From environmental impacts of AI politeness to the linguistic mysteries of snow, today's science roundup may leave you with more questions than answers, and that’s the way we like it. We're exploring a world where being nice to robots could harm the planet, scientists gave elephants LSD (yes, really), and Australian’s get creative with their election day propaganda.
Are You Too Polite to Save the Planet?
Here's a plot twist nobody saw coming: being nice to your AI assistant might be hurting the environment. Turns out, a huge percentage of us are out here "please" and "thank you-ing" our way to higher energy bills. Every polite word you type to ChatGPT is like leaving a tiny digital light bulb on - multiply that by millions of people, and suddenly we're burning through electricity faster than a teenager through their phone battery.
Rod's take? "Save your manners for your mum - the robots won't mind!" Will, meanwhile, is probably still apologising to Siri for not saying goodbye when he left the house.
Snow Way! The Language Mystery
Ever heard that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow? While linguists are still debating the exact number, it shows how our environment shapes our vocabulary. It's like how Australians have 50 different ways to say "mate", each one with its own special meaning.
That Time Scientists Gave an Elephant LSD
In the "What Were They Thinking?" department of 1962, scientists decided to give a 14-year-old elephant named Tusko a trip he definitely didn't ask for. Their goal? To see if LSD could make an elephant behave badly. As one would expect, it didn’t go well for the researchers and especially not for poor Tusko.
Australian Election Vandals
In the lead up to the Australian Federal Election it’s common to see signage promoting candidates for the electorate. They look well put together, smiling and ready to serve their community. In true Aussie fashion however, if we see a sign…we can’t help but take some creative licence in improving it. It starts innocently enough with a few drawn on moustaches, maybe the occasional penis on the head but some Australians went much further to vandalise and left us wondering why.
From accidental environmental damage through politeness to psychedelic pachyderms, science keeps proving that reality is wilder than anything we could make up. Next time someone tells you science is boring, tell them about the hundreds of words for snow - or better yet, about how being nice to Siri might be melting the ice caps.
Got thoughts? Wild theories? Stories about other elephants on acid? (Please don't actually give elephants acid.) Drop us a line at cheers@alittlebitofscience.com.au.
Stay curious, stay weird, and maybe ease up on the pleases and thank yous to your robot friends.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Human Impact on the Environment
00:35 The New Threat: Politeness and Energy Consumption
01:30 Exploring Politeness with Chatbots
03:29 The Environmental Cost of AI Requests
10:56 Linguistics: Words for Snow and Beyond
24:19 Animal Behavior and Ethics
27:42 The LSD Experiment on Elephants
28:47 The Aftermath of the Experiment
29:29 Animal Experimentation Ethics
36:44 Election Sign Vandalism
41:51 Alien Encounters and Soviet Secrets
48:02 The Concept of Sad Fishing
50:13 Conclusion and Farewell
SOURCES:
Tool We Mentioned: https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration_conversation.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/technology/chatgpt-alexa-please-thank-you.html
https://futurism.com/altman-please-thanks-chatgpt
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027724002233
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2417304122
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/the-science-behind-cocaine-bear-and-other-inebriated-animals
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/feb/26/research.science
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Rod: [00:00:00] So if I was to ask you people out there in listenership land, just rattle off five things humans are doing right now to trash the environment. I bet you could do it in an instant like boom. So I did that to myself I didn't even think about it. Burning fossil fuels, mass use of fertilizers over consumption of fast fashion microplastics, humans encroaching on pristine habitats.
My fast thoughts are fancy. Now, anyone out there and you guys, you know William and others would be thinking you had some of those and I've got a few others, I come up with a bunch more. There are plenty and there are big ticket items and less big ticket items. But this week I heard about a new threat that could have huge implications on our energy consumption and it is politeness.
Will: [00:01:00] It is time for a little bit of science. I'm will grant associate professor of science communication at the Australian National University.
Rod: Whoa. I'm Rod Lambert. A, uh, 30 year science communication veteran with the mind of a teenage boy.
Will: And today for your little bit of science, we've got some, uh, cunning linguistics.
Rod: We got a, uh, little bit of, um, ethics and the sch.
Will: we've got some aliens,
Rod: Yes, we do.
Will: and I've learned a new word.
Rod: I can't wait to hear about that, but I'm gonna have to. Right.
Will: Politeness. What's the problem with politeness? Man?
Rod: I know it's, look, it's hilarious. Politeness is trashing the environment or is going to be, so there was a survey 2024. It found that. 67% of us folks who responded to the survey are really nice to their chatbots.
Will: I am, aren't you? I.
Rod: not anymore. Now I'm just like, do it bitch and hurry up.
Will: Look, look, I'm
Rod: Not that I've ever used one. This is all
Will: I've been following this bit of research as well, every time I ask my, uh, [00:02:00] my silly artificial intelligent chat bot, to set a timer or to play a piece of music, I say, please do you say, please,
Rod: no, So of those people, of the two thirds of respondents, just over half of them said they do it.
They're polite and nice to their chatbots because it's the right thing to do. It's just the right thing to do.
Will: I think it probably is, I've got some reasons why I do it, I don't know the right thing to do. I don't, I wouldn't
Rod: You're a nice fella. You just do the right thing. It's in your jeans.
Will: there's one reason where it's like, I'm worried about the robot apocalypse, but, but I'll come to that later. I'll come to that later. No, I was actually, I was actually, the reason I do it is maybe that I've got kids in the house and I want to, I want to indicate that saying please and thank you, no matter what is probably a decent thing to do.
you know the difference between saying, you know, Hey Siri, play some music, versus, Hey Siri, could you play some music, please? I feel like that's a nicer way to ask, and the kids will be like, oh, you should treat other [00:03:00] people with respect, whether
Rod: not people. Not people. Siri music. Now,
Will: Siri
Rod: hurry the F up.
Will: Really? So, but do, but so you, you don't believe in being polite to, to your robot assistants.
Rod: am not rude. I'm just not fluffy. I'll save it for people. I've only got so much nice and send me each day, and then the, you know, the, the well runs dry before I have to replenish it overnight. so apparently Twitter user sort of gone onto some of this stuff. Ae Twitter use, sorry, X formerly known as Twitter.
And they, depending on how you report it, ask the question, how much money does open AI lose in electricity costs from people saying, please and thank you to their models, which I think is a fantastic question. Never crossed my mind. I'm not impolite because I'm trying to save the environment, but I will say that now.
Will: Look, I mean, just aside from, aside from the please and thank you, we've gotta recognize any request on a, on a large language model or a search engine has environmental and energy costs. Large language models, I think, I don't have the data here are a few times more expensive [00:04:00] than a, a regular search on Google.
you know, I saw, I saw one thing here. , this was Neil Johnson, a physics professor who's done a bunch of work on, on the costs of ai. , it's like when you add please and thank you, you're wrapping in more complexity in there, and it's just literally gonna cost it more. It's like the, the, he described, it's like the wrapping you get around the packaging on something.
If you're just buying the product, but then you've got extra layers of plastic, then you've gotta process that and there's an environmental impact to that.
Rod: absolutely. There is, well, the numbers I saw, depending on who you believe, but data center is the power of the chatbots. Use something like 2% of the world's energy,
Will: That's great
or
Rod: so, no. Yeah. Sorry, I should I I said that wrong. Only 2%
calm down people. So apparently, um, Sam Altman, so the open, ICEO chat, GPT, Papa, et cetera, he said, oh yeah, look, honestly, please, and thank you being asked of their chatbots is costing him big time.
Will: so the first person said, I wonder how much money open air has lost in electricity costs from people saying, please, and thank you. and Sam Altman said tens of [00:05:00] millions of dollars. But, but, but, but, but here's the bit that I was intrigued. Tens of millions of dollars well spent.
so I was like, oh, what does he mean well spent? Is he, is he like worried about like the robot apocalypse and it's like, you know, or rocco's basilisk, like out into the future you've got the AI overlord that's gonna come and kill us all. Put us in the torch chamber, whatever it is. And is he thinking, if you say please and thank you, now we are less likely to have that sort of, and, and you, you by your instructional comments, Hey robot, just do shit and, and you are bringing on Basilisk
Rod: be fair, I don't add shit either. 'cause that's extra as
Will: and I, by being polite, am trying to, you know, make sure that we have nicer robot overlords.
Rod: Well, he did that quote went on with, you know, why'd you do it? And he is like, well, you never know. that kind of sum summarized, you said, well, you never know. I mean, maybe, maybe it's a good idea. And I mean, look, they got, we, this the one article I read, so it goes into, so artificial intelligence is often more like a prediction [00:06:00] machine, like predictive text, et cetera.
But it has more autonomy, it can spit out more creative sentences, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a Microsoft designer, they say, look, if you have proper etiquette, it helps generate respectful collaborative outputs.
Will: I've certainly seen versions of this. Now I'm not gonna get exactly phrased right, but I've seen versions where if you do a request and you say things like, take your time or do or do a good job, it actually does a better job.
Rod: Let's take your time and computer time. Oh yeah. I'm gonna take one picosecond instead of
Will: as in, as in like, that would be the instruction, you know, uh, rather than for humans, rather than reacting with a knee jerk.
This is, you know, think, use your system to thinking if you
Rod: Oh yeah, yeah. Use your
Will: And so, and so that Microsoft argument there is, is that you do get sort of high levels of professionalism when you are talking to it in a more professional tone.
Rod: Well, not only that, even, even more basic than that, the, they, they're saying basically if you, if you are polite, then the responses that are generated are [00:07:00] influenced by the way you tone it. And so you get polite responses as well. So maybe that doesn't matter to people. Like, if, if my AI spat back at me, here it is.
Your fuck wit I'd kind of be amused.
Will: would clap. I would, I was
just like you.
Rod: But a lot of people might not are like, don't hassle me, man, and here it is, I'm gonna get to it, et cetera. So, I mean, that's one of the ideas. But I, I, I like, I like that the, the, the idea of how much energy, so one calculation, apparently Wpo WaPo, Washington Post hung out with the University of California and this, this is rough.
Comparative and the energy impacts of generating a 100 word email is basically equivalent to 14 hours of an LED, sorry, 14 LED lights running for an hour. So,
Will: Okay,
Rod: and we all know that's
point. I know you, I know you know this, but others dunno this 0.14 kilowatt hours.
Will: yeah.
Rod: I mean, I know a kilowatt is a lot more than a watt
Will: Look, I think, I think we need to think about the whole [00:08:00] system. Like, like when you say things like 2% of the, the world's energy, or it's bringing on climate change, um, an extra six months early or two years early, it's
Yeah, yeah. But whatever it is, give gimme it to you in terms like the whole thing.
I, I think a 100 word email, yes, it has an energy cost, but if we're comparing it to an LED, like, that's just really hard to
Rod: This is my standard comparison for energy. When I talk to people about changing electricity providers, I go, so how many hundred word emails is that? Or if you could help me, how much cheaper is it for me to run 14 LEDs for an hour? I mean, help me out here, man. I'm trying to, I'm trying to help you sell to me.
Will: so back on the topic though, are you of the belief then that you should not be polite? So your, your point is environmentally it's more important to not be polite.
Rod: yes. It's not my point. It's stuff I read. I am, but a delivery
Will: Give give us your verdict.
Rod: I reckon, I reckon I, I, I just don't really care about the politeness. Like, as I say, I don't waste, it takes energy to be rude as well, but just to be instrumental doesn't take a lot of energy and [00:09:00] I'm not too worried about that. If, if we have a functional transactional relationship, me and the machine just get on
Will: but I've got three reasons. I, I, I got like, like, you know, you should, you should indicate politeness to the people around you. I saw a study actually that was saying that, um, people that are impolite to robots are more likely to be impolite to humans.
Rod: up.
Will: and this is that there is a, there is a learning factor going on here that we are creating a more impolite society.
Whereas if you are kind of, so this is about the human, human interaction that you are just saying something communicative to the robot, but other people are listening, other people are hearing, and so, and it's affecting your own thinking.
Rod: which species are you prepared to lose, man,
Will: oh, look,
Rod: for being nice and teaching your children the right way to interact with humans. Which species are you prepared to sacrifice?
Will: not the humans, but, there's one reason to be polite two, you get better answers as we just said, and three, that, you know, there's the robot upright uprising. You know, I, I saw this thing that was
Rod: The only good reason, that's the only
Will: 12% of the people who are polite are [00:10:00] doing it to appease the algorithm in case of the robot up uprising.
I'm like,
Rod: Do you know the weirdest thing about that statistic? Only 12%. I would've thought it'd be closer to 50%. Like just in case. It's
like, do you believe in God? No. Do you go to church? Well, you never know.
Will: I think I'm a little bit of both. my reason for doing it is so that the kids hear me being polite, but the other part is I don't mind baking in a little bit of, I was the one that was nice to you. Robot killer Siri in the future.
Rod: A little bit of both. So you're saying you're non-binary when it comes to being polite or your
Will: I have multiple reasons to be polite.
and you are rude, straight out, and you've just gone. Now I'm allowed to be, 'cause environmentally I'm better.
You can be, you can be ly rude.
Rod: Exactly. 'cause I give a shit about turtles. You son of a bitch. Speaking of turtles, actually unrelated. Apparently you have some cutting linguistics for me and I bloody love that. I love it.
Will: have you ever heard the argument [00:11:00] that, um, our indigenous friends in northern Canada, the Inuit
Rod: Mm-hmm.
Will: have, I don't know, seven a dozen, a hundred, 200 words for snow?
Rod: In fact, what I heard is 98% of the language is Words for Snow. And then there's if, but, and,
Will: Yeah, that's it. That, that, yeah.
Rod: yeah. That's what I heard.
Will: well I've got got some interesting updates on that story, I know you've done a bit of linguistics in your time, rod, I assume based on one of the articles I, I was just reading before, that if you, if you put the argument that, uh, Inuit have a hundred words for snow to a a linguist, that it will drive them wild in the way that probably not much
else will. No, I, I'm doubting that, I'm thinking a lot more like
Rod: I, I hear you have a hundred words for snow. Say it again.
Will: The idea that, uh, the Inuit have a lot of words for Snow has been around for about a hundred years. , it first came around about [00:12:00] 1911, a guy named Franz Boas. , he didn't go out there and say, you know, they have heaps and heaps of words, but he, he was describing some of their, some of their language and he said, oh, you can, you can see different root words that we might use as snow, to describe different concepts.
Rod: how many words for root do they have?
Will: I'll tell you about that in a bit.
Rod: I've got about
Will: I, I don't, I don't have that data, but I will tell you
something about that. I'll, I'll tell no, I'll tell you about something. Um, for for North American listeners, root is, is a synonym for intercourse.
Rod: of the sexual
Will: Australian parlance? No, no, no. So, um, no, he would say, you know, they've, they've got different words for snow that's on the ground, you know, snow that you're walking in versus snow that's falling and drifting snow and a, a snow drift.
So he, he, he pointed to four different words, and I'm not gonna try and butcher them by saying what those words are, but he wasn't really trying to raise a theory here. He just pointed to a few different ones. But then, um, it was picked up again [00:13:00] in the 1940s, um, a guy named Benjamin Wharf.
Rod: Ah, Sier Wolf Hypothesis.
Love that shit. Love
that
Will: gimme what is, what is the Sapia Wharf hypothesis?
Rod: The simplest version that I recall from my 1980s linguistics classes was that basically your language literally shapes your, your perception and understanding of the world around you. Like it actually gets to a point where the way the mechanisms used to describe it almost change your perception, or affect your perception.
That's,
Will: Was there. And so here's the question. Was there some element of the world around you? Then also describing your language. So, uh, like, like
Rod: A two way kind of,
Will: as in the reason for this being that, um, Inuit Seal or snow and so are more likely to have words for snow than say Polynesians or something like
Rod: Yeah. There, I, I read an argument that was by, it was, I think the Dani of New Guinea, God shit, I'm remembering early stuff. But they apparently had a bizarrely detailed color spectrum for certain sort of what we'd call [00:14:00] reds and browns, basically. And that may have been a reflection on their environment, having a lot of reds and browns.
And then there were subtle distinctions between things that we'd be like, that's red, that's brown.
Will: Good, good. All right. All right. I'll come back to that. Thank you for the, thanks for the linguistics theory. It's actually really useful for this. So Wolff picked this up and in part, uh, raising this Sapper Wolf theory, but he, he would say he, he came to like, to looking at the
Rod: Can, can we just clarify? He's no relation to the Star Trek. Cling on Half Human
Battle.
Will: that. I, I can't
Rod: Different wharf. Different wharf,
Will: Uh, they're the only two WAFs I've ever heard of. Uh, so let's assume they have to be related, like
Rod: yeah. Fair call. Actually, you're
Will: I, we have the same word for falling. Snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard, like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow, whatever the situation may, may be to an Eskimo.
This is all inclusive word would be almost unthinkable. He would say that falling snow, slushy snow and so on are sensuously and operationally [00:15:00] different. Would have different words for them. So he's picked that up and he's got like seven different terms here.
Uh, and, and this is reasonable in the linguistics world and, and I think a reasonable place for discussion, but popular science went, oh, well, fuck, they've got whatever.
Rod: It's gotta be a million then.
Will: so, you know, literally
Rod: We've discovered
10. We dunno what else is there? Let's, let's call it 10,000.
Will: it's not quite 10,000. I read this great article by Jeffrey Pullum who pretty, pretty big linguist.
And he, he wrote this angrily about the, the, the Words for Snow hypothesis.
Rod: Sorry. The image of an angry linguist.
Will: he's like, um, it, in Lanford Wilson's 1978 play the 5th of July. It's 50 different Words for Snow in 1984. We
can find, uh, no, as in like, no, it's not 50 words for Snow. It's like 50 shades of Gray. It's like 50. But like he's saying that that it, it was raised that they've got 50 words for snow. Um, he was looking around in in the early eighties and he's like.
He could find in, in a trivia encyclopedia, it's nine different words for snow. A [00:16:00] New York Times editorial said it was a hundred different words for snow. Uh, a weather forecast that he saw said 200 words for snow. So people are just going, you know, you know those people up there, they have like infinity words for snow,
Rod: It's kind of like lots. I love that. What is it? Trivia dictionary. We're gonna go too far. I'm moving for a lot of words for something and I don't have the internet yet 'cause it hasn't been invented. Trivia dictionary.
Will: Anyway. Anyway, so amongst linguistics professionals, it's probably, now I'm not speaking for the whole profession
and I, and I'll come to that in a second. It's probably been not completely rejected, but definitely calms down from them. They've got 50 different words or a hundred different words. It's like, yeah, there's probably a bit more there.
But, uh, um, some of the key work was done in the 1980s when, an anthropologist did some workup, uh, with the Inuit and, and found that yes, they do have a variety of different words for snow, but not radically different from what you'd find in other snow bearing peoples, uh, Scotland or whatever like that.
But, [00:17:00] but a new challenger has entered the ring. So we've got a team of, , linguists, psychologists and computer scientists from the University of Melbourne have done things a little bit differently. And, uh, what they've done is, , they've compiled this huge data set of bilingual dictionaries, done some, done some cool computer science, and they've looked not just at snow, but they've looked at all, all languages and seen, okay, which ones talk about different concepts more and have more versions of use for that term.
So, just as an example, I, we'll step, step off, snow. I'll come
back to snow in a second. so the word for horse, again, unlikely to come up in Polynesian language,
Rod: Wait, horse or horse?
Oh, horse. Okay.
Will: like,
Rod: That's still not clearing it up for me, but I have some strange proclivities. Carry on.
Will: you know, you're more likely like, like the, the, the top scoring languages.
Rod: Yeah.
Will: The ones [00:18:00] that talked about horses more and had more words for horse seemed to were in French, German, Kazak, and Mongolian. You can get the
Mongolian. Yeah. And Dothraki as well. So basically what they've got is this great data set that looks at all languages around the world and compares how much different concepts turn up in those languages. Now, just, just to, just to pause for a second. They don't have perfect data here. 'cause a word could come up in a dictionary in three different ways.
One is, is where you've got different words for horse or different words for snow, and that's, that's what we're looking for. So different words for the same concept. Another is, is words related to. That concept. So like a shoe, a shoe for a horse or something like, or to hobble a horse.
that's interesting. And the third is when, when it might be turning up as, as an example, like, um,
Rod: Look, a horse
Will: yeah. You know, um, you know, the example is, is not about snow at all or something like that, but it's just so there is some imperfections in this data.
Rod: like an elephant. Shits [00:19:00] like a horse. It's not about the horse.
Will: exactly. That's it. All I'm saying the data isn't a hundred percent perfect, but it allows us to look at all sorts of different terms out there and see who has most likely to have variety of, um,
Rod: How many words for fuck do Australians have?
Will: Oh, I've got, I've gotta bring this data up. I, I, I'll go through a few that I've looked up and then, then you can suggest a few more. so to clear it up, first, they reckon of all of the 616 languages that they looked at,
Rod: Yeah.
Will: snow. Was top scoring as in, had the most variety and most u use amongst the Inuit. So
Rod: I think can say Australian tourists in Japan,
Will: true. What are you like? Uh,
Rod: in and stuff where you're just like, there's so many different
Will: yeah, powder Man
Powder. This is this gross powder. This is Greek powder. This is wild. I
Rod: Dry powder, hot. Pow. Yeah. So really, so that, that's, it's at some level verified?
Will: [00:20:00] level. At some level. True. It's not saying that they have hundreds of words.
Not at all. It's just saying they do have,
Rod: More than Australian have for the, for shit.
Will: totally. Totally.
But I, but I, I looked, and I, I, I gotta say there's, there's some other I amusing examples that make me think, okay, why, why, why does your language have the most for that?
Rod: So, okay. French is for, uh, let's say disdain and disgust for the other.
Will: Oh, French. Now, now there's two ways to look at this. We can look at a, a word and, and say, how much is that, um, in that language? Or we can look at a language and say, what is their, what are they frequently obsessed
Rod: Fuck all our other stories. I don't care about the rest. I just wanna do this for another two hours. This is amazing.
Will: I've got this tool here and we can look at either languages and see what they really are focused about, you know, what is their snow, or we can look at, um, a word and see where it is most common. I'm gonna throw in a few,
Rod: and just in conjunctions, they're the most interesting words in
Will: no, I, I'll do, I'll do, here's, here's, here's one, uh, Japanese, , [00:21:00] unsurprising.
they have the most variety of words for earthquake. I'm like, oh, okay. Okay. There you go.
Rod: I would've thought the Maori would've been up there too.
Will: the difference between, , the Inuit and, and the Scots on snow was small and earthquake Japanese are, are miles out the front. But, um, but I did like some other ones. , old English, , is the winner for the concept of misery, which
Rod: How have you been?
Will: I have so many words for misery. They were
Rod: How, how do you think it'll be tomorrow?
Ah,
Will: were also number one on hedge, um, and hedge, hedge, hedge warrior and misery. And I'm like, is that, is that England? Is that England
Rod: I, a misery hedge warrior. You, you shall be king hereafter. That's awesome.
Will: Cornish? My people,
Rod: pasty pasti
Will: col colon. Like, like, like colon, you know, in your back passage, you know.
Rod: And this is old English
Will: this is [00:22:00] Cornish. I've shifted
Cornish,
now. Cornish, no, they, they were really focused on the back passage. I like this
Rod: but like before colonoscopies.
ALBOS_E377_Audio_WILL: Before, maybe they were just, maybe they knew
Will: about it. Maybe they were early. Do you wanna know what Russians are?
Russians were focused
on?
Rod: do. I really, really
Will: Well, so they are, they are the, the winners for absurdity.
Rod: like the word
Will: They have the, they have the most synonyms or ways of, ways of describing the concept of
absurdity.
But, but, but also screw boot and frost. Now frost I can get But it's like a boot. Like,
Rod: Screw as in the object that holds things together.
Will: I think so.
I think so.
Rod: So what kind of screw you want? Comrade. There's many, many. I have like 900 options. And I don't mean from size. I mean style.
Will: uh, Cajun French was number one for chagrin.
Rod: What?
Will: I dunno. I dunno.
Rod: In my biggest delirium, I would not make that up. That's amazing. [00:23:00] Chagrin.
They're
Will: this is, this is, a fun tool to explore how the languages of the world might be a bit different in
their shape, you know? And, and, and you know, I think, I think definitely you can see, if you look up snow, you can see it's all the peoples that live in the snowy areas up close to the Arctic. It's, it's, it's from Japan, northern China, Russia, through to, you know, the Inuit, Northern Canada.
But there's other concepts like rain. People talk about rain even when they don't have rain. Um, we're all interested in rain as peoples and you know, there's the rainy peoples and the non rainy peoples, but we're all kind of interested in that. yeah, it's these abstract ones that are kind of fascinating to me.
I think, um,
Rod: Absurdity in Russians blows my mind.
Will: Oh, I can get that.
Will: Mandarin Chinese was way out in front
for. Yes, yes. Government and examination.
Rod: Oh God, the stereotype hurts. I got a headache.[00:24:00]
Will: So look, there you go. There's a fun tool out there. We'll chuck it in the links just to, just to explore how, how us peoples of the world are focused in our languages in, uh, you know, some slightly different things.
Rod: and please if, if you dive into that, people listening at home and start playing with that tool, send us some examples.
Will: Rod, you got some ethics sch for me.
Rod: look. I do, and I, I wrestle with myself. Is this about animals or is this about ethics? And I think, yes. So it begins, you know, plenty of animals like drugs, right.
Will: Yes.
Rod: Plenty of animals like drugs or, or when they, they don't, might not seek them out, but when they have 'em, they kind of go, sweet. I'd like it again.
So you've got Apes, monkeys, Simeon, and alcohol. Like there are, there are versions of apes and monkeys that will deliberately go for fermented or off fruits.
Will: remember when I grew up in final Queensland, uh.
The, the, no, the rainbow loates, they'd eat the, eat the, they'd do this game where they eat the off fruit in the trees and then they would sort of [00:25:00] play falling backwards.
Rod: yeah, yeah. Oh, hanging upside down from
treason shit,
right?
Will: yeah. And, and flying off just before they hit the ground.
And it's like, go Good
Rod: That's awesome. Well, some, some of our Simeon cousins also exhibit alcoholic behaviors, which is a bummer, but, you know, no, no surprise reindeers and psychedelic mushrooms. Now you've, we've probably all heard this, you know, the idea that maybe the origin of the Santa Claus myth is these red and white mushrooms that get you off your tits.
But this is in Siberia in particular, but I. It seems that the stories blur. Like the story I heard was always that, um, people would eat the mushrooms and go and piss in the snow and the reindeers would go and eat the snow and go, let's get high. But then other stories say no. The reindeers would eat the mushrooms and stumble around like, like idiots.
And then other people go and eat their piss snow. But either way, mushrooms getting people high and because they read and Right. Boom. Santa
Will: Where, where's the bit about gift giving and, and Jesus, like, I, I, I, I, I
Rod: that's, um, that's, uh, [00:26:00] that's ayahuasca
Will: Oh,
Rod: When the reindeers flew
Will: I I mean, I'm hearing reindeers and red and white, like the Okay. Okay. There's a bit of a jump there to make a whole tradition.
Rod: Well, look, I'm no, um, Siberian, but it makes sense to me.
Will: Okay. Reindeers on magic mushrooms. What do they look like? What are they doing?
Rod: They apparently wobble around and seem happy and disoriented.
Will: Hmm.
Rod: Like we all do dolphins and puppet fish. So dolphins are observations of dolphins. You would've heard this year they, they kind of fuck with a puppet fish until it releases some, um, neurotoxins and they get into it and then they basically get off their face
and they do it deliberately.
I mean, but dolphins are smarter than us. They know. They say, whatcha gonna do today? Well, I've eaten. I might as well get high.
Will: They're not smarter than us.
Rod: You don't know. They have two brains. They can half sleep and half not sleep at the same time. Six brains.
Will: It's a dozen brains, man.
Rod: They got a dozen brains. They've got a brain everywhere. Their skin is a brain. Anyway, these are observations, right? There are [00:27:00] others. These are observations. What we need is an experiment.
Will: Uh,
Rod: There's a little bit of science. We're
Will: I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm remembering that the title of your, your thing here was Ethics. Ethics.
Rod: 1962 enter Dr. Louis Jo, AKA Jolly West, and some colleagues at the Uni of Oklahoma. Oh, and also their willing participant tco
Will: Oh,
Rod: willing participant tco the 14-year-old nearly, oh no, just over three ton bull Asian elephant.
Will: whatever it is, is gonna take a lot.
Rod: It's gonna be great. It's gonna be
Will: It's gonna take a lot to
Rod: Yeah. And in a good way. So apparently this, uh, Toco was considered the zoo he was in, in, I didn't write down Wyoming or somewhere else with the w He was a star attraction, and he was known for his very calm demeanor. This matters. So the aim of the experiment was to determine if LSD.[00:28:00]
Could induce a a a a state of must. M-U-S-T-H which is a natural state in male elephants, which is characterized by heightened aggression and elevated testosterone levels. So I assume it's like, man, horniness, seasonal elephant
want to
bone
Will: aggression. That's not man horniness.
I, I, I mean, I
Rod: Don't you do that? You go to a bar and you think, I want to have sex.
I might as well start breaking shit and punching people, and then the ladies go, yes, please.
Will: I, yeah, I've,
I've heard of other pathways I've heard.
Rod: Only
Will: But also I can understand, you know, giving the elephant drugs where you're like, okay, you need to have some baby elephants. So we'll give you the elephant equivalent of Viagra,
Rod: in the defense of the, of the, let's call 'em scientists, I don't think this is about elephant reproduction
Will: Okay. Okay. But I don't, I don't understand a scenario where you go, okay, what I want is an aggressive three ton version of this thing that is nice and calm. Like, unless, unless you're a till of
the
hun or you're like,
Rod: you just [00:29:00] do science communication. You don't do real science 'cause you don't think this
Will: I wonder, I wonder what an aggressive version of this would be.
Like. It would look, it would be horrifying. Absolutely. No, I've, I've read, I've read stories in, in India and places like that where an, an elephant goes agro and, and it can cause a lot of damage. You and you are not stopping it
Rod: To be fair, a calm elephant intent on something can cause a lot of damage. They're just, they're
Will: So why do you know, you know, I've just gotta pause for a second.
There is a long tradition of experimenting on animals in science, and we use mice like A, they're cheaper, and B, they're smaller.
Rod: But it's way worse press. Like we made a mouse go crazy and everyone's like, how
Will: like, I like, let's, let's
Rod: we made an elephant go crazy? No one's questioning that. No one's questioning that. though. We made this elephant go insane. It's like, yes, you did. Look at this mouse. It seems pretty. You need a ologist to prove it.
Will: okay. [00:30:00] Okay. Look, look, I'm thinking about the science here. Obviously they're thinking
Rod: are you, they're thinking about the science. So they wanted to find out about, you know, the, the induction of must. So Tuscan was injected with, here's the dose, 297 milligrams of LSD. If you were a three ton human,
that would still be 30 times the dose you would need to get you trippen, bro.
So 30 times the equivalent amount you would expect in a human of the similar side. 30 times, not, not even twice.
Will: well
Rod: probably didn't have a lot of LSD, that's my assumption, you know, they're like, well, we've gotta get on
with it Let's
just go straight to straight to X. Let's go to top of the pile. So they dose tus go.
Within five minutes, he starts trumpeting loudly,
Will: Mm-hmm.
Rod: falls over onto his side, experiences, violent tremors, and as they put it, loss of bowel control. So shit's everywhere.
Will: Huh.
Rod: Signs of distress were exhibited, including stiffened limbs and labored [00:31:00] breathing.
Will: I'm hoping he has a religious experience in this. I hope he hope he sees God, elephant, God.
Rod: let's be clear. At the very least, we can show we, you could say at the end of that moment right there, LSD affects elephants too.
Will: Yeah. All right.
Rod: Unambiguous effects. There is an influence. So they went, oh shit, that's too much of an influence. What are we gonna do to counteract it? So they gave humongous doses of Thorazine.
Will: Oh, are you serious? They're, they're still, let's go with counteract straightaway.
Rod: Fuck yeah. It didn't seem happy shitting everywhere. You know, no one's happy about an elephant shitting everywhere, especially if they're also
spasming. 'cause there's no
Will: but in fairness, elephants are not a pants wearing people. Like,
so, so they
are, and and they are not terribly toilet trained. So the, like, I think shitting everywhere, sober or not is the same for an elephant.
Rod: This is called shitting, but not if they're not always spasmy when they shit. And then you've got that classic video of the elephant putting its trunk up, another elephant's bum, and pulling the poo out and eating it.
Will: No, that is not a
Rod: So maybe that's, you haven't seen that?
Will: I have not,
Rod: It's all over the
Will: I
have
not, and, and I
Rod: to 15
Will: have [00:32:00] literally not googled that term. I've Googled every other term,
Rod: I think you should elephant eating poo out of another elephant's bum. It's real. I know it sounds like I'm making it up, but I'm absolutely not. I was mesmerized and horrified in equal measure
Will: I did see,
Rod: between the first and
17th time. I
Will: the, the hippopotamus, uh, doing
Rod: they, they do the scatter
to mark
Will: no, no, no. This is the bidet. I, I think, I think it's,
I, no, no. They're able to get their dick and sort of spray their butt hole, , with urine to sort of clean, clean themselves out.
Rod: who isn't, are they gonna tell me
something exceptional about hippopotamus? Like, oh, I can pay my own bum to make it cleaner. Like, well, duh, you're a boy.
Will: Listener. Listener. If you're able
Rod: Send us video, or it's not real.
Will: No, don't, don't send him
Rod: Just send me video
Will: Yeah. Don't really,
Rod: It's, it's, rod wants to know at a little bit of science. Yeah,
Will: no, I'm not against the knowing. I'm not against the knowledge. I just don't need the proof.
Rod: The only way to know is with proof.
So anyway, they gave him t Thorazine [00:33:00] and then, um, may have caused significant drop in blood pressure. So, so did, so then went, oh, let's tranquilize him, says duh,
Will: Are we adding, are we adding the rats and the cats and the bears at some point into its bloodstream? Just to, to,
Rod: why not to go around and clean it up? So, um, you'd be shocked to hear that, and I love some of the language depending on what you read. So, uh, uh, despite these interventions, he died about an hour and a half after the first injection. Despite I'm, I'm gonna also be moved to potentially say because, or as well as, anyway, so that's what happened.
And what I love now, so the exact cause of death is not necessarily clear. Some suggest the combination of LSD and Thorazine plus tranquilizer. Others say no LSD alone that much. LSD. Yeah. Fucked mate. A technical term from a journal. The doctor in question, Dr. West or Jolly, was involved in the CIA's MK Ultra program,
which
Will: Okay.[00:34:00]
Rod: did we, I can't even remember if any of our guise as we covered that.
But if we haven't, the, the summary is experimenting on people with all kinds of drugs to change minds. Induce truth, serums, you name it. MK Ultra did it. Fascinating. Horrible if you're in it. so rumors persist also that the good Dr. May have been off his tits on LSD at the time as well, and possibly also amphetamines, which may or may not have been accidentally introduced into poor Tesco.
But, uh, these claims, uh, lack concrete evidence. So the obvious thing to do this is in the sixties, the obvious thing to do when you see research like that is, do a follow up.
Will: What? No.
Rod: Not, not, um, jolly jolly obviously was, you know, off sitting under a highway overpass scene through space and time in a, in a small car in which homeless people had had a lot of intercourse.
But it's from a movie. Look it up. 1984, psychologist called Ronald Siegel did a similar [00:35:00] experiment, however, two elephants, much lower doses, and it was mixed into their drinking water. Rather than injected, they apparently exhibited altered behaviors, but survived without alleged lasting harm. So the ethics part, there are pros and cons.
Will: gimme, gimme one Pro.
Rod: Well, apparently proper dosing matters.
Will: Oh, okay. So we,
Rod: Some control
Will: I, I, I think we knew before that proper dosing matters and that
Rod: It was the sixties even I wasn't born then. The
Will: I think, I think we've known for a long time that things in giant measures can kill you. That
Rod: Do you know why we've known for a long time? 'cause of tco,
Will: No, I don't think that was, I really don't, I really don't think that was it.
Rod: other things? I mean, understanding physiological differences in drug effects between species. And again, look right now because it's 2025 and we're very clever, duh. But back then, maybe not so
Will: [00:36:00] Okay. Look,
Rod: know, one drug is another.
Will: fair. But I, I think we probably knew, I think that animal experi experimentation was around before then. I'm sure there was, there was understandings of dose differences in
Rod: But, but a lot of the animal experimentation wasn't necessarily to find out what animals are like compared to us. It was to use them as proxies for us. So there's a, there's trade offs, there's trade offs. Uh, also, this is a shocking one, led us to think even harder about, you know, the welfare and rights of animals in experiments.
Apparently they have that Anyway, that's
Will: Well, thank you for making me sad. Uh,
Rod: You're welcome. Why don't you make me happy then? Make me happy with a little bit more
artificial,
Will: gonna say, see if, uh, see if Alex has a question for us,
Alex: It's election day. Tomorrow. We're voting.
Rod: It's pronounced erection.
Alex: So Australia's voting tomorrow and with the elections come campaigns with campaigns come posters and signs.
We've seen them around, you know, the core flute signs on posts and every, every yard and things like that. [00:37:00] And because we live in Australia, I'm sure there's not confined to Australia with the election science comes vandalism of the signs.
Now we've had some, some funny instances. I'll see if I can share some of these with you.
and if you're seeing me here. So this is the first one.
This is a nice innocent
Will: that's a Googly
googly eyes.
Everyone, loves googly eyes.
there, there
was someone that said, um, stop putting the googly eyes on the town art recently. And I'm like, that, no, don't keep putting the googly eyes on.
Alex: Exactly. I was pretty happy with these ones.
They're pretty nice. And then, and then you just move on to the, um, well we got the standard, you know, take a few teeth out. Is that a, a pixelated dick on the forehead, I think is a pixelated dick.
Will: Did you pixelate that are,
Alex: I didn't pixelate it. I retrieved this from a, from a news website, so, you know. Sorry about that. And I like how put vote 12 just to make sure you know, to, to convince you not to vote for this person. Uh, moving through so we get not so funny. Marker stuff. A racist genetic supporter. Not genocide
Supporter.
Will: I that's,
Alex: innocent. So if we, we scroll on through bit of [00:38:00] lipstick. Oh, lipstick on a pig. Okay. Yeah. right, right,
it definitely says pig, you get to the spray paint just a clever little don't at the top.
Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Then some less friendly spray paint talking about no nukes on, uh, old mate faraway. And then we get to a bit more, uh, a bit more excessive. We're starting to burn signs now.
signs. Yeah. Lovely. Yep. And the Hitler mustaches. Lovely. And then we're moving up in the severity if you star pickets the face.
Wow. Thrown on the ground and stabbed.
Will: That's a little
Alex: And then think, I think my favorite, um, and I thought this was just the effort I had to applaud. Someone's gone with turd, someone's put a poo on an election sign.
Will: dog. Cow,
Rod: I'm assuming animal because there's a bag underneath. Unless I've transported
Will: Oh no, that looks like that. That does look like a dog poo bag there
Alex: How else are you gonna transport a big dog poopoo bag. you can see the indentation of three fingers that splattered that poop across the sign.
Mm-hmm. So we've gone from googly eyes to, to literal turds on these election signs. But my [00:39:00] question to you is, so you are opponents in a political race. You both find yourself out at night. Maybe you've had a few brewskies. You're, you're facing each other's political sign.
I want to hear your most creative or humiliating ways to deface or vandalize that sign to ensure that you win,
Will: you go Rod?
Rod: to ensure that I win.
Alex: You sure that you win?
Rod: Yeah. Well, look, I, I do have in my phone a lot of dick pics of wheels, or at least what I'll claim are those, they're not flattering.
So I would probably, I would go to the local office works and get some printouts of those, and I would stick the small and or diseased riddled looking.
Penises.
Will: Bit harsh man. Bit
Rod: Hmm. He asked me to try and win and you needed space for it to come up with your own strategy. So I'm offering what I can to really inspire you. Yeah. I think I'd go with disease riddled, sort of, you know, genitalia and stuff like that. Or else I'd just say I put in brackets with text. Not very good.
Ooh, it's brutal. Just on Will Grant. Will Grant. Not very good. [00:40:00] Not as smart as he thinks he is. That's brutal.
Will: But he thinks he's very smart, so, so he must be, he must be just a, a peg below that.
Rod: So is like 97% smart. I've done my best man.
I've given you time, you've had
Will: I,
I'm, no, no, I, I, I, I, I, I couldn't react any other way than to go, like Buddha, just walk away, man. Just walk away. I, I, I can't vandalize a sign, like, like, that's not my bag, man. I, you know, smearing extra on a side, like people get worked up the most
I could imagine is just, just push it over.
Like, you know, just, you don't need your message out there. But I'm like, these people that are, that are getting visceral with, with like a picture of someone, fuck, calm down. No, I, I, I, I really, I, I, I don't have it in my brain to go, you know what? I'm gonna get some poo and put it on a picture of you and that'll teach someone a lesson.
I don't know who
Rod: That's an album cover. That's an album of album Poo On a picture of you. It's a punk
Will: I don't wanna pretend I'm like Buddha about this, but I just can't [00:41:00] imagine doing someone to a, like, I, I like your little, but that, you know, not very good. or, uh, doesn't quite, uh, have his policies costed, you know,
Rod: A little dumber than he thinks, but not
Will: so I kind of love a little dumber than he thinks. I think that's kind of fun.
Rod: Look, I would do that more, but I thought, well, you know, given I'm thrown under the bus first, I was like, oh, let's, let's double
Will: No, you went, you, you doubled down. Uh, so
what is, so what is Donald Trump doing to, um, a, a core flute? Does he, I, I think
he, nothing other people will do it for
Alex: Nothing. Exactly. It doesn't have to.
So we've landed it somewhere in between a, a polite message with a marker, just suggesting perhaps they're not quite as good as they think they are. And a severely STI disease.
Riddled penises.
Rod: Yeah. Somewhere near the face. Somewhere near the face. Okay. All right. You know, it's all, you could be either,
Will: Rod, you gotta tell me about some aliens.
Rod: oh, I got some aliens. This is great. So, alien encounters after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 91. The CIA, not surprisingly [00:42:00] got its hands on a whole bunch of KGB reports, and some of them talked about alien activity.
And one of these was a, uh, a platoon of Russian soldiers in the Ukraine. Oh, sorry. In Ukrainian. That's
Will: No, no, no. You didn't mean that.
Rod: Firing at a Russian source. Sorry, an alien sourcer over Ukraine. So C, the CIA documents then were declassified in 2000. So the Ccia a got the, the Soviet Union's documents, then they were then declassified. And so a bunch of newspapers and even Joe Rogan, who's a big listener of this show, started to talk about this sort of stuff.
So the report claimed Soviets were conducting a training exercise in Ukraine and they saw a quote, low flying spaceship in the shape of the saucer. Um, and it was zipping above the head. So during the encounter, they did the only smart thing that you would do. You like, oh, this looks like an alien or some kind of spaceship.
I'm [00:43:00] gonna forest surface to air missile at it. That's what you do?
Will: of course.
Rod: the
fuck is
Will: the aliens instantly.
Rod: Yep. What is it? Kill it. The UFO crashed.
Will: Ah.
Rod: Hits the earth. Great. And it fell not far away from the, um, aggressors and five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes came out of the, the wreckage.
Will: when, when is this again?
Rod: This was, it's hard. I don't have a date on when it happened. It was revealed sometime after 1991.
Will: Okay.
Rod: so after these, uh, large headed black eyed creatures emerged from the wreckage, they huddled together and they again, quote, merged into a single object that, that acquired a spherical shape.
Will: Mm.
The, but I think American troops do have that capacity. Like imagine this is like a U2 and there's four, you know, spherical. Yeah. They've got helmets on and then they can merge to a, I think that's what, that's, that's what the Marine Corps is. [00:44:00] Um,
you know.
Rod: huddle,
Will: Yeah. What unit? Core God, country, you know? It's like, it's like
Rod: simplify spherical huddle.
Will: yeah, exactly. So you're not telling me it's not, it's not Americans right now.
Rod: I'm not saying it's not, I'm just saying, I'm just, I'm just just reporting man. Just, uh, just reporting. So apparently this, uh, spherical shape of ly large headed black-eyed aliens started to grow much, much bigger. It started to just grow.
It grew. It grew. It expanded.
Will: It can inflate,
Rod: Then it exploded.
Will: oh, these are the people that came out and then
huddled, and then expanded, and then
Rod: yeah. What better way to fuck people up then? Apparently it f flared with an extremely bright light and, uh, depending on which source you look at, at that very instant, 23 soldiers who had watched the phenomenon turned into. Stone poles,
Will: Oh,
Rod: they became, and rock
fights
Will: [00:45:00] very biblical.
Rod: isn't it?
It's very,
Will: I mean, I haven't heard UFOs do that to people before. I mean, it's a lot of probing and more probing.
Rod: That's our favorite
Will: Miscellaneous probing, but no stone poles.
Rod: Now this was, they actually turned them to rocks apparently. Um, and the report that was released and blah, blah, blah, included eyewitness accounts and the pictures of the aftermath. And one American agent described it as a horrific picture of revenge on the part of extra terrestrial creatures.
A picture that makes one's blood freeze. Only two soldiers who stood in the shade and were less exposed to the luminous explosion survived.
Will: They stood under a tree,
Rod: Yeah, right. No proper popped up an umbrella.
Will: so the report comes from these two soldiers who stood under a tree in the
Rod: Look, it's not unlikely.
Will: What are they? They doing? Soviet spliffs or something like that.
Rod: Ooh, Soviet spliff. Another good punk name, like a
Will: be great. It'd be a great punk band.
Rod: Welcome to Soviet [00:46:00] Spliff. 1, 2, 3. We don't care about four. We're straight into it. so the KGB apparently took custody of the quote, petrified soldiers and the Roman spacecraft, and they were transported to, of course, a secret base near Moscow.
the scientists found, the Soviets found whatever the light was somehow transformed the soldier's living cells into a substance that was basically limestone. They limestone fired these people. So the CIA report, if the KGB corresponds to reality, if they file corresponds to reality, so you know, if, if they're not lying or on drugs, this is an extremely menacing case.
Will: sure,
Rod: I know it is, isn't it though? I mean, you don't need to be an expert.
Will: I don't wanna be turned into a rock by an alien,
Rod: No. Who wants
Will: I'm Menaced, I'm menace. I, I'm not quite fully believing that it actually happened, but anyway.
Rod: God, you're so cynical. The aliens possess such weapons in technology that go beyond all our assumptions. The final quote I love, they can stand up for [00:47:00] themselves if attacked.
Will: Sure, sure.
If we
know who they are and where they are, you'll get turned into a rock if you,
Rod: who they are, where they are, what they are, if they turn up at all, do they exist? Are we on drugs? At least we've got a gun.
Let's shoot at them
Will: but they'll turn into a ball thing and then turn
Rod: and then make you rocks unless you pop up your umbrella and hide
Will: I, I feel like, I feel like, this is, um, either, you know, it's either deliberate KGB disinformation, or is this, is this them testing the parameters? Like how credulous are Americans? Like what are they, what are they doing here?
Rod: It could also be CIA disinformation playing on Soviet disinformation, double messing with everyone going, what's true anyway? And what's real paving the way. For urban Fluter Trump, what happened to your face?
Will: I'm just,
Rod: your, your mouth
Will: logical, I got some logical gaps here. I, I, I, you know, I got some logical gaps here.
Rod: It's not your fault, man. You're born that way. We all have logical gaps. [00:48:00] me your tiny little thing.
Will: Oh. So this one I just went learn a new word. , I don't know if you've heard the word, but it's new to me. It's been around for like five years. , and I thought, oh, that's a, that's a thing that people do and it needs a word. ,
Rod: This is so mysterious.
Will: have you heard of the word sad fishing? Not, not sad space fishing. Which, which I assume is just fishing. No, I know. People love fishing. Fishing's. Nice. It's relaxing. That's
Rod: But sad fishing is not like I'm feeling really weepy. I'm gonna go and drop a line in.
Will: It's, it's, it's one word together. Sad fishing. So catfishing, a modern term, you know, where, where you go out and, uh, you know, exploit people to try and draw them in with your ruse. It's, it's a, it's a form of, you know, fraud or something like that. Sad fishing, is a term used to describe when someone posts about emotional problems, they're sad, they're depressed,
they're anxious online in a perceived bid to hook an audience and gain attention.
And the reason this came up is [00:49:00] that, um, I was, I was looking at some things and it's, uh. Uh, doing some reading on, on, you know, the broad social problem of loneliness. And I was like, oh, so not only are people posting online about how they're sad, fine, but also people deliberately going out there and going, oh, if I post about being sad, I get lots of likes.
And so there's this idea that, that people are out there going, okay, I can pretend to be sad online. And then it, then it gathers a whole bunch of friends and I'm like,
Rod: Ironically, if you pretend to be sad enough to get friends, you're just sad.
Will: my God. It made me despair. It made me despair for the whole world where I thought, do, do we need a word for this concept of people pretending to be sad online?
Rod: Well, not so much Dewey, but holy shit, apparently we do. And that's worse.
Will: yeah. Yeah,
Rod: Not Dewey, it turns out we do. Uh,
Will: probably. So. There you go.
I, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, new word, sad phishing, deliberately [00:50:00] pretending to be sadder than you are to get likes.
Rod: Does that make you less sad?
Will: But people should stay here with a little bit of science where you only get authentic. Authentic. Sad if we're sad. Or authentic fishing, if we're fishing.
Rod: Glad if we're glad, we would never be sad just to get you to listen to us 'cause we're better than that.
Will: no, because you have already rated us at least five
or 50 or dozens, or hundreds of stars, uh, depending on how many words that, uh, then you would have for snow.
Rod: And if you have any ideas or you wanna correct us or you want to, you know, get us to talk about stuff, email us at whatever Will says the email address is
Will: The email of course is cheers at a little bit of science.com au.com
au. Americans practice that it's, it's nice to try
like other domains. one
big word. and you can say it really fast when you type it. A little bit of science. A
a little bit of science is me.
Will grant him.
Rod: Not Will Grant Rod Lambert. And we love you. We love you. It's actual love. It's almost lust
Will: And it's the most professional [00:51:00] podcast in the world.
Rod: the second most.
