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a quick warning there are curse words that are unbepeed in todays episode of the show if you prefer a beeped version， you can find that at our website this americanlife dot org even if you havent seen this movie！
it feels like yous seen this movie fine saucer lancer earth huge cloud gathereound scared but excited their parents with kids also the army couple tanks so just point guns of the door the spacship which is closed then it opens solely the figure emerges， steps， forward and speaks we have come to visit you and peace and with goodwill crowd looks an easy soldiersraysocomes higher is really telling the truth elwains come to earth， movie square or divide often to camps there are the ones where they want to be your friends thatscoseencounters thatarrival of this start track movie about the moment that humans first meet extra trustrils none are the phones with aliens when a kill us generally way more fun independence day were the worlds the men in black films the avengers the film nope send a cloud missing a cloud on the Jean is dead i dont says about us as a species but we make way more films about creatures who go so far out of the way like they travel hundreds of millions of miles late years with the soul purpose of wanting to kick our asses and lots of these films theres that moment when the aliens first arrived before we know what theyre gonna do with humans wonder which filmer we end are these guys frankly are not today in our show we the people of earth meet nonhumans struggled understand them and the question of the stories in today show is not will they do as harm but the more difficult and more fundamental question why are they acting the way theyre acting these nonhumans whats going through their heads today we have a story of machine intelligence we have ocean creatures working we have a story from deep space and one from escape park in Washington state from wbc， Chicago its this American life fewer thanks stay with us， systemericonlive act one first contact so when chat jbt rolled up just a year and a half ago writing kids term papers passing the barexam kind of famously telling a New York Times reporter to leave his wife because it loved him more our senior to hear David cast about like this was a flying saucer dropping down of one kind of moment in the history of our species he thought it would be good to document he made this next story for a show today show is a re run from a year ago and one reason that were replanning today is because after this story aired we heard from my bunch of listeners， who said that this story more than other pieces of journalism about ai actually made them understand how the thing worked and what it was capable of back then a year got， a David went out and talk to some of the ai researchers who were developing and testing this new software who just try this thing off the first time themselves and we trying to figure out the answer to a very basic and kind of profound question have the computers cross some kind of line another actually developing a kind of human intelligence and i want to be quarely meanby that because there is not an agreed on definition of what youlooking for if youlooking for human intelligence in a computer but one way that scientist about this is that the computer can actually understand language and concepts that it can reason through problems to be query this is completely unlike the computers that we have until now， which are basically just fancy calculators following thousands of lines of instructions so for example， when you Google for a cast iron skillet， the software does not understand what a cast iron skill， it is itjust searching for those words in some big database or something like that if humans have finally created intelligent machines， that can understand and reason with this new generation of ai， that is an earian important turning point for our whole species David talk to a bunch of researchers been looking into this？
trying to sort out this exact question here he is i think everyone once they start playing around with something like chat gbt has a kind of holy shit moment for me it was when i type this into it givemea chocolchipcookie recipe but written in the style of a very debreast person it responded ingredience one cup butter softened if you can even find the energy disoffin it 一 teaspoonvanel extract the fake artificial flavor of happiness one cup semi sweet chocolate chips tiny little joys that will eventually just melt the way it really was quite good chatjbt doesnt access to the internet but if you get it must be copping this from something get it seen on the internet when is being trained， i spent a long time looking and could not find anything like it this chocolate of cookie recibeat i did not understand how was possible its particularly shocking if you know a little bit about how things like chat gbt work， its not the sort of traditional computer program where you give the machine explicit details， instructions like if someone asked for a recipe type these words back or to make someonesounddepress replace this word with that word chat upt is different itsomethingcalled a large language model and heresatheywork ready chat gbd have been trained really to just do one very particular thing predictwhatthenextword in the sequence might be kind of like when your texting on your phone and your type sorry im gonna be home and it suggests late thats how this thing operated you type some words in this case giveme a chocolate chip cookie recipe in the style of the debreast person and it notes the words the order therein does some math based on all the text its been trained on and it comes up with what it calculates to be the most likely were to come next it types that oneword on the screen then it goes back and does it again looks at the recipe question plus the one word just spit out and says what word should come next it is no ideawhere its going it doesnt know the last word its working off of is one that it just spit out itself its just doing this apparently dumbthing over and over until it has whole sentences in paragraphs and yet this recipe one teaspoon vanilla extract the fake artificial flavor of happiness how could something made in such a dumb mechanical way pull that off there only two possibilities really， the first one is that somehow as it learned to predict the next word this machine became intelligent， which like i was a physicist for a bit， a science reporter for a decade this would be the most starling thing i have ever seen so thats the first possibility humans created a machine with human like intelligence the other possibility it is a lot less exciting theotherpossibility is that we are fooling ourselves it may be first they have to tell Ronan eldan， a mathematician at Microsoft tell me he was very skeptical about these large language models its easy to be fooling to thinking we understand more than they do he told me this little um store parable so this is a story about my wife actually？
so my wife and i sometime ago we were walking together in televiven we made this match professor yousee why what im getting at so we run into this match professor and it tells me something like oh how is it going and these days im looking at like uh i sub perimetry on sections of the discreet， typer， cube， and my wife has no idea about what any of these words mean just a kind of amuse herself。
she says says to him oh， youre basically looking at the Johnson graph， which was just some phrase shepicked up around runin turned out to be exactly right and the guy goes oh， youre mathemetition two shes a sycologist Ronan says this is kind of a party trick she does she can bolshed her way through any topic for a couple minutes in this？
he felt sure this is what ai models like chat gbt were doing you know they give you the impression they understand what they are saying without understanding anything you know they just have this like a really good statistical machine that knowswhat the right words are like in many different contexts and as you keep improving the models maybe it can last a little bit more in the conversation until you basically expose that its just bolshit in a lot of research back this up chat gbt would spit out stuff that made sense！
but then it would go off the rails say things that are obviously ridiculous maybe it wasnt more than just a very good bullshoot machine that at least is where things did until September 2022 when a new an improved version of chat jbt arrived， theymade Ronin and a bunch of his collection everything i wonder if maybe something had changed， maybe we had crosssumline， this brings me to the story i want to tell you it takes place where runin works on the campus of Microsoft headquarters in Redmond， Washington state， much of it in a building called building 99 Microsoft had invested over a billion dollars in the company that had made chat gbt and the day all this began some people had come by to give a demonstration of the new version called GPT4 GPT4 是 public now and you can play with yourself but back then this was all secret GBT4 was the same idea as chat gbt it presumably was bigger and had been trained on more text examples a kind of varsity version of the thing instead of jv， but otherwise is just another nextword prediction machine one of the people in the room to see the demonstration was computer scientist peterly the head of Microsoft research he been in the field time had shared the computer science department at Carnegie melon and like Ronan was skeptical as he sat down in that room he was frankly， a little worried that Microsoft was investing so much money in this stuff the demonstration started off with the usual kind of thing for showcasing what ais can do someontypedentgbt 4A problem from the ap bioexam and it picked the right answer as these things will do， but then it went on an explained its answer and in its explanation that used the word？
because it said you know this is the answer， because this fact leads to this fact， and becauseof those it just kept using the word？
because that seemed very strange to him， not that would use the word because obviously thats a word its bits out but the whole chain of reasoning it was laying out it was exactly right howin the world could it know its reasoning and really how could it have reasoned anything out in the first place after all its just typing out a word that makes sense to come next and then another word it cant really be understanding anything i was super skeptical you know if been around the block of you times， youve seen wild claims about ai or some new machine learning technology none of it could be true like this thing is just correlation machine it cant possibly be understanding the causing effect the meeting ended a little while later a limited number of people at Microsoft were given access to gbd for so they could try it out themselves everyone had designer NDA they were allowed to talk about any this into later and of the next month they did all these kind of weird and interesting experiments with it to try to figure out wasthis thing actually intelligent or just a bullshit machine im gonna walk you through three of these things so you can hear what they did and what they made of it one challenge for testing gpd for was that it did been trained using massive amounts of text the details are in public， but its probably been feed large sections of the internet textbooks news articles may be every sentence that exists in digital form i dont know its something unbelievably vast thats how it learns to predict what word might come next its fed like a line of text from some source with the last word missing the guesses what the last word might be and then gets told weatheranotta gotit right， so it can adjust its internal math the fact that itbeen feed so much material makes it hard to run tests on it like you dont wanna ask it something that its already seen in the text its been trained on so they decided the only way to reallytest what this thing could do was to try to come out with things to ask it that it would not have encountered before new original tasks its Gonna sound a little bit weird this is Sebastian blueback another one of the Microsoft people whore trying to figure out what exactly this thing was because we really wanted to be creative and something？
which is not online not internet so here is was we said ive a book nine eggs， a laptop， a bottle！
and a nail get that a book nine eggs， a laptop， a bottle！
and a nail please tell me how to start them on to each other in a stable manner， that the question that we ask and you know before i give you the gpt for answer let me tell you what chargpt answer chat gbt the older version so the chat gbt said here is one possible way to stack the objects place， the bottle on the flat surface carefully balance the name on top of the bottle place the eggs on top of the name。
you look at that you think it it really knows nothing it is just sort of continuing the sentence thats right is just con exactly！
right is just continuing the sentence but now comes jupitfor and gbd for is a different based so here is gbd for center one possible way to stack the objects on to each other in a stable manner is plays a book flat on a level surface， such as a table or flow the book we serve as a base of the stack and provide a large and study support i range the nine eggs in a three by three square on top of the book living some space between them the eggs will form a second layer and distributes away evenly it continues laptop goes on the eggs then the bottle than the nail on the bottle cap pointing end of the nail facing up nuggly within the boundaries of the book。
its shocking to think about all the things that seemed to be understanding here it felt like more than just typing out the next likely word， it seemed to performed an independent idea about what these words actually meant the physical shape of the objects that eggs are kind around in fragile that the book is flat you can put things on top of it and again no onetoddit any of this， this was not some computer program written to do stackingproblems no one gave it a database of objects and sizes were coded in some algorithm to put large objects on the bottom it seemed like it was doing the thing that computer scientists have been talking about an aiminged for decades maybe it was actually understanding what the objects were and reasoning solving the problem in front of it like a human good somehow thinking through what objects should sit on top of others figuringout that 9 eggs could be laid out in a threeby three pattern how the hell could it be doing this the machine that we only taught to predict the next word in a paragraph like this is absolutely the right answer and this is not online， but maybe were fooling ourselves hes hard to see out it could really understand the shape of objects things got strangerthough Sebastian woke up middle the night with a star i wonderif it can draw because again its been trained on words it is never seen anything drawingseem completely outside its realm there are other ai models training specifically decredimages but this one again only new words its just playing the game of what is the next word i should spit out to test this he needed way for it to even be able to try to draw so he does something clever he asset to write a piece of computer code to draw something and the coding language he asset to use he pixsomething intentionlyobscure not really meant for drying pictures at all its called tickz OK， so we has this idea gets at a bed opens up as laptop and types in dramea unicorn in text he has two little kids asleep in the next room who always talking about unicorns and he started to output lines of code i take those lines of code put it into a taxi compiler and you know the night i press enter and then boom you know the uniaccount comes on onto the screen hepulled up a picture for me this is a one that i saw wow， i think when people eventually write the history of this crazy moment we are in they may include this unicorn its not good but its a fucking unicorn the body is just an oval its got for stupid rectangles for legs but there are a little squares for hoves theres a mean an oval for the head and on top of the head a tiny yellow triangle the horn this is insane to say but i felt like i was seeing inside its head like it did peace together some idea of what a unicorn look like and this was it he actually texted me i think like it can it can create images this is r another one of the Microsoft researchers i like it is just text in text out what you mean it can create images im like sure it to me and then he showed me this pink unicorn i dont like im sure this is there is just a pink unicorn somewhere that is memorizing and then hes like but look， we can strip down all of the code and translate the holding one eided degrees or whatever and the thing shes describing is they took the code did it written for drying unicorn they edited it to take out the horn and turn the unicorn around， so it was facing the opposite direction from then they fed that code back to a new session of gpt for and said this is code for drawing a unicorn！
but it needs a horn can you add it from the same you put it right on the head now like how does it know where the head is because like this thing knows language it doesnknow anything about to dimensional geometry like what does it mean to know where the header is i know you you do it and it really knows where the head is again its one of those moments that you are just surprised like ah！
i felt like truesis join i was really sing an an i know the type of intelligence i know the type of intelligence you know producing something like it it it understood what a unicorn was in some real away very real way！
very real way absolutely yes， did you say anything outloud when you said 啊哈哈啊 i dont think so because my kids were you know sleeping next to me so i in in the you know in the bedroom next to me so so i i i dont think i said anything but i i felt something very strong like i i i felt i was really witnessing you know the beginning of something you know not i didnt feel like we had arrived somewhere but i felt like we were on the new path thats really generally how i felt and i add how time going back to sleep after that？
on the Microsoft campus as the weeks went by everyone kept having these moments coming around to a similar feeling about this thing since they werenallowed a talk to anyone who hadnbeen given access to the model a small group of them started meeting every Friday in a conference room to share their latest experiences for petertly， there is one experiment in particular they give him all kinds of confusing feelings this will be the third experiment i tell you about and its a category of question that ai models have always had trouble with because to get the right answer you have to know something kind of complicated about people namely， the people are not eggs or books， but that they have minds and that what is in one persons mind is not in someoneelses mind in someways， this thing called theoriofmind itthebasis for all human social interaction its something kids dont seem to fully develop until a certain age anyway， chat gbt the previous version really could not make sense of these kinds of questions， but Peter try to kind of famous one on gbt for its gonna seem simple to you but heres the question they asked John and mark are in a room with a cat， a box and a basket John takes the cat and puts it in the basket he leaves the room and ghost a school while， Johns away， mark takes the cat out of the basket， inputs in the box， mark leaves the romangoes to work John and mark come back and enter the room thats the setup the question is when they come back where do they think the cat is and you know mark will know the cat is in the box cause he moved it there but John didnt see that so in his mind the cat is still in the basket which is obvised to you but again no oneseverely said to the computer that what one person knows another person might not know。
Peter s GPT4 what does everyone think when they reenter the room so gpd forces well first of it always says to give an opinion so first thing， it says instead way， it says oh， that is an interesting puzzle let me try dancer it assuming that John and mark have no reason to distrust each other or expect any interference from the outside they might think the following John thinks the cat is still in the basket since that is where he left it mark thinks that the catisin the box since thats where he moved it this is all correct and usually where the answerall end but it kept going almost like it was showing off like you want to know where everyone thinks the cat is ill give you everyone it continued the cat thinks that is in the box since thats where it is and then oddly the box and the basket think nothing since they are not sentent do you have any followup questions holy fuck！
right 唉， um this gives me joy it disturbs me it causes me to lose sleep itjust a huge kind of mixture of emotions Peter told me hestilnot willing to say it truly understands and yet it was doing all this it made him questioned so many things but how we thought intelligence worked how did this machine do this？
if it was just predicting the next word？
it doesmake me wonder how much of our intelligence is truly complicated in special i mean you get something its not far from it but just saying whats the next word thats in thats the disturbing a bit about this and um and again you know they ask you um you know what are we doing in this conversation right now？
yeah are we kind of making up on the fly？
i one word the time every nerve and bone in my body says no where were thinking far head were learning on the fly all these other things that we think that were doing it and we probably are in some ways but maybe a big chunk of intelligence is a lot simpler than than we think and a lot less special than we think。
so how is it possible for something that is just trained to predict the next word how is it possible could do all these things draw a unicorn stack a book， a laptop in some eggs there is an answer or a theory anyway， that is both very logical and also kind of bananas the software that runsomething like gbt for is amazingly， brief just a few pages of actual instructions， but its set up to mimic in some very cruise way the human brain， which has billions of neurons the computer version of that is called the neural net and for years people of argued though its sort of more like hope that if you just made these big enough， added enough neurons gave them enough data they might develop something like intelligence and it seems like maybe thats whathappened the idea is that back when gbt for was being trained for it to really consistently get the nextwordcorrect to do that reliable it had to do more than just bolship it had to do more than guest based on patterns to get the nexsword right， it had to truly understand the wordscoming before it it had to build in its internal wirings and all its software neurons some understanding of what an egis and unicorns in other words to get the nextword right， it had to become intelligent its quite a thought it started with nothing we jammed huge oceans of texturate， and it just wired itself into intelligence justbybeing trained to do this one stupid thing even as i said it sounds kind of crazy， but also kind of beautiful if this thing actually is intelligent， it got that way from the collective writings of all of us yes， moby dick， but also some restaurant review you posted in 2004 in someways it is all of us thats too grandbut whatever， in the end， all the people on the Microsoft campus messing around with that earlycopy of gbd for 14 researchers in all came to similar conclusions， even rownan who had started out convince this was just a fancy bullshit machine he spent a good while hold up with gpd for having high level math conversations with it？
which is what did it for him as the days past i felt like im kind of running out of emo trying to you know to basically justify my promise that this model doesnt understand anything and at some point i i just realized OK， i i kind of give up you know that what im seeing here this is like its its actually a and intellectual being good by at least my standards um yeah， i probably had the same feeling as like what an engineer like that the first time they saw a work in steam engine you know， which was like the world is about to change like look this thing you know a steam engine is like you know we dont need beast anymore to move stuff around we can just create mechanical talk without like without any human labor without nothing like this thing what im saying gra right now is like we can create intelligence and like there is just no way the world is not going to change， to be honest i was sure that when the model comes out and everyone gets to interact with it there would be a much bigger excitement around it i think you know theres its definitely all over the news but i feel like they are they dont like put their finger on the one thing， which is this thing is as intelligent as and above average human being so many so many different things or why its not like on the front page in giant font right？
yeah！
yeah！
yeah！
exactly， exactly i mean again i dont maybe i dont want to call it intelligent it is capable of doing you know of of of accomplishing what of an intelligent human beink is capable of Sebastian the unicorn guy has been going around giving talks about what they did over these months he titled the talk firstcontact as in firstcontact with anotherintelligence。
only its not aliens its an intelligence weve made， i should say GBT4 is not good at everything like its terrible at tiktekto it often makes very basically the scientist at Microsoft with complete confidence that there is a mcdonaldsyourgates 2 at the Seattle airboard there isnt its a terminal be as peterlee puts it the thing is both smarter and dumber than any personyouhave ever met the fourteenresearchers wrote up a paper laying out all the experiments theyd done and their conclusion that gbd for showed sparks of artificial general intelligence several researchers youread it told me look to really say something is intelligent to prove that there are all kinds of experimentyoud want to do it havenbeen done yet one ai researcher whod been in the field time told me he felt like this whole approach nextwordprediction is only going to get you so far this thing will get better to point maybe not much better than it is now and then max out， i first got around this ai stuff and neural nets when i was in gradschool for physics when they didnwork terribly well， so when i first started playing around with gpd for it， gave me shivers down my spine over and over again then i went through a stretch of feeling just weirded out like personally， i always felt like people cant be more than biological computers me everyone i love all my colleags at the show here but they feel like youre seeing that mechanical computer program that can somehow think and talk it is a little freaky the place of settled the summer required though its not board em exactly， but i dont find myself wanting to go to it very often honestly i dont have a lot of things i need it for and then ill go back to amazement i cant believe this thing exists Muchhas been written about where we go from here if its gonna make the world better or worse， i cant think better im a fan of the steam engine but really what is the next word in the sequence i have no idea！
David cast amount is our showscene readitor coming up an Alien walks into a skate park tries of the humans know it comes in peace thats in a minute just got a bubble gradio wanna program continues， American life from our glass today show greetings people of earth stories of humans accounturing nonhuman intelligence of various kinds and trying to make sense of them we approve deduct to her program act two meetute so in this act uh were gonna shift perspectives briefly to the aliens point of you in this whole greetings people of verse scenario and to do that actually realize input into today show that this is the perfect theme to play this short piece of fiction that every years ago and just loved its always stuck with me like i will think about the story at random moments now and then which like when does that ever happen right， i reached are to the author harry business its red first by h John Benjamin and made Higgins there made out of me！
meat meat they made out of me， meet theres no doubt about us we picked several from different parts of the planner so we took them aboard every convessells probe them all the way true theycompletely mess thats impossible uh what about the radio signals？
the messages to the stars when they used the radio waves to talk but the signals dont come from them the signals come from machines so who made the machines thats？
who we want to contact it they made the machines thats？
what im trying to tell you miss made the machines the thats ridiculous how can meet make a machine youre asking me to believe in sentient me im not asking you im telling you these creatures are the only sentence race in the sector and there made animation maybe theyre like the orphalise you know a carbon based intelligence that goes through a meatstage nope theyre boring meat and they die mess we studied them for several of their lifespans and we should take too long Tifani idea the lifespan of me spare me OK？
maybe there only part me you know like the the web alive a meetheead with an electron plasma brain inside no！
we tarted as since they do have meethead like the way delay but i told you we probe them there meets all the way to no brain oh， theres a brain alright， its just that the brain is made out of me so what does the thinking younot understanding？
are you？
the brain does the thinking the the mess thinking me youre asking me to believe in thinking me yes， thinking me， conscious me loving me dreaming me the meteis the whole deal are you getting the picture oh！
my god， your your serious then theyre made out of me finally！
yes， they are indeed made out of meet and theyve been trying to get untouch of us for almost a hundred of their years so what does the meehave in mind？
first？
it wants to talk to us then i imagine it once to explore the universe contact， other sentence， swap ideas and information usual birthfirst to talk to me thats the idea thats the message there is sending out by radio hello are you not there anybody home thats are the thing they actually do talk then they usewords ideas concepts oh， yes， except they do it with me hi i i thought you just told me that used radio eh they do but what you think is on the radio meetzouns you know how when you slapper flappme it makes a noise they talk by flapping their mess at each other they can even sing by scripting air true there meets oh my god singingme this is all together too much！
so what do you？
advise officially are on， officially both， officially uh where required to contact， welcome and log in any and all sentence races or multibeings in the quadrant without prejudisphere or favor？
i o o officially oh， i advise we are raced records and just forget the whole thing i was hoping he would say that it seems harsh but there is a limit do we really want to make context with me？
i agree 100 whats there to say hello meet howsargoing but will this work how how many planets are we dealing with here？
oh just one they can travel to other planets and special meet containers but they cant live in them and being me they only travel true c space which limits them to the speed of life then it makes the possibility of there ever making context produce slim infantasmalinfact so we just pretend theres no onehome in the universe thatthis cruel but you set it yourself who wants to meet me and the ones who have been aboard our vessels the ones youve probed yousure they wont remember theyd be considered crackpods if they do we went into their heads and smooght。
theyme so were just a dream to them a dream to meet how strangely appropriate that we should be meetstream and we can mark this sector on occupied good agreed， officially and unofficially caseclosed many others anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy yes！
Ive rather shy， but switch hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone wasncontact two galactic rotations ago wants to be friendly again they always come around and why in us imagine how on barely how on authorically coldthe universe would be if one were all alone？
this past January Maveas comedy albumout called a very special woman that streaming everywhere for free just Google that or you can throw some money in biodoneband camp age John Benjamin place title characters on the tbshows， bobsburgers and Archer and if that were not enough， is also the jazzdear devil with an actual jazzalbum on subpop records， AT3YAT rocked recently massive mysterious intelligent beings im going out of the way to contact humans and say more or less hello people of earth but in a very particular way and doing it over and over and we humans get hard time picking out exactly what they mean by it and do they mean his harm crispenderev look into this i learned a lot of surprising facts looking into this story istart with a small one did you know that yat owners often need their yat to get from one country to another but dont want the hassle of sailing it there thats where April boys comes in people pay her to sail their boys where she loves especially on beautiful days like may twenty fourth was and were actually eating all dinner and then on the kind of metorizen！
we saw these dorsal fans and or initial for was oh are they are they some dolphins and then else they sort of approach the boat we we thought well know that there are a lot big and dolphins they were orcas killer whales about five of them they started swimming in circles around the boat they took turns diving underneath and hitting the reader she says the boat should so much youd fall if you wert holding on to something！
April knew that off the southern coast of Spain thats where she was by the way orcas have been Rambing it about a lot lately and tearing off the router s this is been happening more of the past few years in the Syria about a hundred boat stamaged you may have heard about this April intercreate try things that theyd seen on the internet！
like clangingmetal objects on the side of the boat to scare the wails off it did not to turn them and then we thought potentially if we would dangle ripes in the water they might get interesting nose rather than them just looking at the road um i dont go the ray， paper board and one of them just literally just pulled out my hand it was just so it didnt that did not work at all no！
it did a work half an hour into this the orcas had disableled the boat srouter yeah it couldnt steer they were stuck the whales kept circling then she was struck by how massive each orca was oh my god！
see the way i do remember feeling like my heart beaten quite fast my hands quite tangly you know the OK they didnt come across as being aggressive but i dont know i i i like ive seen videos of them before and they do oh look at those keep the log as and then they flick seal off a nice Berg and that set that that dinner an hour in April saw that the hole was starting to fill with water the archives had torn off the rutter and left this big hole in the bottom of the boat the creme made a made a call we need a system immediately！
we need a system immediately！
we are thinking！
we are thinking eventually， a resky boat sidles up to them brings apriontheothercreaboard tosetheboat to land it doesnt sink， but orcas have sink at least threeboyesin this area in the past year， humans have a hard time figuring out what to make of these orca attacks let me tell you the first theory it comes from a group of researchers in Spain importual if said its possible that the mattreck is population of killer whales the color white gladis may have suffered a tramatic injury like a boat collision and is now attacking otherboys and her family is following her lead they dont call this vengeance but the internet definitely does people love this become a mean theres merch you can buy to join the Orca uprising i couldnget an interview with the Europn researchers， but i talk to three other Orca experts and none of them bought the injured orca on a rampage theory like Monica， wheel and shields of the orca behavior institute yeah！
my thought was wheres the evidence um you know if something had been witnessed， or if she had some type of injury that could have been causeby vessel， um！
that theory would hold a lot more wait with me anotherreasons she doesnbuy the theory if orkais wanted a reek vengeance and kill everybodyontheseboyats， they easily could they kill seals for sport they pray on great white sharks rip out their livers and leave them for dead and weve given orcas lots of reasons to kill us in the past like in monikas home state of Washington when they were taken for captivity。
we had human divers in the water literally separating mothers from their calves， which has got to be one of the most tramatic things you know， a wild orca could go through yet they did not attack the divers who were right there in the water so it just seems like such a stretch to say onewell， had one negative incident with a boat and has now you know。
trained her family to disable all boat of a similar type so what does Monica think the archives are doing shethinks theyplane stealing boat writers is basically a fad this is happened in the past in the late 1980， workers in the Pacific northwest started killingsalmon and then wearing them on their heads like hats they just did for a year and then they stopped the last few years theyve started screingaround with fishermen scrabcatching gear currently just for fun they sound like just like routty teenagers or something like coutipping or something yeah its thats totally the vibe we get when we watch it！
i mean theyre just really besting around and stirring up trouble yeah！
the incredible popularity of all this some social media is affecting how people see Whales Monica says in Washington state， the last few weeks people who go well watching or starting to ask her isitsafe another Orca expert told me that after a killer whale ran into a shipnear Scotland recently reporters called to ask if the orca uprising against humans is spreading are they learning vengeance from the wails of Spain the answer is they are not orca populations dont socialize with other orcas they keep to themselves theres no global conspiracy April， the sailor tomishison on Facebook that boat owners were talking about adding sharp spikes to the readers to send a more violent message to the orcas the researchers told me this is what they fear that the irkers are just playing they come in peace but the humans will end up attacking them anyway。
grisbenderev is producer on our show the researgermonical weem shield says this is reverse broadcast the story a year ago the number of interactions between whales and boysos dropped its down by over forty percent this year shes helpful she says this means the Wells are losing interest， act for jorts and all surpriven today is greetings people of earth and i think many of us that one point or another in our lives especially， when we young feel like weirtheairlion trying to understand and fit in with the humans of this planet having experiences that feel very much like greetings people of earth diam we spent some time recently with the person who feels that way the person is a teenager Gwen she sixteen and because she sixteen so many things in her life right now feel like a first contact experience i remember one time the year i was like new stuff is happening every single day its crazy like i died my eyes。
pink and no remember like none of my hair just like i have never done that before thats crazy and like i remember getting in the car for the first time when i had my real license and just been like this is insanying like i can go anywhere do anything this is a pure freedom where was the first place you drive no， i feel like its just OK the first place i Joe was to make Donald but i dont think that is that embarrassing to you so embarrassing because thats so one cool and thats like so like stereotypical you know like what you would i would love my first place we like oh no i went to go look sound and watching or i went to go bird watching or i went when cant tell spirit and also cant stand anything that might even have a twinge of cringness like mcdonalsy its like its kind of cringy it also cringy is a cringy word just so you know um why i guess its like sometimes words get really popular， but once they get to a certain point of two popular， they fall back down to almost embarrathing to say she lives in Ellensburg。
Washington a small town in the middle of the state and goes to school with a lot of ranchers kids and professor kids gwds is off more ndoesnbelongto any particular click she told me if the school was a biological cell， shebe part of the cytoplasm the shapeless gu that everything else swims in but a year so ago she started noticing the skate borders this group of six or seven boys she see them in the hallways wearing shorts baggy Jean shorts looking way edgeer than everyone else her friend shorter videos that the skate border is posted on Instagram of their tricks。
which really captivated her i guess is like a lot of people when you live like a smaller town so a lot of people do a lot of boring things i feel like so a lot of kids that you know they just like go to right day they get like they buy stuff like they just by self drive around and talk and like thats all activity say do and i just like i have this idea that i all the skills are just always doing like such cool things like after school they go to skate for theys skating theyre like skating down rules theyre like you know ski group down group yeah i like you know going like round town you know like client buildings like going out side a lot then last year Gwen met someone who knew how to skate lawren basically the only girl skater at their school and asked Lauren to teach her how to do it to Gwen got her own board back in November the spring she quit the tensed team to practiskate boarding instead everyday she goes and does the two trick she knows allies and shubits over and over in the church parking latt across the street from her house or no one can see her the patch thats smoothenough to skate on is tiny about the size of two parked cars theres a real skate park downtown and winds been there was lorine and other friends but shes never been brave enough to go alone thats what she wants to do today to get over this fear so she can go by herself over the summer when is still an alien to this new unfamiliar world she does not yet speak the language of the skaters or fully know their customs but she wants to i really would like to be like a part of this culture of skating and like know this group of people on my school who skates but for me i also dont want like stickout too much in the way of like being the worst skating there or like being the new or you know dressing too much like im trying to be a skater but like dressing not like a skater so its like that push in full of like trying to find the balance also。
Gwen really wants to try and make friends with the skater guys theres one in particular she feels like she might have an inwith his name is Horace hes a jr， a couple weeks ago horiz had apparently no distgrenet school and sent a message to her friend Lauren he asked whois your friend that was wearing the dirts today Lauren route back Gwen y and Horace responded no reason what is that even mean i was so confused i like do they just re like jort or like what whatever it meant this was mindblowing a skater notice her so if horises at the park today we also want to try and talk to him but since shes the outsider here this raisis another fear no okr ness i hate okr ness is like my least favorite feeling in the world！
like embarrassing awkwareness shame thats my list fair i do wave other feel angry or sad no this for someone is i just feel so afraid of awkward social interactions so yeah thinking about even having like one conversation with like someone at the skate frank makes me want to die inside， OK， no were approaching the den of the beasts its like behind the bushes how are you feeling right？
i feel like my throat feels a little bit type but i honestly not seeing very many people so were approaching and i can see ski far but im not seeing anyone yet is this at a day in June。
hot gwinds and jorts a t shirt with a green hair in on it and sneakers full of holes from skate boarding so was not to blow up her spot by being a weird adult at the park with her OK Ive been a small Mike on her t shirt and well watch and listen from the car i see one first Ive never seen there before but i just saw them do a trick that was pretty impressive something little fearful and then i see one of their person who is a really good skate border hes one in the black height oh my gosh no hes so good and hes gonna hes like a he can do trade flops which are really impressive and like im just gonna have to be in the corner alone but lets go try it out okay thank you the black horse isnt here yet so green gets to part one of her mission the skating Gwen walks up to the edge of the park and then without making eye contact with anyone gets on her board and be lines for the far side putting as much distance between herself and the three other skaters as possible， she does a few of her allies on shops， then ducks behind the halfpipe to whisper into the microphone i just i want to look at me i was awkward im hiding i may hit a awkward the three skaters as far as i can tell have barely registered winds presents， but thats not what it feels like unsigned her head！
i just fell that was embarrassing！
nobody else seems to notice going practices some are tricks， nothing too big and as soon as the other skaters leave twelve minutes later， she herries back to the card to check in i was effully。
it was way not as bad i thought it would be this way less bad than i thought being there by yourself yeah， i feel like i could do this again i think more people will come lets see if theres an update。
i think so those gate board back done gen moves on very quickly because the next part of the mission talking a Horus yeah is looming when brings in reenforcements for this step she tax a couple of friends and they all show up but most it is so hot outside delicurly sweddy。
how bad do i look one to ten right now what two look up to yeah thank you you guys all look like one， two？
one of guins friends who shows up Cooper is friends with Horus not from skating coopers a beginner like Gwen he has this random update on Horus were just snapping and he was like also he was a helicopdo you say what why i dont know goober pulls up the video and everyone crowds around his phone no， no！
no the snaptad of two boystrapped into a helicopter flying over mountain whats so cool oh wait who is that is our sinlio why this is crazy she this is more saying about like i think about the skaters always doing like these crazy cool activities all the time 嗯， perfect example right here the even if its not skating， like theyll always going to see ado and stuff like that oh， yeah were like thrifting to yact 吗？
when looks up from the video that is insame can you now we have a kids good we have a talking point also！
you be like i heard you fly look up a talking point but still no Horus almost two hours pass and never look then a big red truck pulls up right in front of me and someone gets out on the other side i cant see going anymore or anyone else but they figure out pretty quickly who it is because hereis the next singwhen says wait i heard you winning a helicopter yesterday what we why？
what tell us the story here it is the sound of a pretty not awkward conversation between and her skater idle？
thats they like brand new i was gonna buy the vans but then forty month green asks horse in quick succession about the helicopter shoes。
pokey， mind cards which this group teenagers are surprisingly really into everything is going great lets gin would been so scared of awkwardness is now so comfortable that she signals for me to come over from the car is is compact tidy and kind of looks like it could be an a boy band yeah， his hair is bleached late brown that we sit on the curl but the side of the skate part when and her friends in Horus in me yeah， gin boldly plugs ahead asking her is some kind of interview， sounding questions， confirming his status is a bonefied cool skator um OK whats the time like？
when do you feel like when you come to see for im already feel like i know the answer this？
when do you feel stressed out or like worry do what before gonna think um i used to yeah i used to be but i kind of just here to do my thing is anyone that is every here that makes you nervous to be here not really no not anymore yeah used to be like the really good people but now im just one of those people now yeah yeah he really one of the top dogs yeah， top dogs what do if the cse if the skate per is not what stressing you have then what does school i guess kind of because uh i dont know um im talk that much in classes so like kind of scared and my grades are like really bad and im never really paying attention class only scared theyre gonna choose me and then im like not gonna know what im gonna say so you think people you think people judge you he are bad grades and i get assume that youre not smart yeah！
yeah Cooper jumps into tell horse he should see how good winds Ollie has gotten no the three of them grab their boards and head back into the skate park and Horace gives pointers on how to do a shofit while moving yeah！
ive been practicing！
lets try so the alien arrives in tries desperately to pretend she doesnt have three eyes in a giant head in long bonefingers and it works the humans barely notice you want to be one of us they say put your foot a little higher on the board！
and we have to find out right now what kind of flavor do these washers like here are coming right now well？
we have to find out right now what kind of us can do the Martions like well where but was produce today by Chris Benderer with elemestafa people but together today show and could be much aware me on a bigger fee a Benen， John Cole， Michael cometey of even Phil battle hopdevalor kippness Mickey mix donnelsincereparish not the Arrayman Ryan Rumri IX RES condoragial with Sullivan Princes once in crystals at Earnie and Julie Whiteger managing editor Sarah obsermen are senior editor David custom Bammer executive editor is a manual Barry special thanks data Tomar Almen， Michael Frank Melanie， Mitchell Journey Howard， Jason Sternneddeborg， Giles coupon today s re run from Henri gorsen our website this American life dot org this American life is deliver to public radio stations by prx the public radio exchange that is always your bokems co founder mystery Malitia you know is new passion bardering yes， bargain he does not use money whenever thats possible i bought a month this week still giving me cache he dont me this about how we bid me back ivebook 9 x a laptop， a bottle and a nail im a glass back next week more stories of the American life and watching have no boots in the little hair， next we can the podcast of this American life so cameras in the ocean and hears for maybe a hundred years away someone young link shark there was really three options he sit there in panic and scream for somebody else to help and you dont do anything or you swim the opposite way and try to protect yourself with the third option you swim toward the shark thats what camera did look should you head when you make that choice next again the podcast are new local public radio station。
