Eric Stackpole

To me, I think that that's an emotional roller coaster that is sort of relatable.

It's almost like you can relate to your human aspects of those types of feelings and not just get the data, but actually picture what it might feel like to be the whale.

And I think we're all explorers.

We're all trying to find those things to relate to, even in the natural world.

Oh, I love that question.

I mean, I think I've really built a lot of my career around trying to pursue that.

Yeah, there's some old saying that like, you know, the masters build their own tools.

And a lot of times when you're on the cutting edge, you know, there's no whale tags are us, especially if you have a very specific question that you're trying to answer.

You know, Rui, you know, is a master.

He's one of the leading people in his field.

He came up with how to

get this off the shelf camera that had a particular lens that's very sensitive to low light conditions.

And he knew that these other tags that maybe were built for other types of whales or other situations were too large and were likely to fall off with the speed that the whale goes down and some other things like that.

If you want to do something new, you probably have to do it in a new way.

And I think that that maker spirit is not only important for scientists who are right on the cutting edge, but if you want to do something that's new for yourself, you might need to figure out how to do it in a new way.

When we started OpenROV, the lowest cost robotic submarine that could go to that kind of depth was still on the order of tens of thousands of dollars.

And so we just talked about the emotion of exploration, that everyone, I think, has this feeling of wanting to have the thrill of discovery, of seeing a new thing.

And that wasn't going to be possible unless we kind of had this sort of makery attitude.

And we were willing to do things in new ways that maybe aren't as professional or even as reliable.

But if you want to make something happen, it is possible.