copies first run. He sent it to the Beatles to Joan Baez to Bob Dylan. Dylan would stop and play it in his gigs. whole bunch of other Artists would put it in their songs.
[00:13:30] So there's a Kate Bush song where there's whale song at the start.
[00:13:33] Rod: Surely the Beatles would have
[00:13:34] Will: Bob Seager, of course they would all love it. You know, and then it hits sort of big big things. I don't know about Elton John. But they put it on the Voyager one and two launches
[00:13:46] Rod: hence the star Trek three
[00:13:48] Will: and hence that on Star Trek, I think four, four. Journey home where they come back for the whales, but they, but whale songs a big part of that. In 1979, national Geographic published like a little, it was like a record, but like a sort of floppy type record
[00:13:59] Rod: remember those. Yeah. Magazine. And they'd be 45s and Yeah, they'd totally floppy, but you could put 'em on a turntable and they would play. Not many times. It was mind blowing. Literally.
[00:14:07] Will: They'd play once or something?
[00:14:08] Rod: No, they would play a few times, but they just, they're really flimsy, but yeah, they're literally, yeah the thickness of a sheet of paper, but a plasticy kind of substance. And they'd be in magazines and you could peel it off. Like I bought a comic once, Bloom County. I don't know if you know, there's particular wacky, it's an outrageous cartoon, but one of the characters called Bill the Cat, total psychopath. And he had a band called Billy and the Boingers
[00:14:28] Will: billy and the Boingers.
[00:14:29] Rod: I'm all the Boingers and you're Billy. But yeah, they actually put out, okay, here's what they sound like. And there was one of these flimsy little 45s. Yeah. You can't do that anymore. So no one buys books.
[00:14:37] Will: Well, you could do it, but
[00:14:38] Rod: who could play it?
[00:14:39] Will: Who could play it? How do you poke it into even your DVD player?
[00:14:41] Rod: Scratch your fingernail and you hear it in your head.
[00:14:44] Will: Yeah, you hold it up against your streaming service. Yeah. And that was and that that was 10 and a half million people going out to, and they reckon this remains the largest single pressing in recording history. So it was just huge.
[00:14:56] Rod: So that shouldn't be worth like a hundred dollars now.
[00:14:58] Will: The movement was built. So between the early sixties when they published, going viral throughout the seventies. By the time of 1980s, everyone's moods had been changed on whaling. Greenpeace launched in 1972 with its project Ahab in the mid seventies where they're parking their boats in front of whalers boats and they're doing a direct blockade. David Attenborough makes movies, Jacques Cousteau, everyone. Once they heard the whale singing, Is like, okay, we've got to do things about this.
[00:15:25] Rod: Jacques Cousteau. All I think about with him is this is a very dangerous situation so I'm sending my brother Philippe down and he did it every time. You were done the same with whales. These whales can be very big and dangerous. Philippe, off you pop.
[00:15:37] Will: It's a good role. So by 1986, the international whaling commission came together and banned whaling. There's still whaling that is done. Scientific whaling by Japan and Norway and Iceland and there is traditional indigenous hunting of whales in various parts of Canada
[00:15:52] Rod: business, et cetera,
[00:15:54] Will: but whaling is not what it was before and I think there's a big part that it all comes down to people hearing this and people saying, you've got to listen to this sound, something weird, and we shouldn't be killing these things anymore.
[00:16:07] Rod: Interesting. Like I'd never thought of that. The sound may have, hearing them vocalize made enough people go hang on a tick.
[00:16:13] Will: I think, look, there was other things going on at the same time. Like there's a whole environmental movement, that kind of thing, but I reckon literally hearing the sounds made people change their minds.
[00:16:23] Rod: Well, the ones we're hearing right now, that is definitely farts, like I said, that's farts.
[00:16:27] Will: That is the squeezed fart sound that saved their lives.
[00:16:30] Rod: Whale fart, I've seen a picture or like video of a whale farting and it is colossal. Maybe it was crapping, but either way, like this is, we're talking like the size of eight people.
[00:16:39] Will: Well, whatever sound they're making.
[00:16:40] Rod: It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
[00:16:42] Will: It's beautiful. So, listen to the sounds of nature. Maybe it'll make you more human.
[00:16:46] Rod: How can you not?
[00:16:49] Will: I'll just go through our mailbag.
[00:16:50] Rod: Do it.
[00:16:51] Will: I got a few things that people have sent in first. First, I got to thank P E Z on Instagram. I'm not going to say what it is. It's a case report that he sent in and it's a look as a topic, I've got to say, thank you here. We will be hearing more about that one very soon.
[00:17:06] Rod: So by we, you mean I
[00:17:07] Will: A couple of other things in the mailbag. George Deathridge gave us a nice review. But demanded more singing. We gave singing.
[00:17:13] Rod: Yeah. Are you sure? Like, obviously I sing like an angel, but will sounds like two rocks being smashed together while children cry
[00:17:20] Will: and people continue to be pissed off to my opinions on science ever coming to an end. People be intensely triggered. They're like no, it has to go on forever. It is stupid to think that it could possibly end. So I'm, I will collect all of them one day and go
[00:17:37] Rod: and rebut each one individually.
[00:17:39] Will: You'll all get a note.
[00:17:39] Rod: Here's why you fucks are wrong according to William, I'm just going to sit there going testify.
[00:17:43] Will: So what other topics you've been thinking about?
[00:17:44] Rod: Well, I got a couple. What's happened to Space Force and their guardians? Like where's Space Force at? The Americans are excellent.
[00:17:51] Will: I need to know. I need to know.
[00:17:52] Rod: What is it? The fifth branch of the military.
[00:17:55] Will: Protecting us from uFOs that have recently come.
[00:17:58] Rod: Yes. And turned out to be nothing. Yeah. There's one idea.
[00:18:01] Will: Here's one. I was thinking about this last night. It was a huge moment in time in early 1990s, Sinead O'Connor rips up a photo of the Pope. And I know you look at back at this with our jaded 21st century eyes and you're like, whatever, you rip up a photo, but it was huge.
[00:18:18] Rod: Well, the Irish Catholic does it.
[00:18:20] Will: it was huge. And it's still got huge cultural power. And I'm like, what happened there? Why was it so impactful? Why did it mean so much? What got Sinead to that point? I was like, I want to know.
[00:18:31] Rod: She was a strong opinions lady.
[00:18:32] Will: I love Sinead. I'm a big fan. What else you got?
[00:18:35] Rod: I'm curious about measuring pain. Whether we actually can, how will we do it? How scientific is it? How objective is it? Cause like pain measurement is fascinating to me. I was just getting like a deep tissue therapeutic massage this morning cause my neck's fucked and my mate who was doing it, he's grinding and they hadn't seen him for a few years. He's got his elbow in the crook of my neck. And he's like, I forgot, you've got a really high pain threshold. Most people I do this to a screaming and jumping off the table. Yeah. And I'm like, do I? But then I thought, but I don't mind cause I know it's doing me good. Does that mean I got a high threshold or I can re imagine it? And how do you measure it? You know, they do it in hospital. They say on a scale of one to 10, what's your pain? I'm like, well, is 10 shitting myself crying and I want to die. Or is it just like, this is pretty uncomfortable. Give me opioids.
[00:19:16] Will: That's awesome. Have you heard the classic story? It's a classic comparison of I think it was two construction workers. Not on the same time
[00:19:22] Rod: is one of them a Jew and one of them a Catholic?
[00:19:24] Will: I don't think so. No. So construction worker one nail gun goes off and the nail goes straight through his boot and out through the other side. And he's like, Oh, I am in massive pain. It takes the boot off, he's screaming the whole time and the nail went between his toes, like straight through the gap, but he was in tremendous pain. He was in tremendous pain, but not actually anything happened. The other guy, another situation, I think it was a nail gun again.
[00:19:51] Rod: And straight between the eyes, didn't feel a thing.
[00:19:53] Will: Not far off straight, I think into his jaw, but it was the noise went off at the same time as he expected it and didn't feel anything straight away for whatever it didn't notice it happened. And only later did he realize that it was in there.
[00:20:07] And it's like, how can one person be in horrific pain and nothing happened and someone else No pain at all when something doesn't
[00:20:14] Rod: how do we measure that shit and how much does it mean anything?
[00:20:16] Will: All right. I like that. There's one more, one more story I was thinking about. So there's been a big work in large language models, you know, like chat GPT and all of the others recently over the last few years to make them less racist.
[00:20:28] Rod: Anything would be an improvement.
[00:20:29] Will: Look, absolutely. There's a long history where, you know, Google would show me a professional haircut and there's all the white people show me an unprofessional haircut, you know, dreadlocks.
[00:20:37] So there's been a lot of work that Google and all of the others have done to try and reduce it. So what they've done is they've reduced what's been called overt racism.
[00:20:44] Rod: Cool. The implicit stuff though, rock it. Fantastic.
[00:20:48] Will: Okay. So this is a new paper from Valentin Hoffman and colleagues. We discover a form of covert racism in large language models that's triggered by dialect features alone with massive harms for effected.
[00:21:02] So yeah it's dialect type terms. So not explicit terms versus terms, but sort of dialects choices. And it seems that these large language models are choosing words that are ratio linguistic stereotypes that haven't been seen in America since before the civil rights movement.
[00:21:18] And then is more likely when you, when it runs through a test of how would you judge this person, you know, are they guilty, not guilty or anything like that, more likely to give the death penalty based on all of this.
[00:21:29] Rod: You do that and I'll do pain. I have no doubt you do that and I do pain. Come on. We got it. We got it.
[00:21:33] Will: Oh, well, we'll see what other things are out there in the mix. Enjoy your whale songs. Listener.
