Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness. And every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation

with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes them curious. On today's episode,

I'm joined by philosopher and writer Ava Mayer, where I ask her, can animals understand us?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Van Ness. I am so excited for our episode this week.

I'm always excited for an episode, but this one is especially special. So I'm not going to be

around the bush too much. I want to welcome our guest, but Ava, I'm going to introduce you a little bit

so that people understand your prowess. So Ava Mayer is an artist, a writer, a philosopher, a singer,

a songwriter, and you're also the author of 10 books of short stories, novels and poetry,

and your work has been translated into Count Them, 18 languages you don't literally have to count them.

But what we're going to talk about today is one of your books, which is all about animal communication,

that have just been released for the first time in English by MIT Press Genius, called Animal Languages.

And when I read about that, I was like, we got to have Ava on. We got to learn about animal

communication and just fascinated. So welcome. And thank you so much for all of your work.

Thank you. I'm very glad to be here today. So I remember when I was a little kid and my step-dad

said to me one time about our two dogs whose name were Ginny and Whitney. He was like, well, you know,

animals can't think because they don't have language. And for the first time in my life, I remember

thinking like, what are words? And like, what is language? Because I'm thinking that that's weird

right now as you're telling me that. But if I'm scratching Ginny or Whitney, which were our dogs,

and they think, oh, that feels nice. And they want more pets. And they, you know,

nuzzle your hand like with their head. Like, what makes them think that they want more pets

if they don't have words? And so I was like, what's going on in their brains if they don't have

words? I don't necessarily believe it. So what is going on in dogs and cats' brains? And then we're

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