Citation Needed - Margaret Lovatt
Episode Date: September 9, 2020Margaret Howe Lovatt (born Margaret C. Howe, in 1942) is a volunteer naturalist from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. In the 1960s, she took part in a NASA-funded research project in which she ...attempted to teach a dolphin named Peter to understand and mimic human speech. As a child, she was inspired by a book called Miss Kelly, a story about a cat that communicated with humans. This inspired her to research teaching animals to speak human language.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
And so I say that's the whole point of the character, right?
Because a man must have a place to go and rescound the cow's place is with her.
Yeah, I feel like you're reaching with that though.
I'm not reaching Tom.
I'm reading.
It's called subtext.
You're rearranged in its butt sex.
Meh.
Meh, Meh, Meh.
Oh, debt.
And that's why attacking any form of capitalism
just like as a concept,
rather than attacking the distribution of capital
is actually a problem in itself, you know what I'm saying?
I hear you, but if you can't adjust the system
to fit the purpose, I mean,
no, no, but Piquetti is saying you can adjust the system
to fit the purpose of maximizing utility
across the society with equitable distribution, you know, through
a big wealth tax as a start.
Okay.
Okay.
So your turn.
All right.
So the thing about fencing at the time, it was largely based on dueling.
So the point system is kind of an outgrowth of that.
And then, yeah, sorry, guys, what are you doing?
Madden!
What do you mean, what are we doing?
We're having a conversation.
A conversation.
But I mean, we're the, the Maddick shenanigans that we usually
samadak shenan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where's the episode based intro?
Oh, well, well, um, it's some the thing is is what what?
Um, what?
You know, times that say this week is about a lady jerked off at dolphin.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
That's true.
That's what I wrote.
So we thought we'd, you know, uh, it is that's true. That's what I wrote. So we thought we'd you know
You know like get all the smart stuff out at the top
So you know make room for all the dolphin come in the rest of the show
Okay, yeah, so I'm talking about that economics book that I told you about. Yeah, and I'm talking about the origin of the fencing scoring, you know.
What is Eli doing?
I think he's doing a proust thing.
No idea.
Save whoop!
Well, it's not really clear.
Yeah, that would be a proust thing then.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's out of proust stuff.
He could Wikipedia though, so it should be done in a second.
You know, that actually tracks, right?
Yeah, like brief things he knows.
So we decided to sort of like clear the pipes, you know what I'm saying?
For dolphin come.
For dolphin come, exactly.
Exactly for dolphin come.
Clear it.
Yup.
So I would tell you guys what meteorologists mean
by an unstable atmosphere?
No, but I hope you will tell us.
No. Okay, because I ate a cookie.
Yeah, that's it.
There it is, last one.
That's the last one.
That's the last one. Hello and welcome to Cytation Needed.
The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and
pretend we're experts.
This is the internet, and that's how it works now.
I'm Eli Bosnick, and I'll be hosting again.
Yeah, what?
I mean, don't get me wrong.
I am the charming but lovable face of the podcast, but you think we'd be more subtle
about it.
But don't worry, don't worry, my adorable band of sidekicks are here too.
First up, two men who were inspired to buy dolphin costumes for a totally different reason.
Heath and Noah, listen, they have to let you into the restaurant.
They have to make you lose. Heath counts as a mess. Look, it's practical. I can put a lot of stuff
in there. They charge for carry on bags now. This is just economically practical. And also joining us
tonight. Doc and Do Little if ever I knew him, Cecil and Tom. Doc, join the Nintendo fun club today, Mack!
Little is better than nothing, so I keep telling my wife.
I don't believe it.
Now, we're going to begin tonight.
I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons.
Without our patrons, we'd be jerking off all sorts of things for money, and instead,
we get to podcast and just jerk off ourselves.
So if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks,
be sure to stick around to the end of the show.
And with that out of the way, tell us, heath,
everyone's pretty sure they miss red the episode title.
Yeah.
Well,
person-based thing concept phenomenon or event.
We'll be talking about today.
Event.
You read correctly.
It's dolphin getting a happy ending massage is the theme story, real thing that happened
of this show.
All right.
And Tom, you dove deep into this story.
Are you ready to let it all out?
Like Ben Shapiro's wife, I'm dripping with excitement to tell this story.
So tell us Tom, what was, when did, what are you out there?
What the fuck Tom, what the fuck?
That's the question, that's fair, that's entirely fair.
Look, sometimes there's a story so spectacularly bonkers that the hardest part of the telling
is knowing where to begin.
Though in this case of this story, that will certainly not be the only hard part of the
tale.
Seems like it's easy if you're not going to skip over the story to Truscant tradition
of jacking off sea mammals.
Such an interesting culture.
So to begin our story, we have to start way back in 1949
with a scientist by the name of Dr. John Lilly.
Lilly at this time was a medic.
And he came into contact with a beached pilot whale
on the shore near where he lived in Massachusetts.
He was fascinated by the creature.
So he did what any normal young man would do.
And he began poking around inside the creatures skull.
For knowledge. Yeah.
It is standard. There's a whale stuff, I guess.
So science, you guys remember, it's 1949.
Science at this point, it mostly been focused on inventing
terrifying new ways to extinguish all life on the planet.
We basically didn't know anything about anything.
So Lily concluded that his wife must be right
and that size really did matter.
He was convinced therefore that the whale's enormous brain
meant that whale's possessed the enormous intelligence
and the course of his life was forever changed.
Well, the size does matter.
Maybe I should move my daily apple vaccine into stage two.
So Lillie and his wife began chartering sailboats and just like cruising around the Caribbean
in the hopes of finding other mammals with huge brains they could observe.
What do you do there?
Just like leave chessboards with the situations on them in water.
It's it is super not clear.
He that that's not what they do. They do.
I proved some board like Goodwill hunting.
You see a whale just like E E E E to the floor.
What do you got?
Mr. Whale slapping a girl's phone number against the front window of a diner.
Such a sailing around for several years, which had to amount to something like look over
there at Alfin.
I don't know what else to be to it.
The pair stumbled upon Marine Studios, which was the first place to keep bottling those
dolphins a captivity, which obviously made them much easier to observe.
They get there and he's just like, there's a fucking dolphin watching.
Stort fuck.
Two summers wasted.
Two summers.
Two summers wasted.
Two summers wasted. Just sailing around and warm. watching store fuck. Do summers waste this again? Do summers.
Yeah, do summers waste it just sailing around and warm.
What, look, to be fair, if this was about finding mammals,
they'd have looked on the land, you know,
where animals are visible to the human eye and shit.
Clearly, Lily was not content only to observe
the behavior of captive mammals.
That would be boring.
What Lily was after was to really suss out
just how much of an advantage size conferred
upon these creatures.
Naturally, then Lily began the process
of inserting thin probes into the brains of the dolphins.
What?
Naturally?
Yep.
Oh, yeah, it gets real weird.
The technique that he used was invented
as a means of measuring the electrical activity
in the brains of Reese's monkeys,
clearly a noble scientific pursuit.
But dolphins are not, and I think you may be surprised to learn this, they are not monkeys.
You see, dolphins live in water, and you can't anesthetize them because they stop breathing.
So Lily used his monkey brain probe on the dolphins while they were awake.
Catch a glimpse of the article quote, didn't always end well, sir.
Sir, in order to do this probe thing,
we need to lure in the dolphin
and none of these types of bananas are working.
I don't know.
It's like it's not the same as watching.
Next thing you're gonna tell me we can't use
the electrical equipment.
It's fucking disaster.
All right, so we're gonna pause real quick,
and at this point I have to introduce Margaret Howe, Love it.
As a child.
As a child, Margaret read a book.
I'm not making this up.
She read a book about a talking cat.
That part should not be surprising
since books written for children are.
That's true in Margarita, it's a great book.
It's a great book.
Since books written for children are like That's true in Margarita, it's a great book. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Since books written for children are like children themselves,
fucking stupid.
What is surprising, however, is that Margaret was so taken
with the story that she became somehow fixated
on the idea of communicating in very direct terms,
like straight up having a chat with animals.
This was her thing now.
Lady, I got bad news.
The first thing these dolphins are going to say is
fuck it, get this fucking thing out of my head, you ass!
Ah!
Ah!
So it was that in 1963, Margaret learned of a secret dolphin laboratory
on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, which was evidently not much of a secret,
because she learned about it from her brother-law who just told her, hey, I think there's a secret dolphin laboratory on this
island.
Oh, okay.
Thanks, I guess, brother-in-law.
Quick thing, were you visiting a lair?
Because that's the only explanation for you having that.
What the fuck on a grapevine is that?
You heard about a secret dolphin lab.
It's literally how it's presented in two articles that I read about this.
So obviously Margaret had to check this out.
So a few days later, she drove out to, I don't know, I guess secret dolphin laboratory
point or whatever.
And she just walked right up to it.
And there she was greeted by a scientist who's outside smoking, quote, with tussled hair and an open shirt, who asked her, hey lady, want to buy a dolphin?
What do you say? I got to. So he asked her why she was there,
to which love it replied, quote, well, I heard he had dolphins. And I thought I'd come and see if
there's anything I could do or anyway, I could help. Yeah, just like you do when you walk up to a secret shelter, what the fuck are you going
to spend your time doing something?
So this fucking guy likely dumb struck at the sight of an actual woman at the secret island
monkey pro dolphin lab.
I can what I was like, sure what the hell.
And then he invited her to come in and observe the dolphins and write down what she saw,
which she did.
And Margaret's observations, though she was not a scientist, not trained in any capacity
at all to act as a scientific observer.
I've been only heard observations were so impressive, she was told she could come back
any time to the secret dolphin laboratory.
They liked her because she had all the intents and purposes.
Oh, so hold on.
Tents and purposes.
She was so good at the job that they offered to let her come back and do it more for free.
I'm like that working fry sighted at movies.
I'm so good. So Margaret's life would, from this point on, be forever changed.
And I will get to that.
But now I want to introduce you to the dolphins, though I will let Margaret do the talking
for me.
Quote, there were three dolphins.
Peter, Pamela and Sissy.
Sissy was the biggest pushy loud.
She sort of ran the show.
Pamela was very shy and fearful and Peter was a young guy who
sexually coming of age and a bit naughty. What? And quote, yeah, that's, hmm.
Well, it's something strike you guys about that. Yeah, sure. One of these things. Now, no part of
that observation resembles anything approaching scientific or clinical detachment. No.
At all, right?
But there you have it.
I'm about to get through out a quick spoiler here too.
Dolphins, Pamela and Sissy, they don't fucking matter,
and I'll probably never mention them again.
It's such a Pamela thing to say.
I'm so Pamela.
Take our Buzzfeed quiz.
Which secret dove and are you?
All right, so let's jump back now to Dr. Lily.
Remember him?
Because when we last left him, he was murdering dolphins to find out how smart they were using
monkey wires.
Well, one day, he and his assistant were working with a dolphin.
The market came across them and then this happened.
Quote, I came in at the top of the operating theater. One day he and his assistant were working with the dolphin market came across them and then this happened quote
I came in at the top of the operating theater heard John talking and the dolphin go
Like John and then Alice is assistant. I thought that was good. He did like the man for no not you heard You know and then Alice is assistant would reply in a high tone of voice and the dolphin would imitate her voice
I went down to where they were operating and I told him this was going on and they were quite startled."
Because I guess they were like too busy sticking shit into the dolphin skull to notice
that they were having a baby talk conversation with it. Who was? I think it was fair to
say undoubtedly screaming at them at this point who stopped killing them please.
Awkward conversations always begin with so how much did you see?
How much did you see?
How much did you see?
I like to be standing there.
I'm gonna need minutes.
So Dr. Lilly began to wonder if perhaps there was a better way
to communicate with dolphins.
If maybe some modality beyond murderous monkey wires
was a possibility.
Yeah, but those liberal cuck said the same thing
about childhood. I don't know. Iitating human speech. Dr. Lily wondered if perhaps
that signal to desire the dolphin had to communicate, to speak directly with people.
Lily found the idea so exciting that he fleshed out. Maybe they can talk. I don't know yet, but that'd be cool.
Into a book, inspiringly titled, quote, man and dolphin, which somehow became a bestseller.
So in, yeah, yeah, a bestseller in man and dolphin, Lily mused about the idea that if dolphin
could talk, we'd probably learn a lot of great stuff from them. We'd know more about history
and science. And even in vision, I swear to God, this is in the book, he envisioned a
world where there were dolphins holding their own chair at the UN. It did seem like an
odd choice to furniture for a dolphin to be.
Yeah.
Ah, the representative from Dolphinia is leaking again, Alan. Alan, can we have a smile for the representative from Dolfinia?
Please, we need to bucket in a mop for this wet ass D word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
D for diplomat.
So in 1964, love began working in earnest with Lily to further his research into cross-species
chit chat.
To say this work, the idea of communicating directly
with spoken language with Dolphins excited Margaret,
that is not the half of it.
She began spending nearly all of her time
at the research facility, her job, which, again,
she got this job for no other reason
than she just showed up one day
to a secret island dolphin laboratory,
was to create and then run a program of daily
lessons to teach dolphins to make human sounds from their blowholes.
The work consumed love it, who eventually lamented, quote,
every night we would all get in our cars and pull the garage door down and drive away
and I thought, well, there's this big brain floating around all night.
It amazed me that everyone would keep leaving and I just thought it was wrong."
And quote, for Love It, the problem wasn't the teaching dolphins to talk was utterly mad.
The problem was that she kept having to interrupt the dolphin lessons to go home and sleep
sometimes.
Wow, this really is a cetacean needed story, huh?
Whoa.
Oh, oh, oh.
All right, so y'all, we have been setting that one up for 177 and a half episodes. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, quote, maybe it's because I was living so close to the lab, it just seems so simple.
Why let the water get in the way?
So I said to John Lilly, I want to plaster everything and fill this place with water.
I want to live here."
Love and figure if she never left the dolphins, then teaching them language work the way
the teaching language to a baby works.
And while there's a fair amount of evidence that immersion is a good method for learning
new languages, this is taking it to rather a new level
new water level
Oh my god puns aren't funny
And you might think that if like if you were a scientist and you were doing very serious science stuff and one of your
non-scientist assistants came to you and said like,
Hey, I think I can teach dolphins to talk,
but we're gonna have to flood the building,
and I'm gonna live here in a flooded laboratory and be their mom.
You might fire that assistant when you were done laughing.
Oh, spoiler mom.
I don't know.
Yeah, that's kind of the theory she started off.
It changes.
It changes a little.
Stepmom, she eventually becomes stepmom.
Yeah, all right.
So you might fire that assistant, but that's because you are not a visionary brain probing
dolphin scientist with your own secret island laboratory.
Fair.
Dr. John Lilly agreed right away to love its plan.
The upper floors of the laboratory were waterproofed.
On soon, the indoor space, like the rooms inside where people go off and do their science
thing, they were flooded with several feet of water and Margaret Love it moved in.
It's at this point that the story begins to get a little weird.
All right.
Well, Palms got that judgy tone in his voice again, which means I need some time to lecture him about kink shaming.
So let's take a quick break.
Or some apropos of nothing. The Earth Science Diary, day one, the dolphins are swimming like crazy.
They can't get enough of it.
They're like little wiggle worms.
Oh, sorry, I'm sorry.
You don't actually have to save the observations as you write them down.
You can just write them down.
It's not science, and science unless you say it out loud
You're not Do you science you're here because I was lonely anyways back to writing dolphins are very big fish
They're not fish actually. They're they're aquatic mammals
Correction, they are very big aquatic mammal fish and Cicci is super sassy like a little sass back machine
And Sissy is super sassy like a little sass back machine squeak squeak yourself you little rascal
Okay, so this is really useless information. She interrupting the science thing. Okay, okay Oh, that reminds me I was thinking in order to talk with them better
I was I was gonna stick my head in the water and just scream at them
I also thought that I should cosplay as that girl from Splash, Hannah Montana or whatever.
I could get a fishtail and they might take me in.
It's Darrow Hannah.
Okay Boomer, anyway I want to put this saddle on the boy one.
Can you give me a hand?
You know I don't think this internship is working out.
You might have to go back to running foreign policy for the United States of Anka.
I'm sorry.
No.
And we're back.
When we left off, showed up with a can-do attitude was turning out not to be an awesome
hiring policy.
How did that work out, Tom?
Oh, you got no idea.
Alright, so what we have now is a laboratory flooded with water and a crazy woman who wanted
to talk to cats, but has settled on dolphins living in the flooded
lab. For six days at a stretch, Margaret would live 24 hours a day in isolation with her
dolphin subject, sleeping on a makeshift bed suspended over the water, writing up her
very important work on a desk suspended from the ceiling by cables. Why would she have
to do that part in the water? Why could not just the Jess gonna bed be in a different room?
Just, nothing.
24 hours, she stayed with them 24 hours, she's fucking nuts.
Now obviously this new phase of the experiment needed a subject, but who to choose?
Sissy and Pamela were rejected by Margaret, though her reasoning makes no sense at all.
Here it is, quote,
I chose to work with Peter because he had not had any human like sound training and the other two had. Okay. Okay. But just to review in her original notes,
Peter is the one who reminded her of a sexually naughty 13 year old boy. I saw this
coverage when she gave him a dick name. I'm gonna be honest. Yeah. Spoilers.
I'm gonna be honest with you. Yeah.
Spoilers.
So in 1965, this is only two years after she first learned about secret dolphin laboratory,
love it was now living in isolation.
In a secret dolphin lab, flooded with seawater, trying to teach Peter the dolphin how to talk.
So I can hear some love it described her first night alone in the lab.
Science, bitches.
Quote, human people were out there having dinner
or whatever, and here I am, there's moonlight
reflecting on the water.
This fin and this bright eye looking at you
and I thought, wow, why am I here?
But then you get back into it.
It never occurred to me not to do it.
What I was doing there was trying to find out
what Peter was doing there and what we could do together.
What?
That was the whole point.
Nobody had done that.
He figured out what Peter was there.
What?
I mean, if she means,
if she's very skeptical,
I mean, if she means gone crazy and lived with the dolphin,
she's got a point, right?
Yeah, it's real.
No, my favorite part of that quote is where she goes like,
but then you get back into it. Like she slips into a second person for a point. Right? Yeah. No, my favorite part of that quote is where she goes like, but then you get back into it.
Like she slips into a second person for a man.
And then she's like, wait, no, I am uniquely insane of all in history.
This needs to go back into the first person here.
My bad.
Sorry.
So soon the connection between love and Peter strengthened twice each day.
Love it spent time trying to teach Peter the dolphin how to talk convincing herself that
she was getting the hang of it though.
Uh, big spoiler.
He was not getting the hang of it.
Uh, in her notes about her progress, she writes, quote, M was very difficult.
My name, hello Margaret.
I worked on the M sound and he eventually rolled over to bubble it through the water.
The M he worked on it so hard.
He was crushing it with the other 25 letters.
His R and L distinction was solid, but M was a struggle.
But the connection between love and Peter wasn't purely about tricking herself into believing
that a dolphin could talk.
No, the real connection they built happened in their downtime.
When we had nothing to do was when we did the most, he was very, very interested in my
anatomy. If I was sitting here and my legs were in the water, he would come up and look
at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how that thing worked and I was so charmed by it. I feel
like this is the exact opposite of Ben Shapiro and of a giant. Give me because her
language wet at the time. This Ben Shapiro and his wife in a room full of sand six feet
at Peter grew more and more distracted as they worked together.
Peter was as love at herself observed at the beginning, beginning his own sexual awakening.
And love at a constant source of attention to Peter was the catalyst for those desires.
At first, when Peter began to get aroused and pushy, love it would guide him back into
the larger space where the other two dolphins were so he could fuck them.
But after time she
came up with a handier solution.
Oh,
Lippier as love it noted quote Peter liked to be with me who would rub himself on my knee
or my foot or my hand and love it obliged. That's right gentlemen. We have now reached
the part of the story where a horny dolphin gets regular hand
jobs from his ESL teacher.
Well, or more realistically, a horny ESL teacher gets regular pity hand fucks from a
doll.
Like, well, however, it works itself out.
I'm just glad that this is the porn scenario we're going with because it's so hard to swim in the pizza box on your dick, man.
It's a really different.
So I'm gonna need to see some like these.
And I want to be sure here not to tell this as if it's some Eli style.
Really?
Like because, A.U.
It's not this fucking happened.
Unlike that other bullshit.
Here's what Margaret Loveitt said of these encounters.
These are her words, quote, I allowed that.
I wasn't even uncomfortable with it
as long as it wasn't rough.
It would just become part of what was going on.
Like an itch, just get rid of it, scratch it, move on.
And that's how it seemed to work out.
Wasn't private, people could observe it.
What?
Yeah.
Now I'm not at all sure how it changes
in the calculus of how weird it is to jerk off a dolphin
that you're tutoring that you let people watch.
But there you go.
It was just for the money.
I was so scared.
All right, it does change it, but I don't know how.
I don't know.
It makes it better.
I have a controversial opinion.
I think it's weird not to jerk off the dolphin you live with, right?
What are you fucking friends?
You're not roommates.
You're a crazy person who lives with dolphins.
You should fuck them.
Get friends owned by a dolphin.
Samarga continues on the subject of her sexual encounters with Peter, the dolphin,
quote, Peter was right there.
And he knew I was right there.
It wasn't sexual on my part sensuous.
Perhaps what?
It's to me that it made the bond closer, not because of the sexual activity,
but because of the lack of having to keep breaking.
And that's really all it was.
I was there to get to know Peter.
That was part of Peter.
Yes.
So he's always squeaking doing the dolphin language. I figure if I make him come, you
know, he'll be like, thank you, Margaret. I'm like, it's not like there's some more likely
route to teaching a parrot with one word.
So at some point, somehow the story of the woman who lived with and jerked off Dolphins
leaked and hustler turned it into a story and a draw in which is great.
You should totally look it up.
Love it.
Someone embarrassed by the story went to the news,
stand on the island and bought all the copies they had of hustler.
That turned out though that that wasn't all the copies of hustler
in the entire world.
And so the story was now out.
Okay, sorry.
Who the fuck sent the story to hustler?
Peter, what happened?
Dear Panthouse.
I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that.
I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say middle of the 1960s. Well, Dr. Lilly began to lose interest in teaching dolphins to talk because he had discovered
LSD and how it was awesome.
So, he sort of shifted gears to see what happens if you inject LSD into dolphins.
Turns out, by the way, absolutely nothing, which disappointed Lilly greatly.
Now, I started using the monkey LSD. Right. Yeah.
Right.
With startling speed, the lab coat wearing marine neuroscientists shifted into a full-blown
hippie, more concerned with spending his days tripping balls than watching a soggy volunteer
relieve the balls of a dolphin that couldn't get the hang of the letter.
Sorry.
So no, I got to admit, I did not have my money on discovered LSD after conceiving
of the dolphin handy experiment.
So still love it continued in her work and her bond with Peter grew.
Well, that relationship of having to be together sort of turned into really enjoying being
together and wanting to be together and missing him when he wasn't there
I did have a very close encounter with I can't even say dolphin again with Peter
But Lily yeah, it's a little weird right? Oh, I mean yeah, yeah, yeah
She she developed a sexual relationship with the dolphin and therefore couldn't call it a dolphin anymore?
Yeah, now it's just Peter. She's got the relationship with his Peter.
Well, Lily had soured on the experiment in 1966 they closed the lab. The dolphins were sent
off to another lab. This one was crazily, this was a lab assembled in an unused bank building.
That enclosure was much smaller than secret island Dolphin Lab. I had no natural
sunlight. Peter did not take well to all the changes. So remember how I mentioned early
on that dolphins can't be anesthetized because they'll stop breathing? This is actually kind
of interesting. That's because dolphins breathe and hold their breath in exactly the reverse
of the way that we do. So the default action, the unconscious reflects for humans, that's
to breathe, right? We have to think to act consciously in order to hold our breath. For dolphins,
it's the opposite. The act of breathing is the conscious act, not the reflex. A few weeks
after being separated from Margaret, he to the dolphin held his breath, sang to the bottom
of the enclosure and chose not to breathe again. The fuck Tom. Are you serious? Yeah, absolutely.
Yep. Committed suicide straight up. They? Yeah, absolutely. Yep, committed suicide.
Straight up, they all, like, they're just,
that's how dolphins kill themselves when they're sad.
Uh, yeah.
I feel like we got into Eli Land there for a second.
Here we go.
In the words of Andy Williamson,
the veterinarian at the lab, quote,
Margaret could rationalize it,
but when she left, could Peter,
here's the love of his life, gone.
Peter the Dolphin committed suicide
as a result of his broken heart.
Jesus Christ, next to iTunes views,
the citation needed, abused electrocuted elephants
and suicidal dolphins, zero stars.
Yeah, we're here. He's Jesus.
Margaret, it was all more of a summer fling and her feelings around Peter's death were
more practical.
Quote, I wasn't terribly unhappy about it.
Explains love it 50 years on.
I was more unhappy about him being in those conditions than not being at all.
Nobody was going to bother Peter.
He wasn't going to hurt. He wasn't gonna hurt.
He wasn't gonna be unhappy.
He was just gone.
And that was okay.
Odd.
That's how it was.
Ah, atheism.
We'll jerk off a dolphin,
but we won't get all sentimental about it.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Peter is fine.
He's that of massage parlor upstate at a farm. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha A doctor John Lilly resumed trying to communicate with dolphins, but at this point he was just
on acid like all the time.
So we tried to bunch a stupid shit like telepathy and music, which obviously didn't work, but
then I guess needed a jerking off of porpoise before his spelling does.
Whatever.
It's true.
Margaret moved on with her life,
marrying the photographer that captured the images
of her work and her love affair with Peter,
and eventually converting the lab that she worked
in secret dolphin labs.
She converted that into a home where she lived
and raised her three children.
Wow, okay.
That's like the perfect match of human beings.
That's amazing. perfect match of human beings. That's something amazing.
King match, impressive.
And I think we could all agree that when telling Margaret's story,
we knew this one was gonna have a happy end.
Who's?
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Mom, can I come out of the water now?
Not until I jerky off, young man.
She's just, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
That's it.
And, ah, there we go. That's just a bad one. That's a bad one. And there we go.
That is an ending.
If you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?
And no matter what you say going in, one of you is definitely going to catch feelings.
True.
That is true.
All right, Tom, are you ready for the quiz?
I think it's pretty obvious how ready I am because of the erection that I have.
Yes. That's the same thing.
Okay. Great.
So, are you looking at it?
What's the note?
Nope.
Yes, and I think this one.
Nope.
Nope.
No, yeah.
No, yeah.
It's great.
Tom, yeah, question for you, unrelated to all that, right?
What's the title of Margaret Love It's biography?
A, the Horpest-driven Femish. That's good. What's the title of Margaret Love It's biography a the
Horpest driven
Femmyshe
That's good.
The
Swipe your bottle nose like a
credit card
or see
get the
flipper
Jack the flipper
It's a
me Jack the flipper is good but but just just the timeliness of swipe
your bottom nose like a credit card, just that out of the park. Nicely done. Yes.
Wap reference. Oh, correct. Awesome.
Even more time. Yeah. When we record it, guys, even more time listeners. All right. So
just in case anyone was still in it out as to whether this was the greatest story of all
time, my question to you, Tom, is which of these additional absolutely true facts about this
story?
Would it be the biggest shame not to at least tack on at the end?
Hey, the fact that this entire research project was funded by NASA and they only, and they
only hold their funding because Dr. Lilly refused to stop giving the dolphins acid
even.
He didn't do anything.
It's a doing anything for him.
Either he's just like, I'm going to give it a two more.
He just had a thing for him.
The CIA had all the asses.
No, yeah, I'm going to do something with it.
Right.
B, when the BBC made a documentary about this story, a guy came forward with a story about
him fucking a lady dolphin for nine months and asked him to make a documentary about that too. He would need a BBC for that.
Oh, Cecil wins this question. Cecil wins this question. Or see the person who introduced Dr. Lily to LSD was constant stowling whose husband produced the movie flipper
All absolutely true statement
Unbelievable
That's amazing. Cecil wins that question.
Absolutely he does.
I do have one more question for you though, Tom.
Yes, sir.
When you're doing international C-Mammal hand job research. What is the best vessel to use?
Oh, there you go.
A, a dumb, which is the opposite of a sub.
B, an oil spanker, C, Yankee gripper, or D, a tugboat.
Oh shit.
Oh shit. Shit!
It's a tugboat!
That's so cool!
It's...
It is a tugboat. Absolutely. Oh.
Oh, right.
Well, season was the whole episode for time bomb.
I'm going to get descended to this.
I'm glad that that's how this work out.
It's so high, bro.
I'm so excited.
I'm so excited.
I'm so excited.
I'm so excited. I'm so excited.
I'm so excited.
I'm so excited.
I'm so excited.
I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I'm so excited. I'm so excited. share it with your friends because everyone will show your pie bro to you. Yeah.
All right.
Eli, what a two.
Right.
Amazing assay next week.
Oh, just in case we have a crown of
millions of issues after that one.
Yeah.
Coming right up.
All right.
Well, for Tom, Cecil Noah and Heath, I'm Eli Bosnick.
Thank you for hanging out with us today.
We'll be back next week and by then, I will be an expert on something else.
Between now and then, you can hear us yacking off on our various podcasts.
And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at
hatredon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five star review everywhere you can.
And if you'd like to get in touch with us check out past episodes connect
Listen to social media or check the show notes. We sure to check out citation pod dot com because after all
We're we to judge we jerk off ourselves, and I'm way less attractive
Oh man, that was a lot of dolphin come jokes
Yeah, oh good for sure Oh man, that was a lot of dolphin cum jokes.
Yeah. Oh good.
For sure, man, good.
Well, I'm glad we got the smart stuff in there too though.
That was nice.
Absolutely, I really get the episode to class.
That's absolutely a lot of classy stuff.
Yep.
So you guys wanna talk about dolphin cum some more?
Yeah, I was happy you said that.
Oh, so much more.
Tug boat, tug.
I just want to talk about dolphin come some more.
Yeah.
I was happy to say that.
Oh, so much more.
Tug boat, tug.