I get a team. It's a you project. It's Patrick and Craig. It's we are officially tipless, which sounds like syphless, but it's not. It's we're tipless, not siphless, and straight into it. It's Friday here and the thriving metropolis. I'll say that again slower for our American listeners.
Friday.
It is sixteen minutes past nine in the am. It's the thirtieth of the first. We're sliding into February already, Patrick, we're already well and truly past the new year, like we're into the next month.
Nelly.
That just fills me with dread. And you know what, it's take two, isn't it. Sorry, that was kind of funny, So.
Tell everyone what you did to me.
So Paul Craig is so excited about the intro of the show and he gets in there and he does his rave and it's sounding great. But he was over a termin radio called over modulating. He was yelling so much that it was clipping the VU level meter. Craigo, if you had a you meet her in front of you, it would be belting the red. It would probably smash the glass and it would have gone out and it would have shattered all over the panel.
Yeah, fuck you, vu Meter, stick it up your bottom. That's why I have you, because you're the tech geek. You can go, hey fucking loudy McLoud, start rein it in. Just slow it down, lower it down, get back in the sweet spot where you're not deafening people.
I can be.
I can be a lot like you have to. The thing is too when you do it every day right. You want to get yourself into a place where like you've got good energy, but sometimes that just gets twisted in.
With the volume.
I just like to think that when I'm on the show, you get more excited.
I take it asa you know, well, I definitely look forward to podcasts with you because you know, this is purely subjective and our listeners may or may not agree. But I feel like over the last while, I don't know, I feel like our shows are better. Probably some people think they're worse, but it's just for me.
It's more fun. Like we've had a lot of fun recently.
But what I love about you is I don't need to do any planning because for those who don't know, Patrick sets the agenda for what we're going to talk about and just sends it through to me. I literally have his face and my face on the screen, and below that a list of topics, so I don't even know. It's not like I've read and then opened up the link and then read that I've done nothing, which suits me perfectly because I'm in the middle of my productivity.
I'm also have a propensity for laziness, so that suits me. But yeah, our shows are easy. You and Me is probably the easiest, least effort show, so thank you for that, but not so much laziness for you because you have to do or did you do this prep? Or did one of your underlings do this prep?
No, a bit of both.
What I do is I read a whole lot of stuff over the fortnite, and if I see an article that I think's worth chatting about, I email it to myself and then I get one of my colleagues to just put it all into a document, and then I refine it from there. I kind of swap things around or add a little bits and pieces. So it's usually just stuff that I've read and I want to remind myself of so I don't forget to talk about it.
It's kind of it's fun. I enjoy it because I just I love tech and I love what's going on in tech. And sometimes it scares me, sometimes it excites me. Other times. Yeah, it's but it's nice to to kind of spitball it, you know, it's good to chat about questions. And I think that's part of the enjoyment is that you won't let me get away with anything, which is nice you challenge me.
Yeah, Well, we were talking about this off air, right, we were talking about which we won't mention the specifics, but we're talking about friendship in general, and when were talking about like we all want to be nice, but like when does niceness become weakness or over compliance or people pleasing? And you're a very You're probably a nicer
person than me in that sense. I think we're both kind, but I think you're nicer, Like i'd probably rather hang out with you, you know, but that you know, where does when do we get to the point where we go, Hey, I totally disagree with you, but that's cool, Like we don't have to agree, you think, you know, Like you were saying, you've got a really good friend who's I once say what beliefs but got some very opposing beliefs to you, right, but they're great. They're great, and same
with me. I've got, you know, I've got a bunch of friends who think similar to me, who are kind of half and half, and then some friends who were kind of oppositional in our thinking around certain things, like quite a lot of the time.
But I like how they think.
And I like the fact, like when people become very finger pointing and dogmatic, you can fuck right off. But if you just go you know, I think A and you think B. These are my reasons. I'm like, cool, Yeah, we're friends. We don't think the same about that thing. But as I said to you off here, and you like, the idea is like if we have to agree on anything,
it's not a friendship, it's a cult. Like if we all have to think the same, do the same, eat the same, move the same, believe the same, well, that's a that's weird. That's just so not a normal, healthy friendship.
Do you see that though?
In that ecosystem where people tend to have the blinker vision on and they just attract people who are exactly the same as them.
I found that when I worked in the media.
One of the things I didn't want to do is hang out with people in the media because all.
This later, well, that's confirmation bias, right, where you only look for people who kind of are like you or think like you, or their ideas and philosophy and perhaps habits, behavior lifestyle are familiar to you and comfortable for you, and and so you hang out with them because they're just a different version of you, and you like that.
But people don't like hanging out with people who perhaps the way that they live or are challenge them without even being spoken to the amount of people who have said to me over the years like this is a guy who was morbidly obese who then got himself in quite good shape. I never evangelize people, as in I never I never just go up to people and give people advice. Ever, the only time I give advice is if I'm like on a show or somebody's asked for it.
But the people who have said to me over the years, oh, you're just obsessed, because if I'm obsessed, then they're right and I'm wrong, versus well, I'm actually I've got a set of habits and behaviors and a lifestyle and an operating system that works really well for my physiology and my genetics. I don't obsess about food, I don't obsess about exercise.
I just do what works for me. But it's much easier to.
Criticize someone else's behavior or lifestyle because it means you can't be wrong. If they're wrong, you can't be wrong, then you don't need to change. And that's also all of this shit is emotional too, Like you're a vegetarian slash vegan, which I'm.
Totally up for, and I think we might.
All find out one day that maybe that's a better option. Maybe we won't, but whatever, you're very passionate about it, as you should be. Therefore, there's emotion. So it's very hard to be totally logical and objective about something for which your personality and your identity and your emotion are all intertwined.
Same with me when.
People say are getting in shape, it's all about you having the obesity gene. It's got nothing to do with what you eat. Or I'm like, well that's just not fucking true, you know, Like I'm quite passionate about certain things that others aren't. You go, okay, you believe your thing. I believe my thing. And it's all right. We don't need to convince each other. M yeah, yeah, it's life. It's good. It's good to have challenges. It's good to have your belief systems challenged all the time.
I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I was thinking I wrote this thing last night. It's like, oh, hang on, I'm going to read it's behind me on the whiteboard. Tell me if this doesn't sound good or you can't hear me. I've crunched the numbers, and it seems that the chance of me getting stuff wrong in the future is one hundred percent.
Do you know what I mean? I love it. Yeah.
It's like, well, of course, of course, how many days do I get things wrong every day of my life? How many things with that total since I was a young adult, I don't know, probably in the hundreds of thousands, at least in the tens of thousands. So why the
fuck would I assume unequivocally that I'm right now? I actually think that's a real sign of people in general, of and I know we're getting philosophical, will dive into the tech in a minute, but being somewhat evolved when you can say this is what I think and believe, but I could be wrong because I've been wrong about many things before.
I've been playing little thought games every now and again, where I think, am I still as mentally flexible in terms of my belief systems and being wrong?
And is that changing?
Because we hear that as people get older, they get grumpier and they're less inclined to be flexible with their minds. And so for me, when I'm very firm on an opinion and someone has a contrary opinion or I say well you're wrong.
Do it this way.
I try to take a pause now and say, well, maybe I am wrong with this, and should I just sit back and take a bit of a breath and reevaluate rather than just being no, I'm right, because the instant reaction when someone sees you're wrong is to say no, I'm right, you're wrong, and it is it's human nat. But I wonder whether I'm becoming more old in my mind and less flexible. But i'd like to think I'm not, and I think we all liked to in some point, But I don't know.
Do you do you ever challenge it?
I know you try to be as open minded as possible and take on new ideas.
But more than ever, I was much more closed minded when I was young, much more right, unequivocally like, well, you know my background, right, So I grew up unequivocally telling people how God works and heaven and hell and judgment and the Bible and Old Testament New Testament. But that was my programming, and that was my conditioning, and that was my wheelhouse, and that was where I was comfortable, and that was where I was confident, and that was
where I was familiar. And so in my mind I knew, like, you know, Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the life like that, Nobody comes to me but by the Father. Right, this is unequivocal. This is not an opinion everyone, This is Jesus. And then you go, yeah, yeah, maybe, like do we have any proof that Jesus said that, Do we have any you know? It's like then you unpack it, which to me was unthinkable because that was blasphemous.
But then now all these years later, there's no bidder, there's no twisted, there's no there's just like, oh, look do I still have faith or belief? Well the answer is yes, do I have evidence? No? Do I have absolute unequivocal proof or knowledge. No, could I be wrong?
Yes?
Now, there was a long time in my life where I would never have said that you know about everything, about the best way to try, the best way to eat. I would tell you, no, this is how you should eat. And then I discovered stuff and I'm like, oh, I've been not I've only been wrong. I've been a fucking wrong for like decades.
Yeah.
What was interesting because we were talking before we got on air about human So humanism is basically a secular set of moral values that are innately built into human beings or the belief system of that. You walk across the road you see a kid about to be run over by a car, most human beings, decent human beings, would run across the road and grab that kid. They wouldn't look at a scripture, they wouldn't second guess themselves.
They would just do that because it's the right thing to do, and we would feel that it's the right thing to do. But isn't it funny how ultimately they intersect. So, whether it's religious tenets and or humanist tenets or whatever you believe, Buddhist, Muslim, whatever, there is an intersection where there's a basic right and wrong that I think a
lot of us do feel. So, you know, however you get to that point, whether it's through a book and reading, or whether it's just because it feels the right thing to do, I think a lot of us do come to the same place.
Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, it's I call it your internal sat NAV. That's like almost people might call it their moral car or ethical compass or whatever where you kind of go. You know, there's like this level of knowledge and wisdom and truth and insight. I think again, this is what I think that we have access to where you don't need anyone to teach you or tell you.
You don't need to read it, you don't need to hear it to know that this thing is a bad thing to do to someone, This thing is a kind thing to do.
This is an.
Acceptable behavior, This is an unacceptable behavior, you know. I think there's that in a knowing. But then you know the thing about and we'll get off this in a minute, but we you know, growing up, you don't realize that you are literally being programmed like a computer.
You know, your software is being.
Being programmed you like this Patrick, by the people around you, by your school, by your peers, by your family, by the information, by social media, by mainstream media, by you know, old media, or whatever we want to call it. You know, you just and then you up one day and you're twenty. Now you've got this worldview that you didn't choose. You didn't choose it. It's just a byproduct of your life,
you know. And then so then to actually because that's now your your operating system, that's the window through which you view everything. And then to be able to have enough courage and perhaps open mindedness to go, gee, I wonder of all the stuff that I believe, what's perhaps flawed, or what's true, or what's maybe not kind what's kind
of not true. That's a hard thing to say when your worldview and your beliefs in your your story is intertwined with who you are, because then you've got to kind of maybe refigure out.
Who the fuck you are. This is deep, right, Yeah, I know. I just think we could almost keep on going on this.
I'm happy to do you want to keep going or do you want to do the science.
The disappointing the people who are tuning in for at least.
All right, let's do that let's start sorry about that philosophical fucking way.
That was good?
Do long two winded mainly from me? We do that we Episode one one seven. According to Patrick's notes, Episode one, Patrick James Banello soon to be the mayor of Bland. Wait more on that later. The mayor of Balan. You heard it here first time. His campaign manager. We're going to start pushing that. Are you open to look at him? He's saying nothing. He's saying nothing. That was my idea, not his. So the current mayor of Bland, if you hear this, you don't need to be nervous at all.
We don't. We don't have a mayor anymore. Do you have Maruble? Shi's right, that's it. Well, that's you. That's going to be you, That's going to be you. I was chatting to.
Somebody yesterday who you know who came to visit you. Yeah, and he and I we won't mention his name. Max, Peggy. We are firmly of the belief that you need to be the mayor of that pound slash environment.
All right.
Scientists develop a new way to see inside the human body using three D color imaging. What is the new way? That's not an X ray or an MRI or a bloody pet scan or what is this new way grasshopper or obi one.
This is interesting because I mean I've been for ultrasounds. I'm sure you've been for an ultrasound before. Ultrasounds are great because they're relatively cheap to do, but they don't have the fidelity or the resolution of other things. So you know, you might have so photo acoustic imaging, you know, MRIs, that sort of thing. The issue we've got and many other sort of imaging is where you inject dies into your body to see how your body circulation works and
things like that. So now what scientists are looking at is it's basically blending sound and photoacoustics.
And the idea is that you cannot.
Just capture the structure of the tissue and blood vessels, but you can see them in three D as well, so you know, and that can me in real time while they're doing what they do. So it's this, you know, this mash up of these technologies to give you a much better, more accurate, and higher fidelity view of what's going inside you. It's about ten centimeters in so in terms of how far into the skin and into your
internal functionings. But that's pretty exciting stuff. And I mean particularly if you're trying to diagnose issues related to, say, what's going on in your brain.
If you've got, you know, a tumor, what is the tumor doing? Is it growing?
Is you know, is it being fed lots more? You know, the blood vessels going to it. You know this all that sort of stuff that can help with diagnosis and looking at detailed anatomy because at the end of the day, you know, without having to put a scalpel down, because that's the last thing you want and I have to do. If you can help and get a bit of diagnosis without having to deep dive literally, then this is yet it's.
Pretty exciting stuff.
So just the combination of current technologies to make it all work better. And it's they're calling it RUST. So it's a RUSS pat Rotational ultrasound tomography is what it's called interesting and it's using photoacoustic tomography.
So when you say you can look at it in real time, does that mean it comes up like a little video where you're seeing, like, for example, the heartbeat, so you're actually seeing versus like a still picture.
And that's the idea and it's in three D as well, so you can wow, that's bloody great. Yeah, so it's really interesting this and this is ongoing of course, but and I mean I don't think it's commercially available yet, but it's a way of kind of proving that it can be done. And yeah, it's pretty it's it's going to take a big leap forward in diagnosis.
Well, yeah, the next one is of interest and a little bit of alarm to me. I'm going to be honest. Some people use WhatsApp boys and girls. It's an app that's meant to be more secure, so let's say yeah, no, let's not say anything. But people who don't want other people to be able to access their messages use, among other things, WhatsApp is one of the app apps that's been known to be more secure should you want to send a message that you don't want seen by anyone else.
But there's a lawsuit now alleging that WhatsApp has no end to end encryption, which is their big claim. We have end to end encryption, which means nobody can access your messages, nobody accept you, and the receiver.
Can get to this. That may I'm going.
To have to quickly go and erase a whole lot of shit on my phone. I'm not you are fucking what is it hot in here? So we are you know, those of us who are dealing buddy, you know, peels out the back of our panel van, we could be in trouble.
It's just that I think that. By the way, I don't know.
How drug dealing works, so apologies to the drug dealers.
I'm making this WhatsApp. Yeah, yeah, the figure they don't.
And the other thing too is if you think about a journalist interviewing somebody who's a whistleblower, you know, using ah encryption, or someone who's in a politically volatile country but is using WhatsApp to disclose. I mean, gosh, if you're in Iran at the moment, you're absolutely screwed. But you're not hearing this because there's a massive blockout of Internet anyway. But what this means is WhatsApp was purchased by Neta a few years ago.
And when I just point something out, mister compassion, if you're in i Ran at the moment, you're screwed.
Well, I'll talk about that.
Shout out to our brothers and in Iran, we hope you're okay.
We can't. That's the thing.
It's scary they you know, we take a lot for granted when it comes to tellcommunications, and there's been nearly a three week blackout. The government is trying to just stop the Internet and then filter it to a point where people will just not be able to search for anything except stuff the government has widelisted. I know we're digressing somewhat.
Then I ask one more digressing question, but tech related. So if I live in Iran, I'm a dummy with this shit. So humor me. I live in Iran, I live on the top floor of a ten story residential building, and I've got Starlink.
Can I do I still have Internet? No, they were trying to throttle back Staralink as well. That's that's exactly the point the government was relating. So they could basically say to Elon Musk that you have no right to use stalink in our country and we want you closing off that service so or throttling it back. So that was one of the other issues as well that included Starlink. The government's trying to control everything, every bit of access to technology and every bit of access to the Internet
that hasn't been filtered. I mean, it's happening to a degree in China, but even things like VPNs couldn't be used. I try to geolocate yourself somewhere else so that you can pretend not to be in that country.
Me and ninety two percent of the audience to go on cool story.
What's VPN virtual private network where you try to relocate yourself digitally into another country. So right, mix account and the program that you want to watch is an available in Australia, but it's available in the US or Canada. You could say, well, I'm in Canada, now log onto your account and then watch the Canadian I don't know how to eat track down and eat bears. I don't know whatever it is.
I just had a brilliant idea that turned out to be not so brilliant. Or while you were saying that I was going to start raising homing pigeons, then I thought, how do I sell them in a run?
I can't advertise them all right in the order to flyer attached to it.
Could you imagine the old days like that was technology? I mean, imagine you can send a message one hundred miles and then I'll mate put some message in the old bit of metal around the foot and sends another message back to you and you get a two hundred mile relay in a few hours.
What about if.
You've got a pigeon coop right, and it's full of pigeons, the pigeon flies three hundred kilometers, gets there and it gets to there and sorry, can't fit you in. Your pigeon coop is full? Return to send it?
Ah.
Oh, you're like, oh the fucking oh, you got to clear out some of your pigeons. Bro it existed, not enough space. Ah, that's funny. Tech giants head to Landmark US trial over social media addiction claims.
I'm going to say it again.
Tech giants head to Landmark US trial over social media This is a very addiction claim. This is a very slippery slope and very hard to prove and vary from a psychology and a technology and it's like, it's very hard to say because there's so many variables in this.
But what's the story? Tell us?
There's an organization called the Social Media Victim Law Center and there's an attorney representing them. This's the first time this has gone to court, and what they're trying to do is they're taking all these multiple CEOs to court, including Mark Zuckerberg. They're targeting Meta and YouTube and TikTok and they're basically accusing them of making products that intentionally are addictive and harmful to young people. And this has I was reading through the article and it kind of
makes sense. I see where they're going with this, because they're saying that the actual mechanics of how social media works is designed to manipulate people. So they're you know, and there are one hundred with sixteen hundred plaintiffs, so it's a lot of people involved, more than three hundred and fifty families, two hundred and fifty school districts. This
is quite a big landmark case. But what I thought was really interesting and where it relates to us here in Australia is one of the things that was quoted by the people who are running the case. One of the experts was saying that it's not about blocking children from social media, it's about the onus being on social media being as addictive and manipulative as it is.
So you know, if.
Australians say, Okay, we're just going to not let Australian kids under the age of sixteen access the Internet, access social media. You're not solving the problem of social media. You're not forcing the tech giants to change the algorithms to fix the problem. You're just stopping kids from having access and potentially making it difficult too for some kids that you may have issues where they're isolated and they need social media to connect with community. So this is
the problem. But under the current system. The problem with the system is what they're alleging is that young people get hooked, that they fall prey to depression, eating disorders, self harm, and other mental health issues. So that's the basis for the case. But it was interesting that it had that Australian connection in terms of, you know, just shutting the door on social media isn't fixing the problem because it's not fixing the social media entity itself.
Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's a good point.
Like designing, I'm thinking about creating products or services or whatever or technology that's potentially addictive I'm sure and intentionally doing that, and then I'm thinking, oh, imagine if there was anything else like that, like ah booze or sugar or cigarettes or gambling, horse racing, casinos or pawn or junk food or vapes or all of these things are literally created to addict people, like all of them, Like, none of them are healthy, none of them are good
for you. At least social media can be used in a positive way. Yeah, it's like, well, I mean, marketing in a way is trying to get people, if not intertwined with whatever it is that they're selling, addicted, And I mean that's yeah.
So it is valid.
But also the world is full of companies selling things that are to an extent addictive already.
Look, I see what you're saying.
I guess the proliferation of social media and the exposing of young people because predominantly we're talking about young people. This court case relates to young people who are potentially hurting themselves.
Going down that rabbit hole, and that.
The socialia and I know what you're saying, You're right, smoking all the rest of it is harmful to people. We know that, I guess. But when you think of how many people smoke and how many people are exposed to say, social media and the way that social media talks about being connected and fluffy and lovely, and you know, all that sort of stuff. I think the insidious nature of it is what we're kind of talking about, but also the proliferation of social media more so than anything else.
Well, yeah, but we unequivocally know, unequivocally that smoking kills people literally directly physiologically, it causes cancer. But any eighteen year old can go to seven eleven and buy ten packs today if they could afford it, and you know that's but nonetheless it's totally legal and accessible. Like there's a lot of stuff that is very bad for people that is very available to people because it's lining pockets. And of course I'm not trying to be the moral
high horse on this, but it's just true. And then we jump up and down, which, by the way, I hate the fact that kids' lives are being destroyed to some level by social media, but I also think, well, that is true. It is also true that we have free will. It is also true that at the very least we have a capacity to go. I'm not going to look at that all day. Otherwise we say we have no oh, I'm not in control of my life.
Social media.
If you're saying that you have no responsibility in this or you have no control. It's that your brain and your body and your willpower has been hijacked by this thing. Then you've got no idea of your own potential and you're literally handing over the power to something that is not you. So I think one I agree with you, but I think there needs to be a message that we fucking humans at some stage need to take at least a little bit of responsibility and ownership for what
we do. We can't always sue everyone else for what we are literally doing because there are lots of kids who are not abusing it. So if social media was absolutely the problem, then everybody would be having the same consequence and they're not, which absolutely proves that it's a combination of factors and one being the user.
No, I do agree with what you're saying to a degree. You know, when we talked about smoking, it's black and white. There's absolutely, definitively the facts are all there that you know, it's all been done. We know that if you choose to smoke, you know that you're taking on a risk. Social media isn't necessarily it's veiled. It's more veiled than that.
You know, you might feel like you're missing out because you're not connected to your community, but the way that the algorithm is designed is to manipulate you, particularly young minds. And I was just looking at some stats in Australia. It's still around about ten percent, ten to eleven percent of Australians actually smoke in Australia. That's what the statistics say.
That's twenty twenty two to twenty three statistics. Now twenty eight to seventy nine percent of Australians are on social media, So there's a lot of in terms of comparatively, But I know what you're saying, Wow.
The really important figure is how many people are dying? Right and then use Well yeah, but also for every one of those smokers, every one of them, it's bad. But for the social media users that's not the case.
What the lawsuit's saying is that the algorithm, that what these apps are doing is manipulating people behind the scenes, and that they're deliberately doing this. So we're saying, great, this is great, Well, you know, we can go on by swap and sell, we can jump onto Facebook. But what they're saying is that these companies are deliberately, subversively manipulating people and it's not. It's young people particularly that they're focusing on, and that what seems like it's an
innocent thing is not and it's insidious. And this, I mean this is claims. Of course, this is why it's going to court, because the claims are that it's manipulating people. The claims are that it's in an insidious thing that looks nice and fluffy on the outside but in fact has been designed in such a way to suck our lives through the computer screen.
All right, good now, I'm going to present the opposition case.
Right.
What you're saying is it's veiled. It's not fucking veiled. It's all we talk about is the dangers of social media. Like you need to turn on the Telly bro because every fucking day there's more stories on how horrible social media is. I can see, Fritz, don't try and don't try and woo me with your fucking cute dog. It's not happening, right. And then the other thing is we're saying it's manipulating people. No, that's not true. That's unequivocal.
Oh one hundred percent, not one hundred percent? Oh well, who well some people? Oh is it also true that some people are not being manipulated. Also true. So to say this categoric statement that this thing does that to humans is again misleading. It has the potential, it has the capacity, like you can't just pump it with emotion and go. It's horrible. It's doing this to all our teenagers, because that's not true. It does it to some you know,
and it's the same it can be with humans. And is it fucking up some or our some lives being fucked up as a result of certain kid's addiction to a behavior on social media. I would think unequivocally yes, I completely agree. But if the cause was let's just go with Instagram or whatever, let's just go with Instagram. If the cause was Instagram, then how comes so many
people who use Instagram are not having that outcome? Because it isn't only about Instagram, it isn't only about the social media and this is what we want to do, we go, It's got nothing to do with us. We are just the victim. That's bullshit. That's people not taking responsibility for their own time, or their own choices, or their own use of their energy. Don't pick up the
fucking phone, it's optional. Don't look at it it's optional, like the whole Oh I'm not you know, this whole thing going around at the moment about obesity, which is like, oh, it's got nothing to do with you or your behavior, or it's like it does bro. I know that's uncomfortable,
but no, it's all about having this gene. I go, well, if it's all about genetics, and how come one hundred years ago the obesity rate was lower than three percent, we're not that genetically different, right, and now it's sixty six percent, sixty seven percent for obesit in overweight. I'm not saying it's it's got nothing to do with genetics, of course it has. But to say that these things have nothing to do with us, we're in this generation
where people want to avoid responsibility, accountability, ownership. I think it's what you're saying, and what I'm saying is the truth. It's that combination.
Yeah, yeah, listen to you, Come on, come on, surely you've got to say one day.
That's a good point, Harps. It's an amazingly good point.
And there's nothing that you've just said that I don't totally, unequivocably believe and agree with absolutely. I know that there are a percentage of people out there who need to be protected from themselves or make bad decisions and whatever the reason is they you know, do you know what I'm saying? And not everybody can be Craig Harper. No, I've never suggested that. I would not suggest that. No, but hang on, hang on, that's unfair. That's I would never suggest that. And you know that now.
I see.
Here's the thing. I am not fucking special. I am not genetically gifted. I was a morbilly obese child. I am genetically predisposed to gain weight. I do have an addictive personality. I fucking know that you can change the quality of your life and your outcomes and your physiology and your psychology and your behavior if.
You want to do it enough. But people don't like that.
Because that requires self control and effort and accountability. So we'd rather go yeah, yeah, yeah, but this, but this does that to me. It's just I don't know. I feel like we're just entering a time where nobody does anything wrong. It's nobody's fault. Whatever your outcomes are, it's not you, it's something else. And I know that mediocre me, like mediocre me, can produce amazing results just because I do the things that produce amazing results, not because I am inherently amazing.
Now.
Look, and it's a part of me that was against the social media ban for kids under sixteen because you know, is it about more educating and being proactive about using these tools and saying, well, this is what can happen when you use social media.
However, there are a lot of positives because you.
Get your community with your people, with your tribe. So what we're going to do is teach you to use this in a way that's going to make it acceptable and available to you without just shutting the door. And maybe we live in a nanny state too much. Maybe
we keep making excuses for people. I mean, it was a few years ago, Craigo that I think the AMA, the Australian Medical Association told GPS directed GPS to start using language like fat and obese in their conversations with patients who are overweight, because it got to the point where it wasn't so much political correctness, but it was seen to be you can't call someone fat, you can't call someone obese.
You know it's not right, You're going to hurt that. It's just identifying a state. It's not I'm not calling you fat. It's like calling someone a cunt. I get it. That's horrible, right, Calling someone a fuck with not good. But identifying and recognizing that, let's go with me, so then no one can be hurt. When I was in my early thirties, I was one hundred and seventeen kilos, which is nearly forty kilos. I was fat, right, That's not an insult. That's a recognition and an awareness of
my body, of my body composition. But the problem is, see, if someone goes, you're tall, everyone's cool. If you've got beautiful red hair or blonde hair, great, if you've got great fucking jaw structure, or if you've got wide sholves. But as soon as anyone says the truth that you know, Craig, you're fat, people are like, oh, you can't say that. Oh well, honestly you can. And if you choose to get offended now walking down the street pointing out to
someone that they're fat, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about in the context of potentially a clinical or a health setting where we're talking about your longevity, your health span, your lifespan, acknowledging that your current body composition doesn't lend itself to a healthy long life. But that's what I'm talking I actually love people, and I actually want to be real with people and say, listen, I care about your long term physical health more than your
feelings for the next two minutes. If all, if my job is just to make you feel good and tell you what you want to hear, then I'm going to go get a new job, because fuck that. My job is not to lie to people, mislead people, and kind of stroke their ego or emotions for two minutes. My job is literally to help people become empowered and resilient and strong and aware and choose the life they want
to live and hopefully help equip them to do that. Now, you can't live in a psychological, as you called, nanny state for that. And it's not about self loathing. It's about self wi awareness.
You know.
Saying I'm overweight, that's not blame and shame. That's just fucking true. I'm overweight, I'm too fat. Cool, Okay, do something about it. I will, thanks, you know, And that's me. That's this is just a subject that I've been dealing with for forty years, and I've just seen it get worse and worse and worse. I've seen Australians get less and less healthy, more and more dysfunctional, more disease. The only reason, in fact, we're not living longer now, we've
started to go backwards first time in history. But the only reason we live as long as we do in many instances is just because we've got better and better medication. It's not because people are doing shit healthier, you know. But now what we've seen is the actual health span, the period of time of a person's life, percentage of time where they are healthy, has reduced dramatically. Yeah, they're living until they're eighty five, but from sixty they're fucked.
You know. They're medicated up the.
Wazoo, and people born in nineteen thirty six are more likely to live to one hundred than people after that time period.
So as the rest. Yeah, that's right.
Our longevity and also quality of life is reducing, you know. Interestingly, someone said to me the other day, and others not tech, but they said, oh, you're too thin.
Hah. Yeah.
I got told that too by a doctor by my ear guy recently. You're too thin.
Yeah, you know, and I'm like, I know he meant.
Well, but it's like somebody who has fucking bodiedy morpha and spent his life trying to be in good shape and then trying not to be fat, and then some motherfucker goes, you're too he reckons.
That's God bless him. I won't say his name.
He's actually a very good dude, but he thinks that literally could be contributing to my fucked ears. How funny is.
That when you were one hundred and seventeen kilo's what your AI mirror would have said to you when it was describing you.
Would have told me that I was stocky and well built and strong and powerful, and I wish Yeah, I probably would have tuned right in. I would have gone, you right, bro.
No.
The reason I'm asking this is there is some this is great tech. This is an AI mirror, we're calling it AI mirrors, but smart devices that are helping blind
people see themselves. So, for example, originally it was things like helping blind people navigate the world, so you I and smart tech to see the world around them, but more increasingly people were also using them, so women were putting on their makeup using these AI devices, so they too, wow, and they get assistance because they can't see themselves, they're getting assistance with this AI tech to help them get ready in the morning, you know, spend your twenty minutes
putting on your makeup and stuff like that.
I thought it was really cool.
There's an article with this woman by the name of Lucy Edwards who's blind, and she's a content creator and so she basically is, you know, she's been showing her passion for beauty and styling, which is interesting because you know, for a long time she was quoted as saying that, you know, being a blind person, you know you're beautiful on the inside.
You know, it doesn't care.
That's kind of like a terrible backhanded compliment. It's like, ah, it's like when mom goes, yeah, but you're beautiful to me. I'm like, ah, God, well, this time is kind of want to be beautiful to you, for God's sakes.
This company called Vision was one of the first companies to use artificial intelligence for blind people, and they started in twenty seventeen, but it've come a long way since then. And basically they they thought initially that what would happen is that their app would be used for people to navigate the world, and then they were really surprised, you know, like using it to read letters or go shopping and
all that sort of stuff. But they started to find that a lot of their customers, we're using it to coordinate their outfits.
So what am I going to wear today?
Does this pair of pants clash with the top that I'm wearing.
Isn't that cool? I thought that's amazing. Can I just ask is the app? Is it glasses? Is it something that pins onto you?
What is it?
Well, you can there's an app for the phone, so he just turned the front facing camera to you. But if you're navigating the world and using it to read something, it could be smart glasses as well. So because smart glasses now you can just wear and it will effectively tell you what's going on. Actually, I've got to I'm catching up for lunch tomorrow with a good friend of
mine who's blind. I'm going to ask him about this and see because he's married, so I don't know how and I've never asked him whether his wife tells him what to wear in the morning or whether.
He just chucks out myself.
So I'll have to ask him that tomorrow because they're really good friends and I've never really thought that way.
It'sn't that interesting.
I don't ever want to be blind and shout out to our blind listeners, are well done you for navigating the world.
Someone told me from Vision Australia once that one of the terms that they really help hate people using is you know, the term vision impaired and visually impaired. That's very different. So impaired they can't see. But if someone's visually impaired, they just look bad.
What do you think about it? Terrible? But that's how you see. What do you think about it? Vision impaired?
But whoever says someone's visually impaired, they.
Do all the time. It's said in the meeting.
You mean as a mistake, So yes, yeah, that's so, it's a common mistake that people say they're visually You know that someone is visually impaired and they're not visually impaired, they're vision impaired.
Well you could say to someone your vision impaired, which is probably a bonus right now because I'm visually impaired, so lucky you you know, I I know we've got a list that we may or may not get through tell me about and this is none your list, But I'm sure you know I'm quite in interested in the rayband type of glasses that have a camera that have been around for a few years. It seems like, I don't know, they're in a bit of a holding pattern.
Maybe they're a bit better than they were. But so they essentially can be a phone and the internet and a recording device, video camera, all of it in one am I correct on that.
Yes, yes, so look they do pair up with your phone at the moment, but you means that you as you're walking along the street, you could start recording something. But even more so, it can be looking at things and analyzing them and providing information. So turn by turn directions, it could say, you know, turn left here. It could be paired up with your smartphone while you're using directional maps and all that sort of thing. But I guess one of the big things was the privacy concerns having
a camera built in. When's the camera active? So all of these smart devices have a little white light that comes on when the camera is being used, the video or the still phone.
Ah, that's good, that's good.
Otherwise you look like what I don't have one, but.
You would look like creepy creepster just fucking being able to look at someone and record them.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, I call them perve glasses.
It's you know, you know the people who buy them, the people who used to buy the reflective ones that I'm kidding. You know how people had reflective sunnis and you always were a bit you know you thought, No.
I tried a pair of those, I looked.
I probably look like a wanker all the time, but fucking a bigger anker.
Yeah, they smartt better.
You'll eventually have heads up display that will give you real time translations. I know we've spoken about this before, but I'm pretty excited because I feel that down the track, I would like to use AI smart glasses to accompany me throughout the day and say I don't forget, you've got to do this. And during your meeting, the key points that came out of it was this, this and this that that works for me. I reckon I could do that, but it's the privacy issue and where that data.
Is going to be stored is what is Chris crucial for me?
Imagine if you can you know you're in a one hour business meeting or board meeting or whatever it is. You've got your glasses on, you're recording, and then you say later on you're like, oh, what did Brian say about that second deal? And you go bring up the audio where Brian talks about that second deal. It's about halfway through the meeting, and it just brings up how cool would that be?
Now you can do that? Now? Wow?
And then go also print that or send that to my email, send it as an email to my email so that I've got a written copy of it as well.
Transcribe it. That's what Brian said. Send it back to Brian. Hey, Brian, Hell, that's the problem. The problem is not the technology is not there. The problems me the problems. I'm still sending fucking carrier pigeons and writing notes in crayon.
It's pretty fully.
Am I the right person for this show? It's dawning on me.
Absolute right person for this show because you ask great questions.
Oh god, God, yeah, I love I will say though I do love tech, like the I love the fact that I can drive. Obviously, I'm I think my listeners now, I drive to Ronn and Mary's, my parents a lot, and it's four hours each time, and there's not one trip that I have where I don't have at least one conversation.
And I mean back and forth multiple.
Times with AI about something where I go, you know, I literally say hi to it and goes, hey, Craig, what's up? And I go, I want to chat to you about something? And then I just propose an idea or a concept or I'm thinking about this, thinking about.
Doing a workshop on that.
I've got a you know, I've got this problem.
I want to just it's so good.
And it's not that it gets everything right or I operational everything it thinks or suggests, but fucking hell, it's like having a high level conversation with a pretty fucking smart person whenever you want and they don't get tired.
And I think the key thing is going to be not just the aspects of what you're talking about, but is once you incorporate history, so it knew what you did last week, but it also knew what you did three and four and five weeks ago. That's going to help streamline the processes that you make, the decisions that
you make as well. I think that having that there, and I think in the terms of you know what if someone has dementia or they're in the early stages of dementia, this could be really handy for them.
You know.
I know when Mums started to kind of go down that rabbit hole, you know, we were trying to encourage her. We put signs on the fridge, you know, little notes for reminder. But that AI company and I kind of think about this too. As a person who lives by themselves, I think it would be great to have that AI companion helping in assisting in what I was doing. And I think that if we can use this tech to help people stay home longer and safer, to be in their own home, to be protected, to be checked on,
all that sort of, I think it's great. I think it's technology being used to help people is always wonderful.
And then a.
Podcasts the other day with a cardiologist who's right up there, great guy, good business, but very like he wants to work with people, or he wants his team to work with people before they have massive issues.
Right.
He's ironically his goal is not to see people on the operating table. Like I really liked him. His name's doctor David O'Donnell, and I was driving and I was I generally need to be sitting down about quarter of an hour before the podcast to at least get a bit of an insight into I look at their bio, I look at their maybe five minutes of video just to get a but I want enough, but not too much, because I generally don't want to know.
The answers to the questions I have.
Right, And so I was running late and I said to CHATGPT, so I'm interviewing this guy. This is who he is, this is what he does. I haven't prepared. I want you to come up with a snapshot of who he is and what he does, and I want you to write, come up with ten to twenty questions that you know I may or may not use, and then it comes up in total and then it goes, sure, Craig, I'll do a typ style intro and typ style you know, like you centric you know, and it brings up this
thing that is fucking amazing. Turns out I really didn't use any of it because that kind of gave me a sense of who he was. But just in terms of what it can produce in one minute, where you go, man, this is depending on the situation and the application. This stuff is life changing, if not at the very least massively time saving.
I feel like I.
Want to pick up my phone and call you to see if you will actually answer. And I've just been talking to chat GPT all this time, just impersonating.
You exactly exactly.
You never know, do you know that you and I have been chatting for Nellian out?
All?
Right, let's do one or two.
You pick whatever one you want to do, rather me pluck, Let's do one that tells light you up.
A little bit. No, I don want it.
This is a community service one. Okay. It's been discovered that people who are on older iPhone so the iPhone eight, the eight plus and the X may not connect to Telstra's network after a recent Apple update of their phones, including to triple zero. And I guess given the temperatures and what's going on in places like Victoria and New South Wales, this is kind of crucial. So may not be able to make that SOS call if you need to. And it's just old tech and this came up with
Samsung last year, remember with Optus and Samsung. So I think just checking your phone is compatible and making sure, but sometimes you can get what we call bricked if your phone doesn't update and it's an older phone. And I kind of frustrates me that, you know, I've got a car that's thirty two years old and I can still drive, but I certainly don't have a phone that's thirty two years old, because you know, after about two hours and thirty five seconds, you need to get the new phone.
Now.
It does frustrate me that a phone that was working yesterday suddenly might not work today. So if you've got an iPhone eight, then just check it out, make sure that it's got full functionality.
If you're on the Telstray network, here's that.
I think that's a great community service announcement. Also, I'm worried that now everyone's going to ring Triple zero to see if they can.
Yeah, please don't, please don't do that. Not on it. They go, what's your emergency? Please?
Ah, just checking that my phone can reach you, thanks Dave.
Maybe a Telstra and check.
With yeah, yeah, don't please don't ring triples hero unless you actually have an emergency.
Imagine that it's on the news tomorrow night. It was like the.
Emergency servers overwhelmed with calls from FUK whit seeing that their phoneworks.
Hey, have you ever used the Apple air tags? I know you're in the Apple ecosystem for a lot of stuff that you've got.
I have not. Just remind me of what that is.
So the air tags are literally a little circular disc that you can touch to your luggage, to your dog, to your best friend, and then you'll.
Where they are.
Where do you put it on your best friend? On their forehead underneath their scrotum? We're super glued? Like, where should I put one on you?
You lick the back of it, just press it to their head?
Fuk and hell, good luck sticking on my head because it's a vast expanse.
There's a lot of real estate on both of our heads, isn't there. We could go.
Yeah, I'm just going to a little bit of super glue and I'm going to have it a scrotal tag for you.
Hey.
So I had this instance where when I traveled overseas, what three or four years ago was the last big overseas trip. I was with a maid of mine and we were stuck at one of a German air but I think it might have been Frankfurt Airport, and the flight had been.
Delayed and delayed and delayed.
And we're saying, well, what's happening. Are we about to board? What's going on? And the guy at the counter said, oh, yeah, the baggage is already on the plane. We're ready to have you across. And my mate pulls up his phone and says, no, they're not. There's the plane over there. My baggage is still over here because he had his Apple air Tag and it was hilarious. Yeah, I know,
it's great, isn't it. But the new version of the Apple air tag is now version two is going to have a better range, and it's going to mean that because the way that it works, which is kind of cool, is if the air tag connects to your phone by Bluetooth, then at a certain points you're going to lose connectivity because the tag is further away from your phone. Then
you can, you know, have a range connection too. But what it then does is it searches for other iPhones and it piggybacks off their signal and then retransmits that back to you via the network. So effectively it forms this kind of giant web. So if you imagine a picture of all the iPhones in Victoria and then you connect all the dots. That's the mesh that it's using. So when it drops out from one person's iPhone, it
then reconnects to another iPhone. And that's what's made this such a really great gadget because they're cheap, and so the new version that's coming out is going to be a heck of a lot better and it's going to you know, it's a great bluetooth tracker that I think people in the Apple ecosystem are really getting the benefits from.
Yes, yes, you with you're at the back.
Yes, I just put my hand up everyone like a fucking year four student.
How much of these grasshopper either about twenty five bucks? Okay, So what is the with the new one?
What's the if you're not going through everybody else's jumping off the back of everyone else's iPhone, what's just the distance?
Like the range?
That's a really good question. I think one of the things they're doing with the new one is increasing the range. I don't know that I know exactly what the range is.
Do you know the old one?
No?
I don't know that either. Really, fucking hell, you got one job, bro.
I'm going to talk about I fucking Apple tags.
Air tags yeah, oh yeah, how do they work? I don't know.
Thirty to one hundred feet, so ten to thirty meters. That's for proximity and precision finding. So they're great around the house. If you've lost your keys, you've got your wallet somewhere, you can put a tag in there. But that's the direct Bluetooth range up to thirty meters.
That's me much bigger than that. Come on, Apple, Well, that's sort of sick.
I want something that if I left my keys in Elwood, I can find them.
But this but to find my network range is what we were talking about the web. But that basically is unlimited because it's tracking worldwide as long as the air tag is near another Apple device, so as long as it's another Apple device. That's why for me, it wouldn't work too well if I'm out hiking with Fritz out in the country, because there's no one else hiking at the same time, so effectively I wouldn't be in range of anybody.
And that's what I kind of fund I'll kind of find this Fritzius. I actually have a bluetes. I've got a GPS tracker for Fritzi, so I can. He's got his own GPS tracker just in case.
He's such a cute dog. He's so like old gentlemanly. He's like now, it's just it's just I don't know. He looks like he's wise. He's probably a moron, but he looks wise.
He's probably wiser than I am. He's probably wiser than both of us.
Patrick, tell people where they are future mayor of Balan and surroundings. Tell people vote one Patrick. I'll be his campaign manager. All the details out soon. You're welcome. How can people connect with you while you're still less famous?
I'm here on the podcast, dude, I'm on the new project that's got to be worth something. Websites dot com websites now dot com today. You and if you have an idea, or you have a topic, or you don't like me in Craig, or you want to help something, then then go to the form page on the contact page so websites now dot com today you and we will fight about it on the next show.
Has that Oh yeah, we love well.
I think the fact if we got on agreed about everything, I wouldn't believe us.
I'd go that's bullshit. We like to debate a lot. All right, it's been real. Thank you Patrick,