Dolphins, Aliens, and Lost Time

The Box of Oddities

John Elliott and Kat Walls

True Crime, Society & Culture, Comedy

4.9 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this mind-bending episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro dive into two stories that push the boundaries of communication, perception, and the very nature of time itself. First, Jethro unpacks the extraordinary modern effort to build the world’s first dolphin chatbot—a real AI project inspired by a quirky 1960s SETI club called The Order of the Dolphin. From Carl Sagan and Frank Drake’s early theories to Google DeepMind’s modern neural networks decoding dolphin whistles, this segment explores how scientists hope communication with dolphins may become the training wheels for future alien contact. With signature humor and scientific wonder, we explore dolphin intelligence, their complex acoustic “language,” and what the first dolphin-to-human conversation might actually sound like. Then Kat takes us into the freezing darkness of the Scarassin Abyss, where French speleologist Michel Siffre spent 63 days isolated from all clocks, sunlight, and human contact to study how humans perceive time. As his internal world unraveled, Siffre made discoveries that reshaped chronobiology—and revealed how fragile our sense of reality truly is. From hallucinations to distorted time cycles to the stunning moment he emerged believing he still had a month left underground, Kat tells the story in vivid detail with plenty of Oddity-level dread and fascination. Plus: bizarre YouTube ads, Thanksgiving confusion, and a rapid-fire tour of wild historical events—from Einstein’s famous paper to a meteor that turned night into day. It’s science, strangeness, humor, and existential questions—all in one episode.Keep flying that freak flag, you beautiful freak. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	How's the business going?
0:01.2	We're busier than ever, but struggling to get the staff we need. Oh, recruiting can be such a distraction. We gave Job Centre Plus a try, and they've really helped us out. Really? Yeah. It was dead easy. We got our own employer advisor, Julie, who helped advertise our jobs, shortlisted candidates for us and letters interview at the Job Centre. We've hired some great people, and Job Centre Plus really took the hassle out of it, And there was no fee.
0:23.1	Brilliant. That's straight on my to-do list. view at the job centre. We've hired some great people and Job Centre Plus really took the hassle
0:21.2	out of it and there was no fee. Brilliant. That's straight on my to-do list. Find out more at
0:26.0	business.gov.uk slash recruits. Eligibility criteria apply. What follows may not be suitable
0:31.9	for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. The world is full of stories.
0:40.2	Stories of mysteries, of curiosities, of oddities.
0:48.9	Join Cat and Jethro Gilligan Toth for the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected, as they lift the lid
0:59.0	and cautiously peer inside the box of oddities.
1:04.7	I just looked at the calendar and I shocked myself by realizing that Thanksgiving week, it's this week. The U.S. Thanksgiving
1:14.5	Day is this week. What? Yeah. That snuck up. We haven't even gone to the store to get things
1:21.8	yet. In fact, I still have a suitcase I haven't unpacked from our tour. And we got back three weeks ago.
1:28.7	I did just see on the old info webs the other day, there's a company that's making a bird-shaped,
1:37.5	Tofurkey-style product.
1:40.5	And it's so that you can, like like cut into it like you would,
1:44.7	you know,
1:45.5	a traditional bird on the table.
1:47.1	You get the tactile effect.
1:48.7	Right.
1:49.3	The guy in the ad was like,
1:51.1	yeah,
1:51.4	it's like $89,
	...

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