Latest / The You Project / #2241 New Addictions? - David Gillespie

Transcript

#2241 New Addictions? - David Gillespie · The You Project

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Oh, g'day, team. It's the You Project. David Gillespie is
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: back from sabbatical. He's been away. He's been on a
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: spiritual retreat in the Himalayas, 40 days and 40 nights,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: just honey and locusts, apparently. I don't know how you
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: get honey in the Himalayas, but apparently he did. Tiffany
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Ann Cook has just been... drinking booze and eating chocolate
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: and spending time with her bloke.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: Who even says Himalayas anyway? That's a weird one.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Some people do. You can say the Himalayas because you're
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: a bogan.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Tassie, bro, the Himalayas.
• 0:35
  Speaker 3: I would have gone Himalayas. I don't think I've ever
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: heard anyone say Himalayas. How did he even say that?
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: It's because he's a doctor now, David.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: Oh, right, I see.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you knew that.
• 0:46
  Speaker 3: No, I didn't know that.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Let's not get ahead of ourselves, the old folks. Fucking Himalayas.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: There we go. The mountains in Nepal. Shall we say that?
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you what. Have you been to Nepal, Tiff?
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Not Nepal, but I have been to the Himalayas, and
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: it was magic.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Or as we call them, the Himalayas. What about you,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Dr Gillespie? Have you been in the proximity of Nepal?
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: No, not in the slightest. I think the closest I've
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: ever been to that area of the world is probably Delhi.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Wow. And that ain't next door.
• 1:22
  Speaker 3: That's not next door, no.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: It's not next door. It's closer than Australia. Tiff, favourite
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: country you've ever been in 30 seconds? Gillespie, I'm going
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: to ask you the same favourite. No particular reason, but
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: what did you love about it, Tiff?
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: Ready?
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: I have to say India.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: I know you haven't been to all the countries.
• 1:39
  Speaker 4: No, I haven't been to a lot. I'm one of
• 1:42
  Speaker 4: those Southeast Asia people. I've been to a lot of
• 1:45
  Speaker 4: different places around there.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:48
  Speaker 4: You know, plenty of the world to still see, but
• 1:50
  Speaker 4: because of the context of the holiday, India was incredible,
• 1:56
  Speaker 4: the Himalayas and the Taj Mahal and a beautiful place.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Now, was that because of the geography and the culture
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: and the people or was it just because of the
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: experience you had there or something else?
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Twofold, I think.
• 2:10
  Speaker 4: The experience was literally life-changing.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: It was incredible. But the.
• 2:18
  Speaker 4: There's nothing like just I think I could have gone
• 2:22
  Speaker 4: there and stood on that mountain by myself and had
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: my mind cracked open. But also we had maybe a
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: two-day in Delhi kind of situation, not long, and we
• 2:35
  Speaker 4: made the three-hour drive to Taj Mahal, my friend and I.
• 2:40
  Speaker 4: And I was like, three hours drive for a building?
• 2:43
  Speaker 5: Really?
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: Like I've seen pictures of it.
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: Oh, okay.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: I can't believe a building.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: It's a little more than a building.
• 2:49
  Speaker 4: I know, but the thing was we got there and
• 2:52
  Speaker 4: it took my breath away and I was captivated and
• 2:55
  Speaker 4: it was magical and I don't even know why.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, that was very surprising.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: You should write a blog post called Three Hours in
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: a Car for a Building. That would be fucking, what,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: how far is it? It's just a building though, isn't it?
• 3:15
  Speaker 4: So we could just pop that in chat GPT and
• 3:17
  Speaker 4: tell him to put our photo like we've been.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: They'll be the same.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. No, where you live is just a building.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: I don't think the Taj Mahal is just a– what
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: about you, Gillespie? What's your favourite place that you've been
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: and why?
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: You know, it's going to sound like a cop-out, but
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: I really, really like the Sunshine Coast. You've got to
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: get out more, bro.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: Come on.
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: I have been out a lot.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, come back. Everyone, come back. Come back.
• 3:50
  Speaker 3: I've been out a lot, and everywhere I go, it's
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: not as good as that. Wowee.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: It's funny you say that. I do have a very.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Big soft spot for Mooloolaba. I love staying there.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: I love, yeah, I know.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: It's just I like running events there, not because we
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: get the most people there, but just because I like
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: we get a few people there. But, yeah, well, there
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: you go. For me it's Ireland, but only because of
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: the experience. But it is beautiful, but the experience I
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: had there. So, yeah, I guess it's less about, well,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: Probably with the sunny coast, it's more about the geography
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: and the climate than anything.
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: And the beaches.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: I've been to a lot of beaches in a lot
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: of places, and none of them are anywhere near as
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: good as the beaches you find at the Sunshine Coast.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: The best beach I've ever been to is in Vanuatu
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: on a tiny island called Espiritu Santo. It's just like heaven.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: there's absolutely no development there. So literally it's like stepping
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: back in time 1,000 years or 2,000. When I went,
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: there was no electricity. There was nothing. There were no
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: paved roads. There was no anything. It was just like
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: basically 1,000 years ago, but it was breathtakingly beautiful. Gillespie,
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: people have been– just stressed and anxious and hitting Tiff
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: and I up on the bloody Facebook page. Where's David?
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Where's Gillespie? One lady even went, like, she didn't want
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: to be rude. She went, oh, I'm really enjoying the
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: episodes lately, but where's David? Where's David?
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: Oh, no, he's jumped ship. He's on another podcast. Contract negotiations.
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: You know, we finally sorted it out.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're paying him double. Well, it's been a bit
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: of us and a little bit of you. Probably mainly us,
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: hasn't it?
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: Mostly you, really. You know, I'm pretty sure it was
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: mostly you. Yeah. I mean, I probably bailed once out
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: of the five or six times that you bailed, I'm thinking.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: Well, I think Dad selfishly died. I'm like, Dad just
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: selfishly died.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: So I'm like, oh. I'm not even counting that. I'm
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: not even counting that. That doesn't count. No, that's a
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: free pass. Okay.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: What have you been up to? We did talk about
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: before we went live, your prolific writing has become less
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: prolific because you don't have to stick your head on
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: this every week or two and talk about what you've
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: just written. And so I do feel somewhat guilty for
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: your audience that you haven't been compelled to put metaphoric
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: pen to paper.
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's strange. Had you asked me before whether it
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: would affect it, I would have said no, as if
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: I write for him. But it turns out I do.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: So we'll have to get back to doing this regularly.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: So you'd better get back to your bloody 1935 Typewriter
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: with a bung S and go back into the log
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: cabin out the back of, you know, Del Casa, bloody
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: Gillespie or whatever it is.
• 7:12
  Speaker 5: What?
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: What's taken your interest or your fancy or your breath
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: away lately?
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: Well, I'm finding it really, really interesting, and this is
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: kind of related to the thing we might talk about
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: a little bit today. I'm noticing in the news there's
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: a lot of talk, and I think there was a
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: study that came out maybe yesterday about– I think a
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: university of South Australia or some South Australian set of
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: researchers have discovered that, you know, it turns out the
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: behavioral addiction has exactly the same brain patterns, exactly the
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: same cravings patterns, exactly the same biochemistry as drug addiction,
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: which won't come as a shock to you because we've
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: spoken for a long time about exactly all this sort
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: of thing, but it's good to see the people who
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: are paid to research this stuff are finally getting to
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: that point because it's there the science has been there
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: for a good some time and it's good now that
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: that's getting to the point where people are writing about
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: it in mainstream newspapers because we still are in a
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: mode most of us uh where addiction is something that
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: happens to somebody else not our good selves because we're
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: not weak And it is seen as a weakness. It's
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: a character fault if you end up being addicted to something.
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: And it's good to see the science getting us past
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: that point.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Well, it's good to see the science catching up to you.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: I mean, let's be honest.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah. Well, that's not true. That's not true either.
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: I'm not doing any science. I'm just telling people what
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: the science already says. It's good to see more people
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: realising what the science says.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And so what you're saying with this is
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: behavioural addiction is, correct me if I'm wrong, producing the
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: same kind of biochemistry as a drug addiction or a
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: substance addiction is. So if somebody is, for example, addicted
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: to online spending when they really don't have the dough
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: to spend and they really don't need the things they're buying,
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: they just get that high or that fixed through spending,
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: we're seeing a similar neurochemical kind of response in the brain.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Is that right?
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah, or I guess more relevantly to a lot
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: of particularly parents is gaming. The thing that this study
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: actually looked at was the parallels between gaming and its
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: effect on the brain, gambling and its effect, and also drugs.
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: So what you're seeing is exactly the same thing. And
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: it's helpful to understand it that way because then it
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: helps understand. a lot of the other things that people see,
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: particularly in teenagers, which is when you start taking away
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: things that they are addicted to, they start reacting badly.
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: When you start seeing the effects of addiction, which is
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: anxiety and depression and suicide rates and all of that,
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: and can start... drawing that back to the things that
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: they are doing that are not the classic addictions. So,
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: you know, people would look at teenagers with all of
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: these classic effects of addiction that science has regarded as
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: absolutely related to addiction right from the get-go and say, yeah,
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: but my kid's not doing drugs, so that can't be
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: the reason that these things are happening. Or my kid's not,
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: you know, an alcoholic, so that's not the reason these
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: things are happening. What the science is saying is it
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: doesn't matter. You don't have to be ingesting a substance
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: to get this effect because this effect is caused by
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: dopamine in the human brain. And what pushes those dopamine
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: spikes are things intended to do that. And there are
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: a few things intended to do that that we've talked about,
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: such as social media, online gaming, gambling, et cetera. For
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: some reason, people are happy to accept that gambling does this.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: You don't have to inject anything to be addicted to gambling,
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: but they draw a line there and say, well, yes,
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: but that's different from, you know, porn or social media
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: or gaming. It's not different. And what the science is
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: now bringing out is it isn't different. the biochemistry is
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: identical the results are identical and it kind of makes
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: me think that we're trending towards a society of i
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: guess attack of the zombies for one or one of
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: a better word which is i don't know if you've
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: been out in public in the middle of the day
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: much lately greg i mean all the time.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: I was just out in public just i live on
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: a public street so i was out just Yes. How
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: many times have you encountered? If this is where you're going,
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: I nearly get run over 30 times a day by
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: someone staring at their phone who's walking towards me. And
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: one day, just because it was a dude, I just stopped.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: I didn't walk one way or the other. I just
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: stopped and he just walked right into me. He didn't
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: get hurt. I didn't get hurt. But he just literally
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: walked into me. I said, mate, you might want to
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: have a look where you're going. That's not a great app.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: But Yeah, it's on Hampton Street where I live. It's
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: out of control. Like every second or third person is walking,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: looking at their phone.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: But that's only the first stage. Ultimately, what this turns
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: into is psychotic episodes. So you push this biochemistry fast
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: enough and hard enough and you create psychotic episodes. And
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: what you'll find if you are out and about in
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: town in the middle of the day or on public transport,
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: places where people wander around a bit, you are going
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: to encounter psychotic People talking to themselves and who aren't
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: on their phones, who are having arguments with people just
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: out of the blue, who are behaving oddly and aggressively
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: in public. And I'm noticing it a lot more, a
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: lot more if you just wander around the streets of
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: a city, much more than you or anyone else would
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: have noticed as they were growing up. And what that is,
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: is a symptom of two things. Firstly, the massive increase
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: in addiction in the population, which drives anxiety, depression and
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: psychosis because of the biochemistry involved in the addictive mechanism.
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: And also other issues around access to healthcare.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: I wonder, I just want to go back a tiny bit.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: if we're thinking about some of the addictions like gaming,
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you saw this two or three
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: weeks ago, either of you, on the news. They were
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: talking about a shortage of air traffic controllers in Australia
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: and they were looking at recruiting gamers. Did you see
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: any of that?
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: I didn't see it, no.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: Tiff, can you have a look at that? Can you
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: do shortage of air traffic controllers recruiting gamers or whatever
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: they say, people who had already been... I don't know,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: I guess playing those games that are somewhat simulating, there
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: could be an upside. But the other thing I was
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: going to ask you while Tiff looks for that is,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: what's the newest addiction?
• 14:45
  Speaker 5: Is it just phones? Is it all the social media stuff?
• 14:52
  Speaker 5: Or is there some emergent addiction that we're just discovering?
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: As far as I'm aware, there's nothing emergent. The brands
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: of the addictive apps change on a fairly frequent basis,
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: but the mechanisms stay the same. We haven't discovered a
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: new way yet to addict people, although I would say
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: one that's been flying under the radar is dating apps.
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: It generally hasn't been lumped in with addictive things. But
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: if you closely examine the mechanisms that they're using, they're
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: exactly the same. The bottomless scroll, the hunt for the new,
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: the algorithm that's feeding you things based on what it
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: knows you like mixed in with things it knows you
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: don't like. And this has the payoff, I guess, of
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: ultimately resulting in sex. So these are like social media apps,
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: but with the bonus of, you know, the reward being
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: greater than just, you know, seeing your favorite pictures. This
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: is probably one of the stronger addictive loops that are
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: starting to become prevalent. And as I said, has generally
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: flown under the radar. You don't hear people referring to
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: dating apps as potentially addictive. I think they're definitely in
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: the category. The big one, the one that the people
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: are always pinning at the moment is social media. I
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: don't know why online gaming gets a free pass. Anyone
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: who's had anything to do with a teenage boy knows
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: that online gaming has a massive effect on their ability
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: to function in society. And that's a direct result of
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: its addictive capabilities and the effects it's having on their brain.
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: But the one that gets the big spanking at the
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: moment is social media. Not because it shouldn't, it should,
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: because it's designed explicitly for addiction. People build all these
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: psychology-type narratives around it. I guess it makes it a
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: little bit more palatable. It's not that it's addictive. It's
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: that it has body image issues or the content is
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: destructive or harmful. And all of those things are true,
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: but that's not the real problem with social media. The
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: real problem with social media is the bottomless feed driven
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: by an algorithm. That's the problem, which is why I
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: thought the case that I wrote about a few weeks
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: ago now, which is the settlement with Meta. So Meta
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: owns Facebook.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Before you do that, let's just backtrack for one sec,
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: then we'll dive into that. Tiff, what did you find
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: for us?
• 17:31
  Speaker 4: I found in the US, the Federal Aviation Administration has
• 17:37
  Speaker 4: launched a campaign for video gamers and You know what's
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: really interesting is within three years, the earning potential is
• 17:47
  Speaker 4: more than $ 155, 000 US with no traditional four-year college degree required.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: And you can play real video games with real planes
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: and real humans. And real consequences. Yeah, 100%. So they're, well,
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: they're real consequences with gaming too, just Less fatal. And
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: so they are looking at recruiting people from the gaming space.
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: That's crazy. That's crazy. That is. Well, kids, there you go.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: Next time someone says, stop wasting your time, you say,
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: I'm in training. I'm becoming an air traffic controller.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: I've never played. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, mum, get out. I'm
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: going to earn 150 grand a year US, which is
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: 7 million Australian. Let's hope the defence forces doesn't start
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: recruiting soldiers from I was going to name some game.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: I know fuck all. What are those?
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: Call of Judy.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: Call of Judy?
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: She's all over it.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: How is Judy anyway? Who's that? Oh, that's Aunty Judy.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: She's calling us in for lunch. We call it the
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Call of Judy. All right, mate, tell us about– oh,
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: fucking hell. You just have to show up, Tiff, and
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: it's just here. I've missed this. I've missed this little buddy,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: this little trio of bullshit. Yeah. Gillespie loves it when
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: you're here too. When it's just me, he just gets
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: this little disappointment.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I just get very disappointed, very disappointed.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: Oh, it's just you, Craig.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: It's like, well, let's get it done. Yeah, that's right.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: It's just the psychology guy. The fucking guy who could
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: have done that in one day. Lesbo told us, everyone,
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: before we went live, he could do a psychology demonstration.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: in a day. It would only take that long because
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: he took breaks.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: With breaks, yeah.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: You probably, well, you definitely don't need one of those anyway.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: All right, tell us about Meta. What are they up to?
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: So Meta, they own Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, among others.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: Two of the probably biggest, most addictive, most destructive apps
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: on the planet in Facebook and Instagram. They got taken
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: to court in California, I think it was, by a
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: large number of attorneys general from various US states. And
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: this was kind of mimicking a piece of litigation from
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: the 90s where various attorneys generals from various US states
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: took the tobacco industry to court. And finally, to extract
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: from the tobacco industry and admission in the early 90s that, yes,
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: in fact, nicotine is addictive. I know that might sound
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: like a newsflash, but then no one had admitted it
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: up until then. No one had ever admitted it.
• 20:55
  Speaker 6: I remember, sorry, Gillespie, I remember ads, this is how
• 21:01
  Speaker 6: old I am, with doctors coming in to see patients
• 21:06
  Speaker 6: with a cigarette in their hand or their mouth.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: So like a doctor literally standing smiling. These were not
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: TV ads. These were newspaper ads or print ads. But
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: the doctor smiling, talking to the patient in the bed
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: who was also smiling while sucking on a dart. Yeah,
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: it was literally an ad.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: Well, no one was admitting anywhere under any circumstances that
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: there was anything addictive about smoking. It's just people really
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: liked doing it, I guess.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: They were just really good for relaxing, you know.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Good for stress and anxiety. Like it's a social thing.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Let's just light up buttercup and let's all smile at
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: each other.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: I mean, ironically, they are good for stress and anxiety
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: because they give you a dopamine hit. And since you
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: are low on dopamine, if you are an addict, it
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: will make you feel more normal if you have a cigarette.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: You heard it here first, everyone. If you're feeling a
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: bit flat, Gillespie, go and get some mulberry.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: Have a drink. Have a drink. Have a cigarette. You'll
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: feel better.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: I wonder what a cost-benefit analysis is between offsetting the
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: anxiety and how long does lung cancer take to develop?
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: Maybe if you take up smoking at about 60, you're safe, Tiff.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: I might start.
• 22:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you could be N equals one, Harps.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: We'll find out.
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: When he dies.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: I'll do a 10-year trial. We'll see how it goes. Hey, Harps,
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: how come your teeth are yellow and your breath stinks
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: more than normal?
• 22:40
  Speaker 5: Well.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: All right, I apologise, Gillespie. Okay, so Facebook, Instagram.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so anyway, so they all got– so Meta got
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: sued by all these attorneys general. And the interesting thing
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: about this lawsuit, unlike all of the others that they'd
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: faced up until then, and they faced thousands, is rather
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: than talking about the harm from the perspective of, well,
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: you allow all of this– awful content to be distributed
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: on your networks. And this awful content causes my child
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: psychological harm, which they have a good defense to in
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: the United States, because in the United States, there's a,
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: there's an act that basically prevents people like Facebook from
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: being sued on the basis of the content that they post.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: So they're not responsible for what you put on Facebook.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: And so they've defected. effectively deflected those lawsuits up until
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: this one. This one went a different route. This one
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: said it's not about the content, it's about the mechanism.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: It's about the fact that you are using a mechanism
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: and an algorithm which you know is addictive and you
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: are doing it on purpose to addict teenagers and you
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: are causing this harm, anxiety and depression and suicide because
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: of that mechanism. And rather than let that go to court,
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: they offered a settlement of $ 18 billion. Wow.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: That is interesting, though. It is like this is a
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: terrible analogy, but in Melbourne, like machetes, it's like, well,
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: it depends who's got one. It depends what they're doing
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: with it. It's like I use Facebook. I use Instagram.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Mechanism versus... versus what people are posting. Like it's really,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: they're offering a platform, but then, so it's not about
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: the messages or the messaging. It's just the fact that
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: they've created this tool that people can use to exploit others.
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: No, it was more than that. It was about the
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: algorithm itself. So what they were afraid of getting into
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: court was was a discussion about how the algorithm works. Now,
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: I suspect you may be old enough to remember this,
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: but when Facebook first came out in 2004, there was
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: no algorithm. What you saw on your Facebook feed was
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: what your mum put on her Facebook page or what
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: your best friend put on their Facebook page. And if
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: they didn't add anything, it didn't change. So, you know,
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: you followed 10 people. If they put something up on
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: their page, you saw it. That was the original Facebook page.
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: That's what's called a chronological feed. Now we have an
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: algorithmic feed where if you go into Facebook or Instagram
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: right now, you are not seeing the posts from the
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: people you follow. Maybe one in 10 is a post
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: from someone you follow. And even if it is, it's
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: not chronological in the sense that it might be something
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: they posted a year ago, but it thinks it might
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: be interesting to you right now. So what you're seeing
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: is an algorithmically derived feed. And what drives that algorithm
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: is addiction. They know a lot about how to addict
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: a human and they drive that into this algorithmic process
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: in what gets shown to you. And the point here
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: is to keep you scrolling. If they can keep you
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: scrolling just one more post, they've achieved their job. So
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: the idea here is just keep you scrolling. If they
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: just showed you, you know, your mum putting a photo
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: of a cat up and Tiff putting a photo of
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: her boyfriend up and it was the same day after day,
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: you wouldn't be looking at Facebook very often. But... run
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: an algorithmic feed and you're looking at it all the time.
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: And that's the point. And this is what this litigation
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: was about, which is it's not what's being posted. It's
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: not what you're displaying, which you've got a perfect defense
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: to under the US law anyway. It's how you're doing it.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: And by making people stay on your platform, using that algorithm,
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: you are driving a dopamine loop, which damages humans' brains.
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: That was the claim. They didn't want that in court.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: They so much didn't want that in court that they
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: settled for an $ 18 billion payment plus a requirement that
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: they would put an option to opt out of the
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: algorithmic feed in their apps.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: Let that $ 18 billion go.
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: Well, it'll go to the States and no one will
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: see a cent of it, you know, of any great measure,
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: I suspect. And by the way, 18 billion sounds like
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: a lot to you and me. Well, to me and Tiff,
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: but to you, it probably sounds like, you know, lunch.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: Lunch money, lunch money.
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: But it's actually not much to them. They're like you,
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: it's not much at all. It's about 2% of Meta's
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: annual profit and it's payable over 10 years. So it's 0.2%
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: of their annual profit and it's only 18 billion. if
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: YouTube also does the same thing, otherwise it's only 12 billion.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: So there's a lot of if, buts and maybes here.
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: And this option to switch off the algorithmic feed is
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: buried 16 layers deep in the app and they're required
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: to remind you it exists every nine days, but the
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: default remains the algorithmic feed. So that's like presenting a
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: kid with a plate of broccoli and a bowl of
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: ice cream and saying, you know, you can eat the broccoli.
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: It's just not going to happen. So this settlement is BS,
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: but the fact that they were prepared to pay anything
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: tells you how desperately they don't want a court making
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: a decision about this algorithm.
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: Now, before we move on, Moneybags, there's only one best-selling
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: Australian author and one lawyer and one tech genius who's
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: started 50 start-ups and has got more money than God
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: on the show, and it's not me or the pugilist.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: It's not me or the bogan from bloody Launceston.
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: Turner's Beach, actually.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: What's that?
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: Turner's Beach, actually.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: Turner's Beach.
• 29:09
  Speaker 4: There was no big city, Tassie girl, not Launceston.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Is that the posh part of Launceston? Have they got
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: two milk bars there?
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: Launceston's a big smoke. Yeah.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: They're saving up for a bus. Shout out to our
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: friends from Launceston. No, we love you. So can they
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: come back? So does that mean there's no possibility because
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: of that settlement that they can be taken to court
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: for the same thing moving forward or how does that work?
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: I don't know about not for the same. thing. by
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: the same plaintiff. It was one particular plaintiff. I don't
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: know how much they're excluded from other things, but it'll
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: be pretty airtight. And I think it's going to keep
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: them out of trouble for a while on this kind
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: of lawsuit. It might not be perfect, but it's not
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: going to bother them in the slightest either, not in
• 30:04
  Speaker 3: the slightest. But I think the most interesting thing about
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: this is not the insignificant amount of money that they
• 30:11
  Speaker 3: were asked to pay, but the one thing that was
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: identified that they had to change about their apps as
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: part of this lawsuit, which was to turn off the
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: algorithmic feed. Now, The distressing thing about all of this
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: is that the government here in Australia is wanting to
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: do something similar, wanting to legislate something similar. And there's
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: a lot of talk, at least in the media, about
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: these companies fighting, because obviously this settlement only applies in
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: the United States, about these companies fighting this here. I
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: don't think it's that big a deal because I think
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: even if it was an option, here, no one would
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: use it. If we're going to do something about this,
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: if we actually want to change this, what we have
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: to do is make the chronological feed the default. Now,
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: they don't want to do that because then nobody will
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: use their apps. But they will also stand there and say, oh,
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: you're imagining things. There's nothing wrong with the algorithmic feed.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: It's just an improved version of the chronological feed. But
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: the reality is... it doesn't addict if it's not there.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is a stretch, but like the analogy
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: could even be sugar in that everyone that's producing processed food,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: junk food, fast food, you know, sugar, fat, salt, that combination,
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: or which, I mean, they know that that's addictive. That's why,
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: that's why every breakfast cereal is 30% sugar because kids
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: love sugar and let's put an Olympian on the front
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: and some kids, somehow four and a half health stars
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: or something but it's the same like we know what
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: addicts people to uh social media so they use that
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: they exploit that we know what addicts people to unhealthy
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: toxic food that fucks up their body we do that as.
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: Well i wonder but we're more willing we're more willing
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: now to To just look at someone who has a
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: social media problem and say, well, that's just because they're weak.
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: You know, that's just because they're weak. They're, you know,
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: they could stop anytime they want. They're just bored or
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: weak or silly or whatever it is. There's no... There's
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: no sense that people are saying, actually, I can see
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: what's going on here. There is a very intentional addiction
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: mechanism being deployed against these kids. We still talk about
• 32:45
  Speaker 3: stuff that is at the peripheries on this. We still
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: talk about things like social media being bad because... of
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: body image issues or because it shows, you know, evil
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: things or because, and I'm not saying none of those
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: things matter, but they are not the mechanism of greatest harm.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: The mechanism of greatest harm here is the addiction. And no,
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: it won't give you lung cancer, but it's no less
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: addictive than smoking.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: I wonder what the new, the kind of the cognitive
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: consequences that are And I mean, it's very hard to
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: articulate and measure and kind of correlate directly. But I wonder,
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: you know, like a brain that develops from baby through
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: to 20 years old that that's never exposed to any
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: of this versus one that has kind of normal exposure,
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: identical twins. I wonder what might be going on in
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: each of those brains. That would be a fascinating research.
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: It's pretty easy, actually. The research has been done, not
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: probably to the extent you've just said, but we know
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: what the difference is. The difference is you have a
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: total inability to focus. So what is happening when you
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: become an addict, whether it's to cigarettes or alcohol or
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: drugs or social media or gaming or gambling, the same
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: thing is happening in the human brain. Your tolerance for
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: a dopamine hit is going up and up, which means
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: you need each hit to be stronger and stronger. Your
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: brain thinks it needs more dopamine than it does, and
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: dopamine's other function in your day job is to keep
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: you focused. You can't focus. You can't hold a thought
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: in your head for more than five seconds. We commonly
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: refer to that now as ADHD, but it's just a
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: total inability to focus. If you can't focus, you can't
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: do much. Unfortunately, moving that threshold up also makes you
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: significantly more anxious because it is the thing that drives
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: our risk measurement in the environment. As that level goes higher,
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: as each action of addiction increases, we become more and
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: more anxious about our environment because the threat level we
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: assess in the environment goes higher and higher. Even though
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: nothing's changed about us or the environment, our brain thinks
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: something has. So you end up with a brain that
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: is more fearful, more anxious, and unable to focus.
• 35:09
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: Do you think like with some addictions or a lot
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: of drug addictions and alcohol, depending on the level of
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: the addiction, like you can't just go cold turkey, do
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: you think with people coming off in inverted commas or
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: changing their relationship with social media, do you think that
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: giving themselves a limit of like 30 minutes or 60
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: minutes a day is a good strategy? Yeah. I mean,
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: like I can't see too many people going from eight
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: hours a day, which is a lot of people, on
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: their phone, if not specifically social media. But, I mean,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: the numbers are crazy. You know, when I'm at the
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: gym and Tiff's at the gym, like it is uncommon
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: to see somebody that isn't looking at their phone at
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: all for an hour and saying, Many, many times I've
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: walked into the gym, there's 10 people in the gym
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: and nine people are staring at their phone and nobody's
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: doing any work.
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: And they will say they're bored or they're just filling
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: in time. But what's really going on there is that
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: they are checking their phone for new content because an
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: algorithm has trained their brain to do that. And that
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: same algorithm is destroying their ability to tolerate dopamine. So it's...
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: In terms of stopping it, well, it takes three months
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: to reset the particular chemical in the human brain called
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: Delta Fos B, which is the dopamine tolerance switch. It
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: takes three months to reset it to normal. So you
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: have to be three months without abnormal dopamine hits before
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: you are back to normal. And how you spend that
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: three months probably defines whether it's three months or four
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: months or five months, which is you can either... two
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: steps forward, one step back, or you can just go
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: cold turkey, or you can try something which I suggest
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: in my book, The Addiction Recovery Guide or The Attention
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: Recovery Guide. You can try generating dopamine for the brain
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: at lower levels in a more natural way. So instead
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: of picking up your phone, pick up the weights because doing–
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: Doing something in the gym other than looking at your
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: phone also drives a dopamine hit. Not as powerful as
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: the one on the phone, but it helps you come
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: off the addiction.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: It's kind of ironic that it's pretty well known that
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: exercise is a dopamine producer and yet in the middle
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: of the exercise, people are going to their phone to
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: get dopamine. Not consciously doing that, but yeah.
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: Well, because the other part of this, the other addiction
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: mechanism that's used is notifications. So notifications are designed to
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: make you want to keep coming back to the device.
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: So that's why you get a million notifications about nothing.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: You know, would your life end tomorrow if you didn't
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: receive all the notifications you got yesterday? Probably not. There's
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: an old saying, if it's really news, it'll find you.
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: You don't need to be notified about everything all the time.
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: But all these apps do because it's their mechanism for
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: driving you back and making you pick up the phone.
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: And then you just have another little scroll. Oh, there's
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: something interesting. I'll just scroll a little bit longer. And
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: before you know it, you spent 10, 15, 20 minutes
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: doing it.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: In other news, in other news related, but somewhat adjacent, AI.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: So one of the fears in inverted commas or one
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: of the things that's spoken about now is, you know,
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: people getting dumber and cognitive decline because they're outsourcing their
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: thinking to AI. So people are not writing their own emails.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: They're not writing their own responses. They're not, they can't
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: write a bio. They can't, all of these things. Obviously,
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: I use AI. I wish it was around six and
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: a half years ago when I started my PhD. That
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: would have been really handy. Somebody could have done that
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: a bit quicker. But for me, it's like a tool
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: that I could... use where the quality of the output
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: is dependent on the quality of the prompts and the
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: questions and the way that I use it. What's your
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: thinking about any potential pros or cons of AI? Apart
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: from all the design stuff, which I think is awesome,
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: but people just basically replacing their own brain with an
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: artificial brain in some instances. Yeah.
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: I read a story this morning about this that I
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: thought was quite interesting. There's a Russian plot, apparently, to.
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: Make the AI tell us stuff that destroys the US. Well,
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: not us, but tell American stuff that destroys the US democracy.
• 40:22
  Speaker 3: And these AI things have generated, I don't know, billions
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: of articles of misinformation. that is being fed into the
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: AIs as part of their training, you know, not intentionally,
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: it's just the AIs need stuff to train on all
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: the time. And this study was finding a lot of
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: this misinformation coming up in the answers to questions that
• 40:47
  Speaker 3: Americans asked. So it was kind of working. So there
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: is now a really concerted effort to get the AI
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: to say stuff that suits your purpose. Now it's a
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: bit of a hit and miss thing and it's a
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: volume game. You have to have a lot of money
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: and a lot of time to do it, but it's
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: an interesting use of this. I think it's useful for
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: people to think of AI. Look, I think of a
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: calculator as a really useful maths tool. Yes.
• 41:17
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: I could sit down and do the maths instead of
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: using a calculator. It would take me 10 times as
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: long or 100 times as long to do it. I
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: would get to the same spot in the end. It
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: probably wouldn't be as good because I'd probably make mistakes.
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: Or I can decide what to use the calculator for
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: and use it to do those bits that are just
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: a grind. And I think AI, when it comes to writing,
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: is like that.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: It's... it's still got to be driven by someone who
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: knows what they want written and how they want written
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: and what they actually want to explore. If your use
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: of AI is blindly ask it something and accept whatever
• 41:59
  Speaker 3: it says, then you deserve what you get. It's a
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: chatbot for God's sake. Yes, it's a sophisticated chatbot, but
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: it's no less of a chatbot than the ones that
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: are on Telstra's website when you ask it for help.
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: It's a chatbot. That's what it's always been. And Anyone
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: who treats it any differently to that is deluding themselves.
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: So it is a tool that you can use to
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: do the grunty stuff. If you need a case study
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: written about something that you know and you want it written,
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: get it to do it. It can write it really,
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: really quickly. And as long as you know whether it's
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: right or not, no harm, no foul. Where I think
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: the problem is is when people overreach with this stuff
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: and start to believe it's magic. And you saw that
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: right at the start in the programming industry where AI
• 42:52
  Speaker 3: has been really, really big, had a peak and is
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: now dropping off, where everyone said, hey, this thing can
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: write computer programs. Yes. What do we need computer programmers
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: for anymore? Let's just tell it what we want and
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: it writes a computer program. The trouble is most of
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: the time it's rubbish and unless you know what to
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: look for you won't know it's rubbish um and so
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: what's happening now in the computer programming world is people
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: are coming back from that let's just tell it what
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: we want and have it write it and now going
• 43:25
  Speaker 3: to a place where they're saying let's decide what we
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: want design what we want invent what we want and
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: then have it do the grunty bits where it writes
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: that particular module for us that we've written 17 times
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: we don't have to write again um.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: Yes so.
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: All this talk about AI will end the world and
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: all that kind of thing and take everybody's job, I
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: think is overwrought. The AI that we are currently working
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: with is not going to do any of those things.
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: It's just simply not on a trajectory that could get
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: it there. That doesn't mean that it couldn't be used
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: to create the AI that does. So stay tuned.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I receive pretty regularly emails and or messages from
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: people that I know they haven't written even like text
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: messages because I see the long dashes.
• 44:13
  Speaker 5: Yes.
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: You know, those giveaway long dashes. And like I'll know
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: the person or sometimes I don't know the person if it's,
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: you know, through one of the platforms. And it's this long-winded,
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: overly verbose, unnecessarily complex. I'm like, you didn't write this.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: Like this, by the way, this is super fucking boring
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: and it's so much longer than it needs to be.
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: I often feel like saying when I get messages like that,
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: you know, I know what you mean. They go on
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: for pages and pages and pages of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 44:50
  Speaker 3: And I often feel like writing back and saying, could
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: you just give me whatever it is you put into
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: the AI to generate this? So I can just read
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: what you meant to say.
• 45:00
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: So I know what you're actually trying to get at.
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So, mate, you've got some speaking gig coming up
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: or something. Tell us about that.
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm at the Brisbane Writers Festival this Sunday, 3.30.
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: I'm on a panel thing with Madonna King, so it
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: should be a good chat.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: That's the worst promo of I'm on a panel thing.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: Do you want to try a bit harder?
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: I don't know anymore.
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: That'll do.
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: That's in my diary. It says 3.30 Brisbane Riders Festival.
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: All right, everyone in Brisbane, if you want to go
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: and see something that sounds really fucking underwhelming, the worst
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: ad ever. to go and maybe have your socks blown off,
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: one of them at least, and you're really bored and
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: you've got nothing on, then head along to that. It
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: sounds great.
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: It does, doesn't it? I should try and find out
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: what it's about before it.
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: Hey, next time you do a promo, try harder. I will. Well, Gillespie,
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: it's always good. I mean, you know, let's get together
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: again this year. Yeah, let's do that. I got married,
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: had three kids since we last spoke. So that's been great.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: And Tiffa, have there been any big changes on Planet Tiffa?
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: You and Scott got any news for David and I
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: at this point in time?
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: No, no, Craig. No news.
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: Are you sure?
• 46:18
  Speaker 4: No.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: Because we're both available for, I don't know, emceeing, you know,
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: running the wedding. What's that called? Bloody celebrant.
• 46:30
  Speaker 4: We are coming up to the one-year anniversary, Craig Anthony Harper.
• 46:33
  Speaker 5: Wow.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Wow. And when does the sex start? Is that year two?
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: Like is there any kind of plan around that?
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: I think so, isn't it? I think it's year two
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: or is it year three? I'm not sure.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, look, I mean.
• 46:49
  Speaker 4: I think you should probably work that out before you
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: get into year two.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't need a video, just an update, right?
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: So just keep Gillespie and I posted. Say goodbye affair
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: on that unsavoury final note. Don't think about that, anyone.
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: Tiff's going to edit it out anyway, so, you know, whatever.
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: She won't edit that out, that's for sure.
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: See you, mate.
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: See you later.