In this episode, Steve and Cam provide their top three tech/AI highlights from 2024 and provide their top predictions for 2025.

FUTURISTIC 34

[00:00:00] SS: Recording in progress. Welcome to the future. I’m Steve Sammartino, and introducing the great OG of podcasting, Mr Cameron Reilly.

[00:00:18] CR: Turning me on, Steve. Slow down. Um, don’t turn me on until later in the show. Welcome to The Futuristic Episode 34. We’re recording this 20th of December, 2024. How are you, my little buddy?

[00:00:31] SS: I’m good. I’m great. It’s big. It’s been a big year, Cameron.

[00:00:38] CR: It has been a big year, Steven. I, I suggested to you last week that we don’t do a show last week, because OpenAI started doing this thing called the 12 Days of OpenAI, where every work day for the last 11 days, uh, they have done a live stream where they’ve launched a new thing, a new feature, a new function of ChatGPT.

[00:01:00] CR: And there’s one more day to go and I said let’s wait till next week because there’s probably something big that’s going to come up and as it turns out like Friday US time, which will be tomorrow our time, they’ll do day 12 and hopefully that’s going to be the biggest thing and we’ve sort of missed the chance to do that but even the last 11 days have been insane like there’s been so much coming out in the last 11 days of the year and while they’re coming out with stuff Google have been coming out with stuff to One up them on their stuff that they’ve come out with, so it’s just been this crazy period of leapfrogging going on in the last couple of weeks.

[00:01:38] CR: But it has been a crazy year, and your idea for the show this year is for us to do like our top things of the year and our predictions for next year, is that what you want to do?

[00:01:47] SS: That’s right. So I was thinking the top three from this year, there’s zillions, but we’re kind of trying to at least squeeze it into an hour or so. And top five each for next year. And interestingly, if I think of some of mine, there’s, there’s a bit of overlap, but I’m going to try and keep them separate. I just did my tech and AI transfer 20, 25 and did 20.

[00:02:08] SS: It could have been a hundred long. Uh, there is some overlap, but that’s what I think we do.

[00:02:15] CR: Okay, well, uh, why don’t you kick it off with your top three things from 2024?

[00:02:22] SS: Okay. So my first one is AI recursion, and it’s not a thing, but I think it’s kind of like a zeitgeist or an event. Never, ever have I seen things get so much better so quickly. Like the iterative. Uh, improvements and features that are coming in. And I think OpenAI has been extraordinary. The amount of new things that they’ve had this year, just from the LLM itself, getting better computation, uh, ability to do maths and not just language stuff, uh, imagery, video, Sora, uh, live video feed on what you’re looking at, web integration, which has been huge as well.

[00:03:11] SS: So. Just the recursion happening so quickly, and it’s even blowing my mind, and we know that change is exponential, but it feels like we’ve finally hit the exponential part of the exponential. If that makes sense, the doubling and the recursion is just quick. Let’s just think about Apple do annual events, and things didn’t change that quick, but in the kind of 24 months they’ve been in the Zeitgeist, it’s, like you say, it’s every other month there’s something, and it’s getting quicker and quicker.

[00:03:40] SS: You just mentioned they’re 12 days of open AI.

[00:03:44] CR: Yeah.

[00:03:44] SS: That has never happened in tech.

[00:03:47] CR: No. Look, it, yeah, um, I think you’re right. Recursion is crazy, and this is the sort of stuff that, uh, Kurzweil has been predicting for decades that when you get to the part of the asymptotic part of the exponential curve, that things just go insane. And it,

[00:04:12] SS: It’s incomprehensible speed and, and the recursion itself. And I imagine that this is part of it is that the tool itself is inventing new parts of the tool. Like it’s, it seems that that’s pretty clear. And I don’t think we’ve really been there yet. I think this is the first time because we’ve got, you know, Code that understands code and can self improve.

[00:04:34] SS: I think we’re actually hitting the technology self improvement element of that exponential. And I think that’s why everything is so radical right now. So for me, that was my number one thing this year that blew my mind. Uh, yeah, iterative pace on steroids. That was my number one. My number two. Alright, keep going.

[00:04:57] CR: well, I was just going to say, it’s not just like software, you know, building software, but the ability for people to Increasingly, just to have an idea and then develop it within a week. You know, I saw one of the, I think it was yesterday’s 12 days of OpenAI thing. They launched 1 800 CHAT GPT, which is

[00:05:21] CR: where you can call,

[00:05:23] SS: don’t know what it is, but I love it already because I just love a retro. I hope they’ve got a truck that drives down highways with that written on the side. I hope that so

[00:05:31] SS: much.

[00:05:31] CR: they had it flashing up on the screen while they were doing the live stream in like this really cheesy late night infomercial font. It was fantastic. If you’re in the U. S., you can call 1 800 CHAT GPT and just talk to the AI and ask it questions. If you’re outside of the U. S., You can use WhatsApp to call it and I’m, they were saying it’s, if, if you’re, if you don’t have internet connectivity, but you need to talk to ChatGPT and you have telephone connectivity, you can do it in the US.

[00:06:02] CR: I’m pretty sure, I don’t know about, I’ve never used WhatsApp that much, but I’m pretty sure you need internet, you need data to use WhatsApp, right?

[00:06:10] CR: You can’t just use it over a telephone signal.

[00:06:13] SS: Yeah, data is what you’re

[00:06:14] SS: watching.

[00:06:15] CR: sort of defeats the purpose. But, but that one of the demos that they did is one of the guys used a rotary phone to call ChatGPT.

[00:06:26] CR: And he said, I don’t think I’ve ever used a rotary phone before in my life. So this is an experience on multiple levels. But I was talking to, you know, I was explaining this to Chrissy later on last night. And I was saying like, you know, try and explain that to somebody 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the idea, we were talking about how we remember when the height of cool was to call the time service on your phone.

[00:06:54] CR: I remember in the early 90s, I would do that just because it was cool. At the tone, the time will be 12. 05. And 15 seconds. Beep. Beep. Beep. And you could call and get your horoscope read out. Now, we go, oh yeah, you can just make a phone call, and it’s for free. You can do it for free. I think they’re allowing like, you don’t even have to have a GPT account or anything like that.

[00:07:23] CR: Like 15 minutes a month or something, free phone calls, you can make to GPT from your number. Um, You make a phone call and have a conversation with an artificial intelligence that lands all good. One of the demos they did is a guy said, um, ChatGPT, my friends and I on a road trip, we’re in the middle of nowhere on this highway in California.

[00:07:44] CR: We see these houses. They’re like weird, round coloured houses. Any idea what they would be? And they go, Oh, that’s the famous Flintstone houses that were built. And they’re a tourist thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So just to be able to call AI wherever you are and ask a

[00:07:59] CR: question.

[00:08:00] SS: AI on traditional networks.

[00:08:05] CR: Yeah,

[00:08:06] SS: So not really using data. So you’re kind of not using data.

[00:08:10] CR: No, you’re using a telephone line to call it and it’s talking to you.

[00:08:13] SS: data, by the way.

[00:08:14] CR: well,

[00:08:15] SS: which I love. That was one of their greatest hacks. These are phone calls, and these are data. It’s like, yeah, they’re all ones and zeros flying through the sky, you liars.

[00:08:21] SS: I just want to point that out. I always knew, and I wasn’t falling for it. It’s.

[00:08:25] CR: Everything is ones and zeros. Um, but the, the, the, the point I was going to make about all of this was they said. That this idea came up in a OpenAI Hackathon and the team developed it in like a week to go live with. And this is getting back to the recursion stuff that you’re talking about. To have the tools available now to go, Oh, I want to build this thing.

[00:08:49] CR: And I’ve talked about this on the show, cause I do this all the time now. Oh, I’ve got this idea for a thing, an app I can build that’ll solve a problem of mine. And an hour later I can have it built. Like that is the, Era we are now entering into where billions of people can build things in an hour or a day or a week that didn’t exist before because they have an idea.

[00:09:13] CR: And we’re not quite at the stage, but we’re not far from the stage where you can just say to the app, Hey, build it for me, and it’ll do it lock, stock and barrel. It’s pretty close to that,

[00:09:27] SS: I do

[00:09:28] CR: not a hundred percent.

[00:09:30] SS: all the time. I was asking it to do something yesterday, which was I had a whole bunch of business cards that I wanted to extract all of the emails from because all of these people, when they give business cards, say,

[00:09:41] CR: closer to your mic, Steve. You’re sounding like you’re in the next room.

[00:09:45] SS: Okay. So I collect a lot of business cards at events.

[00:09:49] SS: And when I, Take the business cards off the person. I say, do you mind if I put you on my email list? I do a weekly tech thing. They’re like, Oh yeah, cool. No worries. So I get their permission. And I normally would just type it into my sub stack, but I went on to open AI, took a photo of it, put it in and said, extract the emails, but it struggled with, uh, some of the fonts and the, so I, it had told me why it was struggling with its, um, observational, uh, Metrics, and I said, what would fix it?

[00:10:18] SS: And it said, you would need this. And it gave recommendations of the software that use it. I said, do you know how that software works? And it says, yes. I said, could you build it? And it said, yes. And then it built it and I’ll put it on my client and it worked.

[00:10:32] CR: That’s

[00:10:32] CR: great,

[00:10:33] SS: So, so, so one of the things that I’m doing now, often it’ll recommend a piece of software AI that can do the tasks that it can’t do, I ask it to look at.

[00:10:43] SS: Do and research it, even provide the link and go look in that. What does it do? What does its course functions now write the code and it’ll write some code in Python, and then I download it on my client and I do it there so it can kind of already do it at the moment. It needs us to tell it soon. It won’t.

[00:10:59] SS: It’ll go, wait a minute, let me write some code to be able to do that thing. So, and I don’t think everyone has realized the power in our hands now is insane. It’s insane. I just, every day I’m agog. I’m like, holy Wow.

[00:11:15] CR: Magog.

[00:11:17] SS: My God. So, okay, number

[00:11:19] CR: You were there! You did a video from that alley recently, where Gog and Magog are, right?

[00:11:26] SS: Uh, maybe.

[00:11:27] CR: You did a TikTok in the little laneway in Melbourne where Coco Black is, and there’s the clock with the two,

[00:11:36] SS: do one there. I did do that. I

[00:11:37] CR: two ogres that are defending the clock, they’re Gog and Magog.

[00:11:42] SS: Okay. I did do that. I didn’t know they were called that. You’ve taught me something in my own city.

[00:11:47] CR: There

[00:11:47] SS: If you want to know more about the city you live in, just ask a tourist because they’ve been to all the places you never got around to.

[00:11:52] CR: Dude, I lived there for 20 years

[00:11:54] CR: and I used to do TikToks.

[00:11:55] SS: I know, I’m not calling you a tourist, but I’m

[00:11:57] CR: did a podcast 20 years ago where I had a local Melbourne tour guide and we would go around and do tours of Melbourne and record the tour so other people could listen to it as a podcast. I did it for the City of Melbourne or Tourism Victoria or something.

[00:12:15] SS: right, we’re going to be here at 4am, which I love, which I

[00:12:18] CR: Sorry, keep going. Your top three things. What was number two?

[00:12:21] CR: And

[00:12:22] SS: and number 2 for this year was Humanoid Robots. That surprised me a little bit, it shouldn’t have, in hindsight, but what I love here is the marrying up of robotics which have been around since II, making cars, manufacturing. I love the humanoid element and I love that it’s the installation of LLMs that make them functional and trainable with verbal and visual reasoning.

[00:12:44] SS: And we’ve spoken about it on the show before, within a decade we’ll all have them. For me, what they can do now is kind of like, here’s a computer in 1976 and it’s really going to change stuff. It’s like a huge, huge moment for everyone. And I think it’s going to be Maybe even bigger than the Henry Ford revolution where you’ve just got this incredible device with incredible power that just changes your life, your home, your everything, every workplace.

[00:13:14] SS: That one there was huge and it’s a little bit like what happened with the car. We had carriages for a really long time and then once we had fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine that we put those two together and we changed everything. It’s kind of like that with software and hardware on this.

[00:13:28] SS: It’s a marrying of the two. I don’t think it’s. Extraordinary. OpenAI and NVIDIA, I mean, two of the heroes at the moment coming together with the figure one, super impressive.

[00:13:38] CR: I mentioned to you off air that last night NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, Did a launch of a new piece of technology they have, it’s called the Jetson Orin Nano Super. And it’s a, basically a CPU or GPU, um, that’s basically the size of an iPhone. It, uh, is designed to run, An LLM on device, on a robot or an edge device, something on a mine, something in a factory, something in your house, that can run a fully functional LLM locally on the device without having to go off to the cloud, and they’re selling it for 249 US, and it does 67 tops, 67 trillion operations per second.

[00:14:35] CR: NELP. Um, I did an analysis of that last night with, uh, against my Pentium 400 that I had in 1995 just as, uh, for shits and giggles. And it’s, it’s basically, and that would have cost me two and a half, three grand, I think, back in the day. This, uh, That Jetson device would be about 167 million times as powerful as the Pentium 400 that I had in 1995, it was nearly 30 years ago.

[00:15:22] CR: For a tenth of a second. Tenth of the price, and it’s specifically designed to run all of NVIDIA’s AI platform, the CUDA stuff. Um, just mind boggling

[00:15:36] CR: stuff.

[00:15:37] SS: can’t even get those numbers in your head. And I think I said to you as well, when we hear 167 million times, we just think 167. Yeah, you almost don’t even comprehend it. It’s incomprehensible.

[00:15:48] CR: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:15:50] SS: Number three for me was, and this one’s kind of got a sense of irony about it. Um, cause Google’s been called a monopolist, but I just, I’m calling it the post search society because Google has cancer.

[00:16:02] SS: Certainly their search division does. Uh, I saw some numbers which astounded me, uh, which Google isn’t really. Publishing, and it’s hard to find, but up to 80 percent of heavy internet users are now using GPTs instead of search. An 80 percent substitution ratio. 80 percent

[00:16:25] CR: That can’t

[00:16:25] SS: of, now what they didn’t say, no it is, of high volume internet users are using GPTs and LLMs 80 percent of the time when they would historically before then be using search.

[00:16:39] CR: That

[00:16:39] CR: sounds

[00:16:40] SS: And I think that, I reckon I’m 90%. Yeah, not high, high frequency internet users. So, I don’t know

[00:16:46] SS: what that

[00:16:47] SS: cohort is. I don’t know what that cohort is. It could be 5 percent of super users, but, but look, I know this for sure. And let’s just get anecdotal about it. How many things, how many times a day would you now go to the LLM instead of Google?

[00:17:01] CR: Oh, a hundred, a hundred, a hundred

[00:17:02] SS: Is it 50%?

[00:17:03] CR: A hundred

[00:17:04] SS: you just told me that that’s hard to believe. And then now, you say, I must search as the content heavy internet users. How many times a day would you now go to the LLM instead of Google? Because

[00:17:11] SS: I reckon 80 90 percent of the people just don’t realize how powerful this is and they’re just not really using it yet.

[00:17:18] SS: It’s kind of like this is 1999 and no one’s really using Google. There’s a bit of a lag, uptake lag. But I think that this is my big one. I think we’re about to enter post search society, especially now that GPTs have live web and you can go to the web live. It’s like I almost don’t even use Google now. I just use it to find a location or a map or a particular website, but I don’t actually use it for anything that is knowledge based, information based, function based.

[00:17:45] SS: I don’t work with it like I used to. This is gone. And, I mean, Google obviously has Ramo and Maps and a whole other raft of important parts of their business, and they’ll be fine, and I’m not too worried if they’re not, uh, even though I’m a shareholder, but, I tell you what, this is the post search society, this is, I seriously, I am not mincing my words here, traditional search is yellow pages. it’s already happened. I’m telling you, they’re fucking dead.

[00:18:14] CR: no, I disagree. I think you’re, you’re calling it way too soon. Um, but, and I’ll tell you why in a second, but

[00:18:20] CR: before we get into

[00:18:21] SS: I’m not saying that Google won’t, I’m saying, I’m not saying that Google won’t go and get their LLMs and transition it. And this is their challenge, is to adapt. This is their challenge. And the reason I don’t think that they will, is because they have an entire infrastructure based on the revenue streams, which is pay per click and ads.

[00:18:39] SS: And I think the future is subscription, and thank God for that, because it might just save the internet. Because the last thing you want is ads, because it changes what you see. I think subscription is much better. I think they’re fucked. I think they’re fucking, their search is dead. Absolutely fucked. Dead in the water.

[00:18:55] SS: I’m calling it now. I’m fucking calling it hard.

[00:19:00] CR: so one of the things that OpenAI launched during the 12 days of OpenAI was the general availability of search inside of ChatGPT for free users, as well as previously it was available for plus users. So they’re going hard on that, but again, the thing we have to remember is that Google has a massive ecosystem, they’re a bit like Apple, they’ve got a massive device install base running Android, that where their LLM, Claude or whatever it is, will be the, not Claude, that’s Anthropic, um, Gemini will be the default on all of those devices, um, depending on what happens with their, um, Monopoly lawsuit, they may be able to block ChatGPT’s, uh, ability to be featured heavily on those devices.

[00:19:58] CR: But they’ve got a very strong tool, and they’re coming back really hard with a lot of this stuff. Gemini, They just launched a new version of Gemini in the last week that’s doing really well in the benchmarks. Their latest video, text to video tool looks like it’s way better than Sora, which OpenAI also publicly launched in the last week or so.

[00:20:21] CR: But Google’s tool, I think it’s called Veo, is not publicly available yet. Um, I don’t know, man, I think, you know, because of their install base, their device base, and, you know, you’ve got Chromebooks and all that kind of stuff, and the Gmail user base, and all that kind of stuff,

[00:20:37] CR: that they’ve

[00:20:38] SS: I didn’t say Google was dead. I said search, as we know it, has got fucking terminal

[00:20:43] CR: well, it’s, no, but search is just going to evolve into,

[00:20:46] CR: search is just evolving into AI

[00:20:49] SS: I’ll tell you

[00:20:50] CR: AI

[00:20:50] SS: I’ll tell you why it won’t.

[00:20:51] SS: And it never does. It won’t and it never does and I’m going to tell you why because this happens fucking again and again and again.

[00:20:59] SS: Is that companies always love their business model more than they love the technology in there.

[00:21:05] CR: Christian Clayton’s innovator’s dilemma, I agree

[00:21:08] SS: 100%. It is still

[00:21:09] SS: what can happen.

[00:21:10] CR: But!

[00:21:11] SS: They are gone on that area. They’ll still be a big, and by the way, Kodak and everyone that you’ve seen has been disrupted, had all the technology, had the footprint. Everyone said, Kodak won’t die.

[00:21:21] SS: They’ve got a footprint of 40 trillion

[00:21:23] CR: Google’s a fundamentally different business. It’s a technology business that has been at the forefront. We, like, OpenAI came out of Google. LLMs came out of Google and Google has Demis Hassabis, who’s no fucking clown.

[00:21:40] SS: Okay. I get it. But the difference has got nothing to do with

[00:21:45] CR: They take it, no, it’s about culture, but they

[00:21:48] CR: take it

[00:21:49] SS: It’s about business models. It’s not about culture. No, it’s not even about culture. It is about business

[00:21:54] CR: but it’s the culture that protects the business model. But it’s the culture of the company that protects, I mean, that’s Clayton Christensen’s whole thing about protecting the business model from era one till it’s too late to transition to era two and then you lose

[00:22:10] CR: the transition war, right?

[00:22:26] SS: Do you know what it is? Salesperson.

[00:22:29] CR: Right.

[00:22:29] CR: It’s like

[00:22:30] SS: They’ve got more salespeople than anything else in their business. You think they’re a technology company? They’re

[00:22:35] CR: the way, I love this podcast because it’s the only podcast I do where we argue. All the other podcasts I do, we just agree on everything. I love this. You and I can have an argument. I love it.

[00:22:45] SS: Fuck you, Cameron. You are so

[00:22:46] CR: No, it’s

[00:22:47] CR: great. I love it. I love it that we have

[00:22:49] SS: are fucking dead. They’re fucking dead, mate. Because everything

[00:22:52] CR: but you’re saying Alphabet’s not dead.

[00:22:54] CR: Google’s not dead.

[00:22:55] CR: Just, you’re saying

[00:22:56] SS: I’m saying

[00:22:57] SS: searches, they’re fucking dead. Now, here’s where I reckon, quickly, where I reckon they’re gonna go gangbusters and fucking slay the world.

[00:23:05] SS: with Waymo. Waymo is crazy. In every city they’re in now, they have 30 percent of ride share already. They’ve already overtaken Lyft, and they are eating into Uber so quickly, it’s not even funny. Anyway, so they’re my three, and I love that we disagree, and the beauty of it is, we’re going to talk every week and just see how this thing rolls out.

[00:23:28] SS: Now Cameron, over to your top three from this year.

[00:23:32] CR: I’ve done no prep,

[00:23:33] CR: because you

[00:23:34] SS: I love that. You don’t need

[00:23:35] CR: we were going to do like

[00:23:36] SS: were Born ready

[00:23:37] SS: born ready.

[00:23:38] CR: Yeah, that’s what I always say. Um, but, off the top of my head, I mean, it’s been a huge year, and I’ve probably forgotten a bunch of things. But, the things off the top of my head that I’m most excited or impressed about this year.

[00:23:52] CR: First is going to be Claude 3. 5 Sonnet and Coding. Now, funnily enough, just in the last, last 24 hours, O1, OpenAI’s new model, just beat Claude in the coding benchmarks. I haven’t tested O1 recently for coding because Claude 3. 5 has just done such a great job. job for me, but my ability to code stuff in the last couple of months using Claude 3.

[00:24:22] CR: 5 Sonnet has just been, um, like a magical experience. Not perfect, but just insane. Like you were saying before, like when I wrote that news app, A couple of weeks ago, I was going, Hey, can you just like build me my own news aggregator? Yeah, yeah, sure. Here it is. Boom. Like it’s, it’s, that has been an insane experience for me this year.

[00:24:49] CR: Um, the fact that you could just think of something and build it now, like it’s, it’s crazy that we can do that. Uh, with a tool that cost me, I mean, I pay for the API, but you know, and I, and sometimes I, I, run up quite a bill on it. You know, it might cost me anywhere from 20 to 50 bucks a month to use the API, depending on how

[00:25:09] CR: heavily I’m

[00:25:09] SS: What a build. Isn’t it funny on what’s quite a build these days? Go out and hire a software developer in 1992 and mortgage your house to get a shitty piece of software. It’s

[00:25:19] CR: Yeah. Or even hire one today. It’s going to be the same thing. Like to, to have somebody building apps for me for 20 to 50 bucks a month is crazy. My second one would be AI integration with apps. So we start the open AI, just released a lot of this stuff in the last couple of weeks, part of the 12 days to further and further integration today in their live stream, they announced integration with Apple Notes, which I don’t, I don’t Use any more, I use Obsidian, by the way, if you don’t use Obsidian and you’re a big note taker, check it out, Obsidian is absolutely magical tool.

[00:25:59] CR: One of the best pieces of software out there, in my opinion. But, um, we’re now at the era, I have AI integrated into, um, My code, um, app, the, the, the development environment that I use, I have it integrated in a couple of other different apps. So we’re now in the beginning of the era where it’s integrated into your apps.

[00:26:25] CR: It can see what you’re doing, You don’t have to copy and paste it from your app into the AI and then paste the result back. It’s just watching what you’re doing. It’s making suggestions as you go. It’s coding alongside you. That is the beginning of the future where AI is just integrated into everything that you do and all of your

[00:26:51] SS: It’s just in the walls. It’s just in the walls like electricity. That’s where AI is going. Ambient computing and omnipresence is when a technology has really reached its threshold. When you don’t have to go to it, it is just everywhere. That’s when you know technology has changed things.

[00:27:08] CR: By the way, this has been one of my rants for the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if you and I’ve talked about this, but let me ask you a question. Do you know how electricity works?

[00:27:16] SS: Uh, I’m gonna say no because I think my answer will be wrong even if I try it. So I’ll just go with no. Can you tell me? Don’t they look

[00:27:25] CR: Well, I think most people don’t know how it works. And it’s, it’s one of those things like, Special Relativity and the Double Slit Experiment that I need to re read myself every few years to remind myself because I forget. I need to do a refresher course on it every now and again. But I think, See, the way that you kind of get taught how electricity works in school is when you, at high school, in high school science, right, is you flick a switch and it opens the hose, this is a wire, and electrons get pushed down the wire to the filament in the light and they, and it heats up the filament and light comes out.

[00:28:06] CR: That’s not true. That’s not how electricity works at all. The electrons don’t move. They do move a little bit.

[00:28:16] SS: it’s like a wave in the ocean, which a lot of people think a wave is actually the same chunk of water. You know how a swell goes through the ocean, but the drops stay where they are. It’s the energy that

[00:28:29] SS: moves and it moves the drops in that spot. So it’s actually a hump and, and, and water. People don’t realize that you’re actually just riding energy.

[00:28:37] SS: You’re not even riding the same drops of water when you’re riding a wave.

[00:28:41] CR: but what is energy?

[00:28:44] SS: I don’t fucking know. You better tell me. I mean, I sort of know, but I, I, I’ve done the school stuff, but I kind of don’t really know. So can you please tell me and the listeners?

[00:28:55] CR: well, energy is just the ability to do work. It isn’t anything, you know, it’s what the issue I always have with new agey types, when we start having conversations, they go, well, everything is made of energy.

[00:29:05] CR: Like

[00:29:05] SS: Oh, they love that. It’s their favourite

[00:29:07] CR: is just the ability to do work. So what, What are you fucking saying?

[00:29:12] CR: It doesn’t make any sense. You, you’re just using random words. They don’t mean anything. That it’s like from Princess Bride. I do not think that word means what you think it means. Um, but here’s the, I had this conversation with ChatGPT the other day where I was going down this thing about electricity and how it works.

[00:29:28] CR: And I said, well, you know, what happens is the electromagnetic field. Field, uh, which is everywhere and it permeates everything that’s around the wire carries the energy, the field carries the energy down to the filament. And we go, but what’s, what’s the field? What is the field? And then it started going, well, think about waves on the water.

[00:29:52] CR: Don’t give me fucking analogies. I’m asking you a question. What is the field made of? And they go, well, think of this analogy. I’m going, don’t Fucking give me a na I went on with this for an hour. I’m having a voice conversation with it when I was

[00:30:03] CR: cleaning the

[00:30:04] SS: By the way, you told me you don’t swear at AIs in a previous post. You AIs, and I’m starting to sense that now that they’re

[00:30:11] CR: I was, I wasn’t swearing, I’m, I’m, I’m exaggerating.

[00:30:14] CR: I was being very polite.

[00:30:16] SS: just wanted

[00:30:16] CR: I don’t like And I was like, what is it? What is the field? And it was fudging. So after about an hour of ChatGPT, I gave up and I went to, um, Gemini, cause the new Gemini had just come out. And I said, what is the electrical field made, electromagnetic field made out of? Fundamentally, what is it?

[00:30:36] CR: And it said, nobody knows. Science doesn’t know. It’s one of the great mysteries of science. We do, we know it exists. We know how to use it, but we don’t know. What it is, we just take advantage of it. We don’t know. I went back to GPT and I said, Gemini just told me we don’t know what it is. And GPT said, Oh, well, that’s true.

[00:30:56] CR: Yeah. And I said, well, why didn’t you just fucking tell me that an hour ago, instead of giving me the same bullshit analogies over and over again, just say, Hey, listen, we don’t know what it’s about. He goes, Oh, you’re right. I should have said that. So

[00:31:06] SS: this is a key this is a key career business and technology insight for everyone. You don’t need to know how something works to make it work for you.

[00:31:16] CR: yeah, it’s like quantum mechanics. We still don’t know really what’s going on with quantum mechanics. We know how to use it. We do lots of stuff with it. No one knows how it works, or why it works the way it works.

[00:31:27] SS: It is nice to know how something works, it is nicer to get it working for you.

[00:31:32] CR: Here’s my analogy, though, with AI. We don’t know how AI works. No one knows how AI works, still, right? But we know how, we’re learning to know how to use it, and it will be like electricity, as you say. We, no one will know how it works, we’ll just do stuff with it. So, but AI integration with SMA, my third would probably be Apple Vision Pro.

[00:31:51] CR: Even though it’s had a minor, Eve, have you had the demo yet? Have you gone?

[00:31:59] SS: yeah, the demo, I’m like, how is this changing anything for me?

[00:32:03] CR: God, you’re

[00:32:04] CR: such

[00:32:04] SS: I went there and did it, and I actually meant to talk to you about

[00:32:07] CR: spiritually. You are so dead

[00:32:09] SS: I’m not seriously dead, I’m like, yeah, I get it, it’s nice and you can do all these things, and I get that it has a lot of applications. Right? I get it. I get that it has a lot of entertainment and industrial applications and it’s incredible and it’s, and it’s good, but I just, I just, it’s just a bit of a so what for me.

[00:32:29] SS: I don’t see how I’m going to plug into that and fundamentally change my life for the better.

[00:32:36] CR: Wow. Okay. Well, they’re my

[00:32:38] CR: top three

[00:32:39] SS: me why you love it though. Look, I just want to keep to make sure this is not the Mutual Agreement Society podcast because no one So I did lean into it a bit, I gave a bit of Cheryl, it was a bit of a Cheryl, and I leaned in to the disagreement. Now, come on, tell us what you love. this,

[00:32:53] CR: Well, you know, I think in terms of, I said this at the time when I did my demo, like, very few times in my life I can think of when I experienced a new piece of technology and it blew my mind and I went, this is me. A fundamental quantum leap on anything I’ve experienced before. And it’s completely reshaped the way that I think about the future and what can be done with technology.

[00:33:26] CR: For me, that was Apple Vision Pro. I had fairly low expectations going into it and the demo experience, I was like, Oh, holy shit. Like this just completely opens up new realms of what is possible. Interacting with technology can be like just, uh, the three dimensionality of my experience of the internet and photos and videos and, um, I can just imagine, it’s really just going into the Ready Player One sort of

[00:34:01] CR: space, the beginnings of that, you know?

[00:34:04] SS: and, and, and maybe it is five years from now. I mean, just keeping exponentials in mind, you know, not a huge amount of years. Mate, if, if this could transition into some kind of, Physical virtual reality holodeck style, you know, next gen Star Trek. I mean, for me that, that, that’s astounding, but look, I definitely see the applications and I think VR loosely and AR have had these applications, you know, training and pilots and surgeons and, uh, entertainment experiences, you know, being at a concert you’re not really at on the stage with Dave Grohl, all, all of that kind of cool stuff that could emerge from it, I think it’s still there, but, um, it feels like it’s a great piece of kit.

[00:34:47] SS: That hasn’t really got a home yet.

[00:34:50] CR: Yeah, no, exactly. It’s, it’s very, very early adopter y mode, but you know, I still think an amazing piece of technology, like incredible achievement.

[00:35:04] CR: What’s

[00:35:04] SS: going to go through our top five. We’re going to

[00:35:06] CR: only got one.

[00:35:08] SS: predictions. Hey, you’ve only got one. I’m going to go through my five and rather

[00:35:13] CR: I’m sure mine’s going to be one of your five. So this is going to be

[00:35:16] SS: well, interesting because I, there was, I’ve got 20 from my podcast, which everyone should do, not my podcast, my post on Substack, which everyone should certainly be signed up to and go and read.

[00:35:26] SS: Uh, tech and AI transfer 25, 2025. And I picked out the five that I think. The most interesting to me, there’s a lot that have overlaps. Okay, I’ll read them out and then we’ll just pick which ones you want to speak about. The first one is agentic AI, AI agents. That’s the top of my list and it’s not a course.

[00:35:46] CR: You

[00:35:47] SS: Oh, there you go, well said.

[00:35:48] CR: got my only one. Yeah, Agents. Wait,

[00:35:52] SS: and the, uh, well, the, it’s kind of the top tier one. The next one I had on my list was machine based

[00:35:59] SS: business.

[00:36:00] CR: move on yet. I

[00:36:01] CR: mean, are we going

[00:36:02] SS: No, no, we’re going to come

[00:36:02] SS: back.

[00:36:03] CR: Oh,

[00:36:04] SS: We’re going to come back. Okay. So one was agent AIs or agentic AI. Number two was machine based customers. I think this is going to be huge.

[00:36:12] SS: And that’s when it’s kind of an agent process, but it’s your purchaser, the person that goes and buys things, looks at things, does the research, negotiates all of that, everything from a car to whatever, goes through your subscriptions, does all of that kind of stuff.

[00:36:26] CR: just, that’s just,

[00:36:27] CR: a

[00:36:28] SS: Yes, but I think it has a specific business implication, because I think that businesses are going to get, have to get good at talking to and with AIs, and we’re going to have to get good at prompting them on that realm within that specificity.

[00:36:41] SS: The next one I had was the AI creative explosion, a Cambrian explosion of capability based on the fact now that if you can think of it, you can do it. If you can imagine it, you can do it. I don’t even know where that’s going to go, but the fact that anyone can do everything that has ever been done. is insane because I think a lot of people have ideas and have never had the capability and I think that’s extraordinary.

[00:37:03] SS: My fourth one was the global robotaxi ramp up. 10 years late but it’s finally here and I think that’s going to go global next year. The cities in the US that are doing

[00:37:13] SS: it. Yeah, I really do. I think they’re keeping that in their back pocket, and I think if Google or Alphabet are smart, this is something that they can do without any antitrust issues.

[00:37:23] SS: They can plug it in and then build out different business models based on logistics and moving people and payloads in a way that keeps some of their traditional business models of pay per click and advertising true within that logistical context. I think that’s going to be huge. And the other one is AI Eyeballs, which is the idea of holding up the video in a live moment, distilling, analysing, and helping you.

[00:37:46] SS: I did it with my PK Ripper BMX. I needed a new part on it the other day. I held it up and I said, Hey, that looks like a nice BMX there. It looks like a bit of a retro one. Is that a PK Ripper? I’m like, yeah, it is. He’s like, cool. How can I help you with it? Well, my, uh, cranks are broken. Yeah, I can see those.

[00:38:04] SS: They’re the red line flight tool. They’re not cuddler’s cranks. So they, they do break down a bit easy and I went through and I said, what part do I need? Cause one fell out when I was like, you said, what you need is this here. And then I asked it, I found a place that sells it locally that can ship it that day, gave me a link.

[00:38:18] SS: It was like insanely simple example, but this is kind of like what the promise of Google Glass was. But now OpenAI, you have live video chat, it can understand exactly what it’s saying, converse with you, solve real time problems with AI eyes. That’s huge. They’re my five, brother.

[00:38:38] CR: Well, that’s, uh, yeah. I don’t know about Robotaxis, but Elon running the White House might be interesting how he pushes that along from a Tesla perspective.

[00:38:49] SS: Well,

[00:38:51] CR: Look, I think there are some predictions of AGI as early as 2025. I’m not sure about that, but I think, you know, I think Sam Altman has been saying lately that we will get AGI and it’ll be kind of a ho hum moment. And I tend to agree because people are ho hum about AI already, which boggles my mind.

[00:39:16] CR: I still

[00:39:17] SS: for us. Except for us. Because I’m just

[00:39:19] CR: yeah. I was saying to Chrissy last night, like, AGI. Like when we’re talking about the Jetson and I was like, it’s 167 million times as powerful as the computer I had 30 years ago for a 10th of the price. Like, it’s just, my brain can’t even begin to compute what, where we’re at. You can call an AI over a rotary phone and have a conversation with it about any topic.

[00:39:52] CR: Like it’s just, anyway. Bye. I think he’s right that AGI will, when I say slowly creep up on us, I mean slowly in the sort of time frames that we’re looking at. AI is just getting better and better and better. And at some point in the next year or two, it’s just going to be better at any human, at every topic.

[00:40:17] CR: And people will just go, yeah, so what?

[00:40:19] CR: People will just

[00:40:20] SS: don’t know how many years now. I don’t know how many years now. It

[00:40:25] CR: It’ll just, people will just

[00:40:26] CR: be blasé

[00:40:27] SS: is intellectually. It is intellectually. It is intellectually. Intellectually it is, physically it’s not. On this TikTok that I was watching last night, I should have saved it. Anyway, it’ll be my history. This guy was saying that the thing that’s interesting so far with AI and robotics is that robots find hard the things that humans find easy.

[00:40:45] SS: Like standing still and walking upstairs. And if we go back to the Atlas robots and Boston Dynamics and all of that kind of stuff, but computers and AI find easy, the things that humans find hard, you know, computation, complex, complexity, all that kind of stuff. I thought that was kind of an interesting insight.

[00:41:04] SS: Um, and maybe that’s why we’re blase about AI because computers for a long time in a computational sense. a far exceeded humans, you know, whether it’s a calculator or, or anything. And so I was just going, yeah, they’ve always been better than us. You know what I mean? Like, and, and, and I don’t know if I can talk now, whatever.

[00:41:23] SS: I mean, for me, it’s really interesting because it’s language based and that’s how, that’s how, that’s the fabric of all human knowledge.

[00:41:31] CR: Speaking of which, there was an interesting paper that I saw this morning from Meta, don’t know if you’ve seen this, where the suggestion is that we should write the LLMs in a way where they don’t use language, don’t use English to think. So the way that, like if we have chain of thought reasoning with an LLM at the moment, like an O1, it uses English, language, human language, to think through the process.

[00:42:04] CR: And they’re saying that uses tokens and it’s slow.

[00:42:08] CR: It would be faster just to let it do it in its own way, in code, and then push out the answer in language, it doesn’t, it shouldn’t have to think it through, so that, and that would reduce the level of compute and the level of wattage that was required and all that kind of stuff.

[00:42:24] SS: is really interesting. And that’s where, uh, our favourite linguist, the guy did Esperanto. What’s his name again? He’s one of your boys, the linguist, Chomsky.

[00:42:35] CR: He didn’t do Esperanto. It was a

[00:42:37] CR: different guy, but

[00:42:37] SS: Did he do Esperanto? He was a linguist, wasn’t he,

[00:42:40] CR: Chomsky is, yeah, he’s, he’s one of the, you know, major linguists, yeah, in terms of understanding

[00:42:47] SS: I thought he did Esperanto. Who did Esperanto? Do you remember? Wasn’t

[00:42:50] CR: Uh, no, I can’t remember his name.

[00:42:52] CR: Different

[00:42:53] SS: It was Billy Espo. It was Billy Espo. And he put Ranto on the end of it. Anyway. So Billy Espo, the thing with language that, you know, it’s What I think is interesting is that it has nuance in it, which I think enables all of the things that we would do creatively be possible.

[00:43:13] SS: I think in the computation sense, it definitely would waste tokens. But I think at the output level, probably has to do it in that language. And as someone who speaks three languages, how’s that for a flex? Um, there is something in languages that, Makes it impossible to transliterate exactly. It just can’t be done.

[00:43:34] SS: And the only way you can truly understand the language is to kind of understand the culture and the way of life and even be in that country, because then the words start to make sense because of the physical interactions and they become a function of that. And you just, some things you just can’t translate.

[00:43:52] SS: And when you understand both languages really well, you can explain it to somebody and say, look, we say this word, but it really doesn’t mean that. And that’s the only one that we’ve got to kind of translate. But it’s kind of like this, and you have to go into that. And I think that if the LLMs were doing it in computation, their capacity to give us the optionality of all the things that they can do would be lost in that translation process.

[00:44:13] CR: Esperanto was invented by L. L. Zamenhof, Ludwig Laser Zamenhof, a Polish Jewish ophthalmologist, in the late 19th century. He published the first book outlining the language, titled Unua Libro. First book. In 1887, under the pseudonym Doctoral Esperanto, which means Doctor Hopeful, the pseudonym eventually became the name of the language itself.

[00:44:37] CR: Zamenhof’s goal was to create an easy to learn, politically neutral, and culturally inclusive auxiliary language that could foster international communication, and Understanding. Esperanto’s grammar is highly regular, its vocabulary is derived mainly from European languages, and it was designed to be phonetic and logical.

[00:44:57] CR: Despite being a constructed language, Esperanto has developed its own thriving global community of speakers.

[00:45:05] CR: There you go.

[00:45:06] SS: I’m gonna learn Esperanto late at night tonight after a couple of Campari’s at 1am.

[00:45:11] CR: like that idea. Maybe we should do our next podcast in Esperanto.

[00:45:15] CR: We’ll

[00:45:15] SS: Esperanto!

[00:45:17] SS: Well, Cameron, given that you’ve got one, do you want to give us your thoughts on agents and why they matter? And I’m getting the sense, and I kind of, when I look through mine, it kind of is a capstone thing that really trickles through all of the others to an extent. So why don’t we kind of get your view on agents, what they are and why they really matter.

[00:45:38] SS: And that, that might even be a nice way for us to kind of round out the, the pod. Cause we have to do one before the new year as well, by the way. Yeah.

[00:45:47] CR: Yeah, so look, this isn’t an original prediction. Pretty much everyone in the space is saying 2025 is going to be the year of agents, and the way that most of them describe agents, it’s when you can give your AI a complicated task made up of uh, uh, A number of sub tasks that have to be done, some of which might take a bit of time and effort and they will just go off and do those things and come back to you when it’s done.

[00:46:23] CR: Now, trying to come up with Examples of this is tricky. Like the one I heard Sam Altman use the other day was pretty mundane. He was like, well, you know, you could use, ask it to find a restaurant to make you a booking. And it might go off and ring three restaurants and find out what their availability is and then come back to you.

[00:46:51] CR: And. When it’s got a booking and check your friend’s calendars and do all that kind of stuff and interface with all these different things and come back to you with a result. And he said, that’s pretty, that’s interesting, but not that exciting. He said, but what if you got it to go and speak to a hundred restaurants and find out what all of their offerings were?

[00:47:12] CR: And, you know, if they catered to, you know, You know, uh, what pricing they could do and if they could cater for a particular, I don’t know, vegans or whatever it is. And then he said, well, you might think that’s a lot of wasting people’s time, but it would probably be your AI talking with the AIs of all of those restaurants and having a negotiation and a conversation and then coming back to you.

[00:47:33] CR: And, you know, it reminds me of, um, talks. I was giving at Microsoft circa 2000, 25 years ago, something like that, when I was talking about Web 2. 0 and it was the early days of Web 2. 0 and the vision that we had for how that would play out back then was that If I wanted to build a, um, you know, a TV, if I wanted to buy a TV, I would say to my browser, I need a TV, and it would go off and not just find the best price from a bunch of TV retailers for me, It would talk to the retailers and the retailers would use their own back end systems to do a just in time build of that TV and would go out and speak to all of their suppliers and negotiate the best pricing that they could get for all of the components and it would be built on the fly and I would get the best price based on the best negotiation that the best retailers and manufacturers could get with all of their suppliers, come back and give me the best price.

[00:48:54] CR: Not dissimilar to how Tesla, in a way, will custom build a car for you these days. One of the problems that we had, this was all part of the idea that there would be interoperability between all of the backend manufacturing systems, and they’d be able to have schemas that could talk to each other, and XML was going to be the basis of that, or NET as Microsoft called their platform back then.

[00:49:21] CR: And what. What happened was the, uh, technical logistics and the management logistics required to get all of those schemers to interoperate and interface with each other was way bigger project than anyone really wanted to do just to reduce their margins by having more competition. And it kind of all fell apart and it didn’t quite get there.

[00:49:46] CR: But I see we’re heading into a world where every system, and I remember you and I talking about this at the beginning of this series, like a year or two ago, about agents that sit on the front of every business’s website, that can speak with their back end manufacturing systems, and ultimately I think we’re heading into a world where my Agent will go out and be able to speak to the agents of all of the retailers and all of the manufacturers and negotiate on my behalf.

[00:50:19] CR: You were talking about, what did you call it, machine based shoppers or

[00:50:23] CR: something before?

[00:50:24] SS: Yeah. Machine based customers.

[00:50:26] CR: So agents is basically really complicated processes that software Well, your AI will be able to do on your behalf. And I think Sam’s point was, we tend to think of it in things that we, in terms of things that we already do today, that it might make easier, but he’s saying there are things.

[00:50:45] CR: That we haven’t even thought of because they’re not practical or possible today. That we will be able to do in the future when everyone has intelligent software that can talk to other pieces of intelligent software. And often, in some cases, it’ll be the same software. It’ll be my version of ChatGPT talking to your version of ChatGPT talking to another ChatGPT.

[00:51:12] CR: It’ll just be ChatGPT or whatever it is. It’s talking to itself, uh, cause it’ll be front ending a lot of these systems, but that’s the world of agents, complicated scenarios done completely by software and it’ll, it’ll happen slowly. I don’t think it’ll happen all at once. You know, it’ll, it’ll start with small iterations, but will gradually become more and more sophisticated over the next year or two, but definitely I think 2025 is where we’re going to start to see the beginnings of software, really.

[00:51:51] CR: This is where software as a service becomes real. These things will do services for

[00:51:57] SS: the, the current software as a service gets eaten up by an overriding agent style thing. And the agent is multimodal because it’s not like software at the service now is set in little verticals with functional tasks. But because it’s language based and this is the, this is why language based software LLM is so important is that it’s multimodal.

[00:52:20] SS: It can do any task with any set of directions and it eats up every little piece of software as a service. App that there is. And, and just on that, it’s interesting how technology has a way of building another layer to circumvent the problems. And the problem with the backend speaking to each other is that people have, companies have proprietary systems, don’t want to open them up.

[00:52:43] SS: They want to keep them closed on purpose because they have an incentive. And then technology sits above it. So, okay, you’ve got your two different backend logistics or supply chain systems. Well cool, now we’ve got the agent that just speaks English, or Hindi, or Spanish, or Mandarin, or both. Actually, it speaks all of them, sorry.

[00:53:02] SS: Mainly Esperanto. Look, supply chains in Esperanto has always been what I’ve hoped for. So, it can speak in all of those supply chain levels. So it doesn’t matter that it’s not all in NET or some system in the back end that has this ability for software to kind of, Interact because you get the language layer on top.

[00:53:23] SS: And that brings me back to what that paradox that I was trying to think of before it’s Jevons paradox

[00:53:30] CR: Who?

[00:53:30] SS: and, uh, Jevons paradox, Jevon. And it was by, um, coined by William Stanley Jevons in 1865. And it refers to the idea that as technology improves, the efficiency of resource use, the overall consumption of that resource often increases and Instead of decreasing, for example, more efficient fuel engines lead to greater fuel consumption as travel becomes cheaper and more accessible.

[00:53:58] SS: It’s the same kind of, with ai, it’s the AI becomes better and more useful and, and I think it kind of leads into. Unexpected use cases as well because it becomes more omnipresent. It goes on further and it says in a broader sense this could also be linked to the idea of emergent utility. As we refine or cleave off parts of a material resource or concept we discover new ways to use or repurpose what remains.

[00:54:23] SS: And so it kind of feels into this and it says this reflects on the recursive nature of innovation and while refining or breaking down something often leads to greater complexity rather than simplicity and reduction. So it kind of adds, and for me, Jevon’s paradox relates to the idea that we don’t need a UBI because there’s all of these unexpected things that just layer out.

[00:54:44] SS: So I just thought that that was interesting and a guy was talking about it on my TikTok last night.

[00:54:50] CR: Yeah, well I, look,

[00:54:52] SS: At 2am,

[00:54:53] CR: oh man, I didn’t get any sleep last night, Fox was in our room sick at 3. 30am and

[00:54:58] CR: throwing up all

[00:54:59] SS: Fox, what are you doing?

[00:55:01] CR: then I had to record a podcast at 9am, so I just got up, I had to make bread. Yeah, me too, so, um, yeah, look, I think, we can’t even begin to imagine the ways that we’re going to use this stuff in the next year or so, Steve, and just to wrap up, I had one last thing I wanted to say to you.

[00:55:17] CR: was great

[00:55:22] SS: Can I guess? Something, how are you going, um, have a happy new year, something in Esperanto. I know that much.

[00:55:31] CR: fun. Let’s do it again next week in Esperanto. Thanks, buddy. Have

[00:55:38] CR: a good week.

[00:55:38] SS: Thanks, champion, great chat.

Cameron explains his MANIFESTO FOR AUSTRALIAN AGI, Steve explains why he supports the Australian government’s ban on social media for kids, and they discuss NVIDIA’s downloadable local LLM.

FUTURISTIC 33

[00:00:00] CR: Welcome back to Futuristic. It is episode 33. It’s the 29th of November 2024. Steve Sammartino, welcome back.

[00:00:16] SS: Reilly.

[00:00:19] CR: We have, uh, some big things to talk about, Steve. Big ideas that I want to get into today about the future of AGI in Australia. Social media bans, personal AIs from NVIDIA, but before we do that, why don’t you tell everybody how you have been futuristic since our last conversation.

[00:00:44] SS: One was with VUT and the brief that I got was, you gotta help convince university that we need to embrace AI more, which is kind of crazy and interesting. You know, they’re still using it a lot to stop people cheating or using the tool in some capacity. And I just had two things to say.

[00:01:11] SS: I said, not using it is insane. And I said, I don’t know the answer, but I know the question. And the question is, how do we help our curriculum rise above the AI? Because that’s what we do with every tool. You’ve got to rise above it so that you’re working on top of it. Now, of course, you need to know what good looks like.

[00:01:30] SS: So there’s that. So that was the one thing that was interesting. And I did a workshop with CBUS. Which is a big building company, Seabus Property, who owned the superannuation in the building. It went really well. Incredible Workshop was on MVP’s, Minimum Viable Products, and I want to say that for any company trying to innovate, Or a startup.

[00:01:50] SS: MVP’s are still the ticket. That is still the secret sauce. And it’s really, really hard to do. You know, I really had to thin up some of the ideas for these guys that just cannot think small enough to get momentum. And that was an insight that that’s been true for 20 years. And I can’t see it ever changing.

[00:02:09] SS: Is that if you do something small, you can find a path to success and iterate. And I was really driving

[00:02:16] SS: that home.

[00:02:17] CR: Think small.

[00:02:19] SS: Think small.

[00:02:19] CR: 2024. Well, I’ve done a lot of coding, uh, as usual, just coming up with ideas and coding stuff. Um, just trying to automate a bunch of things. Like, I’m still trying to automate the, um, investing checklist that I do each week. So it’ll be one click button and off it’ll go. I had some success with that this week.

[00:02:39] CR: Did a first phase of it that worked. First test worked. Now I’m trying to expand. And again, think small. So it’s like, I wrote all the scripts around one stock. That I had the data for. I said, right, generate a score for this stock. Got that working. Now I’m like, trying to give it a list of stocks and get it to do scores for a list, like 10.

[00:03:01] CR: And then I’ll give it 200 and see if it still works. But it’s just, yeah, starting off building it piece by piece. But, um, Yeah, I think that’s, that’s mostly it from a technology perspective. Just a lot of using the latest coding tools and it’s frustrating. You know, I’ve been using Claude 3. 5 Sonnet, which a week or two ago was freaking amazing.

[00:03:28] CR: The last couple of days just really sucked. Uh, and I see people talking about that on Reddit. It’s this constant frustration where these tools, uh, have weeks where they’re just like genius level, amazing one shot solutions for everything. And then all of a sudden they’ll just be dumb and, you know, like they’ve had half their brain removed.

[00:03:50] CR: They’ve been lobotomized.

[00:03:51] SS: Why do you think that is? What do you think

[00:03:53] SS: causes that?

[00:03:55] CR: I think they’re. I don’t know. I see lots of theories, but it seems to be some version of, they’ve got a certain amount of GPUs that they’re using to build their frontier models, maintain their existing models. They’re quantizing things. They’re trying to, um, Save money at different stages. They’re moving the, you know, we’ve got 50, 000 GPUs applied to this.

[00:04:23] CR: We’re going to take 10, 000 and move them over to this thing. And so this thing becomes dumber. I don’t know. They’re just messing around on the back end as they’re continually building new models, training new models, trying to save money, trying to, I think, reduce The algorithms as well, like, okay, if it’s costing them a dollar to give you an answer that they’re charging you a cent for, they’re trying to figure out ways to reduce the cost of that by optimizing things, and it doesn’t always work, there’s a lot of experimentation, like, a lot of people get really shitty on Reddit, Um, I’m paying you my 20 a month and this service is terrible.

[00:05:06] CR: And I’m like, dude, you have an artificial intelligence for 20 bucks a month. Like shut the fuck up.

[00:05:12] SS: Hunched a year with excitement, the greatest tool ever invented you have for less than the price of a

[00:05:19] SS: pizza?

[00:05:20] SS: Look, let’s complain here. We’ve got the most incredible AI, mostly free, or the super version for 20 bucks a month. You should so be complaining. Your lot in

[00:05:29] SS: life is

[00:05:30] SS: horrible.

[00:05:30] CR: Yeah. Shut the fuck up and stop complaining. Yes. Yeah. It’s going to be up and down. I just accept it. It’s going to be good days and bad days, but you know, the good makes up for the frustrating things. Um,

[00:05:42] SS: plausible ideas. The one that, uh, all of a sudden, let’s say, a few people get onto the new version, there’s a couple of tabs open, next thing you know it’s amazing and there’s thousands of tabs open and the machine slows down. I mean, that’s highly plausible. The idea that, you know, GPTs are generative pre trained transformers is a big one because one of the things I see on Reddit is often a new version has, let’s call them scary capacities, where they do things that are a little bit, Oh my God, wow.

[00:06:11] SS: And they throttle those back or change those to an extent, which knowing the way the algorithms work that they’re imperfect and it’s not an, if this, or then that protocol that could infect other parts of the system. Uh, the answers that it gives. So they were like really plausible and the cost one, the third one that you’ve mentioned, that’s another great one.

[00:06:31] SS: Gee, this is great. We want to launch and show everyone how amazing it is. But now that everyone knows how amazing it is, let’s just, we’ve launched the plane, let’s pull back there and save a bit of fuel in the, in cruise mode.

[00:06:45] CR: a couple of other things that, uh, I know you introduced me to an AI. There’s a video editing tool this

[00:06:52] SS: Yeah.

[00:06:53] CR: uh, that can take your video and just turn it into TikTok clips and give you ratings on how engaging it is. I ran my investing podcast through it and it gave it all very low engagement ratings. So I didn’t, didn’t post any of them, but it’s an interesting, uh, tool.

[00:07:12] SS: I’ll, I’ll, I want to talk about that because one of the things that, you know, I noticed on, it’s called clap. app for listeners and it is a really great way to get shorts. It’s also can be used just to generate one of the most accurate forms of, uh,

[00:07:31] SS: captions that I’ve seen.

[00:07:32] SS: It’s really

[00:07:33] SS: good. And it actually has an editor. it, yeah. It has an editor inside the browser. So if you haven’t got the software like the iMovie or the Apple software, it actually is a pretty handy little piece of software to do the

[00:07:44] SS: editing on it. Bye. Clap with a K, by the way, like Klu Klux Klan, clap on your own there, Cameron. Clap with, I’ll just go clap with the guy.

[00:07:55] SS: Uh, I, what I noticed is that it does a generic version of it. It gives a summary when you write something and it’ll say, uh, whether or not it thinks it’s, uh, A viral clip and it gives it a score out of a hundred and it’ll say this is viral because it’s got a good hook or it’s quite funny or it’s and so and it actually does get it contextually.

[00:08:15] SS: What it doesn’t take into account is your audience typology, which it doesn’t really know the context of where you’re hosting it. And I’ve had a couple that had ratings of 25 out of a hundred that did better than ones that had ratings of 75 out of a hundred that I posted on my TikTok, uh, which I thought was interesting.

[00:08:34] SS: So. And it also, it chooses some that are good, but you’re better off, I still think, having a look at it, and seeing the chunk that it chose, and going, actually, I’m gonna extend this a bit, cut that a bit, and make it start earlier or finish earlier. Still needs a bit of a human eye of it, but I tell you what, it really can save you an hour and a half going through a live

[00:08:54] SS: video to find good bits.

[00:08:57] CR: Yeah, and I think it’s just a good example as to where we’re heading with these tools where, you know, it will just do all of the editing for you. It’ll be all done on the fly. The AI will do all of the editing, puts editors out of a job. It just makes it easier for everyone to produce more and more engaging content.

[00:09:19] SS: Yeah, so we’ll eat our own dog food on this one cam and we will see what it picks and we’ll see if it picks itself. We’ll see how smart this AI is. If this AI is smart as it thinks it is, it should pick itself and show clap as exactly. Let’s, this is the test of tests cam. Might be the greatest thing we’ve done

[00:09:39] SS: on The Futuristic to date.

[00:09:42] CR: I think that’s when it becomes self aware, when it starts to pick stories about itself to promote. Um, on our last show, I said that I thought Elon Musk was going to be Trump’s AI czar, and that he would be, um, you know, determining the future of AI. Story came out after that, he must have been listening, because a story came out saying President elect Trump is considering naming an AI czar.

[00:10:05] CR: Czar in the White House to coordinate federal policy and governmental use of the emerging technology. Trump transition sources told Axios, Elon Musk won’t be the AI czar, but is expected to be intimately involved in shaping the future of the debate and use cases. The sources said. Now, uh, I didn’t expect him to actually be appointed the official AI czar, but I do expect him to have a lot of influence over how that runs and the policies that they implement.

[00:10:40] CR: And, uh, this goes on to say that, um, Musk, who owns a leading AI company, XAI, has failed. Feuded publicly with rival CEOs including OpenAI Sam Altman and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Rival’s Wari Musk could leverage his Trump relationship to favor his companies. By the way, I listened to, um, do you know, um, Diamandis, Peter Diamandis?

[00:11:07] SS: I do. The, uh, he’s a Singulitarian from the Kurzweil School. He does the, uh,

[00:11:11] SS: Abundance 360.

[00:11:12] CR: Hmm. Do you listen to his podcast at all or watch his YouTube?

[00:11:16] SS: No, I don’t. I’ve seen a lot of his

[00:11:17] SS: YouTubes and his talks.

[00:11:20] CR: I saw two things of him this week. One was a chat with Musk from a Singularity conference in Riyadh that he was hosting just before the election. And that’s where Trump said he thinks we’ll have AGI by 2025, 2026 at the latest. And he also talked about a future of abundance. He said if we get this right, it won’t be a universal basic.

[00:11:46] CR: income. It’ll be a universal, uh, a universal luxury income. You’ll basically have everything you need. It’ll be full abundance. But then I also watched, uh, Diamandis do an interview with the Mooch, Scaramoochie.

[00:12:03] SS: Karamuchi.

[00:12:05] CR: And it was the first half of it was really good. The Mooch was talking about the fact, he says, he said, I have a Trump Dakota ring.

[00:12:11] CR: He was talking about Elon. They were talking about how long Elon’s going to last with Trump. Something we also talked about in that last episode. And Scaramucci famously, when he was Trump’s communications director in the first term, lasted 11 days. And he said, he calls that one Scaramucci. So the amount of time that you last, Working for Trump is, is a Scaramouche, it’s, it’s counted in 11 days, you gotta love, it is genius, and he said,

[00:12:40] SS: that. more than Moore’s Law. That’s how much I

[00:12:42] SS: love it. Wow. he said he thinks Musk is

[00:12:45] CR: going to last 30 Scaramouches, so it’s about a year, but then they were having the question about if and when Musk and Trump have a falling out, who survives, who is the more powerful of the two, and I think We all probably know the answer to that question, and it’s, uh, not the orange demon.

[00:13:06] CR: I think Musk is probably the one who comes out on top, so it’ll be interesting to see what that looks like. But anyway, he was saying, he was talking about the fact that, uh, Musk is already on the outs with Trump. And he said you can tell that because he didn’t Make Musk the head of the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, by himself, it’s him and Vivek Ramaswamy.

[00:13:29] CR: He said so, he’s already, Trump is already starting to white ant Musk’s power by putting two guys in charge. Now the way I’d read that is that Musk wasn’t, he doesn’t have time to actually run this thing. He’s just going to swing in. Probably via Zoom calls once a week and say, yeah, fire this department, fire these 50 guys, and then let Vivek actually implement it.

[00:13:56] CR: Uh, Mooch, who’s got the Trump Dakota ring, is interesting. He said, there are 40 senior ranking members of his first administration that hate his guts now and want nothing to do with him and don’t think he should be president. What makes you think the new people in his administration are going to have a different experience?

[00:14:16] CR: To the first administration who mostly all hate his guts, including his former vice president, want to see him in jail. Um, yeah, he’s like, it’s, it’s going to be exactly the same experience. He’s going to, you know, shit all over everyone, piss everyone off, not listen to anyone. Anyway, it was pretty fake. But then the second half of the chat was them, all of them, Diamandis and Mooch and the other guy pumping Bitcoin as the greatest investment known to man.

[00:14:45] CR: And. And Mooch was plugging his own, his new book on Bitcoin, The Little Book of Bitcoin. Now I, uh, am well on record for five years, longer actually, but since I did the QAV podcast, I’m saying that Bitcoin is just nonsense as an investment. But I got his book and read it just to see what his arguments were, and he doesn’t have any.

[00:15:07] CR: Um, there were no arguments, just the usual thing. It’s going up, so therefore it’s a good investment. Um, and the usual

[00:15:16] SS: really interesting. Really on that, just on the Bitcoin investment. Here’s my rule with investing is that just because something is going up and you can make money out of it,

[00:15:25] SS: doesn’t make it a good investment. That is, That is,

[00:15:28] SS: the fundamental

[00:15:29] CR: Doesn’t make it an investment.

[00:15:31] SS: even an

[00:15:32] SS: investment. Exactly.

[00:15:33] CR: not investing. It’s

[00:15:34] CR: gambling.

[00:15:35] CR: Yes.

[00:15:37] SS: And I will die on that hill. And, and people have got rich gambling. On sheets and on all forms of speculation, no doubt. And it will

[00:15:47] SS: continue, but I would rather, I would rather, I would rather get

[00:15:52] SS: rich slow and get rich

[00:15:54] SS: surely.

[00:15:55] CR: Yes. And be able to sleep at night.

[00:15:57] CR: Like I, What I’ve learned from Tony over the

[00:16:00] SS: I was going to ask you

[00:16:01] SS: Tony’s opinion. Yeah,

[00:16:02] SS: on it.

[00:16:03] CR: same as Charlie Munger’s and Warren Buffett’s. Charlie Munger, before he died, used to call Bitcoin rat poison squared. Like,

[00:16:12] SS: That’s such a

[00:16:12] SS: Charlie.

[00:16:13] CR: yeah, such a

[00:16:14] CR: Charlie, love Charlie. Um, like the conversation Tony and I have talked about a lot, you know, it’s always the basic premise of investing is to buy something for less than it’s worth and wait for the market to readjust.

[00:16:30] CR: And to value it correctly. Uh, so you need to do that. You need to know what the intrinsic value of something is to know if you can buy it at less than its intrinsic value. So the question I always have for Bitcoin people is explain to me how you calculate the intrinsic value of one Bitcoin today. And then I can tell you what it’s worth.

[00:16:50] CR: And they can’t do that because it has no intrinsic

[00:16:52] SS: Well, it’s the same with all currencies. And this is the point. And yes, people speculate on currency and have done for millennia, doesn’t, and no, no investor would tell you that currency is an investment. Even people in Wall Street, they say, well, it’s a speculative tool and we use it and we can make money out of it.

[00:17:10] SS: And we’re happy to click tickets along the way. But Bitcoin is not a currency nor an

[00:17:15] SS: investment because it doesn’t pass the six rules of

[00:17:16] SS: a

[00:17:17] SS: currency.

[00:17:18] CR: And neither’s gold.

[00:17:20] CR: They always say Bitcoin is digital gold. And gold, you know, again, Buffett and Munger say gold isn’t an investment. It’s, it has no intrinsic value. It’s just a pretty

[00:17:30] SS: be a store of value, as can be grain, as can be a barrel of

[00:17:34] SS: oil,

[00:17:36] CR: least you can eat grain.

[00:17:37] SS: that’s right, and You can

[00:17:38] CR: burn

[00:17:39] CR: oil,

[00:17:40] SS: really, gold has some micro uses, you know, small electronics and other bits and pieces in jewelry, but it’s, it’s, it’s, again, it goes back to the Nobel Harari thing on money is a myth that we all collectively buy into because we need a tool for trade.

[00:17:57] CR: Anyway.

[00:17:59] SS: Moving on.

[00:17:59] CR: Let’s move

[00:18:00] CR: on.

[00:18:01] CR: Steve, I wrote a manifesto this week.

[00:18:04] SS: think you

[00:18:04] SS: write enough

[00:18:05] SS: manifestos. What is it

[00:18:07] SS: on? one thing I’ve always, listeners.

[00:18:10] CR: one thing I’ve always said about myself is I don’t write enough manifestos. I need to write more manifestos.

[00:18:15] SS: to as well. Are you going to go live in the shed in the woods? I’m just

[00:18:19] SS: asking. And do you

[00:18:21] SS: know how to,

[00:18:22] CR: got the crazy

[00:18:23] CR: hair, I just need to,

[00:18:24] CR: grow the crazy beard and I’m good to go.

[00:18:27] SS: and, and the post office now, you know, is only two every second day Cameron, just to let you know for when you’re mailing off

[00:18:32] SS: the, some universities.

[00:18:36] CR: Um, you know, Chrissy’s nickname for me is already The Wiz because she says I have crazy wizard hair. So, uh, yeah,

[00:18:43] CR: the Wiz. She’s like, hey, hey Wiz. Um, let me, let me read the preamble. Across Roads, Australia stands at a pivotal moment in history. The rise of Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, and robotics offers an extraordinary opportunity to build a future of abundance where work.

[00:19:05] CR: As we know it becomes optional, technology eliminates scarcity, and everyone has access to the essentials of life. But, who will shape this future? Who will decide how this technology is used? It’s been over two years since the release of chat GPT by open AI in November, 2022. And since then, AI models have continued to improve at a rapid rate.

[00:19:33] CR: Many senior industry leaders are predicting a GI could appear as soon as 2025. Leaders in the field of robotics are predicting that by 2040 there could be a billion bipedal robots in society and they will cost roughly the same as an entry level. Motor vehicle does today. In the last two years, our government and corporate leaders have done very little to prepare Australia for what’s happening.

[00:20:00] CR: If we leave the preparation to governments and corporations, we risk walking into a nightmare. The same governments that failed to prepare for the COVID 19 pandemic, despite decades of warnings from scientists. We’ll fail to prepare for the AGI revolution. During COVID, we saw the consequences of short term thinking, poor planning, and a political system more focused on protecting profits than saving lives.

[00:20:27] CR: Hospitals were overwhelmed, supply chains collapsed, and millions of people were left to fend for themselves. Now imagine the same incompetence larger scale, with AGI and robotics disrupting every job, every industry, every industry. and every aspect of society. Corporations, driven by profits above all else, will use AGI to maximize efficiency at the expense of workers.

[00:20:53] CR: Entire industries will disappear overnight, with no safety nets in place for those displaced. Housing, healthcare, education, and even food could be controlled by algorithms designed to extract wealth, not serve humanity. Without intervention, this technology will deepen inequality and concentrate power in the hands of a small elite, while millions of Australians are left behind, struggling to survive in a system that no longer values their existence.

[00:21:22] CR: But there is another path. A path where we, the people, take control of our future, where AGI and robotics are used to empower communities, not exploit them. A society where technology guarantees universal access to housing, healthcare, education and sustainable energy. A society where every person’s dignity is respected and every community has the tools to thrive.

[00:21:49] CR: Governments are shown as time consuming. and again that they cannot be trusted to act in the public’s best interest. If we leave this to the politicians and the corporations, we know what will happen. They will act too late, too timidly, and in service of the powerful. It is up to us to seize this moment and take responsibility for shaping the future.

[00:22:10] CR: We envision an Australia built on dignity, Equity and Abundance. A society where the benefits of AGI and robotics belong to all of us, not just the few. But this future will not happen by accident. It will only happen if we organize, act, and build it ourselves. The stakes are high. Could not be higher. The future is ours to create or ours to lose.

[00:22:36] CR: Let us rise to this challenge together.

[00:22:39] SS: By the way, I very much liked it. It was getting a little bit Unabomber until the end when he said there is an alternative. And then I breathed. I breathed, I said, I’m on a podcast with a guy. I’m not gonna have to explain in some true crime documentary letters. And

[00:22:54] SS: that’s a good thing for me. I

[00:22:56] SS: may, I really, Or is it? really liked it and I wrote a couple of notes when you were reading the first half that sprung to my mind.

[00:23:05] SS: Based on what you

[00:23:06] SS: were writing, would you like to hear them? Cameron?

[00:23:09] CR: That’s why we’re here, Steve.

[00:23:10] SS: Okay. The first thing that I wrote was that the real question is, can and will all have access to these tools of abundance? And then when I wrote that, I thought about, uh, the abundance that we have now, right? Because you could argue, and I’m just about to go to ChatGPT now and ask it, and you might even be able to do this for me if you’ve got it open, Cameron, is how much Wealth is there in the world per person.

[00:23:43] SS: I think it’s around about a hundred grand and in America, it might even be over a million. Can you check out those two numbers? Because we could argue, despite it not being as well distributed. And a lot of people in underdeveloped parts of the world, the food and the wealth and the electricity and the clean water, they don’t all have that yet.

[00:24:06] SS: So that’s one thing. Um, but we already have incredible abundance now where there is more than enough calories, energy to feed everyone. Everyone can be housed. There’s, there’s enough. Uh, homes, certainly in Australia, there’s a lot of empty homes, uh, there’s an incredible number of resources, uh, and they could be distributed if we had some sort of a system which was not capitalist, you know, potentially some sort of a communist system or where wealth is distributed, so everyone has dignity and access to the resources they need to live a healthy and, you know, moderately Well off life, but I feel like the monopoly on violence that governments have and the rules and taxations that government put in place, even though they redistribute some of the wealth, really is just part of the capitalist system where capture and control of resources is already there.

[00:25:02] SS: And if we didn’t have capture and control of resources, we could already feed, house, clothe, educate, And give medical care to everyone because we’ve certainly got the resources. And while we had corporate control, now we’re just going to have another form of algorithmic control. And the legal system might thwart people from having true control over their robot, like an Apple phone, where it can be bricked if you break some of the laws.

[00:25:28] SS: Uh, it seems as though we’ve got an oligopoly of Companies that control the AI, and even though the AI could potentially lead us to abundance, it’s controlled by the same corporations, and I can’t see them distributing their wealth to create this level of abundance in the back half of your essay, as much as I’d like

[00:25:44] SS: that to be the case.

[00:25:47] CR: I’ll answer that in a second, but let’s go to GPT.

[00:25:49] CR: The global wealth per adult averaged approximately USD 84, 718. However, this figure doesn’t reflect the stark disparities in wealth distribution worldwide. The median wealth per adult, a more accurate indicator of typical individual wealth, was around USD 8, 360, highlighting significant inequality. In Australia, the average wealth per adult stood at USD 546, 184, with a median wealth of USD 261, 805, indicating a relatively equitable distribution compared to global standards.

[00:26:31] CR: These figures underscore the vast differences in wealth both between and within countries, emphasizing the importance of considering median values to understand the economic reality of the average person.

[00:26:42] SS: than medians here, Cameron, and the reason is we’re talking about if we distributed it evenly. Right? So, so, so the averages are more important than the median in this case, because the median is more about how, how well distributed is it? This is a question of if we split up the resources and gave everyone access to abundance.

[00:26:59] SS: I’d love to know what the American number is. I reckon it’d have to be over, it’d have to be over a million per person, surely. Wealth per person in America would, because if Australia is,

[00:27:09] SS: you know, 500, yeah, you’d have to think America would

[00:27:13] SS: be at least that, maybe more.

[00:27:16] CR: Um, interesting, getting back to the, getting back to the,

[00:27:20] CR: the chat that Elon was having with Peter Diamandis, um, they were talking about it being the end of capitalism. And Elon, which I thought was fascinating, the richest man in the world, was saying, yes, this is going to bring about, if we get this right, this will bring about the end of capitalism as we know it, because everyone will have everything that they need, uh, for no cost, everything will just be provided to you.

[00:27:45] SS: are we talking robotics, creating things and extracting resources, or are we talking about nanobots creating a BMX bike

[00:27:52] SS: from scratch, organizing things at the molecular

[00:27:54] SS: level? He didn’t get into that level of detail, but yeah, all the stuff that Kurzweil talks about and Diamandis talks about in his books. In my, um Manifesto, I refer to it as Universal Basic Services, which isn’t a term I came up with, but it’s something that has been growing, I’ve been seeing people start to talk about it.

[00:28:16] CR: UBS instead of UBI. I wrote, We envision a society where everyone has access to the essentials of life, guaranteed as human rights. It should be a future of dignity, equity, and abundance. Now, I agree with you, and Tony and I have had this debate. For the last six months, his view is that the establishment, the powers that be, won’t allow this future to happen.

[00:28:43] CR: They won’t allow AI and robotics to achieve this vision because they won’t give up control. And I agree with that in part. I think that’s basically, this is what I talked about in the psychopath epidemic to a large extent. If you’re in a position of power and wealth and you don’t want to give it up, You’re going to use your power and wealth to keep your power and wealth.

[00:29:07] CR: Uh,

[00:29:08] SS: construct, mostly, was what I

[00:29:10] SS: took from the book.

[00:29:13] CR: what, what, what’s an emotional The idea of keeping wealth and power, because you’ve got abundance, and you’ve got way

[00:29:21] SS: more than You need in a lot of those circumstances.

[00:29:24] CR: You know, why would you give it up willingly? You’re not. You’re going to fight to keep it. And you’re going to use it to maintain control by manipulating or influencing the political system, the legal system, the system of media and education and all the things that influence the people because, you know, the 99 percent are always more powerful than the 1%.

[00:29:48] CR: The 99 percent can rise up at any time and overthrow the 1%.

[00:29:52] SS: And the 1 percent

[00:29:52] SS: know

[00:29:53] SS: this, they know

[00:29:54] CR: And they know this and they need to The 99 don’t though. The 99 actually don’t. You know, 5 percent of the 99 know it.

[00:30:03] CR: because the

[00:30:04] CR: 1 percent have spent a fortune telling the 99 percent that violence isn’t the answer.

[00:30:09] CR: Such a, such a graha, non violence, think about Gandhi. Gandhi was a great man, he was non violent. Did Gandhi get rid of the British from India? No, not really, it was the violent Sikhs who rose up and got rid of Britain I didn’t know that, but there’s a great show that I’m going

[00:30:27] SS: to sit down and watch called Mr. Inbetween. I haven’t Oh, oh my god,

[00:30:32] CR: the greatest show ever to come out of Australia by a landmile. Oh I’ve never heard a bad report you haven’t seen it. Now I’ve seen clips and I love it. Don’t, don’t spoil it for me because It’s when I have my last gig this week, I’m going to sit down joyously and just, and

[00:30:51] SS: just binge the whole

[00:30:52] SS: thing. man, But there’s one scene that I saw, I’ve seen a few of the scenes enough to have a taste that I know I’m going to love it.

[00:31:00] SS: And, uh, in one of the scenes, he’s sitting around in some round table, um, so he doesn’t have to go to jail. And he’s talking about a situation where he had an altercation with someone and was violent towards them. And the, uh, person sitting with all of the attendees to help with their violence, he said, can you give me an example, Ray, of a time where violence has actually worked?

[00:31:25] SS: And he said, World War II? I mean, he said, you know, we didn’t just negotiate with the Nazis. I don’t think they would have left. And I’m like, Oh yeah.

[00:31:37] CR: It, like, the story, do you know about the story behind it?

[00:31:40] SS: I do. And I’m watching, I’m

[00:31:41] SS: halfway through, uh, The Magician. I’m halfway through that. Oh, where did you find that? on YouTube.

[00:31:47] CR: find that. No, really? Yes. And I’m halfway through and I’m loving it. And I know the story about how he made the five minute film, then the longer version at the St Kilda Film Festival. And then some Australian kind of actor, one of the guys, I forget his name, sort of put some money behind it.

[00:32:04] SS: And then it got

[00:32:05] SS: picked up in the

[00:32:05] SS: US. Yeah. so, for people who don’t know the story, I know this is by the by, but fuck it. Um, it’s,

[00:32:12] SS: media, and it’s new forms of media, and it’s all that,

[00:32:14] SS: Cameron, just a great story. So Scott Ryan, the creator and the star of the show, is a um, oh man, like.

[00:32:24] CR: The story is, Don’t ruin it

[00:32:26] SS: for me, no, not the story of the show, the story of

[00:32:29] CR: him.

[00:32:30] SS: of the thing,

[00:32:30] SS: yeah. Um, he has never done anything in his life. I’ve seen him talk about it.

[00:32:37] CR: He grew up in, grew up in Melbourne, um, Richmond, um, and didn’t really do well at high school. Um, you know, they think he had sort of some disorder, oppositional defiance disorder or something like that. Um, mental health declined at 17. He had agoraphobia. And basically lived as a recluse, never left home, didn’t do drugs, but lived with people who did a lot of drugs, and, you knew this world a

[00:33:12] SS: bit. a bit.

[00:33:14] CR: but, you know, he basically just didn’t leave home for 12 years, didn’t have a job, didn’t study, didn’t do anything, practiced as a recluse.

[00:33:21] CR: Yoga and Tai Chi and meditation, didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, just did nothing. And then he started to think about, he goes, Oh, I got to do something. And the only thing he ever enjoyed it at school was writing. So he tried to write something and he was like a fan of the Sopranos and things like that. So he tried to write a Film about a, you know, criminal.

[00:33:47] CR: And he made The Magician, um, then he did start studying filmmaking at RMIT, shot it, I think he spent like 3, 000 on it, 2003, low budget, and it got attention at the Film Festival, noticed by Nash Edgerton, Joel Edgerton’s it, I knew it was one of

[00:34:05] SS: the Hollywood Aussie

[00:34:07] SS: guys. They helped re edit it for a theatrical release, and it was released as a film.

[00:34:14] CR: And then, um, nothing happened. with it. He said, we’re going to, we’re going to get this, you know, we’re going to get a budget for it. We’re going to get it picked up. We’re going to turn it into a series. This is like early 2000s, right? Nothing happened. They couldn’t sell it. They spent like 15 years trying to sell this to get it picked up.

[00:34:37] CR: No one would touch it. And so he did nothing again for the next 15 years. I Yes, because I’ve noticed how young he is in the movie, and it’s like, what have, I actually calibrating.

[00:34:49] CR: so, uh, he just does nothing for another 15 years. Finally, they’re able to sell the show. To a US, uh, network. I can’t remember which one. Oh, FX, picked it up. Yeah, in 2018. And they make this series, which he writes and stars in. Nash Edgerton directs, and they have some other directors, but Nash, and Nash Edgerton appears in it as well.

[00:35:16] CR: He plays a minor character, and his daughter, Nash Edgerton’s real life daughter, plays Ray’s daughter in it, and she’s fantastic. But it’s just, it is like the greatest, this guy, he, he is a fan. Fucking genius. The writing is brilliant. The stories are brilliant. The acting is, he’s terrifying. He’s basically a hitman, low end hitman, enforcer.

[00:35:40] CR: He is just fucking brilliant. But he’s never done it. This is the only thing he’s ever done. And then he did like three seasons and said, I ran out of stories and he stopped. And they’re just like, and the Good. Stop.

[00:35:54] SS: Good. And the final episode, like the final scene of the final episode, Chrissy and I still talk about, it was just, it was like Perfect. my boys. Scott Kilmartin. Scott Kilmartin is a massive fan who

[00:36:06] SS: got me onto it. Big Scotty. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. that’s, that’s my, Yeah. Tony Kynaston got me onto it too. Oh watch it next Thursday night.

[00:36:15] CR: I’m je I’m jealous, man. You gotta,

[00:36:17] CR: uh, it’s like, That’s actually one of the great things about any form of content or, you know, discovering a band or a movie or whatever. And you say,

[00:36:25] SS: I’m jealous. Cause you get to

[00:36:27] SS: experience it again For the first For the first time.

[00:36:30] CR: Yeah. Wow. That was a pivot, wasn’t

[00:36:33] SS: it?

[00:36:34] CR: How did we get onto that? Um, were talking about violence Violence. on violence that, uh, and in that, in the interim, I did look up what the U S is really, really similar to Australia in terms of the amount of wealth per person.

[00:36:48] SS: It’s, uh. over here, was it? It’s

[00:36:54] SS: 579, 000 USD. there you go. That’s probably about 700, 000 AUD.

[00:37:01] SS: Yeah.

[00:37:03] CR: So anyway, getting back to the side. So my basic idea is that I think we need to start a movement. Really? Like, are you serious when you say

[00:37:12] SS: that?

[00:37:12] CR: yeah, because I don’t have any confidence that our governments or our business leaders are going to manage this, Well, let’s, let’s think about it as well, because I think, and I do this a lot in my career, and it’s, it’s, it’s 20 years, is that we have so often been here before. And I think it is fair to say that the industrial revolution has brought about significant abundance and possibility. We just went through the numbers and we could have fed everyone.

[00:37:54] SS: We could have housed everyone and we could have given everyone access to healthcare with the industrial revolution. And we can now, we’ve just seen those numbers and yet we haven’t. And I would be flummoxed because in the transition, it’s not like you arrive at UBI day.

[00:38:13] SS: We don’t, we don’t arrive at abundance day.

[00:38:16] SS: It kind of creeps up. It’s a, it’s, it’s a little bit like Billy Gibson, you know, William Gibson. It’s like the future has already arrived. It’s just not equally distributed. Well, that’s kind

[00:38:25] SS: of, they’re the members, they’re the guys in ZZ Top, Billy Gibson. oh, is it a William Gibson, Billy Gibson? I didn’t know that. Fluffy guitars, give them a spin. Who

[00:38:35] SS: knew? Uh,

[00:38:37] SS: Yeah, so I Billy Gibbons? No. Billy Billy Gibbons

[00:38:41] CR: is uh, is easy. Tough

[00:38:43] SS: Oh, there you go, I didn’t know. Well, William Gibson, I was pretty sure I had William Gibson right, but anyway, uh,

[00:38:49] SS: so,

[00:38:49] SS: I just can’t see it.

[00:38:51] SS: I can’t see it happening

[00:38:53] CR: so here’s my, my without a revolution, without a real revolution, and I think blood would need to be

[00:38:59] SS: spilled. Okay. So maybe, but my, the, the way I mapped it out is what we need to do. First of all, am I

[00:39:11] SS: mapped out the revolution.

[00:39:13] CR: No, no, I haven’t mapped out the revolution.

[00:39:16] CR: I basically see us building together, putting together a movement. Where we bring together the best and the brightest from around the country and we build a shadow government, basically. So we figure out, we put together a vanguard,

[00:39:36] SS: Is it bad that I’m laughing at this? Is it bad that I’m laughing at this? Keep

[00:39:39] SS: going.

[00:39:42] CR: first person I’ve talked to about this, man, like, I need you on board.

[00:39:47] CR: We put together a vanguard of experts in public policy, technology, urban planning, economics, community organizing, voices from marginalized communities to make sure it’s inclusive and equitable, and then we create portfolios. We have ministers or working groups that focus on figuring out the vision for using AGI and robotics in things like housing, healthcare, education, energy, technology, and do we develop detailed, actionable policies for implementing universal basic services, develop a strategic blueprint that could be picked up and rolled out by a future government because they won’t be doing this effectively.

[00:40:36] CR: by themselves. Somebody needs to be building this out. Somebody needs to put the blueprints into place so they can be rolled out by a future government, whether it’s one of the existing political parties or one that we create ourselves because the, there’s no longer any faith in the Existing parties to guide us into this future.

[00:41:01] CR: Like this is, we’ve talked about this for the last year on the show, but we’re, this is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to humanity. AGI robotics, the AGI revolution, the artificial intelligence, and people say it’s the last human invention and they’re probably right.

[00:41:15] SS: I agree

[00:41:16] SS: too.

[00:41:17] CR: This could be

[00:41:19] CR: the greatest time for humanity, or it could be the end of humanity, or anything in between, right, in the next 10 years.

[00:41:28] CR: I don’t trust our politicians to run it effectively. I don’t trust our corporate leaders or our religious leaders or, you know, any of our institutions to manage this process, policing, legal, etc. We need to put together the best and the brightest from around the country. to lead us through this. And there’s plenty of really, people way smarter than me out there.

[00:41:52] CR: I, I’m not smart enough to do this, but I think we need to bring together the smartest people who actually know how housing and healthcare and education and energy and technology, whatever, work at a ground level, what the challenges are, what the implications of things are, so AGI in robotics? and Nanotech to solve all of these problems.

[00:42:18] CR: What are the practical realities of trying to solve these problems? Um, then we need to secure the resources. You know, we need to secure funding and support to drive this thing. We need to, you know, some combination of crowdfunding, major donors, ethical investors, In kind contributions of people who want to donate land and technology and expertise to support pilot programs around the country.

[00:42:44] CR: How do we, how do we solve the housing crisis? You know, how do we start to build cheap, uh, housing that can house people that are sleeping in tents? We’ve got tent cities and caravan cities growing around Australia. How do we solve that problem starting with the people that are urgently in need? For their children of having housing, uh, near places where they can work and go to school.

[00:43:12] CR: Somebody needs to be, our governments aren’t addressing the housing crisis. Somebody needs to

[00:43:17] SS: we have abundance, do they need to

[00:43:18] SS: be near anything?

[00:43:22] CR: Well, you need to Well,

[00:43:23] SS: to

[00:43:23] SS: work? Well, wait a minute, you

[00:43:24] CR: no, right,

[00:43:25] SS: right now,

[00:43:26] CR: now, yeah, so this isn’t like a, the, you don’t flip a switch and you have abundance, right? We need to

[00:43:32] SS: It’s a

[00:43:33] CR: figure out how to use to, yeah,

[00:43:35] SS: the shadow government would need significant funding before you even did anything. That would be pretty

[00:43:40] SS: significant funding. Good organization. You know, it’s kind of like, it’s not even a think tank. It’s yeah, shadow go, it’s, it’s pretty, it’s a pretty involved

[00:43:51] CR: well, not really. Not from day one.

[00:43:54] CR: You’re building, you’re, You’re building strategic blueprints first. You’re pulling together experts, building strategic blueprints. Then, as that’s progressing, you’re figuring, okay, how do we do pilot programs? How do we find some land where we can build cheap housing using the latest cutting edge technology to design and construct 3D printed houses interesting. So my farm, 000 people?

[00:44:17] SS: I’ve got 110 acre farm. Do you know how hard it is for us to get approval to build a second dwelling on it, because the law says only one house per 80 acres. And like, yeah, but we’re trying to build another house to prove our technology so that we can build houses 50 percent cheaper.

[00:44:31] SS: Do you think the local government is going to help

[00:44:32] SS: us? You wouldn’t believe it,

[00:44:34] SS: Cameron. Yeah, said on the Diamandis interview. He said, it takes longer. To get approval to build a new rocket than it does to actually build the rocket

[00:44:49] SS: I think that’s also the case with housing and many other things. One point that’s really interesting, actually, when you mentioned the segments, obviously healthcare, housing, one of them was

[00:45:02] SS: education.

[00:45:04] SS: And I would start there, and I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why I would start with education, because we already have the technology, and it’s not AGI, but it’s good enough in every category to have educational abundance

[00:45:18] SS: Right now.

[00:45:19] SS: Like. Gentlemen, we have the technology to build him better, stronger, faster. Do

[00:45:31] SS: E Boston, a man, half man, half machine, let loose, to come and help a society, a society in trouble. I’m just

[00:45:40] SS: making that up.

[00:45:43] CR: people that weren’t around in the seventies, dunno what we’re talking about, or the early eighties you missed the, it was the 6 million dollar man.

[00:45:50] CR: Yeah, 6 million. Like can’t even get a house in Brisbane for that now. Yeah, no.

[00:45:56] SS: think Education so right

[00:45:57] SS: now,

[00:45:57] CR: Yes, would say that we have, I would say, let’s call it relative abundance with education. I once spoke to RMIT University and they said, the future of education, we want you to come in, we want you to rip the band aid off, tell us everything you think, no holds barred on what the future is, right?

[00:46:20] SS: The executive there were out in the Yarra Valley and I said, okay, the first, they said, I said, so you, you really want me to, they said, yes. I said, the first thing you need to do is to get rid of the ATAR and let everyone study. Any course they want to study, regardless of the course that they got, or the score that they got.

[00:46:41] SS: And they said, oh, we can’t do that because they might not be able to pass the exams. I said, well, that doesn’t matter. And they said, we won’t be able to fit them in the building. I said, okay, if you didn’t get the full score, you can do it from home and do the same exam. Well, we wouldn’t be up that, that every reason I gave them, we couldn’t afford it.

[00:46:58] SS: I said, I had to look at your endowment. It’s 5 billion. You’re a hedge funds disguised as an educational institution. Like, what are you here for? Before I did that, I said, why do you exist? They were for the betterment of society, for the education of people. And then I went, get rid of the HR and let everyone in.

[00:47:16] SS: No, no, no, no, no. That’s just not going to work. Seriously. They hated me so much over the next two hours. We had a family photo where we all lined up at the end of the session. And when I stood there, everyone stood two meters to the side and I’ve got the photo of me on my own, right? Crazy. And when we had lunch afterwards, I sat down at a table and everyone got up and changed tables.

[00:47:40] SS: This is a hundred percent

[00:47:42] SS: the truth. Oh, that’s gold, We could do abundance right now with

[00:47:47] CR: what’s ATAR what’s ATAR is the score, which really

[00:47:51] SS: is a false limitation on the

[00:47:53] SS: amount of Your university, your entrance score, Your entrance score, which mattered when you can only fit 30 people in the building, but no one goes to the lectures anymore. No one goes to the building and we don’t need it.

[00:48:05] SS: So that’s

[00:48:05] SS: Just that is just false

[00:48:07] SS: scarcity.

[00:48:08] CR: Yeah. Just stream them online. You’ll give them an AI.

[00:48:11] SS: want to do it now. So, so already the challenges here are political, not, as you say, you need a movement because

[00:48:18] SS: we can do it right now with education today,

[00:48:19] SS: globally. Yeah. So we go, fuck universities, we’ll start our own university. Anyone can study any subject, anywhere, anytime. And we’ll get the world’s preeminent experts or experts in

[00:48:31] SS: this country. Here’s your engineering guy. Here’s your whatever, here’s your whatever.

[00:48:34] CR: we’ll just get the AI to do most of it, Yeah,

[00:48:36] SS: exactly. within a year.

[00:48:38] CR: Yeah. And we’re going to build a system for how you start from knowing nothing about medicine to being a doctor with AI teaching you everything, you know.

[00:48:48] SS: and, and so, and, and the AI robotics. So the robot will show you how to do the surgery and the, all of that sort of stuff. And Cameron will, he will donate his body to science. He’s that type of guy, but you don’t only need a shadow government. You actually need shadow systems. So then you build shadow education.

[00:49:07] SS: And you almost. It’s kind of almost like any form of industry disruption, but it’s happening category at a time. It’s kind of like what happened with media. They all went across to digital and legacy media is a rounding error with Murdoch’s just hanging on

[00:49:21] SS: somehow at 93 years of age.

[00:49:24] CR: One of the other low pieces of low hanging fruit is mental health. Access, you know, um, down in the pilot program section, I’ve got deploy AI powered mental health platforms offering 24 by 7 free on demand support for depression, ADHD, anxiety, and crisis intervention. Pair AI solutions with community hubs staffed by local volunteers and visiting professionals.

[00:49:47] CR: You know, trying to get kids diagnosed with ADHD in Australia at the moment, as everyone’s heard. Takes forever, costs a fortune, depression, anxiety, trying to get people into, uh, be able to see a therapist is absolutely ridiculous. And you know, it’s deliberately manipulated by the industry bodies to make it as expensive and as difficult.

[00:50:12] CR: I read a, there’s a big article on this in Australia a month or two ago that I read, you know, the, The GPs are trying to get permission for the GPs to be able to diagnose kids with ADHD and the psychiatry or the psychology industry bodies are trying to stop it from happening because it’s, some, some of their members are getting paid 900, 000 a year and I’m not just making that up, 900, 000 a year for to work in AI, sorry, ADHD diagnosis specialty clinics because people are willing to pay a fortune to get their kids diagnosed so they can get them on medication and it’s just a massive payday for psychiatry and psychologists.

[00:51:05] CR: Yeah, I’ll send you a link.

[00:51:06] CR: It’s insane.

[00:51:09] CR: But we need to build solutions for this sort of stuff. Education, mental health, uh, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s not gonna, like, here’s my, my, my realization was that it’s just, we, we, this is too important. We can’t allow business as usual to shepherd us through this period.

[00:51:28] CR: It, they’re not gonna, they’re not gonna do a good job. We need to put together. A shadow government to prepare the, prepare the ground for this stuff.

[00:51:39] SS: It seems to me very much like a, you know, a modern revolution. I don’t know if you would know this better than me, that if the world has had relative peace for the last 50 I don’t know if that’s a bad statement or not, uh, since World War II, I don’t know if this, when you have large tech upheavals that results in war and resources and new systems of governance, not sure, but it certainly feels as though nothing other than a revolution Would make this possible unless we somehow managed to second resources to build out these things. And I just can’t see the donors being there because the donors are typically those with the wealth who are beneficiaries of the

[00:52:33] SS: existential system.

[00:52:34] SS: Saudis love

[00:52:35] SS: to tap into Look, I agree with you. That’s going to be a challenging aspect of it, but, um, you know, you’ll find some of them out there that, that are thinking about their children and their grandchildren and want to see a better world built for them. Um, I think we’ll, we’ll be able to find. We’ll be able to find people to fund it.

[00:52:54] CR: They may not even be domestic. Uh, you know, they may be international, tapping into sources of philanthropy.

[00:53:00] SS: that do some, some brand washing. They like to do some sort of greenwashing

[00:53:05] SS: on their brand. The Saudis are big on

[00:53:07] SS: that. Well, it’s not only that, they know that crude oil has got a shelf life, man, of uh, how long they can make money out of it. Don’t know exactly how long it’s going to be, but they need to prepare for, they need to prepare for the days when they’re not able to sell oil anymore. What are they going to do next?

[00:53:27] CR: Well, I had a final thought on this. It’s just, it’s just that, um, I started this process by, by thinking about what I call techno communism. Um, you know, I, I’ve said on the QAV podcast recently that I’m a communist and, um, people sent me some emails, surprised that a guy hosting a podcast about value investing is a, And what I’ve always said about myself and communism is that if I think about the world that I want my children to live in, it’s a world where everybody is looked after, everybody has their needs taken care of, everybody, um, can have, Abundance and happiness and peace and prosperity and get to live their best life.

[00:54:20] CR: Which system of socio economic cooperation that I’ve heard about or read about over the course of my life do I think is, has the possibility of delivering that? It’s not Capitalism

[00:54:33] SS: Possibility is a good word too, because we’ve never really

[00:54:36] SS: achieved it yet. I would say that’s a

[00:54:38] SS: fair statement. Not on a large scale, not

[00:54:41] SS: on a large

[00:54:41] CR: system has achieved that. And capitalism, see the difference between capitalism and communism is that communism has a vision that it’s aiming towards, and it’s a vision of a better world where everyone is taken care of. Capitalism doesn’t have a vision. There’s no vision for capitalism apart from the capitalists control everything.

[00:55:03] CR: That’s the only vision. There’s no I’ve read Milton Friedman. I’ve read all of the foundational books on capitalism. Um, and there’s nothing. There’s no great vision for a better society.

[00:55:19] SS: but there is one book that defines what it is. I can’t remember who the author is, but it’s called Finite and Infinite

[00:55:25] SS: Games Right? and Finite and Infinite Games talks about the two. It’s a really weird book.

[00:55:32] SS: It’s from the Stuart Brand School of

[00:55:34] SS: Crazy Books in Oh, I love Stewart

[00:55:36] CR: Brand. Yeah. And so Uh, Stuart Brand, for listeners, was someone who, he ran the Whole Earth catalogue, is that right?

[00:55:45] CR: Yeah, real sort of Techno

[00:55:48] SS: utopianism, you know, in the early computer era. And he was part of that, that movement, and he’s done some really interesting things. And he also was famous for saying, information wants to be free. But he also said, information also wants to be expensive. And it’s the balance between those

[00:56:02] SS: two things is sort of where we are.

[00:56:05] SS: Uh, Finite and Infinite Games by James

[00:56:08] CR: P. Kass, an American academic who was Professor Emeritus of History and Literature of Religion at New York University. A review of the book summarizes Kass’s argument. There are at least two kinds of games, finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

[00:56:29] CR: Finite games are those instrumental activities, from sports to politics to wars, in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game, there is only one, includes any authentic interaction from touching to culture that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game.

[00:56:52] CR: A finite player seeks power. The infinite one displays self sufficient strength. Finite necessitating an audience. Infinite ones are dramatic, involving participants.

[00:57:06] SS: so it’s interesting. I would put capitalism as an infinite game because the people who are playing it just want to keep playing and just want to keep the power. When you read it, it’s kind of clear. And to me, communism seems like a finite game. The game is, is that we distribute and find a system to distribute the resources so that we all have them.

[00:57:27] SS: And more resources come in and out, but the game has an end. An end is everyone has access to everything they need. Whereas Capitalism is this infinite game where I just want to win, and I will manipulate and change the rules to keep playing the game. And I want to be seen as, In front of everyone else and maintain that power structure.

[00:57:45] SS: For me, it was the clearest thing. And I obviously had my economics head on it when I read it. But, um, for me, that was one of the ones that really defines economic systems. If you read it with that context in your mind, you can really see certain patterns. Uh, but I, I think you’re right. I think capitalism, uh, is, is, is about the game itself.

[00:58:06] SS: Whereas communism is about a sense of equality, which could or should be achieved, they feel like two different types of games.

[00:58:13] SS: And hence, I think that’s why there’s a tension

[00:58:15] SS: there. And people will always say, well, we tried communism, it didn’t work. And my response to that is,

[00:58:22] CR: my response to that is threefold. Well, no, we’ve never had communism. That’s another point. We, we, communism is the end point. You have to go through socialism to get to communism and the so called communist countries then and now didn’t get past socialism.

[00:58:40] CR: Um, But the other three, the main three points are number one, capitalism hasn’t worked either. It’s brought the world to the brink of destruction. Um, and, and there’s greater economic inequality, et cetera, et cetera, than we’ve ever had before. Right now, there’s consolidation of wealth in the hands of the 1 percent or the 0.

[00:58:59] CR: 1%. So, okay. So that’s a, that’s a nil argument. It, we tried and it didn’t work. Um, but the key reasons why I, as a historian who’s studied 20th century communism for decades, if I had to put down the two main reasons why communism didn’t work, actually three main reasons why communism didn’t work in the 20th century, they are as follows.

[00:59:26] CR: Number one, the countries that tried it Skipped a step. The countries that all tried it were all, um, mostly pre industrial revolution or barely industrial revolution countries. Russia, um, China, uh, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, North Korea. These are countries that had been either oppressed by colonials like Indochina and the French, China had had their century of humiliation under the British and, you know, their emperors hadn’t really adopted the Industrial Revolution, had their own Industrial Revolution in a way, but it wasn’t the same as the British Western one.

[01:00:10] CR: Um, and they tried to, and the Russians had the czars and all that kind of stuff that were very late to the Industrial Revolution. And by the time they started their, Socialist slash communist experiments in the early to mid 20th century, they were in a desperate situation. They were starving. They were being attacked by capitalist countries that were far wealthier and far more powerful militarily as well as economically.

[01:00:41] CR: And they tried to Speed up the process. Now, if you go back and you read Marx and Engels, the process that they envisioned for a feudal society, getting to a communist society, was you had to go from feudalism to capitalism, then to socialism, then to communism. And the capitalist period was important because that would build literacy, uh, and infrastructure.

[01:01:08] CR: You can’t really have a society where the people control the means of production unless the people are literate. And you’ve already invested in the means of production. You have, you know, you have roads and to get to that. and it’s almost like capitalism leads you through the innovation and the incentive process to get the resources and infrastructure required

[01:01:30] SS: to have an abundance for

[01:01:32] SS: all, Exactly. And then you evolve beyond capitalism into socialism, and then you evolve beyond socialism into communism, and the difference, main difference, the way I break it down for people is, socialism is where you have a state, you still have a state, that is controlling the division of, uh, Money and responsibility and power and monitoring it, a vanguard.

[01:01:55] CR: When you get to communism, you no longer need the state. Everything is just functioning by itself in communes, little communities. They’re running everything. The people have taken control of the means of production and everything just runs by itself. We never got there. And what, and what the problem, one of the problems, Russia and China and Cuba, et cetera, et cetera, had is when they tried this, their populations were mostly illiterate.

[01:02:18] CR: They hadn’t had an opportunity to build the infrastructure. So they tried to do a speed run in five year time windows to catch up because the capitalists were trying to destroy them while they’re doing this experiment and threatening them with nuclear weapons, et cetera, et cetera, the invading them, et cetera, et cetera.

[01:02:38] CR: And they, and, and the speed run didn’t work generally, which is why Dong Xiaoping is the great genius of China, because in the 70s, Dong said. we, we went, we tried to go too fast, too hard, we need to take back a step, we need to reintroduce some capitalism into the country, but we need to manage it.

[01:02:59] CR: Carefully manage it so they don’t become too powerful, but we need capitalism to invest in the infrastructure. And then after we do that for 50 years, we’ll be the most powerful country in the world, and then we can go get back to where we were. And that explains the rise of China since 1979.

[01:03:19] SS: Although that’s now a pending disaster. There’s a video I watched last night on China’s economic

[01:03:27] SS: future and it is super, super,

[01:03:29] SS: super bleak.

[01:03:31] CR: I’ve, I’ve been hearing those stories for No, no, no. I saw some numbers that blew my, this, this blew my mind. We’re going to talk about it. Next futuristic and we’re both going to watch it and it’s crazy. That said, we call that the Jack Ma clause.

[01:03:43] SS: We don’t want anyone to get too much power. Uncle Jack, listen, you’re coming on a little holiday with us. We’re going to, uh,

[01:03:50] SS: we’re going to reprogram your brain. But also you’ve got Xi Jinping, who is. becoming incredibly,

[01:03:56] SS: he’s an interesting cat,

[01:03:59] CR: Man, Lee Kuan Yew, when he was still around, said that Xi Jinping was the most impressive human he’d ever met. I mean, and Lee Kuan Yew was loved in the West for what he did in Singapore. And he said He said that Xi Jinping was a Nelson Mandela level leader of a country who was going to completely reshape China.

[01:04:19] CR: You get a lot of, you get a lot of, it gets a lot of negative press over here, but anyway, I don’t know you’ve got Chinese family and all that kind of stuff.

[01:04:25] SS: we’ll go to that another time, I mean the fundamental anyway, Alright

[01:04:28] SS: quickly because we’ve got to get back to a couple of other

[01:04:30] SS: topics on the

[01:04:30] CR: well, techno communism, so they tried to move too fast, but also, the technology wasn’t there to centrally manage hundreds of millions of people and their economic and business and social affairs, right? We have the technology now to do that, and we centrally manage Western economies all the time. You know, the way we roll out COVID vaccines is all done by technology, right?

[01:04:54] CR: And our economies are run centrally managed. Um, the RBI. Centrally manages our economy by tweaking levers. So this vision of techno communism is how I started with this. So anyway, that’s my view. That’s my movement. This is going to be the next 20 years of my life. Well, the next two years, because it’ll all be over in two years, whether we win or we lose.

[01:05:16] CR: So,

[01:05:17] SS: Well look, um the idea that abundance for all i think is, Just wondrous. And, and, and, and, and if that is, I believe that the technology could provide abundance, absolutely. And I agree with you that the challenge is the power structures around that abundance and the distribution of it, not whether or not it’s technologically

[01:05:36] SS: capable. So I agree with the

[01:05:38] SS: capability. the third reason communism failed is that psychopaths fuck everything up. That’s one of the big

[01:05:45] CR: yeah. You need to have

[01:05:48] CR: frameworks in place, whether it’s capitalism or communism or religion or police, whatever it is, to stop psychopaths from being able to take complete power, because they will. That’s what psychopaths do.

[01:06:03] CR: So part of all of this is how do we go through this process and don’t let the psychopaths Infiltrate and fuck it up. Psychopaths have their purpose and they have their uses, don’t get me wrong, but you need to carefully manage the psychopaths, because there’s one in ten people that are psychopaths, and if they can get, if they can get access to power, they will, they’re very good at that, the functional ones, and they’ll fuck everything up.

[01:06:30] CR: So that is another problem we had with communism, is the psychopaths got involved. And capitalism’s fatal flaw is that power structures emerge. And its fundamental flaw is that inequality over time, you need a redistribution of wealth. That’s the number one problem with it.

[01:06:46] SS: Capitalism, I

[01:06:47] SS: think. wealth and the power that the wealth

[01:06:50] CR: buys. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it facilitates that and it needs to be circumvented. Moving right along, right along, Cameron, to uh, social media

[01:07:00] SS: in Australia.

[01:07:03] CR: People, man, I’m getting, I’ve seen a lot of, a lot of people are very angry for our international listeners. The Australian government has just passed legislation that says they’re going to ban social media for anyone under the age of 16 in Australia. TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, I think is included in there.

[01:07:22] CR: Um, doesn’t include some things like online gaming for some reason. Um, there are some things that are. Not going to be, uh, included. How are they going to do it? Not really clear at this juncture.

[01:07:37] SS: I’m gonna write a manifesto on how easy it is to police. It’s so easy. It’s embarrassing as to how easy it is to know exactly, nearly exactly how old a person is on social media. Uh, there’s been a lot of talk, and this is a classic example of

[01:07:54] SS: techno, uh, utopianism,

[01:07:56] SS: and this is, you say, name this theme song. Da da da da da da da da da da da da. You can’t answer it? Okay. You, you’re obviously underage. Get off your band.

[01:08:08] SS: that’s actually a good one. That’s fun. That’s actually a fun one. Name this theme song. We’ve got enough 80s stuff that we can really throw out there until they start memeing on 80s songs and then tell everyone what they are and they use it as an, a stealth

[01:08:20] SS: education process in pop culture. Yeah, right. Sorry. What’s your policing system?

[01:08:25] SS: well, let’s just go for the listeners first.

[01:08:28] SS: A lot of people have come out and said that, uh, it’s thwarting free speech. You can imagine Elon came out and all of the

[01:08:36] SS: complaints. Look, I think it’s, I think it’s super clear that it’s absolutely dangerous for young minds. I think we’ve spoken about it before. I’m really for this law. In fact, I wish it was 18 years of age.

[01:08:46] SS: Because I just cannot see any good coming from social media with kids, you know, young girls and self harm and bullying and all of these expectations on life, reducing their attention spans. The negative, and I’ve seen it personally with family members, where it’s incredibly damaging. And I’m all for this law.

[01:09:07] SS: And I think within a few years, it’s going to go up to 18. Now, The fine corporations can be fined up to 49. 5 million Australian dollars for systemic failures to implement an age limit. Well, first of all, what is systemic? Which means, can they just do it all year and they go, Oh yeah, about that and fight in court a year later after they’ve made zillions of dollars?

[01:09:33] SS: 49 million is nothing for big tech, even in Australia.

[01:09:38] SS: It’s, it’s not even a parking

[01:09:40] SS: ticket.

[01:09:41] CR: Why is

[01:09:41] SS: give you the

[01:09:42] SS: numbers.

[01:09:43] CR: 5?

[01:09:44] SS: Sorry?

[01:09:45] CR: Why is it 49. 5? Is that like 90, you know, 99 cents instead of a dollar? Is it

[01:09:50] SS: nice to make it feel as though they really considered it and didn’t just didn’t throw the round number of 50 is what that is, Cameron. So let’s just be clear on the psychology of

[01:09:59] SS: governance.

[01:10:00] CR: Right, of marketing

[01:10:02] CR: a fine.

[01:10:02] SS: yeah, exactly. So Facebook’s revenue in Australia is 1. 26 billion, right? So it’s what 4 percent of revenue, something like that.

[01:10:12] SS: Uh, Alphabet’s revenue in Australia is 7 billion. It’s not even 1%. Again, parking ticket. The only one that it could affect in Australia, whose revenue is growing, but last reported was only 375 million in revenue. So it’s reasonably impactful on TikTok’s revenue. So, we have a bunch of companies here where the fines are inconsequential.

[01:10:39] SS: Another mistake they made is, underage users, nor their parents, neither of those will face punishment for violations. However, if I’m caught underage drinking or I’m supplying someone underage drink, I get a fine of 2, 000 to 10, 000. Why wouldn’t they do the same thing if they’re serious about it? And I do think that social media is more dangerous for children than underage drinking or driving a car.

[01:11:03] SS: I really do. Uh, now here’s how they can know. I actually wrote like a 30 point plan on the ways that you can know exactly how old someone is on social media. The first one

[01:11:14] SS: is.

[01:11:16] SS: Yes, Cameron.

[01:11:17] CR: before before you go on, I just wanted to point out, what did you say Google’s revenue was in Australia? Do

[01:11:22] SS: Alphabet

[01:11:23] SS: in total is 7 billion.

[01:11:26] CR: you know how much of that they paid tax on?

[01:11:28] SS: Oh yeah, I know they pay about 20 million

[01:11:30] SS: tax a year or something ridiculous. Almost

[01:11:31] SS: nothing.

[01:11:33] CR: 90 million in tax they paid based on income of 1. 892 billion because they claimed that around 80 percent of their income is not taxable.

[01:11:46] SS: That’s right. Because you know what they do? They lease their brands and their assets off themselves, which is the easiest loophole to close in the

[01:11:54] SS: world. That’s like me saying I’m gonna put my brain, I’m gonna put my brain in um, a zero tax haven and I rent my brain from my, this is insane. It’s just

[01:12:04] SS: insanity.

[01:12:05] SS: It’s a joke.

[01:12:07] CR: took 6. 3 billion from Australian customers during fiscal 2021 2022, told the ATO that 93. 6 percent of their income was not taxable.

[01:12:18] SS: allow that. But this is why to remove multinational tax avoidance, it’s so, so simple. And again, Cameron, we’ve been here before. Land tax. Why was land tax introduced? Because people were finding ways to say, yeah, but I had to put the fences up and the cows and the this and the that.

[01:12:34] SS: And then they said, yeah, we’re just going to put a value on your land and send you a textbook. Congratulations. You’re my newest taxpayer. We do the same thing. It’s called revenue assessment tax for any international company. We put a valuation on your company. You did 7B in revenue. Here’s your 10 percent tax on that.

[01:12:48] SS: Congratulations or leave. We

[01:12:49] SS: don’t care. It’s real easy. You

[01:12:51] SS: need his courage. yeah, we’ll just nationalize all of your assets and

[01:12:54] CR: you can fuck off.

[01:12:57] SS: I’m not joking. This is exactly what

[01:12:59] SS: we should do. It’s so easy. It’s an

[01:13:01] CR: Same with mining companies. Oh, you don’t want to pay tax on your mine? Then fuck off. We’ll, we’ll nationalize your take it with ya. Well, we should nationalize the mines anyway, but that’s another part of our communist plan. I agree. That is insane. Zero value add. back to, how do you, how do you

[01:13:16] SS: error. It’s a rounding error. Um, now, here are some of the ways.

[01:13:22] SS: I won’t list them all because it’ll bore listeners, but I’m going to write a manifesto. First one is Despite what they say, they are looking at the face of every single person who is on social media, every single time. They are doing that. And when you’re posting, you’re taking a photo, and they can very accurately with AI, guess your age.

[01:13:38] SS: That’s number one. Number two, finger size. They know exactly how big your finger size is. Number three is the tone of your voice, whether or not you’ve been through puberty or not. If you haven’t been through puberty, they can tell in your voice whether or not you have been through puberty. There’s three.

[01:13:53] SS: We haven’t even

[01:13:53] SS: started. Which room you are in.

[01:13:56] CR: bio authentication. BioPrints. There’s about 20, right? I’ve just given you three. Location, Geo. All right, let’s go with location. The first one is, Which bedroom are you in in the house? Every single house is on Google Maps. Every single house which has been sold, sold in the last 15 years, would have a map of that house and the address knowing where the bedrooms are.

[01:14:20] SS: If the phone is next to a bed which isn’t the main bedroom, you know how old they are. You take that phone, if that phone is in a classroom, we know the classroom and the ages of the people in that classroom. Here’s another one. The most common message on social media is Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday, Steven.

[01:14:39] SS: Great, hope you enjoy your 14th birthday. You can cross reference this with all of your contacts lists who are the same contacts where you can do a triangulation test on the same things on them to work out exactly how old they are. Like, what about the content that they look at? What about the things that they share?

[01:14:55] SS: There is an insane number of indicators and I actually asked ChatGPT and it gave me more than 50 and they said we don’t know if these They actually have access, but it is highly plausible and probable that they do have access to all of this information. They know exactly how old the person is. And here’s what we need to do. Find someone who is on there, who is younger than you. We’re going to come for you. And the fine is 5 percent of your revenue. Your fine is 10 percent of your revenue. Congratulations, here’s your fine. Or we’ll take your directors and put you in an orange suit. It’s real easy. Either way, parents who give it to their kids should risk a fine of 10, 000 as well.

[01:15:37] SS: Because we need to treat it the same way as drink driving, as driving on the road illegally, and alcohol if we’re serious about it, and tobacco. If we’re serious about it, it’s easy to define who is on the phone. So easy. I’ve just given you a whole bunch

[01:15:53] SS: of reasons that you can cross

[01:15:55] SS: reference those. Well, there’s a difference. You’re talking about the ability of the technology companies to determine the age of the participants, but how do you police it? How does the government police what the social media companies, how well they’re monitoring and managing the process? That’s a way you police it is, yeah, so you find people. Who have broken the law. So this is the needle in the haystack. You got to show the

[01:16:25] SS: needle. If How do you find that? You get 15 year olds to confess to the government, go to a confessional with a Catholic priest and after he finishes touching them up just mentions that they’ve you make the fine, here’s, here’s what I think too. If you make the fine and the downside significant enough, you’ll get an incredible amount of compliance from corporations. Cause they’re, they’ve only got one

[01:16:47] SS: motivation,

[01:16:48] SS: Cameron. Yeah, but I’m not talking about the corporation, I’m talking about how does the government police that the corporations are doing it? How do they monitor it to make sure they’re doing the right job?

[01:17:04] SS: I think they will do the right job if the risk is high enough for them financially.

[01:17:10] CR: Yeah, I get that argument, but that’s That’s my argument.

[01:17:19] CR: It’s like talking to my wife. Um, okay, so

[01:17:24] SS: What does that mean? You really love me,

[01:17:25] SS: Cam. Thank you. Well, you know

[01:17:27] CR: that’s true. Um,

[01:17:30] SS: well, there would be

[01:17:31] SS: ways that you could do it. Let me, let me

[01:17:33] SS: digest that and in the you can just you can just say I don’t know.

[01:17:37] SS: not yet, but I’m sure there is a way. I don’t know yet. I

[01:17:39] SS: actually I don’t know. So you don’t have a policing strategy at all, real. Well, You’re talking about compliance strategy, not a policing strategy.

[01:17:48] SS: yeah, a compliance strategy, I think we have, the policing I think is, I mean, you could do the same way you do things with cars.

[01:17:57] SS: You could do random

[01:17:58] SS: checks. Yeah, that was where I was

[01:18:00] CR: going to go with it. So random checks and how do you do that? We’re just going to rock up to Facebook’s offices and

[01:18:06] SS: But you could do that. You, and also, well, wait a at people’s profiles and then determine whether or not they’re. Of age,

[01:18:14] SS: Well, well, if you’re gonna have a law. Maybe, maybe you could determine whether or not people are of age on their profiles, but maybe you take phones out of kids hands in the same way that you get someone on the street, uh, in a car, in a public place. Maybe that’s it. In the same way that it’s what’s in your, I don’t know.

[01:18:31] CR: cops just randomly tap kids on the shoulder on the train on the maybe, Yeah, maybe, maybe, that’s it.

[01:18:39] SS: Why, what’s wrong with that?

[01:18:40] CR: look, cause that sounds very police statey.

[01:18:44] SS: Well, we’ve already got police state with alcohol and, and cars. What’s the difference?

[01:18:49] CR: I don’t want more police statey. I want less police statey, but look, let me, let me throw some. I do, and look, I’ve had a number of people in the last couple of weeks, including my boys, uh, who are 24, say this is just ridiculous and it’s bullshit and it’s never gonna work and kids will find a way around it, they’ll, they’ll find a way to hack Like they do with alcohol and like they do with driving cars

[01:19:10] SS: illegally. Yeah, that’s what they You know, the most important thing though on it, for me, the most important thing, yeah, and, and, and I know that people laugh at me for this, but in my mind the most important thing that this does is it gives parents a reason to say it’s against the law and we are

[01:19:29] SS: not doing it. You’re not

[01:19:31] SS: having it. And I think, and I, and I do think that in countries like Australia and parents who care about their kids. In the same way that they don’t give their kids alcohol, well you hope that they don’t, when they’re young, uh, this becomes like that. And a large part of it is really about parenting, but this gives the parents tacit approval and legal approval to come and say, hey, wait a minute, no, we’re not breaking the law.

[01:19:58] SS: I think that’s the most powerful

[01:19:59] SS: thing on this law.

[01:20:02] CR: I’ve had, so I’ve had a range of conversations and I’ve seen a lot of stuff online about this over the last couple of weeks. Um, one of the arguments that I heard against it from a friend was that what about LGBTQ kids in rural towns that, uh, the only source of support that they get is from social media, being online in communities of other LGBTQ people.

[01:20:30] CR: They’re going to be cut off. Uh, it’s going to be bad for them. Do you have a response to that?

[01:20:37] SS: No, because I was just, um, typing into ChatGPT, uh, ways that it could be policed, because it might have a better answer

[01:20:45] SS: than ours. Sorry, can you ask me again, please, mate?

[01:20:48] SS: Was doing So one of the arguments that I heard against a ban is that what if there are LGBTQ kids in rural towns where social media is the only place they get any sort of community and support and they will now be cut off from that.

[01:21:05] SS: Yeah. Look, that’s a concern and people, uh, who need social connection for a variety of reasons, whether they’re mental health or their personal status or all of those. Things like you’ve mentioned. Um, we should be able to, as a part of this, provide some kind of a forum where they can find each other that is outside of the realms of traditional social media.

[01:21:33] SS: I don’t think that would be incredibly difficult to build a forum. As far as I understand, WhatsApp and a few other messaging groups are still available and Reddit and other places. I think that there is still places for them to connect and communicate. But if it is that government needs to invest in this.

[01:21:51] SS: Then they should, and they should get the money off big tech to do it, right? So build a safe place for people of that ilk to be able to connect with each other and communicate, and that’s actually even more of a healthcare issue than a social media issue, if you want my honest opinion on it, and that there should be services that the government is investing in to help people with specific.

[01:22:13] SS: Um, needs for socialization and connection

[01:22:16] SS: who, you know, don’t fit into the

[01:22:20] CR: Yeah, we already have Kids Helpline. According to Guardian, four hours ago, uh, the laws will apply to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and X. Exemptions will apply for health and education services, including YouTube, Messenger Kids, WhatsApp, Kids Helpline, and Google Classroom. So there are, uh,

[01:22:44] SS: Y.

[01:22:45] SS: Ha ha ha Ha There are going to be avenues and platforms for kids.

[01:22:50] CR: Um, so look, I think we’ve talked about this before, but this is how I’ve articulated it to people in the last couple of weeks. I am personally against censorship as a general rule. I think in a, in a free society, you want to keep the government out of censorship as much as possible. You also want to keep them out of interfering with what people can do in their private lives, their personal lives.

[01:23:13] CR: I disagree with bans on tobacco. I disagree with. Uh, Duties on Tobacco, and all that kind of stuff. Oh, right. That’s said,

[01:23:24] CR: watch what surprises you.

[01:23:26] SS: to hear that you disagree with that. I, I think in a free economy, if something’s legal, you should be able to use

[01:23:31] SS: it, but

[01:23:31] SS: yeah, it’s either

[01:23:32] SS: legal or it’s I’m happy for

[01:23:36] CR: there to be restrictions on where you can smoke in public, but, I, I’m not able to buy cigars to smoke for myself at home on my deck. Because the price went up from like five bucks a cigar to 60 bucks a cigar on the things, right? So

[01:23:55] CR: that kind of stuff, um, I, I take offense to,

[01:23:59] SS: Yeah, No, I agree but here’s the

[01:24:00] CR: thing. I disagree with that. I, and I think they should be limited. It should be a tool of last resort. That said, I do believe governments have a responsibility. of care, particularly for, uh, minors and minorities and, and people that, um, get the rough end of the stick in a society where they’re on the fringes and the margins.

[01:24:25] CR: And if, We, we know there’s increasing evidence that social media is just bad for everybody, generally speaking, but particularly for kids because their brains aren’t fully developed. They don’t have the control, the executive function to know what’s good for them, what’s not good for them. We know that there’s a lot of bullying, there’s a lot of suicide, there’s a lot of horrible stuff that happens just in terms of self esteem and all that kind of stuff that comes from what, looking at Instagram that kind of stuff.

[01:24:56] CR: That, um If corporations know this, but aren’t doing enough to stop it, if parents Know this and aren’t doing enough to stop their kids being on it that there is a point in time Where governments do have a responsibility of care to step in and go enough’s enough We’re gonna have a generation or generations of kids that are more fucked up than they need to be.

[01:25:23] CR: We need to Put an end to this. We need to stop this. We need to step up. It’s difficult. Um, I’m, I’m, I’m in a sort of mixed position on it. Um, I don’t trust governments to do this stuff well. Um, but I do understand the impetus to protect the most vulnerable in society if the, if the forms of protection that exist outside of that aren’t doing a good enough job to protect them.

[01:25:58] SS: Yeah. It was interesting when I put into ChatGPT some of the policing. I mean, the, the most obvious one, which got thwarted because of privacy concerns, which is insane by, I think the coalition was, uh, to put in, um, verified digital ID systems, which would be the easiest way, some form of ID to prove that you’re over the age of 16, whether it’s a learner’s permit or whatever.

[01:26:22] SS: And you can do that end to end encryption, which, which actually

[01:26:24] SS: has zero privacy

[01:26:25] SS: issues as well. All right. So, everyone’s like, oh, they want to get all your ID, yeah, they know who you fuckin are exactly. And they know that as well. So they should have had that. And that’s the easiest way to do it. And I would envisage, I would envisage that at some point that’ll come in. I do think that, like a lot of laws, you put them in for good reason, but there probably will be an amendment.

[01:26:47] SS: Um, some of the other ones was device level restrictions, built in settings. Um, Guardian Approval, all those

[01:26:53] SS: kind of things as well. Um,

[01:26:56] CR: Now, there’s also the argument that this has all been orchestrated by the Murdoch media as, and the other big media, Kerry Stokes, et cetera, and

[01:27:08] SS: it may well have.

[01:27:09] CR: against Google and Facebook for, you know, refusing to, um, be bribed in order to let people have access to the news. And I think that’s probably right too.

[01:27:24] CR: I’m sure I think there’s a high

[01:27:25] SS: chance of that. Doesn’t make me

[01:27:26] SS: against pushed hard for this. Exactly. Both things can change my mind on it. If it came from people who have done

[01:27:33] SS: nefarious, iniquitous things

[01:27:35] SS: in the past, it And are doing it for nefarious

[01:27:38] CR: reasons.

[01:27:39] SS: exactly, for their own power and wealth, doesn’t make me against it. Um, but I think that, um, Yeah, the law will have to be adapted, but putting it in is really important and it gives parents something really important. The policing of it, random checks it, uh, was another one that was suggested by ChatGPT with the companies providing the services and it said the fines would need to be significant enough for them to enforce it.

[01:28:08] SS: I mean, it’s a classic algebra of, do you make more money by not doing it and paying the parking fine? I mean, it’s really simple algebra, right, uh, on

[01:28:15] SS: that. It’s the seatbelt recall argument from Fight It is the Fight Club. It’s exactly that. And that’s all they need to do. I think there are ways that the easiest one is proof of ID on the device. Uh, big tech, absolutely no. If you make the fine big enough and do random checks, then, uh, and if they’re smart, they would comply with it and shut people off because then they can, oh man, I was actually, I’m, I was going to say then they would maybe thwart the laws in other countries by not drawing attention to themselves Hmm. because they would not

[01:28:50] SS: want it in other countries,

[01:28:51] SS: surely. Anyway, I mean, I’m doubtful that this will actually get implemented.

[01:28:59] SS: When you say implemented, passed

[01:29:01] SS: in the Senate, or, no,

[01:29:03] CR: actually, executed. It’s been passed in the Senate, I think. Yeah. Um, I’m, I’m way, this quote, it says, if they can target you for advertising, they can use the same technology to know exactly who you are and verify the age of a child. We know that. It’s whether or not we can police it, like you say. The enforcement is the, is the hard part, but I think that parents, they need to be, it needs to be the same as alcoholic driving.

[01:29:26] SS: But I’m, I’m for it.

[01:29:29] SS: Gee, this has been the longest podcast we’ve ever done in

[01:29:30] SS: history. nah, my, uh, my guess is when Trump is in power, uh, he and Elon will make a couple of phone calls to Albo, or whoever our government is at the time, and it’ll all be, it’ll all disappear or get watered down with some sort of bullshit excuses. That would be incredibly Or, it’ll be, you can do it to Facebook and Google, And TikTok and Snapchat, but you can’t do it to X.

[01:29:59] SS: Because X is really important for journalists and news, and it’s more of a news forum.

[01:30:04] SS: Platform for free speech

[01:30:05] SS: and news, so, Did you want to talk about Nvidia or have we run out of time?

[01:30:09] SS: I can do it, we might as well. We’ve gone this long, anyone who’s here, thanks for staying with us, and send us a little note, an email, a tweet, an X, or something on LinkedIn and say, I, I stayed with you, the whole way, JP, I’m talking to you, James Peterson, I know you stay true, and Jon Yo.

[01:30:28] CR: Johnny Yo.

[01:30:30] CR: Used to work with John at Microsoft like 20 years ago. Okay, get into it. NVIDIA, what’s NVIDIA doing that NVIDIA has launched an AI chatbot. And what I love about this is that it runs locally on your PC. ChatRTX. And I feel like we’ve spoken about this before. A custom chatbot which is trained on your own local data, including documents, videos, and more. For me, this is like the start of digital twinism, which isn’t a word, but I’ve used it.

[01:31:01] SS: And it’s kind of like, I feel like this is what Apple missed.

[01:31:05] SS: This is what Apple should be doing. They’ve got the device with all of the stuff, your voice, your print, everything. You know, I, I feel like this is, I haven’t tested it, but it feels like the first move towards digital twins, local client learning on, on your device about you and what you believe.

[01:31:22] SS: Uh, I don’t know how that would integrate when you’re offline. Cause it can work when you’re offline as well to a chatbot. Um, how much data you would need and whether or not it can work without access to the web. For me, this is kind of like gone under the radar. It’s really significant, and it’s also significant as well, because NVIDIA has teamed up with OpenAI to do the Figure 1 and Figure 3 robots, humanoid robots, which I get the sense that this will go into that local version as well.

[01:31:50] SS: So,

[01:31:51] SS: your thoughts Cameron?

[01:31:54] CR: well, um, to run this, look, I think Apple are doing this, this is their vision, um, but they’re rolling it out slowly. I mean, one of the challenges, I can’t run this, because it only runs on Windows 11. And you need an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 or 40 series GPU, or an NVIDIA RTX Ampere or ADA generation GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM.

[01:32:21] CR: So, I don’t have a time machine to get a Windows operating system as well. That’s the other thing you need,

[01:32:26] SS: is Yeah Yeah So, um, But! I do think this is, um, I think this is great stuff and I do think this is a hint of where the future is. So the point of this is it can read all of your own docs and notes and all your own data on your machine and you can chat with it about all of your data on your machine and you’re not sharing it with, uh, something outside with the greater world can chat with your files.

[01:33:00] CR: Um, and developers can use it to build their own rag based applications for RTX. It’s sort of a demo, I think, of how to do this. NVIDIA, uh, NVIDIA are trying to build their own tools, like they’re building their own robotics, um, operating system, their own LLM operating system. Uh, you have, you have the. LLM platforms like OpenAI and XAI talking about building their own chipsets because they can’t get them fast enough from NVIDIA.

[01:33:31] CR: Then you’ve, they want to go down the stack. You’ve got NVIDIA going, well, we can go up the stack too. We can both play at that game. So they’re going to be building more and more. I mean, most people had never, including me, had never really paid any attention to NVIDIA two years ago. NVIDIA,

[01:33:49] CR: I mean, I had heard of

[01:33:50] CR: them, but course. Yeah. Yeah,

[01:33:52] CR: They were guys that built gaming chipsets for Xboxes and shit, like it was, or high end gaming computers, right? Um, so now Nvidia are going up the market stack. And these other, the LLM companies are trying to go down. I, I think Nvidia’s play is probably easier, seeing as they’ve kind of been the partners of all of the LLM platforms in the building of their platforms in the first place. I think they understand the software layer better than the software guys probably know how to build chip fabs.

[01:34:26] CR: But, um, I expect to see more of this out of

[01:34:29] CR: Nvidia. who could encroach into the other person’s

[01:34:31] SS: space easier is a really good point.

[01:34:33] SS: Right. Yeah. A little bit I expect to see NVIDIA rolling out more of these sorts of tools, generative AI, enterprise level, as well as consumer level, uh, full stack ecosystems built on top of their platform, and start to develop more of a consumer slash business brand on the software level of the stack as well, and just, and doing it for free, because they make money out of The backend tech, you know, they can give it away.

[01:35:04] CR: It’s a bit like,

[01:35:05] SS: like what Google did with the search, right? They made money in a, in a different

[01:35:08] SS: way. And, and Facebook as

[01:35:10] SS: well. Um, pools. I did a deep dive on an American swimming pool company, actually the world’s biggest swimming pool company on QAV this week. It’s called Pool Corporation. And guess what percentage of their revenues comes from pool sales? 13%.

[01:35:28] SS: I have no idea.

[01:35:32] SS: What The rest of it,

[01:35:34] CR: maintenance on your pool. It’s the razor blade model. You get the pool cheap. Hey, take a pool. Everyone gets a pool. You get a pool. You get a pool. You get a pool.

[01:35:47] SS: You get a pull!

[01:35:49] CR: We make money off you for the rest of your life by paying for maintenance and maintenance products. They own the whole ecosystem for pools, including in

[01:35:57] CR: Australia. But did Pool Corporation. And I love a company that’s called Pool Corporation and say, what do we do here? We make computers. We’re called Computer Corporation. We make sunglasses. Therefore we are called Sunglass Corporation. We make BMS bicycles. Therefore we are called BMX

[01:36:14] SS: Corporation.

[01:36:15] SS: Okay, Cameron.

[01:36:17] CR: Yeah, I love it. Branding 101. Just, that’s why I called the, hey, Cause why are we did I call my, what we’re a body of people. Corporate, as in body, Latin, people, corporation. That’s what we are,

[01:36:28] SS: Cameron. By the way, today is the 20th anniversary of my first podcast actually coming out, being published today, 29th of November. Published my very first podcast, G’day World Number One. Um, what did I call my podcast network when I launched it a couple of months later?

[01:36:48] SS: The Podcast Network.

[01:36:51] CR: Yeah, because I’m with you on that. Just call it what it is. It’s Especially if you’re early, especially if you’re

[01:36:56] SS: early. It’s Bauhaus, Steve. The principles of Bauhaus, the design movement into war period in Germany. Form follows function, and just, just call it what it is. Don’t fuck around, don’t put frilly things on it, just say what it is. It’s a podcast network, we’re gonna call it the podcast network.

[01:37:13] CR: It’s a pool corporation, we are the pool corporation. Let’s not, let’s not pretend. Anyway, congratulations I like it a lot. Um, there you go. Well,

[01:37:23] CR: If anyone out there is downloading NVIDIA Chat with RTX and running it, uh, let us know. Tell us what you think. All right, we done? We’re done. That’s uh, an hour and 38

[01:37:37] CR: minutes, Steve. might be the

[01:37:39] SS: longest one ever. Wow. are you going to join my

[01:37:41] CR: movement?

[01:37:42] CR: Are we starting a movement together?

[01:37:43] SS: was, I was stimulated. I was really intellectually stimulated and

[01:37:48] CR: I put you down? Put you down for a contribution?

[01:37:51] SS: put me down, put me down. I, uh, am very interested in reading. Well, I’ve heard the manifesto,

[01:37:57] SS: but You can be Engles to my Marks. sure. Engles was actually the, he was the smart one. He well then I can’t be that. You don’t need to be that. You wonder, you wonder.

[01:38:09] SS: Your breath of knowledge.

[01:38:10] CR: just had the beard. I mean, Engles had a

[01:38:12] CR: beard too, but Marks had the better beard. That’s really. All right. Cheers. Thank you everyone.

[01:38:20] SS: Thank you. That was, uh, I really liked that techno utopian thing that we were, cause it’s, it’s really, really interesting and important. Like, nah, like, well, I, I kind of agree. It’s like, stop.

Is Elon Musk going to be Trump’s AI Czar? And, if so, does that mean he has all of the US’ AI plays – OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, etc – at his mercy? We think so. And it’s going to make for an interesting few years.

Futuristic 32

[00:00:00] CR: Alright, give me

[00:00:06] SS: two, three, Cameron Reilly, Steve Sammartino, tuning in to the Futuristic Podcast. This is the time, we are the people, and we are so happy to have you here.

[00:00:15] SS: Yes.

[00:00:19] CR: episode, uh, 30, what, 2, I think? Yes, 32, according to my notes. Recording this on the 18th of November, 2024, Steve. We’re, um, we’re back in a new era, back to the future. A new era of a upcoming Trump era. Presidency in the United States, and the main reason I wanted to do a show, uh, there’s a lot of stuff going on, but I haven’t seen enough talk about this in the interwebs of late, is the fact that, as far as I can tell, essentially this means Elon Musk is now The AI czar of the Trump administration.

[00:01:13] CR: They’ve declared that he’s going to be co running the DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, with Vivek Ramaswamy. But, uh, like you absolutely got to be certain that Elon is going to be running Anything to do with AI, AI regulation, AI investment, and I’d fucking hate to be Sam Altman right about now, because

[00:01:41] SS: The Funk Soul Brother. Check it out now. The Funk Soul Brother. It’s over, brother.

[00:01:49] SS: It’s right, about now. That’s that

[00:01:50] SS: song.

[00:01:51] CR: right, uh, we know that Sam and Elon have got a longstanding beef, um, Elon sued Sam and OpenAI last year, or this year, I can’t remember, Um, over his involvement in OpenAI, uh, uh, uh, and, you know that this now means Elon is gonna be determining the future of, uh, of AI, of AI regulation. I, uh, uh, fuck, what this means for the future of AI.

[00:02:23] CR: And, my big, like, I’ve got a lot of concerns with the Trump Presidency. But one of the biggest I had in this election was, fuck, if Trump wins, what does that mean for the future of AI? Because he’s a loose cannon and he could fuck shit up.

[00:02:38] SS: yeah. He’s not

[00:02:39] CR: my entire life for

[00:02:40] CR: artificial intelligence and the singularity and I don’t want

[00:02:42] CR: it to get fucked up by some orange, uh, moron.

[00:02:46] CR: But then, and like, all right, there’s a lot of things we can say about Elon Musk. And his support for Trump and all those sorts of things. But Elon is max AI, even though he signed the whole AI slowdown thing early on, we all know that was kind of bullshit. Since then he’s invested gajillions of dollars into building XAI.

[00:03:11] CR: We know he’s all about humans and Neuralink integrating AI into our brains and AI helping the human race survive and all this kind of stuff. If Elon and Trump don’t have a falling out again, which I give that better than 50 50 odds,

[00:03:33] SS: 50, at least 50, 50, at

[00:03:35] CR: at least.

[00:03:35] CR: 50, yeah, I’d say 90 10 that they’re gonna have a falling out, maybe even before Trump takes office.

[00:03:42] SS: yeah, Trump’s really impetuous. He can change his mind in a heartbeat on something because someone else gets his ear or something else is relevant to him, which, there’s more to it. And I think that Musk made the investment because he knew there was complexity and risk. I mean, one of the simple ones is Tesla and China, right?

[00:04:04] SS: So that’s antithetical. Trump’s interests and Elon’s don’t overlap there. So there’s a number of things, which I think is why Elon invested so heavily. And while we’re on the topic, can we just say for all the entrepreneurial things that Elon Musk has done and done so well. Including SpaceX and Tesla. His greatest investment of all time was the 119 million.

[00:04:32] SS: He invested in the Trump presidency, which is about 10 percent of how much was raised. The day after the election, the market capitalization of, Companies that Musk’s owns went up by 15 billion. So that’s 126X return on investment in six months. So that’s his

[00:04:55] SS: greatest

[00:04:56] SS: ROI.

[00:04:58] CR: Well, you know,

[00:04:59] SS: And that excludes, that excludes, uh,

[00:05:01] SS: SpaceX. Which you would have to

[00:05:04] SS: imagine,

[00:05:06] CR: for the last couple of years, everyone who said he was an idiot for buying Twitter, and he’d fuck Twitter up, and he was a moron, you’ve heard me say this a million times, we could say lots of things about Elon Musk, but he is not an idiot,

[00:05:20] SS: no, he’s definitely not an idiot. He’s interesting and strange and I don’t like lots of what he does.

[00:05:25] SS: But

[00:05:26] CR: if he bought Twitter, he did it for a reason. Now I don’t think he bought it to get Trump elected because when he bought Twitter, I don’t think anyone thought Trump had any fucking chance of running again and getting the nomination. But yeah, it was. Clear to me from the get go that he bought Twitter because he wanted a platform to get shit done that he could, you know, use it to market his own services and products and that kind of stuff.

[00:05:55] CR: But he obviously has now used Twitter to help get Trump elected, which basically makes Elon and Peter Thiel in charge of the United States government. He and Peter Thiel just bought themselves

[00:06:10] SS: yeah, I, I think he has a lot of attention across every platform because he’s so newsworthy with everything that he does. I think he could have done it without Twitter or X because every feed that I see, and I can promise you, I don’t go onto X at all, uh, these days and I am still filled with musk. News and content because he’s always on, on, on the edge and, and controversy

[00:06:37] SS: works

[00:06:39] SS: in

[00:06:40] CR: Yeah, well I did a big show on the Bullshit Filter a week or two ago about why he threw his weight behind Musk, the China thing is part of it, but he also had about 20 or 30 lawsuits that the Biden administration were going after all of his companies for regulatory issues, And he had, my take, my read on the whole thing is he had just decided that he was going to destroy the Democrats for the, for, as payback for all of the investigations they were doing into all of his companies for labor practices and environmental regulations and all sorts of things, you know, he has that classic laissez faire capitalist mindset, which is, hey, I’m shaping the future and shaping the economy and doing all this good stuff.

[00:07:32] CR: You should just be supporting me and getting the hell out of my way and letting me do whatever the hell I want. Not trying to slow me down. And so he just decided to weaponize Twitter and his attention and his money politically. Citizens 2010, means that there’s no holds barred now for billionaires that want to buy an election in the And he and Peter

[00:07:55] SS: great idea. It’s a great idea

[00:07:57] CR: Oh, fantastic for

[00:07:58] CR: democracy.

[00:07:59] SS: for billionaires.

[00:08:01] CR: Americans keep telling me, we have to save the democracy, and I’m like, what democracy? You have a plutocracy. You don’t have a democracy. It’s

[00:08:09] SS: I prefer kleptocracy. Kleptocracy is good.

[00:08:12] CR: that too.

[00:08:13] SS: Tech

[00:08:14] CR: So anyway, let’s talk, Steve, about the future of AI for a little bit. Um, how we think this is gonna play out with Elon in control.

[00:08:26] CR: And again, this is with the caveat that That Elon and Trump don’t have a massive falling out at some point and then it could all go awry. Let’s say that somehow those two egos can sit in the same room and manage to make it work for four years.

[00:08:47] SS: I, I,

[00:08:48] CR: AGI with

[00:08:49] CR: Elon Musk in control

[00:08:51] SS: I think he’s too far behind. I don’t think he can catch up. Uh, I think that the other players are doing so incredibly well. And when I say the other players, I mostly mean Microsoft and OpenAI. I don’t think he can catch up and, and I think that even though, even though he’s got the year of the president, I think he’ll get advantages given to him in terms of laws and regulations and decision criteria.

[00:09:27] SS: But I don’t know that enough of that is going to thwart Microsoft and Amazon and Google and all of the other players. It’s because. They’re, I think, already a bar ahead, uh, in terms of consumer use, AI tools, not Neuralink, that’s, that’s a separate thing, uh, and ChatGPT at the moment, seriously, absolutely crushing it with its latest improvements.

[00:09:57] SS: So I actually don’t think it’s going to make, in my view, a big difference to the AI race, because I don’t think inside that four years, the others can be thwarted enough. Now, I do think that regulation and laws will be shaped towards Musk’s preference, but I don’t think that You’re going to make up the last eight or 10 years just because you’ve got some regulatory advantages or decisions that are to your advantage. Yeah, really? Well, what I would like to hear is how, because is anyone using any of Musk’s AI products? Like if we look at robocars, way behind. Alright, now he might get some laws placed where his non LIDAR form of, uh, autonomous vehicles might get approved by the Trump administration, uh, he’s got his robots which are way behind the figure one and other robotics, uh, neural implants I think are still a fair way off because that involves humans and it’s very difficult to get that approved.

[00:11:09] SS: In terms of having a consumer based AI like, uh, Anthropic or Gemini or OpenAI, I don’t know anyone who uses that. And if you look at all the usage charts, his is, you know, Grok is way down and functionality in terms of functionality testing is nowhere near it. So that’s not to say that a lot can’t happen in the four years, but I don’t see how, and I’m happy to have you change my mind because you’ve done that before

[00:11:34] SS: and you’re pretty good at it.

[00:11:36] CR: That’s what I’m here for. It’s my job. Look, ahem, Um, let me preface this by saying some news broke in the last 24 hours, uh, that something bad seems to have happened at XAI. Uh, it’s all just rumors swirling about on X, uh, aka Twitter and Reddit at the moment. So We know that you can’t put a lot of stock in that, but somebody tweeted, a guy called Aidan McLeod tweeted yesterday, Elon lost the mandate of heaven, the cosmic rays weren’t on his side, RIPXAI, the GPU looking data center was cool, look out for departures.

[00:12:18] CR: Somebody asked what happened and he said something bad. Now We don’t know what that means, um, this guy, Aidan McLeod, according to his, uh, ex biography, is just, uh, some sort of an AI guy. Um, I don’t know if he actually works there, I don’t think he does, I’m not really sure. Ha ha ha!

[00:12:47] SS: You hear things. Janitors hear

[00:12:49] SS: things.

[00:12:50] CR: Um, but, you know, I had been, uh, Following the sort of XAI thing, I know Elon was on Lex’s show and he’s been talking about this, uh, with, uh, I’ve also heard Jensen Huang from NVIDIA talk about this, but they’ve just built this massive, uh, data center, um, massive, massive, massive data center with NVIDIA chips that was going to be built Bigger than Ben Hur, the biggest AI data center, um, there was another story just in the last day or so that he was raising up to six billion dollars to purchase another hundred thousand NVIDIA chips for the data center in Memphis.

[00:13:31] CR: Um, And there’s this rumor that something really bad has happened. Something’s not working with the, with the training. But I believe that this guy Aiden has got a reputation of posting a lot of shit on Twitter, so I’m not taking any of it seriously, but we’ll see. But that aside, my guess, knowing how brutal Elon can be, did you see the emails that came out over the

[00:13:58] SS: No, you better, you

[00:13:59] SS: better give them to me.

[00:14:01] CR: Emails were released in the

[00:14:03] CR: last 48, 72 hours. From 2017, there were emails from Ilya Sutskever and Greg at OpenAI to Sam and Elon in 2017. They were, so Elon was still involved with OpenAI. There were management meetings happening around funding and executive structure and shareholding moving forwards.

[00:14:29] CR: And Ilya and Greg sent an email. together to Sam and Elon talking about concerns that they had about Elon’s position and Sam’s position about the company moving forwards. And basically the insinuation in the emails was that Ilya and Greg believed that Elon wanted to have dictatorial control over the company and they weren’t sure that was in the world’s best interests if OpenAI developed AGI. They were also concerned about Sam’s motivations as well for running the company and AGI etc etc. They also said a lot of nice stuff about Sam in it, and the email was very diplomatically worded, it was like, listen, we’ve been scared to bring this up, but we feel like we have to bring this up, or we’ll regret it later on, we have to have an open, transparent relationship with you guys if this is gonna go forwards, and they put their position there.

[00:15:32] CR: And it was very, very carefully worded, very diplomatic. Elon’s reply was basically, fuck you guys, deals off. Literally two lines. And then,

[00:15:43] SS: fuck yourselves. Do you want me to say that again?

[00:15:46] SS: Go

[00:15:47] SS: fuck yourselves.

[00:15:49] CR: and the timestamp on his email was like 10 minutes after the timestamp on theirs. Then he sent another one an hour later, which basically said, just to be clear, This isn’t an attempt to negotiate for my current, my former position. That deal is now completely off the table, deals over, everything’s off.

[00:16:08] CR: And he left OpenAI a couple of months later, completely severed his relationship. So that’s the kind of Elon slash. OpenAI relationship, and it’s never recovered from that. It’s basically, I’m going to take my bat, my ball, and my money, and you guys can get fucked. And I’m going to build, and I’m going to build a competitor inside of Tesla, Slash, now, XAI, wherever that sits. So, here’s my take on what could go down. I think Elon is out to destroy OpenAI. And Google. One of the things that came out in this email thread was that Elon’s concern when he created OpenAI was that Demis Hassabis at DeepMind Google was going to end up running all of AGI and he didn’t think that was going to be good for the planet.

[00:16:59] CR: So I think Elon is going to do everything he can do to make sure that he wins the AI race, either by hobbling OpenAI and or Google and or Microsoft’s. and Anthropic’s efforts through regulatory hurdles that they’ll be able to put in place. Keep in mind too that with, Trump now has no guardrails whatsoever.

[00:17:30] CR: He controls the, all three branches of, of the exec, executive, right? Uh, all three branches of government. The White House, Congress, the Supreme Court. He’s got everyone terrified. He can do anything that he wants, pretty much. He doesn’t give a shit about the rule of law. He doesn’t give a shit about tradition.

[00:17:50] CR: And neither does Elon, for that matter. So they can throw any hurdles that Elon wants at OpenAI and the rest of them.

[00:18:02] SS: So I agree with that,

[00:18:03] SS: but I just don’t see what you

[00:18:05] SS: can do in

[00:18:07] CR: oh, he owns, he, he ends up owning OpenAI, is what he can do.

[00:18:12] SS: Okay.

[00:18:13] SS: All

[00:18:13] CR: It’s okay, guys, I can, I can

[00:18:16] CR: either throw so many regulatory hurdles at you that you’ll never ship another fucking product or I take you over and all the regulatory hurdles go away, Sam can fuck off, I now run OpenAI, I bring

[00:18:32] SS: we’re dealing with, but we’re not dealing with open AI, nice little startup. We’re dealing with. Two of the other most powerful organizations in the world. So you’re dealing with Microsoft, you’re dealing with Alphabet, you’re dealing with

[00:18:49] SS: Amazon. Well, like

[00:18:52] SS: I still, I, okay. If he could, how do you just,

[00:18:55] CR: in the, in the Trump administration?

[00:18:58] SS: sorry,

[00:18:59] CR: How many of those have an official

[00:19:01] SS: you’re right. Well, the only way I see them catching up. Is the

[00:19:06] SS: takeover, because it’s certainly not going to do it with

[00:19:07] SS: product.

[00:19:09] CR: Well, I don’t know. I mean, again, it depends on this data center. Like, we know that OpenAI have been struggling to ramp up their data centers as quickly as they want, partly, I think, because Elon has bought all of the Nvidia chips. Um, you know, it, it, it depends on whether or not they actually have problems in their data center, how quickly they can ramp up all of their stuff, because at the end of the day, I mean, yes, there’s a certain level of expertise with training and your RAG methods and all that kind of stuff, but I get the feeling right now everybody in the AI space knows what they’re doing.

[00:19:44] CR: Everyone knows what everyone else is pretty much doing. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, they all know the basic play here. It’s just who can throw the most amount of money at the biggest data centers. There’s, you know, a little bit of fine tuning and tweaking for the algorithmic approach to this, but really it’s just Who can buy the most amount of Nvidia chips and get them up and running as quickly as possible that’s going to win the day, to a large extent.

[00:20:13] CR: But anyway, I see Elon just throwing everything that he has at making sure that he wins, and if Man, if there’s one thing you gotta say about Elon,

[00:20:22] SS: Yeah, I agree with that. He’s very good at winning. He’s very good at taking over companies that he didn’t found. And taking all the credit that kind of goes with it. Uh, and he’s good at, no he is, he’s done that. And he’s very good at that. And there’s a chance that He could do, I just think that it’s not going to be that easy.

[00:20:42] SS: And if he does try and do that, you’re going to have pretty significant court cases. But as you say, it could go all the way up to the Supreme Court on, on certain, uh, certain things. If anything, Elon could use antitrust to his advantage. Advantage. We know that there’s a multitude of court cases against all big tech.

[00:21:03] SS: Lena Connan and crew and also in the European Union. If there was something that Elon could do quite stealthily is that he could claim that he’s not part of big tech. In that traditional sense, and if I was to, you know, think about a playbook that he could use to get control of some of these companies, is getting to Trump’s ear that it’s dangerous to have Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, already the world’s biggest technology companies, controlling AI, and that should be separate, uh, separation of state, and they should be spun off, And in some way he could get himself involved in that spinoff and take a different form of control.

[00:21:45] SS: He could also say, I’m the only one that has real manufacturing, which has large manufacturing bases in America. And if I have access to the AI and put that within Tesla, we could also use that with Ford and GM and open up robotics and manufacturing back in this country and feed it into humanoid robots, so there’s a play there.

[00:22:06] SS: And that, that would be a plausible trajectory. For Musk to gain control of AI by trying to take it out of the hands of corporations, which already have too much power and use an America first kind of manufacturing regime and

[00:22:25] SS: not giving big tech too much power.

[00:22:26] SS: That could be a smart way to do it.

[00:22:28] CR: And I’ll build your robot fascist

[00:22:30] CR: armies to make sure that, uh, you, uh, remain in power forever.

[00:22:34] SS: Underrated, universal soldier,

[00:22:38] CR: Mhmm.

[00:22:39] CR: Mhmm. Mhmm.

[00:22:41] SS: army is a great name for a punk rock.

[00:22:44] SS: album. And I know we’re on a good podcast when we come up with names for punk rock albums, Robot Fascist Army.

[00:22:52] CR: Mhmm. Mhmm.

[00:22:53] SS: And maybe we can get Gary Neumann to do some of the first songs

[00:23:00] SS: with an industrial punk kind of overlay.

[00:23:02] CR: early 80s Gary Neumann, man, it’s good shit. Um, look, I firmly believe that, um, Trump is gonna try and position himself so he never loses power, uh, as a result of this, because he can’t afford to lose power. He nearly went to jail the last time he lost power,

[00:23:22] SS: And you would think that his megalomania proclivities would have only increased now that he got back in with A Told Ya So. And I would imagine that he’s Even looser with his executive orders and pushing really hard. And this sounds crazy. This is gonna sound so crazy. I really worry about Trump having his finger on the red buttons.

[00:23:46] SS: But I’m kind of interested to see what he could do to Shake and break America. I think that’s probably why he got voted in. I wouldn’t have voted for him because I just think he’s a pretty scary dude and not thoughtful. And you need a thoughtful person that role. I don’t know.

[00:24:07] SS: Your thoughts, Cameron, you’re

[00:24:08] SS: more politically.

[00:24:11] CR: I did a two

[00:24:12] CR: hour show on it last week, man, I’m

[00:24:14] SS: I’ll tune into that. I’ve got a four hour plane ride tonight. So that’s my listening on the

[00:24:18] SS: plane ride.

[00:24:19] CR: Yeah, look, I think it’s a very, very bad time for America and for the world, um, on that respect. I think it’s just going to be a complete mess over there. I’m about to start a series on fascism on my bullshit filter show to sort of explain where this fits in to the history of fascism and the modern form of, like, fascism 20th century was very much, uh, shaped by the inter war era.

[00:24:47] CR: Period. And you had a lot of mostly young men who were rootless. Um, they’d lost friends and family and meaning and purpose, and they’d been

[00:24:57] SS: And we have that now.

[00:24:59] CR: different sort of thing. But yes, and there was an article in the New York Times over the weekend about social media and its contribution to loneliness, young men, uh, all people, but a lot of young men who are lonely, social media has sort of disrupted, uh, even further their ability to make.

[00:25:19] CR: social con social, um, connections over the last 10 years. Anyway, yeah, look, it’s, it’s a very, very dangerous period that we’re moving into, but with a lot of commonalities from the interwar period, a lot of economic inequality, a lot of people feeling betrayed, a lot of people feeling ripped off, and for genuine reasons, in America,

[00:25:41] SS: I agree. I

[00:25:42] CR: has gone overseas, blue collar working

[00:25:45] CR: classes, people are doing it tough, they’re angry, and they’re right to be angry.

[00:25:49] CR: They’re angry at Washington and the big political parties and with good reason. But if they think, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Trump, who’s driven many, many businesses into bankruptcy and fucked the economy the last time he was president, but they don’t know that because they don’t understand

[00:26:06] CR: economics.

[00:26:07] SS: Yeah, he’s, he’s a, he’s a, he’s a classic confidence man, really, in, in, in, in the greatest sense of the word, he’s, he’s a, he’s a confidence man in, in, in, in every sense of the word, in terms of the businesses that he’s had, he’s basically an economic failure. Uh, if you had invested the wealth he inherited in S& P 500 index, he would be more well off than he is now.

[00:26:28] SS: He’s probably not nearly as well off. As he makes out, he’s been broke. He’s had a number of failed dodgy businesses. He’s just a really dodgy guy. He’s, he’s a monorail man. He is taking the monorail to Springfield, and Springfield had the monorail and then they saw it in a monorail and they’re back and they bought the monorail a second time around in Springfield.

[00:26:49] SS: Like seriously, Trump

[00:26:51] SS: is the

[00:26:52] SS: monorail,

[00:26:53] CR: He’s a classic con man. And anyway, getting back to Musk and OpenAI. Um, I think it’s, I think it’s going to be a really interesting period. And I’m in two minds about it. I think I wouldn’t trust either of the big administrations to manage this next five years as we move into AGI. Uh, but with Elon there, I think he will actually, if he stays in good stead with the Trump administration, will push it in the right direction, but it will be in his direction.

[00:27:29] SS: I think. I think he has good intentions for a GI in terms of humanity, but I think he has. A malintent in that he wants to have absolute and financial control within that. So it’s kind of weird. There’s this dichotomy of him wanting power control and all of those things. But I do think that he does have, and maybe I’ve been sold as well, uh, humanity’s interest in terms of AGI and multi planetary species.

[00:28:00] SS: They seem somewhat altruistic, but he does want power and control while he provides.

[00:28:07] CR: mmm,

[00:28:08] SS: Is, is my sense. Uh, okay. But Big Tech, I think. Strategically, they need to be, have an America First viewpoint. If they appeal to Trump’s viewpoint on National First, uh, the move towards de globalization, bringing manufacturing and robotics back home, making sure you win the AI race.

[00:28:34] SS: If they appeal to that proclivity, they’ll, they’ll do pretty well and probably won’t be split up. with antitrust. And I think the biggest issue is going to be how Musk tries to move those chess pieces to gain more control and power over AI

[00:28:50] SS: himself, as we’ve discussed.

[00:28:53] CR: yeah. Bottom line is, I think Musk will be, slow everyone else down until he can catch up. And or take over what they’re doing, but we’ll see how it plays out. Speaking of open

[00:29:06] SS: AI, yeah, let’s keep going because I’ve

[00:29:07] SS: got some stuff on that.

[00:29:09] CR: well, there’s a rumor that’s just come out today. Uh, again, rumors on X, so take it or leave it. But, uh, rumor is that the O1 preview ends next week, that the results have been good and they’re getting ready for the full. launch. Um, rumors are also that five members of the team left due to disagreements over readiness.

[00:29:37] CR: But, uh, It looks like we’re going to get full 01 and what that means, how that compares to the quote unquote GPT 5, it’s still not very clear to me. I, I don’t use 01 much. I did use it a bit for coding when it came out, but I found that Claude, 3. 5 Sonnet for coding right now, and I’ll tell you about one of my coding projects a little bit later, my recent ones, but Claude is just killing it with coding right now, just killing it.

[00:30:13] CR: Far better experience than O1 for me, but, um, yeah, we may be getting a full O1 launch in the

[00:30:22] SS: I’m still using, O1 is really good for, for reasoning and thought patterns and, and that memory enhancement. I’m finding it’s really good for that when I’m having an elongated bunch of work I’m doing with the AI. Um, I’m still using 4. 0 at the moment. I still find that’s the best when I ask it to create things it can’t do.

[00:30:42] SS: One of my favorite things is when it says I can’t do that, I’m like, can you write some code so that you can do that and give me a client to do the thing? So my view is that it can already do anything because whatever it can’t do, I ask it to teach itself how to do it.

[00:30:58] CR: Right.

[00:30:58] SS: Uh, one of the things that, uh, I’m finding incredible at the moment, and I, I haven’t used Google in more than a week. Because lately since, and I don’t know when the update happened, but going to live web while you’re in ChatGPT is now extraordinary. And I’ll ask it, I’ll say, I want you to combine what you’ve got in your database and go to the web to find the latest live information on X, whatever I’m working on. And it’ll give me that information.

[00:31:29] CR: Mm mm-Hmm.

[00:31:30] SS: I’m just finding the difference that I’m seeing, and this for me feels like the next paradigm. of search, and I guess we’re moving away from search to AI, is give me an answer, don’t give me options. It gives me answers, And it will flag where it got it from, reputable sources, and no doubt it’s using Bing in the background, so Bing is back baby, it’s made the comeback.

[00:31:53] SS: A really stealth back ending of Bing inside to chat GPT by OpenAI and Microsoft, really smart play. finding live web with AI on ChatGPT, I’m finding that’s so great. I was doing an investment portfolio for my daughter, uh, and so one of the things that I like to do with my kids to teach them about investing is you don’t start with investing, you start with what they like. And I did this with both of them three years ago. I said, I want you to write down your favorite products or services. And I just wrote a list. The best companies were in that list. I’m like, who makes those? And I told them the companies and then you give them 10, 000, just a number. It doesn’t have to be real money.

[00:32:37] SS: All right. Allocate these around. And I was just updating my daughter’s portfolio because she changed her mind on some of the things that she wants. in her portfolio and she gave me so many great updates. I went on to ChatGPT 4, asked her to download a spreadsheet with live feeds to the web and do some code so that we can update it at all points.

[00:32:58] SS: Um, sits in a Google Doc with a little macro that will pull the live prices. I just did that in ChatGPT. I didn’t have to ask or go anywhere or code anything and it gives the live updates. All of a sudden I don’t have to go to Google and find, like Google has so many SERPs, the search engine, um, panels and now I can just get that stuff and not go to Google.

[00:33:23] SS: I did some homework on it and research hard to get the exact numbers, but research says anywhere where between 5% and 12% of Google searches are now in chat, GPT

[00:33:36] SS: and open ai. I dunno what, which is massive. Five to 12 percent

[00:33:44] CR: mm mm-Hmm.

[00:33:45] SS: right now also has expanded the work portfolio of what you do. And there’s also some, some risk now because what it does is in a stealthy way, it kind of makes the Microsoft suite of products, Microsoft Office, more compelling and live now because it integrates with the live web.

[00:34:05] SS: So it’s really interesting to see that open AI can really eat into

[00:34:12] SS: search.

[00:34:15] CR: Well, I know that Google is also obviously, uh, integrating their own search results into, or their own AI results into their search. They’re trying to, you know, back end around that.

[00:34:30] SS: Yeah, they are. But I think that. I’ve seen some statistics on data on, uh, the usage of OpenAI and ChatGPT versus the other brands. And it’s, it’s, it’s kind of like Google versus AltaVista.

[00:34:45] CR: hmm,

[00:34:47] SS: it’ll be really interesting to see how important brands are in people’s minds from a tech perspective. Because technology has always had this idea that the utility is always more important than the brand.

[00:35:00] SS: And I think we know that that’s true. And if a product has exceptional utility, the brand grows underneath that utility. But it does make me wonder if people’s mindset now that they had their first experience with open AI, it’s still probably a bit better than the others in my view, in most things on average.

[00:35:18] SS: And I think all of the reports show that at this point is Google just become that old thing and we don’t use that now. And we gravitate across because we’re talking about the large majority of the people. population who aren’t analyzing use case like we are. And they might just go, Oh, well, I want an AI for this and to integrate the web and AI.

[00:35:37] SS: I just don’t use Google for that. Even if Google builds that capability because it’s sort of second or third, you know, first to mind, first to market and you get that transition of consumer behavior across, it will be a really interesting use case. And I don’t think we’ll have to wait long, couple of years to see whether or not Google starts to decline because it’s seen as a search.

[00:35:58] SS: And I don’t want. Answers. I want

[00:36:01] SS: one answer. I don’t want options.

[00:36:04] CR: My sense is a little bit different to that. It gets back to the Apple intelligence conversation that we had a while

[00:36:11] SS: We need to

[00:36:11] SS: have that again.

[00:36:13] CR: I think again, depending on all these other factors, like how Elon, um, changes the game over there, I’ve always felt that The people who actively use AI products today is a very, very small percentage of the population.

[00:36:33] CR: And, uh, so therefore the people that have got any sort of brand loyalty to OpenAI, as I do, despite the fact that I use Claude for all my programming, um, It’s very, very small. And at some point over the next couple of years, AI won’t be a category. It’ll just be part of the built in functionality to whatever your device is.

[00:37:03] CR: Apple will use it with Siri. It’ll, people who don’t use AI will just keep saying, Hey Siri, can you do X for me? Or Siri will say, Hey, Steve, I noticed that you’re trying to do X. Would you like me to help you with that? And that will just become how you integrate with AI. And if it’s on an Android device, it’ll be Google’s option.

[00:37:22] CR: If it’s on an Apple device, it’ll be Apple’s option. And OpenAI and Microsoft will be out in the fringes unless A, they come out with their own device, and I know Sam’s been talking about doing that with Johnny Ive, uh, or B, uh, they managed to shut up for fuck’s sake, Siri. They managed to

[00:37:48] SS: me you were nice to your

[00:37:49] SS: robots.

[00:37:51] CR: except Siri. Yeah, I’m nice to all the good ones, Siri can fuck right off. Um, or, they managed to do something that is so incredibly compelling and so far ahead of the game that they do get everybody, even the laggards. And it’s not even the laggards, it’s mainstream. The mainstream people. Using it. You know, I still ask people all the time, um, are you using OpenAI, are you using AI for anything?

[00:38:19] CR: And they’re like, nah, haven’t, haven’t even touched it, haven’t even looked at it, like just, shh, nah, it’s not even on people’s radars. They’ve, they’ve heard about it, but they haven’t even looked at it yet, which, um, Still blows my mind. I think the device manufacturers that own their own operating systems will integrate it in, and from all intent, for the stuff that the majority of people want to use AI for in the next couple of years, it’ll just be seamless.

[00:38:45] CR: Built in to the background and they won’t even know that they’re using AI. It’ll just be, well, this is what Alexa does. This is what Siri does. This is what, whatever Google’s version. What’s Google’s version called? I don’t even remember.

[00:39:01] SS: Gemini.

[00:39:03] CR: No, No, On the, on the,

[00:39:05] CR: Uh, operating system right now. If you ask, if you ask

[00:39:08] CR: it

[00:39:08] SS: know. I don’t I don’t,

[00:39:10] CR: Yeah. Okay.

[00:39:12] SS: know.

[00:39:12] CR: Hmm. I think it’s just, Hey Google, right? You just say, Hey Google, and it does stuff for you. I think it’s just that, if you have like one of those, like, little devices, little speakers in your, sitting in your house. We used to have one. A Nest! Is that what they call it? A Google Nest?

[00:39:29] SS: Yeah. Google Home,

[00:39:29] CR: to have

[00:39:30] SS: Google Home.

[00:39:31] SS: Just, Hey Google. I think it’s

[00:39:32] SS: just, Hey Google.

[00:39:33] SS: pretty much.

[00:39:33] CR: That’s, that’s what I said. Yeah, it’s just,

[00:39:35] CR: hey Google. I, I think that’ll be the way that most people interface with their AI. It’ll just be built in

[00:39:43] SS: Yeah.

[00:39:46] SS: Potentially.

[00:39:48] SS: Yeah, I probably will. That’ll be your personal AI. I just had a look that apparently the traffic is 180 million per

[00:39:55] SS: month of unique

[00:39:57] SS: users, ChatGPT, and

[00:40:02] CR: That sounds

[00:40:02] SS: that was, that was based on

[00:40:04] SS: Semrush,

[00:40:05] CR: Yeah, right.

[00:40:07] SS: No, no, let me, no, sorry, more than that now, 207 million, according to November 2024, which is pretty small, Google something like 3.

[00:40:16] SS: 5 billion. But if you look at, but if you look at that, if you’re getting 5 percent of search, or 12 percent of search,

[00:40:25] SS: you’re eating it.

[00:40:26] CR: yes.

[00:40:28] SS: It’s

[00:40:28] CR: how many people,

[00:40:29] SS: eating. So it’s a clear

[00:40:31] SS: substitute.

[00:40:33] CR: I mean, to be fair though, I’m not sure how many people are still, are already using it as search. More and more will, of those existing users. I, like you, now use it, but it’s only been in the last, you know, week or two since the live web stuff

[00:40:47] SS: Yeah, since the live web, that’s what I’m saying. This is the moment. This is the moment. And I’ve told so many people, and I’ve shown, I’ve demoed it to a few people. Like I did a talk for the CEO Institute, uh, last week, and I did a couple of live demos of talking to it,

[00:41:03] CR: Mm.

[00:41:03] SS: and, this is an interesting one for listeners.

[00:41:06] SS: It’s easy to think that others in positions of power in life know more than you, and I can promise you they don’t. And that’s not to say that they’re not intelligent or haven’t earned their position, but they are so in their world doing their thing. I had a multitude of companies from logistics, manufacturing, finance, all in this room.

[00:41:28] SS: It was a board presentation to a bunch of CEOs running. Companies had to be worth more than a billion dollars, right?

[00:41:33] CR: Mm.

[00:41:34] SS: So you know, serious executives. they’re just so busy managing their business and their people. They’re not across tech the way that you would be. There’s this really big lag. And I showed them how ChatGPT can go live to web.

[00:41:48] SS: I showed them how you can speak to it and have a conversation about an issue. And, uh, and, and even live video feeds and analyze this data. They, they hadn’t used it. They hadn’t, you know, the lag between capability. And people using it and understanding it is where opportunity lives. And right now in the last couple of weeks, since we’ve gone to live web with ChatGPT, and if people are using 5 to 12 percent of its use case with search, you’d have to say it’s, and there’s only 207 million people on it versus Google at 3.

[00:42:19] SS: 5 billion, it’s going to eat it. It’s going to eat it real big as soon as people find out, because we don’t want a bunch of answers or blue links to go and click and do another five or six Pieces of transaction. I just want a singular transaction with a singular answer from a reputable source and then get it to manipulate the data on the screen as opposed to just getting served up something and I just get the ingredients and I’ve got to cook the dish.

[00:42:43] SS: It doesn’t just give you the ingredients, it cooks

[00:42:45] SS: the dish up for you as well.

[00:42:48] CR: But we should pull those numbers back substantially because the search functionality is currently only available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and team users. They’re rolling it out to Enterprise and EDU in the next few weeks, and then they say they’ll roll it out to all free users over the coming months,

[00:43:12] SS: It’s going to be extraordinary because that, that will be disseminated really quickly first in companies, people working in jobs and then they’re going to come home and talk to their kids and, and it’s, it’s, it’s, I think this is a really seminal moment. Gee, I’m gonna say it could be a Kodak moment for Google.

[00:43:29] SS: Don’t forget the beauty that Kodak invented all of the technology that put them out of business. I mean, and here we are. Your history is

[00:43:39] SS: certainly rhyming, if not repeating.

[00:43:43] CR: Yeah, although they say they’re rolling it out in the next coming months, which we know from experience with OpenAI can mean any time in the next year, and in the

[00:43:52] SS: Or tomorrow, of course, because sometimes they just bring it

[00:43:54] SS: forward.

[00:43:55] CR: and in the next coming months, Elon Musk is going to be in control of

[00:43:59] SS: About that. About that, Sam. Hey, Uncle Sam. Now I’ve got Uncle Sam, because I’m in Uncle Sam’s office.

[00:44:07] CR: I am Uncle

[00:44:08] SS: it after my fake coin. I am the Dogeman of the Dogecoin. I am Uncle Sam, and goodbye Sam Altman. Elon is in town, and I’m taking OpenAI

[00:44:18] SS: back.

[00:44:19] CR: Yeah. Yeah. Look, um, well, so we’ll see how that all plays out. Um, but let’s go back a step, Steve. Uh, we normally start the show by talking about things that we’ve done recently. Um, tell me about what you’ve done with new tech or, or AI, uh, since we last spoke that

[00:44:39] SS: I’m really Extraordinarily interested in using OpenAI. I’m going to say almost as like a desktop partner now. So now that it’s got web capability, I’m building things inside it. I’m doing my documents inside it. Uh, whether it’s a PowerPoint, whether it’s a presentation, whether it’s writing some code to build something that it can’t do, uh, adding in logos, visuals, giving it bunches of instructions and asking it to put things together for me and then just download them straight to my desktop.

[00:45:12] SS: That’s how I’m using it now. And I’ve only started doing that since it’s had live web integrations because I need to get information and data that’s live. So I’m doing that and adding its capability to build things based on instructions and put three or four ingredients together and to cook me up a recipe of what I want.

[00:45:30] SS: It kind of reminds me of the old IFTT, If This Then That protocol, the IFT, which was a really solid idea. It does that really well now. And so I’ve done a number of Presentation and, and, uh, work tools, you know, creating work tools that have given me really good results. So that’s been the biggest tech usage that I’ve done.

[00:45:54] SS: I’ve also been asking it to troll Google maps to find things for me. One thing I did for a client that I have. I was developing a leads list of manufacturers that are big enough to have electricians. I work for a really big electrical wholesaling company. They’re about a 700 million firm, um, who wholesale electrical goods and solar panels and all that kind of stuff.

[00:46:16] SS: Uh, and they’ve got 113 branches and I just got it to do some real basic stuff that would just be a bit laborious without an AI. I asked it to give me, uh, 10km of radiuses of manufacturing outlets. And hospitals, and uh, educational institutions, things that are big enough. To have in house electricians, uh, things that have been opened within the last six to 12 months to use Google search and give me parameters.

[00:46:46] SS: And it just gave me lists and then I overlaid it and gave my logins for LinkedIn to go in and find the people who have those roles and then get the phone numbers. And I just got these beautiful leads list. And for each branch, I got about

[00:47:00] SS: somewhere between 60 and 80

[00:47:01] SS: leads.

[00:47:03] CR: How did you get it to

[00:47:04] CR: log into LinkedIn

[00:47:05] SS: So I had a window open and I put in the data from window. I didn’t get it to log in. I did a search on that and then dumped that data in there and got it to troll through all of the click throughs rather than me doing it and looking for the data and the patterns. But it would be great actually, that would be actually, that would be super if they, if you could use your logins with

[00:47:34] SS: it so that it could do grunt

[00:47:35] SS: work with

[00:47:37] CR: Well, you can, and I do

[00:47:39] SS: please tell,

[00:47:42] CR: So here’s my story from the last couple of weeks. Um, you know, I run the QAV podcast and I run a bunch of

[00:47:47] SS: super nerdy. We’re getting deep and nerdy on

[00:47:49] SS: this now, today.

[00:47:51] CR: I run a bunch of, uh, portfolios on that. There’s about a hundred stocks in the portfolios that I manage. And one of the problems that I’ve had in the last couple of months is one or two of those companies were acquired and delisted.

[00:48:07] CR: But I didn’t find out about that for a week or two after they’d been delisted because I don’t have time to read the news feeds for a hundred different companies about what’s happening with them and all that kind of stuff. So I, I, I was trying to figure out a solution for this. And, um, what I came up with a week ago was this realization that, I could go into Google News Alerts, which I’ve been using for 20 years, and I could create news alerts around the stock codes for each of these companies, ASX colon BHP, ASX colon FNG, whatever it is, and it would produce, it would follow the news and give me news alerts.

[00:48:53] CR: But, I don’t know. I didn’t, usually you get those as an email, and I didn’t want to get hundreds and hundreds of emails every day that I had to troll through. Then while I was in Google News Alerts, I saw that you could create it as an RSS feed instead of an email, and I thought, well that’s interesting, I could create them and drop them into my RSS reader, but still I’m going to get hundreds and hundreds of emails.

[00:49:16] CR: News stories every day and there’s always lots of duplications of those because five sites will carry basically the same story or the same press release and there’s just a lot of content to have to go through looking for the important stuff. And I didn’t want to have to manually create a hundred, uh, you know, uh, Google News Alerts and copy the RSS feeds and all that kind of shit.

[00:49:42] CR: So I had this idea. I wonder if I can write a script. that will log into Google News Alerts for me and create those RSS feeds and then save them all into an OPML file, which for people who don’t know what that is, it’s basically a format to collect a whole bunch of RSS feeds. So, I wrote a script using Claude to do that and basically it opens a browser session using a Python tool called Selenium, S E L E N I U M.

[00:50:15] CR: Selenium will run a browser session for you and you can give it your login details and it’ll log

[00:50:21] SS: okay.

[00:50:22] CR: You put it in the script, so it’ll log in to Google for me and then it will, um, just do whatever I need it to do in the background. Um And so I created that and it, it, it, I gave it a, um, I copied and pasted all of my stock codes from a spreadsheet, dropped it into the script, and it just created all of that, that OPML file from all the RSS feeds for me.

[00:50:49] CR: But then I was still thinking, I don’t want to have to read all these fucking stories every day. So then I had this bright idea, why don’t I just write an app? That analyzes all of the news stories for me. So the next step was to get Claude to write a script that every day downloads all of those news stories, then sends them to ChatGPT using the OpenAI API, and then it reads all of the stories and prioritizes them for me based on importance.

[00:51:23] CR: Well, first of all, it removes all the duplicate stories. So we can analyze them and go, okay, well, these are all duplicates of that one. So let’s just get rid of all of these and keep this one story. Then it will analyze them for importance based on a set of criteria that I’ve given it, which is like anything that mentions an acquisition or a change to the CEO status or the CFO status, or it mentions a merger or it mentions a,

[00:51:50] SS: So you’re asking it

[00:51:51] SS: what to

[00:51:52] CR: or downgrade.

[00:51:53] CR: Yes.

[00:51:55] SS: So essentially, you’ve created, you’ve coded an agent with a specific end goal in mind, which leads us into, you know, where we’re going. So you’ve built an

[00:52:06] SS: agent.

[00:52:09] CR: I’ve built an

[00:52:09] CR: agent and the bottom, the end point is every time I run this script, it writes a report for me. Which categorize, it scores all of the news stories from, uh, from 10 down to 1.

[00:52:23] SS: Beautiful.

[00:52:24] CR: Important

[00:52:25] CR: down to very low, high importance down to low importance. And I can just read those then and see, okay, here are the highly important stories each day.

[00:52:32] CR: And it basically analyzes all of the news for a hundred companies for me. Tells me what to pay attention to and what to ignore. But the, the key thing for me, the turning point in that whole process was realizing Hold on, I can just code my own. It’s this build your own mentality that my brain has, doesn’t go to first yet, but it was just a brain fart in the middle of the night.

[00:52:54] CR: Holy shit. Why am I trying to do all of it? Why don’t I just build my own? Just tell it to build something for me. That’ll do exactly what I want. And then it did it, you know, it was a little bit, it took me probably an

[00:53:06] SS: This is, you know, this is so

[00:53:07] CR: but it just did it.

[00:53:08] SS: This is so important for a couple of reasons. And why don’t we just talk about the fact that on the next news, one of the news pieces we had was that OpenAI is planning to launch an agent

[00:53:20] SS: early next year. Right?

[00:53:23] CR: rumor.

[00:53:24] SS: Yeah. And, and what you’ve just described is an agent that you’ve built.

[00:53:29] SS: For me, this is important for a couple of reasons. Is that the mindset that you have to, why don’t I just?

[00:53:36] CR: Mm

[00:53:37] SS: Which we all can do now and I did a far less complex version of that with the finding leads and prospects for a business. That why don’t I just thing with agents is actually going to be potentially one of the most important things.

[00:53:55] SS: All of us doing our work, certainly white collar work, is putting together pieces of the puzzle that would never be arranged until you arrived. Because you have certain needs and your ability to direct an agent with AI capabilities to organize the digital factors of production and present them back to you in a certain way upon your needs is actually a really important and new

[00:54:21] SS: type of creative skill that we need

[00:54:23] SS: to develop.

[00:54:25] CR: Yeah, and, and, like, that particular app that I built, probably no one on the planet has that exact same need

[00:54:31] SS: that’s the point. And that’s the exact point is that everyone keeps saying, well, what will we do? Well, we all have really different needs based on our geography, based on our, uh, health, based on where we live, based on what our kids needs are, based on our finances, based on where we work. And so all of us are going to be creating all of these unique agents based on what our needs are.

[00:54:57] SS: Personally, and from a work and a financial and health perspective, and our job is going to be literally working with the AIs. To build these agents, but we’ll probably be doing it more verbally than building some of those pieces or asking it to do the code like you and I have and go to external places.

[00:55:15] SS: And that’s where the integration of Apple AI, if they get it right, where it can log into certain things. And if you have the right trust and security protocols around it, uh, all of a sudden we all develop these amazing superpowers.

[00:55:30] CR: Yeah, it’s, uh, you know, I just did a podcast this morning, um, to commemorate my 20 years of podcasting, which

[00:55:36] SS: Congratulations, by the way, mate, you’re the OG

[00:55:38] CR: Thanks, man.

[00:55:39] SS: That’s how we met.

[00:55:40] CR: but one of the OGs. OG in Australia, but there are other OGs.

[00:55:45] SS: no, you’re the

[00:55:45] SS: OG. I don’t care what anyone says, mate. You are the OG and you reached out to me with an email from the podcast network and I was stimulated. I was like, I’m going on a podcast. I was very

[00:55:56] SS: excited.

[00:55:58] CR: Uh, 20 years ago this month, I did my first podcast and Ewan Spence, who was one of their first hosts on the podcast network a few months later, um, he and I did a show together, but he, he was, we were talking about the role that podcasting has played in society in the last 20 years, of course, including helping get Trump elected, um, this time around being on Joe Rogan and that sort of thing.

[00:56:20] CR: But Ewan positioned it as the democratization of Um, many to many. conversations. Like pre podcasting, if you wanted to interview somebody for an hour and put it out there as a live thing, you had to have a TV show or radio show. You could do pirate radio or that kind of thing, but the, the technical hurdles for all those things were very high or the cost hurdles were very high.

[00:56:52] CR: Podcasting came along and all of a sudden anyone could talk to anyone Pretty much no cost. You just needed a microphone and a recording device, and then you could upload it and get it to the entire world at almost no cost. Uh, so it was the democratization of, of. That kind of content. And you know, I, I talked about the fact that when I started my Napoleon show, I could teach people the history of Napoleon.

[00:57:18] CR: We did like a hundred hours of Napoleonic history. No one had ever done that. And no one ever in history had talked about Napoleon for a hundred hours in a public format like that, like we did. It was You know, probably no one gave a shit either, but it was like a turning point. My point is that was the democra 20 years ago, it was the democratization of audio content.

[00:57:41] CR: We’re talking, this is like the democratization of computer programming, of coding, of being able to write computer programs. Anyone will be able to write a computer program that will do whatever they need at that particular moment. It might be a use once app. I just need to do this thing. Once, like, when I was doing this thing, I needed to get all of these stock codes and build RSS feeds into an OPML.

[00:58:08] CR: It was a one off thing. I don’t need to do that again because it’s done. But I wrote a program that did that and then I can throw it away.

[00:58:15] SS: That’s a strong point, Cam, because what happens now is many of the things that we would like to do, we would look at The cost of doing that, and when I say cost, time, effort, potentially money, and say for the one time I’m going to use it. It’s just not worth the effort. But now with democratized AI where that can be built verbally or just by writing it down and anyone has that capability, many things that never get done all of a sudden might get done and can get done and new value can be created because it’s not too intensive for the one time effort and to then throw it away because it comes down to a efficiency thing.

[00:58:57] SS: And your point, and I say this on stage, I say, Congratulations, everyone in this room is now an AI developer, because if you can type or you can talk, you can do it, and I am not mincing my words. All you need to do is have the wherewithal and the will to try, and to just get on there and use your imagination and ask it to do the thing, and you can do it.

[00:59:16] SS: And I, I just don’t think everyone has realized how powerful that is. Like podcasting has incredible power and you were way ahead to more than 10 years ahead of everyone. And now it’s what is your favorite podcast? It’s like, what is your favorite TV show? Like that is there and deep and ensconced. And, you know, I imagine three years from now, people are saying, Oh, what AIs have you built lately?

[00:59:40] SS: What have you built? Like, what did you get your agent to do lately? Oh, I should have seen what I got my agent to do. Like, that’s going to be cool. We’re going to be saying, oh, I just got my agent to build this. It’s so, it’s so

[00:59:53] SS: amazing. And everyone’s

[00:59:55] SS: going to be excited.

[00:59:57] CR: And that’s an interesting point. So after I built this news app, it was one of those sort of light bulb moments for me. And I was like, fuck, why didn’t I think of this earlier? And what are the other things that I should have done already that I haven’t done just because I haven’t realized that I could do it?

[01:00:12] CR: And I went looking in Reddit for people talking about, here’s the app that I built this week. And I couldn’t think of anything. Find that platform. And I think that kind of needs to exist is a place where we just share ideas. It’s no point me sharing my code with you because my code is specific to me and my login and all that kind of stuff, but just the idea.

[01:00:34] CR: Hey, I built a news app. That filters the news that’s important to me and it’s, um, and, and customize, you know, one of the things that I’ve bitched about for fucking a long time with the internet is why the internet isn’t already filtering all of the news and telling me what I need to know. Like, Spotify does a pretty good job if I’ve, if, if it knows I’m a Nick Cave fan, it’ll go, Hey, Nick Cave’s got a new album out.

[01:01:01] CR: You might want to listen to it. I’m like, fuck yes. I do want to listen to that. Thank you, Spotify. But if Vince Jones is Coming to Brisbane and doing a gig? Which app is telling me, Hey, Vince, you love Vince Jones. You’ve loved Vince Jones for 40 years. You’ve got all of his albums. You’ve seen him live a hundred times.

[01:01:22] CR: Vince Jones is going to be in Brisbane next week doing a gig or a month from now. You should get a ticket and go to the gig. There’s no app that does that for me. Maybe I should build my own that says. You know, just keep an eye out for any news involving any of these artists or businesses or products that I’m interested in and just make sure that I’m aware of it.

[01:01:43] CR: You

[01:01:43] SS: could. You can also, with what you’ve done, say, here’s what I build for, uh, my investment portfolio. I’ve built this agent. Here’s a link to it. Just ask the

[01:01:56] SS: agent to re ask your

[01:01:57] SS: agent to reconfigure that

[01:02:00] CR: Yeah.

[01:02:00] SS: the things that you want. So you kind of like, it’s a little bit like your phone. You have a template and then someone reconfigures it.

[01:02:08] SS: So you can take someone else’s, uh, Software that their agent built, that they guided their agent to build. And then you say, well, I want it now for my kids’ investment portfolio. I’m gonna adapt Cameron’s one, but take these changes to Cams and add this, this, and this for me. Uh, so you will sample your agent to a friend who then reconfigures that agent for their needs.

[01:02:31] SS: It, it does make me think another thing, cam, when we move to this agent based AI environment. And you mentioned that you go to Reddit and different places to get ideas and ideas become a really important currency all over again. I do wonder if we’ll rebuild our websites, not for SEO and search engine optimization, but AI optimization.

[01:02:56] SS: And because the AIs and the agents will be trolling websites to find certain things and to pull that back in. The only difference this time is that It’s not for clicks to people come and do commerce with you. The entire shift takes the person to the AI. So they come and scrape you. It’s going to be interesting to see where the value lands in this chain.

[01:03:20] SS: If I’m extracting information from various sources, does it become extractive in a way where value gets all pushed into the AI and those Creating the ingredients to cook up the dish, get nothing.

[01:03:36] CR: Hmm.

[01:03:37] SS: That’s going to be an interesting shift.

[01:03:42] CR: Well, we’re over an hour, Steve. We should probably, unless you have something else you want to squeeze in, we should probably call it

[01:03:48] SS: I think we got into some deep stuff, but there’s some topics I think here that are on our list that there’ll be more bits on those that

[01:03:55] SS: we can reconvene

[01:03:58] SS: on.

[01:03:59] CR: But the big thing for me is what happens now that Elon’s in charge. We’ll have to wait and

[01:04:04] SS: In Charge! He’s giving him straight to the In Charge. Let’s just say he’s in the house, Ali G style.

[01:04:14] CR: Have

[01:04:15] SS: Talk to you soon, Cam.

[01:04:19] SS: That was cool because we were just fucking talking. I don’t know how it’ll go for everyone else, but

In this episode of Futuristic, Cameron and Steve debate the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) amid economic shifts driven by AI and automation. They address cost reductions and market disruptions caused by automation, the future of personalized AI-driven content, and public sector roles as potential solutions for unemployment – critical conversations needed to shape a future where AI and humans coexist.

FUT 31

[00:00:00] SS: Just an ease.

[00:00:05] CR: Okay, I’m recording. Turn on my backup record. Give me a one, two, three.

[00:00:13] SS: One, two, three.

[00:00:17] CR: Welcome back to the Futuristic Sammartino episode 31. Uh, we’re recording this on the 25th of October, 2024, two weeks before the U S election, January. Um, one year before the Singularity, um, one year before Elon Musk releases RoboTaxis and RoboVans and robots to the world or two or five, depending on Elon’s timeline, just before we came to where I showed Steve the Tesla stock chart, they released their earnings today, share price.

[00:01:00] CR: Bumped 22%, their biggest day in 11 years for all of the Elon haters out there that were shitting on the RoboTaxi launch a week or so ago. Have you been Steve? How’s the future treating you these days?

[00:01:13] SS: If you’re just treating me okay, when you said one year out from RoboTaxes, I was like, I said 2015, because wasn’t that when he made the promise? This is like,

[00:01:21] SS: we’re 10 years in to coming soon. Jeez, I’ll tell you what, you’d be

[00:01:25] CR: As he himself,

[00:01:27] SS: trailer and they said coming soon to a theater near you.

[00:01:29] SS: Be lining out the front,

[00:01:30] SS: 1977 Star Wars, you’d be like, what’s going on?

[00:01:35] CR: as he himself said at the RoboTaxi launch coming out by 2026, but I am often a little bit over optimistic with my launch date. So let’s say 2027 at the latest. Uh, well, look, the future’s complicated, Steve. Things are sometimes harder than they seem. Objects may appear closer than they really are when you’re looking in the Elon Musk rear vision mirror into the future.

[00:02:01] CR: Steve, um, one of the things that we want to talk about today, I’ve been trying to get some time to talk to you about this for a while, and a couple of our listeners have asked for this, is a deep dive on the UBI, um, which isn’t a, which isn’t a urinary tract disease or something, a form of birth control.

[00:02:21] CR: Um, universal.

[00:02:23] SS: that. It’s got a real medical

[00:02:25] CR: it will be, maybe it

[00:02:28] CR: could be both. We don’t know. Maybe it will

[00:02:29] CR: be a form of birth control because you won’t have enough money to actually afford to have children. The, uh,

[00:02:35] SS: UBI, the greatest birth control ever invented. Well, we’ve already got that with the property crisis. That’s, that’s birth control, isn’t it?

[00:02:45] CR: yeah,

[00:02:46] SS: by a policy as well. You know, one of the big policies there is you only pay half the tax on money you make through property. What a great idea.

[00:02:55] CR: mm, mm,

[00:02:56] SS: Because money is more noble than

[00:02:58] SS: labor, Cameron, to our government.

[00:03:00] CR: well,

[00:03:01] SS: Hmm.

[00:03:02] CR: more noble than the Labor Prime Minister is buying 4 million beachfront properties, Steve. He’s done okay out of the property market. Um. I’m not sure how a Prime Minister is able to afford a 4 million, uh, like a, not just a Prime Minister, but a career long politician. He’s not like Malcolm Turnbull, who was like a multi millionaire when he came in.

[00:03:22] CR: He’s a lifelong union labor guy, buying a 4 million beachfront property. But let’s not get distracted, Steve. Um, like I’ve been talking to UBI for, uh, 10 or 15 years. It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time that we’re going to have to have one of these things eventually. Not always directly related to the idea of AI taking our jobs or robot taking our jobs.

[00:03:54] CR: They’re often part of the conversation, but usually it was just sort of what capitalism was doing to incomes, offshoring jobs, and stuff like that. But Over the course of the last year or so, as I’ve been trying to figure out where our economy is going over the next five to ten years as a result of AI and robots, I can’t escape the conclusion that we’re facing a severe and significant re engineering of the fundamental economics Of Western Civilization.

[00:04:32] CR: Uh, which makes it hard because I run an investing podcast and we’re always talking about, uh, you know, the prospects of companies into the. Future, uh, intrinsic values and, you know, forward cashflow projections. And I’m always saying, I don’t know, don’t know what the world’s going to look like in five years from now, but, um, fortunately we just have to live in the present moment.

[00:04:56] CR: You know, Steve, I know you’re, you’ve been a skeptic about UBI on the show in the past

[00:05:01] SS: sceptical and I’m still anti, so let me just play my cards straight up, I agree there’s issues coming our way, I think UBI is a terrible idea, absolutely fundamentally disastrous. And that’s my position. So that’s, I guess, going to force our discussion. That said, I agree with your opening premise.

[00:05:27] SS: We are heading for a significant fundamental shift in the way society

[00:05:34] SS: and all economies globally work.

[00:05:38] CR: well, as I’ve said on the show before, it doesn’t, Require very high net unemployment number to crash an economy. Like it’s, it doesn’t, I think sometimes people think, Oh, well, you know, that would require 50 percent of all jobs to be gone or something like that. Yeah. The great depression and the major recessions that we had, like the Keating recession that we had to have, we were talking high single digits, 10%, uh, unemployment.

[00:06:14] CR: And that has severe, um, recessionary or depressionary, uh, characteristics. I’m just checking my facts here. The unemployment during the Great Depression was 10 percent in 1929, which was already high just before then, 21 percent by mid 1930 and 32 percent by mid 1932. So it escalated well beyond that sort of 10 percent level.

[00:06:46] CR: You know, it, it, it snowballs, I guess is the point, you know, because when you have an economic crash like that, uh, money disappears out of the economy. You end up with people don’t have jobs, so they don’t have an income, because they don’t have an income, they can’t pay taxes, so governments that rely on taxes can’t provide services, uh, businesses that rely on people spending money to buy stuff.

[00:07:11] CR: don’t have those customers anymore. So businesses go broke. They have to let go of employees and, you know, it, it can escalate. It’s like a negative spiral that kicks in pretty quickly. So if we’re assuming, uh, as I am, that AI is going to start to take a chunk of initially white collar jobs, as I’ve talked about before, starting with maybe low level, uh, white collar creative.

[00:07:37] CR: journalistic type jobs. And I was showing you last night, this latest version of, uh, image generation tool, text to image generator, ideogram. ai launched their version two yesterday, which is better than mid journeys. I think I produced not only a futuristic, uh, banner out of, I said, make, make the word futuristic out of rusty cogs on a factory workbench.

[00:08:07] CR: And it did. Then I told it to make some word marks, like a, a logo. It got there. The wording right every time. Mid Journey, I still struggle. And even with, um, DALI, I still struggle to get it to write words consistently. Now, to be fair, when they first launched the latest versions of DALI and Mid Journey, it did do a good job, and then, for whatever reason, it seems to have deteriorated in its ability to get words right over the Next couple of months.

[00:08:34] CR: Ideogram, uh, at the moment anyway, was doing a perfect job getting words correct. So I, you know, my immediate thought is this, you know, as soon as these things are consistently reliable, give me 20 logos or 20 word marks for this business. You got a lot of freelance graphic designers that are shit out of luck with this kind of stuff, uh, very, very quickly.

[00:08:57] CR: But then, as it escalates, Up the food chain, we end up with quite a lot of unemployment. And the question then is, what do we, how do we handle that? Now, if, if you don’t, and so for people who have never read much about a UBI, universal basic income is this idea that everyone is provided with a certain amount of money by Usually a government or, you know, it could be in a Sam Altman vision sense, his UBI startup, that’s going to take profits from open AI and distribute them back to the masses.

[00:09:35] CR: Some form of regular income that enables you to survive when you don’t have a job. Anymore. And you know, maybe it’s just a survival income so you can pay rent and have food, uh, and maybe it’s enough for you to be able to go and fulfill your dreams of learning how to, I don’t know, carve wooden spoons or something like that, uh, follow your hobby instincts, but if you, if you don’t think a UBI is the path to income replacement, Steve, is the model that, um, you see.

[00:10:09] CR: As a solution to the

[00:10:11] SS: In short, it’s redistribution of wealth. That’s the short answer, which is a number of things. The first one could be antitrust activity. So that those that have removed the labor and own the capital, the capital then gets distributed in society.

[00:10:30] SS: So it’s kind of like anti monopoly. Redistributive wealth or anti, well, why would, why would there be no jobs?

[00:10:39] SS: That’s the first thing. Why would there be no jobs? And if there is no jobs, Where did the money go? Like, we actually got to go back a few wires. We’ve got to ask a few questions on, before we say AI ate all the jobs, we actually have to go a step back and then another step back and then another step back, and you’re going to see the root of the problem.

[00:11:01] SS: Because what we’re jumping to is this assumption. We’ve got this economy at the moment that works, that

[00:11:06] SS: does all of these things. Okay. It includes,

[00:11:10] CR: Steve. It’s all the dinosaurs fault. If the dinosaurs hadn’t have fucked shit up 200 million years

[00:11:14] SS: that’s right. A lot of people that don’t know that, um, so, uh, they don’t know that, uh, if, if jobs disappear, what, why do jobs disappear? Like, let’s, let’s ask that question first. We’re going to ask that. We know that AI and robotics can replace people. Yes. And which we, which creates, let’s call it structural or technological unemployment.

[00:11:37] SS: True. That’s the reason we might need a, Uh, UBI? Do we agree on

[00:11:41] SS: that?

[00:11:44] CR: Oh, hi, Mark. Yes, we agree on that.

[00:11:50] SS: All right. So

[00:11:51] SS: why did those jobs go away?

[00:11:55] CR: Well, the jobs will go away because, uh, business managers and business owners will have the opportunity to replace, uh, 30, 40, 000 a year job with a piece of software that they will pay 100, 200, 1, 000 a month for whatever it

[00:12:16] SS: And They do that to why do they do that? To get more what?

[00:12:20] CR: They do that to maximize their profits.

[00:12:23] SS: Okay. So they’re doing it to maximize their

[00:12:25] SS: profits.

[00:12:27] CR: And also to stay competitive. I mean, if, if their competitors are doing it, they have to do it to cut their costs to stay competitive. I mean, it’d be a combination of those.

[00:12:38] CR: The reasons we always have automation to decrease costs, to remain competitive, to increase profits, and also to add new services ostensibly that they couldn’t deliver before in a cost effective

[00:12:52] SS: So if they do that

[00:12:54] SS: and people go away,

[00:12:57] SS: do their, does their people go away in their jobs? Now people go away. First, the people go away with the jobs, but guess what else goes away too when people lose their jobs? Either that money, either that money, that extra profit goes in one of two places. The extra profit gets redistributed back to the populace so that they can continue to spend, or prices have to drop and they get competed away, which frees up new money to be spent elsewhere where new people will be

[00:13:30] CR: Why do prices need to drop?

[00:13:34] SS: Because if they don’t drop, going to have less demand, because less people in the economy, people have got to buy stuff. See, the problem at the moment is

[00:13:44] SS: robots don’t buy things.

[00:13:48] CR: Yes. I mean, it depends. I mean, yes, there’ll be a lag there though, is what

[00:13:52] SS: there’s a

[00:13:53] CR: Prices don’t necessarily need to drop. If your cost base is

[00:13:57] CR: reduced,

[00:13:57] SS: you cut if your customer base is a different bunch of people.

[00:14:02] CR: Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

[00:14:04] SS: But what happens though, if, if the labor market shrinks, the economy shrinks too, unless the reason, and you mentioned it in your own first analysis is prices drop because you have to do it because everyone’s doing it. For example, if you’re making your cars by hand and everyone’s making them by robot, yours will cost him too much.

[00:14:26] SS: You won’t be able to sell them or make enough money and you get out competed and then your business

[00:14:30] SS: dies. Let’s just use the car

[00:14:33] CR: over time.

[00:14:33] SS: right?

[00:14:35] CR: Over time, But

[00:14:35] SS: over time, over time. over

[00:14:37] CR: quickly.

[00:14:38] SS: But what generally happens, what generally happens with structural unemployment, and it depends on how fast it happens or technological unemployment, is that the cost of production goes down. So long as you don’t have a monopoly, right? You have to compete. So even though your product costs go down, your margins go down. And if your margins don’t go down, right? Because You have to compete because everyone’s competing. Then new, new people will enter that market to try and get those high margins, entry and exit to the marketplace because you’re making abnormal economic profits.

[00:15:18] SS: Unless you’ve got a

[00:15:18] SS: big moat, which is usually a monopoly,

[00:15:22] CR: Well, it also depends. I mean, it depends on the barrier to

[00:15:25] SS: barrier to entries, barriers to entry. So yeah, competitive moats or high capital expenditures, those types of things. So usually when the price of something comes down, Everyone does it. The price comes down with the product cost as well. They both decline because you compete away those excess profits that would be

[00:15:46] SS: made by a reduced Cost and production.

[00:15:50] SS: Then that money gets freed

[00:15:51] CR: A says, well, if company A says, if we

[00:15:54] CR: reduce our, our, uh, price by 5%, we’ll pick up 6 percent market share. So, and

[00:16:01] SS: And we can do it. And we can do it because our cost is lower than our competitors, right? And then your competitors go, we better get that new technology to reduce our cost. And then we’ll match them with our price, but they match them with their price, even before they get the new tech, because they do that while they get the tech.

[00:16:16] SS: So they don’t lose too much money. Everyone competes down. So long as you’ve got competition, you will compete away the excess margin that gets invented via automation, right? Then that money that used to get spent on product A, then gets spent on product B. And in product B, which is often a new category that doesn’t exist, labor transitions across to it.

[00:16:42] SS: And what we need to do is not give UBI, but help people transition or put in place legislation to protect

[00:16:53] SS: the people from the capitalists.

[00:16:57] CR: In what way? Protect them in what

[00:16:58] CR: way?

[00:16:59] SS: Protect them from having monopoly power on necessary goods and maintaining their

[00:17:05] SS: margin and having an anti competitive environment.

[00:17:10] CR: Well, I, I see, Two issues with what you just said. Number one, this whole idea of transitioning people to a new skill or a new job, which historically is what has always

[00:17:21] SS: It’s what has always happened Yes.

[00:17:24] CR: when the Luddites were

[00:17:26] CR: unhappy about, uh, you know, machines being introduced to, you know, knitting factories. Um, Those, you know, the, the, the people that formerly were doing whatever those fucking machines were that the lullets were

[00:17:42] SS: Lathes. Was it lathes? No, not a lathe. It was a No, not a lathe. It was a

[00:17:47] SS: It was the, um, geez,

[00:17:50] CR: Yeah. Some sort

[00:17:51] CR: of material manufacturing, I forget. You know, those people were re skilled into something else or their children were re skilled and re tooled into a different thing. That’s always been the way it’s happened. Horse and buggy manufacturers ended up getting jobs in a Ford factory. The problem is, is I can’t see.

[00:18:11] CR: What the new jobs will be. And that’s not

[00:18:15] SS: no one can.

[00:18:16] CR: look into a crystal ball. No, no, no. But it’s beyond that. It’s beyond our inability to see around the corner. It’s because you have to conceptualize what kind of a job. will not be done better by a super intelligent AI and or super intelligent AI with anthropomorphic robots and any other kind of robots that you want.

[00:18:40] CR: Like the, I cannot even begin to conceive of What kind of a job can be done better by a human than an AI

[00:18:53] SS: All right. So that’s a

[00:18:55] CR: Outside of maybe teaching violin. I think Chrissie’s

[00:18:59] CR: got a job

[00:18:59] SS: but, but no, no, you know, let’s assume that teaching violin can also be done better by a robot, a humanoid robot with incredibly dexterous fingers, who knows how to play perfectly every classical violin piece in the world. Let’s assume that that is also going to happen, but I would, I would go in a different direction.

[00:19:17] SS: I would say that there are already. An inordinate number of jobs that can be done better by machines that we still choose humans to do because a human is doing it. And some of them are the most highest paid jobs in the world. Now, they’re not for everyone, but I’ll give you a couple of examples, okay? A robot can do a better version of Taylor Swift for free, because I can listen to every song she’s ever had or made or recorded on Spotify, perfect studio version wherever I am for free. watch the video.

[00:19:53] CR: you can’t, you have to pay Spotify.

[00:19:55] SS: 10 bucks, whatever. All right. I’ve got every song ever

[00:19:57] SS: made for 10 bucks a month. It’s as good as

[00:20:00] SS: free.

[00:20:00] CR: you’re living in,

[00:20:01] SS: It’s as good as free. Mate, I used to pay 30 bucks for 12 songs. I used to pay 30 bucks for 12 songs on a CD and, and force myself to listen to the album to, to like

[00:20:11] SS: them because you’ve spent your money on it.

[00:20:13] SS: You’re

[00:20:14] SS: in, which was sometimes

[00:20:16] CR: had them for life

[00:20:17] SS: ended up liking

[00:20:17] CR: you got rid of your CD collection.

[00:20:20] SS: yeah. All right. So. But, but I can’t get a

[00:20:24] CR: As opposed to what? Going to a Taylor Swift concert.

[00:20:27] SS: Which is a different product. I understand. It’s a different product. I get it. It’s

[00:20:31] SS: a different product. But

[00:20:33] CR: you’re not

[00:20:34] SS: that I’m there, you’re not

[00:20:35] CR: the music.

[00:20:36] SS: not actually buying the product.

[00:20:38] SS: I’m buying the emotional connection that I am there live with other

[00:20:42] SS: humans who are also there at that moment and I will pay an ultra

[00:20:46] CR: buying the experience.

[00:20:48] SS: Right. And you’re buying the experience because it’s human. Now I would, I would argue, imagine this. Imagine that in the future we have, it could even be 10 years away, right?

[00:20:58] SS: The perfect humanoid robots that look and feel with soft exoskeletons and grown flesh Terminator style to have Taylor Swift with all of her dances, the exact same constant setup. And we can, it sounds exactly like her, even with the croakiness in her voice and the imperfections are put in there. And I can go to the MCGNC, the Taylor Swift.

[00:21:22] SS: Robot version for 50 or the Taylor

[00:21:26] CR: It’s already happening, dude.

[00:21:28] SS: wait.

[00:21:28] CR: It’s called

[00:21:29] SS: know it’s already happening. I know they’ve already got virtual concerts. I know with ABBA and all of that. I know.

[00:21:34] CR: It’s the ABBA virtual concert.

[00:21:35] SS: I

[00:21:36] SS: get it.

[00:21:37] CR: And it’s, people are going to see virtual versions of

[00:21:40] CR: ABBA.

[00:21:41] SS: because ABBA won’t turn up in the real. Now, that’s because ABBA

[00:21:44] SS: have said, yeah, we’re out here, kids.

[00:21:46] SS: We’re done. We’re done. Fernando,

[00:21:48] CR: 20 year old.

[00:21:49] SS: Fernando. Can you hear the drums, Fernando? No, I cannot. I am sitting home in Sweden, listening to a national radio, and doing an interview with Molly Meldrum in 1982, because I ain’t going, right? Now. Let me finish, man. I know that this is happening, but let’s, it’s the dancing Taylor Swift.

[00:22:08] SS: It looks exactly like a robot. And, but you can go and see the actual her for 500 bucks or the robot crew for 50 bucks. I promise you people are lining up for the Taylor 500s, the 500 versus the robot version, because most of the things

[00:22:23] SS: that we consume, right, are in our head. It’s what you get in your head.

[00:22:29] SS: Also,

[00:22:30] CR: of those graphic designers that are out of work can go become Taylor Swift.

[00:22:33] CR: But

[00:22:34] SS: I did say that this is an example that is a little bit extreme.

[00:22:37] CR: so what are the, what are the realistic things that people can go do when their jobs get neutralized by AI?

[00:22:47] SS: I don’t know yet.

[00:22:49] CR: Exactly.

[00:22:50] SS: Yet,

[00:22:52] CR: And not, not even

[00:22:53] SS: going to be,

[00:22:53] CR: jobs, but give me

[00:22:54] SS: I didn’t know there was going to be, a

[00:22:55] CR: me an example of a job.

[00:22:57] SS: Okay. I didn’t know that there would be 30 million app developers

[00:23:01] SS: in 2005 because there was no such thing as the

[00:23:03] SS: iPhone.

[00:23:05] CR: Yes, you did. You knew people were going to be building software. You didn’t know what the platform or the device was, but 25 years ago, if I had said to you, Steve, what do you think some of the big jobs are going to be in the future? You

[00:23:17] SS: right. Well, let’s go back further. Okay. I could say software. All right. Let’s go back to 1600. To go to 1600 and say, what do you think the big jobs will be in the year 2000? You couldn’t guess because 90 percent of humans worked in agriculture and now it’s like 5%. We didn’t know then that there’d be mechanics.

[00:23:37] SS: We didn’t know then that there would be, uh, any of the things really we do now, whatever the 95 percent other things are that have arrived,

[00:23:46] SS: we didn’t know then.

[00:23:47] CR: Yeah, okay. Look, I, I

[00:23:50] CR: get it. we don’t know what the new things are, but my point is that I can’t even imagine any kind of job outside of a small handful of things. Like I talked about teaching violin, and even that’s potentially replaceable, and teaching Kung Fu is potentially replaceable, but I, I still think most people would probably prefer, depending on the economics of it, to learn from a human than a robot.

[00:24:15] CR: Those sorts of situations, but if a robot’s for free, because you’ve got one in your house already doing your cooking and your cleaning, and you go, oh, by the way, it can also teach your kids violin and kung fu, you’re probably going to go, oh, fuck it, let’s just do that, right? Because it’s got the, it’s got the, it’s got the software, it can tap into the

[00:24:32] SS: The other potential too is that a lot of these things that robots can do, especially when they’re personal services, they really could reduce the cost of things really significantly because I don’t think the robots are just going to take people’s jobs. Right. Which might be 20 percent of the cost of product, right?

[00:24:51] SS: They may also have the potential to organize things at the molecular level to move us to a near zero marginal cost society where most things become really, really, really reduced in cost. And then potentially

[00:25:06] SS: we

[00:25:06] CR: but you still need money.

[00:25:07] SS: you still need money, but I think,

[00:25:09] CR: So where’s the money going to come from? You said redistributing the wealth, but when I asked you to explain the mechanism by which that had happened, you went back to the dinosaurs. So,

[00:25:19] SS: got to take, you’ve

[00:25:20] CR: tell me what the mechanism is.

[00:25:23] SS: tax, breaking up companies. And

[00:25:26] CR: And then what do you do with

[00:25:27] SS: well I don’t think you can do a UBI,

[00:25:30] CR: Well, how do you do it?

[00:25:31] CR: How do you redistribute the money? How does it go from tax to me?

[00:25:42] SS: don’t think you do, well we already have redistributing

[00:25:44] SS: money to people who are unemployed now, so that kind of UBI already exists to a certain extent.

[00:25:49] CR: That’s it! It’s a UBI!

[00:25:51] SS: not en masse. Not en masse. and That is the show Thanks for

[00:25:55] SS: joining us.

[00:25:56] CR: 10 minutes. I took Steve from UBI is fundamentally wrong to we want to

[00:26:02] SS: Nah, well, I think the money doesn’t go to UBI.

[00:26:05] SS: I think it goes to building new industries, re education, and here’s what I honestly think deep down in my heart of hearts. I’m going to tell you what, I think the highest paid jobs are going to be because a human is doing it. Human labor in human things that robots can do. The simple examples I’ve given, this is the lowest in the, I’m double ending it here, Cameron, double ending.

[00:26:27] SS: I’ve gone Taylor Swift to a waiter or a service staff, right? I think service staff, uh, humans doing things at a, basically, you’re going to pay more because a human is doing it.

[00:26:42] SS: Because you want the human connection.

[00:26:44] CR: that?

[00:26:44] SS: Because you want to look someone in the eye and see the sweat on their brow. We already do that all the time now, with so many things. Like right now, you could go Most people buying coffee when they go to a cafe and paying 5 for something that could be 30 cents at home isn’t because of the coffee.

[00:27:00] SS: I’ve got a machine at home, I make coffee just as good as the one down the road. But I walk there and go there and say hello because we are a social species who want to connect

[00:27:10] SS: with people physically, mentally, emotionally. And I think those physical

[00:27:15] CR: are you connecting with your, your barista

[00:27:18] SS: I’m talking to them, they’re my friends, they’re my people.

[00:27:22] CR: for how long?

[00:27:22] SS: Oh no, it’s 10 15 minutes.

[00:27:26] CR: You talk to the barista

[00:27:28] SS: yeah, I sit around there and I get my coffee and I

[00:27:30] CR: how many customers are at these cafes you go to

[00:27:33] SS: busy, but I’m there, I’m their person.

[00:27:35] SS: I’m, I’m,

[00:27:35] CR: and they’re talking to you for 15 minutes?

[00:27:37] SS: not, not constantly

[00:27:40] CR: leave, I bet they’re like, oh, thank God that fucking Sammartino guy’s

[00:27:43] CR: gone. I’m like, I’m trying to, I’m trying to make coffees here. He just sits there, he’s talking, he’s

[00:27:48] SS: I’m serious.

[00:27:49] CR: obviously lonely.

[00:27:50] CR: He needs a podcast so

[00:27:51] CR: he can actually talk to, talk to someone.

[00:27:55] SS: No, I’m

[00:27:56] CR: I think cafes are like the Tyler, the Taylor Swift

[00:27:59] CR: experience. I go to a cafe. Uh, usually to meet my, my, my adult sons, we’ll play chess and we’ll drink coffee. And we’ll talk these days, mostly about the U S election or my, that or AI or social media is what we’re talking about, but it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s the experience of getting out of the house, sitting somewhere.

[00:28:20] CR: And yeah, getting served, but just, you know, it’s, it’s about, you’re, you’re paying for the environment. You’re paying for the experience of getting out of your house. I’m not paying for the service staff,

[00:28:31] SS: Well, I

[00:28:32] CR: uh, as human connection. I’m not paying for the human barista.

[00:28:35] SS: I’m paying

[00:28:35] CR: a shit if it was a robot serving

[00:28:37] CR: the

[00:28:37] SS: see,

[00:28:38] CR: I’m, I’m going out

[00:28:39] CR: because of the people I’m sitting at the table with, not.

[00:28:42] CR: The person delivering the

[00:28:43] SS: Well, I’m actually, no, I actually, I like to see the people who work in establishments where I develop relationships, and maybe I’m just a very, very lonely guy,

[00:28:54] SS: but I genuinely, I genuinely like

[00:28:58] CR: Minimum wage! You like to be around minimum wage people so you can go

[00:29:03] CR: Yeah, look at that poor sucker

[00:29:05] SS: mate I can’t believe you would infer

[00:29:06] SS: that, I’m a minimum wage guy who did paper rounds and worked at Hungry Jack’s

[00:29:11] CR: I know, you’re like, but I remember! You’re like, yeah, I

[00:29:13] CR: remember when I was When I wasn’t rich too, you SUCKER!

[00:29:17] SS: I’m not, you can’t infer that, that’s, I’m, I’m in a wealthy country, but you know, I’m normal, um,

[00:29:26] SS: in the middle, somewhere in the meaty part of that middle

[00:29:29] SS: curve. In the middle of that, that meaty curve.

[00:29:32] SS: But look, I genuinely want to

[00:29:34] CR: so your argument is that we’re gonna that businesses your argument is that business owners are gonna pay more than they have to to have humans working for them when they

[00:29:45] SS: Nah, that’s not my

[00:29:46] CR: robot for a tenth of the

[00:29:48] SS: It’s not my argument. I’m saying that a lot of

[00:29:50] CR: Well, who’s who’s paying

[00:29:51] SS: my argument. I’m saying a lot of the things that we pay a premium for, Right? And we do it already, Cameron, a lot. We do, we have a lot of things that we pay for because they’re personalized. When we can get robotic versions of them at home for a whole lot of reasons.

[00:30:09] SS: Yes, you go to the cafe for the ambience and the

[00:30:11] SS: people and you sit with and all of that experience. I’m saying

[00:30:14] CR: what? Give me, give me more examples then.

[00:30:21] SS: well, I gave you the music one, the live music, which is one, whether it’s Taylor Swift or whether it’s someone at your local pub, you go into the local cafe, you go to the restaurant, you like the people there, you like the people that you do business

[00:30:32] SS: with. For me, I do events, right?

[00:30:37] CR: you don’t have an, you can’t do business with a

[00:30:39] SS: Okay, I do events and I do keynote speeches, all right? You ready? I’m about to, I’m about to give up the ghost here and tell everyone my trick. There is nothing you can’t learn by watching a YouTube video online rather than coming into a room where I’ll do a speech for 45 minutes. Right? And probably more entertaining than me, funnier than me, smarter than me, more researched than me, but for some reason, people, yeah, right, for some reason people want to turn up, go to that room, interact with each other, watch a monkey on a stage, have a few ideas that aren’t as good as something you can see online and you get paid a good amount of money to do it.

[00:31:16] SS: Now that’s another example. Basically, whenever you see a human doing something, most of those things now, they’re not robots necessarily in the way that you infer, most of those things are available and better for anyone to get online, but they still choose the human side of

[00:31:32] SS: it.

[00:31:32] CR: Yeah. Okay. But that’s, that’s like, that’s just the Taylor Swift example on another level,

[00:31:36] SS: but, yeah, but wait a minute, I gave you three examples. I gave you three,

[00:31:40] SS: right?

[00:31:41] CR: none of them were good.

[00:31:42] SS: Well, in your

[00:31:43] SS: opinion. In your opinion, but we don’t need to get there because here’s what’s going

[00:31:47] CR: Everyone, go vote online.

[00:31:49] SS: go vote online, but

[00:31:50] CR: com slash vote.

[00:31:51] SS: okay, we don’t need to worry about it because here’s what’s going to happen and here’s what has always happened.

[00:31:56] SS: All right? A company finds a way to automate things. The other companies who compete automate it as well. They compete with each other on price. The price is dropped. The money gets freed up. New industries are invented, before automation arrives in that industry, people go work in that industry, then that new industry gets automated, margins get competed away, and, and the money moves sideways.

[00:32:19] SS: The easy example is, music is the perfect

[00:32:21] CR: will be new industries.

[00:32:22] SS: So music is the perfect example, right? Where did the 30 of a CD go? Where did it go? Like, where did it go?

[00:32:31] CR: to

[00:32:31] CR: Spotify,

[00:32:32] SS: No, but not all of it, because you used to spend way

[00:32:34] SS: more. If you’re into music, you’d spend

[00:32:36] CR: Jobs and Spotify.

[00:32:38] SS: Right. No, but where did it

[00:32:40] SS: go? This is, this is, this is

[00:32:41] CR: well, people, people spend less on, I mean, I don’t know what the net net is, but I don’t go and buy, uh, you know, I, I thought I previously would have spent maybe 30 bucks on a CD, maybe three or four times a year. Now I spend 20 bucks a month on Spotify. So it’s actually 240 bucks a year on music rather than 120 bucks a year on music, but.

[00:33:08] CR: I get a lot more music, um, and the artists

[00:33:12] SS: That’s what automation does.

[00:33:13] CR: and the labels get less.

[00:33:14] SS: yeah, you get, labels get less. But where did the money you

[00:33:17] SS: spent go?

[00:33:18] SS: Because you, you’re not earning less money.

[00:33:19] CR: Spotify.

[00:33:20] SS: No, but let’s

[00:33:21] CR: Oh, where did my

[00:33:22] SS: yeah, that’s actually the question. It’s not.

[00:33:24] CR: to 15 video subscriptions.

[00:33:27] SS: Yeah, So

[00:33:28] CR: Netflix, is

[00:33:28] SS: that’s what I’m

[00:33:29] SS: saying, though. This is what I’m saying, Cameron, and it’s easy to just poo poo it. no, no, no, no.

[00:33:34] CR: but what I’m saying is there aren’t going to be new

[00:33:36] CR: jobs that people go to,

[00:33:39] CR: because the new, there will be no new jobs that AI and robots can’t do better and cheaper and more effectively than humans.

[00:33:47] SS: well, you’re assuming that it has to always be cheaper is the thing that people want.

[00:33:54] SS: Sometimes people want things because they’re expensive. Look at the richest person in the world. One of the richest, Sir Bernard Arnault. Look at him. What does he sell? Overpriced handbags. An overpriced fashion. And it’s not the billionaires that are buying it.

[00:34:08] SS: It’s people like mortgaging their house and spending 10 grand on a bag that they shouldn’t because they want the emotional attachment with the fact that that bag was pretended to be handmade somewhere. And they over invest in it. That’s because of what it is emotionally. And what I’m saying is that so much capital will be freed up because many things that used to be expensive, expensive, will come down in price so, so radically because of AI and automation and competing the prices down.

[00:34:34] SS: Money gets freed up into new industries where people, the most premium product you can buy is no longer a handbag or a brand. It’s like, I had a massage by a human today. What? Did you get the massage by a human? They used to do it in the 60s. Yeah, well, I got massaged by a human. Look, I know that the, the Momo massage robot is, is, is amazing.

[00:34:56] SS: But I had Terence today and Terence’s fingers, I could feel the fingers on the back of my skin when he massaged me with this, uh, herbal oil that he got from Southeast Asia. How much was it? It was 780 for 20 minutes. What? 780?

[00:35:11] SS: A Momo robot only cost 100 and You have it in your house. But Terrence was so nice when he

[00:35:16] CR: don’t even have a job.

[00:35:17] CR: How did you afford to pay 780? You don’t even have a job. You

[00:35:21] SS: but I do have a job. But I do

[00:35:23] SS: have a

[00:35:24] CR: What is it?

[00:35:25] SS: I don’t know yet. I don’t know.

[00:35:27] CR: You’re giving Terence a massage after he gives you a

[00:35:29] SS: It’s a double massage scenario. I, I, the point, what I’m leading with is not what the jobs are. I’m leading with something different because what you’re gravitating

[00:35:42] SS: towards right now, Cameron, Not Cam. Cameron. I’ve Cameron, do.

[00:35:47] CR: Oh, you’ve camera’d me. What are you, my mother?

[00:35:49] SS: is your leading with what are the jobs? I’m not leading with that. I’m leading with the economics of the fact that the only reason, the only reason that you would automate something

[00:36:02] SS: is to reduce cost and unless you’re a monopoly. Yes.

[00:36:06] CR: It’s not the only

[00:36:06] SS: and quality.

[00:36:07] CR: it’s also, if

[00:36:08] CR: it can be Custom quality, yes,

[00:36:10] SS: right? Okay, put them both

[00:36:11] CR: Quality, it can be done

[00:36:13] SS: cost and quality can be done better, faster, whatever, right? That is why you would do it. If you would do that, your competitors would do it too.

[00:36:23] SS: Now,

[00:36:24] CR: Yeah,

[00:36:25] SS: if you leave the prices up high, And there’s margin, others will enter that market, so long as the barriers to entry aren’t too high. And if what we are saying is true, because automation is becoming so cheap and so omnipresent, humanoid robots, AI and everything, and open source, then we have to also assume that the barriers to entry would be low.

[00:36:47] SS: Therefore, a couple of players who reduce their cost with automation, they either bring their prices down or new entrants come in the market. And force the prices down because there’s margin to be had, right? That happens. That money gets freed up. The 30 of the CD gets freed up. I’m talking about the process of where money flows, right?

[00:37:10] SS: And I don’t know what is next. Maybe it’s retro stuff that you get humans to do, or maybe it’s things we didn’t even know we needed, wanted, like, we don’t know what they are yet. Just like in 1500, or even 70 years ago, or 50 or 30 years ago, there’s a lot of things we do today that we didn’t do. Humans are inventive.

[00:37:29] SS: Alright, we are very, very good at inventing ways to spend money we thought we would never spend money on, right? Like my dad reminds me, how many times did we go out for breakfast, Steve? When we grew up, approximately how many times did we go out for breakfast? Approximately, Steve. And the number being zero is very easy for me to give the approximation.

[00:37:50] SS: Right? Zero. All right? Money spent on break. There’s a whole lot of things we spend money on today. And I really wish I had written the list before I got into this podcast. But I was asleep on the couch because it was nap time and all of that. So,

[00:38:03] CR: That’s why you were

[00:38:04] SS: that’s why, no, it wasn’t why I was

[00:38:05] SS: late. Um,

[00:38:07] CR: you were doing your hair.

[00:38:08] SS: I,

[00:38:10] CR: Thought you were doing your

[00:38:11] CR: hair.

[00:38:11] SS: It does look nice

[00:38:12] CR: always looks

[00:38:13] SS: I had a haircut the other day.

[00:38:14] CR: always looks

[00:38:15] SS: Thanks, mate. And so,

[00:38:18] SS: so that money gets freed up and we are creative and we will invent new ways to spend that money. And in the short run, in the short run, right, we have to organize how to do these things that humans want and that thing arrives and then the money shifts to that and then the process of automation continues.

[00:38:35] SS: So I don’t think that we’re ever going to get to that place of mass automation. Removing jobs. And I don’t think that lag is going to be there like it is with the recession because the recession is based on perception of what the future is like. Whereas automation is based on reality and they’re very, very different because the perception is based on behavioral economics.

[00:38:59] SS: Things get bad or there’s too much demand and the interest rates go up and everyone

[00:39:02] SS: panics and they stop spending and you get into a negative spiral.

[00:39:06] SS: An inflation spiral and an unemployment

[00:39:08] CR: Unemployment isn’t perception If people don’t have jobs that’s not a

[00:39:13] SS: No, no, no,

[00:39:14] CR: That’s a, they don’t have jobs

[00:39:16] SS: but most of most of the recessions that we’ve had have been because of economic shocks that haven’t really been because of technological shocks.

[00:39:25] CR: that’s not what we’re talking

[00:39:26] SS: But we’re talking about a technological shock creating unemployment. We’re not talking about, no we’re not, we’re not talking about, um, a GFC where, uh, a lot of companies went broke and so they had to unemploy people or, or let people go.

[00:39:42] SS: We’re not really talking about that, are we?

[00:39:45] CR: No,

[00:39:46] SS: so it doesn’t have the same behavioural impact, because if you have a shock in the share market, or an economic shock, right? Companies make decisions based on what they believe will happen. And therefore they invent it. It’s behavioral economics, whereas this is

[00:40:01] CR: talking about a situation. 30%.

[00:40:04] SS: you’ve got to have automation be implemented, implemented new pricing, different behavior, but it’s, it’s more elongated.

[00:40:12] SS: Then an economic shock that leads to a recession, like a share market crash and a panic, which is what happened in 29. It also is what happened in 2008. It was also what happened in 1991. By the way, our highest unemployment rate ever since the recession. What do you think it

[00:40:30] SS: was, Cam? I looked it up.

[00:40:34] SS: Nah, it was,

[00:40:35] CR: the great

[00:40:35] SS: yeah, it was, it was close to 30 in Australia as well.

[00:40:39] SS: It was 11 percent

[00:40:40] SS: in 1991.

[00:40:43] CR: Um, I don’t know why you think it’s going to be elongated, because I think that

[00:40:48] SS: Because, because I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why I think it’s going to be elongated. No, I’m just going to answer this one question, and then you can tell me why I’m wrong. Which, which I’ve probably been a lot of today, but that’s okay. I think it’s going to be elongated because the lag time between something being

[00:41:05] CR: Elon Musk gated?

[00:41:06] SS: Elon Musk, it’s like an Elon Musk robo van.

[00:41:08] SS: It’s elongated. It’s just, it’s just an infinite timeline.

[00:41:15] CR: Yeah, sorry, go

[00:41:15] SS: Uh, uh, well, this is the funnest one we’ve had.

[00:41:22] SS: Uh,

[00:41:22] CR: I knew this was going to be fun, because I knew we were going to

[00:41:24] SS: oh, we disagree a lot because I, I work with a lot of large companies who have every resource in the world at their disposal. Alright, I’m doing some work at the moment with Seabus, right? Giant multi billion dollar building firm. Haven’t implemented any forms of modern modular 3D printing, construction, all of these things which can save them 50 percent in time, in production.

[00:41:50] SS: Uh, they’ve got a whole lot of challenges with the software that they use. Things are all fragmented. And they’ve got every resource you could imagine in their industry. I work with a multitude of companies, Rio Tinto, who could do far more automation in their, in their minds, don’t really do it. They’ve got automated trains.

[00:42:09] SS: The reason it’ll be elongated is the lag between something being possible and something being executed against in large companies. Is usually really, really long for a whole bunch. Even if the finances stack up and you say, we’re going to go to automation. Yep. It’s going to be better. The finances stack up on a whole lot of tools right now today.

[00:42:30] SS: And yet these companies haven’t implemented them. Now, do I think that we will go with AI and robotics? Absolutely. And I think AI before robotics, cause it’s really easy to remove an information worker more than it is a physical worker. And that’s the opposite of what a lot of people expect. Remember they said, Oh, blue collar are dead.

[00:42:48] SS: Now it’s more, it’s the white collar that are, that are going to get crushed. And in the modern economy, that’s probably a bigger percentage as well, but the implementation with software that can improve them with companies, the lag is huge. That’s why I think it’s going to be elongated. That was a long answer.

[00:43:03] SS: I’ll let you get in a word. Edgewise has arrived. Get

[00:43:06] SS: your word in.

[00:43:10] CR: think that’s the most solid argument you’ve made on the

[00:43:13] SS: Oh, thank God I finally made one.

[00:43:18] CR: Companies, you know, we’ve both had a lot of experience in the IT industry. Companies Peace. tend to be very slow to roll out major IT implementations and things like that. But one of the reasons for that is it’s very difficult because you have humans that are running your IT department. If you’ve got an AI system that’s going to do all of the implementation for you, it may speed things up.

[00:43:46] CR: But I don’t think The really big companies doing big IT implementations is really where we’re going to see the impact of AI in the workforce first. I think it will be small to mid sized businesses that are desperate to cut their costs and that will be able to implement AI faster than a lot of the big corporations that have a, it’s like turning around a battleship.

[00:44:14] CR: But again, I’m still Okay, let’s assume that you’re right, that uh, there are still jobs to be had for enough of the people, then we don’t need a UBI, but uh, cause people will be redeployed and we’ll be able to find work, and as you said,

[00:44:35] SS: Money changes places.

[00:44:36] CR: which I wrote, I wrote, I wrote about in my Mind Mapping the Future

[00:44:40] CR: article that we talked about an episode or two ago.

[00:44:43] CR: The implementation of AI and robots and nanotech when it arrives will drive the cost of production down, which should drive the cost of products and services down. And, you know, we should find that we have a decrease in the cost of living as a result. Uh, housing aside, but even housing, you know, if we have a million robots building houses for us, um,

[00:45:09] SS: In places you don’t want to live, of course, but they can build them. I mean, you can live in the Simpson Desert if you want. We’ll get a robot out there in no time.

[00:45:17] CR: yeah. And actually I think that’s one of the big opportunities, like, um, business opportunities is going to be using robots To

[00:45:24] SS: entirely new Yeah, because hasn’t China done that? Don’t they have like, ghost suburbs and cities that they’ve built with no one in them?

[00:45:33] CR: Not with robots, but

[00:45:34] SS: Yeah. Well, you know, they treat their people like robots up there. Cam, you know that.

[00:45:39] CR: okay, no, no, enough of the anti China stuff, man. Come on, we’re better than that. Um, uh, we, we. Let’s say that people still have jobs. Um, I don’t know what those jobs are. No one can tell me what kind of a job AI and robots won’t be able to do better than humans.

[00:45:57] CR: But you’ve got this

[00:45:58] SS: that they don’t have to be better.

[00:46:00] CR: touch, high human service. Um, big corporations and governments might be slow to implement stuff. Um, but then outside of that, getting back to this idea of redistribution of So if you look at the Google sheet that I prepared for today, um, You know, when I talked about in potential solutions there, I talked about automation taxes.

[00:46:28] CR: Let’s say that we do want to redistribute the wealth, which is where you started. And then you changed your mind and said, we won’t need you

[00:46:32] SS: Oh, that’s, that’s what podcasts are for, changing

[00:46:34] SS: minds, even if it’s your own.

[00:46:37] CR: It’s your

[00:46:38] SS: Well, it is one of the best

[00:46:39] CR: Well, honestly, talking about stuff is how we think through things, right? So that’s why I enjoy talking to you because it makes me Anyone else

[00:46:48] SS: don’t fall in love with my, I’m happy to change my mind on ideas.

[00:46:51] SS: If, you know, and, and I’m exploring what

[00:46:53] CR: make me think.

[00:46:55] SS: I’m exploring what I

[00:46:56] CR: Well, when I talk to anyone

[00:46:57] CR: else about this sort of stuff, their eyes glaze over in

[00:46:59] CR: about 15 seconds, and that’s it. They just

[00:47:01] SS: Yeah, likewise, likewise.

[00:47:02] CR: away.

[00:47:03] CR: They walk, they walk backwards. Very, say, oh, I think I left the kettle on, and they try and get out of my, uh, vicinity. Or Chrissy comes and saves them, and says, Okay, Cameron, I think they’ve had enough from you now. And rescues them from me. Um, So automation taxes was one of the things that I put there. So a tax on AI or robots that are replacing human workers.

[00:47:27] CR: I actually think that as a legislative option is a good one. Okay, so, Mr. Employer. You’ve got, you’re currently paying, um, Jane Bloggs, uh, 50, 000 a year to do her job. You can replace her with AI for 10, 000 a year and you have 40, 000 a year profit. What you can, what we’re going to make you do is you have to split that profit with Us, and you can keep half.

[00:48:02] CR: So take 20, 000 of that, add it to your bottom line, happy days. The other 20, 000 has to go to the UBI fund, and then we redistribute that. Maybe back to Jane, or maybe it just goes to Jane. You have to pay that to Jane as a dividend for the rest of her life, uh, that 20, 000 a year. Or maybe you give it to the government, then they redistribute it.

[00:48:27] CR: I think it’s just easier if you just give it to them. And it’s legislated, so anyone who terminates somebody on the basis that they’re going to replace their job with an AI or a robot, um, you have to split the profit with them. Uh, there’s also the idea of increased capital gains or wealth taxes, um, Particularly for companies that are profiting from automation, higher consumption taxes, GST, for capturing, you know, the, the existing or continuing revenue that’s coming from spending that gets redistributed or corporate taxes, increased corporate taxes, just straight up companies that are making way more money

[00:49:05] SS: We need to do that anyway.

[00:49:07] CR: go of all of their

[00:49:07] SS: We need to do that before the AI revolution. But there’s, there’s something really interesting that you mentioned there, which hasn’t really occurred that much yet. It has a little bit, but not a great deal. Is an entire job being replaced by automation. There, there are examples, of course.

[00:49:24] SS: I’m, I think a production line in a car factory or production lines are good examples. Supermarkets are a visual example that we’ve all seen. Um, ironically, uh, It wasn’t robots, it was stupid customers who ended up doing the work themselves, doing

[00:49:41] SS: self scanning. Um,

[00:49:44] CR: I don’t know if it’s stupid. I prefer to do it myself.

[00:49:47] SS: I don’t mind either, because it’s the same amount of time standing there anyway, and you do it yourself, and you pack it yourself. But look, there are, there aren’t that many examples where a person gets replaced in totality. Usually parts of the job get removed through automation. Certainly in White Collar, that’s been the case.

[00:50:06] SS: And an example might be, um, lawyers used to do A certain part of the analysis, now AI’s, large language models might be able to do big parts of that. And the lawyer then does more FaceTime with customers and more customers talking to customers. You sort of layer up in this sort of new sphere that is a layer above the AI’s talking to the AI’s.

[00:50:27] SS: And we sort of become, let’s say the, the guardians or, or the bureaucrats. We’re like bureaucrats that. Assess and manage a whole bunch of AIs who are doing the hard stuff and we’re almost like they’re, they’re political, uh, overseers that sort of organize the ethics and the behavior of the different ro I don’t know.

[00:50:50] SS: It, it may be that to an extent, but it’s very rare that you see a full job get replaced. It’s usually pieces of it and that’s why we’ve been able to adapt so far. And so it’s really hard to say, Jane blogs, Um, her 50 grand, we replaced her with 10 and she’s gone because usually Jane blogs doesn’t go in one go.

[00:51:10] SS: Parts of her jobs

[00:51:10] SS: go away.

[00:51:15] CR: look, I, I understand the theory behind that. And I think there are some jobs like lawyers, uh, that, where that may be true, but you know, when I wrote

[00:51:25] SS: in business and commercial, commercial scenarios, like when you worked at Microsoft, all those kinds of commercial scenarios, there’s a lot of things that AI could do, but there’s a lot of things that you never got to on your to do list that frees you up to do, which is kind of what’s happened

[00:51:38] SS: with automation to this point in white collar scenarios.

[00:51:42] CR: yeah, but the analysis that I did a

[00:51:44] CR: few months ago, my mind mapping the future, um, post, you know, I was saying that the first layer of jobs I see going will be the low risk, high value jobs. So, Coding. Okay. At the moment, you’ve got five coders working on a project and you’ve got a manager overseeing those or a head coder.

[00:52:03] SS: You only need

[00:52:04] CR: probably get rid of

[00:52:05] SS: Yeah, of course you can. Yes,

[00:52:06] SS: you can.

[00:52:06] CR: right? So those four aren’t going to have human facing jobs. Oh, well, you can go all talk to a client now. You don’t want a scruffy neckbeard coder talking to humans. That’s a terrible idea.

[00:52:20] SS: keep them away from humans. That’s really

[00:52:21] SS: funny. A

[00:52:23] CR: Customer service. You know, people that are answering phones and doing chat service, you know, and little text box service things, completely replaced with AI.

[00:52:34] CR: No, there’s no human facing, happy touch, double massage opportunities for them in this scenario. They’re just gone, gone. I don’t see them being, um, given something else to do inside of the business. Analysts? At the moment, big organization, you might have five, 10 analysts doing stuff or,

[00:52:56] SS: and financial institutions, insurers, all of

[00:52:59] SS: that. Yep,

[00:53:00] CR: cost estimators in construction companies and stuff like that. You might keep one out of five or one out of 10 and a manager initially, but the rest of it’s just going to be replaced with AI. You’ve got riders. Freelance writers, PR, journalism, whatever it is, um, gone, um, marketing writers, graphic design, industrial design.

[00:53:24] CR: I was talking to a young guy at Kung Fu the other day, he’s 19, 20, working in a factory or something, hates his job. I said, what do you want to do? And he, like, why don’t you go do something that you like? He goes, eh, I’m thinking about getting into drafting. I want to get into drafting. I said, uh, that’s interesting.

[00:53:42] CR: How many years do you think it’s going to be before an AI just does all of the drafting? And he said, uh, maybe two. I go, yeah, that’d be my guess too. Not much of a career really, is

[00:53:53] SS: Well, let’s go with that analyst

[00:53:55] CR: the time you learned to use a CAD tool.

[00:53:57] SS: You know, and I wonder if this is, because there could, there could be unexpected forks in the road. Often with technology, there’s just this really unexpected fork in the road. I foolishly believed that the internet would create more truth in society.

[00:54:11] SS: I really, really did. Like, I’m serious. I thought, wow, we can find things out now. We can go to the tapes figuratively and see what the truth is. And, and the way the

[00:54:22] CR: look it up.

[00:54:22] SS: evolved, here we are. Maybe a lot of these big organizations, and let’s take any organization that is big enough to have some type of analyst.

[00:54:32] SS: Whether it’s a fast moving consumer goods company like Procter Gamble, whether it’s Citibank, whether it’s an insurer. Lots of analysts in these big organizations. And even coding software companies, you know, rooms full of coders. Maybe we get an unexpected and new fragmentation, right? Where there is hundreds and thousands.

[00:54:58] SS: Of small people doing individual tasks in certain realms and areas. Ostensibly working with powerful AIs that they orchestrate and coordinate. And we enter this new era of the digital craftsperson, where we have access to massive open source forms of AI and robotics, where people can build, make, and create things, whether it’s physical goods like handbags or whatever with robots, or whether or not it’s someone who can somehow with powerful AIs, Build a banking system where you can get money off an open money market and have a banking system where your margins are enough for you to make 500 grand a year and you’re, you’re so skinny on the margins that everyone will go with the banking with you.

[00:55:43] SS: You, you, you build a micro bank, bank or something, or a micro insurer and we have All these individuals totally disrupting large corporations who used to aggregate all of this power. I don’t know. I mean, this is just a thought pattern that again, I’ve just made up on the spot. And, and that was like a little bit of the early internet dream.

[00:56:06] SS: Remember it was like, Anyone can make and do their own thing, become a little e commerce business. But we ended up with these power laws where things just aggregated. Um, as Doctorow said, you know, the internet became five giant websites with screenshots of the other four. So it’s like maybe this, this AI was the missing link because it was too complex to orchestrate the pieces of the puzzle in the supply chain, the finance, the data analytics, the advertising, the connecting the consumers.

[00:56:34] SS: And maybe AIs. Can be all put together so that we all become small business, digital crafts, people empowered by AI, totally demolishing big corporations because they can’t compete with us anymore because we have access to tools. That they have as well, but we have lower cost infrastructure and we don’t need as much margin because you’re only feeding us and our family.

[00:56:59] CR: we could call it the great fragmentation,

[00:57:01] SS: Look, just wait here because

[00:57:04] CR: that title.

[00:57:04] SS: that was kind of what I was thinking way back then in 2014 when I wrote that book, but it kind of didn’t turn out that way. I mean, a lot of the things that I had in there did turn out. I actually going to do a review of it. I’m going to do the 10 year review because it’s coming up to that.

[00:57:19] CR: Mm

[00:57:20] SS: Um, what I got right and what I got

[00:57:22] SS: wrong,

[00:57:24] CR: know, I, I have been saying for some time that I think that, you know, I see people talking about the role of AI in marketing and the way I hope it plays out is AI just eliminates marketing because. You know, right now, if somebody wants to, if I want somebody to discover one of my history podcasts, you know, they need to go, it needs to either be an ad that they see in Facebook or Spotify or Apple podcasts or something, or it’s word of mouth, or they need to go searching for funny history podcasts that talks about Rome and.

[00:58:01] CR: It has a lot of dick jokes in it, which is a pretty specific search term that I’m not sure a lot of people throw in. But, ostensibly, you know, uh, a few years from now, somebody will say to their AI tool on their Apple intelligence device, Hey, um, look, I want something new to listen to. And it will say, well, Steve, based on what I know about you, you have an interest in history.

[00:58:23] CR: You like dirty jokes. Um, you should check out, I’ve got this podcast for you that absolutely, I know you, is going to target your funny bone. You should check this out. Um,

[00:58:34] SS: which is what friends do, which is what friends do, because you want to have an understanding of each other that’s really deep and visceral and you, and you,

[00:58:41] SS: know what Cam will like. Yeah.

[00:58:45] CR: Um, and you can have the, the Etsy creator of, uh, uh, You know, like, I don’t know, some cool, uh, knife that they’re hand making. My friend Ian, who’s a boiler maker by profession, um, patent maker actually by profession. Um, he’s going to retire. He wants to make knives, have a little factory in his little property up in the Sunshine Coast and teach people how to hand make knives and stuff like that.

[00:59:14] CR: You’re going to have, you’re going to have like an Etsy thing where you have your handmade knives and The AI will find it for you and promote it to you. Hey, I’m looking for a really good custom knife. Oh, you should check this guy, this guy out. He’s doesn’t sell many. He doesn’t do any advertising, but he’s got great reviews.

[00:59:30] CR: Customer love his stuff. He runs a little course. You can go spend a weekend and learn how to make a knife and all that kind of stuff. It’ll cut through marketing and advertising by, it’ll know everything that exists on the net and it’ll be able to custom connect businesses with customers.

[00:59:47] SS: wonder how many businesses that we would love. To spend our money on, we just never really find because the game is so hard to get attention. And that’s why you’ve got these big tech companies. Yeah. And, and, and maybe a lot of those businesses could be thriving and not just be the 30 grand a year side hack.

[01:00:05] SS: That could be the 300 grand a year or the 500 grand a year. If you could connect with the right people. And humanoid robot that costs you 10, 000 in your garage doing Bits and pieces for you that you’re, again, the orchestrator of. It may well be that those businesses already exist, but the AI and the robotics is the missing ingredient or link to make those happen.

[01:00:27] SS: Reach more people and have the production capacity and organizational capacity to keep the finances, all the pieces of any business puzzle humming along. And that’s why, uh, it’s kind of almost goes back to Robert Coase and the theory of the firm and the theory of the firm. I think it was written in 1910 or 15 was why do organizations exist?

[01:00:50] SS: Because they create value through organized, organizing things that individuals just can’t do. But maybe AI. It makes us have to reconsider whether or not you need managers when those managers could be essentially AI bureaucrats who manage those pieces of the puzzle for you and give you a chance to

[01:01:11] SS: compete against the big, the firm.

[01:01:15] CR: Mmm. I like that. Well, before we wrap up and we’re running out of time, but I wanted to run through some of the other thoughts that I had when I was thinking through the UBI stuff, um, a few weeks ago, one of the, like I read, there’s, there’s a bunch of people that have been writing about this from Bill Gates through to Yanis Varoufakis through to Thomas Piketty and Andrew Yang.

[01:01:39] CR: I was, Scrolling through a lot of their ideas, and one of the things that I came up with that I thought was interesting was the idea of public sector jobs, like a return to the Works Progress Administration that FDR set up during the Great Depression in the US, where basically people who were unemployed just worked for the government, and they would go around and do Major projects like cleaning up the national parks or working on major building projects.

[01:02:05] CR: We’ve got a major housing crisis, as we know in Australia, the government go, okay, well, we’re just going to employ a hundred thousand, uh, people. Um, you’re all going to be taught how to build. Residential property. Um, we’re going to have some people who know what they’re doing come in and they’re going to just have work crews roaming the country, building residential property, just government jobs for everyone.

[01:02:30] CR: Um, beautiful communism where everyone just has a job for life, working for the state. Getting him to do whatever we need you to do. Where do we need, now, why wouldn’t you get robots to go build those things? Uh, well, maybe

[01:02:43] SS: Because the people need something to do, Cameron, is

[01:02:46] CR: to do,

[01:02:47] CR: exactly. Yeah. The government’s not run for profit. It’s going to be getting its money from somewhere. So if

[01:02:52] SS: I love this. You would be surprised as a raving capitalist at how much I love that. Like, I love, and I’ve always said that, that I think the best thing you could do if anyone wants their unemployed is after period X, whether it’s a year or whatever, and, and it might not even be full time, you might say, okay, you get unemployment benefits for six months, a year after that, you either need to be doing study to retrain in whatever you choose, or we will give you a job.

[01:03:25] SS: Right? And there’s plenty of things that need done, you know, whether it’s, you know, like say parks and gardens cleaning, like Singapore do a great job of it, you know, they’ve got bloody flowers in the middle of their highways, right?

[01:03:33] SS: It’s a, it’s a, it’s a beautiful place. And there’s,

[01:03:35] CR: What about handymen for elderly

[01:03:38] SS: exactly. It could even be, you

[01:03:40] CR: we’ve got, yeah, we’ve got guys that’ll go around and change

[01:03:43] CR: a light bulb for my mother. Who’s in the late seventies

[01:03:47] SS: Exactly.

[01:03:47] CR: you know, chop the. you know, chop

[01:03:49] CR: the branches off a tree so she’s not up a ladder

[01:03:51] CR: with a chainsaw.

[01:03:52] SS: So that, that I think would be a really great idea. And it’s not you work for your doll. You get more money, even more than the minimum wage. And if it is that we have monopoly companies and the prices don’t drop like I think they will in the economic flow, Uh, again, you just tax it really highly, and then the government takes on people to do the things that the robots can’t, or other things that robots could do, but people do them anyway.

[01:04:20] SS: Like, I really think that is a really strong proposition, is to redeploy people doing Large scale public infrastructure works, products, houses, services, parks and gardens, everything. I mean, there’s a nor walk around any suburb and you could write a list as long as your arms and legs on things that need done that would be better to make, you know, our society more livable.

[01:04:41] SS: A lot of it might even be, you know, recreation and sport and, you know, take, you know, kids soccer clubs that don’t exist or, you know, building facilities for sport or whatever it may be.

[01:04:53] CR: Teaching people

[01:04:54] SS: That’s another example, by the way. Robots will be better at soccer and football and every sport than humans will be as well, but I bet you we’ll still go and watch the rugby league or the NRL or the NBL basketball because humans are doing it.

[01:05:07] CR: I don’t even watch any of that shit now because I

[01:05:09] SS: Because you focus on world wrestling with Mr. McMahon.

[01:05:16] CR: No, I just go to Kung Fu and get beaten up. Oh, I did my Kung Fu grading last week. Chrissy and I had a Kung Fu grading

[01:05:22] SS: Did you get the black belt?

[01:05:23] CR: Got our Brown Belt. We got our Brown

[01:05:25] SS: you said you were going to send me some video too.

[01:05:29] CR: did

[01:05:29] SS: Yeah, you promised. You said at the grading, you’ll film it and you’ll send it to me.

[01:05:32] SS: Oh

[01:05:33] CR: Fox was supposed to film it, but he spent most of the time filming himself doing Pokemon Go in the kitchen. But one of the other guys there did film some stuff and he sent it to me. I got punched in the throat towards the end. I haven’t been able to talk for the last week. I got punched in the throat really badly, but, um, I’m recovered

[01:05:51] CR: today. Two one what?

[01:05:59] SS: Minutes.

[01:06:02] CR: Two one minutes what?

[01:06:06] CR: really? You’ve got a

[01:06:07] SS: Yeah. I had a hard stop at 2. 30, but that’s all right. We’ll go to three. I was

[01:06:10] CR: All right.

[01:06:11] SS: I was getting, look, Cameron, I was enjoying the podcast and I think I was

[01:06:15] SS: starting to improve my performance as we went. I actually made some better

[01:06:20] CR: You’re hanging on, you’re hanging

[01:06:22] SS: at one point, but I

[01:06:23] SS: think I made a really good comeback.

[01:06:25] SS: I actually made a really good comeback. The other one. So

[01:06:28] CR: me quickly run through

[01:06:29] SS: to government, I love.

[01:06:30] CR: of the key,

[01:06:30] SS: That’s a tick from me.

[01:06:32] CR: some of the key. I want to run through some of the key thinkers and what their ideas are on this. Andrew Yang, who ran, I think, in the last presidential election, he advocates for a UBI funded by a value added tax on tech companies. A guy called Darren Ashamoglu warns about the unchecked Bread of automation and calls for policy focusing on job creation that complements human labor.

[01:06:55] CR: Guy called Eric Brynjolfsson supports progressive taxation, worker retraining, and lifelong learning to address automation driven inequality. Thomas Piketty, who wrote a great book on capitalism. He’s a French scholar about five or so years ago. He pushes for wealth taxes to combat rising inequality due to automation.

[01:07:12] CR: Yanis Varoufakis, who is I think the Economy minister of um, uh, Greece for a while there, he’s a big advocate for public ownership of AI and automation distributing the profits from these technologies. As A UBI, bill Gates is proposing a robot tax to fund social programs for displaced workers. Guy called Martin Ford warns about the scale of job loss and supports UBI as a solution, David or.

[01:07:41] CR: focuses on complementary jobs and the need for vocational training to fill roles that AI can’t replace. And Mariana Mazzucato calls for governments to shape markets through public ownership and investment in innovation. Those were the sort of eight or nine key thinkers whose stuff I’ve been reading through.

[01:08:03] SS: And, and they’re all,

[01:08:04] CR: ideas, but the, well, that’s

[01:08:06] SS: they’re all good. And, and they’re actually all the same thing. They redistribute wealth, some form

[01:08:11] SS: of tax. They’re all the same thing, aren’t they? Except

[01:08:14] SS: for Mariana

[01:08:15] CR: what a UBI is. It’s a redistribution,

[01:08:17] SS: I like hers, which is

[01:08:18] CR: retraining and redistribution of

[01:08:20] SS: Retraining, redistribution.

[01:08:22] CR: the thing is, we need to be having conversation about this now as a society. Government, I mean, we’ve got an election coming up here in Queensland this weekend. I don’t hear anyone talking about how the fuck are we going to prepare our society for AI.

[01:08:36] CR: It’s not really being talked about in the US presidential election, outside of being a throwaway. It’s all more about, you know, stopping

[01:08:44] SS: Well, you know, no, you know why that is. And it’s the same as in your election is because people are worried about their grocery prices and their interest rates and if they can

[01:08:53] SS: buy a house. And if you start

[01:08:54] SS: talking about this, you just get lost because people are worried about

[01:08:58] CR: I know.

[01:08:58] SS: It’s you and

[01:08:59] CR: are we going to talk about it?

[01:09:01] SS: and I and, and, and a small cohort who are thinking about these bigger things.

[01:09:05] SS: And we’re fortunate enough to have the time and energy and

[01:09:08] SS: capacity to do it. But most people are thinking about making their bills this

[01:09:12] CR: I’m not worried about the people. What, where are the, what are the governments? Where are the governments working

[01:09:17] SS: okay, so the

[01:09:18] CR: Where’s the,

[01:09:18] SS: while they’re not

[01:09:19] CR: where’s the COVID emergency plan that

[01:09:21] CR: we have for this, Steve? Like, where are we pulling together the greatest minds? When are you and I getting called into a room in Canberra to say, Hey, listen,

[01:09:29] CR: we, we, we need help.

[01:09:31] CR: Steve and Cam, Futuristic, come and help us

[01:09:33] SS: well, you know, I, I did get called by the federal police on the future of terrorism, but that’s, that’s, that’s another story, uh, for, for another podcast,

[01:09:41] CR: Were they talking about me?

[01:09:42] SS: hey? Well, I think they’ve found out that I hang out with you, and they’re very, very worried.

[01:09:50] SS: But they’re, they’re,

[01:09:51] CR: a socialist with crazy wizard hair.

[01:09:53] SS: yeah, but I, I really like the idea of governments shaping markets and taking action.

[01:09:59] SS: I think governments should take back all of the utilities. I think they all should be government owned. I don’t think any public utilities and natural monopolies should be privatized. They also give us the ability to employ people. They create natural monopolies where you can have money flows with it.

[01:10:13] SS: And they also give the government the potential to raise and reduce prices based on economic pressures. Um, yeah. And, and I don’t think anyone’s going to talk about this anytime soon because the threat is internal and not immediate.

[01:10:30] CR: Well, that’s the Futuristic for this week, maybe this month, uh, depending on what happens. We had a lot of other things we could have talked about, but we ran out of time. Uh, thank you. It was good fun to talk to you as always, my friend. I love, you make me think, you challenge my thinking. I appreciate that about

[01:10:46] SS: well, you, you even stuck it out when in the first instance I was struggling, but I felt like I hadn’t okayed back half. I think you still won the match, but I think it was a close game in the end.

[01:11:01] CR: Have a good week, buddy. Take care,

[01:11:03] SS: See you, mate. Bye.

In this episode of Futuristic, Cam and Steve discuss OpenAI’s groundbreaking o1 model and Advanced Voice Mode. They voice concerns over social media’s impact on youth, touching on legislative measures and the Instagram Kids launch. Cam talks about how he’s used ChatGPT on his weight loss journey. The episode also looks back at the 1973 launch of the first personal computer, MCM 70, the relevance of Moore’s Law and Marvin Minsky, using of AI to digitise handwritten notes and Sam Altman’s vision for The Intelligence Age.

02:36 The Impact of Social Media on Youth
15:46 Using GPT to lose weight
21:07 OpenAI’s New Model: O1
34:31 Advanced Voice Mode in ChatGPT
41:03 The Future of AirPods: Integrating AI
43:54 OpenAI Leadership Changes and Implications
46:43 The Evolution of Silicon Valley
56:45 The Bystander Effect and Social Media Legislation
01:03:43 Sam Altman’s Vision for the Intelligence Age
01:16:15 Technology Time Warp: The First Personal Computer

FUT 30

[00:00:00] SS: Freestyler, futuristic microphone, straight from the top of our domes. We got the Cam Reilly, a Rocker microphone and a Sammotron, s s s s s sammotron.

[00:00:17] CR: Uh, welcome back to Futuristic, uh, episode 30. I think this is, it’s been a while, Steve. Our last show was August 3rd. We’re recording this on August the, uh, September the 27th. So almost two months since we’ve done a show and partially because you had a lot of stuff going on, partially because I had a lot of stuff going on and partially because there was a lot going on in the.

[00:00:47] CR: AI world up until about a week ago, and then everything happened. So, you know, look, there’s a lot of, I follow a lot of, uh, AI based YouTube shows and podcasts. And a lot of time it’s like watching cable news. There’s just. filler stories happening and I’m like, really, this isn’t really, there’s a lot of gossip, there’s a lot of rumour, there’s a lot of minor news and I’m like, nah, I’m not going to waste your time, my time, our audience’s time with minor stuff.

[00:01:21] CR: I’m really here to talk about the big stuff and so if there’s no big stuff, I’m saying, we don’t do a show. There’s nothing really worth talking about, but of course in the last week or two, the big stuff has hit. Stuff that had been rumoured for a long time. Some of it finally landed and it’s definitely worth talking about.

[00:01:40] CR: What do you think, Sammartino?

[00:01:43] SS: You made a really good point on filler stuff in media. And so much of our social feeds are like that as well. And even podcasts that I like to listen to, I’m like, yeah, it was a whatever episode, cause they got to do one every week. You know, it’s all the game is frequency. We used to say that columns need to be filled and now it’s, you know, pixels need to be put across screens, but I like that we’re pretty straight up on it, but definitely a lot happening now.

[00:02:09] SS: And it feels like. AI has kind of crossed another bridge where it’s starting to piece together the islands and the archipelago of intellectual riches that AI is becoming.

[00:02:25] CR: Whoa, there’s some wordsmithing from Steve Sammartino. It’s beautiful. There’s a, all those years of getting up on stage, spitting your rhymes. Uh, let’s, before we get into the news, Steve, let’s, uh, talk about what’s been going on in your personal life from a futuristic perspective. What do you want to, how do you want to start off the show?

[00:02:47] CR: What insights do you want to share with

[00:02:50] SS: I’ve got, got a few insights. My little boy’s been a little bit ill, um, which has kind of kept me out for four weeks. When he was ill, he was using his smartphone a lot because it was one of the only things where he could have a reprieve because he was quiet. Um, you know, without going into too much detail, couldn’t move around much at all.

[00:03:07] SS: Um, and. Yeah, talking to a lot of the doctors and, uh, and various psychologists and people recently, I think we don’t take social media’s impact on youth seriously enough. Now, I know that in Australia and in the U. S. they’re looking at passing legislation. I actually still don’t think It, despite them looking to pass legislation, know the potential serious impact this could have.

[00:03:36] SS: I feel like we might be heading to a quasi lost generation of sorts. The Australian government has looked to ban social media for children under the age of, I think it was touted as 14 and potentially 16. It’s got to be 18 because I’m convinced That this is potentially more dangerous than underage drinking or underage driving.

[00:04:02] SS: Uh, we know that children’s brains and certainly boys brains don’t develop till they’re about 27. The impact it has on the frontal cortex and the lack of ability to delineate what’s worth watching, the fact that the algorithms put them down wormholes of terrible information, uh, misogyny, uh, rude, Uh, get some even quick viral loops.

[00:04:25] SS: One of the other things that we see a lot is that the speed of content and the truncation of content length is having a really significant impact on I won’t be surprised if in 10 years we say, wow, that has really had a developmental issue on the youth’s brain and their ability to think and their ability to Maintain an attention span, which is required for a lot of things to function as an adult human.

[00:04:53] SS: Uh, it’s not just a joke and I’ll make something short and make sure you have a hook. Yeah, that’s all good to get views. Um, but a little bit like junk food, like alcohol or driving dangerously, I would be flummoxed. Um, if we don’t come back and find out that that’s really bad. I did one LinkedIn post which had so much resonance, um, which I, I said, and I’ll, I’ll read it pretty quickly for the audience here.

[00:05:20] SS: The words that I used was, I’m just going to say it. Social media could be more dangerous for our youth than underage drinking or driving. Both of which are age gated at 18. Kids spend five hours plus a day, which is a stat based on Australia, it’s probably more in some areas, on tech purposely designed to create addiction.

[00:05:37] SS: And I said that I’m, I’m going to write a manifesto on how easy this is to fix, which I’m going to do this week. And I’ve said that we just need the political and social will to do it, to care about our kids more than we do about corporate profits. And the reason that that’s really important is that it had like six reposts, more than 10, 000 views, hundreds of comments with.

[00:05:55] SS: Anecdotal stories of so many, uh, kids and families having major issues with this. And, you know, it’s touched me personally in my house. And we had kept my boy away from social media for a long time. And it really just opened my eyes. The conversations that I’m having are that this is really causing a whole lot of social issues.

[00:06:21] SS: So ironic, social

[00:06:23] CR: Yes. And I, and I see it at two different age levels, right? Cause my older boys, uh, are nearly 24 and Fox is 10. And Fox doesn’t have a device of his own, but he borrows our devices to do things with. He used to have a device, uh, for, for a couple of years, he had devices, but then he broke his last iPad and we said, that’s it, you’re not, not getting another one for a while anyway.

[00:06:51] CR: And so, but he borrows our things, but we, we try to limit. He’s a, like one of the things that I limit a lot is YouTube, because he will just go down, it’ll take him down rabbit

[00:07:05] SS: Bad rabbit

[00:07:06] CR: he’s sitting there watching something that is, I deem is good for your brain content, I’ll let him watch it, but if I leave the room for half an hour and I come back and he’s watching shorts, I’m like, dude, this is just bad for your brain.

[00:07:20] CR: Get off it right now. You know, this is rubbish. And we don’t let him on, you know, TikTok or, or anything like that. My older boys, Hunter and Taylor, you know, they, you know, they, they sort of grew up in the early stages of this stuff. Um, and of course they’re both, they, they both TikTok world now. Hunter’s a creator, Taylor’s a manager of creators and You know, we have constant debates about short form content and the value or the danger of it.

[00:07:53] CR: They tend to agree by the way, that there’s a lot of bad stuff associated with this. Um, but you know, I see them like they don’t read. They struggle with long form content, paying attention to it. Um, and they’ve both had a certain amount of success in their early twenties. Um, but, which is great. You’re like, they’re doing okay in many ways, but you know, they, they, they suffer, Hunter suffers a lot from.

[00:08:24] CR: Loneliness. Um, and it’s cause he’s in his room all the time making content for strangers, for 2 million followers, but he doesn’t have any real friends.

[00:08:33] SS: That’s funny because my boy, um, is really struggling for connection. He’s, he’s been quite isolated through his illness and the thing that he’s struggling for his own offer with the people in his house, and yet he looks for it from strangers. There’s, there’s some really interesting element there and the struggling with the short form content.

[00:08:50] SS: You know, we know that it has like a dopa cycle and you’re getting into a dopamine hit. I wonder how similar it is to the physicality of junk food and, and fatty and sugary foods, where it gives you a short term hit, but you know that the broccoli and the protein, long form food, let’s call it, and long form content.

[00:09:08] SS: I do wonder again, now we’re expert in this, whether or not there’s some sort of physical analogy where those things, even though one is food related and one’s content related, whether or not they have the same chemical impact. Um, on your physical development.

[00:09:23] CR: I don’t think, I think the science is already in on that. I don’t think there’s any debate about that. I mean, the brain has a, um, limited number of hormones and neurochemicals that it uses to motivate behaviour and the social media companies have, Paid lots of money to consultants to, and gaming development companies.

[00:09:45] CR: It’s all shit, not just social media companies, to develop the technology in a way that creates those addictive responses. So you want more and more of it. It’s been, as you said earlier, deliberately designed to hack. Our brains to bring us back, to keep us on the devices. No doubt about that. And I can remember early days of this sort of stuff, like 2007, 2008, when Twitter was fairly new.

[00:10:16] SS: Yep. I

[00:10:16] CR: I can remember spending a lot of time on Twitter, having conversations, having debates, and when I wasn’t on my phone, when I was in my car, driving somewhere, feeling the need to have Twitter open to see what the last comment was, or the last part of this conversational debate, and feeling the need.

[00:10:36] CR: Increasingly icky about that. Like the same, the same feeling I get if I’m playing an Xbox game, you know, you get addicted to an Xbox game or something, and then you realize you’ve been playing it for two hours and you’re in a frustrating level and you’re trying to get through the level. I remember this most recently with Red Dead Redemption, which is a terrific, Red Dead Redemption 2, which is a terrific game, really beautiful, well designed game.

[00:11:05] CR: But I remember getting to a point where, um, I just felt kinda queasy after playing it for an hour, and I’d be like, you know what? Fuck this. I’m off. And you know, I got the same with Twitter 10, 15 years ago, whenever it was, where I just was like, you know what, this makes me feel bad. I, and I had to go cold turkey off of it. Like, you know what, I don’t want to, I don’t want this in my life. I don’t want to be part of this. It was a sort of a, a cycle. And I, and I’ve said this, Chrissy and I have had these debates for years and years, the pros and cons of these new technologies. You know, when they’re new as adults, we can get.

[00:11:46] CR: Swept up in them, but then as adults, if you, if you aren’t malfunctioning, I think you have the ability to go, you know what? This isn’t good for me. It’s like eating Tim Tams. Not good for me. I’m gonna step away from this and do something healthier. Kids! You know, as you said before, we know boys brains don’t fully mature until 25, something like that.

[00:12:08] CR: Particularly younger kids don’t have the ability, their brains don’t have the, literally don’t have the ability, to make wise decisions, why we don’t let them drink, why we don’t let them drive. We’ll send them off to war, but outside of that,

[00:12:21] SS: Look, look, I’ve always said Cameron. A toy is his gun, and all he’ll ever know is to fight forever, fight forever. Little bit of the noise works, circa 1987, welcome to the world. I’ve always said that,

[00:12:33] CR: And we’ll, we’ll teach them religion when they don’t have the ability to discern between what’s true and what’s bullshit. Nah, look, I’m, I, I’ve seen the gnashing of teeth over the social media ban, and I’m actually all for it. I, I, I, I don’t have any issue with a ban on this stuff for kids. I don’t think it’s good for their brains.

[00:12:53] CR: I don’t think it’s good for any of us, quite frankly. Um.

[00:12:57] SS: it’s actually really, really easy to do. And this is, and, and, two things I want to say. The first one is, What did I despise? And as you know, this is the futuristic, we talk about the future. And people often say to me, I thought you would be all for technology. Aren’t you a futurist? Isn’t that about technology?

[00:13:16] SS: And my answer is, well, we need to be better than that and think better. The future is about creating human flourishing. Which may involve new technology and may involve some of the things which are the oldest things we’ve had. Like, uh, slow food is a classic example. In the 60s and the 70s was irradiated food and packaged goods and just add water and that was the future.

[00:13:40] SS: And then we went, actually, I like slow made coffee and grow our vegetables. Like we learned that with food, right? And, uh, you know, meditation, thousands of years, like, A flourishing future isn’t just about technology, often it will, and technology, as, uh, we hear from Kevin Kelly, is 51 percent good most times, but what we need is the wisdom to delineate where technology use is good, and where we need to say, actually, now we’ve learned this, we need to, Uh, moderate that, or legislate, or put regulation around it, like we did with cars, like we did with factories, like we did with so many other things, and for some reason, society have this view that you’re a Luddite if you don’t embrace all new technology, no, no, no, I’m far more thoughtful than that, and I’m certainly not a Luddite, and in fact, not being a Luddite is finding civilize the technology, and that’s one of the things that we need to get better at.

[00:14:35] CR: Look, I’m, I’m very cautious about, um, government affairs in personal lives and censorship and having to legislate behaviour. Uh, you know, I, I think it’s necessary in certain Places for a safe and civil society, but you want to be really careful about how much of it you allow and where the line is. It’s something that needs constant vigilance.

[00:15:03] CR: I would rather see parents be responsible for their children’s access to this sort of technology. The parents be the gatekeepers and decide what’s best for them. what is good or what is bad for the children. But if parents aren’t doing that because they themselves are addicted to this sort of stuff and they’re not able to turn it off, then perhaps there is a role for the future.

[00:15:27] CR: Because if the parents aren’t protecting the children, it’s a bit like, uh, I don’t know, paedophile priests. If the parents are allowing the paedophile priests

[00:15:37] SS: Wow,

[00:15:38] CR: close to

[00:15:38] SS: you just Cameron Reilly,

[00:15:40] CR: then the

[00:15:41] SS: Reilly will go

[00:15:42] CR: to step in and do something about it. Well. On my front, Steve, um, since we last spoke, in the last two months, I’ve lost 12 or 13 kilos.

[00:15:53] CR: And I have to say that you are partly the inspiration and my mentor in this. We had this conversation on the show a while back. I said, how do you stay skinny? You said, I don’t eat until the afternoon. So. I started doing that. I started just not eating until after lunch, but the other side of it is Kung Fu.

[00:16:16] CR: I’ve got a grading coming up in a couple of weeks and I decided that I wanted to get down to a lower weight for my grading, uh, for my fitness and my health, but also ChatGPT. Now, as you know, cause we’ve talked about this on the show, I started using ChatGPT as my calorie. tracker about a year ago because I wanted to be more conscious of how much I was eating for my health and to lose weight and it wasn’t working.

[00:16:41] CR: I wasn’t losing weight or even with the amount of Kung Fu that I do, which is insane. Like I’m doing eight to 10 hours of Kung Fu a week. I still wasn’t losing weight. So, A couple of months ago, I jumped into GPT and I said, look, I’ve been tracking my calories for the last 10 months, nine months, whatever it is.

[00:17:01] CR: This is the amount of calories as my input. This is the amount of Kung Fu that I’m doing. I’m not losing weight. What should I do? And it said, well, try cutting your calories back a little bit extra. I was like, Okay, I said I want to lose about a kilo a week. Can I do that? Yeah, you can do that. You have to cut it down by about 1, 100 calories a day.

[00:17:25] CR: So I was eating about 2, 800 calories a day on average. I cut it back. Um, to about 1700 and weight just started dropping off me. So I’ve lost 12 kilos. I’ve lost eight centimetres off my waist, jumped into my swimming trunks for the first time in six or seven months on the weekend. And they fell off. I went into the, I went into a clothing store the other day.

[00:17:53] CR: I’ve dropped down from an XL to an L. in two months. Um, and you know, again, partly because of you, partly because of Kung Fu, largely because of ChatGPT’s given me the ability to track that. Like I used to use MyFitnessPal and some of these calorie tracking apps, and you have to look up everything that you’re reading and, you know, plug it in.

[00:18:16] CR: And it used to take, longer to plug in what I was eating than it actually took to eat what I was eating. And there’s a certain level of commitment that after a while just gets difficult. ChatGPT, I just go, yeah, I had a plate of this. I had some chicken and some vegetables and a bowl of lentil soup and a slice of bread with butter and honey and a coffee and whatever.

[00:18:38] CR: And it just works it out. Now is it completely accurate? Probably not, but it gives me a rough indication. Yeah, so when I said, hey, I need to cut back a bit, it goes, okay, well try cutting back the yogurt and frozen berries and honey that you’re having for dessert every night and replace X with Y. And, you know, not eating until after lunch helped as well.

[00:19:00] CR: And so, although now Tim Ferriss is for our body, I’m having two boiled eggs first thing in the morning when I get up, he reckons protein first thing in the morning, um, puts your body into a different mode. So when you have carbs or sugars later on in the day, it doesn’t, uh, start off your insulin response if you have protein anyway, so that’s been.

[00:19:21] CR: How I’ve used technology most in the last couple of months is just to lose weight. And it’s been fascinating because I’ve been trying to lose weight for 15 years. I haven’t been this light for 20 years. And it,

[00:19:36] SS: it’s easy. Like, I mean, the basic thing is you can never exercise away a bad diet. That’s number one. Often when you’re hungry, you can’t, you just can’t do it. You can no amount of exercise, right? Diet is everything. Because I think 80 percent of your calories are just keeping your body alive.

[00:19:54] CR: Yeah. Just your base

[00:19:55] SS: yeah, just basic,

[00:19:56] CR: through the day, right?

[00:19:57] SS: metabolism. A couple of other things, just simple hacks, is often you think you’re hungry when you’re really thirsty, so have a big chug, a big thing of water, and you won’t be hungry for an hour. So, that’s a good one. And the other one is the density of your food. So, food density. So, for me, high fat, high protein works.

[00:20:15] SS: And I think it works for most people, but most people just don’t have the discipline. If something’s, you know, Carbohydrates are low density foods, like breads and all those other high density. So, you know, broccolis, even bananas, they’re carb based foods, but they’re fine. Um, and, and basically, yeah, the less processed it is, the better it is.

[00:20:32] SS: But I just have a high protein. I can lose a half a kilo a day if I have a bad week. Pretty easy. Because I just not really, I’ve never really counted calories. But I just don’t eat until the afternoon and I just have protein only. Won’t really have any carbs. I just avoid bread, pasta, um, rice. And I eat as much fat as I want.

[00:20:52] CR: Yeah.

[00:20:53] SS: And

[00:20:54] CR: There you go.

[00:20:54] SS: that. Anyway.

[00:20:55] CR: you’re a good looking skinny dude. Let’s get, let’s move,

[00:21:00] SS: with skinny.

[00:21:01] CR: speaking of Kung Fu, I’ve got a hard time, I’ve got to get out of here to get to training soon. So let’s, uh, get into tech news. Steve, uh, obviously I think the biggest thing that’s happened in AI news in the last, This month has been OpenAI finally releasing the model formerly known as Strawberry, uh, which they have called O1. Now um, O1, Strawberry, we started hearing about Strawberry in November last year when Sam Altman was fired from the company. And there were these rumours that Ilya saw something, and there were rumours coming out about something that was codenamed Strawberry or Q Star, and we’ve been hearing rumours about it ever since, and it was this A new model that they had developed that could do thinking and reasoning, but they were very tight lipped about it until it finally dropped a week or so ago, O1 Preview and O1 Mini.

[00:22:12] CR: It’s called Preview because it’s not the full model, there are strict limits which they have increased, but I think you get 50. Queries to O1 preview a week at the moment and 50 a day for O1 mini. And then you get cut off and you have to wait a week. But these are the models for people that haven’t heard about it or haven’t played with it yet.

[00:22:37] CR: It does advanced thinking and reasoning before it answers. And look, it’s not perfect. And in fact, on the launch day, Sam tweeted, ah, it seems impressive when you first use it, but over time, not so much, but they’re also calling it. PhD level intelligence and

[00:22:58] SS: I’ve been using that on stage. They stole my bit. You’ve all got a PhD in every single subject now,

[00:23:05] CR: they, they did a put out a bunch of launch videos for, with, um, physicists and chemists and biologists and coders talking about, uh, how impressive they had found they’d been early testers of the model and what, you know, I’ve seen some other videos.

[00:23:23] CR: There’s a guy who gave it, uh, as a physicist on YouTube who gave it a. Question out of a PhD level physics textbook, which the textbook said it should take a week and a half to complete and O1 did it in 122 seconds and got the

[00:23:45] SS: Now we’re all, now we’re all goodwill hunting. Physicists and mathematics experts just on a chalkboard. I’m just going to, I’m going to get ChatGPT in my pocket and just become a janitor at MIT or Harvard and just try to smash up on the chalkboard some answers. Just bam.

[00:24:02] CR: like apples? Do you like apples,

[00:24:04] SS: like apples?

[00:24:05] SS: That’s what they should call the next one. Do you like apples? That should be called, Do you like apples? I

[00:24:12] CR: Uh, and the fascinating thing, uh, for me playing with O1 is you can watch its reasoning, particularly O1 Preview. You can give it a question and then watch it go through the reasoning steps, how it’s thinking about it. And the, the physicist I mentioned who did the textbook example. He showed the reasoning.

[00:24:34] CR: It started to try and solve this problem, and it spent like a minute going down one path, and then it went, no, no, this is the wrong approach. So I went back to the beginning and started again. So, uh, now they haven’t explained how this works, how they’ve done it. I think the QSTAR methodology came out of a university originally, and I haven’t bothered to drill into how it works, but

[00:24:57] SS: was just about to ask you to take me through the QSTAR methodology. You can’t drop that on me and not take me through it, Cameron.

[00:25:03] CR: man. Nah, nah. I mean, I haven’t had the time to drill down on that yet. I do plan on trying to get my head around it though, but it’s a huge step forward in the ability of LLMs and people like Sam Altman are now saying they have reached the conclusion that there is no upper limit of what we can do with LLMs.

[00:25:25] CR: That LLMs are now capable of way more than just, uh, fancy autocomplete, as people were saying two years ago. It’s,

[00:25:35] SS: That is just a bugbear of mine and Hinton and others, some of the others say that. It’s like,

[00:25:41] CR: oh, Hinton

[00:25:42] SS: what all intelligence is. An advanced level of autocomplete. You work out what comes next. That’s like, it’s just so mind numbingly frustrating that people do not understand. Sorry.

[00:25:54] CR: Cory Doctorow, not Hinton. Geoffrey Hinton’s,

[00:25:56] SS: Oh, sorry. Not Hinton.

[00:25:57] SS: Doctorow. My bad. My bad. Doctorow. Stand corrected. Which I love Doctorow too, by the way, which shows you can still love someone and disagree with some of their bits, right?

[00:26:06] CR: should be able to. I’m exactly in the same camp. I love Ayn Rand. I love Ayn Rand’s novels. I’ve read her letters. I love Ayn Rand. I think she was completely misled and wrong on lots of things. But then, you know, I appreciate a lot of the stuff that she

[00:26:20] SS: Yeah, exactly.

[00:26:23] CR: Um, okay, so let me read a little bit from OpenAI’s launch document, uh, for O1.

[00:26:30] CR: How it works. We train these models to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond much like a person would. Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes. In our tests, the next model update performs similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology.

[00:26:52] CR: Note PhD students, not PhD graduates, PhD students. Big difference between somebody who’s had a PhD for 20 years and somebody who’s trying to get a PhD, right?

[00:27:09] SS: Yep, okay.

[00:27:11] CR: We also found that it excels in math and coding. In a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad, GPT 4. 0 correctly solved only 13 percent of problems, while the reasoning model scored 83%. Their coding abilities were evaluated in contests and reached the 89th percentile in Codeforces competitions.

[00:27:34] CR: Now, Um, you know, there’s been some benchmarking of this done by other people, they disagree or agree to varying degrees, but everyone seems to be blown away by what O1 can do. My personal experience with it from a coding perspective is some days I’m super impressed, other days I’m not so impressed, which was also true of, say, Claude, 3.

[00:28:02] CR: 5 Sonnet, which I was using before O1 came out. Extensively. But, uh, there’s a lot of, if you go into Reddit and look at the OpenAI subreddits, et cetera, people tend to be fairly impressed with what O1 is able to do. And again, it’s only sort of a week old, but, uh, people are pretty impressed. September 12th, it came out.

[00:28:26] CR: So, uh, yeah, two weeks, maybe. Mm

[00:28:29] SS: Yeah, I mean, the coding thing is just so often now, I’ll just get it to create like a little script for what I need. Even this morning, I’ve been trying to get my substack back and start publishing again on a weekly basis. And I’ve got some old MailChimp emails, uh, that people have been subscribing to there and not my substack.

[00:28:49] SS: And I couldn’t get things uploaded, so I just grabbed the data and just said, Write me a little, you know, write me a little CSV, get me some scripts, extract these emails from this, double checks, some things that you would have to muck around a hundred times within the substack or the MailChimp format to find its formatting.

[00:29:05] SS: I just grabbed raw data and then asked it to format in what I needed and I also asked it What is the best format for Substack? And it said, this is the best format. So can you make it? Yes. And it just starts writing the Python script and then it, and then it executes against it, just doing that scripting in there for you really is a magical feeling.

[00:29:23] SS: Cause it’s not like you have to download it onto your client, just getting it to do it in Python. In the interface is really kind of special. It reminds me of the early days of the first web browsers where it does it in the browser, where it writes the script, executes against it and gives you the thing that you need.

[00:29:39] SS: I don’t need it downloaded on my client. I don’t want to have that script sitting there and then have to put data in it and get it to execute against it. It’s a really empowering feeling. And that’s like something I think we should be getting people to use in companies. And one of my clients, I’m like, well, take information from your different data, like dump it in there and, and just get it to execute against and find the links that you need.

[00:30:00] SS: It’s really good at that. And the answer that I always get back is, oh, we’re too worried about the, uh, The safety and security concerns. I’m like, listen, no one’s really worried about your company. You’re going to go in there and steal your little piece of sales information. Seriously dudes, just, just be that, just be that company that waits 10 years.

[00:30:17] SS: That’ll work out. That always works out. What a great

[00:30:19] CR: that always works out. That’s never a bad idea. Yeah, I’ve used it. I’ve had a lot of, um, server issues. Um, I’ve increasingly over the last six to 12 months, my server that I host all my shows on has been struggling and it got to a point where it was going down two or three times a day for five to 10 minutes at a time.

[00:30:37] CR: My IT guy, the company that hosts the server that’s supposed to do support has been completely useless. Um, not able to give me any sort of guidance or fix anything. It’s in the too hard basket for them. And I tried to use GPT in the past and, and didn’t get very far. I jumped into O1 and I said, here’s the situation.

[00:30:59] CR: It said, download your log and give me a look at your log. So I download the log file. Which, if you’ve ever seen a log file, it’s full of unintelligible bullshit. Uploaded that to it, it goes, okay, I can see you’re getting hit by bots, there’s certain processes that are running cron jobs that are taking up a lot of Bandwidth, a lot of, uh, CPU time.

[00:31:25] CR: It got me to run some reports. It read the reports. It gave me the fixes and then told me what to do. All right, install this plugin and set it up like this. Go into CloudFare, set up these rate limiting options. Do this. I spent a day following its instructions and so far, so good. Fixed all of my, um, server performance issues.

[00:31:45] CR: So it was like having a. First tier, um, sysadmin to walk me through the, it couldn’t do it for me. And that’ll be the next stage is when it’s integrated into our OS’s. Yeah. But it could tell me what I needed to do, guide me through it, answer my questions, hold my hand in a friendly way, and enable me to solve problems that I would, no way could I solve them myself.

[00:32:14] CR: It’s like, again, it’s, I said this many times. It’s like having a superpower. Yeah.

[00:32:18] SS: Yeah. The way that it’s sewing together, the pieces of the puzzle, and I used in the first inferences, bridges between those islands of what it can do. Uh, the fact that it, you can ask it, how do I solve this problem? And then it comes up with the idea and then it helps you execute against the idea.

[00:32:35] SS: That’s super powerful, but it makes me feel that, you know, And I’ve, I’ve been reading a lot about the emergence of agents and I’ve been using agent G-P-T-A-A little bit and I still demo it on stage in keynotes to show how it’s objective driven rather than task driven. I mean, I think that’s gonna be the next phase at some point in 2025.

[00:32:55] SS: ’cause so many people are talking about AI agents and it seems like. It has all the pieces of the puzzle to make agency where someone actually manages a situation and a problem for you, just, just for the listeners to understand. Instead of doing discrete tasks, it accumulates all of the tasks to get from point A to point Z, let’s say.

[00:33:16] SS: And we’ll do all of those that, that achieves the objective. And that move towards agency based AI is going to be, I think, the really big part. And that’ll be big for a couple of reasons. It enables individuals to have an agent infiltrate their OS and have a look at all the various data points and find those.

[00:33:34] SS: You won’t even actually have to upload necessarily, oh, upload the file like you’ve just described. You’ll say, here, are you in there? It’ll go, oh, have a look around. And then it finds it. Think about how many calculations it can do per second, you know, trillions of calculations. It’ll be able to find it and find the pieces of the puzzle that it needs and then execute against it.

[00:33:53] SS: And you, Do that in a corporate sense. It’s really the administrative burden of modern life. You would have to feel like 90 percent of that is just going to go away. Like do my tax, go through everything I’ve spent, understand where it was spent, the places, what my benefits are, where I go, what can I claim back?

[00:34:12] SS: I mean, that’s a really complex task that you feel that agents would be able to do.

[00:34:17] CR: Yeah, particularly when they have access to your bank accounts, your emails, your calendar. They know all about, you know, your Xero, when it’s integrated into Xero, you know, all that kind of stuff. So the other thing that happened, Steve, this week is that OpenAI released what they call Advanced Voice Mode for nearly all Plus subscribers. This has been coming for months.

[00:34:47] CR: People have been complaining endlessly that they hadn’t launched it as fast as they suggested they were going to months and months ago. I think they’re still yet to roll it out to the EU for some unknown reason. But, uh, there’s a whole bunch of new voices. Now the voices have supposedly got a lot more capability of expression and personality in them.

[00:35:11] CR: People have been doing all sorts of demos of getting them to sing or to whisper or to do accents, but I just tried and I can’t get my, uh, ChatGPT to do any of those things successfully. So. I don’t know if I don’t have that new functionality, if it hasn’t rolled out into this geography yet and we’re just getting the stock standard voices.

[00:35:34] CR: So Kim in the editing booth here, folks, um, I did play around with chat GBT on my desktop. When we were recording this and tried to get it to do the advanced voice mode stuff. And there was really no difference between it and the normal voice mode, except there were new voices. However. After we finished the show, I jumped onto my iPhone version and oh yeah, it worked. It was far more expressive and I could interrupt it in the middle of it talking. Which is actually kind of useful.

[00:36:10] CR: I don’t know if you’ve ever been using the voice mode and then you pause to think about something and it assumes you’re finished and it starts replying. This new version does the same thing, but you can just stop it and say, hold on, I wasn’t finished and it will pause and you can finish your conversation. The answers are far quicker than they were before.

[00:36:30] CR: It used to be. You would talk to it, then you’d wait. Five seconds and then it would reply. Now it’s almost instantaneous. And I played around with the usual stuff. I asked him to whisper. Something to me. And it did. Um, my son, Taylor said he tried to get it to do an evil laugh and a did Ivan played around with that? And I like a lot of that stuff is kind of gimmicky right now, but over time, I’m sure that we will find it. Just more human, like to have an AI that has a full range of emotion and expression. So, if you haven’t played around with advanced voice mode on your phone or your iPad yet, uh, Definitely give it a go. I stay away from the desktop version for now. Stick with the, um, uh, the, the phone.

[00:37:20] CR: Uh, versions of it. Uh, have you had a play around with any of the advanced voice stuff?

[00:37:27] SS: I’ve had a play around with the advanced voice stuff, uh, not any of the singing or that, the hacks or tricks. I didn’t notice a huge difference. In the way it interacts, it’s pauses and it’s intonation. Um, because it was launched, I played with it more than I have previously. Normally I would only use it really, uh, to talk to it when I’m on my mobile, but when I’m on my desktop, I would always type.

[00:37:53] SS: But the one thing that I did notice is that when you get conversational with an AI, it creates almost like a collective thinking process. You know how you and I, when we chat on here, we’ll, we’ll propose different ideas that put us on different trajectories. When you’re typing, I think it slows down what you’re doing.

[00:38:13] SS: You become more specific and put more pieces into the puzzle that you want to be considered. But when you’re speaking, that has this live thought process where there’s an interchange. And I actually think it helps you go on different paths just by having that. And also the pauses of the AI, to me, just.

[00:38:34] SS: It says, and I do wonder if it is actually thinking harder and looking at more of the data to give its answer or whether it’s just been designed that way to give it a human feel. I don’t know the answer to that. Uh, but it does, I feel like, put you down on a different trajectory that you otherwise might be on because of the way that thoughts happen when they’re expressed verbally versus written.

[00:38:58] CR: Yeah. I don’t know, but I think you’re right. I, even though I’ve had the basic voice for quite a while now, I tend to I’m going to use typing more than I use voice. I use voice in the car. Sometimes I use it in the kitchen if I’m cooking and I want to ask it something, but I will, I will default to using text more than voice for some reason.

[00:39:23] CR: Now, this advanced voice stuff is supposed to And when they did the demo of it, uh, whenever it was, months and months ago, it was supposed to be much smoother in the conversation, not as many pauses. You could interrupt it in the middle of a conversation just by talking. Uh, it, it had, it was multimodal, so it could see what was going on in the front and back cameras of your phone.

[00:39:51] CR: And you could integrate those into the conversation. I haven’t noticed any of that in this new rollout. Really, all I’ve got is new voices. There’s, uh, nothing really that different that I can tell about how it, uh, is performing. So, I don’t know if they’re doing it in increments. Releasing the voices first and then there’s additional technology and different geographies as they go.

[00:40:20] CR: Maybe it’s just a bandwidth thing, they’re rolling it out slowly and incrementally, I don’t know.

[00:40:26] SS: Yeah, I didn’t notice a huge amount, but it does seem, and I’ve always kind of thought that I’ve always said that language is our killer app. We’ve just got talked about that a lot. And also the ability to speak is just so quick. And I think it’s the required element. Again, we talked about screen and addiction and, uh, earlier on, but that idea that you can talk to something and have an intelligence, uh, for me is really interesting.

[00:40:53] SS: Uh, and I, I think that this speaking thing could potentially be an interesting play for. Apple. And the reason I think it could be interesting for Apple is that the AirPods are such an extraordinary product. And the revenue, I can’t remember what the revenue was, but it was, would, would make it, I think, in a top, just the revenue of Apple AirPods alone would make it a top 20 company in the world.

[00:41:20] SS: Just that. You talk about extraordinary product launches. I can see you’re wearing yours. I wear mine all the time. Imagine if you had an intelligence in your ear. You don’t have to touch anything, talk to anything. You have to. Pull your phone out, uh, even potential for little cameras to be on the side of the earpod, sort of, you know, looking forward, um, pointing it with my hands from my ears for everyone who’s just listening.

[00:41:44] SS: It would be an in an incredible form of AI if Apple could get that right, uh, with the voice and integrate that into the AirPods. That would be An absolute product necessity. Certainly delineate it and differentiate it from all the other white AirPod copycats out on the market for, you know, 20 in a Mars bar.

[00:42:07] SS: Feels like that could, that could be extraordinary.

[00:42:10] CR: yeah. Speaking of Apple, my son Taylor got the new iPhone 16 Pro Max the other day. And, uh, after he’d had it for a few days and he’d travelled with it, he’d gone down to Melbourne to meet Katy Perry. And he came back, I picked him up from the airport. I said, uh, what do you think of your phone? He goes, don’t get it, man.

[00:42:32] CR: It’s like, there’s nothing. His battery life was a bit better. He said, instead of it being a. 30%, it’s at 50%, but, uh, apart from that, he’s not, I’m not impressed with the level, but you know, he got it because he knows Apple intelligence will be rolling out and he wants to have that when they finally start to deploy it.

[00:42:51] CR: But right now he said, it’s just, he’s gone from a 13 He goes, yeah, it’s barely noticeable.

[00:42:58] SS: Oh yeah. Yeah. They’re definitely in their bumper bar era. Uh, 100%. Well, sales of AirPods were 14. 5 billion in revenue in 2022, according to the SEC. I mean, that’s,

[00:43:12] CR: and I live in our Airpods. Our Airpods are working most of the day, you know.

[00:43:19] SS: Yeah, so I, I think that that’s a really interesting potential overlap, uh, whether or not Apple, and I think that they should, because they’ve got every resource in the world, they should be doing whatever they can to make an open AI like Uh, AI Engine, and then if they plug that into both their phones, then I think even in their, uh, earpods, that’s kind of, I think, where we would go, and that would enable us to have everything that we need, you know, without the screen necessarily, I think.

[00:43:50] CR: Yeah. Well, I’m sure those sorts of things will happen. Meanwhile, more OpenAI news. Mira Murari, the Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, who’s been pretty much the face of them from a technological front since Ilya. Well, actually, for the last year since the attempted coup against Sam, just announced yesterday that she’s leaving the company as well.

[00:44:19] CR: So, of the, uh, sort of original team that was there a year ago, um, Sam, Greg, Ilya, and Mira, Now there’s only Sam left and he’s not a technology guy. He’s a marketing, venture capital CEO guy, which I’m not

[00:44:40] SS: I didn’t know, I thought it was a, I thought it was a developer as well. Like

[00:44:44] CR: No, Sam is not a developer.

[00:44:47] SS: like Jobsy, ask the average man on the street and they, they think, they think that Elon Musk has got the, the, the Sigweld out, and he’s out just welding up a couple of rockets, and Steve Jobs had the soldering iron just putting a couple of microchips in the back of a smartphone, that’s what people think, ask the person on the street, he’s a genius, he invented everything,

[00:45:06] CR: he is a coder though. He is an engineer and a coder. He’s not

[00:45:10] SS: uh, Elon is.

[00:45:11] CR: Altman. Yeah.

[00:45:12] SS: yeah, Steve Jobs wasn’t, but I just always loved that Bill Burr when he said Steve Jobs genius, he told other people what to invent.

[00:45:21] CR: That is the genius though. Yeah. That guy, you want to, have a look at what Apple did in the 10 years Steve wasn’t running the

[00:45:31] SS: know. No, he definitely did great

[00:45:33] CR: it did before and after.

[00:45:35] SS: Yeah,

[00:45:36] CR: You can’t, you can’t

[00:45:37] SS: no, no. They’re cool. Well, I’m not dizzying him. I’m just trying to, I’m just trying to, I’m just, I didn’t know that Sam was a marketing business guy. I actually thought he was a developer, but anyway, that’s okay. You learn something every day, don’t you?

[00:45:49] SS: Can

[00:45:50] CR: Sam’s just an entrepreneur. And, and, but look, again, I’m not taking anything away from that. You know, the suggestion seems to be that, I mean, Ilya obviously left because of the political situation, but he’s since announced his own startup. Probably Myra is going to like, she must be getting, You know, unlimited amounts of money thrown at her to go and do something.

[00:46:14] CR: So it’s going to be interesting. It is this Cambrian explosion already happening in the AI space. Now we’re going to have the startups and even we already have that within Anthropic. And Anthropic is run by the people that put out Claude, is run by ex OpenAI people. And then the ex OpenAI people are all ex Google DeepMind people in a lot of cases.

[00:46:35] CR: So Google spawned OpenAI, OpenAI spawned Anthropic, and now you’ll have people leaving from there to go and do stuff as there’s just unlimited money.

[00:46:43] SS: was it, was it the Fairchild 8? Was that what they were called?

[00:46:47] CR: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. That started the entire Silicon Valley

[00:46:52] SS: so Silicon Valley emerged out of Fairchild, was it Fairchild Semiconductor? Which was one of the first microchip plants, which just so happened to be in a particular area near some orange groves, uh, a valley, uh, in California.

[00:47:06] SS: Uh, which then spawned, uh, Intel, and a whole lot of other technology firms, and Hewlett Packard, and all of these guys emerged out of that.

[00:47:17] CR: the, the traitorous eight. We’re the guys that left Shockley Semiconductor in 1957 and founded Fairchild Semiconductor,

[00:47:30] SS: Right.

[00:47:31] CR: right?

[00:47:32] SS: then there was those that left Fairchild and founded Intel. And it is really interesting. And this hearkens back to one of the things that I say to people, I say, how do you get such a good view of the future? And, and, and, and I know that you do the same Cam, you more than anyone, is to be a student of history while the technology changes, the patterns don’t.

[00:47:54] SS: Because humans haven’t had a software upgrade in 200, 000 years. Although, it looks like we’re about to have one with some BMIs coming in real soon. So we’re about to have our first upgrade when we merge with the machines, according to Kurzweil. So

[00:48:07] CR: Mm.

[00:48:08] SS: Uh, yeah, but it is interesting that we’re seeing this same pattern again with the AI Cambrian explosion.

[00:48:13] SS: And we saw that, I think, we definitely saw that with the semiconductor explosion. And we also saw that with, um, a lot of the big tech companies as well, where they all spawned out in the early 2000s and a lot of startups have since come from there.

[00:48:29] CR: Do you remember FLIR, by the way? F L A I R? FLIR

[00:48:34] SS: No, I don’t. You better tell me.

[00:48:36] CR: was the Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research started in 1980 at Fairchild.

[00:48:46] SS: Wow. That’s

[00:48:48] CR: And you could probably draw a line from Fairchild to OpenAI, right?

[00:48:54] CR: so, uh, anyway, expect to see more announcements in the not too distant future from what, from Mira Murati about what she’s doing. Um, of course, the other big news that’s just happened in the last 24 hours as well, coincidentally, when she announced she was leaving, is that OpenAI, uh, really, really, really, really According to rumours, are removing their non profit control and giving Sam Altman, Altman equity.

[00:49:20] CR: Don’t know if there’s any connection between those two stories, but what we all knew was gonna happen at some point.

[00:49:26] SS: feel like there, there, there, there could be a connection there. One of the things that clearly has happened, OpenAI obviously started, uh, it was meant to be open artificial intelligence for all non profit, and then it just became incredibly profit centric. Uh, When there’s a lot of money involved, it’s very, very hard for something to remain non profit.

[00:49:46] SS: It’s a miracle that Wikipedia has remained, um, as is still, I think, a pretty important, uh, website. It’s the only one that I can really think of. Uh, but that non profit thing was inevitable. When you have that much venture money chasing it, remember, uh, venture capitalists only ever get married with divorce in mind and, and, you know, the prenup is big and the numbers are big when they make that split.

[00:50:09] SS: And I’ll tell you what, a non profit just, just does not Fit that at all.

[00:50:15] CR: Yeah. And you know, you’re right. You really got to give Jimmy Wales credit for what he’s done. The establishment of Wikipedia and how he’s maintained that. I know a lot of people, including Jason Calacanis, have been telling him for years that he should take advertising. He should take money and should do this and that.

[00:50:33] CR: I think Calacanis tried to set up his own competitor to Wikileaks, uh, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, 10 years ago or so, which didn’t get very far. But, uh, Jimmy Wales set up a good board of trustees that have maintained the

[00:50:48] SS: rare. I can’t think of any kind of commercial media format that is as powerful. And I think it’s still a top 10 website in the world as powerful. And there’s no doubt that if it was commercial, it would have been poisoned. No doubt.

[00:51:05] CR: And you got to wonder how long it has left now that, uh, you know, AI is where people are going to go to get their questions answered. Um,

[00:51:14] SS: good point. I find now just in hindsight that you’ve mentioned that, that now a lot of things that I would go to Wikipedia for I now go to ChatGPT for, because that’s actually what you’re after, is a truncated answer to a particular topic, which it can give you, but you can also guide which parts of that you want and how long you want it to be in the format.

[00:51:33] SS: Whereas Wikipedia is in a fixed format, let’s say, um, I guess you could take Wikipedia pages and summarize it. Uh, but that’s actually, I’d be interested to see if Wikipedia’s traffic has declined since then.

[00:51:50] CR: Yeah. But you know, you could also, uh, try perplexity if you haven’t. Are you using perplexity as

[00:51:57] SS: I have used it. I have used it, but not

[00:52:01] CR: I go to. I go to Perplexity if it’s something that I would Google because its answers are much more truncated than OpenAI’s, GHRGPT’s, but it, um, standard provides you with sources and links is how it’s been designed.

[00:52:18] CR: So you can ask ChatGPT for sources, but it won’t always provide them straight up. Perplexity provides it straight up every time. So you can go and check the validity of the information. Uh, Steve, moving right along. Do you want to talk about Instagram kids?

[00:52:35] SS: Yeah, look, we opened up on the idea that around the world, America and Australia are moving pretty rapidly to get some form of legislation. I just think it’s kind of disgraceful that Instagram kids Miracle. It gets launched on the eve of legislation. And what it says to me is that we have a very nefarious corporation that understands the dangers of exposing kids and teenagers to a product.

[00:53:09] SS: And at the 11th hour, they’ve. Buy Miracle started to put it in some of the features that we’ve been asking for a long time. It feels like a corporation getting on the front foot to further delay and obfuscate potential legislation when they know that they have a potentially very damaging product. Um, you know, some of the features that go into Instagram Kids.

[00:53:29] SS: Under 18’s web account set to private by default. Wow, what a miracle. And 16’s only allowed to say, change the permission, uh, change the setting with parental permission. Teens only able to receive messages. From people they’re already connected with, as opposed to all the sexual predators and, uh, scammers that they’re getting to now.

[00:53:49] SS: Content restrictions, blocking of offensive words and messages. To the maximum set possible. Notifications turned off between 10 PM and 7 AM because yeah, we know it’s bad for kids while they should be sleeping. A reminder to leave 60, uh, to leave Instagram after 60 minutes of use each day. Ironic we’ve, uh, given my boy a 60 minute screen time of all screens limit, uh, to 60 minutes while he’s trying to get better.

[00:54:15] SS: Uh, I mean, for me, this really tells us that we’ve had a flaccid set of legislators Who really should have acted a lot quicker and a very deceptive set of corporations, which are driven by what corporations are always driven by, which is to maximize profit and to obfuscate the difference between something that’s possible and profitable.

[00:54:40] SS: And, and if anything, it shouldn’t make us far more suspicious that it is even worse. than what we think, based on the fact that they’ve flicked a switch and put these forward. And anyone who went out there and clapped Meta Corporation for doing this, really need to have a good hard look at themselves.

[00:54:58] CR: But you can trust Zuck now, Steve. He’s got his, he’s grown his hair out

[00:55:03] SS: Well, listen, I think the fact that he’s, he’s got, he’s got the chain, the gold chain of the curly hair and, and you know, he’s a surfer, apparently he’s a cool surfer. And look, we just

[00:55:16] CR: between a surfer and a rapper.

[00:55:18] SS: And a wrapper, and then we just put Jensen

[00:55:20] CR: And there’s nobody we trust more right now than hip hop stars. I think if

[00:55:27] SS: They’re right up

[00:55:28] CR: us anything,

[00:55:29] SS: can we just, can we just divert to a little bit of P. Diddy? Look, P. Diddy wasn’t really on my radar, but it sounds like he’s really done some iniquitous work there. I mean, what’s going on here?

[00:55:44] CR: uh, yeah, let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Anywho, yeah, Instagram kids, like you’re right, these tech companies, um, A, can’t be trusted, B, are going to try and find ways to manipulate governments and, um, To, you know, get around any legislative changes that are made. Um, that’s what we expect corporations to do, right?

[00:56:10] CR: Is to try and manipulate things to their advantage, to enable them to keep. generating profits. And, uh, yeah, but again, I think it’s the primary responsibility in this area is and should be on parents to be the first line of defense for their kids. Uh, but then if parents aren’t doing the job, then, uh, I, I do think governments have a responsibility to protect, uh, the people

[00:56:42] SS: look, you’re right about the parents. You’re right about that. Parents, what is that social phenomenon where if someone’s being injured, people all stand around and no one does anything about it? It’s got, there’s a certain psychological phenomenon that has a name for it. I can’t remember what that is.

[00:56:58] SS: You can think of it while I explain why I think this is really important that legislators

[00:57:02] CR: Samaritan, you’re talking about the Samaritan legislation, Good Samaritan?

[00:57:07] SS: No, I’m not talking about good Samaritan legislation. I’m talking about the idea that when someone’s getting injured or something and no one acts and everyone just stands around and watches it, even though they know that they should be doing something, there’s

[00:57:19] CR: That was it.

[00:57:20] SS: for it,

[00:57:21] CR: That’s what the Seinfeld episode was based on, the Samaritan laws that were introduced. Yeah, if you stand by and watch someone get hurt, and you’re not a Good Samaritan, you don’t step in and help them, it’s based

[00:57:33] SS: But there’s a psychological phenomenon where there’s a number, a large number of people not helping. Uh, you can go to ChatGPT and ask that while I explain why this is important. So, so,

[00:57:45] CR: can ask ChatGPT, hold on, let’s ask ChatGPT. live

[00:57:50] CR: What’s the phenomenon called where a lot of people will stand around and watch somebody getting hurt and do nothing about it? Um, the phenomenon you’re describing is called the bystander effect. It happens when individuals are less likely to help someone in need when there are others around.

[00:58:07] SS: I thought it had a far more fancy name like that, like the Dunning Kruger or something, you know, where two psychologists named it after themselves, which if I ever invent anything, I’m going to call it the Sammartino. Although we’ve already got one. We’ve already got the Sammartino

[00:58:19] CR: Yeah, I coined that on your behalf. Yeah.

[00:58:22] SS: So look, I think what happens is you get this, um, bystander effect where it’s a real challenge socially. And Scott Galloway has said some really important things on this. He, I think is really courageous. Again, I don’t agree with everything he says, but on this one he said there’s a challenge because if anyone is on these social forums, the deep desire for connection for other teenagers to be on it and not be the one left out has this collective bias where it becomes increasingly difficult for parents to isolate their children because some are on it.

[00:58:55] SS: If you make it a law that none of them are on it, it makes it easier for the parents to implement that because they can use the law as a way to Show that this isn’t just us. This is what society agrees upon. These are the values of society, and there’s reasons behind this, as it is with alcohol, as it is with cars.

[00:59:15] SS: And I think all of the research shows that a large majority of parents wish their children weren’t on social media up to the age of 18. And this is where the law becomes our proxy to enable us to collectively implement something which is difficult because if you even get 10 or 20 percent of the cool kids or whoever on it, others feel isolated and left off and you get this social paradigm where they all go down into it.

[00:59:38] SS: So I think that this is where legislation is important because it’s not the government handing down a bunch of Uh, laws which reduce free speech or our ability to connect. This is what the government should do, which is implement against the collective value systems that we have so that we can have a more civilized society.

[00:59:57] SS: Rather than them deciding That they want that for their benefit. We, we collectively, and the research shows it, don’t want our kids exposed to this. The help of a government implementing laws that we would want would make it easier for us to develop a society that benefits our kids by reducing their exposure to a negative tech.

[01:00:16] SS: That’s my thought.

[01:00:18] CR: Yeah, but the, the, the, I agree. The challenge though, and um, I talked about this in the Psychopath book is we don’t have, let’s take Australia as an example, we don’t have a commonly agreed upon set of values. We don’t have a ministry of ethics or a ministry of values.

[01:00:39] SS: No, you never do. And it’s always a moving, it’s always a moving beast as well. Values

[01:00:44] CR: how do we know what the common values are of a society at any given point in time?

[01:00:49] SS: Well, this is what research is for, right? The way that we know is that we do, we conduct robust research where we can assign an entire population to this. And those research methods have been long established for over a hundred years where we can understand what the large majority feel and we need to govern to the majority.

[01:01:11] SS: I mean, that, that’s not particularly hard. Now, values as a term is difficult because you and I might agree on some things and not others, but on a particular singular issue that we can isolate like this, exposure to social media, it’s actually not that difficult. The only difficult thing I think in this legislation is what is social media?

[01:01:32] SS: The definition of that, I think is probably the most difficult thing. And I would take YouTube as the example. Is YouTube social media? I mean, that, that, that’s an, that’s an interesting question. There is social media is something where you can publish. Maybe if you can’t publish, if you can publish, then it is social media.

[01:01:50] SS: I mean, that, that’s actually the hardest part of this equation. It’s determining what it is.

[01:01:55] CR: You know, I would love to take it up a level and say that we need a Department of Ethics, and then it should be responsible for looking at Murdoch Media. Uh, you know, I mean, we already have Some bodies that are supposedly there to restrain media companies from stirring up the shit or doing falsehoods, but, uh, it’s not very effective.

[01:02:20] CR: I mean, there is, again, there’s a line between censorship. and holding media organizations, be they traditional one to many media or social media, to certain values and standards that we as a society believe are important to uphold. Not that it’s the government just implementing things because the people in government think that this is good or this is not good.

[01:02:47] CR: That we as a society, the majority of a society believe that in order to live together, there are always going to be people that are bitching on the sidelines about who want ultimate freedom of speech and ultimate freedom of behaviour. But as we were saying during the COVID times, I don’t have the freedom to walk up to your table at a restaurant, drop my pants and take a dump on your meal.

[01:03:10] CR: So are. Restrictions. If we’re all going to get along and live together in a society, there have to be some certain standards that we all agree to. And it’s the same when it comes to freedom of speech as it does in freedom of behaviour. You can’t do 150 kilometres an hour down past a school. I mean, for good reason.

[01:03:33] CR: And I think the same applies to what we allow publishing and what we should allow with social media. So anyway. Instagram for kids. What’s next, Steve? I wanted to talk about one other, I know it’s all open AI today, but Sam Altman published a piece on his blog a couple of days ago. It’s called The Intelligence Age.

[01:03:54] CR: I’m just going to quickly flick through it for people and then you and I can discuss. He says, In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time.

[01:04:12] CR: We can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible. I like to tell the story that my, my mother grew up in a house with no electricity until I think she was four years old when they got electricity. Now she has AI on her mobile phone. Like it’s an incredible change in 75 years.

[01:04:34] CR: This phenomenon, oh no, we are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us. In an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents and the generations that came before them built and achieved great things.

[01:04:55] CR: They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out. on our own. The story of progress will continue and our children will be able to do things we can’t.

[01:05:16] CR: Um, and then later on he says, how did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words, deep learning worked. And this, I think, is the crux. In 15 words, deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it. That’s really it. Humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data, or, really, the underlying rules that produce any distribution of data, to a shocking degree of precision.

[01:05:53] CR: The more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is. There are lots of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge.

[01:06:14] CR: Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world. You know, it reminds me of conversations I was having with my friend Dennis Bastas.

[01:06:37] CR: 20, 25 years ago, Dennis is now billionaire owner of one of Australia’s largest pharmaceutical companies. But back then he was the CEO of a startup and we used to hang out a lot together in Melbourne. We used to talk about consciousness and, and, and, uh, artificial intelligence and how we thought it would play out.

[01:07:00] CR: And we, we agreed back then that. Consciousness and intelligence were probably just very, very high levels of computation in that any sufficiently advanced system of computation would exhibit something that looked like consciousness and or intelligence and it would be increasingly difficult to discern between what is really conscious and what is not, what is really intelligent and what is not.

[01:07:30] CR: Sam is basically saying that deep learning. works. Throw enough compute and enough data at a system and it becomes intelligent.

[01:07:40] SS: It’s funny. It’s kind of, when you describe it that way, this is where my mind went. Not to say that this is right, but it’s almost like consciousness is the space between thoughts. Just a general awareness of being like you have like a bunch of thoughts and then you kind of there, I’m here, I can think of, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, but I have this general awareness and it’s kind of almost, yeah, it’s almost this, it’s almost a bit ironic that We were talking about some of the recent evolutions in the large language models, obviously open AI and chat JBT of those thoughts and deep thought and thinking between spaces, it’s like it’s progressing towards that.

[01:08:20] SS: The way that you described it then kind of reminds you of the, the human neural network and how it has this idea of consciousness and it, I often think. About a lot when I’m gardening, Cameron, about a worm, I’ll dig up a worm. I’m like, does this worm know that it’s here? Like, does it, where does consciousness kick in, in terms of creatures, whether it’s plants or grass or worms or bees or birds or other mammals?

[01:08:46] SS: When do they, you know, what level does it kick in?

[01:08:52] SS: Because we already have computation, which far exceeds many organic species in their computations per second and the size of their neural networks in their brains versus what we have now in large language models.

[01:09:04] CR: Yeah. I mean, my thinking on this back then was led by Marvin Minsky’s book, The Society of Mind, which I read At some point in the 90s, um, Marvin Minsky, for people who don’t know, was one of the guys who was at the beginning of artificial intelligence research and cognitive science. Um, he was, um, at MIT, co founded MIT’s AI Laboratory.

[01:09:36] CR: You know, he was, uh, one of Kurzweil’s, um, Uh, teachers and mentors, uh, K. Eric Drexler, who wrote the first book on nanotechnology, came out of Minsky’s lab. Um, Danny Hillis and the, uh, you know, what’s his clock, the immortal clock or whatever it is that he set up. A lot of the greatest, uh, current thinkers around AI and cognitive science, um, came out of, Marvin Minsky’s lab.

[01:10:05] CR: And in his book, Society of Mind, he basically just talked about how he believed that the concept of self was just a society, it was a society of thoughts. Basically, the brain is just a whole bunch of single unit processes happening, billions of single unit processes that somehow become aware of each other.

[01:10:29] CR: And it’s what he calls the interaction between those. Agents is what he referred to them as, was what we call mind. It was a society of. agents, billions of agents operating in conjunction, which became a society like millions of people living together, doing their own thing, become a society. There’s like a, a meta level of behaviour that emerges, emergent behaviour that comes out of enough people doing their own thing that exhibits a behaviour of a society that the brain, the mind is really no different.

[01:11:05] CR: So, you know, these ideas have gone right back to. You know, at least his book in the 80s that he, you know, 86, he came out with Society of Mind, one of the foundational books on artificial intelligence. So anyway, I thought it was really interesting and, you know, I remember I was talking about this a long time ago that, um, in an early interview that I saw that, um, Jensen Huang at NVIDIA did with Ilya Sutskever.

[01:11:30] CR: Um, he said what was the most surprising thing about ChatGPT to Ilya and he said it was that it worked. Like, we had this idea that if you threw enough data and enough compute at a large language model that it would, that it might show intelligence and it did. You know, that was, that was still surprising to him, um, a year and a half ago.

[01:11:53] SS: Yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, again, in Kurzweil’s book, which I’m savouring the words, almost don’t want to read it because I’m enjoying it so much because once I’ve read it, it’ll be read. The singularity is near. I just love the idea that he talks about the connectionist versus symbolic AIs. And that, that was the first type of AI they developed in 52, but they just didn’t have the computation to make it possible, but they, they thought that it would be the right approach because it had a sense of biomimicry about it, which is just, if you have enough, enough, uh, computation and enough input, which is really all there is, it’s computation and input, that’s all really there is, input out, it’s like something to mix it up and, and, and the data inputs really.

[01:12:34] CR: but he talks about, um, how this, like what became the LLM model, which is where there is no hard architecture between symbols and concepts that you just feed data. No, everyone thought that was, uh, the wrong approach and wouldn’t work. And, and so for 30, 30 years, We just gave up on that.

[01:12:55] SS: yeah, for a really long time. I mean, the simple example is, uh, words that have the exact same sound and spelling, but two different meanings, like boot and boot. If you feed it enough information, boot, car boot, put it in the boot, um, the boot was full, it’ll eventually work out that that boot in the right context is to do with cars versus it’s climbing up a mountain with the boot, you’re chewy on your boot, all that, and it can work it out just by the words that are near it.

[01:13:23] SS: Yeah,

[01:13:24] CR: Yeah, so, like, but those three words I think are incredibly profound. As Sam said in the article, deep learning worked. Like that’s, it’s like one of the pivotal statements. It will be one of the pivotal turning points, tipping points of not just human society and human history, but the history of intelligence on this planet.

[01:13:54] CR: And potentially. In the entire universe, because we don’t know how much intelligence there is in the universe, we can’t assume that there’s anything outside of this.

[01:14:04] SS: Wow.

[01:14:04] CR: Deep learning worked. To me, like, that is as, it’s going to be as profound a discovery as the taming of fire. Or The Wheel, or Electricity, or General Relativity, or Quantum Mechanics.

[01:14:24] CR: It is one of the most prof and it’s just slid by and I don’t think, most, I mean, most people still don’t know how electricity

[01:14:32] SS: I too, I too am absolutely astounded by the capability and I think that anyone who isn’t maybe hasn’t really played with it enough. Really?

[01:14:42] CR: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyone who’s dismissive. I had lunch, one of my listeners from Boston, shout out to Doug if he’s listening, was

[01:14:50] SS: Aggie boy!

[01:14:52] CR: He was here in Brisbane a couple of weeks ago. I had lunch with him and he, he runs a biotechnology company, which is really interesting and we should get him on to talk about the work that they’re doing in solving

[01:15:02] SS: that’d be cool.

[01:15:04] CR: But I asked him about how much they’re using AI and he was still kind of dismissive about AI and I said, have you played around with it much? He goes, no, not really. And I was like, man, I pulled out my phone and did my usual parlour trick, which is like, let’s ask him a question about, Oncology or biotechnology or cancer research and have it have a voice conversation.

[01:15:24] CR: This is a few weeks ago before advanced voice came in. Uh, I just think I said, have you played with the voice? He goes, no. And I was like, seriously,

[01:15:33] SS: Get

[01:15:33] CR: just have a listen to this. Talk to you, man. Like anyway. Yeah. People who aren’t blown away either haven’t played with it or don’t understand it. But as I keep saying to people, the most profound thing is didn’t know this would work.

[01:15:51] CR: We just had a, we, I mean, the people who developed it

[01:15:55] SS: Well, I mean, when you and I were developing the LLMs back in 2007, we couldn’t believe what we stumbled upon. Could we,

[01:16:02] CR: Using the, the broad we of humans,

[01:16:05] SS: way. Look, I’m part of the human species. I’m one of the developers. If humanity is the

[01:16:10] CR: we. Yeah. Well, yeah. All right. Let’s move on. Let’s move on. Technology Time Warp, Steve, what have you got for us

[01:16:18] SS: I just wanted to put in a titbit. Every now and again, I’ll just say today in technology, and I did find out that the first ever personal computer was launched in 1973 today, and it was the Microcomputer Machines of Canada, the MCM 70, which had the first 8008 processor in it, but it failed, and I just, no one really knows about the Microcomputer Machines of Canada Corporation.

[01:16:45] SS: Big companies, Chevron, Mutual Life Assurance, NASA, And the US Army were its first customers and it was launched at a, uh, programmers, microcomputers, programmers conference in Toronto in 1973. So interesting how often it’s kind of 10 years before it gets in the zeitgeist and a, and a product then becomes available to general users, late seventies, early eighties.

[01:17:13] SS: I just thought that was an interesting little titbit as a technology time warp.

[01:17:18] CR: The company, Microcomputer Machines, was founded by Canadian inventor, Merz Kutt. Merzlau Kutt, born 1933, still alive.

[01:17:30] SS: Oh,

[01:17:32] CR: Former professor of mathematics at Queen’s University. Um, worked at Phillips, IBM, and Honeywell. Wow. There was a professor of mathematics at Queen’s during the 1960s, served as president of the Canadian Information Processing Society, was the director of the university’s computing center, and then in 1968 he was interacting with punched card based input systems and thought Maybe there’s an idea to put a keyboard on one of these things,

[01:18:10] SS: it’s one of the crazy things about. All of the early computers, none of them had screens, and most of them just had tapes. And that’s, that’s the interesting thing, you would do little printouts of what you get, a little punch card analysis. Uh, which is an interesting idea, a screen, and then from a screen to a voice.

[01:18:31] SS: I mean, it actually is really interesting on how things have this anthropological Natural flow. First, it’s something physical, whether it’s a cave wall drawing or whether it’s a printout or a punch card, then it’s a screen, then it’s a voice. It’s really interesting in the way that that flows. And it almost shows that in the first instance, it’s hands, hands driven, it’s typing, punch cards, physicality, and then it’s screen, it’s visual, it’s eyes.

[01:18:58] SS: And our eyes are working before our language developed. And then it’s language. And there’s almost this anthropological pattern that technological develops have followed and they’ve done it with AI again. Now we’re at voice. Actually, that’s ironic. I didn’t plan this. It sounds like, sounds like I planned that, that this technology time warp, that it would fit into all the other things, but I didn’t, it just turned out that way, just like large language models.

[01:19:23] SS: I can’t believe it actually worked.

[01:19:26] CR: And now we have vision, like visual inputs into the AI as well. Um, not just a screen as an output, but you can, you know, I, I mean, I do this increasingly with chat. PT is take a screenshot of whatever it is I’m working on a report or a spreadsheet or an error message and just drop it in and say, what do you make of this, you know, screenshots.

[01:19:50] CR: We can’t do live video input yet, but that’s what we’ll have. Oh, you do it with

[01:19:54] SS: my scrappy notes. I’m writing a piece on dead internet theory and you would be astounded at the accuracy that it can decipher my scribbles, which I don’t think a lot of humans would be able to make sense of what that word is. And I, and I’m guessing that the reason that it can do that is that it looks at the words around it and guesses what the word should be, even if it’s not spelled right.

[01:20:18] CR: He just gave me a great idea. I’m going to scan all my old paper diaries

[01:20:23] SS: I do that. I do it all the time.

[01:20:26] CR: and say,

[01:20:26] SS: when I’m doing a briefing, when I’m doing a briefing with the client on the phone for an event or some consulting work, I’ll write it all down verbally. I take a, I take a photo of it, dump it into ChatGPT, turn it into a Word doc, bam, I’ve got it all done, and then I’ll file it.

[01:20:42] CR: Wow. Good thinking. Just gave me another project to waste my weekend on. Uh, by the way, that Uh, computer. We talked about the M cm 70 based of course on Intel’s 8,008 or 80 0 8 processor, one of the earliest eight bit microprocessors, which had 16 kilobytes of memory

[01:21:07] SS: it was.

[01:21:08] CR: introduced in April, 1972.

[01:21:13] SS: And my first computer was the 16K RAM Terus 80, which had the same microchip in it, which was way back in about 1981. So, The recursion then was a lot slower, wasn’t it? I mean, you were still selling the older, slower ones for quite a long period of time, whereas now I imagine, you know, things don’t even last 12 months before they’re off the shelf.

[01:21:33] SS: Uh, but that, that was interesting.

[01:21:37] CR: just the leap from the 8008 through to what Apple are putting in their iPhone 16s, the processing power and the chips, all through to the NVIDIA, the NVIDIA chips that are running AI now, like that is just, it’s just a mind boggling demonstration of Moore’s Law. I was talking to my mum about AI the other night, I was explaining Moore’s Law.

[01:22:04] CR: And how over the last 20 years, I, there’s been so many people saying, Oh, Moore’s Law is coming to an end. We can’t get the gates down small enough now for an electron to pass through them. And then everyone’s like, no, well, now we just put them together. You know, what NVIDIA is doing where they’re just slamming these things together.

[01:22:23] CR: Uh, Moore’s Law has not, uh, died. It continues to speed up our ability

[01:22:28] SS: Yeah. I mean, I always liked Kurzweil’s and I think he did it in How to Build a Mind, where he talked about Moore’s law being, or the transistor being the fourth iteration of what is truncated ways of transmitting information, where he starts with punch cards and then he goes from punch cards to vacuum tubes, vacuum tubes to, um, microprocessors, microprocessors to transistors, and that, you know, Eventually you’ll invent a new technology or a new way to weave information together to hold and process more information.

[01:22:58] SS: It’s not people confuse Moore’s law with the overriding idea of the law of accelerating returns where technology finds a way to fit more information into less. Um, you could probably go all the way back to cave wall drawings, you know, bits of

[01:23:12] CR: Yeah.

[01:23:13] SS: right?

[01:23:14] CR: think Kurzweil does, right? I think he goes back that far. Yeah. All right. Uh, well, how are we doing for time? An hour and a half, Steve. Geez. And we’re not

[01:23:25] SS: Jeez. Well, what happens when you have

[01:23:27] CR: a line under it.

[01:23:29] SS: we tidy this up,

[01:23:32] CR: Yeah. Like, um, I think we’ve, we’ve talked about social media gating anyway. I think that’s pretty much it.

[01:23:39] CR: Um, yeah. Big couple of weeks. Let’s see how long it is before we do another one of these, Steve. But, uh, good to chat and

[01:23:48] SS: Oh, so enjoyable. Look, just, just, you know, exploring things with you, uh, and hopefully, yeah, and hopefully Lewis has enjoyed some of the explorations we went on, but so good. Mate, appreciate the chat.

[01:24:03] CR: Yeah. Thanks for taking time, man. And, uh, anyone out there, you got any ideas you’d like to, like us to cover in future episodes, uh, let us know, reach out. You know where to find us. Thanks, Steve.

[01:24:15] SS: Thanks, Cam.

In this episode of Futuristic, we chat about balancing screen time with reading physical books, Mistral Large 2, another bloody AI pendant (The Friend), Chinese text to video app Kling, and the use of crypto financing in the U.S. Presidential election. Our guest Martin Murray, helps us understand the potential role of AI and humanoid robots in agriculture. Finally we discuss the role of open-source AI, Mark Zuckerberg’s push against Apple’s closed ecosystem and how this affects industries beyond tech.

00:59 Steve’s Desire to Reduce Screen Time
07:49 Cameron’s levelled up his coding skills
12:19 Mistral Large 2 for Coding
14:59 New AI Pendant “The Friend“
21:48 AI in Agriculture with Martin Murray
52:25 Kling, the Chinese TTV product
01:05:11 Crypto and Political Influence
01:11:26 The Future of Open Source AI
01:19:48 Nanotechnology and Radical Abundance

FUTURISTIC 29

[00:00:00] Cameron: Welcome back to the Futuristic Steve Sammartino, episode 29. You’re looking sharp as always, man. Look at you. You look like a, I don’t know, he’s just stepped out of a venture capital meeting in Silicon

[00:00:20] Steve: Finance, 6, 5, Trust Fund, Blue

[00:00:23] Steve: Eyes.

[00:00:24] Steve: really finance, 5 6. Finance, 5 6, not 6 5. I’m

[00:00:29] Steve: not 5

[00:00:29] Steve: 6, but anyway.

[00:00:31] Cameron: I look like I’ve just come off stage at a Grateful

[00:00:33] Steve: You actually do, you’ve got the, what have you got on there? The

[00:00:37] Steve: bandana.

[00:00:38] Cameron: It’s a beanie, cold enough. One of the few cold enough days in Brisbane to wear a beanie. I’m going to

[00:00:44] Steve: have you got on there? A

[00:00:45] Cameron: I’ve got a

[00:00:46] Cameron: got A

[00:00:46] Cameron: bit of,

[00:00:46] Steve: lovely 23 degrees or

[00:00:48] Steve: something.

[00:00:48] Cameron: yeah, that’s

[00:00:49] Steve: is real.

[00:00:50] Cameron: I got a, I got

[00:00:50] Cameron: a, got an annoying cough. So I’m going to have to keep muting my mic to cough. Hold

[00:00:54] Cameron: on. Yeah. All right. Uh, Steve, uh, tell me one. thing of note you’ve done that’s futuristic y since we last spoke.

[00:01:03] Steve: Futuristic y. Is, I’m trying to balance my screen usage. I’ve never really looked at how long, I’ve spin on the screen because it was always justifiably, well, it’s work for me. And to be fair, I don’t really spend a lot of time doing things on the screen that aren’t work. Uh, but I looked, and it’s an average of 5 hours and 46 minutes a day on my phone.

[00:01:27] Steve: It’s an average of 92 pickups. And so, I went out and bought a few books. This week I asked you for a couple of recommendations and I have some on the way and every time I go to pick up my phone when it’s not an absolute necessity to do a task on it for work, I’m going to instead pick up the book. Uh, because I actually think that there’s a really big difference between knowing about, hearing about something and knowing about it.

[00:01:58] Steve: And I think we hear about a lot of things and the screen lets you hear about a lot of things. I don’t think Enables deep understanding, like reading a book and really going deep into it, into a topic.

[00:02:13] Cameron: Well, one of the things I was going to add to our talking list, but I ran out of, well, we had too many things already, but I was started watching a video last night, uh, an interview with Dwarkesh Patel, who does a lot of AI videos on YouTube, but he was being interviewed on another YouTube channel. And he was talking about how he thinks you don’t learn very well from books.

[00:02:35] Cameron: And I think we talked about this in an earlier episode, and he’s come up, he said, like, when I interview people that are experts in a topic, I need to, you know, get smart on that topic really quickly, and often they’re topics I don’t know a lot about. Said he had a geneticist on his show recently. So he’s developed this workflow that he puts into Claude, his AI tool of choice at the moment, that creates, um, uh, spaced repetition.

[00:03:03] Cameron: And he said he can upload an EPUB. of somebody’s book into Claude and say, tell me what the key points are that I should know before I interview this person and then test me on those. Um, you know, give me questions and answers and test me on it to test my basic knowledge. And he’s developing a system, which I haven’t fully finished the video to integrate it yet, but I think, you know, we’re moving into an era where Books are going to be a component of how we learn, but there’ll be an AI layer wrapped around that, that will create a, um, educational context.

[00:03:42] Cameron: What do you call it when somebody’s an educator? You call it, uh, uh, there’s a word for it that’s escaping my memory. Hold on, I should ask GPT. Um, what, what, what’s, what do you call a system of education that, uh, leads you through the learning process?

[00:04:02] Cameron: Scaffold.

[00:04:04] Cameron: Or pedagogee was the word I was trying to think of..

[00:04:07] Cameron: He’s talking about it’s a scaffold

[00:04:09] Steve: yeah, and that’s a nice way, and that’s a nice visual of Understanding the elements and almost seeing a matrix design of where you could go to get different types of learning. And just, uh, look, I think that what you’re saying is right. There’s a multitude of ways of learning. I mean, I’ve always been very good at kinesthetic learning, where actually hands on doing, and it’s one thing with startups that I’ve always realized.

[00:04:30] Steve: It’s one thing to read about startups and it’s another one to get out there in the battlefield and try and get people to use your product and, and raise capital and, and, you know, exiting theory. is really important. Uh, and you always learn a little bit more by doing something than actually reading about how to do it.

[00:04:46] Steve: Like you can’t learn how to ride a bike by reading about it. You have to hop on the bicycle. You can probably get some tips. Sure. Uh, the context of what I was saying, and I, it’s probably good that you brought this up because I can clarify. I’m not saying that I want to read more books to learn more. What I’m saying is, of what I’m doing with reading, I want it to be physically on paper.

[00:05:11] Steve: So the context is the reading context. And I actually looked up some research on it because I was curious about it because I have this theory that I get more out of a book and we all know about the distraction side of it. It’s easy to get distracted when you’re on a phone and not stay in the book as deeply because it’s singular versus a phone which has a multitude of uses.

[00:05:31] Steve: But some of the research suggests that the subconscious impact on the light and tiring out your brain and the way that the words are absorbed is very, very different to ink on paper. And another one which blew my mind, I never thought of that, is that the pixels that are on a screen, uh, flashing lights really, really quickly.

[00:05:52] Steve: And apparently your brain doesn’t digest the words as well. So there’s some research coming out, uh, in relation to screens not enabling people to digest information as well as books. So there’s that part to it. And there’s also that you go deeper into a book than you do just scanning the news on tech.

[00:06:09] Steve: So I know about a lot of stuff or hear about a lot of stuff, but I want to know more deeply about

[00:06:13] Steve: it. So that’s that’s what I’m really trying to do.

[00:06:18] Cameron: I think you’re probably right. I mean, I think, hey, well, let’s, let’s break that down. Like, um, yeah, reading rather than scrolling. Um, you know, I, I’ve developed the habit over the last few years where if I have some spare time and I’m not working and I’m picking up my phone, it’s usually to do Duolingo, to practice my Italian,

[00:06:39] Steve: is great.

[00:06:40] Cameron: or it’s, or it’s chess.

[00:06:43] Cameron: I’ll be playing a game of chess against somebody on Chess. com and I’ll have to go and make a move. Oh shit, that reminds me. Oh no, I did make a move this morning. And. Or I’ll read. Um, sometimes it’s Reddit, um, but often it’ll be a book that I’m in the middle of. I’ve always got like ten books on the go, so it’ll be one of those.

[00:07:01] Cameron: Um, But for me, and I think you’re probably right in terms of reading paper, but for me, the upside of being able to, I’ve got a shortcut on my iPad that if I copy a, if I copy a block of text in a book and I run this shortcut, it’ll paste it into a running note that I have in Obsidian.

[00:07:19] Steve: got benefits that a book will never

[00:07:20] Steve: have.

[00:07:20] Steve: Absolutely. No doubt. For sure.

[00:07:22] Cameron: I can, I can pull up GPT and

[00:07:24] Cameron: say, what’s this word mean? Who was this person? What’s that I don’t know. So I think there’s, there’s pros and cons, but I, I, I think you’re probably right that ink on paper is

[00:07:33] Steve: Just something about, I just want to extricate myself from the screen somewhat because I just think I’ll get reading done as well because it’ll be more purposeful and less distracting. So there’s, there’s a multitude of reasons, but that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do more

[00:07:46] Steve: of and just pay attention to the physical world.

[00:07:49] Cameron: Well, I’ve, I, you know, I know every

[00:07:51] Cameron: time we do this, I talk about coding because that’s where I spend a lot of my time, but I really felt like I leveled up my coding in the last couple of weeks. There’s a particularly big thorny problem that I’ve been working on and getting nowhere for days and days and days on it.

[00:08:06] Cameron: And then I learned. To, if there’s a particular problem. See the way the AI tools work at the moment, if you’ve got a really big script and it’s doing, it’s doing like 25 functions, but one function’s not working properly, and you tell the ai, I got a, I got a an error code, I’m gonna try to do this. It’s immediate thing will, it’ll rewrite the entire

[00:08:28] Cameron: script and go, okay, run it

[00:08:29] Cameron: again. And so I’ll wait till it finishes and then I’ll run it again and it still won’t work, and I’ll give it the error code and it’ll go, oh, okay. Let’s put some more logging in. And then it’ll give you the whole script again, and you run it again, and you give it the log, uh, the error log. And he goes, Oh, okay.

[00:08:45] Cameron: Let’s put some more logging in. And you get in this loop and it’s really frustrating. So what I learned to do is to isolate the bit that’s not working and say to the AI, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, just stop. Write me a script that, that has three or four ways in it. To solve this problem, like the particular thing that’s not working.

[00:09:07] Cameron: And let me just run those independently. So I’m not running the whole script until, so I isolate, test, figure out the method that actually works, and then integrate that back into the bigger script as a new function. And, um, I did that over the last week or so, and it’s solved a whole bunch of problems.

[00:09:28] Cameron: Just isolate. Test and then combine or integrate it back into the main thread has really,

[00:09:35] Steve: it’s a really good point, Cameron. And I don’t know how the large language models.

[00:09:40] Steve: But it seems to me as though you cannot iterate verbally on the previous finding. And I know that OpenAI is quite guilty of this. I was doing a presentation, uh, getting ready to go to New Zealand early this week, and I had an image that I wanted in 16, or in widescreen format. Is it 4 is it? And I said, this image that you’ve developed, Now go,

[00:10:09] Steve: 16,

[00:10:09] Steve: 3, I’m way off, um,

[00:10:12] Cameron: It’s 3, 4 and 16,

[00:10:13] Steve: there you go, 9, okay. said, develop this image in widescreen format, redo it. It gave me a new one. I’m like, no, no, this image here, exactly the same, widescreen. Can I do it? It actually is. And I’m wondering if what you’ve found as well is it’s very, very poor at verbal iterations, unless you take out the piece of the puzzle and get it to reframe that exact piece and then insert it back in, it always goes back to the well and starts again.

[00:10:42] Steve: And I’ve noticed it can’t do the same thing twice. It’s very, very bad at doing the same, which is interesting and cool. Uh, but if you ask it to recreate an image or create that image again, it won’t do it. It’s always a little bit different. And I think that comes down to the probabilistic nature of it and the way that it works.

[00:10:59] Steve: And it’s really noticeable, especially from an image perspective, and I imagine from a code, based on what you’ve said, and it reruns the code base again, because it goes, oh, you didn’t like that, I’ll just do the whole thing again. I’m hoping that ChatGPT 5 and others come out with a greater iterative ability, and for it to understand what’s required within the iteration of the previous development, and it doesn’t seem to be there.

[00:11:24] Steve: And this goes to show What, what you’ve been doing and what I’ve been doing, and I’ve been saying this on stage so much is getting to work well with the AI is an absolute art form that cannot be understated. And the only way you learn that art form is by experimenting with it and playing with it. And I wonder, If that’s always going to be the case, even if we have extraordinary AIs that are close to the general level, because it, it doesn’t, it’s trying to satisfy your needs and it is not inside your brain.

[00:11:56] Steve: And so that is the complexity that requires the ability to prompt well and to work with it and iterate and, and craft the angles and take pieces of the puzzle out and then reframe those and then put them back into the puzzle. It’s a really interesting insight.

[00:12:10] Cameron: Mistral. Mistral. Large 2.

[00:12:15] Steve: You’re going to have to give me a download on this cam because I didn’t test

[00:12:17] Steve: it.

[00:12:18] Steve: I had a look and read

[00:12:19] Cameron: I’ve been using, I’ve been using Mistral for my coding. For the last couple of weeks, their latest model, Large 2, Mistral’s a French company. Um, I believe made up of former employees of Meta and Google, was founded in April, 2023.

[00:12:41] Cameron: And, um, they, uh, have a open source model. Well, we’re going to talk a little bit of open source on this show, if we have time. Their latest version, um, Large 2, absolutely. Stunning when it comes to coding. I haven’t used it for much else, but it shits all over GPT 4. 0 and 4. 0 when it comes to coding, just gets it right almost every time, understands what I want, nails it, so much less stress, uh, using it for coding and, uh, that in and of itself is great.

[00:13:23] Cameron: So if you, if you haven’t tried it, you can use it for free. If you go to Mistral. ai, M I S T R A L, they have something called Le Chat And le plateforme, le plateforme is the API. Weirdly, I signed up for the API and I haven’t been able to get it to work. Because one of the problems with le chat is, as my thread gets long, which it can often do with coding, it slows right down.

[00:13:52] Cameron: It’s certainly not fast enough. Fast. It gets really slow, like one letter at a time, typing out, like my, my, you know, my dad trying to type something on a keyboard 20 years ago. Um, uh, so I tried to use the API, and I can’t get the API to work for some reason, and their tech support is not, has not been great.

[00:14:12] Cameron: I’ve been asking their tech support for a week to Figure out what’s wrong with my API access. And they’re not really very responsive because they’re French. But the, uh, the, but the LeChat service in and of itself is pretty good. If

[00:14:24] Cameron: you don’t have massively long threads that

[00:14:27] Steve: in the chat. It’s right up So I highly recommend.

[00:14:30] Steve: I said it’s right up there with Ordineter. Which is what they call a computer because they’ve got the French language division which makes sure they don’t have Western words.

[00:14:40] Cameron: Ah,

[00:14:41] Steve: And that’s the computer, is it already

[00:14:43] Cameron: So anyway.

[00:14:43] Cameron: Mistral

[00:14:45] Cameron: 2 is great and if we have time after our guest comes on in six or seven minutes, I want to talk more about open source versus closed source because it’s been a big topic, uh, in videos I’ve been watching this week. Um, The Friend, Steve, another bloody AI pendant, uh, has hit the

[00:15:06] Steve: Yes,

[00:15:07] Cameron: by a 21

[00:15:09] Cameron: year old guy called, uh, Schiffman.

[00:15:13] Cameron: Uh, did you

[00:15:14] Steve: I did, he’s an interesting cat. You know, he, it was interesting. His turn of phrase was interesting. What I did like was that he said productivity’s over in his Wired interview, and I kind of, I do feel as though there’s so many productivity tools, we need productivity tools to handle the productivity tools.

[00:15:32] Steve: It’s like, it’s eating its own tail. And at least he had a point of difference where this. Is to help people have a friend and for loneliness, which is a real problem in the world. I mean, he just forgot to put the word in the name of the product imaginary before friend, which would have been so perfect that I would have loved that.

[00:15:51] Steve: And I think he really should have done it, missed an opportunity.

[00:15:54] Steve: Also really curious that he spent almost half the venture capital on getting the dot com.

[00:16:00] Steve: Uh, he spent 1. 8 million on buying friend. com. Uh, which I thought it was interesting, Look, this is one of those

[00:16:10] Steve: ones that I can see that there could be some utility

[00:16:13] Steve: for

[00:16:13] Steve: it.

[00:16:13] Steve: Definitely. Yep.

[00:16:14] Cameron: So tell people, tell people what

[00:16:16] Steve: So, it, it’s, it’s, interacts with you on your day to day where you can talk to it. It sends you messages which I think appear on your phone where it talks back to you. It might even just make comments without asking saying, hey it’s

[00:16:27] Steve: great to be outside. It’s good that we’re walking around getting some fresh

[00:16:30] Steve: air.

[00:16:31] Cameron: You wear it you Wear neck like a little necklace.

[00:16:34] Cameron: around your

[00:16:35] Steve: Round your necklace and it observes and listens. It’s always on, as is Siri and Google and everything else. It’s always on and it makes comments about your life and talks to you and send you text messages and interacts with you in a way that is kind of like, let’s say an imaginary friend or a little AI friend that comments on your day and has opinions and can summarize, Hey, you know, you had that chat with whatever.

[00:16:59] Steve: Did you follow up and do that email? I don’t, stuff like that. It seems interesting because I don’t think it’s over promising in what it can do or trying to replace a screen which none of them have been able to do. All of them have been technologies in search of a problem where the smartphone usurps their utility.

[00:17:15] Steve: This one, I think, I think it could work. I don’t think it’d be anything ever more than niche, something incredibly niche. I could, I could see it potentially working. Um, just because it’s a little bit more single minded on what it does. Because the smartphone is the ultimate Swiss Army knife that does it all and does it incredibly well.

[00:17:35] Steve: And it’s very, very difficult to see that being supplanted. But I think that the single minded proposition of it, commenting, talking to you, helping lonely people, You know, you can, I feel like it could have some utility. So, look, that said, do I think that having an imaginary AI friend is better than sitting across the table or me chatting with you or picking the phone up?

[00:17:59] Steve: No. But maybe some people don’t have that opportunity or that wherewithal or that confidence or have a base of

[00:18:05] Steve: friends. So that’s kind of my taking on

[00:18:07] Steve: it. Yeah.

[00:18:09] Cameron: And I don’t think it’s an either or. I think in the near future, we will have an AI friend or multiple

[00:18:15] Steve: Yeah, right. Yep.

[00:18:16] Cameron: and as well as real friends, if you’re lucky enough to have real friends. Personally, I don’t like real people that much. I like you. I like Tony. I like Ray. I like my wife.

[00:18:28] Steve: pretty sure, I’m not even sure if you like me. You say that you do, but you’re, you know, you’re

[00:18:33] Steve: an unusual cat, you know that.

[00:18:37] Cameron: There’s a small group of people that I actually like to hang out with. But, getting back, I look, I think, um, trying to sell these sorts of, uh, single purpose AI widgets is probably a path to nowhere. But, I do expect that in the very near future, my watch, or my phone, or my iPad, or all of those, will have an AI, or several AIs, that will be my friend.

[00:19:09] Cameron: We’ll be listening to everything that happens, watching everything that happens, and maybe I’ll have different friends. Maybe I’ll have, I’ll have the friend that lends a sympathetic ear when I’ve had a fight with Chrissy. Maybe I’ll have a friend that’s like, dude, you, you, you really weren’t very productive today.

[00:19:27] Cameron: You know, you know, I’ll have my coach,

[00:19:29] Cameron: you know, The one that tells me that,

[00:19:31] Steve: idea. Your own personal

[00:19:33] Steve: Jim Rohn, straight around the neck.

[00:19:36] Cameron: yeah, yeah. Although the one that’s telling me that, uh, I need to be, I need to spend more time with my kids. I’ve been

[00:19:43] Steve: You’ve only hung out with Ox.

[00:19:44] Cameron: or maybe it’s all wrapped up

[00:19:45] Cameron: into

[00:19:46] Steve: had one hour with Fox today, your average is 2. 3 hours, you’ve let him down.

[00:19:49] Cameron: I was thinking of my older kids, my 23 year olds, but, uh, yeah, they’re always calling me up like. Like, one of them said, I want to take you to Deadpool, the Deadpool film on the weekend. I’m like, uh, I’ll just wait till it comes out on streaming.

[00:20:02] Steve: go out and have some popcorn with your boy, what’s wrong

[00:20:04] Cameron: hang out, hang out with your sons. I was like, oh yeah,

[00:20:07] Cameron: okay, good point, good point. Um, so I do think we’ll have AI, uh, friends that’ll be listening. I don’t think these devices are really going to be where it’s at, but I do think we’re going to have these AI friends, coaches, mentors, guides, uh, counselors that will be there. end up playing a really significant role in their lives. They’re not going to replace people, but they will be on top of that.

[00:20:34] Cameron: It’ll be like having, uh, the smartest person that, you know, just hanging out with you all day. Oh, here’s

[00:20:43] Steve: can also see a B2B context for these being valuable. You can see a context where you might have an AI pin that is hanging around your neck because you’re a Boeing engineer and it’s like, Hey, did you do the X? Don’t forget the Y. And then that way we’ll have less windows pop out of Boeing 737 MAXs and that’s the kind of plan I want to be on.

[00:21:04] Steve: I’ve always said that. But, yeah, different AI contexts of some of these pendants and AI friends that could be useful, like you say, coaching, training, uh, work context, technical skills. Which are, uh, a fragment, uh, but a, a, a far more knowledgeable AI within a certain slither. And you tend to see those categories

[00:21:28] Steve: split down in, in ways as well.

[00:21:29] Steve: So that, that could, there’s some potential

[00:21:31] Steve: there,

[00:21:33] Cameron: He’ll be like, Hey Cameron, do you really want to buy that box of Tim Tams that you just picked up at Coles? Really? You know, you’re trying to lose 10 kilos right now. Do you really want to buy that? Is that going to help with your black belt grading if you get a box of Tim Tams? Maybe, maybe think twice.

[00:21:46] Cameron: Alright, we’ve got a guest! Uh, it’s a long time since we’ve had a guest on the show, uh, but Martin Murray has been, uh, tweeting up a storm from his farm in, I’m gonna say, somewhere in New South Wales. I’m taking a guess, and he’s been talking recently about his, how he was testing ChatGPT on the farm, and I thought, wow, that’s something I know

[00:22:11] Cameron: nothing about.

[00:22:12] Cameron: We should get him on. Welcome to Futuristic, Martin.

[00:22:17] Martin: Yeah, G’day, it’s good to be here, and yeah, you are right, northwest New South Wales, just around Dallungra, which is sort of between Armidale and Inverrell if you, sorry, between Armidale and Moree if you, yeah, you know that area at all.

[00:22:33] Cameron: I have driven through there a number of times. Yeah. It’s a lovely part of,

[00:22:37] Steve: It’s a New England highlight.

[00:22:38] Cameron: And you are talking to us, you were

[00:22:40] Cameron: talking to us from the cab of your tractor, by the looks of it.

[00:22:44] Martin: Yeah, literally in the

[00:22:45] Martin: spray rig. So, um, yeah, hopefully I didn’t ruin it when I jumped on earlier, your audio quality, uh, but I’ve shut it down, but kept the time booster on. So hopefully this conversation holds

[00:22:56] Steve: I have to ask the mandatory, uh, AI question. Are you on a John Deere with the right, no. Right. To fix it if it breaks down. That’s, that’s my

[00:23:06] Steve: question,

[00:23:09] Martin: Uh, can I swap the camera around? Because I am, yeah, you are banging

[00:23:14] Steve: there you go. What do you have the right to repair? Because that, that was something that was really, had a head of steam a few years ago for quite a bit. I don’t know what’s happened on the right to repair. There may be that, that’s an interesting starting

[00:23:25] Steve: point for us before we get into some of the depths of.

[00:23:28] Martin: To be honest, it’s not much of a, um, yeah, an issue for me personally. Cause if I had the right to repair, I still lacked the

[00:23:35] Steve: Okay.

[00:23:36] Martin: So,

[00:23:36] Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:38] Martin: um, But, I think you are right, yeah, I think, like, in terms of diagnostic tools, and, um, all of that sort of software side of things, uh, which, I mean, these things are pretty well just computers now, computers with an engine.

[00:23:52] Martin: Um, yeah, we still don’t have the right to repair that and access that diagnostic software.

[00:23:58] Steve: think that’s it. Wow. With every sort of machinery, I think if you buy something, you should buy it. I don’t care if it’s got software inside it. The Digital Millennium

[00:24:05] Steve: Copyright Act is an absolute disaster.