Science Extra: The anatomy of a scam
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It's never a dull year in the tech world, and 2024 was no exception. Artificial intelligence told us to put glue on our pizzas. Elon Musk shot into the political stratosphere like a SpaceX capsule to the space station. And our right to data privacy felt less certain than ever. But do we really care? Welcome to Science Extra on Radio National. I'm Belinda Smith, and today we're picking the tastiest bits from the past year in technology.

Coming up, as artificial intelligence becomes ever more embedded in daily life, what will it do to our mental health? And are we really ready for it psychologically? But first, I'm joined by not one, but two ABC Science Technology reporters, Angela Voipierre and James Pertill. Welcome. Thank you so much. Hello. In 2024, it was impossible to ignore tech billionaire Elon Musk's ride into the US government.

So after winning the election, Donald Trump said Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy would lead his new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, which is a joke referencing Musk's favourite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. I hate myself that I know that. But here in Australia, a couple of Musk's main consumer brands, that's Tesla and Starlink, are

They've been caught up in Musk's antics too. James, you had a look into these, didn't you? Yeah, so earlier in the year, I started wondering what Musk's reputation was doing to Tesla sales in Australia. It turns out that Tesla sales at that point were down about 12% on year. And I went to a brand kind of reputation agency called YouGov, and it turns out Tesla and Elon Musk's reputation in Australia had plummeted in the last two years.

And I spoke to a lot of buyers, Tesla buyers and potential Tesla buyers who said they were really turned off by his antics. That was a few months ago. Tesla sales are now down 20% in Australia this year. They've had eight months of lower sales.

So it does look like for some reason Tesla sales are down and I'd say Elon Musk's reputation is a part of that. And then, of course, the other consumer brand is Starlink. Now Starlink has become enormously popular in Australia over the last three years. It's about 200,000 users. It's a satellite internet service that connects people in remote and regional areas with really fast internet, much faster than what was previously available. And it's a very useful product to people in those areas.

But there is this concern that Elon Musk controls whether a country has access to that internet. He ultimately has control because it's a private company and he owns most of it. There's this kind of growing concern amongst communications analysts and defence strategists about we're sort of building this telecoms network that is ultimately controlled by one man and he's becoming increasingly active nationwide.

in terms of his politics. And we've seen that around the world this year. Yeah, massive. It's almost, I mean, it's always a bigger conversation whenever Elon Musk is involved, right? Because he's such a well-known character and so controversial for more reasons than I can even, you know, that we have time to name. But...

It's kind of the same problem whether or not it's Elon Musk, right? And it's just the fact that it's Elon Musk that's focused everyone's minds on this. You do have this evolving conversation, I think, in Australian government and defence circles where there's an awareness and a discomfort, a growing discomfort that with the knowledge that Australia is

has been always, but it's, it's an issue that we're an end user for a lot of technology. We see that conversation playing out when it comes to AI. It's the same with styling. It's the same with, you know, we haven't always had the strongest tech sector, you know,

We haven't always thought about it as a key Australian industry, but I think we saw that start to shift in 2024. There were these somewhat panicked conversations happening at a government level about, oh, we actually need to be producing and not just an end user with a lot of this space.

tech and especially infrastructure like internet. I mean, and remember, um, the, you know, the, the, the Google and Facebook shutdowns of, um, a couple of years ago when people were talking about, we need an Australian made search engine. We need Australian social media was a conversation that flared up again in 2024 as well, because you had this collective outcry, this anger about the effect of social media, particularly when it comes to young people, um,

And you had News Corp executives saying, why can't we have our own social media? And of course, there is a pretty longer answer to that question, but it worries everyone, continues to worry everyone. What are the odds of us getting our own social media? I honestly think it's pretty,

I think it's pretty low. And yeah, if you want to answer that question, I think it's actually less to do with the fact that we, you know, whether Australia has the capability and the, you know, the workforce to do it. I mean, yes, that would be a challenge, you could argue, but it's more to do with the fact that that is such a crowded space right now. I mean, we've seen, you know, speaking of Elon Musk and the reputation of his consumer products, Twitter, Facebook,

I should say X, diminish in popularity, particularly around the US election and people, you know, progressives almost as a protest moving across to blue sky. But there are a bunch of Twitter or X clones out there and they've all really struggled to break through because it is a very crowded market now. It's no longer 2007 or 2010 where you could

have a good idea and it would just cut through. The whole point of these social media platforms is you need scale, right? You need so many users. And the idea of just having Australians or every country having their own social media platform. Defeats the purpose. And then you apply it to something like AI, where AI companies are spending billions of dollars on training these AI foundation models. And there's cause for Australia to do the same. And I think ultimately we're kind of just a victim of the size of our society.

of our market, of how many people there are on the sides of our economy. And yet the whole world uses the products that are most often produced in America, sometimes China, right? So, but you know, yeah, you have hit on something there is that like the joy of being online is the globalised nature of it. So if you are coming up with a social media product, it's not enough for it just to succeed in Australia. In order for it to actually compete, it would have to succeed in

you know, across at least the Anglosphere. An Australia-wide social media platform would be like, I don't know, a giant WhatsApp chat with everyone involved. That sounds chaotic and I don't want to be a part of it. I am muting that chat. And everyone in the world has to talk about Australian politics. There's no choice. Yeah, no, I'm out. Okay. Look, another tech theme from the past year was data privacy or lack thereof in many cases. It feels like

Massive data breaches just happened all the time. And in the first half of last year alone, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner was informed of 527 data breaches. And one of those was the MediSecure hack, which is quite hilariously named, in which nearly 13 million people in Australia had their data stolen, including their name, date of birth and what medications they were prescribed.

And then there's all the data we give up willingly, such as what we hand over to social media platforms, global or Australian focused. And all of this scraped and stolen data is bought and sold and shared hundreds and hundreds of times a day. One of the endpoints of this data economy is scam text messages. And like I get heaps of Australia Post scam text messages, especially this time of year around the holidays.

Now, Ange, you looked into how scammers seem to know when we're expecting a package, even outside of these kind of holiday times. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, like you said, Belle, I think we do often assume, oh, it's, you know, the Optus hack or the Medibank or Medisecure hack and that's how they got my data. Or, oh, they've, you know, scraped it somehow from Facebook or whatever. And it's all quite, you know, murky, but we assume it's those things. It turns out, particularly when it comes to those parcel scammers,

scams and the toll notice scams as well. Yeah, so many of those. You've got an overdue toll notice if you don't want us to suspend your license, pay up. That may have more to do with a third category of data, which is entirely legal in the way that it's collected. It's consumer data. Whenever you make a purchase online or whenever you browse the internet, there is a

invisible but sophisticated web that is trading all your activity, all that data of what you've been doing online, what you've been buying, where you've been hanging out. And it's location-based as well, where you've been going, hence the toll notice scam. And trading it out in fractions of a second. This is called real-time bidding. So this is the system that places personalized ads online.

on every webpage, every app that you open. So, you know, the kind of conspiracy theory that your phone is listening to you? This is the thing. It's actually half true. Your phone is listening to you, but not in the way that you imagine, not like a cup to the door, more of an internecine advertising tech, like digital advertising system that...

builds psychographic profiles on pretty much everyone who's been on the internet. Now, it doesn't have your name attached to it. The theory is what the ad industry would say is that we don't attach personal information to it. You've got a unique identifier. You're just a number. But we know that this number connected to this browser, this computer or this phone likes the following things. And to a really...

creepy degree. Like the level of detail they go into was mind blowing when I looked at this story. So it's things like, I mean, some of it's funny. It's like, we know whether this person prefers Fanta to Sprite, for example. But then it gets pretty dark. It's like, we know if someone is maybe a survivor of sexual abuse or we can infer or know that this person is

a Catholic. So that's the kind of level of detail. We know if they're a problem gambler, we know if they've visited a casino a few times this week. In terms of how that data moves around, like, yeah, advertisers buy it. It's useful to advertisers.

It's also useful to scammers. Sure. And there aren't great controls on who buys that data. I think we should just call it and say the internet has gotten worse. I mean, let's just step back, get some perspective. You wake up, you've got a message trying to scam you with a toll notice. You log on, like the internet's broken. Either it's a meltdown or Google search is just delivering AI sludge.

Some scammers trying to get your details. Like this thing that we've... Your inbox is overflowing. You've got notifications from 10 platforms. What have we created? Like this wasn't the dream. Yeah, it was not. Yeah, the dream definitely soured at some point. This is Science Extra on Radio National. I'm Belinda Smith, joined by ABC technology reporters Angela Varpierre and James Pertille.

Now, if 2023 was the year of breathless hype around artificial intelligence, 2024 felt a little more measured. You know, sure, there were still standout moments like when Google's AI told us to eat a small rock a day and put glue on our pizza, as well as the emergence of more realistic deep fakes, including one of the ABC's Dr. Carl supposedly touting the benefits of pills on Facebook. But all in all, any advances in AI seemed less earth shattering than in the year before.

Now, three of the leading generative AI companies, that's OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, they all seem to not quite reach a plateau with their technology last year, but their newer models didn't seem to pack as much of a punch as their previous ones. Why was that? I have my own view about this. I mean, I know that there are...

headwinds in terms of, you know, they had a big breakthrough. They had massive breakthroughs with generative AI towards, well, throughout 2022, we saw that playing out in 2023 and 2024, like, you know, reaching a kind of consumer level. Yeah, chat GPT just took the world by storm. Right, right. And that was a huge step change. That was a big leap forward. And so by comparison, everything is going to seem better

less significant than that. Like, I actually, I think there's something, you know, we've become accustomed to the magic of it rather quickly. And I think there are pretty serious improvements happening. But it's not a story that is told very easily, because it's not an interesting story in some respects. It's like, oh, it can do this

you know, new trick or whatever, or, you know, this thing. But it takes maybe a bit more explaining to understand what the nature of that leap forward is. And so people, like it's not a media friendly narrative. So I don't think the story gets told much. The breakthroughs

in 2022 were essentially, like the reason we've got ChatGPT and all the things that we somewhat take for granted now was because of a breakthrough in the understanding around how AI learns and that it can learn a lot better. And it's just a much more powerful model if you chuck

heaps of data into it. It's what we call deep learning. It's just giving it these enormous data sets, you know, that have been hoovered up from all over the internet, including our personal data and trained, used to train these AI models. And that's got us to a certain point, but maybe also this sort of, you know, those

leading labs are finding the limit of how helpful deep learning is. And they're going to, and this is something they've been saying for a couple of years, you know, sort of leading engineers is that

we're going to have to find new tricks to make AI smarter. Like deep learning, chucking more and more and more and more and more data into the mix may not get us to like human level AI. Yeah, I think it's those two things. I think we've hit a wall with deep learning and we're also a bit numb to the improvements. Yeah, right. Yeah. I guess those big, those big

big breakthroughs, they all came in quick succession as well. It's hard to shock us. It's hard to shock us these days. It really is. We've become very desensitised to this kind of thing. Yeah. James? I don't know if it's just a matter of us not appreciating AI companies enough. Not what I said, but go on. No, I mean, like, I take your point that, you know, 2024 was kind of the crash after the sort of hype, the amazing excitement of 2023 and AI. Yeah.

But it's also the year that more was spent on AI than any other year. I mean, trillions of dollars on training these models. So they have to be significantly better. I mean, the scaling up has to have a return. And there have been several reports out saying, well, what is the trillion dollar sort of problem that they're solving? And I've been asking myself that, you know, like I find AI useful in some ways, like with transcription,

But a lot of the time it's delivering me Google results that I don't want. It's delivering me spam kind of images on Facebook that I don't want. Like I would say that my interactions with AI, at least the visible ones, they're like a mix of positive and negative, but they're not

They're not a trillion dollar problem. Yes. Okay. So I think it's interesting. Yeah. What is it? What is the problem we're trying to solve? I think that trillion dollars is not necessarily being spent to just to make AI smarter. It's to work out how to make it useful. It's like, it's actually like,

R&D, it's research and development for the use cases, right? Which is a separate problem to like making super smart AI because we actually have super smart AI. It's all about how you then roll it out. And, you know, 2024 was also the year we started to see, you know, rubber hit the road with a lot of AI regulations.

We're still waiting for some of those to come into effect, definitely. But maybe money being spent on trying to get the super smart AI that has already been developed for

into consumer products in a way that is going to be compliant, is not going to be, you know, savaged and criticised by the media and attract the ire of governments and also be, you know, there's a business case for it. All right. Maybe in 2025 we'll be talking about this again and I'll be the cheerleader for... It is a bubble. I'm not saying it's not a bubble. It is a bubble. Don't get me wrong. James, you mentioned the, you know, trillions of bucks that are being spent on...

on just training AI models. And there's other costs as well associated with AI, like the computing costs and the massive environmental impact that the massive data centres have. You know, we need these massive data centres to run it all. Are those costs outweighing these, I mean, I don't want to say incremental advances, but maybe the benefits that we're sort of getting from AI in

Yeah, well, that's it. I mean, there's the amount that we've spent on training AI, but then there's also the amount of energy they're consuming, like Microsoft...

And Amazon. And so they're now looking at building nuclear power plants. Well, firing up old ones. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. We might get there, but in the meantime, we're going to be burned through huge amounts of energy, water, like the amount of e-waste by 2030 was something like 13 billion iPhones a year. So, I mean, the narrative around AI is often that it's sort of this like ephemeral, abstract, intangible.

but it's like very embodied, you know. It's concrete. It's concrete. It's energy. It's water. It's silicon. It's data centres. Yeah. And I think that people are starting to become more aware of that through 2024. And Angie's point earlier about the training data, that's also people becoming aware of like, oh, that's my image that's being used today.

as part of trillions of other images to train these data sets? The devastating thing is that I think, you know, there is this data heist going on to train AI. In fact, it's mostly already taken place. We are starting to see a regulatory response now, but it's kind of a window of time and it's coming to an end. Like before...

very long. And I would argue before any of that meaningful legal pushback can happen, the data will all have been consumed. That's the theme of 2024. It's like, what have we built and what have we already given away? And we're slowly becoming aware that it's

It's like, it's too late. We've already given away so much data and we've already built this internet that just thrives on surveillance. I do want to say though, I think people are desensitized to it. I think there is a sense of hopelessness, but I think that's a very dangerous place for us to let ourselves reside. I don't think anyone wins if we, or except maybe some of these enormous companies, if

If we say, oh, well, too late. Let's not bother fixing the Privacy Act. Let's not bother prosecuting these things. Let's not bother making complaints. Let's not bother covering it. I think... It's not too late. It can always get worse. LAUGHTER

Grim, grim, grim. Sorry. On that note, Angela Voipierre and James Pertill, ABC technology reporter extraordinaires, thank you so much for that lovely chat. Would we say it was? Anyway, look, you're welcome. So much fun. As we head into an AI future, one question that remains to be answered is how will it affect our mental health and our identity?

Sana Khadar from Radio National's All In The Mind wanted to explore this question. So she spoke to University of New South Wales cognitive neuroscientist, Joel Pearson. I work at a university. I have young kids at school. Education will radically change. And I'm not just talking about we're going to be taught by an AI, which will happen. Okay.

I'm talking about what is education? Like what are we learning? Why do we need to learn? If each of us are going to have built-in versions of AI assistance, we're going to have not only all the knowledge of humanity at our fingertips 24-7, we're going to have personal assistants which can outthink us, that don't get tired, which don't get grumpy, which don't suffer the biological things that we suffer from. What is the purpose of an education?

I'm almost thinking, what is the purpose of us then? Well, yes, that's where you're jumping ahead. That's where I'm going to come to, right? And it is a little bit scary, right? The way we try and get people to memorize and learn stuff online

so they can then do something may not be the way we need to educate in the future. But more broadly, a large part of society is built around companies, people working companies and companies do things and produce products and make things that other people then buy with money. That will likely all change. Companies won't be what they are today. Economics won't be what it is today.

And then jobs won't be what they are today. So when you think about this, most roads lead to some version of what might be called universal basic income that us humans don't need to work for a paycheck in a job that we don't want to to get money to buy the things. That structure will change in various ways. We don't know how that will unfold or when it will, but it's pretty hard to come up with an alternative to that over some extended period.

One decade, two decades. We're going to get there, some version of that at some point. Yeah. How far away do you think that is? It's hard to know. 10 years maybe. Wow. In 10 years, we could potentially have the entire system of how we work and operate. I think so, right? I mean, I'm not a fan of... That's probably wrong, but you can make predictions. Other people...

2029 is a year that I hear a lot of people talking about. So it is useful to make predictions. With AI, almost all predictions so far have been wrong. Things are happening faster than everyone, including the CEOs of these companies, have predicted. Is the psychological implication of that kind of thing just this generalized upending of our purpose and our role and how we interact in the world? Like everything's going to change and so that can't help but completely mess with our heads.

Yes. See, I told you it's going to be all fun and games in this episode. So what does that mean, right? If we don't have to work for a living the way we do now, is that like everyone gets to retire? We all get to do our hobbies?

That's kind of one way to think about it. Now, the potential downside of that, which I don't hear a lot of people talking about, is we know that retirement is pretty bad for health, right? Particularly in men, historically. Mental health crashes when people retire. People get depressed. So we don't know if we scaled out this kind of semi-retirement, work on your hobby thing, universal basic income at scale, it wouldn't happen all at once. But we don't know the effects. Would it be catastrophically negative? Right.

What I'm worrying about is, and what I hear from, I talk to people, talk to companies and work with companies is uncertainty.

Now, we know there's lots of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that humans and primates and basically all animals don't like uncertainty, right? Our brains have evolved to fear uncertainty. And we're already faced with a lot of uncertainty in the workforce and people are already uncomfortable and anxious about this. And it's about to go up, you know, a hundred or a thousand fold in the coming years, right? And we're going to have to start thinking about uncertainty like that. We've got to have this uncertainty revolution where we

find ways of making people more comfortable with uncertainty. And that's what I think, that's what I'm talking about when I talk about the psychological impact of this coming AI revolution. Okay, we've jumped way ahead to the future, a future scenario. Let's bring it back to the present and AI in the present and the psychological impacts of that now. I feel like

You know, Taylor Swift recently was the target of deepfake pornography. So porn images of her that were not real were seen by millions of people. That to me, as a woman, has to be one of the scariest aspects of AI right now, what it can do right now. Yeah. So that's so deepfakes. They've been around for a while, but they've just taken a step up last year.

Not only can they look real, you can actually now do real-time deepfake. So you could do that in a video conference on FaceTime. So I can have a screen next to me now and I can be talking to you, but on the screen it could show someone different and a different voice. You can do that in real time and it looks accurate. There were demonstrations of this about almost 12 months ago now. Oh, wow. So that's where the tech is at.

And you're right. So about 90, above 90%, I think it's 96% of deepfakes so far have been non-consensual pornography, basically, and like revenge or otherwise. Did you say 90%? Above 90%. 96% was the numbers from last year. That's terrifying. So yeah, not off to a great start when it comes to deepfakes.

And then you have all the news versions of this, they're trying to create political turmoil. We're going to see a lot of this coming up, you know, the US elections coming up very quickly. But we know from psychology that once you see misinformation and you take it in, and then I tell you afterwards, hey, that was a fake. It was misinformation. Forget about it. You can't really forget about it. That information sticks with you. And it's quite, it's kind of sticky. This narrative glues into your head and it's,

attempts to try and undo that don't always work that well. Now, most of the research on this has not been done with videos and deepfake because it's so new. So there's a couple of papers out last year on this, but most of it's been done with written stuff. But there are predictions that when it comes to video with audio, these effects will be even stronger. We don't really know. There's not a good comparison of written versus still photos versus videos, for example. It feels like we're just staring down a future where...

It's impossible to differentiate in our minds between what is real and what is not. And like what we've already seen from misinformation in the last 10 years and how that warps people's sense of reality and people have alternative facts and alternative truths. That's just going to get a whole lot worse. We're just going to be living...

with our own sense of reality based on whichever chatbots we're interacting with or what's in our orbit. Yeah. Fun times. Party time. Yeah, fun times. Sorry. So sorry, everyone. I don't mean to be the bringer of scary news and anxiety. Is there any reason to feel hopeful or optimistic about the arrival of AI then? Yeah, so I don't... From the psychological point of view. Like I said, my mission here is to point out the negatives...

And my hope is that if I could be effective and all the other people that could come along and lobby this with me, we can, if we have the opportunity to lobby governments, lobby universities, lobby companies to pay attention to this psychological dimension of this and not just put it off and wait for it to happen later on when it's too late, then we could avoid these things.

So if I'm wrong, fantastic. I'm happy to be wrong when it comes to a lot of these things because that means we're in better shape than we could be. And in the meantime, here's how Joel says you can start to think and plan for all of this change heading our way. I think figuring out what humanity means to us and how we can be more of ourselves, leaning into that, whether that's emotion, whether that's

whether that's leaning into intuition, something I've studied a lot of, figuring out what is the core essentials of being human and how do you want to create your own life in ways that might be independent from all this tech uncertainty, tech noise happening around you. Right. Is that going for a walk in nature?

Or is it just spending time with physical humans and loved ones? Maybe it's woodwork. I don't know. There's lots of, for me, it's the work and discovery. And I'm trying to figure out how I can use AI to help me do more of the things I really enjoy. I think over the next decade, we're all going to be faced with

sort of soul-searching journeys like that. And so why not start thinking about it now? My hope, as I said before, is that a lot of things I've talked about won't be as catastrophic as I'm making out. Right. But I think raising the alarms now can avoid that pain and suffering later on, and that's what I want to do. You can hear more of that chat with Professor Joel Pearson on All In The Mind. Jump into the ABC Listen app and search for scarier than killer robots, why your mind isn't ready for AI.

Now to the weather that changed us, and today, drought. When the millennium drought finally broke, it was the first time some children had seen rain. The big dry, which affected eastern Australia for a decade, delivered more than cracked earth. It changed how we thought about and valued water.

It also heralded star ratings, you know, those stickers you see on dishwashers and such. So we could buy appliances that save water. There's a moment Margaret Cook remembers, nearly a decade into Australia's longest drought on record. It was about 2009 and she was living in Ipswich, just west of Brisbane. She was in the kitchen chatting with some friends who were visiting with their young kids of similar age to hers. When she heard a sound she'd not heard in a long time.

And we all went and sat on our front veranda on the steps because we were so excited. And the smell, the smell of rain is just magic when you haven't seen rain for that long. My favourite, favourite sound is rain on my tin roof. And I didn't hear that for years. And my favourite smell is rain on a hot summer's day when it hits the grass.

We didn't mow for six years. It just became a dust bowl. We didn't even have prickles. And in Queensland, when you don't have prickles, you know it's bad. She and her friends watched in awe as years of dust began rolling off the trees in the pavement. And you see things become green again. We've got a big...

Morton Bay fig in the front yard. So he suddenly bring leaves again. So the adults are pretty excited, which is amazing in itself. But the kids, oh, they were delirious. As the rain kept pouring down, puddles started forming. These kids were just running and jumping and laughing and just having the best time. It was probably the best day of their childhood because none of them had seen it, that it had been born in this drought. Aged three and five,

They had never seen a puddle before. It was just such a joyous day. That's the word, just joy and delight and laughter for all of us. For the adults getting to see the kids do this, I'm not sure we jumped in the puddles ourselves, but it was tempting. This was not the day the drought broke. It was one of the many false promises they'd grown used to over the decade. But it sticks in Margaret's mind like it was yesterday.

because it's when she realised the Australia of her childhood was not the same as her kids. It really was an unusual experience and they'd never seen a sprinkler and they'd never seen a puddle so their relationship with water was just so different from my own.

It is that sort of moment where you realise what you've been missing and you realise, wow, we really have been in drought. We have not had this rain. I'm Tyne Logan, and this is The Weather That Changed Us. Today, the story of the Millennium Drought, a decade of drought that impacted nearly all of Australia's population, threatening drinking water supplies, degrading major rivers and ecosystems,

and pushing farming communities to the brink. It drastically changed the way we think about and use water in every part of our life. It was such a tough period from 2000 through to 2010. Living through it was quite difficult and, you know, just remembering the hardships through that period of time there. If you look up the start date of the Millennium Drought, a few different numbers will come up.

Some say it's the late 90s, others say it was the early 2000s. And that's because drought doesn't hit like other disasters do. It's creeping. Droughts, they seem to sneak up on you slowly. I mean, they just, it's like a slow burn. Brendan Cullen is a sheep and cattle farmer who's spent his life in far western New South Wales.

and he loves it out there. You know, living that life on these sheep and cattle stations, it can be a massive gift. It's basically pastoral land and you would presume it is what it would look like, you know, thousands of years ago. They're just rolling sandhills in some areas and big giver flats, beautiful stony ranges. It's majestic. But the Millennium Drought, that was tough.

even for someone who was used to managing water. With droughts and long droughts like that, you never know how long they're going to last. You know, they might last 12 months or they might last five years. But with the millennium drought, it was just a constant because it was a bloody long time. I'll admit, when I first started looking into drought, I initially thought it meant no rain, or at least barely any rain. But that's not right. There was rain.

There just wasn't enough. The millennium drought was a series of droughts within that 10-year period. And I suppose the lack of respite through that long period of time was quite evident. I mean, I can feel it now talking to you, the benefits of getting rain in such a dry period. It's such a huge relief because it means that you can actually stop for five minutes.

and the country would respond magnificently. But it might only give you three or four months of respite and then you fall back into another long, dry spell. It meant over the course of 10 years, Brendan's world became drier and drier and dustier and dustier. And a heads up, the next couple of minutes include some distressing descriptions of farming in the drought. So if you'd rather not hear that, jump forward.

I've got a lot of pictures of dust storms and, you know, the like. They're quite spectacular when they roll in, but they're bloody ugly and there's just someone's grabbed a shovel and just thrown a heap of dirt everywhere, over everything. And so your first port of call could be get up in the morning and clean.

before you even get a start. Yeah. And then what happens over time? You start getting sick of it. So you only clean certain areas of your house because you know in two days' time, it's going to be covered in dirt again. When you close your eyes and think about that time, what did life look like? Yeah, well, the first thing that pops to mind is death.

And I don't like to talk about it in a way that that's what it's all about. Drought is about death. But the realities are is that there's just sheer hardships and the struggles. For example, a sheep getting bogged in dams and having to wait out on top of three or four or five bodies to pull out one live one. And, you know, the animal's completely caked in mud and crows sitting on top of them pecking their eyes out and pecking their arse out while they're still alive.

and then having to put those animals down. And no matter how hard you try, there's always a few that slip through the cracks. I think it gets to a point, well it certainly did for me, is when things are so bad, you just want anything with a heartbeat and a set of lungs, you want to see live. It wouldn't matter whether they're a wild pig,

an emu, kangaroo, you know, I do have a hatred for crows, I must say, but anything with a heartbeat and a set of lungs, you want to see a lot. There was little doubt things in Western New South Wales were bad. Brendan describes it as a time where there was a lot of pain. Farmers were facing financial ruin and had to decide to completely give up the farm, go bankrupt or sell what they could to get through.

Back then, men in rural Australia didn't really talk about mental health. Even today, the suicide rate in remote Australia is nearly double what it is in the cities. Brendan saw the drought grind people down. Really, it was about getting out of bed and just going as hard as you possibly can to counteract the misery of it all, really.

But what made the Millennium Drought so significant, apart from its length, is that it wasn't just far western New South Wales. Almost all of regional Australia outside of the tropics was in the same situation and

so were the cities. Often you've got a situation where Queensland might be in drought but New South Wales or Victoria isn't. But when it's a national drought and it's going west as well, where are we going to get that water from? It's not like somebody else has got lots of spare water. So it really is quite scary. Back in Ipswich, Margaret Cook watched as the effects of drought...

overtook everyone's life. You just see the world sort of deteriorate in front of your very eyes. It's soul-destroying. All around Australia, water supplies were dwindling. Years of not quite enough rain adding up to the point where it wasn't just the lawns that were drying up. Australian households were staring down the barrel of a terrifying reality.

that soon there might not be enough water to drink. Water shortages are starting to be felt across more and more of the country. As the Murray's flow slows, there are concerns the taps may soon stop running too. People across southeast Queensland will be drinking recycled sewage by late next year. It's a record dry spell for Melbourne and across the state. We have here a race that's coming down to the line as a photo finish as to whether we run out of water

or get some piece of infrastructure finished on time. - As the drought dragged into the second half of the decade, Australia was overcome by a mania about water use. - It sort of became the national obsession. We were all talking about it. We were all talking about would it rain? If there was a cloud in the sky, we'd get hopeful. We were obsessed with the chance of rain. - Each night and each morning,

Australians would turn to the news to see how much water was left. The thing that was really affecting South East Queensland is Wivenhoe Dam.

Wyvernhoe Dam is our main dam for providing water and it was just going down and down and down. Then there were the water restrictions. We weren't allowed to use our sprinkler every second day and then we weren't allowed to use sprinklers at all and then we weren't allowed to use hoses and then we were only allowed to use buckets of water if it came out of our dirty water from the showers. Reminders of the drought started to fill letterboxes in the forms of leaflets and egg timers for your shower.

and governments poured money into programs to reduce water use with incentives for water tanks or washing machines, setting targets of how much each household should aim to use each day. We each save a little, we all save a lot. Together, let's target 155 litres per person per day. For tips and more information, search Target 155.

People were even told to turn on their neighbours if they were doing the wrong thing. Anyone with a green lawn was under suspicion. We were encouraged to dob in a friend if they were using sprinklers, so that's pretty divisive when you start, you know, dobbing in your neighbours when they're using water. We got a tank and you had to display that sign, tank water, and make that as obvious as possible. It meant that...

Everyone thought about water all the time. Almost every city in Australia drastically cut its water consumption. Melbourne households were using nearly half of the water they did at the start of the drought.

and Brisbane even less, going from 300 litres a day per person to just 127. We as a society are so lucky that we turn on a tap and seemingly endless water just comes out. We don't have to think about whether we can wash or clean or cook, but it never ever dawns on us that one day it might not come out of the tap. And then...

Finally. Across Australia, you're with Fran Kelly, Radio National Breakfast.

Well, the old saying, every cloud has a silver lining, has perhaps never rung more true than this week in southeastern Australia. A big smile this morning, mate. Yeah, what a wonderful weekend. The deluge has turned around the drought situation of some Queensland farmers. Oh, it's a brilliant sound. It's a long time since we've had a good, solid winter rain. You can drink it now and it tastes beautiful, so thanks to the darling that we've got fresh water. Yeah, somebody said to me the other day, if you're not smiling now, you're hard to please and you're a whinger.

everything just bursting out and starting all over again. And that's nature's way and that's the way it should be. It's been over a decade since the drought broke across Australia and it's fair to say in that time we've gotten a bit slack.

Gone are the days of egg timers in the shower. People are starting to wash their cars on the driveway. They're starting to hose their driveways again. We're allowed to sprinkle as much as we like. That sort of thing's gone. But even with that obsession now in our past, we haven't gone backwards, not entirely.

And that's because many of the measures from the millennium drought are still in our lives today. Our coal stations don't use drinking water anymore, they use recycled water. Farmers use recycled water. So if we're looking at how impactful that drought was, it's really, really significant. Dr Margaret Cook is actually an environmental historian and has spent time studying the millennium drought. So she knows this subject well.

And she says the fingerprints of the drought, they're everywhere. Like how we share water across the nation's food bowl. It's a watershed moment for federalism, the Prime Minister's bold 10-year, $10 billion plan to find a solution for Australia's water crisis. Central to it is an attempt to address water over-allocation in the Murray-Darling Basin. In a protracted drought and with the prospect of long-term climate change...

We need radical and permanent change. Also, recycled water and desalination plants in our capital cities. Adelaide will get a desalination plant. This is necessary. It's about water security for the future. It's an insurance policy for the future. They're even inside your home. Want an example? Go take a look at your toilet. If you're in Australia, my bet is it's got two buttons.

One half flush, one full flush. Standard, right? Not when the millennium drought kicked off. Jewel flush toilets actually invented in Australia in the 1980s in South Australia. Koroma invented it. But it hadn't really been widely taken up. By the end of the drought, the jewel flush toilet was in more than 80% of households.

And it's not just Jallu. The majority of Australian households now have a water-saving showerhead. The use of those more than doubled during the millennium drought. In the laundry, our washing machines now have water-efficient ratings on them, as do our dishwashers.

That star rating was also an initiative introduced during the millennium drought. It would be impossible to buy a washing machine now that did not have that star rating. So every household, without having to do anything, without even having to think about drought, is actually using less water by virtue of the appliances we have in our houses. So we're not going to go back, which is so good. That's actually a really exciting outcome of the millennium drought.

When the rains came in Western New South Wales, Brendan Cullen's world was transformed. I still remember to this day when that drought broke and the amount of water that just was everywhere and how the country responded. It was unbelievable.

all your native species come back. Our sandhills were covered in marsupial mouse tracks. The bird life was extraordinary. The creeks were filled with yabbies. Droughts are hard.

But Brendan says we're much better at looking after each other during those periods now. I will volunteer for a program called We've Got Your Back, which is a peer support model with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and Lifeline. So I was diagnosed with depression in 2015 and a lot of that was caused by drought, succession and a lot of other stuff that was hidden in my back pocket that I was unable to get rid of. And what that model is about is

You being a portal between those people that are doing it tough and the services that are available to those individuals. Do you think it would have happened without the Millennium Drought? Honestly, yes, but it pushed it along a lot further because people were reaching out, screaming out for help, and they didn't know where to look. Because by the end of the drought, almost every city... And the Aussie spirit never leaves you. You know, we're driven...

by hardships and having to work through really tough periods and finding a resolve there that can keep you forging forward. And you hope as time goes by, you can share that information and get people to recognise and understand what it's like to live through that. Of all Earth's continents, only Antarctica gets less rain than Australia.

But even still, it's easy to forget what drought is like when you're not in it. Margaret says remembering the lessons learnt during that time will be vital for when, not if, we find ourselves in drought again. I think for governments and individuals that have lived through the drought...

It will never be the same again. I don't have such long showers. I turn off the tap when I'm cleaning my teeth. And the challenge, I think, is we have to keep that alive. We are definitely going to get droughts again. We may get bigger droughts. With climate change, it is pretty likely we will get longer and bigger droughts. We never know when.

We never know how severe and we never know how long it's going to be, but the one certainty is we will get another one. We actually did make some amazing changes in the millennium drought. I don't want to have to wait for the next severe drought to have to do that again. I'd like to do it now. And you can catch the full season of The Weather That Changed Us on the ABC Listen app.

That's all from Science Extra today. I'm Belinda Smith. I'll be back next week with the biggest stories from science over the past year, including a mystery solved by earthquake scientists. Have an excellent day. Bye.

Hollywood, it's all glitz and glamour and crazy headlines. But when it comes to the natural world, how accurate are the movies? Are father-son connections universal, like in The Lion King? Should groundhogs really be predicting anything? I mean, they sleep for eight months of the year. I'm Anne Jones and I'm going to break down Hollywood myths and tell you what they got right and what they lied about in my new series, Hollywood Lied To Us, on Radio National.

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