Eric Stackpole

And having that kind of innovative attitude, trying things out on your own, I think is often the only path there.

Oh, man.

Well, first of all, just the fact that we got footage blew my mind.

At 2 in the morning, I guess technically that morning, this tag was in pieces on the lab bench.

The camera was taken apart.

The microphone wasn't wired in.

It was this very last-minute effort to kind of get it together on one of our last days of being able to deploy.

So the fact that we got any footage just blew my mind.

But...

I think the fact that not only was it successful that we saw so many new things, it kind of actually made me think almost more of the technology.

The fact that like, even when something seems so unlikely, it's possible that the profound can come from that.

I was next to Rui, who spent his entire life researching these animals.

And to see him physically, like he even cried a little bit.

Both of us did.

As we were seeing this was like...

I guess I was in awe of what we were witnessing about nature, but I was in awe of the moment that we were at in time where technology exists that makes it possible to participate in this way.

It's a huge release to be spending so much time preparing for something and then to get what you were hoping and more.

So, yeah, I think I was sort of flooded with emotions of feeling like I could relate and understand these whales in that way that we were talking about before.

And that also I was alive as a human and a technologist in this moment where we could do something like this for the first time.

I'm so lucky to be able to witness something in a way that no humans ever have before.