Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Predictions Of A Scientific Futurist" with Dr Catherine Ball

Transcript

"Predictions Of A Scientific Futurist" with Dr Catherine Ball · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Can I humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas?
• 0:05
  Let me ask you a little question, do you have a noodle on the future?
• 0:09
  Would you say you're noodle on the future?
• 0:12
  When you're noodle on things in your noggin, would you say that you're noodle on things in
• 0:16
  the future?
• 0:17
  Because I know I do.
• 0:19
  If you're anything like me, you find yourself doing a lot of noodling and the things you
• 0:24
  find yourself noodling on, I hazard a guess, probably things in the future, because you're
• 0:30
  not much point noodling on things in the past.
• 0:33
  Am I right?
• 0:34
  I don't know how we got started on this whole noodling thing.
• 0:40
  Honestly, I turned on the microphone and I was like, I'm going to talk about Catherine
• 0:43
  Ball.
• 0:44
  And then now we're up noodle creek without a paddle.
• 0:48
  So to speak, do you think I'm going to turn the microphone off and do a second take?
• 0:52
  Not on my life.
• 0:53
  I'm going to get out of here and do more noodling on the future.
• 0:57
  I don't want to be doing second takes just so we can do less noodling.
• 1:01
  The world needs more noodling, not less.
• 1:05
  That's my motto.
• 1:06
  I'm going to write a book about that.
• 1:07
  Anyway, in the meantime, you should enjoy this conversation with Catherine Ball because
• 1:10
  she noodles a hell of a lot about a lot of things and mostly in the future.
• 1:14
  You know why?
• 1:15
  Because she's a futurist.
• 1:16
  And that's what futurists do.
• 1:17
  They noodle on things that haven't happened yet.
• 1:20
  And if you want to noodle on things, I'm not going to say no anymore.
• 1:24
  If you want to noodle on, there you go.
• 1:26
  But that's this sentence is not included in that, in that promise, after this sentence
• 1:30
  I'm not going to say no to anymore.
• 1:31
  If you want to noodle on things, that's the last noodle about the future.
• 1:35
  And this is the podcast episode for you full stop new chapter of this introduction.
• 1:43
  Catherine Ball is a futurist, a scientific futurist and you'll explain, she'll explain
• 1:50
  to you in this conversation why she makes that distinction, who thinks heavily about
• 1:56
  what the next half century is going to look like or more.
• 2:00
  And this is a fascinating conversation.
• 2:01
  She's got a book called Converge and its subtitle, which is appropriately long as all
• 2:06
  subtitles need to be now, is a futurist's insights into the potential of our world as
• 2:12
  technology and humanity collide.
• 2:16
  Catherine, when we talk about all kinds of things in this artificial intelligence,
• 2:21
  the singularity, the future of food and clean meat and lab-grown meat, aging and longevity
• 2:28
  and whether aging is diseased or be cured, basically all the stuff that you want to explore
• 2:34
  and think about where future of privacy and data, all this stuff, we go everywhere in
• 2:39
  this conversation.
• 2:41
  So without any further ado, I hope you enjoy this chat with the one and only scientific
• 2:47
  futurist, Dr. Catherine Ball, as she noodles.
• 3:02
  Last night was a roast chicken in the air fryer, we love our air fryer.
• 3:06
  It's been like to do chicken and rubs in the air fryer, so he's trying all the different
• 3:10
  spices and things with cheap chicken cuts.
• 3:14
  So when we're going through the cheap chicken meat phase of our life, I've bought an air
• 3:19
  fryer during the pandemic and then just threw it out and never having used it about a year
• 3:23
  later.
• 3:24
  No.
• 3:25
  I know.
• 3:26
  Is that bad?
• 3:27
  We should have given it to a mate who's got children mate.
• 3:29
  I've got two five year olds at a time for an air fryer, I don't have time to learn
• 3:33
  anything new.
• 3:34
  Oh, it's just so good.
• 3:36
  Oh my God.
• 3:37
  I can't believe it.
• 3:39
  Will you big fried food fans to begin with?
• 3:42
  I know because you don't do fried food in it.
• 3:44
  So for example, one of the things that we love is chicken skewers.
• 3:47
  Right.
• 3:48
  So rather than get out on a smoky barbecue grill or smoke the kitchen out or put it in a frying
• 3:53
  pan with oil, you just literally chuck them in the air fryer.
• 3:56
  It's actually less oil.
• 3:58
  Right.
• 3:59
  It's a yeah.
• 4:00
  I guess I kind of got hoodwinked by like online articles and reviews and recipes that
• 4:05
  would say, you no longer have to spend hours over the stove like deep frying your chips
• 4:10
  in like vats of oil.
• 4:13
  Now you can use an air fryer.
• 4:14
  I mean, like, but I have never made French fries in my entire life.
• 4:18
  So first thing I made for my husband, I went to a posh butchery place and bought one of
• 4:22
  those really nice rack of lambs because he really likes lamb, but I don't eat lamb.
• 4:26
  Oh, and I used to eat lamb.
• 4:28
  So I understand and appreciate when you like a good piece of lamb.
• 4:32
  And I was like, let's try because it keeps everything really juicy.
• 4:34
  So the first thing we had in there was this really expensive $40 little rack of lamb in
• 4:39
  the air fryer.
• 4:40
  And it was amazing.
• 4:41
  It was done in so quick a time.
• 4:42
  It did not stink out the whole kitchen and it's probably a lot more energy efficient than
• 4:46
  using the whole oven for one tiny little rack of lamb.
• 4:49
  And it wasn't overcooked.
• 4:50
  Was it rare inside?
• 4:51
  No.
• 4:52
  Perfect.
• 4:53
  Really?
• 4:54
  I've got to give myself another air fryer.
• 4:55
  You might need to go into the air fryer.
• 4:57
  It's basically just a hot oven, right?
• 4:59
  It's basically a small version of an oven that's just a lot more energy efficient.
• 5:02
  Can you imagine if everyone just used an air fryer instead of using the whole oven,
• 5:05
  the amount of electricity would be saved?
• 5:07
  It's a good point.
• 5:08
  Also, yeah.
• 5:09
  No, that's right.
• 5:10
  I was actually talking to Saul Griffith on this show who believes we should electrify
• 5:14
  everything and just get rid of gas and all that.
• 5:18
  I'm a convert.
• 5:19
  He's very persuasive.
• 5:20
  Oh, look.
• 5:21
  He's a genius.
• 5:22
  He had a MacArthur genius grant, didn't he?
• 5:23
  Or something like that?
• 5:24
  I've got a lot of geniuses.
• 5:25
  I've got a lot of time to Saul.
• 5:26
  I've got a lot of time for him.
• 5:27
  The thing that I find with him, though, is when he just disagrees with things he goes,
• 5:30
  well, that's fundamentally against the law of physics.
• 5:32
  I'm sort of like, yeah, but can we look at it a slightly different way?
• 5:34
  No, it's fundamentally wrong.
• 5:35
  No, no.
• 5:36
  Yes.
• 5:37
  Can we just look at it a different way?
• 5:38
  A couple of years ago.
• 5:39
  There's no way it's going to work.
• 5:41
  So let's talk about you.
• 5:42
  So a futurist.
• 5:43
  We, you and I have spoken on ABC Radio Sydney, but that's a rather fast format.
• 5:48
  Here we have a bit more time to luxuriate in ourselves.
• 5:51
  What is a futurist exactly?
• 5:52
  What do you see your work as being?
• 5:55
  I suppose for me, I'm trying to open everybody's eyes to the potential of some of the things
• 6:00
  that we have in our lives that we're not using, like you, not using your air fryer to
• 6:04
  its full potential.
• 6:05
  Oh, gosh.
• 6:06
  Thank you.
• 6:07
  In the media albatross.
• 6:08
  It's an interview, isn't it?
• 6:09
  I'm just never going to be able to share my humiliation over my air fryer humiliation.
• 6:14
  You've really gone down in my estimation.
• 6:16
  No, I'm kidding.
• 6:17
  It's not right.
• 6:18
  It's okay.
• 6:19
  It's forgivable.
• 6:20
  You know what it's like?
• 6:21
  I'm having little kids.
• 6:22
  I bet there's something.
• 6:23
  What's the thing that you have bought, Catherine, that you never ended up using because you
• 6:27
  were too busy being a parent?
• 6:29
  I bet there's something.
• 6:31
  Gone.
• 6:32
  Oh, my gosh.
• 6:33
  I'm trying to think.
• 6:34
  Stop yourself in.
• 6:35
  There's something.
• 6:36
  Yeah.
• 6:37
  Well, in terms of kids paraphernalia, just in general.
• 6:39
  Just in general, I bet there's something that you've bought since your children were born.
• 6:42
  They were you were like, I'm going to learn to do this thing.
• 6:45
  Is it going to be, this is going to revolutionise my cooking or my recreation or my exercise
• 6:50
  or my children's?
• 6:51
  Oh, I have.
• 6:52
  Oh, well, my children like to use, you know, what is it?
• 6:55
  I bought a peloton.
• 6:56
  Of course you did.
• 6:57
  Of course you bought a peloton.
• 6:58
  About two thousand dollars.
• 6:59
  Yes.
• 7:00
  And it's still sitting there.
• 7:01
  Because I broke my foot.
• 7:02
  I broke my foot a year ago.
• 7:03
  So I don't have to walk in.
• 7:04
  You don't have to give me excuses, Catherine.
• 7:05
  That's all right.
• 7:06
  I'm not judging.
• 7:07
  No, because I couldn't walk, but I need to exercise.
• 7:08
  So I bought the peloton and I've used it once and that was just to see how it worked.
• 7:16
  I've not even done a class and that was two thousand dollars.
• 7:19
  So I'm feeling pretty smug at the moment because my air fryer was less than a hundred dollars
• 7:24
  and your peloton was two thousand dollars.
• 7:26
  I can sell my peloton for two thousand dollars though.
• 7:28
  You've thrown your air fryer away.
• 7:30
  True.
• 7:31
  Yeah, but will you, I mean, will you, you're not going to get on the peloton.
• 7:36
  That was one of the other things.
• 7:37
  Really?
• 7:38
  Yeah.
• 7:39
  All right.
• 7:40
  I'm going to do it.
• 7:41
  You send me a text when you get on the peloton.
• 7:42
  I will have proof.
• 7:43
  And then I'm going to judge you.
• 7:44
  I even, the worst thing.
• 7:45
  We talk about buying into a brand.
• 7:47
  I even bought peloton exercise clothes.
• 7:49
  Yep.
• 7:50
  So convinced was I, so I was going to become a pelotonian.
• 7:54
  It's not a device.
• 7:55
  It's a way of life, Catherine.
• 7:57
  Well, apparently so.
• 7:58
  And I've never really subscribed to exercise.
• 8:00
  Every single gym membership has ever, I've ever had as failed.
• 8:03
  I signed up to that Chris Hemsworth one.
• 8:04
  I've never done it.
• 8:05
  I feel that way about, I mean, this whole, like you just think that you're going to become
• 8:11
  a different person because you buy a device type thing.
• 8:14
  This whole way of life type aspect of materialism, I think applies to the air fryer.
• 8:19
  It applies to people's relationship to their nutri-bullet blinders.
• 8:23
  And the thermomix.
• 8:24
  The thermomix, exactly.
• 8:26
  Like, there are certain devices that are not just devices.
• 8:29
  They are totems of allegiance to a particular tribe.
• 8:33
  And I just never get around to joining the tribe.
• 8:35
  That's my problem.
• 8:36
  I'll get the air fryer.
• 8:37
  Then I'm like, I don't have to join this community of people who are excited about air fryer's.
• 8:43
  Well, when you see the air fryer guy makes me laugh because he makes the most disgusting
• 8:46
  things on Instagram.
• 8:47
  That's right.
• 8:48
  That's gross.
• 8:49
  Yeah, that's right.
• 8:50
  You can deep fry a turkey or something.
• 8:51
  I'm like, I've never deep fried it.
• 8:53
  You'll no longer spend whole afternoons struggling with a vat of oil while you're deep frying
• 8:59
  your turkeys.
• 9:00
  I'm like, that has never been a problem.
• 9:01
  Never happened.
• 9:02
  Never happened.
• 9:03
  You can roast chickens in it, you know?
• 9:04
  Well, I can roast chickens perfectly adequately in my oven.
• 9:07
  I know, but your oven's massive.
• 9:10
  What's wrong with it?
• 9:11
  But it's huge, right?
• 9:12
  So you're using your light just to just fill it in.
• 9:14
  I don't know how big your...
• 9:15
  No, my chicken...
• 9:16
  No, I mean...
• 9:17
  How big's your chicken, Josh?
• 9:18
  Getting a big, buddy chicken.
• 9:20
  And I've got a wee little...
• 9:21
  Get a massive chicken.
• 9:22
  I don't...
• 9:23
  I've got a...
• 9:24
  No, I'm not wasting a huge amount of energy when I roast a chicken.
• 9:28
  My chicken's taking up maybe one-sixth of the volume of my oven, one-fifth.
• 9:35
  So four-fifths or five-sixth aren't being used?
• 9:38
  Well, what are you jamming your chicken inside this air fryer, so that there's not a
• 9:43
  scary of a volume left?
• 9:45
  You can buy those boned chickens.
• 9:47
  You've got a toilet one, right?
• 9:49
  And you're just standing above the chicken.
• 9:50
  You're trying to wedge the chicken in from above.
• 9:52
  How do you even get it out?
• 9:53
  If it's that perfectly...
• 9:55
  Oh, yeah.
• 9:56
  It does fit.
• 9:57
  Okay.
• 9:58
  The chicken fits.
• 9:59
  Anyway.
• 10:00
  I have it.
• 10:01
  This is great.
• 10:02
  We've gone from futurism, but it's shoving chickens in air fryer.
• 10:04
  I love it already.
• 10:05
  It's very good.
• 10:07
  No, carry on about your about, yes, about futurism.
• 10:11
  Yeah.
• 10:12
  Well, I think all of us are futurists to a certain extent, because we always take bets
• 10:14
  on how we think things are going to go.
• 10:16
  And the problem is, in the corporate world and in the academic world, people like to use
• 10:21
  labels.
• 10:22
  They like to name things to try and explain things.
• 10:24
  So a lot of the time over the last ten years when people have asked me what I do, and
• 10:29
  I've gone straight into the deep geek of it.
• 10:30
  I've lost them.
• 10:31
  I've just lost them on it completely.
• 10:33
  So I had to find a new way of explaining some of the ways I was trying to accelerate new
• 10:37
  technologies, trying to test new business models, trying to find new ways these things
• 10:40
  were going to work in the real world.
• 10:42
  And I just came up with this idea, well, it is like global foresight, and it is futurism.
• 10:46
  We are literally taking new technologies and testing them to see how they could go and
• 10:51
  how that can move into the future through business models and applications.
• 10:54
  And so futurism became the thing.
• 10:56
  And then I was like, well, everyone calls themselves a futurist these days.
• 10:59
  So how do I differentiate myself from the pack?
• 11:02
  And I suppose that's where I'm a scientific futurist because my background is science.
• 11:07
  And so I live by the tenets of science when I look at some of the things that I'm trying
• 11:11
  to extrapolate and model and predict.
• 11:13
  And as you say, we're all futurists because we all wonder about the future.
• 11:18
  We're also all living in the future already, because if you'd asked us 20 years ago what
• 11:23
  the world was going to be like in 2023, we would have made our predictions and now we're
• 11:26
  here.
• 11:27
  How are we doing?
• 11:29
  It's interesting, isn't it?
• 11:32
  If we think about 30 years ago in the 90s, you know, 1998 or 1999, when the Matrix films
• 11:38
  came out, you know, and this whole futuristic ideal around how we'd be dressing and the
• 11:44
  phones we'd be using and I was actually reviewing back through old Bond films the other day
• 11:49
  to look at some of the futurism in the Bond movies.
• 11:52
  And it's funny how they all managed to sort out the automatic door, but in the Bond films
• 11:56
  in the 60s and early 70s, they still had lots of light switches.
• 12:00
  They still hadn't figured out the light switch.
• 12:03
  And so I think we're actually we're doing okay.
• 12:06
  One of the things that really chills me to the core is that, you know, in terms of some
• 12:09
  of our client science modeling and the climate emergency, how great some people were at modeling
• 12:14
  this in the 70s and 80s and just continue doing exactly what they were doing anyway and
• 12:19
  didn't tell anyone about it.
• 12:21
  And I just feel like sometimes as the general public, we're always on the last foot with some
• 12:26
  of this and it's really unfortunate and that's what I kind of rail against and disagree
• 12:29
  with. I feel like we should be hearing things as they come out new, but no, unfortunately
• 12:34
  as an environmental scientist by training Josh, it's quite a quite a dark space to have
• 12:39
  to work in because all we see is biodiversity loss, climate change, you know, no matter what
• 12:43
  kind of new earth observation technologies come out, it's basically still telling us the
• 12:47
  same stories that we know, which is, you know, we've got some real issues that we have
• 12:52
  to deal with and just looking at it through a different kind of satellite is not going
• 12:55
  to change what's actually really happening.
• 12:58
  I mean, I'm not sure that we didn't, I'm not sure it's necessarily a fair criticism
• 13:03
  that scientists don't articulate or don't try to articulate to the public what they're
• 13:07
  finding, but I just think we don't do a very good job at understanding it and propagating
• 13:11
  it and amplifying it, especially in the media as well.
• 13:14
  I mean, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change was in 1992, which I have a lot of friends
• 13:19
  who weren't born in 1992 and when ever that was you, I'll trust you, I'll trust you,
• 13:28
  but it was thereabouts, right?
• 13:29
  And I mean, I was in the 90s, I read the early 90s, I read the other day that half of
• 13:33
  all the carbon in the atmosphere, half of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have
• 13:37
  been emitted since that convention, which we all convened to say this is an emergency
• 13:42
  and we have to do something about it.
• 13:43
  So there's a problem with democracy and like implementing big changes that involve lots
• 13:50
  of moving parts and conflicting interests that transcends, I think, any ignorance on
• 13:55
  the public's part about the scale of the problem.
• 13:58
  Well, the people who I was referring to with regard to climate modeling was actually the
• 14:02
  oil and gas industry, Josh.
• 14:03
  Right, I see.
• 14:04
  I wasn't referring to scientists.
• 14:08
  The manufacturing of descent of both of them.
• 14:10
  All that the main one has just come out is the Exxon mobile modeling, isn't it?
• 14:13
  There's just been in the news.
• 14:15
  What's that?
• 14:16
  They showed that they basically predicted climate change and their models were eerily accurate.
• 14:22
  And don't forget who came up with the term carbon footprint and what was it, who came up
• 14:26
  with the term carbon footprint?
• 14:27
  You know how we look at our own carbon footprint and we worry about our carbon footprint?
• 14:30
  Yeah.
• 14:31
  Who came up with that expression?
• 14:32
  No.
• 14:33
  BP.
• 14:34
  Really?
• 14:35
  Because if it pushes back on ours, then it's not on them.
• 14:38
  Right.
• 14:39
  I'm going to end up on a list here, Ron.
• 14:41
  I keep talking about it.
• 14:42
  Well, maybe.
• 14:43
  Well, Kyoto Protocol was adopted on the 11th of December 1997, but owing to a complex,
• 14:51
  and this is the thing, right?
• 14:53
  Politics.
• 14:54
  Owing to a complex ratification process, it entered into force on the 16th of February
• 14:57
  2005.
• 14:58
  So it was in 1997?
• 15:01
  1997, when it was adopted, 2005 was when it was ratified.
• 15:06
  Huh.
• 15:07
  So, you know, it's like they've just had these things in the press about the ozone layer
• 15:12
  recovering, but one of the things that people are missing about all of that is they reckon
• 15:16
  it will be sorted in about 40 years.
• 15:18
  Yeah.
• 15:19
  I saw that.
• 15:20
  So they're like, they're like, yeah, it's fixing itself.
• 15:23
  Oh, I see.
• 15:24
  And I'm like, here we go.
• 15:26
  So Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework
• 15:31
  Convention on Climate Change.
• 15:33
  What was that?
• 15:34
  That was Rio.
• 15:35
  That was Rio.
• 15:36
  Okay.
• 15:37
  So I'm thinking of Rio in 1992.
• 15:38
  Yes.
• 15:39
  Kyoto in 1997.
• 15:40
  Anyway, that's interesting, isn't it, about carbon footprint putting the burden of responsibility
• 15:43
  back on individuals and off, you know, the companies that are causing the problem?
• 15:48
  I've always, how do you feel?
• 15:51
  Look, why don't we park climate for a second, because otherwise we'll spend an hour talking
• 15:54
  about climate.
• 15:55
  And I don't want to waste the time talking about not that it's a waste of time.
• 15:59
  I feel like everyone's hearing it from the right people now.
• 16:01
  We've got the right people talking about it and it's not my, exactly.
• 16:04
  And it's not, it's not specifically your, you know, your Bayley wick in comparison to
• 16:08
  all the other things that you have thought closely about which are more uniquely your
• 16:12
  own.
• 16:13
  What do we talk about artificial intelligence and where computing is also just incidentally
• 16:19
  on what people in the past didn't get right about today?
• 16:22
  I've just finished reading 2001 of Space Odyssey, the Arthur T. Clarke book, which I never
• 16:27
  read, which he wrote sort of as he was trying to figure out what the screenplay was going
• 16:31
  to be and concurrently with the screenplay that he was collaborating with Kubrick on.
• 16:36
  And yeah, that's really interesting.
• 16:38
  I mean, obviously you can't see the things that he's getting wrong.
• 16:42
  But the fact that, you know, there are still gigantic computers with big buttons on them
• 16:48
  and that the way that humans are interfacing with IT is not through screens and, you know,
• 16:55
  holographic displays and, you know, touch things is interesting that they, you know, this
• 17:00
  is a universe in which we're going to sat and we've got manned missions to sat and Jupiter,
• 17:05
  but we haven't yet invented the iPad.
• 17:09
  Is the very first example of FaceTime, the movie, the Space Odyssey?
• 17:12
  That's true.
• 17:13
  The movie FaceTime is his daughter, doesn't he, from space.
• 17:15
  Yeah.
• 17:16
  Yeah.
• 17:17
  Space food.
• 17:18
  Everyone says to me, why are we eating space food yet and I'm thinking, what do you think
• 17:21
  you're eating?
• 17:22
  What do you think you're eating?
• 17:24
  Why am I eating space food?
• 17:26
  Well, because a lot of the techniques that we use now in terms of the breeding methodology
• 17:30
  that's gone through, a lot of the animals that are used as food animals, this don't
• 17:34
  exist in nature now.
• 17:35
  They've been so hyper domesticated.
• 17:38
  And we look at some of the issues around even lettuce wheat on, you know, the idea that
• 17:42
  we would actually be growing fruits and veggies in urban farms is no longer sort of a v-seek,
• 17:49
  you know, venture capital Silicon Valley type conversation.
• 17:52
  We seriously need to look at how we ensure food security for all Australians, looking
• 17:57
  at new and emerging technologies around food and some of those technologies is really
• 18:01
  interesting.
• 18:02
  They've been developed for space, like big biopod food production for the moon, well,
• 18:06
  we're using that same kind of technology on planet earth and this is where everyone
• 18:10
  goes, oh, you know, but why do we care about the space industry?
• 18:12
  And we need to worry about planet earth and I'm thinking, we only have earth observation
• 18:16
  because of the space industry.
• 18:18
  There's so much environmental science that we have an understanding now because of the
• 18:21
  space industry and there's so much acceleration of technology because of the space industry
• 18:25
  that actually they're not separable.
• 18:27
  You have one, you have the other.
• 18:30
  So in terms of, you know, where we were and where people were thinking and how people
• 18:33
  were writing in the 50s and 60s, they had to grasp or an idea of where things might
• 18:37
  go, but you're right, they were stuck within the technological limits of their time.
• 18:42
  Wouldn't it have been frustrating?
• 18:44
  The idea that you're still stuck with transistors and silicon chips and they probably have never
• 18:48
  even really thought about quantum computing.
• 18:51
  I mean, that's going to be the thing that changes our generation.
• 18:53
  Josh is actually quantum computers and artificial intelligence working together because at the
• 18:58
  moment, we don't have a lot of cybersecurity, crypto protocols protecting the internet
• 19:04
  that can actually stand up to high level quantum computing.
• 19:07
  So if we just pop that in the terms of reference frame and think, could we go back to a world
• 19:12
  without internet?
• 19:13
  Are we looking at a post internet future and unless we get quantum right and cybersecurity
• 19:19
  right, we're very much looking at a post internet future.
• 19:21
  Let's explain what the hell you're talking about.
• 19:23
  What's quantum computing?
• 19:25
  So quantum computing is where we use methods of quantum physics to hold super, super, super
• 19:31
  fast calculations, normally done at very, very cold temperatures, but what it means that
• 19:37
  they're able to do is calculations on a computer that would normally take, say, 20 or
• 19:41
  30 years, they're able to do in a matter of minutes.
• 19:45
  And that will change things why, simply because the computing power becomes so much faster
• 19:49
  that our computers will, you'll have the computing power of a laptop in what they had
• 19:54
  of a pin.
• 19:55
  Well, if you think about it now, it's quite frustrating to me that most people that have
• 19:58
  a smart device don't recognize because everyone quotes, so we've got more computing power
• 20:03
  in your smartphone than they had to land on the moon.
• 20:05
  I'm like, yeah, that's great.
• 20:06
  That was great from 10 years ago.
• 20:08
  But now when you look at your smart device and you might have one more than one smart
• 20:11
  device in your home, each of those smart devices has enough computing power on it right
• 20:16
  now to run a hospital department.
• 20:19
  And so if you then go, okay, well, that's just a traditional solid metal, glass, silicon
• 20:24
  type processing of this smart device, imagine now that that was a thousand times faster.
• 20:31
  Would you just be scrolling Instagram quicker or loading up TikTok videos faster?
• 20:35
  Well, what could we actually do if we had computing power?
• 20:38
  So this is where I'm really excited by some of the good work that's coming out of Silicon
• 20:42
  Valley.
• 20:43
  Well, let me pause you there.
• 20:44
  I mean, what would we do?
• 20:45
  Because I can imagine someone 15 years ago saying if you could have the computing power
• 20:51
  of an early Mac that Steve Jobs unveiled, what in the 80s or something, let's take
• 20:59
  ourselves back then and someone saying if you could have that computing power in something
• 21:02
  that you could fit in your pocket, what would we do with it?
• 21:05
  I mean, would we just be mindlessly chatting to each other and sending each other notes?
• 21:10
  No, we'd be doing fantastic things.
• 21:11
  Well, fast forward to now and we are mindlessly effectively sending each other notes, addictive
• 21:15
  little algorithmically designed notes, but little messages to each other on Twitter and
• 21:20
  TikTok.
• 21:21
  So would it be all that different or would we just find new ways of scratching the itches,
• 21:26
  the human itches that evolution has instilled in us?
• 21:29
  Okay.
• 21:30
  So there's two things that can be done.
• 21:31
  One is offense and the other one is defense, so if you think about it as a sports game,
• 21:38
  when you've got super, super fast computing power, it means you can hack things.
• 21:43
  You can undo things.
• 21:45
  You can attack things in ways and I'm not suggesting anyone does because you're in breach of lots
• 21:49
  of different kinds of legislation.
• 21:51
  Bad actors, if they get their hands on super fast computing, can do a lot of damage
• 21:56
  incredibly quickly.
• 21:58
  Anyone who's ever had their social media accounts, how to ransom universities that keep getting
• 22:03
  cyber attacks, banks that are constantly attacked, do you want to cause an exclobal financial
• 22:08
  crisis?
• 22:09
  You take out a big bank and hold that for ransom.
• 22:14
  You want to invade a neighboring country and successfully take over in a couple of days.
• 22:18
  You have a cyber attack that takes over their entire financial government and water and electricity
• 22:23
  systems.
• 22:24
  You have their critical infrastructure without unleashing a single paratrooper or a single
• 22:29
  bomb.
• 22:30
  You take control of it.
• 22:31
  Cyber warfare, as in one of my chapters in my book, we talk about the war with no dead.
• 22:35
  This idea that, I say we, the royal we, I talk about the war with no dead, which is we
• 22:40
  can use cyber attacks to silence people, and I'm not suggesting anyone should.
• 22:47
  It's pretty nasty.
• 22:48
  So now imagine that you've got the computing power that can hack.
• 22:53
  Josh, it's really scary.
• 22:54
  This can actually undo the internet.
• 22:56
  They're trying to find that there are codes that can actually keep up with the cyber security
• 23:00
  attacks that we're having.
• 23:01
  And we have solid cyber attacks in Australia every few seconds.
• 23:06
  Cyber security underpins everything we know as normal day to day life.
• 23:12
  And with quantum computing, we are going to be living in a hyper real internet.
• 23:18
  It will move to web 3, which is a whole other conversation.
• 23:21
  It will move deeper into the immersive web metaverse, which is another conversation.
• 23:25
  And it will hopefully remove some of the carbon footprint burden that currently takes part
• 23:29
  in terms of service space and the way in which we store data, which means we'll be able
• 23:35
  to store more things.
• 23:36
  I don't think we can understand the cyber security and cyber warfare component until we
• 23:40
  understand more about like web 3 and what we'll all be doing on this thing.
• 23:44
  Because my instinct, and we don't have to go down a rabbit hole on this, but my layperson's
• 23:49
  instinct is, well, of course, that's not going to happen because no government would
• 23:52
  be stupid enough to embrace putting all of their systems on to quantum computers until
• 23:58
  they were at least as invulnerable as they are now, which may not be very invulnerable,
• 24:03
  but has done us fine so far.
• 24:05
  So presumably, that'll be a problem that will fix itself before it's launched.
• 24:10
  No, no, quantum computers are what we want.
• 24:13
  We're in a race.
• 24:14
  This is a cold war.
• 24:15
  Are you saying that quantum computers will provide us with the security that we currently
• 24:18
  don't have?
• 24:19
  Correct.
• 24:20
  Oh, I thought you were saying the reverse at quantum computers, so super power that individual
• 24:25
  actors, non-state actors will be able to leverage that computing power to unleash mayhem.
• 24:31
  I'll tell you now, Josh, we are at war.
• 24:37
  We are in a cold, cold, cold war for quantum computing.
• 24:42
  There is a race.
• 24:43
  That is putting the space race into like the space race is just so last century, right?
• 24:50
  This is now the thing who will ever cracks the quantum computing aspects.
• 24:56
  They will control the entire global internet.
• 25:00
  Can you imagine someone being able to do that?
• 25:04
  Well, presumably that scares me.
• 25:07
  Isn't that surely going to be either Apple or Google or Amazon or some other private company
• 25:13
  in the world?
• 25:14
  No, you need to think outside of the Western world that we live in.
• 25:17
  You need to think outside of Silicon Valley.
• 25:19
  There are other countries that have perfectly good capability around this that don't have
• 25:23
  anything in Silicon Valley.
• 25:24
  Right.
• 25:25
  But why aren't they producing iPhones to everyone uses?
• 25:27
  Well, they do.
• 25:28
  They produce them in their own countries.
• 25:29
  You know, Twitter's banned in India.
• 25:31
  I can't use Twitter in India.
• 25:33
  Facebook's blocked in China.
• 25:34
  They've got their own versions.
• 25:36
  They've got their own internet.
• 25:37
  They're not the same as creating a new engineering breakthrough to simply ban a platform.
• 25:41
  Do you know what?
• 25:44
  I'm thinking quite Elon Musk is probably hoping someone does because then he's got an excuse
• 25:49
  to get out.
• 25:50
  But in all seriousness, if we don't get, and this is where we've got some wonderful, the
• 25:55
  good news is for all Australians listening, in fact, you know, all people who are allied
• 25:59
  with Australia geopolitically is that we're actually really good at quantum computing.
• 26:03
  So we've got the centre there in Sydney with the former Australian of the year, Michelle
• 26:09
  Simmons, Professor Michelle Simmons, running the quantum academy there and all the work
• 26:13
  out of Sydney.
• 26:15
  So the key here, Josh, is quantum computing is the next set of levels around how we need
• 26:21
  to increase the security around how we currently live our lives.
• 26:25
  Unless we own the quantum computing and we control the quantum computing, we are in real
• 26:30
  trouble.
• 26:31
  And when I say we, I mean our security partnerships, people that are aligned with us geopolitically,
• 26:36
  you could call that five eyes quad or kiss whatever you want to call it.
• 26:40
  So there's some other things that bother me, but why would you want super fast computing?
• 26:44
  Well, you know, I say defense and offense, right?
• 26:47
  So there's one thing there's a defense aspect and if we just put that to one side and you
• 26:51
  can watch all your 1980s, war movies, you know, about computers trying to plan nuclear
• 26:56
  war and stuff like that and put that to one side.
• 26:59
  Good movie there with Matthew Broderick in it.
• 27:02
  But and then if you look at, okay, we'll let's have a look at some of the good things that
• 27:05
  you can do with quantum.
• 27:07
  And so for example, looking at alpha fold, which was something that came out of Silicon
• 27:11
  Valley where they literally used artificial intelligence and designed every single protein
• 27:17
  that could ever potentially exist.
• 27:19
  So I was going to take as a hundred years to do and they did it in days because they
• 27:24
  had super fast computing and they had artificial intelligence working through it.
• 27:28
  Now why do we care about proteins ever taken antibiotics?
• 27:34
  We have the next pandemic.
• 27:35
  My prediction is the next pandemic is going to be antibiotic resistance and our weaponry
• 27:41
  in that war is not very good.
• 27:44
  And so any new proteins that we can discover give us more bullets in the gun, right, against
• 27:53
  this war on antibiotic resistance.
• 27:56
  And if I'm going to throw some real geek at you this morning, I'm just going to say
• 27:59
  the words molecular de-extinction, I'll take the bait, Catherine, tell me what is molecular
• 28:09
  de-extinction?
• 28:10
  So they used artificial intelligence and some remnants of Neanderthal DNA to work out
• 28:16
  what kind of proteins were being produced by Neanderthal humans and they managed to
• 28:20
  find four or five that grew in the lab and three of them were new antibiotics.
• 28:30
  So we used artificial intelligence and historical DNA from a former fellow human species to
• 28:37
  find potentially new weapons in the fight against microbial resistance to antibiotics.
• 28:42
  How cool is that?
• 28:43
  Come on.
• 28:44
  That is cool.
• 28:45
  Let me, I want to stay on computing for a moment because the way that you were talking
• 28:50
  about quantum computing being an arms race and almost existential threat arms race reminds
• 28:56
  me of the way that a lot of my colleagues in Silicon Valley think about artificial intelligence
• 29:01
  that once you can create systems, like forget about conscious systems and are we creating
• 29:06
  new life and are there going to be systems that start to turn on us and want to exterminate
• 29:13
  us all or terminate a robot thing?
• 29:18
  Simply creating a system that is sufficiently smart in general ways, in generalizable ways
• 29:25
  that it can produce more examples of sophisticated code that can do more and more things.
• 29:32
  So you have a runaway kind of artificial intelligence effect where you've got computers
• 29:36
  creating computers to do lots of tasks that are currently done by people or that currently
• 29:43
  require tons and tons of computing power and that won't, thanks, perhaps to quantum computing.
• 29:48
  That strikes a lot of people as what is going to sling shot civilization into a new era
• 29:56
  of either prosperity or destabilization and that whoever finds that jewel is going to basically
• 30:03
  dominate the rest of humankind's existence and that is the arms race that we're not
• 30:10
  paying attention to.
• 30:11
  Do you buy that?
• 30:13
  Generalized artificial intelligence is something that Stephen Hawking said would be the end
• 30:17
  of the human race.
• 30:20
  I don't know that I necessarily agree because it is such a complex thing.
• 30:26
  The thing that I think it definitely does is cause more division in society.
• 30:32
  So we have the haves and the have-nots and the gap between the haves and the have-nots
• 30:35
  in terms of the digital world is really big and it is just getting bigger.
• 30:41
  So how do we make sure that everybody has access to these kinds of technologies that their
• 30:45
  health systems have access to these technologies and if they're commodified and owned, how
• 30:52
  is that different to being out there for social good?
• 30:55
  Can computers do the things that the horror movies and the sci-fi films that we've predicted
• 30:59
  do?
• 31:00
  Yes, they will be able to, but even some of the best cyberpunk and science fiction writers
• 31:07
  like Neil Stevenson and William Gibson, they were hypothesizing on this in the 90s and
• 31:12
  the 80s around how some of these things might be.
• 31:15
  So whenever I get scared about this, I always turn to someone like Professor Genevieve Ball
• 31:19
  who's 20 years in Silicon Valley as an anthropologist watching how humans interact with the internet
• 31:26
  and she always gives me some great points around, well what do we consume on the internet?
• 31:30
  What do we use artificial intelligence for?
• 31:33
  And the thing is, I think Josh, a lot of us don't realise just how much AI is already
• 31:37
  in our lives working away without even consciously knowing about it.
• 31:42
  And that for me, when a technology becomes invisible, that's when it knows it's working.
• 31:48
  And so for me, the AI race to this sort of global domination of machines, building machines,
• 31:54
  talking to machines, making humans into battery packs, is not probably going to happen
• 32:00
  because social licence is key to how we operate and use some of these systems.
• 32:04
  And so I have another term for you this morning.
• 32:08
  So if we take the black box of algorithms that are used inside artificial intelligence
• 32:12
  to make these calculations, you go for a mortgage application or a car loan or you look
• 32:17
  for a cheap flight on the internet, that all goes through an algorithm, a black box where
• 32:21
  a computer says yes or computer says no.
• 32:24
  Well in the States, there's already been legal cases where people have sued their insurance
• 32:28
  companies for not telling them the kinds of artificial intelligence and algorithms that
• 32:32
  have been used to make those decisions about their lives.
• 32:35
  So there's this whole push now for something called explainable AI.
• 32:39
  So how you turn that black box into a glass box and how you then show people how those
• 32:44
  conversations are managed and how the data is being used.
• 32:49
  And so explainable AI will counteract some of this cloak and dagger secrecy that we
• 32:53
  have around artificial intelligence, but isn't it funny that it has to be led by case law
• 32:58
  coming out of places like the United States that we suddenly have to start looking at this?
• 33:02
  Catherine, is it possible to actually have a glass box or I mean my hunch is that the
• 33:08
  artificial intelligence is becoming, let's just talk in a limited set, let's not even use
• 33:12
  that term because I think a lot of people think that artificial intelligence implies
• 33:15
  some kind of general intelligence of a kind that we haven't yet devised, but let's
• 33:20
  talk about these, I guess algorithmic systems that are making all of the calculations that
• 33:26
  decide whether or not we're going to get insurance or be allowed, be considered a high-risk
• 33:31
  person for getting a visa to go to a particular country or whatever it might be.
• 33:36
  These systems, my hunch is that they're so complicated and for example the systems that
• 33:41
  decide what you're going to be shown in your social media feed next like on tiktok are
• 33:47
  so complicated that to allow you to see the explainable AI, what would actually have
• 33:55
  to happen is the people who designed them would have to create a mask that looks transparent
• 34:02
  but is actually just a simplified abbreviation or summary of roughly what the system is
• 34:08
  doing so that it's comprehensible to you, but that if it was actually transparent, it
• 34:13
  would be so complex that you would be completely baffled and you would be able to understand
• 34:16
  it anyway because even the people who design it don't even really understand.
• 34:19
  And even Mark Zuckerberg doesn't fully understand why Facebook is presenting me with this
• 34:24
  particular post and not another particular post, the system is just learning from my
• 34:29
  habits in a way that no human or collection of humans can fathom, so aren't we getting
• 34:34
  beyond the point at which the glass box is possible?
• 34:37
  Absolutely not Josh and what you've just described is software engineering.
• 34:41
  So there are actually people who have full qualifications that can actually tear apart code
• 34:45
  forensically and find out what's happening.
• 34:48
  I'm going to give you a solid example for this.
• 34:49
  Do you remember the COVID safe app that we all got forced to download pretty much helped
• 34:53
  for ransom to download on our phone?
• 34:55
  Yes, to non-Australians, early in the days of the pandemic the government came up with
• 34:58
  an ill-fated app that it quietly shelved which was going to sort of notify contact traces
• 35:04
  every time you bumped into anybody else with a phone that had the app on it and so that
• 35:10
  way we would all be able to go back and trace who we'd been in contact with for more than
• 35:14
  15 minutes or so and then it seemed that it didn't really work anyway and it was much
• 35:18
  more reliable for contact traces just to call people and ask them where they'd been.
• 35:22
  So we have this thing called open source software.
• 35:25
  So open source software means that you literally open your code up and so the coding community
• 35:29
  can work on it and interrogate it and fix it when things are broken.
• 35:35
  And so even in my PhD I used a statistical program called R which is an open source piece
• 35:40
  of software where everyone builds and fixes it a bit like Wikipedia, everyone can contribute
• 35:45
  and fix it.
• 35:46
  And so this idea of a glass box is actually having an open source access to the algorithms.
• 35:52
  So there are people that can translate these things.
• 35:54
  There are people that even use, I mean look at chat GPT, right?
• 35:57
  You can actually take that code, put it into chat GPT and say what does this code do?
• 36:02
  And chat GPT will tell you in common English what the code is actually doing.
• 36:05
  So there'll be AI being used to decipher AI but back to the COVID safe app.
• 36:11
  When that was opened up to the coding community, one of the first things that I remember seeing
• 36:15
  and this didn't get a lot of headlines but I definitely saw it.
• 36:19
  One of the first things that was there was that they'd forgotten to put one of the states
• 36:22
  in.
• 36:23
  Can you guess which state was forgotten?
• 36:27
  Tasmania.
• 36:28
  Tasmania.
• 36:29
  So anybody in Tasmania couldn't get COVID because there was no COVID safe app so they were
• 36:36
  fine.
• 36:37
  They were fine.
• 36:38
  I mean they're an island.
• 36:39
  They're an island.
• 36:40
  They're an island.
• 36:41
  But you know, so it's just like and it's because it was designed by people that weren't
• 36:44
  Australians.
• 36:45
  Right.
• 36:46
  This is still skeptical that you think I'm, it feels naive to me to think that software
• 36:53
  engineers understand everything that they have created.
• 36:56
  I know software engineers who work at some of these big tech firms and they will tell
• 37:01
  me that like there are a whole chunks of code that are basically legacy code from some
• 37:07
  other system.
• 37:08
  Like you know, we're talking about for example aviation reservation systems that are extraordinarily
• 37:12
  complicated and that need to be linked into a whole bunch of other reservation systems
• 37:16
  of other airlines and in alliances and so on and they'll say, well, there's this whole
• 37:19
  chunk of code.
• 37:21
  Nobody knows what it does.
• 37:22
  It's inherited from some from some other purpose, you know, from years ago.
• 37:27
  We all we know is that when you delete it, something completely unrelated that an era
• 37:31
  starts happening and people can't use this thing over here that has absolutely no connection
• 37:34
  to this piece of code and there's no one can explain why this happens, but we just leave
• 37:38
  it there and we don't touch it because we know that if we take it out, then problems
• 37:43
  happen in this completely unrelated sphere.
• 37:46
  And so then you just leave it there and that's the so the idea that opening up the turning
• 37:51
  the black box into a glass box is going to be as simple as allowing people to look at
• 37:54
  that.
• 37:55
  I mean, even if the software engineers themselves don't know what the code does, then how
• 37:58
  will I?
• 37:59
  Well, this is it.
• 38:00
  I think there are software engineers that could probably work out what that code is doing
• 38:03
  and I think someone's half pulling your leg there, Josh, because I have never in my
• 38:06
  life ever come across people that don't know exactly what all parts of the code do and
• 38:10
  how they build that code with the different blocks of code and how I was even using code
• 38:14
  in my PhD, writing code is just writing a language, right?
• 38:18
  It's like learning French or German.
• 38:20
  It's just like learning another language.
• 38:21
  And I always had this thing, well, when I was on Q&A, we're however many years ago,
• 38:25
  and I always say coding shouldn't be taught in a science classroom.
• 38:28
  Coding should be taught in a language classroom because it is literally just a language.
• 38:33
  The thing is it is complex, but there are some people who like me get away with speaking
• 38:37
  French and there are some people that understand the, you know, the etymology and where the origin
• 38:41
  of that particular word comes from, the historical reference.
• 38:44
  Doesn't mean that I'm any worse at communicating in French.
• 38:47
  It's just that I don't understand it on all those different levels.
• 38:50
  No, but there are aspects of French that people don't know.
• 38:52
  We don't know why French, particular French verbs are conjugated in a particular way.
• 38:57
  Well, exactly.
• 38:57
  We just inherit them because we didn't have it all written down.
• 39:00
  I mean, I'm literally looking at a box on the studio desk right right now,
• 39:05
  which is a system that this studio uses to communicate with other studios.
• 39:10
  And it was built by someone decades ago.
• 39:13
  And I'm told reliably by the engineers here that when that system breaks,
• 39:17
  they're just going to have to junk it and import a new system because that because nobody knows exactly how,
• 39:22
  nobody can quite figure out exactly how it works.
• 39:25
  So because the person who built it has died, yes, that's a historical thing, right?
• 39:30
  So this is, yeah, I understand that's a hardware issue.
• 39:33
  So there's a hardware and software are slightly different.
• 39:37
  But I agree.
• 39:38
  And in fact, the thing is we are getting to the point now where we're scaling these technologies
• 39:43
  in ways that when that particular piece of hardware on your desk was created,
• 39:47
  the scale did not exist.
• 39:49
  The world as it is right now did not exist.
• 39:51
  So I'm absolutely, I know that there are forensic accountants who are different to my regular accountant.
• 39:57
  There are forensic software engineers that are different to regular and software engineers.
• 40:01
  People can decipher an open and when they opened up the COVID safe app code,
• 40:07
  they absolutely, the community went on it like a vampire on a virgin.
• 40:11
  It was a blood bath.
• 40:12
  It was amazing to see all these people going, what's this code here for?
• 40:15
  What are they doing with that bit?
• 40:17
  And I was just like, I'm sorry, we do have a really active coding community
• 40:20
  and people that work in this that can do it.
• 40:22
  Now the problem though is and you've inadvertently knocked the nail on the head for me
• 40:25
  in that not everyone does not everyone does understand code.
• 40:30
  Because we're not all taught it and those of us that are in our 40s,
• 40:34
  you know, the computers that we first got exposed to with literally floppy disks,
• 40:39
  you know, in the Commodore 64s,
• 40:41
  those are not the kind of machines that we are living and working and playing with now.
• 40:46
  And so her fellow futurist, a lovely woman called Shaneid Bavall,
• 40:50
  who's based over in New York, had this piece on her Instagram this week
• 40:54
  and she talked about how if we trained somebody right now in technology in five years,
• 40:58
  the time 90% of that information is already obsolete.
• 41:01
  And so if you think about how many years it's been since you and I were at school
• 41:05
  learning about basics of IT, I learned about Excel spreadsheets at high school.
• 41:09
  I avoid Excel spreadsheets like the plague now.
• 41:13
  I'm not sure they're even needed anymore are they?
• 41:16
  I mean, who's using an Excel spreadsheet?
• 41:18
  I suppose they use it occasionally for a household budget,
• 41:20
  but I mean, we're not using it for anything sophisticated.
• 41:22
  I assume anymore.
• 41:23
  So is your takeaway?
• 41:24
  What's just to wrap up the section about artificial intelligence computing and quantum computing?
• 41:32
  What's your, you know, fast forward, I guess,
• 41:35
  as far into the future as we are from Steve Jobs unveiling the first personal computer?
• 41:41
  And what does this all look like?
• 41:43
  It's inside our bodies.
• 41:45
  We're moving from the internet of things to the internet of bodies.
• 41:48
  In 10 years time, we will not have mobile phones the way we have them right now.
• 41:51
  They're going to be wearables, implantables will have new phases of Google glasses and
• 41:57
  Google contact lenses or whichever provider Facebook or Apple, Apple are coming out with
• 42:02
  their new VR headset and we'll be diving into immersive realities just looking like normal
• 42:07
  people, not wearing great big headsets because they'll be actually contact lenses that
• 42:10
  we're wearing or things that are actually just little earbuds and things like that.
• 42:15
  So technology is going to get a lot smaller and a lot more inside us.
• 42:20
  So we are going to become cyborgs, I suggest in the next 40 years.
• 42:24
  And will we interact with that with that technology presumably through voice activation?
• 42:28
  I mean, will we, will we punching at my iPhone with my finger, seem as antiquated to future
• 42:34
  me as the people in 2001 with their big computers and gigantic buttons pushing brightly lit
• 42:40
  buttons?
• 42:41
  Same.
• 42:42
  Yeah.
• 42:43
  So it's been less than 20 years since Steve Jobs introduced the scroll, you know, to move
• 42:47
  the screen with your thumb.
• 42:48
  Yeah.
• 42:49
  And that was less than 20 years ago, right?
• 42:52
  So the idea now is that you won't even be using, if you wanted to go really far into like
• 42:58
  40 or 50 years time, you'll just be thinking about it and it will do it.
• 43:03
  You reckon.
• 43:04
  Absolutely.
• 43:05
  We've already got brain computer interfaces that can do this in a rudimentary fashion for
• 43:08
  people who have locked in syndrome and who are paralyzed.
• 43:11
  They can just think about it and they can move robot arms.
• 43:15
  That's amazing, isn't it?
• 43:16
  I've done, I did, I was doing a story about this for an American TV show that I was working
• 43:21
  on and the, this was a good 10 years ago now and the, the, they basically had a rudimentary
• 43:27
  video game that you could play just with your mind, but it was simply your intensity of
• 43:31
  thought that was pushing the dial.
• 43:34
  And it worked.
• 43:35
  I mean, I could definitely think, I could think that the thing should move and it would move.
• 43:38
  So, but I don't know what the step is from taking, from going, all right, this brain
• 43:44
  has increased electrical activity in it, therefore I'm going to move this thing to, he's
• 43:48
  thinking of an apple.
• 43:50
  Well, this is where now we're going to be using lots of MRIs and you will probably get
• 43:56
  involved in some kind of trials where you will be personalizing your equipment according
• 44:00
  to your own brain activity, where you'll be trained on how to do those things.
• 44:06
  It's going to be so interesting, Josh, I'm just, I'm sad I'm not going to be around
• 44:09
  to see it.
• 44:10
  Well, we'll see some of it, hopefully.
• 44:11
  Maybe.
• 44:12
  Some of the beginnings of it.
• 44:14
  Yeah.
• 44:15
  The beginnings of it.
• 44:16
  Okay.
• 44:17
  Great.
• 44:18
  Look, there's so many things that we could talk about now.
• 44:19
  I almost want to get you, want you to navigate the director's conversation because we could talk
• 44:23
  about drones.
• 44:24
  We could talk about longevity.
• 44:27
  We could talk about vaccines and cancer.
• 44:30
  We could talk about, I mean, war and conflict.
• 44:34
  We could talk about food production, food shortages.
• 44:36
  We could talk about manufacturing.
• 44:37
  We could talk about, let's not talk about climate yet.
• 44:41
  Take, what do you see as the sort of, as the things that if you, that if everybody could
• 44:45
  know about them, the world would be a better place.
• 44:48
  What are those?
• 44:49
  Oh, crumbs.
• 44:51
  I just, I really believe that if everyone was just a bit more intentional about how we
• 44:58
  made choices and how we interact with each other and more intentional with how we used
• 45:02
  the computing power that we had, there's so many things that we could do, but you're going
• 45:06
  to make me start sounding like an optimist.
• 45:09
  You are.
• 45:10
  Don't you think you're the self as one?
• 45:13
  I have referred to myself as a hopeful optimist.
• 45:16
  I have two children under five, like do I, I don't really have a right to be anything else
• 45:19
  other than an optimist, right?
• 45:20
  Yeah.
• 45:21
  I have to hope there's something out there for them.
• 45:24
  And here's something, I find the idea of the future of food.
• 45:28
  So let's take that question that you've just asked me in terms of what's the technology
• 45:31
  going to be like in 50 years and let's think, what's the food we're eating going to look
• 45:35
  like in 50 years?
• 45:37
  There are some real advances in food that I'm really excited by, which might sound really
• 45:45
  weird, but I love food.
• 45:46
  No, I'm excited by them as well.
• 45:47
  I mean, I will, I will go out on a limb and has it a guess that in 50 years, it will
• 45:53
  not be considered, and this is a cultural prognostication as much as a technological one,
• 46:00
  it will be considered barbaric to be eating the flesh of animals who were able to suffer
• 46:04
  and who were raised in ways that had no regard for their suffering, and that the technological
• 46:11
  revolution that's taking place in terms of what they're calling clean meat or lab-grown
• 46:16
  meat where you can grow actual animal flesh, not fake, you know, not vegetables that
• 46:22
  are compiled to seem like a burger, but actual animal flesh without a brain that that's
• 46:28
  going to become the norm.
• 46:31
  I agree a thousand percent because it's already happening.
• 46:36
  I think that's actually going to be in the next 15 years, 20 years.
• 46:41
  There's some people that have, like Jim Mellon, there's Chapsden, some extrapolations for
• 46:45
  Australia, and it's not just meat though, so it's meat, it's milk, it's leather, and
• 46:51
  it's silk, so anything that kind of comes from an animal as an animal product that can
• 46:56
  then be turned into something that microbes make in a vat, palm oil was one that I was
• 47:02
  reading about yesterday, so there's a company in the states that's actually managed to
• 47:06
  start creating palm oil, so all of that deforestation in Indonesia and all the destruction of the
• 47:10
  orangutans habitats, we don't need it anymore because we can make palm oil in the lab.
• 47:15
  So it's not just even about sentient animals and how we slaughter animals, it's also about
• 47:19
  the environmental impact of our current methods of agriculture, but Jim Mellon went so
• 47:24
  far as to say that, you know, in Australia, we will have no large dairy herds and we
• 47:29
  will have no large beef cattle herds in the next decade.
• 47:34
  Well that's not true, that can't be true.
• 47:36
  Well it's interesting because you've got to look at the invisible hands of economics,
• 47:39
  Josh.
• 47:40
  But I've just been technologically speaking, I mean everyone I talk to and clean meat
• 47:44
  says we're getting pretty good at chicken nuggets and ground beef, minced meat, it's
• 47:50
  going to be a while before we can, it's going to be a long time, before we can artificially
• 47:54
  recreate the mouth feel and the structure and the sinew of a steak.
• 48:00
  Steak is the apex of all the meats, right?
• 48:02
  So the majority of human beings on this planet, even those that eat meat, will never eat
• 48:07
  a filet mignon in Paris.
• 48:09
  No, but Aussies regard that as being a backbone of our diet and that's what all of those beef
• 48:13
  cattle are doing.
• 48:14
  Yeah, the no, no, most of our beef cattle are exported.
• 48:17
  Yeah, I know, but it's right, but so that's what I'm saying to these large beef cattle
• 48:21
  herds, they're not actually eaten by Australians, we're only 25 million people.
• 48:25
  Yeah, and I understand that it's an export market, but what I'm saying is, are you
• 48:29
  saying that we'll still be raising cattle for our own consumption?
• 48:32
  I think there will be a dichotomy in the industries where we'll have these, you know, the
• 48:36
  Aberdeen Angus grown on grass fared in, you know, central west Queensland will become
• 48:40
  sort of the steak that you have as an Australian.
• 48:44
  Right.
• 48:44
  We'll have like that, you know, really high quality Australia is known as the Delhi
• 48:48
  counter of South, Southeast Asia and Asia and APAC, we are not the bread basket.
• 48:53
  We are the Delhi counter.
• 48:55
  Yeah.
• 48:55
  So I think we'll push it as with as this thing scales, we will push into that luxury
• 48:59
  market for those that still want those grass fed Australian beef cattle steaks.
• 49:04
  Yes.
• 49:04
  And it's going to be a long time before those can be replicated in the lab.
• 49:08
  Well, you say that they're going for it.
• 49:10
  So let's see.
• 49:11
  Hey, one day when they still have them, right, because I don't really eat meat.
• 49:14
  So one day when they have them, let's you and I go for a steak and Sydney when they
• 49:17
  have these lab grown steaks and I will blind test, I will blind taste.
• 49:21
  I honestly think that we'll both be dead by the time that the time to be true.
• 49:26
  You know, the thing that's actually holding it back is actually the regulators, Josh.
• 49:29
  So we've got in Singapore.
• 49:31
  We're already there serving that chicken at 1880, that posh restaurant in Singapore.
• 49:35
  Right.
• 49:35
  These railies have a chicken restaurant already that's up and running with their chicken
• 49:40
  manufactured me as they call it.
• 49:41
  They're trying to get away from the phrase lab grown to manufactured.
• 49:44
  Right.
• 49:44
  Manufactured manufactured milk.
• 49:47
  Can you imagine if you don't need dairy cattle, you just have manufactured milk?
• 49:51
  Well, yeah, I mean, surely, surely in 50 years, we're going to, you know, at my
• 49:55
  children's, our children's children are going to say, you mean they used to get milk
• 49:58
  by literally just having a cow and they would just like squeeze the cows out.
• 50:03
  Doesn't work.
• 50:04
  The milk out.
• 50:05
  That's so gross.
• 50:06
  Yeah.
• 50:07
  It is, isn't it?
• 50:08
  It's, it's, it's weird construct, but that's already kind of, that's already kind
• 50:12
  of happening because the push for veganism, especially in the face of climate change,
• 50:16
  the push for alternative ways of getting protein.
• 50:19
  And also we've got another two billion mouths to feed before you and I pop off the
• 50:23
  mortal coil.
• 50:24
  It's like, how are we going to do that when we can't keep fishing the way we're
• 50:27
  fishing? We can't keep aquaculture.
• 50:29
  We can't keep farming the way we just have to find new ways.
• 50:32
  So even if it doesn't kill off the traditional methodology, even if it actually
• 50:36
  just allows us to have alternatives to that traditional methodology, if I was poor
• 50:41
  McCartney, I would be throwing so much money at this.
• 50:44
  Like, you know, they put so much money into the Linda McCartney brand of this idea
• 50:47
  of vegetarian sausage rolls, which I'd say are really nice.
• 50:50
  I do love my Linda McCartney sausage rolls, but the idea that, you know,
• 50:54
  you could actually have people who are these big multi billion, you know,
• 50:57
  really rich people that are like, you know, vegans and vegetarians throw their
• 51:02
  money at manufactured meat and milk.
• 51:04
  And that would be doing everything they want to achieve politically.
• 51:07
  It's so interesting.
• 51:08
  It's the regulators.
• 51:09
  So the FDA in the US are just starting to approve it.
• 51:12
  The Europeans are getting a bit itchy and getting ready to approve it.
• 51:16
  And that you'll find that this thing like with all things, there's a cascade
• 51:19
  effect as soon as someone like the FDA approves it, then there's pretty much
• 51:23
  pressure on all of the other regulators, including Australia to go, well,
• 51:27
  hang on a second, if the FDA's approved it, why are we not?
• 51:30
  Well, but I mean, also you were talking at the beginning of the conversation
• 51:33
  about the misinformation from big oil companies about climate change over
• 51:37
  the past few decades, just wait until you get a load of the misinformation
• 51:40
  campaigns run by big agricultural companies against clean meat about
• 51:44
  franken foods and how we don't know what the long term consequences of eating
• 51:47
  this stuff are and so on and so forth.
• 51:50
  It's interesting because if I was these big, if I was a milk producer or a meat
• 51:54
  producer right now, I'd be investing in this because I would then split my brand.
• 51:59
  Yeah, I would then I would then say, here's our we care about the future.
• 52:03
  And we want to investigate these technologies and maintain the quality
• 52:06
  of our industry by by looking at these technologies and actually looking at
• 52:10
  how this is good for our industry and good for Australia and good for
• 52:13
  everything that we produce.
• 52:15
  And we also have our traditional methods and our farms that we support in
• 52:19
  all of these other ways.
• 52:20
  I would be I would be diversifying my portfolio.
• 52:23
  I wouldn't be fighting against it.
• 52:24
  Yeah, what does that mean for a country like Australia where our backbone is,
• 52:29
  you know, one of our major export industries, as you said, is is agriculture is
• 52:33
  meat. If we're only then providing boutique steaks to people in fancy
• 52:38
  restaurants in Asia, that's not going to provide the same amount of revenue as
• 52:41
  we currently get from from beef.
• 52:45
  Well, that's correct.
• 52:46
  But you've also got to look at who owns the beef farms and who's making the money
• 52:49
  off the beef farms.
• 52:52
  Who is making the money off the beef farm?
• 52:53
  Well, it doesn't doesn't tar gene around quite a few in partnership with foreign
• 52:59
  nationals.
• 52:59
  She's a she's our richest mining magnet in Australia.
• 53:02
  Yeah, I'm sure she's bought up a lot of cattle cattle land.
• 53:07
  Yes.
• 53:08
  Yeah, but I just think what do you think of her?
• 53:10
  That's an Australian company employing Australian people to do Australian.
• 53:14
  They're not though.
• 53:14
  You see, and this is the mythology of it, I think, and that it's not.
• 53:19
  It's not going to affect what part of that is wrong.
• 53:22
  I think that if you were sitting in an agricultural economy right now,
• 53:25
  there are so many ways in which you could diversify your income streams to
• 53:28
  drought, prove yourself and flood proof yourself and do lots of different ways
• 53:32
  in which there's going to be money, for example, around carbon farming.
• 53:35
  Australians are already carbon farming.
• 53:37
  We're paying our farmers to sequester carbon already, rewilding,
• 53:42
  looking at getting people out into nature, working with indigenous Australians
• 53:48
  to rewild and protect the areas that we have.
• 53:51
  And I think that large scale beef cattle farms, they may be a thing of the past
• 53:55
  in 10 years time.
• 53:57
  But we, the thing is Josh.
• 53:59
  We all have that very worthy, but that doesn't pay the rent.
• 54:03
  And when everything is, oh, it does a few diversify your income streams.
• 54:06
  This is a red flag.
• 54:07
  This is not saying these are definitely going to happen.
• 54:09
  But the idea is look to see what the opportunities are in some of these future
• 54:13
  technologies and look to see what some of the red flags are of some of these
• 54:17
  future technologies.
• 54:18
  And don't just walk blindly with your fingers and your ears singing along,
• 54:21
  ignoring them.
• 54:22
  Look at them and say, okay, we want to be a farm of the future.
• 54:26
  We want to get involved in permaculture.
• 54:28
  We want to get involved in horticulture.
• 54:30
  We want to look at diversifying our income streams.
• 54:33
  And the thing is if you look at every single country in the world that's had
• 54:37
  some kind of major agricultural history to it, that history has always changed.
• 54:42
  And this is where people don't like it and they're scared of the future.
• 54:45
  And they're like, stop having a go at everybody.
• 54:46
  And I'm like, I'm not having a go.
• 54:48
  And this is the point.
• 54:49
  This is why I even wrote the book I wrote because if people are aware of the
• 54:53
  opportunities that these new technologies can bring,
• 54:56
  then then work on those opportunities.
• 54:59
  Don't try and fight them because the invisible hands of economics will
• 55:02
  disrupt you because we work in a global society now.
• 55:05
  And you will be competing against people that you'll never meet.
• 55:10
  And so you have to get yourself ready to prepare for global disruption.
• 55:15
  I mean, you know, we banned live animal export in the UK 30 years ago.
• 55:21
  Yeah, yeah, still have an agricultural economy.
• 55:24
  Yeah.
• 55:25
  Well, partly we do not the size of the country.
• 55:30
  I mean, come on, it's not even the size of fricking Victoria.
• 55:33
  Half a quaint.
• 55:34
  It's not over the size of Victoria.
• 55:35
  It's tiny.
• 55:36
  Yeah, no, but I mean, it's financial services are a much bigger export
• 55:40
  in the UK than they are here.
• 55:42
  I've got friends that are beef cattle farmers in in Devon with beautiful
• 55:45
  Aberdeen Angus cattle on their farm there.
• 55:48
  And, you know, they're beautiful, beautiful cows.
• 55:51
  They're wonderful, wonderful life.
• 55:53
  And, you know, they are doing very well.
• 55:55
  And I mean, I understand your point that it's about managing the transition
• 55:59
  rather than opposing the transition.
• 56:00
  I'm just making the point that that transition does have to be managed.
• 56:03
  And we can't just say, oh, well, it's going to be great when there's no more,
• 56:06
  you know, when people are no longer eating cheap beef across Asia,
• 56:10
  that'll be great for the cows.
• 56:11
  And it might be great for people's health.
• 56:14
  And it might be great for the future technologies and the companies that own
• 56:18
  the IP on how to create lab-grown meat.
• 56:21
  But there will be losers and those, you know, those losers have to wake up now
• 56:26
  and realise what's coming.
• 56:29
  Because if you said to the current to current farmers in Australia
• 56:32
  that in 10 years time farming is going to be the same proportion of Australia's exports
• 56:38
  as it is of the UK's exports, they would regard that as being an Armageddon
• 56:43
  situation, which has to be managed.
• 56:45
  It's something that people need to take seriously.
• 56:48
  I mean, if I said a company named to you that you will hopefully recognise,
• 56:52
  though, I bet you anyone who was born, like, you know, in the late 90s and afterwards
• 56:56
  might not even know this.
• 56:58
  Kodak.
• 56:59
  Yes, of course.
• 57:01
  You know the name Kodak.
• 57:02
  Yep.
• 57:03
  So what did Kodak do?
• 57:04
  They produced cameras and film.
• 57:07
  And that was their problem because they didn't produce cameras and film.
• 57:11
  Their business was in the business of memories.
• 57:14
  And so when one of their employees developed the very, very first digital camera in 1977,
• 57:22
  two years before I was born and he was laughed out of the boardroom because they said no
• 57:27
  one's going to care about digital imagery, that won't increase our paper sales.
• 57:32
  Where's Kodak now?
• 57:33
  Yeah, I mean, do they even exist or are they all digital?
• 57:37
  They do still exist and if you go to specialist photography shops, they still have their film
• 57:41
  and their paper and you can still get their disposable cameras and their kids' cameras.
• 57:46
  But you see, if you look at your smart device, Kodak were the best at this.
• 57:50
  They were the first to develop a digital camera.
• 57:54
  And on every single smart device we have, it should have a Kodak camera on it, but we
• 57:58
  don't.
• 57:59
  Why?
• 58:01
  Because they refused to see the changes coming.
• 58:04
  They refused to, but they also forgot what it was that they did as their business.
• 58:08
  Their revenue was generated by paper sales.
• 58:10
  Their revenue was generated by camera film, but their business was their business of
• 58:15
  their community, their people that bought their products was memories.
• 58:20
  Yeah.
• 58:21
  It was all about memories.
• 58:22
  So if you translate this now to things like the Metaverse, the Metaverse is about communities.
• 58:27
  It's not about technology.
• 58:29
  And so every single industry is up and ripe for disruption and up and ripe for disruption
• 58:34
  and a scale and a speed that we've never experienced before.
• 58:38
  And you know, this isn't put the, the EBGBs into people, but it's to go, wait, can we
• 58:43
  just wake up, please?
• 58:44
  Yeah.
• 58:45
  Like, if we, if we don't leave this, we will only ever be a fast follower or a slightly
• 58:49
  slower follower.
• 58:50
  And that is not going to an economy build.
• 58:54
  Let's talk about, and by the way, just looking at agriculture, because I've never picked
• 58:59
  my interest about UK agriculture, it's about a half a percent of UK GDP is agriculture.
• 59:04
  And it's about 3 percent of Australia's GDP.
• 59:05
  So about six times as important to Australia as it is to the, to the UK still, that's
• 59:10
  still smaller than I would have expected.
• 59:12
  Three percent.
• 59:13
  What's the dollar figures though?
• 59:14
  GDP is a bit of a misnomer for me because they're three times our population.
• 59:19
  No, but as a, as a proportion of GDP.
• 59:21
  Yeah, yeah.
• 59:22
  So they're three times our population.
• 59:24
  So that's gross domestic product by the population, right?
• 59:26
  So what's the actual dollar value or the sterling value of the industry?
• 59:30
  No, I think it's a just, I think it's a, I don't think it's, I like it's, it's adjusted
• 59:33
  for that because the, as, as a fraction of GDP is going to be the same regardless of
• 59:37
  the population, right?
• 59:38
  Yes, I think I need to just do a bit of homework on this to give you some notes for the,
• 59:44
  for the program.
• 59:45
  I think so.
• 59:46
  I think so.
• 59:47
  So I think in 2021, agriculture's contribution to the UK economy was 11.2 million pounds
• 59:52
  or 0.51 percent of GDP, so 11.2 million quid, that's right.
• 1:00:08
  And then GDP distribution across economics sectors in Australia is, it doesn't have an
• 1:00:16
  absolute, but the absolute value shouldn't matter.
• 1:00:19
  So that's why you do GDP and a proportion of GDP because, yes and no, because our GDP
• 1:00:24
  outwe, our population to GDP, Josh, it just throws the statistics because you're using
• 1:00:28
  smoothing, lies down lies and statistics, okay?
• 1:00:31
  So Australia's total agricultural exports, including crops and livestock were valued
• 1:00:35
  at an estimated 66.6 billion Australian dollars in 2022.
• 1:00:43
  So you can take your 20 million and compare it to 66.6 billion and that sounds a lot
• 1:00:48
  different to 0.5 to 3 percent GDP, doesn't it?
• 1:00:51
  Well, yes, but it works in my favour as, as proving that Australia is more aligned on
• 1:00:55
  it.
• 1:00:56
  No, isn't it huge for Australia?
• 1:00:57
  Yeah.
• 1:00:58
  I mean, either way.
• 1:00:59
  I, I, I, I, can you imagine now, if we're the world leaders in manufactured milk, we're
• 1:01:04
  the world leaders in manufactured chicken and we're the world leaders in manufactured fish,
• 1:01:09
  fish is massively important for the Pacific.
• 1:01:12
  So imagine that we could actually grow our exports through manufacturing these products,
• 1:01:17
  huge opportunities.
• 1:01:18
  We've already got the supply chains.
• 1:01:19
  We've already got the contracts.
• 1:01:20
  We've already got the clients.
• 1:01:21
  We've already got the markets.
• 1:01:23
  One of the other things that people who are, you know, very obsessed with how whizz-bang
• 1:01:28
  the future is going to be, especially in Silicon Valley, obsessed about apart from artificial
• 1:01:33
  intelligence, if we touched on the future of clean meat, which we've touched on, is health
• 1:01:39
  and aging and longevity.
• 1:01:40
  Like, there are a lot of people who see, and this kind of relates to artificial intelligence
• 1:01:44
  because you also get these, well, I don't want to call them crackpots, but, you know,
• 1:01:48
  some people regard them as crackpots like Ray Kurzweil who feel like fairly imminently computers
• 1:01:53
  will be sufficiently sophisticated that we'll be able to upload our consciousnesses into
• 1:01:57
  Silicon-based life forms and we will still have the, the qualia, the sense of me, the actual
• 1:02:03
  sensation of being alive, the sense of what it's like to be me, even if I were existing
• 1:02:07
  inside a computer, which I think is, the jury is completely still out on in a way that
• 1:02:13
  many people in Silicon Valley don't seem to appreciate.
• 1:02:15
  But nonetheless, how do you feel about this growing trend that we should imminently be
• 1:02:20
  able to live to 120, 150, 200 years old, that there's nothing necessarily inevitable about
• 1:02:28
  aging, that that aging is a disease and like all diseases, we can treat it and start swapping
• 1:02:33
  out things in our systems that are decaying in order to live much, much longer than we
• 1:02:38
  currently do.
• 1:02:39
  Will that happen?
• 1:02:40
  Okay.
• 1:02:41
  So there's a few things.
• 1:02:42
  So one is, I've recently been listening to, and I hope it doesn't kick in here we go,
• 1:02:46
  because I've just had to find it on my audible lifespan by David Sinclair, have you read
• 1:02:51
  that?
• 1:02:52
  I have read it.
• 1:02:53
  And I've spoken to David.
• 1:02:54
  He's an Aussie who's probably the world's leading proper legit non-crackpot expert
• 1:02:58
  on life extension, he works at one of the big ivy leagues in the US, Princeton or Harvard
• 1:03:03
  isn't he?
• 1:03:04
  I think.
• 1:03:05
  We're looking, because I'm connected to the ex-price.
• 1:03:07
  So Peter D. Amanda is talking with him about looking at an aging ex-price, anti-aging ex-price.
• 1:03:16
  And so there is a lot of work that's been happening for a long time looking at this.
• 1:03:20
  And I think that when we look at the fact that we've got a growing population and an aging
• 1:03:25
  population, it's not about necessarily extending the years, but the way I really liked how David
• 1:03:31
  framed it was that aging is a disease.
• 1:03:33
  And if we could see aging as a disease, how would we treat that disease?
• 1:03:37
  And one of the things that's thrown me, you know, with this whole Chris Hemsworth on
• 1:03:40
  Discovery Channel, not Discovery, let me start that again.
• 1:03:44
  One of the things that's thrown me with this Chris Hemsworth thing on Disney Channel
• 1:03:48
  where he's got that limitless program where they found that he had a genetic predisposition
• 1:03:53
  that was greater than the general population to have Alzheimer's disease.
• 1:03:56
  Yeah.
• 1:03:57
  And so they started, oh God, I'm going to get emotional.
• 1:04:00
  They started showing him pictures of what his wife would look like if she was old, so
• 1:04:04
  that if he does get Alzheimer's when he's old, he will remember having seen those pictures
• 1:04:09
  when he's young, so he will know what his wife looks like.
• 1:04:13
  Oh my goodness.
• 1:04:14
  Oh my God.
• 1:04:16
  And my uncle just died last week of dementia and it robbed him of his dignity.
• 1:04:21
  It robbed him of his thought.
• 1:04:23
  It robbed him of his relationships and he's suffered for the last five years.
• 1:04:30
  And in the end, he died after they called an ambulance to help and there was 12 hour
• 1:04:34
  delay on the ambulance in the UK and he died.
• 1:04:37
  And how do you feel about the whole, I haven't seen the Chris Hemsworth thing, but you
• 1:04:42
  mentioned lies, damned lies and statistics.
• 1:04:44
  I mean, I find there's something a little bit macabre and hysterical about that stunt
• 1:04:51
  with Chris Hemsworth because your odds of getting Alzheimer's, your general odds of getting
• 1:04:56
  Alzheimer's prior to say the age of 80 are fairly low.
• 1:05:02
  And to have the gene increases them by some amount, but I think it's an amount of something
• 1:05:07
  like 17% over the baseline or something like that.
• 1:05:10
  So your absolute risk is still, it's still much, much, much, much, much, much, much
• 1:05:16
  likelier that Chris Hemsworth won't get Alzheimer's than that he will.
• 1:05:20
  Oh, absolutely.
• 1:05:21
  I agree with you Josh and it's all click bait and it's all designed to make us watch
• 1:05:25
  the show and I haven't managed to spend much time watching the show.
• 1:05:29
  And I found that I found the, that it was very, what I've got, the macabre is such a
• 1:05:33
  great way to describe it, anything around, you know, death.
• 1:05:37
  But we, one of the things I did take away from it was that we do forget sometimes about
• 1:05:43
  the health of our brains.
• 1:05:44
  We're obsessed with what our bodies look like and we don't really talk about our brain
• 1:05:49
  health.
• 1:05:50
  And this is where, you know, people like wonderful David and the work of the ex prize
• 1:05:54
  and lots of, lots of people are looking at the fact that, you know, people have been
• 1:05:59
  laughed out in the past of saying, you know, there's a link between your gut and your brain
• 1:06:02
  except now we know that most of our serotonin is made in our gut that directly affects
• 1:06:07
  our brain, you know, that expression, trust your gut, you know, it's from old English.
• 1:06:11
  Now backed up by science.
• 1:06:14
  And part of me is like, look, if this is given one person an idea that, an idea of, I need
• 1:06:20
  to think about protecting my brain better.
• 1:06:22
  For me, it's almost like a public health message.
• 1:06:24
  Yes, it's obviously click baity.
• 1:06:26
  Yes, it's obviously trying to get people to watch a TV show, but this is actually also
• 1:06:30
  his real life.
• 1:06:31
  And I don't want any kind of predisposition to any kind of neurodegenerative disease increased
• 1:06:36
  by even one percent, let alone eight to ten percent.
• 1:06:39
  I mean, isn't this part of the problem with the whole longevity mission?
• 1:06:43
  And I'm excluding David Sinclair from this because he is very rigorous about his science.
• 1:06:47
  But there's a whole, there is a whole movement of people of futurists who feel like, like
• 1:06:53
  Aubrey DeGrey, you know, who has a, do you know, Aubrey?
• 1:06:57
  Do you know, Aubrey?
• 1:06:58
  I do.
• 1:06:59
  Yeah.
• 1:07:00
  So he's a wild head shaggy Englishman who lives in California and heads a longevity
• 1:07:09
  startup that I think was acquired by Google as part of their moonshot program.
• 1:07:14
  And, you know, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on fixing the body and how like our
• 1:07:21
  human systems can really sort of be treated like a car in a way and you can swap bits out
• 1:07:27
  and you can keep prolonging them indefinitely until you get to the next phase of research
• 1:07:31
  at which you know more than you did earlier and you could kind of just keep a head of the
• 1:07:37
  advancing needle of technology so that you're always just ahead of death.
• 1:07:45
  I mean, my dad has Alzheimer's as well.
• 1:07:47
  He's, he's not bad, bad yet.
• 1:07:48
  He's still living at home with, with my mum.
• 1:07:51
  And he has a pacemaker.
• 1:07:53
  So his body is in great shape and he was always fit and he's in good weight.
• 1:08:00
  He's in a good, a good weight.
• 1:08:02
  But you, one does note the difference in modern medicine's emphasis on keeping the body well
• 1:08:10
  and it's understanding of how to keep the mind well.
• 1:08:14
  And, you know, what are we gaining by sustaining the body for as long as we possibly can?
• 1:08:21
  If it fails to deteriorate at the same rate that the brain does.
• 1:08:25
  Who wants the additional 50 years at that point?
• 1:08:30
  Well, it's like a right back in my book.
• 1:08:32
  There's no point in is all living to a hundred if the last 20 years of it, we're basically just
• 1:08:36
  suffering right in a, in a, in a home, like, absolutely no way.
• 1:08:42
  Am I signing up for that?
• 1:08:44
  Yeah.
• 1:08:44
  No way.
• 1:08:45
  And, and this is, this is the big thing.
• 1:08:47
  Like they literally just discovered a brand new part of the brain that we didn't know existed.
• 1:08:51
  Just, I read it in a paper yesterday, brand new structure of the brain that's just been discovered.
• 1:08:56
  Look, I mean, Minski, one of the first people that worked on cybernetics.
• 1:08:59
  And I suppose you'd call him a futurist.
• 1:09:00
  He's been deep frozen since he passed away a couple of decades ago.
• 1:09:03
  Everyone talks about freezing so they can be brought back.
• 1:09:06
  People talk about the singularity.
• 1:09:08
  It's still 50 years away.
• 1:09:11
  Would we still be human if we were uploaded to a machine?
• 1:09:15
  Let's just take a look at social media.
• 1:09:17
  Would you say that you are yourself anyway on social media?
• 1:09:21
  Are you using filters or are you using clips of what it is that you are?
• 1:09:25
  And the idea of the singularity is that, you know, you become part of this super consciousness.
• 1:09:29
  And what could that possibly achieve?
• 1:09:31
  You know, in terms of let's all work together to solve the world's problems.
• 1:09:34
  And I'm thinking, have you ever actually met another human being?
• 1:09:38
  Let alone been trapped in a room with them or stuck in a lift with them for more than half an hour.
• 1:09:43
  And have you ever seen how humans collaborate in a free-for-all?
• 1:09:46
  I mean, have you ever seen a mob?
• 1:09:47
  Have you ever been on Twitter?
• 1:09:49
  Like, have you ever seen what actually happens when people, original metaverse?
• 1:09:52
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:09:53
  When people are completely free to bump into each other in an unfettered way, it's not pretty.
• 1:09:59
  And it's all a bit utopian, isn't it?
• 1:10:01
  It's all a bit, this is going to be perfect.
• 1:10:04
  No, it's not.
• 1:10:04
  Someone's going to make money off it as well.
• 1:10:06
  And the thing is a lot of people don't even realize there's already a digital twin of them somewhere
• 1:10:10
  in a computer in a data and a automation company, probably in Colorado or something,
• 1:10:14
  where they're building a digital twin of you and your life choices.
• 1:10:17
  And they're selling that to various companies to try and market things.
• 1:10:21
  The fact that we're at all doing that.
• 1:10:22
  I mean, a lot of people, I mean, this is a separate question to whether you can upload your consciousness
• 1:10:27
  to a computer or something in the future.
• 1:10:29
  What you're talking about is the aggregation of all the data that is essentially the exhaust
• 1:10:33
  fumes of what you're doing online, which are getting picked up and collected by companies
• 1:10:38
  that know that they can compile a bunch of information about person, the 372,643,922 named
• 1:10:46
  Catherine and that they can therefore make predictions about what you might want or
• 1:10:51
  need or what can be sold to you.
• 1:10:54
  Where is that going?
• 1:10:57
  Is that actually going to affect my life?
• 1:10:58
  I think most of us have responded with a resigned shrug to the questions of data privacy.
• 1:11:04
  Well, I mean, this is it.
• 1:11:05
  We don't even own our own data in Australia.
• 1:11:07
  The only country that really got that done was Estonia.
• 1:11:11
  The idea that, you know, you think, therefore, you are or you shop.
• 1:11:15
  I remember it was at John Lewis or somewhere in the UK.
• 1:11:17
  I shop there for I am.
• 1:11:18
  It was itself, which is a car, but I was just like, oh my God.
• 1:11:22
  But we really are the sums of our choices and our actions speak louder than our words.
• 1:11:26
  And people can start making, you know, building jigsaw puzzles of you digitally around all
• 1:11:32
  of your choices and how you interact with people and all of your relationships.
• 1:11:36
  The thing that a lot of people forget about digital twins is that they don't take you
• 1:11:39
  in isolation.
• 1:11:40
  They actually take you and your entire family and all your second degree connections.
• 1:11:44
  And so we are already being put together in one great, big mass around our own personal
• 1:11:50
  relationships.
• 1:11:51
  There's that old adage, isn't it?
• 1:11:52
  You know, you're the, you're the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with,
• 1:11:56
  which basically means I'm a raging toddler at the moment.
• 1:11:59
  But the idea that digitally we'll have those kinds of footprints, social capital really bothers
• 1:12:05
  me.
• 1:12:06
  The idea that we'd be judged and be given things or have rights taken away from us depending
• 1:12:10
  upon how we behaved on social media, some of the things that scares me about some of
• 1:12:15
  the other jurisdictions in the world, like, I think in Saudi at the moment, they've been
• 1:12:18
  putting people in prison for 34 years for tweeting or retweeting things.
• 1:12:24
  And, you know, don't get me starting.
• 1:12:27
  But human rights and digital rights and, you know, this is where Ed Santel's always good
• 1:12:31
  for a chat around these things.
• 1:12:32
  We haven't got it right, Josh.
• 1:12:33
  And unfortunately, these things are scaling and it's going to directly affect our children.
• 1:12:37
  And these are kinds of difficult conversations that we're probably not even literate enough
• 1:12:41
  to have with people like MPs who should be putting in protections for us.
• 1:12:46
  And it's almost like we sit here just responding to things that are happening to us rather
• 1:12:50
  than actually saying, hang on a second, no, we don't want to be able to have this
• 1:12:53
  data shared.
• 1:12:54
  No, we don't want people to be able to access these things.
• 1:12:56
  But I don't know anybody who reads the T's and C's when they download the app they want
• 1:13:00
  to download to upload videos of dancing or face changing or we've slept walked into
• 1:13:07
  a surveillance capitalist society and we're quite happy to sell our identity to people
• 1:13:12
  for some reason.
• 1:13:13
  We wouldn't do it if someone walked up to us in the street with a clipboard and a pen
• 1:13:16
  and asked us questions, but we'll give it to the likes of the tech billionaires for free.
• 1:13:20
  Yeah.
• 1:13:21
  Or the Chinese Communist Party.
• 1:13:22
  That's the case maybe.
• 1:13:23
  Yeah.
• 1:13:24
  Exactly.
• 1:13:25
  What's the way out of that though?
• 1:13:26
  The layers.
• 1:13:27
  I mean, layers and layers.
• 1:13:28
  But if I want to, I mean, if I want to live in the modern world, then I sort of have
• 1:13:33
  to have, well, I don't have to, but I choose to engage with my, with culture, with contemporary
• 1:13:41
  culture in a way that requires that I have apps and I don't get to tweak the terms and
• 1:13:46
  conditions on those apps.
• 1:13:48
  It's a take it or leave it proposition.
• 1:13:50
  So I have to, what, essentially be a Luddite in order to not hand over my data.
• 1:13:55
  Well, for yourself, for example, you could have a whole separate phone and separate thing
• 1:14:00
  for your work identity and then that's all the things that you need to do.
• 1:14:04
  And then for your personal life, you could have nothing if you didn't want it.
• 1:14:08
  People are buying the dumb phones, the old Nokia phones of the 90s that we could probably
• 1:14:13
  all get out of the drawer and switch on and it would still have battery power, you know?
• 1:14:17
  I'd kind of love to.
• 1:14:18
  Yes, I'm jealous.
• 1:14:19
  I mean, I'm envious of the, the hoots of people who are willing to take that leap.
• 1:14:26
  It takes the speed.
• 1:14:27
  You know, there's people going off grid all the time and you know who the most, the most
• 1:14:30
  people I see going off grid are the billionaires, Josh.
• 1:14:33
  Yeah.
• 1:14:34
  Yeah.
• 1:14:35
  And sending the kids to, like they're sending their kids to Steiner Schools with no technology
• 1:14:39
  where they can just climb trees and embrace the grass.
• 1:14:42
  Yes.
• 1:14:43
  Now, what does that tell you?
• 1:14:44
  Yeah.
• 1:14:45
  What does that tell you?
• 1:14:46
  If they're the ones that have created it, drug dealer, a good drug dealer doesn't take
• 1:14:49
  their own drugs, right?
• 1:14:50
  Yeah.
• 1:14:51
  Yeah.
• 1:14:52
  Yeah.
• 1:14:53
  It's, it's really interesting.
• 1:14:54
  But it's also incredibly worrying.
• 1:14:55
  But this is also though.
• 1:14:56
  Well, this is where I look back as the optimist and I can't help it.
• 1:14:58
  The systems engineer optimist and me.
• 1:15:00
  So we talk about all of these ways in which identity is going to be managed and then we look
• 1:15:04
  at computer brain interfaces and we look at ways in which we're going to try, you know,
• 1:15:07
  bionically preserve the body and people are looking at computer brain interfaces.
• 1:15:12
  And, you know, Malbin was the first in the world to get into the human trials of the computer
• 1:15:16
  brain interface.
• 1:15:17
  And I think then a lot of tech billionaires wanted to then invest in that company.
• 1:15:21
  We beat the Silicon Valley crew to doing that because it was science, publicly funded science
• 1:15:26
  managed to get there first, who would have thought it, and anyone used Wi-Fi lately.
• 1:15:31
  And you know, we've got these opportunities to look at, okay, if somebody has got a
• 1:15:37
  major generative disease, how do we support them looking at how these things are going
• 1:15:41
  to be rather than, you know, the internet of bodies is going to take us into a gamified
• 1:15:45
  universe and metaverse and go, right, okay, how do we use this therapeutics for people?
• 1:15:49
  So that they know how to use their legs, that they know how to remember their wife's face,
• 1:15:53
  that they know how to do various things.
• 1:15:55
  And that for me is quite exciting.
• 1:15:57
  I was very sorry to see Alan McKisim, unfortunately, passed away.
• 1:16:03
  He was a godfather of the stem cell, you know, the stem cell to nerve cell technologies.
• 1:16:10
  He was former Australian in the year, you know, working on people with spinal cord injuries
• 1:16:14
  and helping people walk again.
• 1:16:17
  And you know, when we look at some of the convergent technologies around some of these medical
• 1:16:20
  treatments, they are coming out of what might seem to be the games industry or Silicon
• 1:16:25
  Valley or the tech industry or the aging industry.
• 1:16:28
  And I think that the biggest thing we can do is to try and encourage that convergence
• 1:16:34
  and that meeting of different kinds of industries to try and solve a problem.
• 1:16:38
  And the best way to do that is funding, right, and funding research and allowing scientists
• 1:16:42
  to take these technologies and test them rigorously to ensure that we can actually provide some
• 1:16:47
  decent health outcomes.
• 1:16:48
  You know, the world could go very dark, but the world could also go incredibly bright.
• 1:16:52
  We've got amazing technologies that are scaling right now that some of them don't even have
• 1:16:57
  business use cases that we just need to find for them.
• 1:17:00
  What's your general sense?
• 1:17:01
  I mean, you mentioned you're an optimist and you said it can go dark or it can go light.
• 1:17:05
  Like when our children, I say our children, not because you and I have had children together,
• 1:17:09
  but because we haven't had children roughly the same age, we're now little little lads
• 1:17:14
  and lasses, you know, are our age.
• 1:17:19
  I suppose what advice would you give them now for navigating that period of civilisation's
• 1:17:26
  future?
• 1:17:27
  One of the things I saw this week was really interesting is Finland are actually teaching
• 1:17:31
  school kids how to recognise fake news.
• 1:17:36
  So we've now got teachers in classrooms teaching pre-teen students to pick up the fakery
• 1:17:41
  on the internet because humans are actually quite good at sniffing out what's real and
• 1:17:45
  what's not.
• 1:17:46
  And you don't have to call yourself a cynic.
• 1:17:48
  Like we can tell the difference between a robot and a human pretty well.
• 1:17:52
  We know that deep fakes and audio fakes are going to get more sophisticated and there
• 1:17:56
  are people that are creating, you know, for example, with chat GPT, there are people
• 1:18:00
  that are creating algorithms to pick up if you've used a chatbot or not.
• 1:18:07
  And so I think the thing is to always teach people to be inquisitive and ask questions
• 1:18:12
  about where that information came from, where is the reference, where did that person
• 1:18:17
  get that inference and that reference.
• 1:18:19
  And to just try and allow people to be individuals and less part of the pack, I suppose, with
• 1:18:24
  our kids, it's like I talked to a lot of my friends who are primary school teachers.
• 1:18:27
  I worry because my children do have screen time.
• 1:18:30
  And they love some of the educational apps and we watch movies together, but we also read
• 1:18:35
  books.
• 1:18:36
  They're out playing in the dirt.
• 1:18:37
  They love kickable as we call football kickable.
• 1:18:40
  And frisbee's, we've just got into like, you know, proper long distance frisbee throwing,
• 1:18:45
  which I'm much better at than my five-year-old is, so he really runs a lot, which is great.
• 1:18:50
  And you know, swimming in the pool is the best thing ever.
• 1:18:52
  If you were to offer them the iPad or the pool, they will choose the pool over the iPad,
• 1:18:56
  you know.
• 1:18:57
  And so I think it's like with anything, just balance and, you know, offering new opportunities
• 1:19:04
  and just constantly keeping them hungry and just never just sticking to the one thing.
• 1:19:09
  To cut children off from technology is not necessarily going to be the way to teach them
• 1:19:16
  how to use something responsibly and to learn when to put it down and to learn the fact,
• 1:19:22
  you know, that that for me is a bigger key.
• 1:19:24
  Our kids, my gosh, when there are age, when there are age, the world is going to be such
• 1:19:30
  a different place.
• 1:19:32
  And I suppose, you know, what did my mum want to teach me when I was a kid growing up?
• 1:19:36
  You know, the world is a beautiful big place and there's, and now our kids are going to
• 1:19:41
  be generation Artemis, so they're going to be off planet.
• 1:19:44
  I mean, they're going to be at the moon, they're going to be looking at, even in their lifetime,
• 1:19:48
  they'll be having people go to Mars, like they'll have robot missions to Mars in our lifetime,
• 1:19:52
  but human missions to Mars will happen in their lifetime.
• 1:19:55
  Catherine, that's the subject for an entirely different podcast, but I thank you so much
• 1:20:00
  for enlightening us about this.
• 1:20:02
  It's wonderful to talk to you again and take care of the little ones.
• 1:20:06
  And hopefully their lives are full of joy and amazement as well as all of the crises
• 1:20:11
  that they're inevitably going to have to navigate.
• 1:20:13
  Thank you.
• 1:20:14
  I think once you find something that you love in the world, then it helps you weather
• 1:20:19
  those storms and things are dark.
• 1:20:21
  And so that's the biggest gift, I think I'll try and give them.
• 1:20:23
  But thank you so much for your time.
• 1:20:24
  I always love digging deep and pulling the layers off the onion with you, Josh, even
• 1:20:28
  if it makes me cry sometimes.
• 1:20:29
  Fantastic. Thanks, Catherine.