Cloning is edging closer to science fiction’s favourite nightmare, tropical trees may actually be better at cooperation than their colder cousins, and smart underwear is now tracking human flatulence in alarming detail. This week, we bounce between organ-growing biotech, forest diplomacy, AI failures, and fart analytics, which is not a sentence anyone should have to type, but science keeps forcing the issue.
Cloning Gets More Useful and More Unsettling
We start with cloning, where the conversation has moved well beyond dead mice and into something much stranger. New research is pushing toward the creation of non-conscious biological structures designed to grow organs for testing and transplant, without producing anything that could reasonably be called a sentient animal. Which sounds, depending on your mood, either like a medical breakthrough or the first ten minutes of a very expensive dystopian film.
The idea is being driven by companies like R3 Bio, which want to replace lab animals with what are essentially organ-growing biological platforms. No awareness, no suffering, just useful tissue. In theory, it could transform medical testing and organ transplants. In practice, it also raises the sort of ethical questions that arrive the moment science starts saying things like “headless” and “bionic” with a straight face. Helpful, yes. Comforting, not especially.
Trees, Teamwork, and the Climate Advantage
From there, we head into the forest, where tropical trees appear to be much better at getting along than trees in cooler climates. Research suggests they are more likely to cooperate with neighbouring plants, including species that help enrich the soil through nitrogen fixing. So while humans are busy building apps to remind ourselves to drink water, trees have apparently been running quiet little mutual aid networks this whole time.
It is one of those findings that sounds gentle and poetic until you realise it may also say something awkward about us. Are warmer environments more likely to encourage cooperation? Do harsh conditions make everything a bit more competitive? Or are we just projecting human social drama onto a patch of very successful beans and trees? Either way, the forest is looking more organised than most group projects.
Smart Underwear and the Data-Driven Fart
And then, inevitably, we arrive at flatulence. Because science, having mapped the stars and split the atom, has also decided it is time to work out what counts as a normal number of farts. Thanks to smart underwear and better monitoring, researchers now know adults may be producing a lot more gas than older self-reported studies suggested, with daily totals ranging from four to 59. Which is both useful medical information and the sort of statistic that permanently changes how you look at a crowded lift.
The research also points to different “fart profiles”, linked to diet, digestion, and the microbiome. Some people are calm, low-output operators. Others are apparently running a far more ambitious internal programme. Add in a story about a Tennessee grandmother wrongly jailed after faulty facial recognition, and the episode becomes a neat little reminder that technology is not automatically wise just because it is clever. Sometimes it helps us understand the gut. Sometimes it throws innocent people in jail. Progress, as ever, is a mixed bag.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Cloning Nightmares Recap
01:45 Monkey Organ Sacks Idea
04:34 Human Organ Replacement Debate
07:45 How It Could Work
08:57 Surrogates And Storage Problems
12:39 Trees That Get Along
15:45 Why Tropical Trees Are Friendlier
17:25 Not All Prodigies Win
19:47 Late Bloomers And Training Myths
24:10 German Forest Bathing Tease
24:52 Forest Sounds Boost Mood
25:35 Massage Stories Detour
27:58 Local vs Tropical Forests
30:14 Fart Science Gets Serious
34:37 Smart Underwear Study
36:55 Farting Baselines Explained
39:19 Farter Types Atlas
43:00 AI Facial Recognition Fail
46:53 Why AI Enhancement Lies
49:13 Wrap Up and Callouts
SOURCES:
https://futurism.com/health-medicine/startup-pitching-cloned-human-bodies
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1115965
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590137025001268?via%3Dihub
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509261-high-achieving-adults-rarely-began-as-child-prodigies/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-023-01840-1
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-grandmother-jail-mistake
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1123556
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Rod: [00:00:00] So in the last episode, I talked about Japanese researchers cloning a clone of a clones clone, and how basically they got to the 58th generation, and at that point, every damn rodent dropped dead the day after they were born. So for me, it's the stuff of sci-fi nightmares and a couple of very bad eighties comedies.
The idea of cloning if it's a person, cloning, cloning, cloning. But in that app, I promised a more upbeat version of cloning, more optimistic, more interesting. So this is one that cuts right to the heart of my personal greatest hopes for cloning.
Folk dancing.
Will: It's time for a little bit of science. I'm will grant an associate professor of science communication at the Australian National University.
Rod: fuck, you're good at it. I'm Rod Lambert's, a third year [00:01:00] psych sitcom veteran with the mind of a teenage
man.
Will: And you too are good at it.
Thank you.
I didn't get the fuck you're good at it.
I, you know. No,
Rod: but I get excited. I get carried away. I don't see a lot of people.
Will: And today as well as hopeful cloning news. Oh yeah. We also have some nice trees.
Rod: Um, I'm gonna offer a little comfort to those of you who were not child prodigies.
Will: We have some German trees.
Rod: We're gonna talk fighting objectively.
Will: have some poetry news for you
Rod: and a little bit of a and emphatically not I,
Will: I,
Rod: my favourite sort. a lot of it. So much you're like, oh god, what have you done now? But we'll get to that. That's way, way, way, way, way at the end. You have to stick with this, with the whole 31.6 minutes or
Will: something. Yeah, indeed, indeed.
Rod: So, um, this story about positive, excellent cloning, which really makes me happy, begins in the bay area of, what is that?
San Fran?
Will: only one Bay area.
There's a lot of bays in the world. But you only use bay to mean,
Rod: the San Fran Angelis Bay.
Will: The Bay [00:02:00] of Biscay.
Rod: Yes, the bisque. So San, San Francisco Bay, whatever, you know, the classic Bay Area, high Tech, whatever. It's a company there called R three Bio, R
Will: R three, R
Rod: R three Bio. 'cause R one and two didn't
go so well, but R three is nailing it.
and apparently they've been, quietly pitching a way to replace lab animals without the ethical issues that come with living organisms.
Will: Hey, that is a good thing. I
Rod: a bad thing at all.
Will: you know, we need a lot of animals in scientific research at the moment, and
Rod: do.
Will: it'd be nice if we didn't have to use as many.
Rod: Yeah.
And look, that quote's almost true. bit
Will: What do you mean? What do you, what, what quote?
Rod: Talk about how, you know, with, without the problems of living organisms. ' cause what they wanna do is engineer quote non sentient monkey organ sacks. I
Will: I mean, when you phrase it like that, like sac is such a great outcome when you put it around organ,
Rod: Yeah, I know. I want a sack of organs, but non sentient. 'cause we're not monsters.
Will: You know, like sometimes you just gotta be explicit and say, yeah, I want me a [00:03:00] non sentient organ sack.
Rod: I do
Will: kind of monkey but monkeys.
Monkeys
Rod: for, well because we use monkeys and monkey organs and monkey bits and so
Will: Yeah. We also use rats and we also
Rod: we do others, but this, they're focusing on, on your monkeys, I dunno specifically which ape or otherwise, but you know of that Janus. essentially they say these would be, and I love this word structure.
Will: Well, that's what organs are, structures? Yeah.
Rod: No, no. the sacks are structures.
That contain all your typical organs
Will: All of them
Rod: except for a brain.
So therefore they,
Will: is it a monkey shaped sack?
Rod: I do wonder? I hope so. Not like a bag of monkey organs
that looks like
Will: it just a bag of organs that like, it's like the monkey
chest
Rod: a skin bag with hair on it.
I'm happy with both.
Will: they're made of skin. I was assuming something more plastic or something?
Rod: No, no. I think it's all organics. Oh
Will: my, oh, okay.
Rod: So you'd use 'em as alternatives for drug testing. You know, transplant, fuck, fuck around in general, which is great. Right? It's cool. It's cool.
Will: Look, there's a bunch of, um, [00:04:00] ethics in science that take you to places that may be gross and maybe,
Rod: ethics.
Huh?
Will: Well, no, look, I assume this is part of the, the big effort to reduce animal testing.
Rod: Yes. And, uh,
Will: And,
Rod: re what is it? The three s? Reduce, reduce, recycle. Revive,
Will: Reduce, reuse, recycle?
Rod: No, no, not for recycling for animals. It's like reduce Revive Ravage.
Will: No, it's not those either.
Rod: There is reduction, but then there's Replace and Rumble.
I can't remember the third RI was only on Ethics Capu for 10 years, and
Will: be be more efficient with it. Like Yeah.
Rod: but with an r ro river. Yeah.
Will: Yeah.
Rod: So that's cool. That's cool. It's cool. But it seems, it seems the company's ambitions go a bit beyond replacing animal testing.
Yeah.
so it has been reported that they're looking to generate, replacing human body parts by creating non sentient human organ sacks that could provide blood tissue and organs to people when their own bodies fail them.
Will: That's great. That's great. well, are they made with your DNA, I guess. I mean, that's, that's the big problem with, transplants that we know rejection. Rejection is a [00:05:00] huge problem. Like, like the other
Rod: the other organs go, no, you're not. One of the cool kids bugger off.
Will: I mean, it must have been something that when they first did transplants, they're like, okay, swap out a heart or whatever, man, we've done the miracle.
And then they go,
Rod: what's wrong with you? It
Will: doesn't, the, the body doesn't,
Rod: why are you unwell? Why is your heart looking like it's been immune system?
Will: See, I, again, again, this may sound gross and I wouldn't want to accidentally walk into one of my neighbourhood walk, but
Rod: oh, we'll get to that.
So this, this is like, company may or may not be refuting this, but I'm just, you know, I'm just the messenger here. So in the words of a CEO of a Singapore company called. Immortal Dragons, what a name. And it doesn't matter what they
Will: do.
it's very close to the imagined dragons. Like, like
Rod: Yeah.
They're not a band.
Will: Yeah, I know. But it does sound like they could be, or a video game co-op.
Rod: We are the Immortal Dragons. Exactly.
Will: Yeah, exactly.
Rod: These guys aren't that. They're investing in R three bio and their CEO says, look, we think replacing is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the ageing process of the
Will: Uh, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Okay.
Rod: So if we can create non sentient, headless body opioids for [00:06:00] humans beings, that would be a great source of organs.
Will: We can do like 58 generations. Like that's your limit.
Rod: it. Only 58 Headless body opioid.
Will: Yeah.
Rod: Non sentient, headless
Will: Yeah. No, again, you, you're trying to provoke me being grossed out by
Rod: this.
No, I love it. I love it. I'm, I'm a hundred percent on board with
Will: you. See? There you
Rod: I would do it tomorrow. Tomorrow I'd say gimme a bag of me with no
Will: I, The instant visceral reaction is strong and everyone would go, okay, that's gross. But do you think about it for like a second and you're like, uh, uh, uh,
Rod: no, no, no.
My instant visceral reaction is yes.
Will: grow me some extra
Rod: items. I've thought
about this for years. Four
Will: lungs. I want two spleens. I want
Rod: Yeah. Look, statement to the tech review, the company, the original R three bio, the, apparently their founder said, we never made any statement regarding hypothetical quote, non sentient human clones that would be carried by surrogates.
We'll get to that. They insisted that any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false. And they would, right. You would say, no, we didn't.
Will: Look, I think it's an area where you want to get your, your, PR just right.
Rod: Yeah. Your [00:07:00] ducks is in the rows.
Many, many ducks
Will: don't, don't just have people assume what you're doing. And don't, do your work in like a weird mediaeval castle. Like,
Rod: do.
Will: No, don't like it. It might just have the wrong vibe.
You wanna get the vibe right about
Rod: white? It should be completely white shiny rooms with no obvious joins.
No,
Will: no, no, no. I'm thinking it's like, you know, when you go to like a hospital and then you walk past the kids' ward and it's all like, colourful and, and there's like animals and stuff. Like,
Rod: you wouldn't do this with children.
Will: No, I, I'm just saying make it, make it colourful and pretty. And, and,
Rod: like rainbows and rainbows, hoy.
Will: Yeah. Exactly. Don't make it look like a sinister, you know, video game, sort of.
Rod: Sure, that's fine. so they either are or they aren't planning this. I reckon they are, but I have no evidence for that. It's just like, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you plan this? But ignoring that, ignoring whether they are or they aren't.
I mean, let's, let's assume for fun, someone is. Let's look at a few facts and issues. So one is, is it feasible at all to do this? And, and yes, it is, it's feasible that you could, or plausible that you could, use your, your induced pluripotent stem cells. So now you get your adult stem cell and you coax it into being,
Will: This is [00:08:00] not, taking embryos.
This is like any cell, like
Rod: from Yeah,
Will: can get like a skin cell and take
Rod: Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. Yeah. And in theory, you can do that and you could bring it back to stem cell level and then reprogram to embryo and like states. So you have the, to the potential then to turn any cell or tissue into the body, into something that ends up being an a quote, embryo like structure that resembles the real thing.
And then what you do is edit the stem cells and, and disabled genes needed for brain
Will: development.
Yeah, Yeah, You just, you just turn that
Rod: You just turn that off. That's
Will: decapitation, it's just turning off
Rod: No, you just go in and, and you push that gene that says no brain.
Then what you do, the resulting embryo they say could be incubated until it grows into an organised organ structure. So, cool. Ethically, I don't know. Again, look, I don't have a problem with that.
I dunno if I'm a monster or just a pragmatist, but I, I don't care. Do that personally. Do it. but beyond that, let's get into a few more practicalities. So my sci-fi fever dream that just glossed over it when they said, we are talking about making these human, uh, you know, meat sack bait made outta me without a brain, I'm like.
Absolutely. Great. No problem with that at all. Cool.
Mm-hmm. Love one. But, uh, one of the problems, of course is an artificial [00:09:00] womb is not really a thing yet.
Will: but do we need a womb for this? I guess we need some
Rod: gotta grow growing. Yeah. And those are called women who are prepared to bear them.
Will: Well, no. Yeah. in the past. Yeah. Still. But in this future world,
Rod: I'm talking tomorrow.
Will: what you're saying that this has to be grown inside
Rod: a lady?
Will: well, not
necessarily,
Rod: you know what? I'm inside
Will: a womb a
Rod: human.
Will: Really? Yeah. I thought they were talking. This is in a big tube. I thought, ditto. I thought they were like, this is a plastic
Rod: because you've seen, you've seen movies too.
Will: Fuck me. Like, no.
Rod: So let's say the cloning thing works. You've got the embryo, then you've gotta find, say, excuse me, Griselda, we've been chums for a while. Would you mind bringing to full term this, we'll call it baby
Will: blob. That has no brain that, that, that I can use my, the
Rod: of. Yeah. And when it comes out, it will absolutely not be able to
interact
Will: heart's gonna be like baby sized.
Rod: yeah, you gotta wait, you gotta wait.
Will: you've gotta wait
Rod: You gotta grow
it
Will: until it's your size, or at least 20 years, like
15 is probably
I, I think, I think the technology relying on, human worms is, is a big ask[00:10:00]
Rod: It is a big ask.
Will: a big ask. It's a big ask.
Rod: I mean, just even before the waiting period, like the idea that, imagine the conversation, I'll give you like eight grand.
Will: Oh, look, look, this is
Rod: you mind gestating this
Will: this is another area where you can say it and then you go, oh, the only people that have this is like the billionaire world, where they're like,
Rod: of course,
Will: you know, Elon Musk wants a new pair of legs, and he's like,
Rod: get his 19th wife to
Will: out on X someone grow me some new legs and,
Rod: give you half my trillion dollars.
Will: not even, I don't think
Rod: they're more like probably, yeah, 5,000 bucks. also you flag this, if they've gotta grow to adulthood, they need to be quote, stored and
Will: maintained, stored and maintained.
Rod: And those two words are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
So my sci-fi brain says, kind of like what you were saying about the ward, but for me to be like, I imagine this. Sleek tube in my, maybe my garage. It's maybe got frosted glass. It's full of fluids. Yeah. I've gotta keep it nearby. I don't trust other people. So it'll be sitting there and occasionally I'd go out and change, I don't know, the survival tube and
Will: yeah, you add some, add a bit of
Rod: hummus.
Yeah, exactly. Hummus and I, I [00:11:00] don't know, organic, organic kelp juice and, and kombucha. See, but I imagine this tube that you can't really see what's in there and you kind of replace
some stuff. Occasionally I
Will: see my, my new legs growing in there. Mm-hmm.
Rod: So I imagine that to be, you know, it'd be easy to clean. You wouldn't have to worry about it. But in reality, if we were doing it tomorrow, you probably have like this grown ass version of you drooling, shitting itself and needing to be fed, maybe
sitting in a chair in your spare room.
Yeah, exactly.
Will: No, no. Surely, surely they're not thinking it, like they're not aiming for this
Rod: This is not what this company has spoken about. Not that they ever said they were actually gonna do this, but the practicalities of this is likely right now. If you could get the thing and you find the surrogate and it comes to term, and then you've got
Will: growing it and maintaining it is actually
Rod: gotta treat it like someone's gonna help it live until you need to cut organs out.
This is wonderful. That's wonderful.
Will: I feel like maybe, maybe it should be like a backpack, like it's sort of surgically attached to you
Rod: Oh,
Will: and then it gets and, and you grow your new legs. In a backpack that you wear on
Rod: So when you fall over, you can [00:12:00] just jump right up again as you land on your second pair of feet. Look, the principle I, I'm on board with like a non-high functioning lump of meat that I get completely, you know, rejection free organs out of.
Fantastic. Sure.
I accept
everything else sounds too hard and I don't wanna do it.
Will: maybe everyone should just look after the ones you've got.
Rod: You can do both. I mean, look, even if we start tomorrow, you're still gonna have to wait for it. As you say, like if it's a 3-year-old, it's not a very useful set of lungs
to
Will: I kind of, I kind of want some 3-year-old legs. I'll, I'll just swap my
Rod: dead. Poor
Will: legs. He grew his much more quickly though.
Rod: Yeah. Well, he's
got superpowers.
Will: Well, thank you for
Rod: that. You're
welcome.
Will: Well, I, I have some nice news for you that you did not think you needed to know about. our tree friends. So
Rod: I have more than tree friends. I've got like four.
Yay.
Will: a a, a a. so we've known for a while and as I spoke about, previously, trees talk to each other.
Yes. Uh,
Rod: but they have an accent. So they're hard to understand for us
Will: well, I don't know if this shows that [00:13:00] they have an accent, but they do. well, some trees are nicer than others
Rod: really
They're jerks.
Will: Look, they
Rod: that's cool.
Will: This comes, uh, out of, researcher in the Chinese Academy of Forestry.
Rod: I love that academy.
Will: but you can also understand why they might, which are the nice trees and which are the not
Rod: nice
And you, you can also imagine it's the Chinese Academy of Forestry. So it's only got what, like 45 million?
Oh, yeah.
Will: Oh yeah. Yeah. It's, it's
Rod: Fellows.
like, it's, like,
Will: yeah, it's, all of the Australian university sector.
Rod: all the whole population. Like what do you guys study here about trees? What don't we, there is nothing we don't
Will: but, but well they went and interviewed 3 million trees.
Not
quite interviewed, but, uh, no they didn't
Rod: So tell me chestnut.
Will: in 17 places around the world, 17 different forestry study sites. Right? Not just in China, north and South America, Asia, Africa, Oceania. No, Europe. Didn't do Europe. Alright, so, so I'll have to tell you about European trees later.
but what they wanted to know is, how well they relate to each other. Look, you can imagine. You can
Rod: imagine.
So soaring redwood, how do you feel about the larch?
Will: Hate it. Hate it. But [00:14:00] I
Rod: love
the beach. Endorse
it. Love the beach.
Will: I don't know. Look, you can imagine an academy of forestry studies going, okay, is there, I mean, if you are fully into tree producing, you could go, who can we squeeze more of them in together?
Like, can we, you know, it's
Rod: without 'em
Will: fighting.
Yeah. Like battery hen scenario. Fabulous. Can we make them so that the trees don't annoy each other? If you
Rod: get
one on top of the other and Yeah. Yeah. How do we make them good citizens?
Will: When I think about this more, this is very a production mindset
Rod: sort Is it though? Shocked. Absolutely
Will: shocked.
Okay. They didn't go as far as that. Okay. They didn't go as far as that look. Basically what they, they looked at is in these different forestry sites, 17 different places around the world, more tropical. Less tropical, you know,
Rod: Oh, that describes both
parts of the world.
Will: yeah.
Yeah. It's, it's the tropics and the non tropics. The temperate zone. No, there's also the, sub temperate and the arctic, I
Rod: think.
Yeah. Which is nontropical.
Will: Yeah, they're all nontropical. Exactly. But I think they went temperate,
Rod: both parts of
Will: world. Not many trees in the Arctic. tropical trees. Way more friendly to
Rod: each
other.
Of course. They're, [00:15:00] they're, Hey bro.
Will: Well actually, here's the thing, I'll tell you their result. So, so I'll tell you their result and I'll tell you this parallels, With something else in a bit, which I'm like, did you need to include that? Okay. So 3 million trees and they looked at, how they interacted with their neighbours in both positive and negative ways.
a tree species is considered to have positive relationships if it has more neighbours, more diverse neighbours, and that they, they seem to growing happily together, negative
Rod: relationships. These,
these, this is very like distinct and clear measurement system. I
Will: like
Rod: it. Yeah. They seem to be growing happily together.
Will: Look, don't blame them for that. That's just the telling. Like blame the science communicator for that, not the
Rod: scientist.
Oh, I always
do. Yeah. Uh,
Will: so yeah, tropical trees have a wider variety around them and they seem much more
happy.
The researchers said why? first they gave tree level explanations and then they took it in a slightly weird place.
Number one, there's more beans, closer to the equator and, and the bean family seems to be a really nice family. Like the beans
Rod: [00:16:00] I have too many things to say in response. I can't say any of them. I'm broken.
Will: but if you, if you wanna do the forestry signs, beans, legumes, they fix nitrogen in their
soil and all them other trees are like, fuck yeah. Give us some nitrogen. That's awesome. You did some good stuff. Mr. Bean. Mrs. Bean. so that could be part of it.
Rod: And if they get mad at them, they flick them away. Carry on. Uh,
Will: Uh, there's also tropical trees have more of the, the mushroom fungus, the
Rod: micro.
Will: micro microrisal networks.
Rod: Yeah, Your chlorides.
Will: yeah, the
midians
Rod: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
helps as
Will: as well. but also in the tropical rainforest, there's more of the canopy effect that, uh,
Rod: cannabis effect is
Will: different.
Yeah. They, they, help each other grow. Like they, they're kinda more nurturing to each other. In the
Rod: tropical,
well, the tropics, Ys in the tropics do tend to really hang together quite thickly.
Will: So then they concluded another possible explanation, or at least another parallel.
Previous studies in the US and China have showed that people are more agreeable, emotionally stable and open to new experiences when they grow up in warmer climates. us
Rod: Tell it to everyone in Scandinavia.
Will: I just love, I just love trees are doing this [00:17:00] and therefore also
Rod: so are
Will: how are you?
tropical people are nicer to each other.
So,
Rod: so foresters do not talk to anyone who don't study trees nor even notice them.
Will: Hey, I grew up in the tropics. I'm nice. So you know,
Rod: I grew up in Canberra.
Yeah, you and I'm not. It's true.
Will: You go,
there you
go. We're basically trees.
Rod: So, uh, we here at the, uh, little bit of science podcast, we're no strangers to Elite Performance.
I mean, the evidence is self evidently obvious, evident. Exactly. Our legions of devoted listeners might be shocked to find out though, that we weren't actually child prodigy podcasters. No,
Will: No, no, no, they weren't.
Rod: we weren't.
I mean, I, I dunno about your school reports, but none of mine said this guy is, is already clearly brilliant at it. None of my performance reviews in any job
I can remember podcast. None of them. So, um, the question is, are we exceptional to the standard rule that the top notch performers were always really fucking good and like [00:18:00] prodigious or
Will: So,
so, so the standard rule then is that
Rod: like, if you're really top
end musician, athlete, art, whatever it is, then it's probably, you know, you probably were pretty damn good at your whole life.
And potentially even Prodigy, like, I don't know if, does that mean you are prodigious
Will: Yeah, I think you are
Rod: or is Prodigy esque.
Will: Oh no, I think you're just
Rod: prodigious. Prodigious.
So I mean, everyone knows that's basically, it feels right, right? You kinda go, well, of course. So like
Will: if you, if you are good at Mozart when you're a,
Rod: when you're a little Mozart and yeah, Mozart, little Tiger Woods
Will: good at Tiger Woods ing when you're an old Tiger Mozart,
Rod: Bobby Fisher, the chess
whiz. what
Will: what is Tiger Woods's talent? I think it seems to be drunk driving and,
Rod: and
hitting a small ball, but he could hit a small ball into a hole.
Oh
Will: yeah. Not sexual harassment. Just, just a lot of sex.
Rod: Silly. Yeah, just silly. He's a silly Billy Bobby Fisher, the American chest whiz kid. Terrence ta. Yeah, he was, he was fiendishly good at a very young age and quite apparently acceptably cocky about it.
Terrence Tower math whiz, all childhood prodigies, all of them. So yeah, there's been a bunch of research strongly linking the intensity of the [00:19:00] trial's training. I mean, we talked about this with chess, Whis and so forth as
Will: Like old Don Bradman, he hit that golf ball a
Rod: against the water tank with a.
Will: a
Rod: Yeah. stick, he
Will: had no other entertainment. Yeah. Oh my God. What an annoying skill
worth
it. Like can you imagine as a parent, you go young don out in the back, just whacking a ball
Rod: hitting a golf ball with a stick against a water tank. Again, no moment's gonna pay off. I'm sure Donnie
and it did. It did.
Will: did. It did. But, uh, geez, Louise. So annoying.
Rod: So a bunch of research has linked the intensity of a child's training programme in specific activities, music, athletics, et cetera, to the excellence in their competitive performance as teenagers and young adults.
That seems to be a fairly strong pattern, but that doesn't necessarily mean top-notch. Adult performers need to start young and specialise early to push the same thing to do as well. So this researcher, Arnie ish, a German person with some buddies, they analysed 19 studies, which ended up being about 35,000 high performing people.
Mm-hmm. So a shitload of, uh, people. And they also, they analysed like life histories of [00:20:00] Olympic athletes, Nobel laureates in science world, top 10 chess players, most renowned classical music composers, international leaders in all kinds of fields. So they looked at the biographies life stories of these people, and they compared these results with nearly 70 studies on training histories of young and sub elite performers.
So young people who were very good, you know, high school champions, who didn't necessarily grow up to be the best in the world. And they found that over all these different skills and talents, things that made a, a high achieving youth really. Distinguishable, which was early specialisation. Sure. Rapid progress.
Yeah. Huge amounts of discipline, specific practise. All these things were basically absent or reversed among the adult world class performers.
Will: It
Rod: the opposite. So the people who were really superb as adults on the whole, were not that as children.
Will: There you go.
Rod: Quite the reverse.
Will: There you go. Well, if so, that means I still have a shot.
Rod: We both do. And the number get the number. 82% of international level junior athletes did not go on to become international level adult or senior ones.
Will: 82%.
But this is, I mean, there [00:21:00] is the classic, I think it's Roger Federer or something like that, like, EDIC around until he was 19, and then he was like, you know what I, this tennis
Rod: sounds
good. I think I'll play tennis.
Will: I think I'll give tennis. But, but there's other, there's other stories of
Rod: There are,
Will: There are later, you know, not from four and just going, you know what, this is
Rod: great. Like me with cage fighting, I'm starting next
Will: year.
Cool. I, I suspect you'll do brilliant.
Rod: do it.
I'll definitely do it. But yeah, it's, it's interesting. So basically they're saying high early achievers and later world class performers were essentially different. Not the same people, different people. Only about 10% of those who are excelling in their things as adults were top performers in their youth.
And the reverse, only about 10% of the top youth performers went on to excel as adults. That's fantastic. Which is a lot like you, like, you know, you're a prodigy video game reviewer when you were
Will: Look, I don't think there is a prodigy in the world of video game
Rod: review. There was one.
Will: you know,
Rod: But nowadays, me, you know, so basically these findings contradict a lot of popular beliefs about
Will: And does it go across,
sports and other
Rod: activities?
Yes. Appears to musical athleticism. You know,
the, the two
Will: there is the [00:22:00] classic, maybe they're pushed into it, whatever it is, and they, can excel while they're under a, a, potentially a disciplinary environment or something forcing them, and then they just go, I'm Jack of
Rod: Yeah. Fuck it. I've been doing this since I was six.
I'm 12 now.
No,
no. There
is a suggestion of that. I always think that about, friends or friends of friends who were hardcore swimmers, like competitive swimmers when they were kids. Yeah. They're like, what, nine mornings a week, 12 days a week? They would, they would just up in the a in the morning what?
You'd get up at three o'clock in the morning, swim for nine hours. Yep. Go to school, eat everything in the world, and then swim for another nine hours in the
Will: evening.
Yeah. It's like the opposite of the,
um, humanity.
No, of the Hunter s Thompson diary, you know, like get, get up and have the, the brandy and then the cocaine.
Rod: he would've swam pretty fast
briefly. But yeah, I mean, look, there are a bunch of suggestions that basically, I mean, obviously the takeaway is exceptional. Early performance is not a prerequisite for being really good later in life, which I find hugely relieving. That's hugely relieving.
and there are a bunch of speculations why. But in the end, kind what you said, one of the problems might be that young folk have been specialised so [00:23:00] early that they don't really do anything else. And so when that doesn't quite work or they get bored with it, they're like, I don't know what else to do.
But we wacky cats who've diversified and done a bunch of things and tried it, maybe open to more flexibility and
options,
Will: there you go, listener. It's never too
Rod: late.
And if you were a prodigy, congratulations. I hope you're in the 10% who went on to become a leading
Will: or maybe you've achieved everything that you wanted to achieve in
Rod: whatever you feel seven years
Will: You know, you wanted to get to junior Olympic gold medal, but not screw
Rod: the under Olympics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm waiting for the take whatever drugs you won, Olympics. And of course my 6-year-old cage fighting debut. It's gonna be awesome.
Will: I got some updates for you.
Rod: I wanna, I wanna know about
Will: more, more tree news
Rod: all, all I
Will: care more tree news.
Rod: do you know, I used to work in this work wear store. I just have to say this is the best business I've ever heard. So there are all these accounts, they're all come in there, all kinds of different tradies and stuff.
And there was one mob who'd come in and they go like, I need some boots and I need this, you know, safety gear because I'm using train saws and go, oh, what account is that? And he goes, three fellas, tree fellas. And I thought, that's three fellas genius.
Will: tree
Rod: Three fellas, tree
Will: fellas.
But you have to slow down [00:24:00] and, get your mouth ready to
Rod: say I
Will: three fells tree
Rod: three of
Will: fells, like you can't be a mumbler. And
Rod: oh three, you're lying. You don't have an account here. Fuck off. There'll be cash. So
Will: Two girls, one cup. so this news is, important news from our German friends in tree research.
Rod: God, there are so many. Name two.
Will: have you heard of forest bathing?
Rod: Yes.
Will: So
forest bathing is a particularly Japanese associated phenomenon, but I, think it's probably something that applies to all of us around the world. get yourself out into a forest and.
Rod: have a wash.
Will: You have a wash, but you feel better like in, in so many measures. There's been a bunch of things.
Yeah. You know, in, long-term wellbeing. In short-term wellbeing, happiness, chill out. Calm. Yeah. Uh, I think your skin's better. Yep. You know, uh, you live.
Rod: four to seven centuries longer.
Will: much more glorious stools, all sorts
Rod: Yep. Absolutely. Grow extra digits. Extra digits. Yeah. Yeah. Forest baths
Will: but forest are lovely and forests are really
healthy forests.
Yeah. And so these researchers said, well, how much, how much forest do you need? and what,
Rod: how tiny can we make the forest for your [00:25:00] wellbeings?
Will: well, what they wanna do is we have
Rod: two bonai trees. Do you feel better? Okay. Three bonai trees.
Will: No, they, they weren't audio. They
Rod: won audio. They said,
oh, listen to these trees.
Will: trees.
Can you listen to the, well listen to the forest, not the trees, man.
Rod: Oh yeah. It's the trees, not the, yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
so they,
Will: They gave a bunch of their people in their study, obviously students in Germany, some audio, one minute audio
Rod: clips
of a
Will: um, of forests.
and overwhelmingly. People felt, much better once they'd listened to it. Only a minute. only a minute. and they're feeling better in a bunch of different
ways.
Rod: But did they, did they fuck with 'em? Like, this is a recording of a forest?
Will: Well, I, I gotta tell, I gotta tell you. I, I had a massage once in, Germany, and I swear, I swear to
that's the beginning of I know,
right? I know, right? And, and she's like, okay. and she goes to the CD plan to put on the calming music and it's fucking traffic sounds. I'm
Rod: like, I'm thinking Ramstein, but not traffic sound.
It's even worse.
Will: I was like, whatcha whatcha doing? I
Rod: why are you not relaxed? Wait, what's when I turn it [00:26:00] off? Uh, seriously,
Will: It was traffic sounds like.
Rod: What the.
So here's some industrial
Will: medal. I,
I think, I think it's my goal, like in life to collect a, a series of intercultural
Rod: mass massage
Will: see how they're done in the world.
Rod: I had one in Japan from this tiny dude.
It's the first message I've had where they put you in these full on neck to the, sorry, ankle to wrist pyjama things with a belt around the middle. I'm like, what kinda massage is this?
Will: Hang on, slow down ankle to neck pyjamas with a
Rod: in the
middle.
Yeah. Completely covered. Yeah. No, yeah, full. Like a, a
Will: like track pants. Have you got le have
Rod: like a judo outfit. Basically. Fully decked. I'm like, this is gonna be a weird massage. And this little dude walks in and he's in the same stuff and he progressed to fling me around the room and climb up and down me like a spider monkey. And I was like, this is sensational. This is just sensational.
This tiny little guy climbing all over me and throwing me all around the place. And I came out, it was even better than traffic
Will: noise.
Rod: I
Will: Ah. I mean, have you heard my, my Indian massage story? We've, we've digressed listener, we've digressed. so this one, we were in a hotel and, [00:27:00] my girlfriend, later wife that, I said, I'm gonna get a massage. I'll call up the hotel, I'll get a massage. And, and I'm there. And he says, okay, lie down on the bed and, uh, get into your undies.
And I'm like, okay. Fair
Rod: enough.
You weren't wearing them to begin with?
Will: No, no. I said like, just out
Rod: please
Will: and all good. And then I see this smirk on, on my wife's face and she's like. I'm gonna go sit on the roof and I, I look up and old mate, the masseuse has got into his undies and he's, and these were not the greatest undies in the wildlife.
Rod: And did he use all of himself to massage you
Will: I was there,
Rod: there?
there was,
Will: there was literally 45 minutes of, not traffic noise, but 45 minutes of me thinking, screaming
Rod: in your own head.
Will: I signed up for,
Rod: More than you
Will: expected. Yeah,
more than I expected. I mean, totally legitimate if that's the service that you're looking for. But I didn't know if I had signed up for that.
And. a moderately happy, some sort of happy and I
Rod: oh, a con confused and sort of okay. Ending anyway, forest bathing,
Will: so anyway, not traffic [00:28:00] noises, but forest noises and so, yes, they did vary. This, there wasn't just forest. They, they wanted to mix it up and,
Rod: this is a nuclear explosions whale song. Forest
Will: getting burned.
Rod: children head butting each other.
Will: No, they did it in ways that forests normally vary. One, how many animal sounds they are. Like, is, is it like there's lots of, lots of animal shit or just not much animals, you know, like, like the diversity of
species and whether they are from, local forests. Or from far away tropical
Rod: forests.
Mm.
Will: Now, now I don't want to stereotype anything here,
Rod: No, but you're gonna,
Will: I just wanted to remind you that these are, German students and German researchers. And so, do you wanna have a guess as to which ones they preferred? which ones made them happier?
Rod: The Black forest.
Will: Local
Forest. Yeah. Of course Like they, the,
the tropical ones,
Rod: they're, they're insincere and frivolous. How can I relax in such an environment?
Will: result of this research is that German people preferred German forests. So Hitler
said that.
Rod: that. [00:29:00] Did I just godwin
Will: Look, look, I mean, we might just pause and just go, maybe that's a phenomena all around. It's about being in the local environment might relax you and, and hearing different species, you're like, I don't know that, uh, you know, where's, where's my kookaburra? Where's my, where's my
Rod: that's tricky in Australia though, because like there isn't an Australian forest type, whereas maybe German forests are more homogenous.
Will: Yeah. Yeah,
Rod: that's
because I mean, you know, a, forest in FNQ, oh
Will: god, we've got the
Rod: castle. You're far north. Yeah. Where, so you're trying to survive because a giant dinosaur bird's gonna kill you. So the sounds of screaming would be background
noise as opposed to your Mornington Peninsula Victorian forest, which is basically rich people gargling caviar
Will: or the Tasmanian Gothic forest.
Like I
like. Oh yeah.
and in
Rod: so we don't have an Australian forest. They should test
Will: here. We, not one simple, but I as a, as a final Queensland kid, I did think of this reading the study and I was like, oh, actually, if I was to be immersed in a tropical rainforest sound, I'd be like, oh damn, that feels so nice.
I like it. Like, oh, just, so maybe there is something in your [00:30:00] local community that, that, that you're actually imbuing what's, what's the richest environment around you or something like that? There's something
Rod: or it's as if we adapt and prefer familiar things.
Will: What, what?
Rod: I know
Will: in
Rod: year 2000
and widely acknowledged, and I'm not kidding, king of farts, Michael Levitt was apparently a little sad 'cause he said, this is his quote.
It is virtually impossible for the physician. To objectively document the existence of excessive gas using currently available tests as
Will: he slow down.
It is virtually impossible for the, for the position to document objectively document
Rod: the existence of excessive
Will: gas.
So is he like, no one knows what's actually excessive?
Rod: Yeah. And how, how much farting and like how
much he's
got a Yeah.
Will: skinny person versus, you know, Garga like, Andre the giant, I imagine Andre the giant produces a larger amount of gas
Rod: than
he apparently used to eat, like whole live horses. That was like, he, that guy, his eating levels [00:31:00] were freakish.
His consumptive capacity was beyond amazing. But they're basically saying, you know, at that point, at least, and until recently, fart studies rely on self-reports.
Will: Or what
Rod: I like is they say in this piece, most have relied on self reports. you waving
Will: Self, self,
Rod: self reports? Like how often?
Will: but are we talking like also excessive? Are we talking number or volume? Yes. Like are you trying to report your own
Rod: volume,
volume, frequency, qualitative aspects?
Will: You know, there's a bunch of research and I support all curiosity driven research. Yes. But there's a time when you go, but do you wanna be associated with
Rod: that?
Oh my God.
If you're getting worried now you need a seatbelt maybe with a, a shoulder strap.
Will: So
Rod: they'd ask, you know, how many times a day would you say you fart, et cetera. And I mean, look, if I asked you that, how often, how often do you, how many times a day do you fight?
Will: it's a two digit number.
It's not a three digit number, I don't think. I think a three digit number will be a lot. Like do a one digit number is probably,
Rod: for me it's like you should be asking me how often do you not, are you not [00:32:00] farting? I got like this constant thing
with little stato
Will: you wouldn't be at a three digit number of
Rod: farts No, not in a good
Will: day.
No.
Rod: No
Will: really? Good day or bad, like you're saying. Good day is a high number.
Rod: no good day's. A, a low number. It's, it's down to your low eighties.
Will: Oh, well there you go. I
Rod: But seriously, what do you, would you say like, 20 10, 50. Any
idea? I,
Will: no real idea though. I, you know, if you're doing a study, I could count fairly easily.
Like I do notice when, when I far, like, it's
Rod: apparently, I don't always, I've been told,
Will: I've been told, I gotta say nothing is funnier than,
Rod: the, the accidental
No,
no.
Will: People sharing a bed, who knows who did it, but, being woken up by a smell, like, it's like, oh my god. Mind you, I have had a dog fart in the room and we have conversed on dog farts before where it's like,
Rod: yeah, they have a life of their own and they don't move across the room. They ooze across a.
Will: room.
Rod: One of our dogs likes to sleep on the bed and her preferred position, by the end of the evening is she's lying with her back against my side, but her [00:33:00] head is basically where my butt is and her butt is up towards my head end.
And there's been a couple of times where I've let one rip, it's been very loud, and she's jumped up looking fucking shocked, like horrified and confused, and then jumped off to bed and
left the room. She's
like, what's that noise? She's like, if when she gets too old, I think I might give her a heart attack.
It's hilarious. Anyway, so how many farts you do? I don't, I don't know. I couldn't tell you how many times I fart a day. I, I really don't have a strong
Will: feeling
Well, next week you'll have, you'll have the full
Rod: report.
I started this morning counting. so we don't really have a baseline. We've got no real sort of objective and well captured baseline for how many times a human
Will: thought.
Like no one has done a study
Rod: on.
Well, they They have now. And there's reasons for doing this, not just to amuse us, although obviously that's as good enough reason as any, it'll enhance our suite of use for biomarkers. 'cause like we can track blood glucose, you know, we can track cholesterol and stuff, but farts give us a, pretty good idea of how our digestion's
Will: going.
Oh,
Rod: Oh, definitely.
And to get technical on it, in most people, I'm quoting one of the studies, flatus. Your
Will: flatus he's the Roman general
Rod: flatus, [00:34:00] flavius, Maximus, uh, consists mainly of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. So that's the standard fart mix. Sure. But hydrogen is produced when you've got excessive gut microbes.
And so if you can track hydrogen in your flatus, you can get a direct readout or an idea of how active your gut microbes are. A microbiome is going
Will: you can only light your farts if you've got active gut
Rod: maybe overly active, maybe they're overly fermenting things in your tum, et cetera. and also sometimes people's flats,
Will: flatty, flatty,
Rod: contain methane, which is useful to know They shouldn't or they don't sometimes, sometimes, apparently.
Oh.
Anyway, until now we have no strong idea of what normal is, but we don't need to worry anymore. 'cause in 2025, a paper came out.
Will: wow. I am, I'm shocked that there weren't some Victorian scientists who did this.
Rod: I'm sure there were, but that would've been like what? Putting a a, a two litre glass retort up the onus.
Yeah. Well,
and telling you to walk carefully and, and sleep on your stomach. So the paper is called Smart Underwear, A novel wearable for long-term monitoring of Gut by microbial gas production via Flatus.
Will: [00:35:00] was
Rod: And it turned up in 2025 to set the record straight. So they used the specially designed smart underwear device. Yes. Which is a unit 26 by 29 by nine millimetres. So, so basically coin size two and a half centimetres by three centimetres by one centimetre.
So a
Will: a thick coin.
Rod: Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's not tiny, but it's not in humongous.
Will: and are you putting this right against the, um, exit zone?
Rod: I imagine you would. It, what they said is it snaps discreetly onto any underwear. Yeah.
Will: for people on the outside. I don't know how discreet that
Rod: is
Well, in theory, all underwear should be fairly discreet unless it's all you
Will: all wear Well, I'm just saying that you might, you might get the feeling that you have, a,
Rod: I feel like you'd
Will: coin pressed up
Rod: against yes, I have. What is it? I suppose like an apple, what do they call a tracker? Those
Will: little, yeah.
Oh yeah.
Like
Rod: a,
what do they call 'em? You know, the tracking devices that you use to be weird.
and apparently he uses electrochemical sensors to track intestinal gas production 24 7. Nice.
Which is great. And so the senior author on this, a guy called Brantley Hall, he said Objective measurement gives us an opportunity to increase scientific rigour in an area that's been difficult to study, [00:36:00] which is true.
So results from this, they managed to conclude it seems quite confidently healthy. Adults produce flat twists. On average, you wanna guess how many times a day?
Will: Uh,
1532. Ah, Okay.
Rod: 32 bottom burps a day,
which is about twice as often as was previously thought.
Will: Oh, well there I was in the previously
Rod: thought
You're in the, yeah, you're in the old school.
Although it varies a lot. Apparently the totals range potentially from four to 59 farts a day. Four. Four,
Will: come on. But I hope they're giant. like maybe
Rod: like the colossal
Will: got a holder holder and it's like hide your
Rod: the kaiju of farts four times
Will: a day. Yeah. See
that's where I am with fireworks.
It's the like, let's, let's do big and don't hang
Rod: around
big and four.
So
Will: what would you choose Of the two
Rod: two? I, oh, it's tricky. 'cause if I only did four times a day, I think that would be horrifying. Like, I think I'd evacuate neighbourhoods and children would start crying and bleeding from the eyes. I don't think it's a good idea. so one of the questions related to this is why were the previous estimates so far off?
So we're back [00:37:00] to this whole self-reports thing and obviously self-reporting on almost anything, at least has a few,
you know,
Will: to do self-report at nighttime as well
Rod: Exactly. That's one of the problems when you're lying around and asleep.
You not really up and
Will: counting Yeah. No one farts.
at night. in bed. It doesn't happen.
Rod: No one, literally no one. And also it, like many self-reports of many things you might tend to over or underreport, like, you know, when the doc says, so how many drinks do you have a week? And you go, oh two
Will: Oh, very different. And I get self-reported is flawed. if you were to ask someone think about the last week and how many times you farted in the last week, like no
Rod: one
would, I don't have enough fingers to count
Will: that.
No, but no one would know that. Whereas if you said, okay, can you tomorrow please count the number of times you fought?
And I think people would, would be able to do that within a, a
Rod: ruffle probably, yeah. But not when they're asleep, as you say. Or if they're like, you know, falling asleep in one of your lectures or something.
Will: Yeah, sure.
Rod: Then they wouldn't
Will: Falling asleep and farting. Like I what a dream student
Rod: that
is, it's a squeaking noise followed by snoring.
Will: and just occasional jerks of their leg.[00:38:00]
I just
Rod: I just, if I had a dollar
Will: I students, I, I want you in my class. If you just drift off
Rod: and then fight yourself awake. We've all been there. Neurobiology, third year, CO2 or something. God, I fell asleep and farted myself awake. Um, one of the things they say though, is also, as they put this, when you're self-reporting, visceral sensitivity varies widely.
That is, you and I could fight and produce the same amount of S gas. Yes. But our self-reported experience of that could be dramatically different. Like for me, it could just be
Will: of the smell or
Rod: the whole thing, volume, sensation. Okay. Taste, texture,
Will: Yeah. What's normal in, in one person's stomach, gas is gonna be different for,
Rod: yeah.
Yeah. So I let out something colossal and horrible and I put in the log, did a fart, and you'd let it out and go, oh my ho my God, I'm gonna
Will: hospital.
So did they, in this, investigative people, the stinkiness of the fart, and if people, you know, can self-diagnose the
Rod: distinction? Well, I don't know, but the, the thing is that the monitor, which is of [00:39:00] course objective Yeah.
Gathers your biochemical
Will: surely it would, it would.
Rod: So it probably could say, well, you know, there was more,
well, sulphur versus, yeah. More meat flavour.
Meat flavour. Oh, I was gonna say, 'cause Ooh,
Will: meat flavour,
Rod: more meat
Will: flavour.
I wouldn't, I don't think anyone would describe it as flavour.
Like,
Rod: Oh, I don't know. so the device exists now.
It's been tested. It seems to work, but there's more to be done. So the hall lab, after the main researcher has launched the human flatless atlas.
Will: Oh.
Rod: and you can go and look at it. I'll give you the, the web address in a moment. By you, I mean all you people at home will seize
Will: they've already got it 'cause they've got the show
Rod: 'cause they've got the show notes. They're already Oh, they do. That's right. They hear this in the future
Will: and we hear it in the past.
Rod: We do. So he uses the smart underwear to objectively measure flatulence patterns and correlate the patterns with diet microbiome composition, et cetera. But there are also to make, the full variation and the recruiting participants all across the US in this case.
But there are three main categories of farter. Are
Will: are they
Rod: really? Apparently.
And it's terrible 'cause I'm one category and my wife is definitely the opposite end category. So it's an interesting talk about [00:40:00] opposites attracting. So you have your zen digesters.
Will: Oh.
Rod: These are people who consume high fibre diets like 25 to 38 grammes of fibre a day, yet experience. Your minimal flat.
Will: with, oh.
Rod: Oh.
they may hold clues to understanding microbiome adaptation to high fibre diets. Okay,
Will: So high fibre, no
Rod: fat with very, very low
Will: now at this point, I just wanna warn you that you don't have to actually say which category your wife is 'cause, 'cause this is a public
Rod: I don't mind. She's a zen digester.
Will: I guess if you were to be asked which one do you wanna be publicly identified?
Sure.
Rod: She's a zen digester. I can count. We've been together for nearly a quarter of a century and I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually been aware of her doing a bottom burp.
Will: bottom burp. A bottom burp.
Rod: Then you have your hydrogen hyper producer.
Will: Sure.
Rod: And as they say, simply put people who fight a lot,
Will: Yeah.
Rod: no one's gonna be shocked to hear
Will: You've, you've said many times in this
Rod: thing, it's more likely that I'm in that category. And they say studying these individuals could reveal what drives
excessive gas [00:41:00] production.
Will: you're like the, the unique individuals with the high plasma or the
Rod: are, we are of use to science.
Will: You could be abused.
Rod: the thing is there's no, I point in me being part of this. 'cause I can tell you what it is. Well, it's beer
Will: Yeah. Well,
Rod: and you know, live meats. Then you've got the people called normal who are in between the two. So you zen digests your hydrogen.
Will: it's not really categorising.
We've got a bell curve and we've
Rod: gone
no, we've got three, three bumps
Will: up that end and everyone in
Rod: and everyone extreme, extreme middle.
Yeah. Yep. So which one are you?
Will: I'm just gonna guess I'm normal because I don't have any No, but I haven't stood next to someone all day and worked out how much we're each farting.
Like,
Rod: I
okay, tomorrow I'm gonna come over and hang out
Will: day. I, I, you know, I don't think I would describe myself as a vast fighter.
Rod: oh, lift your game son.
Will: You know, I'm always worried, you know, this is,
Rod: this
is,
Will: it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's the office fart. You know, you know when you're, you're in your office and you're, it's
Rod: like,
oh, I hate that you do on anything. I'm safe. And someone knocks on the door, is like, no one has turned up all day.
Will: Could you wait five minutes to clear the
Rod: air?
Let's meet the, we're go in the boardroom, well step out the [00:42:00] kitchen, get a coffee. Why? Because it smells like I sat in here. It's happened every now and then. It's happened to me. I was just like, oh my fucking God. I haven't seen anyone for
four
Will: not now,
Rod: for four hours. I let out one little sneaky and someone turns up and is looking polite at me. So anyway, got an ongoing study right now in the us If you are over, if you are over 18, you can play, you contact these people, they'll send you your smart underwear device.
But be warned, the people in the two low, the, the Zen digesters and the hydrogen producers may be ask for stool samples as well.
Will: Oh,
Rod: wow.
Will: well I don't mind that.
Rod: I love it. Any study that involves capturing, uh, and collecting people's shit and analysing it for me, they're champions of science. Anyone who's prepared to do that, they need a Nobel Prize.
Just
Will: for,
well, you know, as, as the Australian government asks for our stool sample every so often, so
Rod: that's just to make sure we don't have the cancers. I
Will: know, but also just so they've got a collection of
Rod: food. Yeah, I know. 'cause you know what they do with it, don't you? They fake moon landings.
Oh. Or something.
[00:43:00] Angela Lips, she's a mother of three and a grandmother of five. She lives in Tennessee. Um, I gotta say I was a bit horrified to find out though, this is, 'cause the headline is, you know, about grandmother X, Y, Z. She's 50.
Will: Yeah.
Rod: But just 'cause that's younger than me and he like, oh, you know, this, this poor granny has had this situation.
I'm like, what the f
Will: Eh, you know, it, it,
Rod: she's younger than my little sister.
Will: Well, bio biologically, you don't have to be terribly
Rod: You don't, and in Tennessee, they like to get in early. That's the state's motto of get in early. So just last year, July, July last year, US Marshals went to her house, quote while she was babysitting four kids and arrested her at gunpoint.
Will: I
Rod: mean,
pick
Will: a random American story and it involves some aspect of
Rod: that.
It's gotta be, yeah, yeah.
Will: It's like, and.
You know,
have you seen this tweet? it's like every good news story in America, you know, it's like whatever TV show saves this, family or gets this,
Rod: puppy found after 11 years in the
Will: world. And it's all whatever saves person [00:44:00] from the orphan crushing machine.
And it's
like,
why do we have an orphan crushing machine? It's like
Rod: to save people from, oh
Will: my God.
Rod: Well, this, this isn't quite that. So she was arrested, Marshalls took her away at gunpoint, I assume, therefore cuffed and all the thing.
So she'd been arrested for bank fraud in Fargo, North Dakota.
Will: Oh, that's the place to
Rod: do
it. It is.
Will: You get a TV show made after you, if you
Rod: and a, a movie, then a TV
show.
and Fargo, north Dakota's about 1600 kilometres away. So it's a, a fair hike. So apparently she had used a fake US Army military ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars from banks or a bank.
and they had footage of a woman doing the criming.
Will: So
Rod: detectives investigating the case, used ai, facial recognition to id the woman in the
Will: video. I was almost about to look up what was the frame You gave this a but definitely not.
Rod: I
mm. Emphatically not I,
Will: oh my God.
so the
Rod: detective said, look, the suspect's, facial features, body type and hair were a match
to Angela Lips.
So because she'd crossed state lines from North Dakota to Tennessee,
Will: uh, they don't [00:45:00] butt up right against each other, I don't
Rod: They do not. But she'd crossed state lines. So she's basically a fugitive from justice.
Will: Okay.
Rod: Okay. Federal crime. Yeah. Or federal offence, whatever it is. You know? You know how I've seen
Will: movies?
This is not a law podcast. Don't worry about the law.
Rod: Especially American law. I don't think there isn't anymore. So, because she's a fugitive, she was locked in a Tennessee country jail and no bail
' cause fugitive.
She's given a court
appointed lawyer. Mm-hmm. Just to check. Yep.
Will: The children that she was babysitting at the time, did they give them, um.
Care.
Rod: yeah.
Oh, I think it was a dish of water, you know, crack the window. I don't know. They
Will: didn't
they put the dog in
Rod: charge?
They probably did. Come on Rover.
Good girl.
Lassie shouldn't, well, she won't be away for long. yeah, so no bail, court appointed lawyer, was given to her extradition process, began to transfer her to North Dakota to face the courts, uh, you know, mount the defence, et cetera.
So they left her in the Tennessee jail for 108 days
before
they finally flew her to Fargo. her first interview with the Fargo police was in December, so five months after the arrest. And she said an interview, to the local radio station. She'd not only never been to North Dakota, she didn't even know anyone from that [00:46:00] place.
Oh. And also her lawyer had undeniable evidence that she was in Tennessee at the time of the crimes. But it seems the detectives didn't do a lot to, you know, like verify her. Id relied
Will: relied on
Rod: that. They didn't call her to question her while she was in the Tennessee jail for 108 days.
How was that? It was an oopsie.
So she's finally released from jail in, uh, Fargo on Christmas.
Will: Eve.
Rod: So she'd been brought up from Tennessee in the middle of summer, so she only had summer clothes.
The local authorities did not pay for her trip home.
but then some local defence attorneys, apparently they pulled a bunch of money together to pay for a hotel room and a non-profit called the F five project, pulled together money to arrange for her to get a trip back to Tennessee. So by this stage, she had, because of her jail time, lost her home, her car, and her dog.
So if you needed any convincing that maybe you should be a little bit cautious about what AI spits
Will: out
Rod: there is number 754 bajillion.
Will: billion. I was looking through a study the other day. This was a 2023 study.
Yeah. Um, and it was, it was, you know, you know how there's [00:47:00] a bunch of AI saying it can unblur images and this is the same sort of
Rod: Oh, no. You mean enhance?
Well, yeah. Enhance, enhance, basically.
Will: there's actually been a, a big outcry a couple of weeks ago. from Nvidia doing something like this, but this was, this was a study of people.
Yeah. And so the researcher, she's a black woman.
she took a variety of photos of herself.
Mm-hmm.
put a blurring sort of filter on Yeah. And then used AI to unblur turn it
Rod: turn it back into
Will: me. And
none of them, none of them were even nearly all white. Like, it just, it just
Rod: so people, it turned back into
people.
Will: Yeah. Turned back into
Rod: a fish or
Will: fish. A tan turned back into people.
But
what, yeah, absolutely.
Rod: Couldn't even get the colour
Will: And
one was definitely, I would call a, a masculine looking, going, going like, it was wildly wrong because what it's doing is not, it's, this is the thing about stuff like un blurring and all of this kind of identification.
It is just predicting based on probabilities, what is the likelihood based on all of the sample set that it has not on what is actually in the [00:48:00] data. And you know, this whole thing of, oh, it can actually go back and get you the truth of what No,
Rod: No,
Will: it's just guessing based on what might be plausible.
So the, the other '
Rod: cause AI is magic.
Will: The other thing, this is Nvidia, like it's got this, I don't know the name of this was a couple of weeks ago. So Nvidia huge now because of all of the AI
Rod: processes.
Will: It's the big biggest
company in
Rod: in the world. Yeah. Yeah.
Will: But they came from video games where they were the graphics processes.
And so they had released this software that used the graphics processes to upscale old games. And so I love that. And, and so, you can understand why that, you know, if it's a good game from like 20 years ago, but maybe you could
Rod: make
you could play, did you ever play descent?
Will: Descent. I do did play descent.
Rod: Descent. I would love to see an upgraded version
Will: There you go. but uh, the joke was, you know, people put like resident evil, you know, sort of they're zombies and put it through the AI upgrade and they all turn into hot women because, because that's what AI is trained on and looking for and it's like, it's not trained on accurately purveying what might be there.[00:49:00]
Instead it's trying tovey some sort of probabilistic thing of what
Rod: want. Of course. And it doesn't ask questions about context. It doesn't say, well who put this in? And we, no, of course it's not
Will: intelligent.
Don't trust it. It's garbage,
Rod: not intelligent.
It's not intelligent. We are
Will: a little bit of science
and we have given you. A bunch of little bits of
Rod: science.
Yep. If you nail all the snippets together, you'll get one science unit.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Will: if you like that sort of science unit, you know what you need to do. You need to tell your friends and give us,
Rod: smash the yay button.
That's the 16 star button in every
Will: part. And in fact, actually, actually tell your
Rod: friends Tell your
Will: like, say you guys listen to this podcast.
These guys are really nice
and
Rod: and they need your support.
Will: Yeah, they do.
Rod: They feel lonely.
Will: They do. They, they're, and you can watch them on Twitch on a Friday afternoon
Rod: often.
And if you want to Yeah. When, when it suits. And if you wanna email us, it's cheers. At a little bit of science.com au slash
Will: Jesus
au. I i We should probably put a slash Jesus thing.
What
Rod: happens? We should. I wanna see what happens. But yeah, tell us stories or whatever.
Will: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us [00:50:00] some,
Rod: give us some suggestions.
Correct us. 'cause we probably need it.
Will: Uh, love you, you
Rod: you. He's beautiful.
Miss you.
