Aza Raskin on interspecies communication, empathy, and AI’s next frontier

Can AI help us better understand animals and, if it could, what might we discover? This week’s episode was recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit where Reid and Aria sat down with Aza Raskin, co-founder and CEO of the Earth Species Project. Aza and his team are using AI to decode the languages and cultures of non-human species. From dolphins that invent new tricks together to crows that raise each other’s young in communal “villages,” Aza reveals the startling complexity of animal communication and what it teaches us about our own. During the course of their conversation, Reid, Aria and Aza explore why recognizing the intelligence of the animal kingdom might spark a new Copernican Revolution, one that changes not just science, but who we believe ourselves as a species to be. It’s a thought provoking journey through language, empathy, and the limits of human perspective that will make you listen to the natural world a little differently. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ Topics: 00:00 – Live introduction from the Masters of Scale Summit 00:58 – Aza Raskin explains the Earth Species Project and its mission 03:03 – How AI can decode animal language and culture 05:18 – Crows, whales, and dolphins—evidence of communication and community 07:32 – What we’ve missed by only “hearing the shouts” of other species 08:30 – Dolphins learning to innovate together and what it reveals about intelligence 09:57 – Elephants’ overlapping calls and the idea of “communal grammar” 12:33 – From speaking to listening: the ethics of interspecies understanding 14:23 – Names, self-awareness, and identity across dolphins, elephants, and belugas 16:05 – Animal rituals, drum languages, and AI’s early attempts at conversation 18:10 – Animal Language Processing as science’s next frontier 20:38 – The moral shift: what animals teach us about empathy, AI, and responsibility Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Each episode seeks to enhance and advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi. So the conversation you're about to hear is a conversation Ariane had onstage at the Master of Scale 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.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  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 Aza Raskin.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Welcome. It's awesome to be doing this at the Master of 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?

• 0:58Speaker 02

  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. So 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. It's

• 1:41Speaker 02

  now like, fully documented. But almost no progress has been made. In fact, no progress has been made on, say, the communication of orcas. And just one, I think, really interesting side tidbit is, orcas have fashion fads. I don't know if you know this. A couple, I think it was in the 90s, 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.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  I feel like salmon's in this season. And like, next month, it's gonna be aqua. Get ready?

• 2:14Speaker 00

  And we will have salmon hats.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sale on your shop.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  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, NHTLM, things like that, to do that. But then, the even bigger goal is sort of create a Copernican revolution. Which is to say that, you know, when we start to, when we learn the language or the culture of another human group, like, 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. And I think the same thing for animals.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  So, when I hear a dog bark, I hear a dog bark. And when I hear, you know, you go to the zoo, you hear a lion roar. But you guys are decoding animal communication. Can you, can you just give us some examples of that animal communication? And what you are seeing with these animals?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, alright, so let's play a guessing game. Does anyone know which animal makes these sounds?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Not bat. It is a kind of whale.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Not an orca, good guess, though.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Beluga, yes, nice work. So these are a couple beluga communicating while hunting.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Have you done a bod rate?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  That's a great question.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Did you guys, I'm sure you've played a lot with dial-up.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. Back in bulletin board days. We left our walkers outside.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  I feel like my, if I ever have to do an untalent show, is the ability to do like

• 4:46Speaker 02

  which is how I'm going to communicate with AI, really.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Exactly, or how it might communicate with you.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  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 a high pitch? And the answer is, we don't know yet. But the theory is, 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.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  And they have their own unique culture where they do collective child rearing. So they sort of like form a little commune or a cabutts or something.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Yes, it's not a murder of crows. It's a commune of crows.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  That's going to over grate these days. They have their own dialect, they'll take outside adults in, teach them their new dialect, language, and their crows will start participating in the communal child rearing thing. And we, 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,

• 6:31Speaker 02

  but 70% of the calls that crows make, science hasn't really touched or been aware of. And so we've been trying to understand the language of another species by only listening to its shouts.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  That'd be like trying to understand humans by only listening to Twitter.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Uh oh.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  You're only listening to Jim Cramer being really loud.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Right. And the same thing, like the same tools that we're now building for crows, to your point about scale.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  These methods can scale. Most people say like, well, you're starting with just a couple of species, right? Like actually, no, the way AI works is learning one about one species teaches you about all species. If I learn in human language, but teach an AI German and French and Japanese, it actually can learn very quickly Esperanto and Aramaic.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  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 sort of alpha fold moments, where we're going to be able to show that many species have names or many species have compositional language or many species have like abstract thinking going from abstract to general, abstract to specific. And that's sort of like where we are.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And one of the things that I learned from early days when we were doing the, when you kicked off the Earth Species Project and it's like, what a year in, is you had discovered this, these trainers who had trained these two dolphins to do an original aerobatic trick.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  And a part of what you were just saying is if we can get in dialogue, there is all kinds of other things that come. So talk a little bit about the dolphins.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  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 like do it here.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  It was Jeff's yoga pose.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  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, which is 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.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  I mean, I couldn't even do that with a human. If I went under the water, it was like you and me, it would be a disaster, so...

• 9:46Speaker 02

  We should try this. Yeah, this is actually going to be like the ice breaking game for the National Scale next year.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  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 like beautiful heartbreaking meme of the elephant to like every year returns to the spot that their mother died. And that teaches us that there's so much more going on than we think. So when it comes to elephants, like what have you learned about both communication, but then also like social group dynamics within the elephant, within the crew?

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I don't know how many people know this, but elephants, like they can communicate infrasonically, so sub like our ability to hear, they will shake the ground and actually transmit sound through the ground and get picked up by other elephants through their feet. So there's like, there's a lot going on with elephants.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  One of our partners, Joyce Poole, runs the Elephant Listening Project, pointed out that when elephants communicate, they communicate on top of each other. They overlap. So you know, with humans, like, we do turn-taking. I speak, you speak, I speak. Well, except if you're a New Yorker, I guess.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  I did not bribe him. New York comment.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Constantly a New York/San Francisco battle.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  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 is, in order to say a sentence, 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 kind of 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.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  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, and so spatial intelligence. But here's another thing of, 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? Because I know you, I've never asked you this question before, but I know you're philosophical. So what's the, what are some like glimmers of possibility there?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Well, I think this one with elephants is one, is 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 a 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. Mm-hmm.

• 12:55Speaker 03

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• 13:20Speaker 02

  Often people ask us, like, what is the first thing you want to say to an animal? And like, actually, that's already the wrong way to think about it, right? 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, that's, that's the real goal.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And just to give you a couple of examples, these are dolphins looking in mirrors. Do people know about the mirror test? Mirror test, how do you tell whether something is self-aware, like a, like a being? Well, one way of doing it is you, 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 like get the dot off, well, that means they've done something very important. They've associated that thing in that mirror, that image, that is me. Yeah. And a number of different animals pass.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  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. And so these are, you can see what happens when dolphins look at themselves in a mirror. And they have what is maybe the most universal mammalian experience, which is you look in a mirror and you check out your abs.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  And so the realization here is 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 Fulmer and her partners in the last two years.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Belugas do, they also include clan identity. So like, identity is just, parents actually spend the first couple of weeks of the chick's life, like 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. Like, what's more core to identity than a name? So they may be, if they're communicating, they may be communicating about 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.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  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. Recently, it's 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 research just escapes me, but that chimpanzees

• 16:28Speaker 02

  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 like trance ritual. They're like, they're hooting, they're panting. We obviously don't know really what's going on, but it's this very fascinating behavior.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  So what, one of the things actually also that I remember from an early 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 were having a conversation with corvids.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Say a little bit about what that discovery was. Well, I know we don't, we didn't know what, what was being said.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  But that there was a conversation happening.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this was not with corvids.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  This is with another songbird called the zebrafinch.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yep. And we're just at the place now where we can start investigating conversation.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Um, where, uh, we can model how like a bird responds to another bird.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Replace the bird with an AI and start to see how do those conversations shift? And, you know, the, 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.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Um, it's sort of like the ability.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  By the way, there's a certain amount of human beings that also have that. But yes.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  It's true. I, 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.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's exactly, it's like, well, the temperature switch doesn't work.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. But the thing that we're really discovering, this goes back to the, the crows and also the belugas, right? It's like 70% of crow communication, just science has never heard. Beluga communication is sort of the same thing. That is, um, when we're working with some of like the best researchers, like Dr. Valera Vergara, who's, who's did the work to discover that belugas seem to have names. Um, she has tags on whales, or whaleables, if you will. That's good. Yeah, thank you. I've totally never used that one before.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Um, but she can't use a lot of her data because there are multiple whales that are overlapping at the same time. Um, and, uh, she can't figure out who's saying what. And so she's only be 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, Luca is 3% explored. So 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 astronomers pointed the Hubble telescope at an empty patch in the sky. And it was a big scientific gamble, and of course, what they discovered was not nothing.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  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 pointed at a space we thought was empty and what we discover is not nothing, what we discover is everything.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  So I can 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, why are you trying to understand them? Why are you communicating? Maybe you're introducing some negative thing by sort of being there. 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, like, why are we even worried about that? So what do you do when people say those two things? How do you respond?

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Before Aza responds, I think my response to the first one is woof. Yes, yes, exactly.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Come back to this a little bit, so like encryption, and we'll tell you what it is later. If I'm not a little provocative for just one second for why matters. 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, our identity as a species, right? So Jane Goodall was like a hero, I think, of mine. I know you spent time with her.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  And we, yeah, we had her on Possible, awesome.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  And she just passed away, right? And she was able to show that

• 21:07Speaker 02

  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 in our image, coming out of language. And when in the history we've like really encountered and like 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 Katie 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 one after on the Golden Record.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  It gets played in front of the UN General Assembly, becomes a multi-platinum album, I think like three times platinum.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Became the anchor for Star Trek one.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. Go back in time, save the whales.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  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, what, 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, you know, whenever we invent a new technology, we invent a new class of responsibility or uncover it, right?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  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, 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, sort of created this idea of like the right to privacy. So same thing for communicating with animals. To give one example is Katie Payne, one of the people that made, discovered actually that elephants communicate sonically, 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.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Are they demon hunters as well?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  I see a franchise for that. A new whale business model. 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 in the ocean to have it sing, we might create viral memes, whale QAnon. Like, 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.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Well, we got to two of the 30 questions that we had. Right. But as you can all see, what A's and Earth Species Project is doing is magical. Thank you.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Also, a round of applause. It's just a deep thank you to you, Reid. Because Reid, we've known each other since I was at Mozilla. You were the first person I came to talk to about Earth Species. Most people at that point, this is 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. Give him a round of applause.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Big thanks to Dan Nealon, Eve Tre, Brian Pugh, Aaron Bostinelli, Jeff Berman, and the frickin' awesome teams at Wait What and Earth Species Project.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  This podcast is supported by Google. Hi folks, Paige Bailey here from the Google DeepMind DevRel team. For our developers out there, we know there's a constant trade-off between model intelligence, speed, and cost. Gemini 2.5 Flash aims right at that challenge. It's got the speed you expect from Flash, but with upgraded reasoning power. And crucially, we've added controls, like setting thinking budgets, so you can decide how much reasoning to apply, optimizing for latency and costs. So try out Gemini 2.5 Flash at ai studio dot google dot com and let us know what you built.