Eric Stackpole

speaker

292 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 11 Apr

Eric Stackpole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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TED Talks Daily · A whale’s-eye-view of the ocean | Eric Stackpole · 11 Apr 2026 podcast

I wasn't even a good student.

I spent more time tinkering than doing homework.

But I love engineering, and that has led me on an incredible journey.

With friends, I built low-cost underwater robots designed to democratize exploration, and that democratization drew the attention of the show's producers.

You can watch the show to see what we discovered, but for me, the most powerful moments were seeing things that no one had ever seen before using the tools that we had built.

In the Azores, we teamed up with Rui Pareto, renowned whale biologist who spent decades studying sperm whales.

These giants can dive to over a mile deep to hunt, and we know very little about what they do when they're down there.

So to find out, Rui had put together a very DIY tag.

It used a taken apart action camera, it had a light, there was a radio beacon, and it had suction cups designed to stick to the whale for a few hours and then pop up and float to the surface.

It was very DIY, but even on an advanced research ship,

Building your own tools is often the way to get the information you need.

It barely worked.

We had to spend nights soldering and improvising to try to get it going.

And at like two in the morning, we finally got it going.

And while I overslept, Drew was already out on the boat.

He placed the tag on a whale, and I remember him radioing back the tag was on.

Okay, a huge amount of suspense.

Would it ever come back to the surface?

Or would it flood with water?

Would the battery die?

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