Tiffany and Cook, David, Brian, Kevin, Patrick Gillespie. Welcome back to the show. We'll start with the lady. Hi, TIV Good evening.
I went to say good morning. I always say good morning.
Yeah, how are you? Oh? I kind of know because we did a podcast a few hours ago, but you know, maybe maybe you've had some good or bad news since then. Are you all right? No, I'm good.
I went for a little short three k run. Haven't done anything cardio for two weeks and now I'm back in the cold office, freezing with the electric blanket on my knee like a nana.
Well, you're in the throes of and I'm not throwing you under the bus here because you've spoken about it quite a bit because it was in context. But you're in the throes of perry menopause.
Yeah.
Yeah, is that why you're not running?
Yeah?
Yeah, I've had no energy yep, hrvs at an all time low, not sleeping, good, whole lots of stuff, Very tired. But you know, a run, just a short one, makes you feel so good and give you that little dopamine hit and you know, so it's finding that balance of doing the thing that gives you energy but not doing it too hard or too much so it takes all of the energy.
When was the last time Do you reckon that gillespo went for a run? Do you reckon he's ever gone.
For a run?
I'd be interested tonight.
I actually think I did go for a run once. Who you.
Are?
I went to a school that had a compulsory once a year across country and run might be an exaggeration. I certainly completed the course, but I don't think I ever got much above a fastish walk.
I don't know why I think this, because I mean I've been talking to a black box for two years, and by that I mean David doesn't have his camera on everyone so Tip and I just it's actually a rectangle. So you may not even be a human. You could be humanoid, especial with recent developments.
Yeah, but I'm actually an AI. Let me. I'll do We'll come back to that. I'll tell you a fairy, funny story about that. But I keep going go story.
I mean this sounds I don't mean it like it's going to sound. But I don't picked you as particularly athletic.
I'm not not in the slightest No, No, I had a brief period of being pretty close to athletic in my late teens early twenties.
I'm just athletic adjacent.
Athletic at Jason where I used to hang out at the gym a lot and do all that sort of stuff, and managed to snag my wife during that period. So poor woman then got sucked in.
Came for the biceps, stayed thirds right.
I was too late by then we were married.
She couldn't get out. That's all right, contractor wow, wow, I tell us what you're going to before we Joe, I don't know.
Ah, it's just the thing, right. So you know, James, my son, he's been experimenting with AI to ring, you know how that he rings all the doctors and asks them how much they cost, and he pays real people to do that, and so he's been experimenting with getting AI to it and he's had some success with it, fooling most people. But he was telling me a story the other day about one where it rang a receptionist
and the receptionist said, what's your name? And the AI responded, that's not important right now, and and the receptionist it was quite cleuely as a young bloke said you're an AI, aren't you? And it said, it said, let's not talk about me, Let's talk about the price of the doctors or something like that. And the guy said, oh, this is so cool. You're an AI, aren't you?
That's what I mean? What is the the legality around that? Is it okay? Like, I mean, I'm sure it must be okay. Otherwise, one, he wouldn't be doing it until you wouldn't be telling this story. But like when you use AI to ring someone to get information or a business, do you need clearly you don't need to announce that this is.
His is trained to from now on since that call to respond, if someone says, are you an AI, it'll say, yes, I am an AI, and I'm rather doing you know what it's doing.
But yeah, wow, and so does he have any kind of idea? See this is so interesting. I love this shit. Like, I think that's a good use for AI.
I mean, I mean, right now, there's the opposite. He's done quite a lot, which is when people call in and the phone is answered by an ai. So and a lot of the time you won't be able to detect that you're talking to an AI, not a person. So and but from my perspective, I think that's a
good thing. Personally, I'd rather have the phone answered immediately by an AI that I can understand, you know, sit on hold for an hour and a half before speaking to a call center that I can only understand every second word.
Yeah, that's that's quite often the case. And so does James know how what percentage of people figured out that they weren't talking about it?
He's not using it at the moment, He's right, this is this is just some test runs he did, and just I thought that was an interesting thing. Is somebody who figured it out and then was just thrilled that they were talking to an R That is funny.
Well, I mean a young person would Yeah, I reckon if my mum answered the phone, it might be a different story moment probably.
Yeah.
Yeah, Well, I mean I guess that's it's all that and more. And it seems to be like AI seems to be I feel like we talk about a lot, but it's because AI.
Well we probably should talk about AI a lot because it is going to significantly change the way everything works. I mean, you know, robots replaced industrial workers at scale sort of forty years ago, and now to the point where you take a thousand workers out for every robot and nobody even blinks. But a similar sort of thing is going to happen with knowledge work as well. So sort of mid level AM and sorry, administration and down is going to be chewed up by this stuff. And
that then means okay, so what's the story then? Is everybody going to be unemployed? Or do we have to
come up with a different economic model? You know, do we have to come up with the one that we've talked about briefly every now and then, which is sort of a universal basic income where essentially, if you're a citizen of the country and the country produces a dividend for you and pays it to you in the form of a standard basic income and everyone gets it, and then if you choose to earn more than good on you.
Yeah yeah, yeah, Well I wonder if that's ever going to be the case.
I don't what about a choice soon? The question is how much how much ugliness is going to have to happen before we get to that inevitable position?
And what I mean, I know you don't know, but like if you just had to have a guess, what do you reckon the timeline is on universal basic income being a reality in Australia.
I think, unfortunately, it's probably ten years to fairly large scale unemployment and probably twenty years to someone figuring out that that's really the only solution.
And will the main genesis of large scale unemployment unemployment be AI?
Oh yeah, AI and the the things that we call AI now and the things that will follow it which are going to be even more human like in their abilities.
And your fellow lawyers running around with their legal undies on their head because AI can now do quite a lot of the work that was being charged out at eight hundred bucks an hour.
I think it will definitely change the legal industry. AI is really really bad at some of the things lawyers do, and sort of hilariously bad, but it's also really really good at some of the things that they do, particularly the sort of lower end of the legal profession, where you know, in large firms, a lot of lawyers are spending most of their day doing legal research to provide sort of condensed versions of it as advice, as part of an advice that a more senior lawyer will be delivering.
That kind of work that's perfect for AI, you know, and I think increasingly that will be part of the deal with law firms and they will have to adjust.
And I guess even junior lawyers working in conjunction with AI. Do you know what I mean? Because you know that I mean, working like with all the right prompts and all the right whatever, you can generate a huge amount of or do a huge amount of research, get a whole lot of clarity in way way way less time, or a lot more information in way less line.
I think in general that's the story with A, which is it's quite powerful in the hands of somebody who knows the area that it is working in. So if it's maths you're doing, and you're getting AI to do stuff in maths, as long as you know enough about the area that it's working in to know when it's bsing you, then it can be really powerful, you know. But and the same with computer programming or law or
anything else. I mean, you know, podcasters are probably s for now, but you know, we had a bit of a peek at what that looks like too, where you can just feed it a document and you know it'll carry on a conversation between itself that is reasonably convincing.
Yeah, we did that, and you were the one who opened that door for me. We did that with one of my papers. I wrote a systematic literature review, which is you know, like seventy pages, put it into AI and it did a twenty six minute podcast chat between this lady and gentlemen and they kind of they chatted, debriefed and shared all the kind of you know, the the high points or the key points I guess of
my research and my paper. And it was other than a couple of little minor glitches or misrepresentations, it was fucking amazing. I'm like, and it did it in like three minutes. So in inverted Commas read my whole paper and then punched out this twenty six minute conversation in three minutes, which I listened to. I thought, oh, this will be garbage, and it was mesmerizingly good.
Yeah, but think about that at scale in that if you decided, you know what, I'm just going to create a whole bunch of podcast channels. I'm going to have one for every topic known to man. I'm going to feed it articles out of the New York Times or the Washington Post or wherever, you know, whatever source is a good source for that, whatever that particular topic is, set up the library of those things, punch go. Three minutes later, you've got a thousand podcast channels.
Yeah, yeah, it just it makes you one wonder very much where yeah, I mean, even where podcasts will be in a year, because you know, you can my voice is enough of my voice that we can rip my voice off and make me say whatever whatever script somebody wants to provide, and it's.
Oh have you tried that? There's it's actually it doesn't take long. I think you have to read. There's like a page of text. It's it's maybe a minute's worth of reading.
Melissa has done that with my voice and produced like a five minute thing. And other than perhaps a little bit of nuance and timing. And you know, because I'm I'm I'm probably a little bit loosey goosey, I'm not too you know, what's the word? I don't know. But if you.
Give it enough, if you give it enough of a sample of the way, give it a bunch of your podcasts, and then say I don't want to just copy the voice, I want to copy the style as well, it'll come pretty close.
Yeah, amazing, speaking of AI, you were telling it something before we press the go button, which was rather ironic about the new Toyster Story movie.
Yeah. So this has caused a bit of a fuss because people are saying, is this really just a way of covertly attacking modern parents? Which is the sneak peek of toy Story five seems to suggest that the villain of toy Story five, Now, you'll be right up on the toy Story series, you know, which is your favorite.
I love Woody, I mean, I love them all.
You know. Well, I didn't know there was a four, a little much lesser five, but there you go. So toy Story five comes out next year.
That makes fun of me. I reckon, I've got you covered in terms of toy story knowledge, all.
Right, do it wouldn't be hard. But anyway, I did see this fuss because it's vaguely relevant to stuff that I write about. And the villain in Toy Story five is lily Pad, and lily Pad is an iPad. And the idea is that the reason that's the villain is that the child you know, who is the owner of the toys is given lily Pad as a gift and suddenly she's got no interest in the toys, doesn't want to play with the physical toys anymore. She had just
played with lily Pad from then on. Now. I don't know any more about it than that, because that's all they've shown us. But it's been enough to fire everyone up.
I wonder what the I wonder what their motivation for that storyline was, because it seems, as we said before, it seems ironic that people will watch the movie, some people on an iPad.
I think it's probably just that this is a very real problem now. I mean, we've talked for a little while now about the problem with and it's just not this always sounds like a kid's these days kind of thing, right, But it's not. It is dramatically different. You talk to any teacher, and I was talking to some teachers just the other day, a group of them, and I said, you know, any of you that have been teaching for more than fifteen years, what's today's classroom like compared to
when you first started? And they said, the biggest difference is the ADHD. You know that we've gone from it being rare, maybe one kid in the school, to every classroom's five to ten kids who are on medication for it. And that's just really really hard to manage. But it's if it's hard to manage in the classroom, imagine how
hard it is to manage at home. And this is a direct consequence of giving every child in a generation access to highly addictive software which is altering their brain chemistry and creating ADHD from that alteration, and remembering that the definition of ADHD for our purposes here, it destroys focus so that you can no longer focus on anything for more than about a second, and that what's doing that is the devices. And these devices are now everywhere
all the time, and kids are on them all the time. Now, the reason that this talk about this movie has caused a fuss is because many parents feel like they're being blamed for this. Yeah, you know that somehow people are preaching at them about you know, why are you're giving you why you're setting your kids just done? Why are you just handing them a device for your two year
old and the trolley at the supermarket? And the reality is that it's pervasive and the kids would be desperate to get their hands on the things anyway, even if the parents weren't making them available. To them. They beg borrow and steal the things because the industry has done exactly what it needed to do to make money, which has made these things accessible everywhere.
Isn't it interesting? How much like with different different products, I mean everything from iPads and iPhones to drugs, Like, there's a real incentive for companies to make things that are addictive. I mean, like highly incentivized to make shit that people can't do without.
Well, it's why Coca Cola used coke coke as in cocaine when they first manufactured it. I mean, you need a competitive jump. If you're selling sugar water and the guy next to you is selling sugar water, one of you better come up with a way to get an advantage, or one of you is going out of business. So you know, make it addictive. Now, sugar is pretty addictive anyway, but you add cocaine to it, it's really addictive. So
it's marketing one oh one. Make your product addictive, and particularly important when your product is a piece of software you have spent literally billions of dollars developing and that you are giving away for free. If your product is an addictive there goes your billions of dollars.
Yeah. Yeah, and when you think really, I mean, like we talk about ethics and morals and values and all of that, but really, when you talk about that stuff in the context of industry and the commercial landscape, that is, it's like, obviously every company's priority is money, is profit is you know, So.
That's if you think about it, a company is actually a psychopath by design.
Yeah, I remember you saying that, you go on unpack that.
I love that a companies is required by law to maximize profit within the law for its shareholders. So there's no bit of that that says be guided by your morals, be empathetic, none of that. They are required by law to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. Now, shareholders might be a bit squeamish about doing some of the things companies do, but the company is required without regard to anything like that. The only boundary it has
to be set is do not break the law. So as long as it is permissible within the current law to do whatever they are doing, they must do it, or else they are breaching their duty to their shareholders. And that is a psychopath. A psychopath operates on the basis of in any thing that I have to make a decision about. I must maximize value to me without regard to anyone or anything else, as long as was
I don't break the law. And so a psychopath looks at a problem from that perspective, and that's the fundamental difference between them and everybody else, because everybody else pays attention to what am I going to hurt somebody else by doing this? And they take that into account.
Do you think, based on that rationale about companies being psychopathic, religions are psychopathic?
Of course they are, absolutely doubt go on, well, any organization that requires loyalty as the primary driver of the way it works is operating fundamentally psychopathically. I mean all psychopaths work on this. So if you look at say the cult, look at the history of cults, which is always fascinating reading.
I love I love cult. I'm toyed with starting one, but you know, just letting people know up front what it is.
I think you have started one, Craig. You know you've got a fairly fairly loyal listenership there, haven't you.
Sh I try to cut that under wraps.
But the difference between what you're doing, which is a fan base who are following you and the cult? Is it? A primary requirement of a cult is that the person must be absolutely loyal, so there can be no questioning at all, and any failure to be loyal is instantly punished.
Did you hear that, everyone stop fucking listening to Joe Rogan and get back to me.
That's right, you know. And and if you had enough power, you would start punishing them, undoubtedly. If I want you to look into that, see if you can see if you can make their their screens explode if they look at Joe Rogan, I love Joe Rogan, I'd have to explode myself.
Well, I like it. Yeah, it is so interesting when you look through that lens of you know, psychopathic qualities. Qualities doesn't seem but attributes. Yeah, that is because it is very very you know like it.
Actually it plays to a weakness in the thing, which is both a weakness and a strength in humans. So if and I think we've talked about this briefly before, but if you ask yourself the question, how is it that a puny little animal with no clause, fangs, venom armor, which is humans meat on feet, she's got claws you
don't want to miss the tiff. But like armadillo, But how is it that we dominate the planet when there's all these other animals that could take us in a one on one fight, you know, without even blinking, even tif, even t if versus a crocodile. I think I'd have my money on the crocodile. No, no chance. I'll tell you.
If she could get in a couple of jabs, then an uppercut, that crocodile be fucked.
Tiff. Tiff versus a crocodile and a great white shark. What about that they.
Got a big chin to try and cover those crocs. Yeah, you'd just be a little snack for a croctiff. You'd just be like an appetizer before lunch. And I think Alesbo would be lunch probably.
So the question is how do we How do we do it? What do we do? We use the oxytocin trick, which social media uses to exploit us by making it addictive. But we work well with strangers because we're rewarded by straining just thinking good things about us, And the way we make strangers think good things about us is we do things they like. And if everybody does things that everybody else likes. Guess what, Suddenly we're not one person, We're a million people, and we're all behaving in the
same fashion. And that is what gives us the power. Now cults use that against us, and so to religions by the way, which is, if you can make it that the thing you're doing that everybody else likes is a very particular thing within your cult, then that binds the members of the cult together and simultaneously makes enemies of anyone outside the cult. So you are doubly rewarded.
You're rewarded by doing whatever weird thing the cult requires you to do or believe, and you're rewarded by feeling that by doing that, you are above and beyond anyone outside the cult. And so it's very, very powerful, and it's a really neat trick where cult leaders and church leaders and some politicians have figured out, if you can manipulate that and get that dynamic working, suddenly you've got a rusted on following that cannot be removed. It's impervious
to logic, it's impervious to facts or truth. It doesn't need any of the above. It just needs to know what the cult wants you to believe.
Yeah, and people from the outside looking in or just objectively, people like I'd never get sucked into anything like that, and it's like they're sucked in.
A human you will be well.
Yeah, And not all cults are religious, I mean, like I call them thought cults. Where to belong to this group, you've got to think this, You've got to believe this. You've got to you've got to be opposed to that, you know, and that there's a price of entry or rice of membership, you know, and that is you need to agree with us, align with us. Think how we think. You know, we all live in an echo chamber, and everyone who isn't in our echo chamber is the enemy
and they're wrong and they're inferior. But you're lucky you got here just in time. So you're welcome.
Yeah, and we know that we saw that done on a mass scale with COVID. I don't want to go into the pros and cons of the science there, which was largely rubbish, but.
You just did. I don't want to say anything, you know, I don't want to say anything you know, controversial, it's shit, ye go on, But I don't want to say anything.
We don't want to dig into the detail of that, but the way it played out in our society is interesting, the way governments became impervious to evidence and impervious to science. And it started out the normal way it starts out with science, which is inquiring minds, people being open to discussion and criticism and so on, and then it all got shut down really quickly, and you had to believe without any evidence whatsoever, or you were outside the cult.
And people who think this can't happen to me just need to go back there and think about how it felt, because it can happen, and it does happen a lot. And like you say, it doesn't have to be something that you traditionally describe as a cult.
You know.
It can be a political party, it can be a church, it can just be a group of friends.
But in the fitness industry, David, there are a bunch of cults. You know, CrossFit is a kind of cult. You know, there's a shout out to our CrossFit friends, but yeah, you know, it's like very much, this is the best way to train. We've got a monopoly on effective training, you know. Whatever, there's a bunch of those, Yeah, you.
Think about how that's reinforced. So say, let's use a training thing as the example. The way that's reinforced is people post videos or pictures of them or stories of them doing things in the correct fashion according to the cult, and all the fans of the cult applaud and reward them for that, and so they get an oxytocin hit for doing things in the correct way. And if they do things slightly wrong, they either get no rewards or worse, get attacked. You know, they say, oh, what are you doing?
You're lifting that the wrong way, or you're picking that up the wrong way, or you shouldn't be doing that, And that either drives them away from the cult or sucks them deeper into it, because then they think, wow, I really enjoyed it when I was being rewarded, and so I'll make sure not to post things that are the wrong way now because and then that just reinforces it. So now there's another person posting things done the right way.
The way that gets you people saying, isn't you know, isn't Craig a fabulous person because he's doing things the right way? Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And where I mean very much, where like a species of that. We want to belong to something, We want to belong to a group, we want to belong to a club, we want to be like people don't like not belonging to something. And so it's very I did this thing. And this is not a word of a lie. Some of my listeners would remember this.
But back in the day, David, before podcasts were a thing, probably fifteen years ago, I had a blog and I had eighty thousand subscribers, and so every day when I would write a blog post, I would send it out and it would go in eighty thousand inboxes, right, so, and the open rate was massive, like so many I mean that was back four people were doing what they're doing now. So I had a huge amount of you know,
relatively influence and all of that stuff. And I remember I wrote a tongue in cheek cult about how I was going to a tongue in cheek post I should say about how I was going to start a cult, and I described how it would be this community and you know, how it would all go on and like it would all be open and honest, there wouldn't be any you know, everyone's not routing each other. That's not what's going on, there's no.
But I just created this cult. If you're not, jeez, Craik.
Now, well that's just bullshit to get him in the door. Don't worry about that. No, not really. And so I described this utopian and I literally, you know, everyone knew it was a bit of fun. Right, I'm not really doing it. It's not real. But I would have had at least one hundred messages or emails from people saying, if you actually did that, I would absolutely want to be part of it. And I'm like, oh, this is terrifying.
It's terrifying, but it's actually it's relatively simple to do. You could decide now to create, you know, a cult, I don't know, the worshipers of Tiffany Cult or something like that, and you could You can't be in you're already you're you've got to be hidden behind a screen, you know, the mysterious Tiffany. So but you could create
some rules around that, Craig. And as long as you've got a reasonable number of followers who were prepared to follow whatever rules you made, and who would quickly jump on anyone who broke the rules right and say no, you're you're thinking the wrong way. This is what Tiffany would have wanted. Then you could very quickly create a cult.
It's just that simple. Reward people behaving the way you want them to behave and punish them or make an example of someone who behaves in a way that you don't want them to behave, and you know, pretty quickly you'd have yourself a cult.
There's there's a book, if could you look it up for me, I'll try and I just this is a terrible thing. A lady wrote a book about the west Bro Baptist Church and Unfollow. Thank you. What a great book, what a great like if you want to understand cults everybody, and the most fascinating and like compelling book written and read by this lady who's just brilliant. She grew up in the Westbro Baptist Church.
Which have you heard of that, David, No, I haven't known. Oh my god, just West as in west and the book follow.
Oh it's fucking like it's.
One way to join the cult, as you can hear.
Well. The thing is she exposes everything that went on, and she talks about how hard it was for her to get out of there and what they did to her. Oh my god, it's such a Yeah. I don't often recommend books, but I'm recommending if you're at all interested in cults and that everyone just have a listen to that and then send me a message on our Facebook
page and tell me what you thought of it. But yeah, it's such a good book, and it's so interesting, and it gives such a first person insight in so it's not some external person writing some kind of commentary. It's literally this lived experienced and it's incredible. But anyway, that's enough of a sales pitch on a book that I get no money from, but it's worth I never promote my own books, but I promote everyone else's.
You've written a book, great, there you go about that.
I've written seventh. There you go seven.
My goodness to me, that's how much I don't promote them.
That's how much I don't promote myself. I hate promoting. Well you've so. You just learned that right now, and we've known each other for a long time. I hate selling my own shit. Yeah, you're a close second. You're a close second, right.
I only do it when forced, when you make me say something about something I've done.
When I'm on someone else's podcast. They go, oh, do you want to promote you?
I go nah.
They're like, okay, I go follow me on Instagram. That'll do, you know, I don't want to go. Well, everybody, you need to go to my go to my website and there's a shop and there's a whole lot of product to fuck all that. I hate that. I'd rather have less money and more self esteem.
I don't want to do it, I said the richest guy in Melbourne. I don't know.
It's exactly right. Don't you forget it? Hey, mate, that was a really good chat. Thank you.
We'll say that about nothing.
But no, it was good where we were going to talk about fluide. But fuck that we might do Yeah, we'll say goodbye affair. But tif did you you picked that quite quick? Have you read that book or listened to that.
Book last time you raved about it?
I downloaded and did you listen to the whole book?
Nearly to the end?
Then I got bored?
But she followed it.
Yeah, okay, so all right, well fucking there goes my raving recommended.
She was I remember being, like I said to you, It blew my mind. Some of the stuff getting into it, you know, and I'm like the books and.
The ship that they honestly just listened to it. Five stars from me, three and a half from Tiff. You're welcome. You're welcome. Thanks everyone, Thanks David, No worries to you.