Hamish Macdonald - After The Facts

0:00There was a point in time where we imagined like a post-truth future in which none of us really knew what was real and what was fake. And I think probably the reality that we're all experiencing is that we're kind of there now. Certainly, the algorithms are feeding off basic functions in our brain, you know, what we react to, what we have the emotional response to. The issue is, are these algorithms doing something back to us? I think we're all going to have to arm ourselves better to confront the onslaught, the waves of information pollution that are coming our way, particularly with AI's development.

0:39I think my gut says we'll figure it out. humans are pretty resilient as well you know and like if you think back not that long ago the Cuban Missile Crisis might have been happening or Chernobyl was happening and people really genuinely thought this might be the end of the world yeah but humans have a remarkable capacity to move through those things He's back. He is back. And boy, oh boy, is this something to celebrate because for the first time, as Bridge, producer Bridge just pointed out, never in the history of the Imperfects.

1:23And this is huge. This is huge. Never in the history of the imperfects has a guest gone from just a guest to expert on an Academy of Imperfection episode. Hamish, welcome to the club of one. I feel very, I feel deeply honoured. I didn't know the club existed. It didn't actually. It didn't. Until moments ago. You started it. But yeah, I'm glad I've met the entry requirements. You did. I'm not quite sure how I have, but anyway. No, well, that's the first fact of the episode.

1:55We'll be getting to many more, hopefully. I'm trying to work out why Hamish's voice makes me nervous, and I've just worked out why. Because for our entire live show that we did, Hamish comes up on the screen and does a breaking news report, and then the second that finishes, we would dance and sing. And I'm not overly comfortable dancing and singing in front of a very big crowd. Yeah. 12 times. And every time your face and voice appeared, I would start to get nervous.

2:26I think I probably knew when every one of those live shows happened because you'd get random texts from friends. You know, Susie Yusuf would be like, Hey, I've just seen you. How are you? I haven't thought of you or texted you in months. But I'm at the imperfect slide. Yeah, that's true. We spent a lot of time with you without you knowing. Anyway, well, thank you for having me then and again now. Oh, pleasure. Pleasure. I just want to do a quick bio because I think most people remember your episode.

2:53It was so amazing. But I guess the bio will help explain why we have you here as an expert. Sure. Can we keep the bio brief? No. Because I'll go bright red. No, we cannot. It's your fault because you've done so much in your life. So you only have yourself to blame. But I'll do it quickly. If this helps, it's actually for the first time not a very flattering bio. Oh, great. Great, great, great. As you said, Ryan, it's an extreme privilege that we welcome Hamish McDonald back into the studio as one of Australia's most awarded and loved journalists.

3:22Hamish has travelled all over the world delivering us on the ground real-time updates about conflicts, natural and man-inflicted disasters. For his work, Hamish has received a Walkley Award and a Human Rights Australia Award for his journalism. He was GQ's Man of the Year in 2012. Whoa. What did he get for that? Okay, let's slow down. GQ's Man of the Year. I think it was a subcategory. I feel like given facts are so important, I don't think I was the GQ man of the year.

3:50I think they have like media, sport, you know. Your sport? Yeah, obviously. And in 2016, Hamish was awarded a Neyman Fellowship at Harvard University. Hamish was a previous host of Q&A on ABC, Channel 10's The Project, and now is working as Mornings presenter on ABC Sydney Radio. Hamish also co-hosts Global Roaming, which I listen to every single night because my wife listens to it every night in bed. It's wonderful. Good to be there as well. No wonder you get nervous.

4:34Hamish has dedicated his life to him. The unknown throuple. I didn't mean to divulge that. Anyway, moving on very quickly. It's one of Penny's demands before we go to bed. You did say you'd go red. Put Hamish's voice on, please. Hamish has dedicated his life to reporting the facts. But what are facts and how much does their truth matter? Is that a question? No, that's not my first question. That's a rhetorical part of the fire. What are facts? We keep hearing the word, but what actually are they?

5:14So your TV show, The Matter of Facts, I've got a whole description of it here, but maybe it's – I think people would prefer to hear you describe what it is. Well, I mean, it's just basically an exploration of the – reality that I think we're all confronting right now that it's becoming increasingly hard to discern what a fact is. You know, like it is not a simple question to answer anymore what a fact is because there are contested facts. People are fighting over facts.

5:43We all know, and I'm sure every person listening to this will think of an experience recently where either they themselves or someone around them will say, oh, I've seen this thing. I don't know if it's real. Mm-hmm. I mean, a recent one that I can remember is the Jim Carrey clone debate. Is Jim Carrey the real Jim Carrey or is it a clone? It seems like he's had some cosmetic surgery done and he appeared at like an awards thing and the internet went into a frenzy and the common assumption was, oh, well.

6:18He's a clone. Not that he's followed a history of people getting plastic surgery, but no, clone. I think there was a point in time where we imagined like a post-truth future, a future in which none of us really knew what was real and what was fake. And I think probably the reality that we're all experiencing is that we're kind of there now. We're well and truly into that space. And we're all probably being tricked, duped at certain points in time.

6:52If we're not... We're not sure whether we are, and so we're having to ask ourselves those questions. And essentially, our whole information ecosystem is being heavily polluted, sometimes deliberately, sometimes just by machines and computers and friends and family spreading stuff that they don't realize is false. But everything that we consume is being polluted. If you just imagine a big information stream that's constantly spewing at us, You could argue that it's always being polluted, but I think the proliferation of digital media, social media, AI generated stuff is meaning that more and more of that is not trustworthy, is not what it looks like at first.

7:38And so that's also sowing doubt in our own minds. They call this the liar's dividend. It's sowing doubt in our own minds about even the stuff that is true. So we now don't really know what's fact. So I've been off, I haven't been on social media for nearly a month now and my life feels so much better. I feel so much happier and just I feel much better because of it. You've been off social media for how long now? Four years. In 2026. 26, yeah. Yeah, four or five years, yeah.

8:12Would you say, I mean, I'm interested to know how you feel after, if I'm feeling that after a month or maybe this is just your normal now. Everything's perfect now. Get out. It's not the podcast for you. It was a radical change. I mean, I think like everyone, I'm, you know, impacted, influenced by the news and there's a lot of really difficult, heavy stuff going on in the world today. And I think that probably provokes things in all of us. It's not like you're kind of free of that.

8:39But I definitely think I've reestablished a relationship with long-form reading. So books, magazine articles, all that sort of stuff, in a way that I think is healthier. When I want to tune out or calm down, I'll just go and sit on a couch with a book. And I only do physical books. I know e-readers and all the rest are fantastic. But I just think, and in fact, I've learned through this doco series that books, there is something different going on in our brains when we read a physical book compared with something on a screen.

9:14And that doesn't fix everything. It doesn't solve any of the problems. But I think if you can have a healthy relationship with things in the real world, even if those things are fictional, that's probably healthier than some of the other options. Yeah, and I think what's helpful for this conversation to set this up is just that through this TV show, which is on ABC and ABC iView, you travelled the world and met with world-leading experts on this and you've spoken to them, you've learned a lot from them and that will kind of help shape today's conversation, I'm guessing.

9:50Yeah, absolutely. I didn't do a very good job of explaining it, did I? It's been a big journey over the last couple of years basically to travel the world and Australia just to try and facilitate. find out both what's happening broadly in the world that's diminishing, damaging our grip on reality, but also to find out what's happening in our brains. Because I think we all can sense it's doing something to our brains, but is it actually changing something?

10:15And the short answer is it is. Yeah. It feels to me, and I would like to go on a bit of a rant about this later, but it feels to me like the – A little rant now. Yeah, a mini rant and then a big one later. Foreshadowing a rant. Yeah. It feels to me like we've got some pretty serious problems to solve in the world right now, but the more time we spend on social media, the more our quality of thought and the clarity of thought sort of diminishes and decreases, and I feel like that's a serious problem for us, but we can talk about that later on.

10:48Sure. Many around. Look, I think wherever you come from, wherever you're listening to this, you'll have examples of this in your own community, in your own maybe school or work environment or just the town you live in or the city that you live in. And we can probably think of examples that are confronting Australia right now. But I'll tell you a story about where I come from because we have explored this in the series. Yeah. I grew up in Jindaby and in the snowy mountains of New South Wales.

11:15It was a beautiful place to grow up, an amazing environment to be raised in. I love it. I'm still very passionate about it. When I grew up in the Snowys, there were issues that divided people. There were, you know, frictions and fracture lines. There were local TV news services that came out of Canberra. There were local radio stations. There were a couple of local newspapers. Those issues that existed then, I think, were always present. I was kind of aware of them, but they weren't so big that it sort of pulled the community apart.

11:52I think the difference that exists today is that those issues, and I'm going to tell you about one key issue in a moment, There's not these kind of shared spaces where people get their information from, like newspapers, like TV news in the evening. There's just a community Facebook page, and that's where it all plays out. The issue in my community is Brumbies, so horses, that are in the national parks, so this pristine environment. The Brumbies have been there for a very long time after white settlement.

12:25Farmers took them up for grazing in the summer months. And this became part of the kind of identity of the place, the heritage of, or at least the colonial heritage of the place, the man from Snorri River, you know, you get it. Today, it's so divided because no one can agree on how many of these horses there are and therefore what to do about it. And the reason I tell you this example is because you need to agree on the basic facts of something to be able to then embark when there is a difference of opinion on solving a challenge.

13:02We need to be able to sit at this table and all observe, there are four glasses of water here, a cup of tea and a laptop. in order to then discuss about the placement of those things or solving whatever the problem is. If you can't see the same things or agree on what's there, then you don't even have a starting point for solving that problem. It's become so serious in the Snowys. There are threats that are made on these Facebook pages. There has been security placed outside the National Parks Office.

13:35Some of the National Parks workers have had threats on their life. We met a guy who runs the local cafe who ended up going to court because he delivered a severed horse's head to the front door of the National Parks Office as a sort of warning to them. Oh, my God. As he says, you know, a nod to the Godfather. Yeah. The local MP when I was growing up, who was a friend of my dad's, a nationals guy that's very passionate about the Brumbies, he says, look, there's no way we could do today what we did then and have a town hall meeting because these intense feelings would bear out if everyone was in the same physical space.

14:13He says there's never been so much hate. Versions of this story play out everywhere today. It might be to do with a wind farm. It might be to do with a solar farm. It could be migrants or particular, you know, diaspora groups in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane and how they're, you know, coalescing with the rest of the broader community. I think there are just versions of this story playing out all over the world in large and small scale. And it does go to identity.

14:46It goes to emotion. People are picking tribes. You know, bushfire happens and you either believe that it's climate change or you believe it's arson. and you jump on social media and you make your arguments one way or the other, you cannot engage with someone that has a different view. Yeah. You insult them, you belittle them, you refuse to see any nuance. If someone injects nuance into the conversation, they're accused of whataboutism. You ask a question that's the wrong tone or the wrong note, and someone says, well, you're supporting genocide by asking that question.

15:23It's super binary. Totally. And this is deliberate. This is the way the social media platforms are built. That's the way the algorithm drives content. The things that people react to are the things that bubble up the algorithm. And so people end up in these tribes. You know, it's very complicated for people that might take a position on one issue that fits them into a particular tribe, but then on another issue they choose something which doesn't fit with that tribe and suddenly the cohort over there is saying, well, you're not one of us.

15:56Oh, it turns out you're a transphobe or you're a genocide supporter or, you know, you can see this happening everywhere and it's largely driven by emotion everywhere. There are often layers of facts, there are bits of facts built into these arguments, but often it's fact layered with emotion and opinion and that becomes very difficult and overwhelming for people, I think. Yeah, it also feels like the facts always, they never go in the direction of things aren't quite as bad as you think.

16:32Like they always, they never go in the place of, as you just said, things are a bit more nuanced and it's not quite as extreme. It's like everyone's facts go in the direction of extremes and fuels. I wonder if it's, is it the algorithm that's driving that or is it our brains that are attracted to that? Like which comes first, the algorithm or the brain? Well, I genuinely don't know the answer to that, but I think certainly the algorithms are feeding off basic functions in our brain, what we react to, what we have the emotional response to.

17:09They're being trained in a certain way. We all know the business model is to keep us engaged, keep us on the platforms. These are conversations that have been well traversed. The issue is, are these algorithms doing something back to us? You know, is the consumption of all of this material through screens, through devices, doing something to us? You know, we're not born able to read. It's something that we learn. So this is the sort of neuroplasticity of the brain.

17:44We meet this researcher in the United States, Marianne Wolfe, who researches all of this. And she is looking into what this kind of large scale human, humanity wide experiment is doing to our brains. You know, part of this series came here to Melbourne to the School of Psychology, had my head wired up to computers to measure my response to distraction. you know, my ability to just function, to read things, to identify mistakes in text. As soon as you're having a little light flash or a sound pop off or ask me to press another button, your ability to deal with, consume any of this stuff in a rational, functional way drops away.

18:33But as a human race, we're experimenting with uh, the written word on page, which we've been doing now for a few hundred years, uh, now that's all digital and it happens, you know, if any of you pick up your phone, how many different apps and web browser pages would you have in there that you would toggle between in the course of a couple of hours? You mentioned before that you're reading, like you deliberately choose to read a book over like a Kindle or an e-reader.

19:06What for you is the difference there? Like how do you, why do you feel like it's something that you want to do or deliberately choose to do? Because... In part, it's because if I have to pick up a physical book, I have to put the phone down. I have to walk away from my laptop. I like reading a book lying down on a couch or sort of sitting down on a couch and I can leave my phone over there for half an hour, whatever it is, and not pick it up. Like if I read an article on my phone, I'll be checking my messages while I'm doing it.

19:39I'll be dipping into my email. I'll reach a boring bit. But like a Kindle... Yeah, look, I don't own a Kindle, so that's the reason I don't own it. But for work, for example... Don't you take my Kindle away from me. Yeah, I don't have a sort of fatwa against Kindles. Yet. Yes. But... through work, I'm always being asked to read books before doing the interview with someone. And I would say, most of the time now, the publishers will send you a PDF version of the book and I might have to do five of those a week.

20:14And it's just, it's too much digital consumption for my brain. I need that break. I'm enjoying the sanctuary of having a book. just a safe physical space for me to engage with a different narrative, fact or fiction. And, um, it takes me away from screens. And I think that's healthy. I think something I think is worth kind of adding to this. And this goes to Mary Ann Wolfe's research in the United States. When you read a book, you know, if you think about the way you might do that on your Kindle or a physical book, you might read a chapter or two at night before you go to bed and you put it down and then you go to sleep and then you go about your day and you may not come back to it until the next night or even a couple of nights later.

21:06In between those times, you're sitting with the information that you read. You're thinking about it and maybe you're coming at it from different angles. Maybe you don't think about it at all until you come back to it. But you're allowing those ideas, those thoughts, those emotions to kind of gestate. And she says that by reading in this far more rapid, fragmented way where you're jumping between different articles and different screens and different platforms, you're you're not actually giving yourself that time and that space to digest the information.

21:41And so that means that we're consuming the information and not allowing ourselves to have empathy, to have a rational, emotional consideration of it. You're not digesting the ideas. You're not challenging the ideas. You might just read it and go, well, that's the thing. You know, sometimes if you really have a bit of time, you might read something and then the next day think, oh, I kind of liked that at first, but I'm just coming at it again and I'm thinking or feeling a little bit differently about it.

22:09I don't know if I agree with that. And then maybe you come back and you read a bit more and it takes you... Like I think as humans, we kind of need that journey and we need the space and the time as well as the concentration to go on a journey like that. So interesting. It occurred to me before when you're talking about reading that I loved what you said then about the consumption of it yourself and what's happening to your brain while you're doing it.

22:33And... But something else pops into my mind that seems a little bit left of field. But we, in doing this show, Bridget and I have had to speak to a defamation lawyer a couple of times to be just very clear about what we're putting out in the world. With some episodes, you want to be, as you would be very familiar with, you want to be very certain that you're doing everything you can to make sure that you're getting the facts right. And one of the things that this lawyer said was – what's the cost of making the mistake?

23:03So if someone comes back to you and says that's wrong, what is it going to cost you as a business? And for us it would be we can reload, we can update the piece of audio on our place where we put the audio so that can change. On YouTube you can't replace a video so there's a bit of a cost there that we'd have to re-upload and lose some stuff. And he said typically the appetite for risk in getting the facts wrong is a lot lower in traditional media like print because it costs so much money to reprint something if you've got it wrong or to issue a retraction in the next paper.

23:39And it occurred to me then that by... moving your consumption to slower forms of media that are more expensive to produce. It's sort of a great way to filter, to have a funnel and filter on the way in, purely out of that cost of defamation. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, look, it's not like the traditional media hasn't made mistakes. No, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But yeah, certainly like... Just consuming a tweet or an Instagram post that someone hasn't given much thought to is different to someone that's written a book that's taken them 10 years to research and write.

24:13So, you know, there's different filters that apply there for sure. I think... you know, we all have a relationship with the media that we consume and it's evolving fast, right? Like if I go and do a lecture or talk to a room of people about these issues, I'll often ask them to begin with about like where they get their media from. And generationally it's quite different. You know, obviously people that are in the kind of boomer generation are still maybe relying on newspapers a bit more, watch the evening news, but then as you go to younger demographics – That shifts to the point where, you know, people in that sort of 18 to 30-year-old age demo is now mostly getting their news and information from social media.

24:55And people will trust those things in different ways. People will have, you know, nervousness about certain forms of media that others don't. You know, a young person say, well, there's no way I would watch that. you know, the evening news on commercial TV because that's the mainstream media and they're corrupt and they're controlled. And, you know, I wouldn't read these newspapers because that's owned by a billionaire and they have these particular views that I disagree with.

25:19So they would have distrust. Equally, someone my mum's age might think, well, I feel quite nervous about going onto Instagram or Twitter. I wouldn't really read any articles. I'm nervous about clicking on a link. I don't know where that would take me to. So everyone is kind of making their own judgments about what they trust and why. I guess what I'm starting to think about and what we've been exploring in this series is how we get our population more generally to become more invested in, more engaged in media literacy, information literacy, just understanding how polluted the whole information ecosystem is and then help us all develop our own skills to navigate that better.

26:05Because I don't think... No one's going to come along and just clean this all up and make it easy for us. I think we're all going to have to arm ourselves better to confront the kind of the onslaught, the waves of information pollution that are coming our way, particularly with AI's development. My experience is with news, these days, most of my information comes from YouTube and then a bit of like Instagram, I guess, realistically. But I still pay for New York Times and really try to will myself to check the New York Times and look at it as if like, okay, I'm going to look at the New York Times, get my world news from that.

26:49But it is so much less entertaining. Yeah. And I find myself always going, I'll just watch The Daily Show. I'll just watch Jon Stewart. He'll tell me... So is that what you mean when you say you mostly get it from YouTube? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so I'll end up going to YouTube to see what's going on. And, of course, I'm getting like... And objectively, intellectually, I guess, I know that that is an unhealthy and potentially biased view of the world.

27:20And I'm definitely not getting all the information. But I also know that I'm not going to read the whole New York Times. I'm not going to read long articles because I just do not have the attention span. Or really, to be honest, and it's kind of embarrassing, but I'll want to read that much text. Um, but I maintain my subscription because it kind of feel like I'm kind of offsetting, offsetting the fact that I'll just like watch 23 minutes of Jon Stewart, tell me what to think.

27:48Yeah. And then supporting the business model, if not by reading it, but by at least paying the subscription. Exactly. It's like, I believe in this, but I'm not really getting most of my news from it. And you said social media as well. So where is it popping up? Where are you seeing? I guess like, I mean, not that I'm seeking it out, but just like whenever I go to Instagram, I'll be seeing things there. Yeah. But it's not like I'm going there to check the news, but I just like by default do get news there.

28:15So can you tell me a bit more about that? Because it's something I've heard from friends. I wasn't aware of this, but some years ago, Instagram, switched their algorithm. So it's no longer now just your friends and what they post, right? Hardly. Yeah. It's, it's this kind of mix of some of the people you follow, but then other random stuff that gets filtered through. I mean, I guess from their point of view, it's like whatever it takes to keep me on the app, but it doesn't matter about who you follow or who your friends are anymore.

28:43Yeah. But I've been reading that the algorithm, the Instagram algorithm is pushing a lot of like far right content or extreme right content. Sorry, can I just answer? I have an answer to that, which I think is important because I meant to talk about the algorithm. And also I want to hear about how Australians are coping right now because it was the 27th of Jan, so my six-year-old daughter was starting school two days later. And she has this thing where she will talk about the worries and concerns she has about her life will often come out when you're putting it to bed.

29:21She'll be lying there staring at the ceiling. She'll start talking. And that's a really important time for her to reflect and for us to be present. and she got up to go and get a drink of water, and I was lying on her bed waiting for her to come back. Just checked my phone quickly, went to Instagram, stupid thing to do, and I saw Carl Stefanovic had had Pauline Hanson on his new podcast on Australia Day, and my first thing was just like I was so angry and outraged, and then I was like, well, this is so disgustingly transparent what he's doing.

29:52And then I was thinking, why has this come up on my feed? Why have I got this? And then I'm looking at the comments and I'm getting more angry about the support for that. And I had this really big feeling of overwhelm and my daughter comes back and she starts talking about school starting and I wasn't there. I just wasn't there for it because I was so overwhelmed, angry, disappointed, what's happening to the world. And I missed that. Like I missed that really important conversation she needed to have.

30:20I just wasn't there. And that was kind of the moment where I thought, this is ridiculous. This is a game. Like, this is a game. I'm not playing anymore. Like, I know Josh, you came to this realization a long time ago, but I just thought, I'm being played. Like, this has been sent to me because I knew it would, whatever it takes, get his attention. I'm not playing this anymore because this person here needs me more right now. And it was a huge feeling of overwhelm.

30:43And I guess that leads to the question, in all the work you did with making this show, how do you think Australians are coping right now with this landscape? I think we'd be confused. I think we don't know what to do. I think we're starting to see people in our own community and society as fundamentally different to us. And I think that's generating disharmony and discontent. I think it's harder today for people, you know, that share the same city.

31:10They might love Melbourne or Brisbane or Sydney or Adelaide, you know, and share a love of the place, but genuinely see people in that same environment and think, I have nothing. I can't. I can't come together with them. I feel so strongly and profoundly different to them on the issue of, and you can name it, you know, it could be Australia Day, it could be Israel-Gaza, it could be, you know, climate change. It could be any one of these issues. And that polarisation, I think, is becoming so deep because we don't have the capacity to sort of see shared sets of facts.

31:49We don't all sit down and watch the same news program at night. We don't all read the same newspapers. We have this kind of fractured media environment. There's lots of good reasons for that. You know, mainstream media has not been a perfect operator, has not always been a fair player. And it's probably a good thing that there are more voices, there are more podcasts, there are more people that, you know, there's been a democratisation of the information space.

32:15But I think that has come at a cost of our ability to see the common things about us. You know, look at people in the same city that maybe go to different protests, that have very strongly held different views, but still at the end of the day be able to sit down together and talk about some of these things. It's like... I ask people on my radio program all the time, you know, have you changed your mind about something recently? Have you, okay, yeah, you've called me a few times about this over recent months.

32:45Is there anything about what's happened recently that's made you question your position on this? You heard anything this morning that someone said that's made you come at this again? I don't think we're doing that enough. I don't think... I think the way we're consuming our media is not encouraging us to do that. You know, the outrage that that particular clip provoked in you may be well-founded. But, you know, look at the polls. Probably something like 25% of the population is willing to vote for One Nation at the moment.

33:22You know, it's the time we're recording it. Who knows where it'll be next month. But a lot of Australians are finding appeal in the message of Pauline Hanson. So what are you doing to think about those people and what you share with them to understand, I'm not saying to change your own views or your own values or your own principles. But I think we do still need to look for ways to understand one another and listen to one another, you know. And like we've been hearing from people on the radio recently that, you know, are supporting some of those views that Pauline Hanson is talking about a lot.

34:03And, you know, it's really interesting to me how outraged people are just to hear them said. But these are other Australians that vote, that pay taxes, you know, they have as much right to ring into a radio station as another person. I guess for me, the function that I am interested in playing is making sure that if we're having those conversations, facts are inserted. Because often these conversations are happening without facts. It's just emotion.

34:35It's just people saying, well, I don't like those people or I don't like their values. Well, hang on. Well, what are you talking about? What are their values? Well, you think immigration is too high? What are the numbers? What precisely are you saying? What's the policy that's being offered that you think is going to fix the problem that is being discussed here? If the argument is that immigration means you can't afford a home, what's the link? What's the evidence?

35:04I guess that's where in this picture, I think facts become even more important. But I don't think that's necessary. I mean, I haven't watched that interview, but I don't know. I don't know how much questioning there was of actual policy. No, all I saw was a video that showed that she'd been on it and that it had been released on Australia Day. And I thought, this is so transparent what you're doing here. I couldn't bear to watch it, which is probably another problem in itself.

35:27What you bring up there, I think, alludes to the whole reason why you made the show in that I think for a lot of people when they have that conversation – There's a basic, like I had this, I'll take the wind out of it to be a lot less divisive issue. But I remember having a chat with a mate on Boxing Day at the Cricket and he brought up the idea that the moon landing wasn't real or something like that. And I was like, no, it's definitely really nice.

35:57It's pretty weird though that they only went once and never went back though. And I'm like, yes, they did. They went like, there's a whole group of them that went. And he's like, no, no, they just went once. And that happens to be an area that I'm like, I know this one. Yeah. And I got it up and I showed him. But I feel like so often when you have these conversations, there's a version of that where you're like, suddenly you realize that, oh, you have a completely different picture of reality.

36:19Yeah. And on that one issue or one topic, I happen to know what the reality is. But I can't keep up to date with the realities of every single thing and every single... Well, we've all been in those situations, right, where you're having a conversation, you know, or an argument with someone and it's like no one at this table has all of the facts here. No one really knows enough about this. Have a lot of emotions, but not in many facts. Totally, totally.

36:44But, you know, like... I went to Finland about 18 months ago for work. It's not part of this series, but one of the things that really fascinated me there is that they teach information and media literacy to kids from school age up, from primary school up. And, you know, in part this is because they're right next door to Russia. They've had Russian mis- and disinformation coming at them for many decades, but And they've seen the need to build a kind of a population that is ready and armed to deal with this themselves.

37:21And so they teach kids things like triangulation of stories. So if you see something on social media, Ryan, that gives you a reaction, not just, and I know you're saying you don't have, feel like the New York Times articles are too long for you, But if you see a thing on social media that you then go and look for a couple of other versions of that story to read the different takes on it so that you at least end up with something that is – you have some perception of the kind of spectrum of views that there are on this so that you at least can kind of build your own picture of it.

38:00Allow your curiosity to flourish. I think encourage it to grow. Maybe that's, you know, the thing I would say in your situation. Like you've obviously got curiosity there because you're watching The Daily Show. This stuff is interesting to you, but maybe the written form is like not the way for you to consume it. You don't have to read everything in text, but what I'm suggesting is you find the a number of different versions of that story to make sure that you're not just consuming one left-wing version of it and one or a right-wing version of it.

38:32Just try and triangulate the information so that if it's something that matters to you, you're at least building out your own picture and can analyze it yourself. I mean, it's such a good theory and a great practice, no doubt. But like, I just know myself and this is just like probably the way that I've now been conditioned to like, I mean, unless I'm like super, super interested in something. What's something that you are super interested in? Okay.

39:03I mean, media, stories about the media, to be honest. Like American, Australian, like I love reading about like the behind the scenes, the sort of- Kyle and Jackie. Kyle and Jackie. Yeah, yeah. No, but like all the kind of machinations of what is going on in the media. Yeah, that really interests me, yeah. And would you only read one article on that or would you read multiple? Well, read article. I don't know what that means. But no, I would get usually multiple sources, yeah, or like multiple podcasts, yeah, that are usually covering the same thing, yeah.

39:40Yeah. And so from that, you'd build out a picture. True, true. So you're already doing this. Yeah, I'm Mr. Triangulate. What was the square? the other night Penny said to me she said oh my god you will not believe this video it's on Instagram it's the funniest I've ever seen in my entire life and she showed me and it was a lady who was sleeping and she fell off her couch landed on her cat her cat somehow shot up to the roof swung around on a fan and it went flying out the window she said it's the most amazing thing I've ever seen I said watch it again and we watched it again I said how did the cat get squashed and then fly up to the roof and she goes I don't know it must have got such a shock This is not real.

40:23What do you mean? This is definitely AI. And she couldn't believe it. But I feel like that's happening to a lot of us in different areas of our lives. Like some to me, that's quite obvious. Totally. But I'm interested to hear the examples you get through the talk that you're doing and through all the work you've done of the things that people are saying that they believe to be real. And also just whether this is part of it or not, but whether in that particular case, when it's not a news item, but in entertainment situations, will it matter if it's real or not?

40:55Yeah, look, I mean, there is some argument that audiences don't care that much, but just parking that to one side, it's happening all the time. Like during the Bondi attacks, you might recall there was an image of two female police officers that was slightly manipulated. So there was a real original photograph and you can see the bridge at Bondi where the The way it was manipulated was to make it look like they were afraid to take on the attackers.

41:31The actual original image was of two very brave female police officers getting crowds out of there to safety. But the narrative was completely flipped, and that went around the world straight away. Ivan had a colleague, another journalist, suggest that we talk about it and question the role of the police. Wow. because they'd seen it, someone had referred them to it. And you can see how this stuff takes fire. And it particularly catches a light during periods of confusion or acute distress.

42:10Late last year, we started getting regular calls and texts on my morning show asking us, why aren't you covering the new road rules that are coming into force this week? And there was this huge glut of information cycling through social media pages, but also with links to articles on, you know, when you like see a newspaper link and... And it looks like a real newspaper. When you click through, it's like a slightly different version of that newspaper.

42:43Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Might be a few words different. So you have to be looking kind of closely to see that it's- The age, like logo's a bit more pixelated than normal. Exactly. Yeah. And so there was a lot of these articles supporting the social media clips or linked to them that people were then reading detailing all of these new road rules that Australia was introducing. And the main ones that we were hearing about were that I think it was people over 60 or 65 weren't allowed to drive at night anymore, that you had to have your headlights on 24 hours a day.

43:22And the other one was that you could be fined for taking a sip of water while you drive. And the articles and posts were referring to a specific date in the back half of last year. And so listeners rightly were wondering why we weren't covering it. What was really interesting was that our producers were then going and searching this because it seemed like a big thing that we should be covering. And when they went to Google, the AI, the Gemini Google function was throwing up results based on the fake stories as if they were out there.

44:00So AI was presenting it as fact. Yeah, because the AI tools are just sort of scraping the available information. Oh, my God, we're stuffed. And so they were picking this up. Yeah. I ended up running, I was at Parliament House for an ABC thing and ran into the Federal Transport Minister, Catherine King, and was talking to her about it and she was like, oh, my God, this has been going on for so long. I don't want to misquote her. I'm sorry, Minister.

44:25But she said that they had been being bombarded by, with voters reaching out to them wanting clarity on all of this, that they'd had to reach out to the tech companies to get them to take down the fake search results that were coming up in the AI search functions. The key thing for you to know is that all of this was a disinformation campaign. There are no national road rules in Australia. They're all state and territory based. Sorry, what's the difference between disinformation and misinformation?

44:56When have you been dissed and when have you been missed? So there is a little crossover, but the easiest way to think about it is that disinformation is a deliberate set of fake information that's being presented. Such as the road rules? Such as this, yep. Misinformation is incorrect or false information. It may be shared, if you like, innocently by someone that thinks that it's The truth. Like Gemini. Yeah, I guess Gemini could be, yeah, I guess that's an example of where Gemini thinks it's real.

45:34Disturbed to miss. Yeah. But the misinformation might be more like your aunt saying, oh, I heard all of these bushfires are started by arsonists. There was a report on the radio about an arson arrest. Probably there was an arson arrest. but maybe the bulk of the bushfires were started by lightning strikes and the climate scientists would argue that the broader conditions were created as a result of climate change. So the lines do blur, but there's, I guess, a level of...

46:14There can be a level of innocence about the misinformation. The disinformation is often far more deliberate, organized. Sometimes it's state-backed. So countries like Russia or China or even Western countries might be involved in disseminating disinformation. Like one of the stories that we explore in this series is, do you remember during the Paris Olympics, there was like the big story about all the bedbugs? Yes. Everyone was getting bedbugs at the Paris Olympics.

46:42Yeah. chaos. It was all a Russian disinformation campaign. Why though? Who has time? I have to do the grocery shopping today and I've worked out I don't have time. Who has time to sit at home and go, I'm going to do some disinformation now? So they call these sort of gray zone tactics, hybrid warfare, sometimes the description it's given. Often the specific objective is unclear. Why? But the broad objective is to destabilise, create so distrust. Yeah.

47:11So often, you know, Russia is probably the biggest state actor behind disinformation campaigns or at least the most experienced at it. And they'll do it to sow distrust in democratic society, make people question their government, the ability of their government to deliver on policy outcomes. Can I drink water in my car or not? Yeah. Like what is it? You would rightly ask, why would anyone bother coming up with a disinformation campaign about road rules in Australia?

47:45But it makes us doubt our systems, our institutions, our relationship with government. So that next time the government tells us something or tries to enforce something, we might be more likely to question it or say, oh, that's, that's rubbish. We, we went to, we went to the Poland-Belarus border as part of this, um, where there's a huge border fence, um, Russia and Belarus. So Belarus is like a client state of Russia. Um, They're accused of advertising cheap flights and visas from Central Africa, Somalia, the Middle East, Syria, Afghanistan, to come to Russia and Belarus as a cheap and easy way to a new life in Europe.

48:39So this is not part of the kind of migrant crisis of 2016. This is in the years after that. The Poland-Belarus border was never a big entry point during that migrant crisis. But in subsequent years, as Russia has sought to destabilise the democratic process in Poland, At particular points in the electoral calendar, they have brought in large groups of migrants and sent them across that border. At the same time, they have fed into the Polish media and information ecosystem, particularly Polish social media, Videos of migrants coming over the borders, commentary about Muslims coming to build mosques in your community and marry your daughters, steal your wives, to create distrust, disharmony, make people question their democracy.

49:36We went to the border, went out with these activists that go there. They're not allowed to help the migrants at all. They'll be done as people smugglers now. but we walked for hours and hours and hours to a pin drop on a map where these two Afghan guys who had come over this six-meter-high fence, both very injured, one of them sort of turning septic, who think they're there for a cheap and easy and open pathway to Europe. They're real humans that have been caught up in this disinformation campaign.

50:07Yeah, it's such a good point that for many people in the world, like the cost of disinformation could actually be their life. But I have to say, for me on a personal level, the more that my perception of reality and what is real and what isn't is manipulated or just misled. So I guess the various disinformation and misinformation coming at me. I'm a bit afraid of what the cost is on me just purely for my own well-being and mental health. I've been feeling for a while now that maybe climate change has so many costs involved.

50:54It's infinite, almost the costs of climate change in many areas, but one of them for me is not having a feeling of the seasons being as regular as they used to be and that that is essentially a sort of destabilizing force that me as a human or humans have never had to or for a long time haven't had to confront. And I wonder if you've explored or you've learned or if you've had any thoughts on what it does to you as an individual to feel like there is no terra firma.

51:26Yeah. I mean, I reckon probably in some ways we all are feeling versions of this. Like we feel outrage, stuff is designed to trigger something in you, whether it's you, you know, looking at a clip on Pauline Hanson late at night or you thinking about climate change. I think we're all having emotional reactions to what we're seeing. Like, I think we all feel a bit more afraid at the moment. Like there's a, Everyone you talk to, certainly in my life, just wishes things would dial down a little bit.

51:57You know, Sydney's been really, I think, on edge, probably before the terror attack, but particularly so since. I think, you know, we've also felt very distant from a lot of the problems of the wellbeing in Australia, this big island continent that's physically a long way away from things. I think it feels less far. Mm-hmm. And that's in part because some of these big, terrible things unfolding in different corners of the planet are now also in the palm of our hand, right?

52:27So I think inevitably that creates an emotional response. If you watch a video of a child being harmed or starved, you know, you're... it would be hard, I think for most of us not to have some reaction to that. Um, I think the, uh, American academic Marianne Wolf that, that we spoke to, she says, you know, an active resistance in this world is just to pick up a book. Like, I think you can get overwhelmed by the whole thing. I don't think there are easy fixes to these huge challenges, you know, like, the threat of AI and what that might do to our world is sort of almost too big for most people, I think, to think about, you know, in any really way that grasps the scale of it.

53:13But I think there are individual things that we can all do. And I suppose that's what I keep coming back to in this is the idea that you can step away from things, you can put a device down You know, you can leave social media or just dial down your usage of it. You can control what you can consume. You can read a book. You can read a newspaper article, right? I'm sorry. You're going to have to send me a link to that. I don't know. But I just think the most helpful thing we can do is remember that we all do still at this point anyway, until the robots totally take over, we do all have agency.

53:52So you mentioned it just before and I feel like we haven't talked about it on the show yet and I've been desperate for ways to have a conversation about it but it's a terrifying one as you mentioned. I have consumed everything there is out there on the topic of AI. It is keeping me up. There's a lot of talk about my bed in this episode and my bedtime. Do you feel from that that you have any concept of the kind of totality of it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

54:22In a way that you can articulate. Um, what do you mean totality of it? Like when I, like I read, uh, Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari who wrote, uh, Sapiens and then Homer Deus and Nexus is the latest one. And he sort of tries to explore what the future holds for humanity and that the kind of leap into AI is like this kind of seismic inflection point for us as a species. Um, um, And he does a brilliant job of explaining it and, you know, he's an incredibly gifted communicator.

54:59But I still don't feel I can fully conceive of what AI means for us as humans, if I'm honest. Okay, I know. Yeah, okay. So, no, I have no idea because all the experts say we actually have no idea. But we do know that the world in five to ten years' time will be a completely almost unrecognisable place. And I don't want that for my, I don't want, I just, through the lens of my children, I just, I think that's why I've gone down this, I don't call it rabbit hole because it makes it sound, um.

55:33Like it's something I shouldn't have done, but like I've just listened to a lot of the experts. You spoke to Tristan Harris, who is probably my favorite person to listen to nearly on anything in the world. I mean, he in 2013 rang the alarms around social media and said, this is what's coming for us. This is not a good thing. And he spoke about what the algorithm will do before it had really taken effect. And he was right. He's now standing there saying AI is the next thing that we are not ready for, but this feels much bigger.

56:06For me, the overriding thing that I just am struggling with, and I really don't want to give my opinion on AI because we've got you here. I want to say to you, AI, talk. There's no real question. But I think the thing that I'm struggling with is- You have to say, hey, Siri. The thing that I'm struggling with is that we are about to have- a form of intelligence far greater than us. We're going to have, like if someone had said to us, you know, in 10 years time, there's going to be aliens turning up that are far more intelligent than you guys.

56:38We'd be in a state of panic, but we're kind of, that's what's happening. That's what's coming. I think it may be. What if the aliens had really good recipes for us though? That would be, that would be exciting. I knew everything. You could ask him anything. I think a lot of people, the problem is people are using AI like a sophisticated Google, really. They're not totally engaging in what it's able to do and the fact it's just wiping out industries with every update.

57:03I think the thing that I think it was Tristan Harris who maybe gave this analogy is, or maybe it was, I forget his name, the godfather, the guy who came up with AI on the first page, but just said that like when I leave the house, my dog doesn't know where I'm going. It's not intelligent enough to understand. It doesn't know what I do all day. It knows I come home and I feed it at the end of the day, but it has no idea what I'm out there doing in the world.

57:26And he said, that's kind of what... I said, I feel I need to get this right because of what we're talking about. I can't remember who it was. What was the dog's name? But we are about to be that. Like there's going to be a form of intelligence out doing stuff that we don't understand having a huge impact on our lives. Oh, we're the dog. Yeah, we're about to become the dog. Oh. Whoa. Is that, yeah. Yeah. So it just, what breed? Like what's the? I'm going to say golden retrievers.

57:54That's not so bad. I mean, they're lovely, but they're not the smartest. No, that's true. Well, that's what we're going to be today. I feel like there's a new species arriving on part of the earth that is going to take over and we don't. Look, I'm genuinely not sure if we've already passed the point where we can try and keep a hold on it. Like it's possible, I think, that it's already moved beyond our grasp. Feels like that. The dog's out of the bag.

58:19Yeah. If you think about... what it was like for Australia, just as one country to try and regulate social media for under 16s and what, how challenging that was to take on just a selection of companies and just deal with one particular age group where there was a pretty strong, clear moral argument for doing it. Think about like the pushback that came and how difficult that was. I think that's nothing in comparison to what it would be like to try and genuinely place some regulation or frameworks around AI.

58:59It sounds like it's not possible. It's just not going to happen. Well, like the Australian government had a crack at it at the end of last year and they were criticized for really going quite light touch on it. There was an argument that we were going to have this kind of guardrail approach that So, yeah, you can't really regulate it because you don't know yet what it is. But if you create some guardrails, then maybe you can ensure that whole industries, for example, aren't wiped out or that intellectual property is protected so that artists, for example, can't have all of their work taken or authors can't have just a whole...

59:38volumes of their books consumed by large language models. But the government did not opt for that kind of, that sort of framework. in part because, you know, Australia is in a competitive global environment and we want the investment here. We want to attract that sort of business. And if we're looking at industries and workforces being wiped out, then we need that. Like we have conversations all the time about productivity and big businesses hope that the next wave of productivity is going to come from AI.

1:00:16What that means for us, I think we don't really have... the answer for. But I think, um, I think to the, I guess the sort of fundamental question that's in front of us now about whether we're in control of it or will be in control of it in the future. I think most people that we see in our daily lives don't really understand what its capabilities already. So I feel like we're, we may be past that. Yes. And it's also the really scary thing is that I don't know if there's been a time in human history where we truly don't know what the world or at least this part of the world will look like in the next like two years because the improvements are so rapid.

1:01:02like it was probably like a year and a half ago where I was pretty confident that I was like, I'll never want to watch an AI generated film. Like what, I've got no interest in something that wasn't the point of view of a human. Yeah. But now the footage that's coming out that there's being generated is so good. I'm like, I reckon I probably will. Yeah. Because we don't know what is coming and how quickly it's coming. There's just never been a time where we literally can't expect what the... We can't... Like when I was...

1:01:33When we were kids, I reckon our parents had a pretty good idea of what the world will look like when we're teenagers or when we're adults. Like not a hell of a lot was going to change apart from like potential wars that could come out of nowhere. But in terms of like technologies and stuff, yeah, like we got DVDs instead of VHSs, but it's not really affecting our lives that much. Whereas this is like a time where we, where it's like I was pretty confident a while ago, a year ago that like no one's, I can't replace our podcast.

1:02:05Like it's our points of view, like it's our opinions and it's our experiences and our vulnerabilities. Like people will want that, but I'm now not so confident. Have you experimented with Notebook LLM? Well, that was terrifying actually when I first, and I did that. I tried that when it first came out with the podcast feature. So I don't know if you've, do we need to explain this? Yeah, yeah. So it's, I mean, it does quite a few things, but one of the features of Notebook LLM is you can just ask it to make you a podcast on any given topic.

1:02:40Yep. And in a couple of minutes you'll get a podcast with voices available Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't be telling our listeners. Well, it's interesting because when I first did it, at the time I was writing a TV show, like a scripted show, and at the time, I'm not sure if it's changed now, but at the time you had to input the data that you wanted the podcast to talk about. It couldn't just scrape the internet. Right. So I uploaded the script of the pilot episode of my show and just said, like, talk about this.

1:03:15And these two hosts, quote unquote, the two voices, the male and the female voice, American voices, sounds like an American podcast, they dissected over 20 minutes, dissected the episode, the script, perfectly, and to the extent where I was learning stuff about the script that I didn't even mean to do. To be in there. It was finding, like, context and... like narrative themes that I didn't even intend to put in there, but it like gave me insight into the script that I'd written that I hadn't seen.

1:03:50And so that was quite terrifying. So yeah, Notebook LLM comes up in the third part of the series. We meet a woman called Joss Fong, who is an American podcaster and kind of science influencer. She makes incredible videos about science, sort of like pop science, basically. She's incredibly beautiful. I'm saying this for a reason. And also has a lovely voice. And the situation she's now found herself in, in part because of Notebook LLM, is that a very large proportion of the internet doesn't think she's real.

1:04:37Really? Because of what she looks and sounds like. Yeah. So there's no evidence of this, but if you listen to Notebook LLM, the male-female voice that's generated, it sounds incredibly like her and her male co-host. Oh, yeah. I have no evidence of this bit of it, but it sounds to me like it's either modelled on or trained off. The LLM model is trained off either them or something like them. Yeah. It sounds so similar, even the way they take breaths, their turns of phrase.

1:05:13It's like Joss Fong and her co-host. She's physically quite perfect looking. And people think that she's AI generated her videos. So she's now found herself in this space of trying to make the content that she produces less good and more human, more flawed, a bit more rough to try and prove to people, many of whom on the internet still won't believe it, but to try and prove to people that she's real. Because, I mean, it really is, other than doing like a tour around the world and literally standing in front of people, there really is nothing she can do.

1:05:55Yeah. Because you can generate an imperfect looking version of her videos. Yeah. I mean, this is the tip of the iceberg with what AI, how it can influence us. So you with your, what's that? No, I'm just like, okay, well, fuck. Well, what do we do? I was doing the same thing. I'm like, well... What can we do? I actually don't know what to do. Yeah. Like, not that I'm expected to know. And not that we have to, but I feel like we need to give some people some hope.

1:06:23Well, I do want to get to that because the last thing I want to say is, like, let's talk hope because I... Please, please, please. Tell me you've got the answer. Before we get to that, so you did this with your mum, is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what happened there? So the producers wanted to test how good the AI is. I mean, I don't want to give it all away, but essentially we brought mum in for the filming on this to test whether she could spot fake me and real me.

1:06:58And I think what really... I think what shocked me was how emotional mum became upon realising that she was kind of a bit trapped in this. Like, I think something set off for her that it wasn't quite right, but also she was leaning into wanting to believe, you know, there's something emotional that goes on for us when we're believing something. And I think Yeah. It's worth watching because I think for me it was a bit instructive about how vulnerable we all are to this.

1:07:37Like statistically, the more you think you are able to spot a fake, the less likely you are to spot one. So why is that? So people are – So basically we all have, like broadly speaking, we've got about a 50-50 chance of spotting a fake. So we filmed with the researchers that have been looking into this and we filmed with a bunch of Australians, you know, to see what they're like at spotting real and fake. And those statistics are borne out. It's basically 50-50 of.

1:08:11statistically, the people that think they have greater awareness, literacy, are more sort of digitally literate, are less likely to spot the fakes. To be honest, I can't tell you the reasons why that is. I suspect it's to do with... maybe overthinking it, but, um, but that's what the statistics show. And that's certainly the, the, the group that we had, uh, you know, the younger ones that were like, I know how to spot a fake. They were like really quite, quite blown away.

1:08:43And yeah, it certainly is what happened with mom who obviously went in quite, you know, she knows who I am. She knows who I am better than pretty much anyone. Uh, and, uh, you know, I think by the end of that whole interaction, she was just kind of like really quite thrown and emotional by the whole, because of the whole experience. It's an important thing for people to watch. Cause I feel like that gets to the very heart of this, how disconcerting and uncertain it all is.

1:09:11Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, you don't, I don't think any of us want to feel that this technology has the better of us, but I think we probably have to concede. I think we have to be aware of where it's at. And I think, you know, happy to go to the hope bit of the conversation. Let's get that out of the way. But I do think, I think we have to recognize what this means for us as humans, as, you know, members of democratic society, that if we want to hang on to some of this stuff, We actually have to arm ourselves with skills, with tools to be able to navigate.

1:09:56And what are those tools and skills that you- Well, using a New York Times subscription. I subscribe. But and reading it, right? Like I think we have to- So triangulation? Yeah, a bit of that. I think- So the Finland example that I gave you earlier, the media has a part to play in it. The media in Finland has some of the highest trust scores of any media anywhere in the world. And one of the things they do that is quite different is that they acknowledge and are very prominent in apologising and clarifying when they make mistakes.

1:10:38So I think maybe a good thing that the media can do more generally, like the mainstream media, is to be more transparent about when it makes mistakes, like we do make mistakes, be more willing to admit those. recognize that there has been a loss of trust in the media and start to rebuild that. And I think acknowledging mistakes, giving them equal prominence. You know, if you ever like read the little, we need to make a clarification in the newspaper, it's like on page 12 at the bottom that you would have to go looking for even though the original article was on the front page and was the whole front page.

1:11:14So start to give that stuff similar levels of prominence. I think we could be thinking about what we're teaching to children. You know, we've thought about removing social media from kids under 16 in Australia. I think there's a lot of very strong arguments for that. I do have a question having filmed this series. Well, hang on. What does this mean if then at 16, we just open the floodgates? How are we preparing them for that? You know, kids do do ethics classes.

1:11:44There is a degree of media literacy, but I think we should be having a really big conversation about what teaching kids information literacy is and what that looks like from the word go. I think we do need a robust conversation uh, national media market. I think mainstream media does need to survive. I think you need things like national broadcasters that people can trust in. I think, uh, you know, having centers of discussion where people come and have shared conversations where you do hear different views.

1:12:15So yes, podcasts are great, but having spaces where different people with different ideas and views and opinions come together and that facts are entered into those conversations. Yeah. And I think as individuals, I think that this whole idea of picking up a book and reading a book is a really healthy thing to do. I wonder as well, it's like, I mean, so many of these places are businesses and they're not choosing to do this, but it's like they need views and they need clicks.

1:12:43And so it's almost like the priority is not providing people with the news. They've turned into an entertainment machine. And the motivation is to get as many people on their website for as long as possible. Like that is the motivation. But I wonder if there's a future... where the value, what people will value is trust and whether or not the motivating factor for certain media outlets will be like this is all the stuff we're doing to ensure that this is all trustworthy and that will be the value that people will be searching for because I feel like we're not far from that.

1:13:24Like I feel like I want that now. I mean, I'll subscribe to it. I won't read it. But like to have like- You're being very entrepreneurial about all this. You're looking to spot the business opportunity. Always, always. No, no. It's just like trying to think about it in like- Because from that point of view, it's like the Instagrams and the, you know, we can't wait for them to change because their business model doesn't allow it. What I would say is that the tech does present us with opportunities as well.

1:13:53So when it comes to like spotting original vision and images, tech can be helpful for that. When it comes to like Taiwan is a really interesting example of this. They've got a lot of like citizen democracy tools being developed that they're using. So using AI models to help solve problems where the community is fractured over a particular issue. So if you think about, you know, the example I gave you before of the Snowys and the Brumbys and everyone fracturing and it being all over social media.

1:14:26Is there a version of that where there are AI-based tools which take all of that information but then look for common threads? Like, it would be very difficult to pass through all of the different opinions that exist on wind farms in Australia right now, But maybe some of these AI tools could be developed or used to pass through huge volumes of data around people's opinions, their physical proximity to those stories, as in like where the wind farms are versus where they live.

1:15:00You know, some of the research that we had done for this found that the bulk of the people that were commenting on the Brumbies weren't actually living in Jindabyne or the Snow Mountains. So can you use technology or you can use technology, but perhaps we can use it better to say, okay, we've got a problem here. It's wind farms. Here's what the sort of social media discourse is around that. Can we distill from that the range of views and the volume of views from the communities that are actually adjacent to where those wind farms are going?

1:15:34Okay, so let's cut out... the noise and here's what the community actually thinks. Okay, within that community, can we categorise those people into very strongly held views for and very strongly held views against and then can we come in from there to find where... Triangulate. Yeah, exactly. AI triangulate. Yeah. Like, I think the technology does have the possibility and probably requires someone to think about what the business model is because they're really only going to do it if it makes money.

1:16:08But could that help us to solve some of these problems? Could you then get that cohort of people together and ask them more questions, ask them to feed more information into a tool? that would help you pass through the possible solutions and challenges. Could you also feed into that tool facts? You know, so spot where the kind of consensus of opinions lay and how much of that is based on fact, how many of these people are forming their judgments based on fact versus semi-fact versus fiction.

1:16:45You know, to me there must be opportunities there where technology can be used to solve some of the problems that are being thrown up by our use of... Yeah, tech. Hope. Was that okay? That is. That last bit I'm laughing at. That's a really good idea. I reckon that would be amazing, yeah. Well, just cut me in on the deal. You cut me in on the deal. I think they'll come to you first. If anyone who wants more hope, we've given you two lots of hope, but Dr. M did a wonderful episode on hope and uncertainty that we can put a link to in the show notes.

1:17:22Are you feeling frazzled and frayed? from this conversation or just in life? Just generally. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Massively. I spend a lot of my time thinking, trying to understand what the world's, knowing I can't, but just how am I- best preparing my kids for something that I don't understand and what is the most important thing to be teaching them and paying really close attention to what's happening. They go to a wonderful school, but a lot of me is thinking the most important thing to be teaching them right now is problem solving skills and ways of exploring what they're naturally good at in order to make the world better.

1:18:09How you teach, I mean, my son's grappling with, um, place value at the moment. I'm thinking, mate, don't, don't stress too much about place value. I think there's like in math, there's, I feel like there'll be much bigger things that will require you at some point. Tapping a water source. Yeah. Yeah, I'm feeling a bit frazzled and afraid because I didn't sleep very well last night. And one of the reasons I didn't sleep very well was I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the world in general yesterday.

1:18:38And last night I decided I'm going to try and understand exactly. As we're recording this, the US and Israel just bombed Iran a few days ago for the first time. Who knows what's happened since then? but I thought I'm going to try and just understand what's happened in the last few days. And I found this video on YouTube, had a huge subscriber following the channel. I started watching it and my sort of, Media spidey sensors were saying, I feel like this, at least I feel like the people making this are doing their best to try and deliver facts and I can't see any obvious biases.

1:19:19And I watched the video and I felt like, okay, I've got a general understanding of just play by play what's happened. And then I went to the comments and the second comment was like, really impressive that you got this up. Love the video. Just so you know, that footage of Dubai airport, that's AI that's been circled already and identified already. And it occurred to me, how am I going to know anything about, like, as this war unfolds, how am I going to know truth from fact here?

1:19:49And it feels like there are some actors involved who really want to manipulate the truth for their own outcomes. And I found myself completely afraid and I couldn't sleep till about 2am because I was just thinking, I don't know how I'm going to navigate this. I mean, it's probably not that comforting to know, but, you know, like the saying truth is the first casualty of war has been around for a very long time. You know, like that is what happens in war.

1:20:18I think there are going to be more conflicts in our lifetime. I think we're going to... have more saturation of information and video footage every time this happens. You know, I'm just thinking back in the last couple of years where, you know, hospitals were being bombed and people were arguing about whether the fire was coming out of the hospital or into the hospital. But these are... This has happened every time there has ever been a war. So we're not distinct from other periods of time in that sense.

1:20:48I think just the tools are changing. They're more easily manipulated probably. And maybe – You know, the rapid nature of it, I guess, is what makes it more difficult to sit with it and give it time to think about whether that thing was correct or not. Because by tomorrow, you'll have probably forgotten about that video because there'll be some other video that we're then trying to pass through and connect with. I thought it was really interesting what you said before about climate and you'll worry about that.

1:21:15Someone very close to me in my life, that I just always think of as a supremely kind of confident, competent, non-frazzable figure, just out of nowhere recently said to me, oh, I just find myself really worrying quite a lot at the moment about my children and the climate and what they're going to be living. And it totally sideswiped me that this person even had that thought. Uh, so to me, um, that was a bit of a wake up call as to like what people are just kind of sitting with and grappling with at the moment.

1:21:53And I, I'm just very conscious that the media information, um, journalism is, is maybe not doing enough to like hear and listen to that. Maybe because we don't have the answers. Yeah. I feel really confident and this is to, I don't know if it's under the section of hope, but like just something I'm doing right now, which has really helped me is I'm being vastly aware of the fact that I reckon at some point I'll look back on this and go, these are the good old days.

1:22:21Remember when, you know, we were just learning about AI, I didn't know much about it. And remember when there's only a few wars going on. And remember when I'm just trying to remember these, at some point I reckon there's a chance these will be the good old days and I'll be... When I'm with my family and anyone I'm around, I'm just thinking like make these good old days as good as possible because this is – there is good stuff happening around us all the time.

1:22:45True. Yeah. I think I don't have as bleaker outlook on the future. Okay. Potentially. But I think the outcome of that attitude is a really good one to just like celebrate all the – like look at all the good things that are happening every day as well. Like this morning I'd get here and find out that – so apparently there's a massive bin out in the front of me and tipped over and it was like hundreds and hundreds of cans and bottles and Belle and Bridget and George who are on our podcast decided to go down and clean it all up.

1:23:12Right. And that's great stuff. What good people. Isn't that good stuff? Humans are pretty resilient as well, you know. And like if you think back not that long ago, the Cuban Missile Crisis might have been happening or Chernobyl was happening. And people really genuinely thought – this might be the end of the world at various times. Or this could be World War III. And it may be, it may not be, but humans have a remarkable capacity to move through those things.

1:23:41Underwise. Yeah. Hopefully we still have that. More hope. But I think my gut says we'll figure it out. And we'll finish there. It's just a gut. I can't say it's true, but it's just my vibe. I didn't need to make this TV series. Always call me first. Always. We'll figure it out. I just got a gut feeling. Who needs facts? Yeah. I just got a gut feeling. We'll just sort of like figure it out. So you've got a bunch of people in a room. Let's just talk about it.

1:24:20Let's just sort this shit out. As a matter of fact, you can get it on ABC. If you watch it on ABC, we'll put a link in our show notes. You are such an incredibly intelligent man. And I feel so... Yeah, it feels wonderful to spend time with you. It feels hopeful. Yeah, it feels hopeful. And congratulations on the show because I think it's a really, really – I feel like when you first came to the show or was pitched to you, it would have been like, this is a bloody great idea.

1:24:47Need this. I wish you had your time today. It's such a pleasure. Thank you very much. If you enjoyed this episode and want a little more, you might enjoy our subscriber-only eps, available on Patreon and Apple Podcasts. If you want a little more but don't want to pay any more, then you can join our newsletter at theimperfects.com.au. And while you're there, you'll be able to see the names and faces of all the incredible people who helped make this show.

1:25:10A show made on the lands of the Wurundjeri, Woiwurrung people, and we pay our respects to elders past and present. The Imperfects is not a licensed mental health service and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, treatment or assessment. The advice given in this episode is general in nature, but if you're struggling, please see a healthcare professional or call Lifeline on 13 11 14.