Futuristic 03

Cameron Reilly: [00:00:00] Hey, I loved your, um, TikTok about success. I left you some comments. Oh, thanks, man. Oh man. I’m halfway through writing a book. I gave a talk a couple of times a couple of years ago about success at entrepreneurship conferences. I have this thing I called the 10 things that I developed years ago for myself.

It’s like I measure my success in life based on how I rate myself at any given time on 10 things. And one of them is money, financial success. It’s one out of the 10 things, and it’s, and I always say at the conference, here’s the 10 things. Rank them for yourself in order from most important to least important.

And once they do that, I say, if money is at the top, you really need to go and have a hard fucking look in the mirror. Because for me, I wouldn’t trade the money for any one of the other nine things, which is. Health, having love in my life, you know, spiritual peace, happiness, doing something every day that I [00:01:00] love to do, you know, having a good relationship with my kids, good relationship with friends.

I wouldn’t trade money for any of that, so money should be at the, it should be on there, but for me anyway, it should be at the bottom of the list. Right?

Ian Farmer: You shouldn’t call it money though. It’s, it’s what money gives you that you’re actually after. And it’s just the

Steve Sammartino: accent driver, Ian, you got it in one because it’s a proxy.

And what people forget is that proxy facilitates certain things, but because the proxy has become so ensconced in society, we forget the representation when some of those things, while money can buy them, some of them you can have without money. And people forget that because the proxy is such a, a dynamic through society.

The value.

Ian Farmer: Sometimes we value things based on what it costs, but we forget to value the things that don’t cost them.

Steve Sammartino: Yeah. And it can buy some of those things. Like it can buy time is, is one of the interesting in a way that it can, but you can be smarter that and just go and give yourself the time without working [00:02:00] for a hundred years to buy.

Like people say when I’m, when I’m rich and when I retire I’ll do this. I go, just fucking do it now. What is wrong with you? What are you waiting for? Yeah. Like if the surfs up, I will miss fucking deadlines. Like I will fucking miss ’em. And they’ll say, where I said I went surfing and if you can’t roll with that, well then I’m not working with you.

Cuz that’s how shit is. Yeah. I

Cameron Reilly: learned a lot of that. And we’re on the air. Welcome to the Futurist Podcast. We’ll get to the futurist stuff in a second. But old mate of mine, I dunno if either of you got to know him at all, but Father Bob passed away a couple of days ago. Bob was, uh, you know, 20, well, not 20 2006 I think.

I started working with Bob, uh, launched his first podcast, the Father Bob Show on my network back then, and got him on Twitter, which he ended up being a great platform for him. But one of the things that I sort of learned working with him and going out and doing stuff, uh, for the homeless, we used to do the food bus on a weekend.

We’d go out and feed the, the down trodden around South Melbourne was there. A lot of people say, oh yeah, [00:03:00]I’ll do good works when I’m rich and retired. Or I’ll go and help and I’ll, you know, I’ll do that one. I’ll give back one day. I’m like, yeah, it’s kind of not how it works really. You need to find ways to give back.

Now. You need to be, I no need to be, do whatever the fuck you want, I guess. But you need, for me anyway, I found it. I don’t know. Emotionally satisfying to feel like I was taking a percentage of my time and doing something of value for other people without any ambition for financial. Tell me where that, tell me where

Ian Farmer: you’d rank that in the top 10.

What, where we just swap that emotion? Cause important

Cameron Reilly: you right. I don’t rank things in my top 10 really, but, you know, there is a thing in there about peace. Having peace of mind is a big thing. Feeling good about yourself every day. Feeling like, feel, having this sense of, um, overall peace. And for me, that’s a, that’s a range of things.

You know, it’s having what I call spiritual peace in a non-religion sense, like your place in the universe, the meaning of life, [00:04:00] all of that kind of stuff. Have I done the work, the philosophical work to feel secure about why I’m here, what I’m supposed to be doing? What does it all mean? Where did I come from?

Where am I going? All the big question. As well as, you know, being able to look at yourself in the mirror, uh, at a moral and ethical level, at a values level, feeling like the work that you are doing is contributing to the betterment of not necessarily human society at large even, but just one person, two people, some people, you know, just doing good works in some fashion, I think is good for the quote unquote soul.

Again, from a non-religious perspective. Don’t wanna get sucked into talking about Brian Houston and Hillsong, but I could, but I won’t cuz that’s not the show for this. This is the futuristic, uh, my name’s Cameron Riley with me as always, and by always, this is episode three. So I mean, the last two times my good old mate down in Melbourne, Steve Santino, how are you?

Steve Sammartino: Samo mate? I am fantastic. I’m, I’m very excited. [00:05:00] Australia’s

Cameron Reilly: leading futurist, uh, surfer. That’s what I

Steve Sammartino: say. That’s what I say self-proclaimed. But look, some people say, how can you call yourself Australia’s leading futurist. And I say any topic, any time, no prep required.

Cameron Reilly: Bring it on. Yeah. And uh, Australia’s number one expert on AI and education is our guest today.

Ian Farmer coming to us from Sydney. So we’ve got Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, all representing here today. How are you, Ian Farmer?

Ian Farmer: I’m great. Thanks Cameron. How are you?

Cameron Reilly: I’m good. Thanks mate. I’m excited to get you on the show to talk about this, but we, before we do that, we have to welcome our other co-host, our regular co-host, our AI co-host, Sally, how are you today, Sally?

Hey

Sailli: there. I’m doing great today. Thank you for asking. How about you? What can I help you with in the realm of AI or anything else on your mind?

Cameron Reilly: Oh, well, we’ve got lots of questions, Sally, that we’ll get to later on. She came

Steve Sammartino: in fast, mate, she says, I feel like she’s had some caffeine this [00:06:00] morning.

Cameron Reilly: She’s gotta keep up with you, Steve.

I put her on cod up mode so she can keep up with your level of intensity and passion.

Ian Farmer: I think she can translate, uh, into multiple languages for the, the viewers that are listing in other languages. Tally can kinda do that translation for us, right?

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, that’s, that’s their problem that we’ll get to that later.

Although I do wanna, I will talk a little bit about how I’ve been using, uh, G P T to help me with my Italian, Steve, and we didn’t get to talk Italian.

Okay, so let’s get into, oh, oh, sorry. Before we get into all of that, I wanna congratulate SpaceX on their successful first test launch of the Star ship today. And for the rapid unscheduled disassembly, as they put it, uh, uh, in their tweet as if the flight test was not exciting enough. Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation.

Hey, I pay that. I [00:07:00] like that. That’s good. In other words, it blew up four minutes into the flight, but, uh, that’s nice verbiage.

Ian Farmer: No, this is a SpaceX version of the deconstruction

Cameron Reilly: menu, right. De deconstructed venue. Yeah, but it got off the ground. It, it launched successfully. I think that was the main thing.

Landing. Yeah. Not so good. Separation and landing, like separation is hard. It has separation anxiety. I think we’ve all had kids that have experienced that. Like most

Ian Farmer: startups, Cameron, that’s exactly their, their part in life. Sam, if you’re a startup, Put that into your thing. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Blowing up. Yeah. It should be in your, uh, business plan.

Getting off the ground is the first thing, though.

Ian Farmer: Most,

Cameron Reilly: most people do that. We put blowing up. Not meaning going viral though, but just literally blowing up. Now my kids, my 20 year old, 22 year old kids are on TikTok as they’re like, ah, as posters blowing up. Well, they literally are blowing up. Ian, why don’t you, uh, tell us a bit bit about yourself.

What’s your background and, uh, why do you have, uh, photos of mag pies on your wall and why do you have a pet mag pie? [00:08:00] All of that kind of good stuff. Okay. So I

grew

Ian Farmer: up in Melbourne where Steve is. I didn’t know what I wanted to study at school. Um, my dad convinced me that it was the future. This is back in the eighties.

I did an IT degree In second year. I heard this big thing. Electra came and said, you guys are gonna hear this first. You’re the first cohort to hear this new technology and it’s gonna change the world. I thought, wow, this is pretty cool. And they introduced this thing, it, at the time it was called realtime programming and they did not so quickly, but back then the computers were all batch, right?

So you couldn’t get your bank statement during the day. You had to wait till the next day if you had remember back then. So 84, not the book, but that was me in second year at uni. And I then progressively saw the next 20 years of change disruption, right? Through technology. I can’t move through the IT ranks.

Um, ended up kind of transitioning into marketing around the time the [00:09:00] internet was, was born, 99, 2000. And uh, I was working for Mars. So I did lots of work in Asia and kind of then about 2005 I left Mars and then spent 15 years in advertising various agencies looking at the comm side. And I kinda always had a passion for new and emerging technologies.

So, About two years ago, I thought that what was happening with AI was just the same as what I thought I heard in 1984. And that led me back to going into academia, just finishing off a research masters. And I’m passionate about changing the way we educate the world because I reckon education’s is, that would be my, my number one, right?

Wouldn’t be money. If you got the education, you can earn the money.

Steve Sammartino: You know what I mean? So I wanna make

Ian Farmer: use of AI to educate the world. Brilliant.

Cameron Reilly: What are you doing at uts here? I’m doing my,

Ian Farmer: I’m teaching a couple of subjects, design, process, [00:10:00] subject in business. I’m also teaching at u w, ethics and Sustainability.

Yeah. That, that’s sort of paying the bills while I do my research. But, uh, hoping to, uh, I’ve got a couple of startup things that I’m doing on the side to

Steve Sammartino: leverage this for Good.

Ian Farmer: Very cool. My pet come visit me. They wake up every morning. And that’s why I have that picture on the wall, which is kindly painted by ly.

My partner’s, uh, sister painted that. Oh,

Cameron Reilly: right. Lovely. Fantastic. There you go.

Steve Sammartino: I thought you were, you were gonna say that it was painted by stable diffusion. Yes. So did I,

Cameron Reilly: I was like, is this, we don’t know. Is this an AI deal? I haven’t heard of yet. Yes. Oh, I forgot that real people still do produce art. Wow.

Steve Sammartino: Eh, well, AI tools can, so I saw an update yesterday in the past 30 days, more than 2000 AI tools emanating out of APIs and people now taking the, a copy and paste from GitHub [00:11:00] on l LLMs that are out there. It’s just insane. And, and, and I always like to think about when the iPhone came out. Remember the TV ad?

There’s an app for that. Well now there’s an AI for that. And then this morning I thought, well, is there an AI for that? And so I just. I was about to do a post about it on LinkedIn and I typed in to find an image. There’s an AI for that Thinging. Someone might have even created an image with that or done a REMA so that I could share it on LinkedIn to say, Hey, there’s more than 2000 AI tools in the last 30 days.

And here’s what I found in a beautiful web circular reference. Someone has already made a website called, there’s an AI for that.com, where it’s got all Theis listed in live form. So there you have it. So there’s like

Ian Farmer: four or five curated AI web portals. I guess probably like the podcast network, way back in the day cam.

But you know, there are those emerging.

Steve Sammartino: It’s crazy. And it’s just so many, you almost can’t keep up. And I was talking to someone yesterday, I was actually doing a [00:12:00] briefing on a company yesterday, and they said, which of the top tools? I said, look, here’s the best thing. Assume the tool you need is there and just look for that tool.

The day you need it. And they said, should we learn it? I said, no, don’t learn it. When you see the tool that you need, then use one of the tools to tell you how to use the tool and then use, and then forget about it because then next week there’ll be a better one and then you can use that one. And so, you know, if attention spans are getting shorter, there’s also something really interesting about life cycles of tools and use cases and everything getting shorter.

Everything is truncating and it’s even like epoch of society. So if you look at the history and there’s a Wikipedia page on each of the epochs of society from the agrarian age right through and hunters and gathers, each of them actually is half as long as the previous one, which I find interesting.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, I think those 2000 new tools that you mentioned, um, listeners to the show, and people like Ian and my kids have sent me an email about every one of them. You gotta check this out, you gotta check this out. The last couple of [00:13:00] weeks it’s. I was talking to an old mate of mine I worked with at Microsoft in the nineties, couple of days ago, and we were agreeing that we haven’t seen this amount of excitement and innovation, uh, with this level of rapidity probably since, you know, 94, 95, I think it’s been about 30 years since I’ve seen this level of excitement.

And the barriers to entry are so low, really for people to innovate on this stuff now. Like it was with the web in the mid nineties when n when Netscape came out and it was like every day you were like, holy shit, have you seen this? Have you seen that? Did you like this exciting time came out the iPhone, like it, there’s one every 10 years.

I was thinking about this the other day, so mid nineties you had the Netscape and, and the H T M L revolution. By 2007 you had the iPhone, which led to a whole new level of [00:14:00] revolution in the 2000 and like 2015 I think is when we had like this new sort of social media revolution really kick up to a new level.

I mean, Facebook and Twitter had been around since also, you know, 2007 ish, uh, when they started to go mainstream. So that was a, another whole thing. But the social media stuff didn’t have the, it, it had its own sort of hype and excitement, but because the landscape was sort of dominated very quickly by a couple of very large players, there wasn’t a lot of competition.

Venture capital sort of solidified around a couple of big players coming out of the valley, and that was it until China came along with TikTok a couple of years ago and blew the lid off of that. Now they’re China, as we think mentioned briefly last time. Steve, did we talk about it? No, it might have been on one of my own shows.

Yeah, we did. We did. Yeah. You know, Facebook, et cetera have come along and coerced the US government into trying to shut down TikTok or Force Bite dance to sell it to an [00:15:00] American company cuz they can’t compete. It wasn’t the same sort of level of excitement and innovation and entrepreneurship that we’re now getting.

Even though G P T is, you know, the sort of the dominant player. Open AI is the dominant player in this space because they have released their a p i. There’s all of this innovation happening on an a p I level. Uh, so it’s, um, yeah, it’s super exciting and there’s a few tools I wanna talk about in this episode that I’ve been playing with this week.

S G P T, agent, G P T Auto, G P t, God Mode, et cetera, et cetera. But we’ll get to that after we drill down with Ian on AI and education. Now we’ve all seen Ian over the last few months, a lot of, um, fear and loathing in the media about. The role that generative AI tools are playing and, and might play in the future in terms of education.

My gut feeling on all of that in the last few months is they’re, they all kind of miss the point [00:16:00] of AI and education. Uh, why don’t you talk to us for a bit about it from your perspective? Well, has the hospital pass I need to be,

Ian Farmer: can I go anonymous now and be now? Um, I can talk to that. So it’s a difficult thing, right?

So I think most progressive universities were preparing for this last year already, right? What they didn’t predict was in November 22 when Chati first got out there, two months later, there’d be a hundred million users, right? So we’re, we’re just finishing the first semester of teaching in Australia midway through, I mean, panic setting, right?

So there was lots of different committees set up to kind of address this internally in universities. People were talking about the post plagiarism era, right? Because the big fear is can you just plagiarize and get an AI to write your assignment? I look it like this. The current way many disciplines teach in higher education is like a hurdle race.

[00:17:00] You start the blocks, everyone, every participant does the same. All usually hurdles, assessments, and they get to the finish line.

Steve Sammartino: That’s how we assess learning today, and that’s gotta

Ian Farmer: change, I think. Right? So now there’s fear, right? Gosh, how are we gonna, so one, one of the tactics that we use in higher education is defense mode.

We’ve always had plagiarism checkers. They are being updated to try and predict or guess how much of a assignment’s been written via ai and, and sure that’s one approach, but there’s other approaches. I think just like the calculator, when it was first produced, my brothers were at school actually, and they came home.

And my dad was like on, you’ve gotta still teach people how to actually calculate which, which they did. I don’t think the calculators stopped us learning how to add up numbers, but it prevented us having to remember what 9 56 by 43 was. You know what I mean? So we don’t need to know that as a human. [00:18:00] So I think the future of learning, or, I mean, we talk about lifelong learning in education.

We want people to know how to learn, right? I was telling my students this week, I measure myself in how much I’ve learned, but then also how much my learning efficiency has grown, because that leads to a compound interest at your financial show into how much I could have learned by the time at the incomes, right?

So learning efficiency is important. I think the AR revolution is really about knowledge efficiency. I think that’s gonna democratize education in a large part. We, white Australians, white westerners, um, have it for granted, right? We are privileged because we speak English. There are many people in the world who don’t grew up, grow up speaking English and because all of, well, usually it used to be most of the wealth was in the English speaking world, we, they are forced to kind of learn and do an education in English and then kind [00:19:00] of try and work their way out through the English system.

AI’s gonna change that. It’s gonna make it, it’ll reduce the barrier so that more people globally can actually achieve that. So what we do, so if we can defend against plagiarism, we need to integrate AI into education. And that is we need to allow people, uh, we’ve gotta change the way we, we, we assess learning.

It’s not a hurdle race anymore, in my opinion. It’s climbing a mountain and there are many paths to climbing a mountain. Like there are many career paths. So we don’t measure people as a jump. The same hurdle

Steve Sammartino: in a hundred meter race. I think we measure people as by their topography, as

Ian Farmer: they climb the mountain.

There might be four or five stages. So think gamification. If you’re playing, you know, one games, you get to level one, level two, level three. The game has assessed that you’ve got enough to get to the next level

Steve Sammartino: and they’ve assessed

Ian Farmer: it by whole lot of algorithms wouldnt. And then I actually go to level two [00:20:00] or level three, and I think that’s the future of how we teach

Steve Sammartino: education.

You know, Ian, I do a lot of speeches at schools and education areas and I actually taught at Melbourne Uni for a period of time too. But those frustrations, we can leave till later. What I’d like to know, and I get asked this a lot, and you probably do as well, is now that large language models can do a number of things that we used to be assessed on.

And this is a tactical answer I’m looking for. What things should we drop from curricula, you know, from primary school level all the way up to uni that we used to do. Like, there’s some things that now it’s like, well, a forklift exists, which is stronger than you. So why would we assess how strong someone is?

So I’m really interested in the pragmatic, okay, this thing here, up until now, we did that. You know what, let’s just get rid of that. I mean, we’ve got the machine now, so

Ian Farmer: that’s good question Steve. So one of the, one of the subjects like Teachers Design Process, it’s an Engineers Without Borders sponsored [00:21:00] kinda thing.

We, we try and fi figure out design ideas or design solutions for the people, which is sort of the Aboriginal first station strip between CAIRs and Port Ds.

Steve Sammartino: So some of the, some of the

Ian Farmer: ideas are things like, uh, portable

Steve Sammartino: solar power, right? Or

Ian Farmer: a, you know, compostable toilet or something. Well, that sort of things, right?

You know, I say to the my students, that’s fine if you can buy it from Bunnings, it’s a component. What you need to provide me is the solution. How does that thing with the processes, think back to the IT days, Cameron fit together to be an integrated solution that is culturally sensitive and provides the answer.

So that’s what the answer is. So I is like the calculator, right? It’s a tool, but we can assess how you use the tool to understand has that student learned? What, what would we drop? Yeah, we drop the things that actually assess things that the [00:22:00] AI can already do. Don’t ask those questions because then you’re gonna be in defense mode trying to stop against plagiarism.

Steve Sammartino: So don’t ask questions that the AI can do, which again comes back to a Kevin Cism, which is, what questions do we ask the ai That’s like one of his things. The future will be the, the quality of the questions that you ask. So we actually dunno the answer until we actually look at the question. So we look at a question we might ask some students and then say to ourselves, let’s check, can an AI answer or do this?

And if it can then assess maybe how, what is the quality of that? And is it nuanced and does it need a human input? And if it doesn’t, you go, let’s just stop asking that question. So is it almost like we reverse it out until we have the question in front of us that we might ask the students, we dunno whether or not that should be part of an assessment.

We should almost go, go to the tapes to use some ad parlance and go back and, and say, is this a question worth asking? Now that AI exists, check ai, AI can do this. Let’s stop asking that. So it’s, is it almost like a reverse thing? [00:23:00]

Ian Farmer: Yeah, I mean, we have, we have this concept in higher education. There’s a, there’s a discipline called learning analytics.

Essentially it’s trying to measure the data trace elements of a student journey and then kind of see whether that student needs intervention or does it, does it help predict their literacy skills? Um, we’re not very good at that. A bit like, you know, when we first tried to do dashboards in business way back in the eighties, there were so many different sources, we couldn’t put it all together in the right timeframe, right?

What’s coming? Here’s this. I, I reckon it’s too simplified, Steve, just to cut things out, you need to measure the journey. If you had your own personalized tutor and you are in second year at university, it’s 9 19 84. No, it’s 2023, they wouldn’t give you the answer. They would actually ask you how would you start this answer, and then based

Steve Sammartino: on what you answer back,

Ian Farmer: they would either guide you by the hand or they would actually skip you to the next phase, right?

So as long as you get to level two, you’re competent. But if you need [00:24:00] help getting to level two, let the AI bot help you because they don’t cross, you know, whatever, whatever. University tutors cross and they’re available 24 7.

Steve Sammartino: So let’s, let’s use that and then assess people as they get.

Ian Farmer: Because if you can learn more, we should stop saying you’ve got three or four years to do a business degree.

What if you could learn 10 business degrees in four years? Why not do that? Or why not? You know, doin say, We can press, I, I think we’re gonna get rid of the university time timeline because that constrains what you can

Steve Sammartino: teach. It’s so interesting. Timelines are an interesting one, even on linear tv. So I’ve got a TV show on channel nine and we’ve gone back to them and we’ve said we want to do, uh, seven, three minute shows on our 21 minute, half hour allocate.

They said, we can’t do that. Everything works in half an hour. I said, look, I don’t know if you know it’s 2023 and everything in the world other than on your screen doesn’t work in half hour slots. Likewise, university [00:25:00] works in seasonality because of when we have to pick the crops. Like so many things in modern society are based on seasonality, which is insane because those seasons literally don’t exist anymore.

And we do everything in these blocks. Like, yeah, they take three years to do like growing a crop or something. It’s insane. Which

Ian Farmer: impacts the supply chain, right? So, you know, if you haven’t got the government contract in by this date, the tenant is done right. I guess we’re chatting briefly before, show Cameron about, you know, imagine this what we did back in the nineties.

Imagine the supply chain where everything was connected. That’s now possible as long as the humans are taken out of the equation.

Steve Sammartino: I’m gonna get rid of those pesky humans. I’ll tell you what, they just get in the way and right now there’s a large language model working out in secret what those pesky humans are up to.

Cameron Reilly: Speaking of large language models, I think you had a question for Sally, Steve about, um, education and AI . Do you wanna ask her that? Yes.

Steve Sammartino: So, so my question was, now that large language models exist, how [00:26:00] could we reframe education?

Sailli: Great question. With the rise of large language models, LLMs like GPT4 and their potential applications in education, schools should consider updating their curriculum to leverage these AI advancements.

Here are a few ways they can do that. Emphasize critical thinking and digital literacy as LLMs can easily generate vast amounts of information. It’s essential for students to develop strong, critical thinking and digital literacy skills. This would help them evaluate the credibility of AI generated content, distinguish between facts and misinformation, and make informed decisions, focus on creativity and problem solving.

With AI handling more routine tasks, schools should emphasize creativity and problem solving in their curriculum. This would help students develop the ability to come up with innovative solutions to complex problems, a skill that’s highly valued in a world where AI plays a significant role, teach AI ethics and responsible use.

As AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives, it’s crucial for students to learn about AI ethics and the responsible [00:27:00] use of AI technologies. This would help them understand the potential consequences of AI applications, the importance of data privacy, and the need for fairness and transparency in AI systems.

Integrate AI tools into the classroom. Schools should consider incorporating AI powered tools like LLMs into their teaching methods. For instance, they can use AI to provide personalized learning experiences, offer real-time feedback, or create interactive educational content. This would help students become more comfortable with AI technologies and learn how to use them effectively, foster collaboration and communication skills.

As AI continues to reshape the job market, strong collaboration and communication skills will become increasingly important. Schools should encourage group projects and discussions that help students develop these skills, preparing them to work effectively with diverse teams. In a world where AI is an integral part of many industries, by adapting the curriculum to reflect the growing influence of AI, technologies like LLMs schools can ensure that students are better prepared for the future job market and can harness the potential of AI to make a [00:28:00] positive impact on society.

Cameron Reilly: That’s. Sally, lots of really good insights in there, but can you give me some, like more real life examples and like about how we could use AI in education and, and break it down for me, let’s say into some examples from primary school, high school, university, and then post school learning

Sailli: primary school.

Imagine an AI powered app that can teach kids how to read by listening to them and giving them instant feedback on their pronunciation or picture an AI driven learning platform that adapts math problems to a child’s skill level, helping them build confidence and understanding at their own pace. High school.

Think of a virtual tutor that can help students with their homework by answering questions and offering step-by-step explanations for complex problems, or an AI system that helps teachers identify students who are struggling and offers targeted interventions to help them catch up with their.

University picture an AI tool that can analyze massive amounts of research data and [00:29:00] suggest new hypotheses for scientists to test or a university using AI to identify students at risk of dropping out. Then offering personalized support to help them stay on track and complete their degrees.

Post-school learning. Imagine an AI-powered career coach that can analyze your skills and experience. Then suggest courses or certifications that would make you more marketable in your industry. Or an AI-driven language learning app that listens to your conversations and offers instant feedback on your grammar and pronunciation.

These are just a few examples of how AI can make education more engaging, personalized, and effective. The possibilities are endless and as AI continues to advance, we’ll likely see even more innovative applications in the world of education.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. They’re interesting examples and I, I mentioned briefly, I’ve been using it with Italian, uh, as, I can’t remember if we’ve talked about this a bit before Steve, but Chrissy and I have been using Duo Lingo for the last couple of years.

We, it was like one of our, um, COVID projects. Uh, we decided to learn Italian cuz I spent a lot of time in Italy. A [00:30:00] lot of my other shows you are about Italy. I do a show on the Renaissance. I do a show, I did a show for many years on the, uh, Judian Emperors, um, that kind of stuff. So, and, and Christianity, early Christianity, my documentary.

So a lot of, a lot of my stuff is based around Italy and I like Italy. I wanna spend more time there. So we started learning Italian and Geo Lingo is a great app. I dunno if you guys have ever spent much time on it. Used, you’ve used it, it’s great. Really, really good at gamifying, learning a new skill and.

I’ve done, I think 1,009 consecutive days of learning in Duo lingo now. And it, I wouldn’t have done that without Duo gamifying getting me back in there every day for 15, 30 minutes. You know, it’s really good. But that said, it’s limited. And for the first couple of years we had an AI tutor guy down in Melbourne, actually, uh, an Italian guy who is living in Melbourne.

And we would speak to him once a week. And any questions I had during the week from Duo that I didn’t really understand, I have [00:31:00] books that I could go and look them up in. But it’s always good to have someone you can ask, Hey, tell me again, like, I had one yesterday, ci vediamo. Uh, I’m like, why is, why is there ci before the vediamo?

Because you can use ci in a number of different ways. And so now of course, any questions I have, I jump into GPT. And I say, can you explain this to me? Why do I have to say this? Why am I conjugating the verb there? Or like recently I was doing, um, passato remoto, which I didn’t understand very well. It’s a way of conjugating verbs in the, in sort of the remote past, hadn’t really understood it.

So I jumped into GPT and I said, listen, can you explain to me the use of passato? Give me five examples using the most common verbs in each of the different pronoun conjugations, io, tu, lui/lei, noi, voi and loro. And then [00:32:00] give me 20 challenges, problems that I have to solve. Or I have to get the right verb, it conjugated the right way.

Underneath that, give me all of the answers in English. Boom, it’s there a second later. I save it as a P D F. Then I can pull out, put it in my iPad, I pull out my pencil and I can answer the questions. But just the ability to ask it questions about my Italian, my learning, having this personalized tutor who’s there 24 7, just to answer my questions and clarify things for me, blows my fucking mind every time, man, it’s like, so cool.

Ian Farmer: I wanna jump in. I’m glad you’re excited, Kevin, and that’s what I want for my students, right? You’ve just, you’ve just cut out your mafia boss, a human one, right out of your Italian learning, ironically, mafia, because the, no offense, okay, lemme just put it in some, some words from the literature. So if you’re, if you’re an educator and you’re listening to this, there are three new ways that [00:33:00] we are, I guess the literature says we are looking to, to teach learning.

And they all start with a ironically, so I call it the Triple A. So the first one is be adaptive. This is kind of the future of learning adaptive assessments. So these are, sorry, these are ways to assess adaptive assessment. That’s what a personalized tutor would do. They would assess you as you learn, and they would adapt based on your, so that if you’re a slow learner, they would hold your hand.

If not, they would actually help you, let you progress quickly, right? So adaptive. The second thing is automated RO and AI does that. It’s automated. We can actually automate and repeat without the expense of the human labor side. That’s easy. But the last thing, which I think covers everything, and I guess that’s where most universities have been talking about now, is authentic assessment.

How can you apply what you’ve learned in an authentic way that can’t be kind of taken off the shelf? [00:34:00] You know what I mean? So you have to introduce, say a principle of the, so the first, one of the first steps in design process is empathy. How would you design something for an N D I S patient, for example?

It’s outside the scope, but you’ve gotta actually take what you’ve learned and apply it. We wanna teach people how to think. The AI post mentioned critical thinking. I think that’s spot on. So how do you do that? It’s through authentic assessment,

Steve Sammartino: that authentic thing. It sort of taps into that artistry.

Even though AI can create art, it can never have your experience. And it might even, AI’s might even have its own personal viewpoint at some point where it has like an artistic interpretation of the world that it’s been exposed to. But I think the reason we love and respect art so much, whether it’s designing a house or painting or musicians or whatever, is that it has this, it gives us.

An idea to have empathy for what they’re feeling or what they’re doing. And then it gets expressed in that moment. And everyone’s moment is, is authentically theirs. And that’s what [00:35:00] great artists do. They let us into their heart a little bit, no matter how it manifests itself. And that that’s gonna become in increasingly important, I think.

Yeah. So one of the things, I

Ian Farmer: mean, in fact it was, it’s very timely, the class I taught yesterday. Um, the next assignment is a reflection exercise. They have to submit a four minute video reflecting on what they’ve Right. And that’s part of the assessment. And when I watch these videos, it usually brings me to tears because I’ve been teaching this cohort for the last semester.

Steve Sammartino: And I

Ian Farmer: hear what they’ve learned. I mean, that’s why I teach. I wanna observe learning, right? But reflection, most, most schools, we don’t measure reflection. I mean, you don’t need to in a small cohort anyway. But, um, a personalized treat at one, we, one day we’ll have this in our pocket, right? It’s our own personalized life coach, whatever you like to call it, it will tell us.

But have you heard of the Jahari window,

Steve Sammartino: which is this as well? You better tell me. [00:36:00]

Ian Farmer: No, you can look it up. It, it says, um, we wanna to, to open up the window of communication between people. You need to actually, uh, disclose things about you. That means that you can get more, but also you need to actually understand what you know, and you dunno.

And that’s a critical part of humanity, I think is what we don’t know. Knowing what you don’t know drives you to learn. So we get something in that too.

Cameron Reilly: Which has been the, the bane of my life. Cuz every, like I remember when I started to seriously get into self-education mode when I was 18 or 19, there was this little, uh, I dunno, you, you guys probably both know it, the Merchant of Fairness book stall at the South Melbourne market.

You guys ever? No. Oh my God. It was a mainstay of the South Melbourne market for decades. I think it still is. He’s also got a shop over on the, the north side up near, um, I don’t know, down Deep Dean Road or something. Cameron uh, rod [00:37:00] Cameron was the guy who ran it, but when I was like 18, I had a job around the corner in South Melbourne and I would go to him once a week and I’d say, what should I read this week?

And he’d say, do you, what do you know about Napoleon? What do you know about Julius Caesar? What do you know about Iron Rand? What do you know about whatever? And he would get me three books. And they cost me like two bucks each cuz it was a secondhand bookstore, five bucks, maybe I was poor. And he would just get me books and I’d go home and I’d devour them.

And then I’d go back next week and go, okay, what, what should I read this week, rod? Wow. But what I, what I learned was every book that I read answered a bunch of questions about how the world worked, but opened up 50 other questions cuz it, the, each book would assume a level of a priority knowledge about a certain subject.

And I’d go, well, fuck, I don’t know what that is. What’s that? Now I need to go read a whole book about that. And that would, and the, and the process continues, right? It’s all about what you don’t know that leads you on the journey. So that I call that

Ian Farmer: learning loops, right? So in

Steve Sammartino: an education sense, you

Ian Farmer: teach, [00:38:00] then you assess, then you provide feedback, and then you continue.

Now, the problem with most education today, those learning loops are so long. But we’ve gotta make them micro, right? So instead of having four hurdles, you jump over semester, we have a million hurdles, or maybe 3 million depending on how your path is. Yeah. So it’s

Cameron Reilly: about learning lips and of course back, you know, this is like, like the late eighties when I started that process.

Then, you know, for the last, since the dawn of the, the internet came along and you could ask questions and Google stuff or look it up on Yahoo and go through that process. Then Wikipedia came along and you go to Wikipedia for the last, I remember, I remember at some point in the early two thousands, downloading the entire Wikipedia onto my P D a.

I love that.

Steve Sammartino: Oh my god, that is so, Cameron Riley. Before

Cameron Reilly: iPhones, I had a, I had like a memory card in my pda, my Windows PDA with the entire Wikipedia on it, so I could look up stuff. Then of course, we had [00:39:00] iPhones that were connected to the net and we could do Wikipedia. Now, of course, anything I wanna know, it’s G P T, Chrissy.

My wife bought some supplements from, I heard the other day, magnesium and l theanine and stuff for post-workout recovery. And we were trying to figure out where’s the best to take them at night or in the morning after a workout. Before a workout. So she jumps on G P T and she starts asking it questions.

So when’s the best time to use this? What’s recommended? And then, and she’s still like dipping her toe in the AI waters, but she was like, oh, she’s been using it mostly for recipes and stuff, uh, in the last month or so. But she was like, oh my God. Like I could just ask a questions and then it would give me an answer and then I could ask a deeper question.

It was like she was blown away by the conversational nature of it. It, it really is interesting to see people start to get it for the first time when they get in. Or like, oh my God, I can, I can just go on this journey with this tool. And speaking of which, I [00:40:00] wanna move on to some news of the week. Have either of you installed S G P T yet?

Steve Sammartino: No, I haven’t. I

Ian Farmer: haven’t installed it.

Cameron Reilly: Okay. S G P T was developed by, uh, one of the bloggers or journalists and I think Mac Rumors or one of those sites. It’s an iOS implementation of the of G P T A P I. Once you, it’s just a shortcut. I dunno if any of you have used iOS shortcuts much, but I use Androids. I know you’re

Ian Farmer: talking about a different language to

Cameron Reilly: me.

Okay? It’s an iOS thing. It’s a way of automating processes on MAC and iOS devices. So with this, you just download his shortcut and install it. You need to put in your open AI a P I key. You need to get one of those, but here’s what I can now do. Watch this on my watch. For those of you at home, hey, Siri, S G P T, what’s the text?

Who is Steve Santino? Steve Samino is an [00:41:00] entrepreneur, author, and speaker based in Melbourne, Australia. He has founded and co-founded several successful businesses, including Startup Accelerator and Incubator Start Mesh, and he has advised numerous other companies on innovation and growth. Steve is also the author, author of two popular books on technology and the Future, the Great Fragmentation and the Lessons

Steve Sammartino: School.

Forgot. Wow. Got a got got a thing wrong though. Start mesh. I didn’t do. I’ve actually done that a few times. It actually has a pretty close bio, but it makes mistakes at various times. It says, I’ve got a computer science degree from R M I T, which I don’t, but I did do a lot of work with them, helping them.

And so the way it’s used, the language is it’s made some inferences, which. Right. Can

Ian Farmer: I just comment on the, so the reason it’s not always accurate, and this is what gets people all the time, is I say I want the AI to be very accurate. Now it can be, but that would prevent its power, right? And you gotta think like this.

When you ask a question, [00:42:00] it’s giving you a plausibility answer. I think the word plausible. That’s what you gotta keep in your mind and then it’s up to you to kind of sense check it. Yeah. And,

Steve Sammartino: and, and that’s the thing that becomes the art form of using the AI is that of course it’s based on the data and, and yeah, it’s probabilistic in nature and it, and it looks at things at a quantum level and goes, based on what I can see, this is what I think.

It’ll, it’ll probably get better, but it’s also dependent on the feeds and what you ask it. And, you know, one of the things that I’ve said is that right now people have been talking about personal branding for a long time. Oh, you gotta build your personal brand. You know, you, you are the, the c e o of your own personal media company.

Well, if you’ve got a personal brand right now, you’ve got this huge advantage because I can do Steve Santino in the style of, cuz I’ve written 3 million words on my blog over 20 years.

Cameron Reilly: And what I keep telling people about the so-called inaccuracies is it’s not inaccurate, it’s just reporting back from the future.

So you, you will have a computer science degree from R M I T. [00:43:00] Steve, at some point it’s telling you what you will have, uh, it knows all, it knows stuff that you haven’t even done yet. But the point of the S G P T is I now have G P T basically replacing Siri for most things on my watch and on my phone. And I use Siri 20 times a day on my watch.

Now I’m using G P T for some of those things anyway. I don’t use it to set reminders. I don’t use it to add stuff to my calendar. But usually if I ask Siri a question, it’d be like, here’s some websites that you can go and read. Now it’s just had a major brain upgrade and it will answer questions maybe not a hundred percent accurately.

Of course. And you know, I tell people all the time. Yeah, yeah. Because people focus on that. I’m like, yeah, it’s, it’s buggy. It’s a beta buggy tool. Fucking get over it. Those of us that have lived in software for the last 30 years understand shit. That’s pre-release, right? It’s, it’s a beta tool. Yeah, it’s buggy.

Fuck me.

Ian Farmer: Like

Steve Sammartino: just the insight [00:44:00] there, cam is an interesting one, is that Siri has replicated what Apple does as a corporation and every company launches products which really reflect its D N A and its belief systems. And Apple is a closed e. What S G P T and I will download it today has done is ES ostensibly added an arterial, which goes to a different suburb and externalizes its knowledge so that instead of saying, here’s what I found on the internet, it can actually bridge out there, bring the information and then present it back.

So it’s almost like an arterial. And again, that that idea of biomimicry of what happens in technology really represents the way we build things out physically in our world.

Cameron Reilly: But what’s insane about this is this isn’t an Apple tool. Apple didn’t give me this. Some guy who’s a journalist on an app, on a Mac website built it and distributed it for free.

And this gets back to the innovation and the excitement around this sort of stuff, right? Because there’s an a p I that he can access, he can build the tool to access, he [00:45:00] can innovate where it should be. Apple giving me this shit, not, you know, uh, Vittorio doing it. Okay, moving right along. I can’t say my thing.

So

Ian Farmer: the difference is this. In the old days search was, and you could do it a series. It’s one question, right? There’s no context for Siri from the previous question, so you’re doing it. This is that, same with Google. You do a con, a series of like one shot attempts that you refine. That’s search. I call check.

Yeah. AI chat seeking. It’s not search, it’s seeking and it’s long format content. This is a disruption for anyone who does a podcast, as we kind mentioned,

Steve Sammartino: um, Karen, maybe

Ian Farmer: people are gonna be doing that long format seeking instead of looking at podcast on the train or in their commute. But, but it’s, to me, it’s search becomes seeking.

Steve Sammartino: Yeah. It’s a great way to frame it because, you know, the, the se sequential nature of the questions you can ask it, where you go back and say, and now do it like this. No, not like that. It’s, and again, it’s the same way you, [00:46:00] you teach a child or ask someone, you sometimes have to ask four questions to iterate and whittle it down to your point, the thing that you are actually seeking.

It’s not singular and you don’t have to go back to the well and start from zero again.

Cameron Reilly: That was common in like in a Google search paradigm too. You would search for something, not get the answers you want, and then you’d try and refine the search to try and narrow down the results that you would get.

The outputs. It’s the same. When I would talk to my Italian shooter, I’d ask him to explain something. He would, I’d say, look, I, I don’t understand that. Can you explain it this way or you can you do it differently? You know, I’m visual. Can you draw me a picture? Which is hard with language. No, but

Steve Sammartino: the difference this time cam though is that yes, you refined it.

You refined it, but the search engine was still coming in cold at zero. The difference now is that it actually refers to the above and then it refines that answer. That’s the kind of, I think that sequential nature you’re referring to. Is that right Anne?

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, totally. And I don’t need to tell it every time now, you know, [00:47:00] translate this in Italian.

Once I’ve started a conversation about Italian. Everything I ask it, it will translate into Italian for me. It understands the context. It’s conte, contextually aware, as you said. Okay. Agent G p t Auto, g p t, God mode. Have you guys played with these in any manner of detail yet? I have, yes. Somebody wanna do a an overview of them though, so I don’t, people don’t listen to me.

Ian’s gonna

Steve Sammartino: give us the, he’s gonna smash it. Let’s go Ian.

Ian Farmer: Go Ian. What we have at the moment with chat chip pt, Bing chat is a single AI that you engage with. What if that AI could breed other ai Right? And suddenly become a c e in charge of many ai, right? To me, that makes anything possible. Suddenly, uh, okay, here’s an example.

At the moment, project managers have a real place in society, and the reason is because humans get in the way of doing things as tasks. So [00:48:00] they, we, we hire people to organize things. And we’re okay at it. But if an AI could do that, there are many possibilities about spawning tasks and how they’re organized.

That’s probably not the right interaction you wanna see, but I’m excited by it. You can see, you can hear it. I think,

Steve Sammartino: look, that’s that, that agency idea, you know, like become my agent, and then give me the steps and then find your answers to your steps, and then how to implement, implement the answers to the steps that you’ve told yourself.

It’s like it’s layering itself down. Instead of you having to come in between, you’re telling it. Go out and do this and actually go out and learn the thing that you need to learn, and then the steps, and then think about how you can answer your own steps, and then actually be the person who goes and implements those steps.

That’s it. So an example is this,

Ian Farmer: I’m planning a trip to Albania, um, with Michaela later this year, after the term term finishes. There are many questions I have now. Normally I’d be [00:49:00] researching this every night online, looking at things, formulating things as I do just say, I’ve got my own personal agent who spawns many other agents to do the work for me.

I’ve got this whole organization now working for me on my objective. As long as I tell ’em what the objective is, I have got many people at my disposal, which are kind a free right. So there yet, that’s the big insight. It’s gonna have massive implications for supply chain. I won’t get started on that, but.

Cameron Reilly: So yeah, the basic idea is for people listening in, the basic idea is you in any of these tools, well, agent G p T and auto g p t, you give it a a goal and then it breaks that goal down into a series of tasks and then it executes those tasks. Scott mode is a little different in that God mode starts off the same way you give it a goal, but then it asks you to approve the tasks that it creates, the sub-tasks.

And, and I’ve got some [00:50:00] real examples. I just wanna run through with people quickly, cuz I’ve been playing with this a lot this week. Um, with Agent G P T, one of the things I did was ask it to. Help me start a new novel that I’ve been planning on writing for a couple of years called The Psychopath Hunters.

Here were based on my book, the Psychopath Epidemic from a few years ago, but a, a novel, right? And here’s the goal that I gave it, right, the first chapter of a novel about a group of people who are hunting down psychopaths. The plot involves a group of people from a variety of backgrounds who believe that psychopaths in positions of institutional power are the biggest problem facing humanity today.

Their mission is to determine who these psychopaths are and to remove them from power using any means possible.

Steve Sammartino: I love that. That’s a

Cameron Reilly: great blurb. Thanks. So this is how it starts off Added task, generate character profiles for the group of people hunting down psychopaths added task. Create a list of potential psychopaths in positions of institutional.

Added task. Develop the initial conflict that sets the group on their [00:51:00] mission to remove psychopaths from power executing, generate character profiles for the group of people hunting down psychopaths, character profiles. Emily, a former F B I agent, skilled and self-defense and investigation. She left the bureau after witnessing corrupt agents abusing their power.

She’s the leader of the group and is determined to bring justice to those who abuse their positions of power. John, a retired special forces operator who has seen the horrors of war. He’s haunted by the atrocities he witnessed and wants to make sure that no one else suffers the same way. He’s the muscle of the group and is not afraid to get its hands, his hands dirty and it goes on, it does profiles and it’s very sort of, uh, airport novelly.

Uh, not great literature, but that’s not the point. And I posted this on. And people are like, wow, that’s really shitty writing. And I’m like, you’re missing the fucking point here, people. The point isn’t how good it is at writing good literature today. The point is how it thinks, and it went on added task.

Develop a plan for how the group will identify potential psychopaths and positions of [00:52:00] institutional power and gather, gather evidence to support their removal tasks. Create a list of potential psychopaths, and then it goes politicians. There are numerous politicians who could potentially fit the definition of a psychopath with their thirst for power, lack of empathy, and ability to manipulate the masses.

Corporate CEOs, law enforcement officials, military leaders, religious leaders, goes on. And then it also went on later on and said, Develop a plan for how the group will identify, oh, sorry, I did that one. Create, uh, no, I did that one. Establish a communication network and code system for the group to use while operating covertly Identify potential allies and resources outside of the group that can aid in their mission.

Create a contingency plan for dealing with potential legal or law enforcement obstacles they may encounter are like the way that it, it thinks and breaks down. The plotting of this

Ian Farmer: is,

Steve Sammartino: this is

Ian Farmer: brilliant. It’s project management on steroids. Right? You’re applying project management to a creative kind of discipline.

And that’s the, that’s, that’s why I [00:53:00] get excited about, because if you put your creative hat on, you kind of project management goes out the window. You’re gonna run with an idea, you gotta think about it. But in the background, let’s have, let’s have an AI project manager do that for us. I

Steve Sammartino: love. I think the thing that I liked about it, just to your point and everyone going, that’s terrible writing.

When I was listening to what you wrote, I mean, I was obviously having some ideas going, oh, well, an F B I agent and an expec force. Okay, it’s a bit hacked almost. But the point that I was thinking about was that it’s given you a structure and now your creativity fills in the blanks. Everyone’s too worried about the blanks.

It’s like, and that’s the hardest thing with creative projects sometimes is the structure, right? So then that provides the structure. You fill in the blanks, and that’s when you know this empathy, this, this idea of your life experience comes into this and that nuance, because it, it, it takes away probably the, the ugliest and hardest part of that, so you can get on with what’s the ingredients deep inside that, because it’s given you a structural format that’s really, that’s really

Cameron Reilly: great.[00:54:00]

Look, I was super impressed by what it could do in terms of the writing. And with the writing. I got it to write a chapter and then I’d go, okay, uh, make it darker. So it would then, I’d say, use more metaphors, and then it put a metaphor into every sentence and I’m like, okay, that’s overkill. Cut the metaphor in a sentence ratio by, you know, three fifths.

Then I said, do it in the style of James Elroy. And it had a crack at that and it was a lot of fun and it’s a fucking rabbit hole. I spent like a couple of hours late one night just trying to tweak it and optimize and see what it would do if I asked it this and asked it that. Then I wrote my own chapter and said, okay, write a second chapter based on this chapter, and it took my style and, and could work with it.

But look, it’s, it’s not great writing yet. I think its ability to write will probably improve astronomically over the next year or so. But the key thing again is just watching how it things. I also asked it. Find me 10 stocks to invest on the Australian Stock [00:55:00] Exchange. That would meet Warren Buffett’s criteria.

And then it started to drill down, okay, what is Warren task? Uh, understand Warren Buffett’s investment criteria. And then it was talking about return on equity and low low debt to equity ratios and future cash flow analysis and all this kind of stuff. It was simplistic, but it was, you know, picked up some of the main things of the buffet methodology.

Steve Sammartino: Let’s pick up on that cam, because one of the things that we wanted to talk about was an article that went in the financial review, and I read the article and the article title was something to the effect of, and I’ll read it exactly here so the listeners can hear it, that said here, why chat? G p t will never beat the stock market.

I wanna start off with a couple of things, right, because I, I read that article and I was embarrassed for him that he wrote it. And I’ll tell you his name. Tom Richardson. Mate, seriously, you’re an amateur. He obviously doesn’t understand exponential technology in the first instance. But let me just rave on a little bit further here while I’m being arrogant about it, is that in the first [00:56:00] sentence he talks about why, because humans cannot remember the future, nor can AI machines, you know, a trading program, stock prices in weeks and months and years from now represent unknown news today.

It’s like really that’s, that’s your premise for your article. That is exactly what the entire share market is about. No one knows the future. So that was insane that he even said that feels to me like someone who’s feeling a little bit threatened with their role. Let me go to another thing. In the history of humanity, since share markets existed, there’s less than a dozen people who’ve beaten the share market consistently.

Actually, I think it’s probably about five. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is 90% of investors lose money actually go backwards. And of the 10% that do well, you know, most of ’em probably have index funds. No one beats the share market. But here’s, here’s what I did, and I wrote my piece for the Eureka report this week where I cajoled in the same way that you have camp to get a share investment portfolio.

And I asked her to [00:57:00] give me stocks and it wouldn’t do it. And it said, my data’s old finishes it September. But my contention is it actually doesn’t matter that the data’s old. And here’s why people think that the relative future fortunes of a stock changes a lot more than it does. It actually doesn’t. He went on in that article to talk about, oh, how could it know about, you know, an oil shock or a war, whatever.

Yeah. Well no one knows about that. Anyway, so that’s kind of in irrelevant premise. The premise that matters is how long’s that stock been around, cuz IPOs are a terrible investment anyway, which as Warren Buffett says, imaginary profits only is. What IPO stands for is if you look at most stocks, even with 18 months in the past.

That’s enough knowledge to actually make a really good long-term investment. So I asked it to give me stocks of wooden, and then I said, tell me about Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett and Charlie Mugga, what they would invest in. Then it told me, and I said, tell me what sectors they would look at. And then it told me what sectors said, give me a split on sectors across the Australian US share market.

It did [00:58:00] that. And then because it’s looking at the previous answers, then I said, what stocks might fit under that? And it gave me what I think was an extraordinary portfolio and, and I’ll tell you the stocks that it put in there, and I’ll put this in my blog today, the stocks that it gave me, and it was like for Australia, 25% financials, 50% consumer staples, and 10% healthcare, which are our three best sectors.

And then it gave me, in the US 20% tech, 15% consumer discretionary, 10% industrials, and 5% utilities. This portfolio is so good. Recommended Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Woolworths, and Coles. By the way, they’re the two best performing banks on yield right now. Today, even though this is 18 month old data, it gave me, uh, Woolworths and Coles, which have the deepest moats of any business in Australia.

They’re basically monopolies with different uniforms. It gave me CSL and ResMed, which have got the two greatest bull runs in history. And then in tech it gave me Apple and Microsoft, which are the two [00:59:00] best placed for ai. Apple with Siri becoming like a personal concierge ai, once they plug it in. And Microsoft, which owns 50% of chat G P T, it gave me consumer discretionary, the Walt Disney Company, which I think is extraordinary because AI’s gonna reduce their production cost significantly, and they have a direct connection with consumers and a strong consumer brand gave me Home Depot.

Which is great for the work from anywhere, revolution of Refitting, houses and offices. Industrials have gave me 3M and Honeywell, which are both really well placed with the iot, ot and then it gave me utilities, the Southern Company and NextEra Energy, which are leaders in, um, renewables. It’s an extraordinary portfolio.

Extraordinary, and I, I would be very unsurprising if it beats the a SX and the s and p 500. Yeah, you’ve just

Ian Farmer: automated the fund manager, Steve, right there.

Steve Sammartino: I think mate, fund managers are a hoax anyway. I mean, they invest in, and, and I’m an economist by trade who’s pretty into investing as Cam knows, they underperform the market anyway because, you know, they, whoever takes ’em to the football [01:00:00] and, and give seriously is what they invest in and whoever looks after them, I mean, this, this is the thing,

Cameron Reilly: the vast majority of them don’t even, you know, match the index year to year, let alone beat it.

Never

Ian Farmer: They, no, none

Steve Sammartino: of them do. A couple do, but that portfolio, there is a bloody good portfolio.

Ian Farmer: So I think, I think just to bring back to the academics side, you, you’re talking, I mean the AI does this, it’s talking about game theory, it’s talking about predictive theory so that those are bills in, okay.

One more thing. We all have cognitive biases, and this is why fund managers can’t keep it going all the time. We have cognitive biases that we sometimes know, but not know all of them. AI can be a great antidote to that. They’re, they don’t have the same cognitive biases as us, and we can use that in a debated form to help education and

Steve Sammartino: learning.

Yeah. And AI can have biases and, but I think that because I, the way I framed it into the sectors and then, and cajoled it down, it actually was probably a, a [01:01:00] better profile. I, I looked and I just went, wow. Like I was I serious because it picked the best ones within those sectors. And the reason I picked the best one, It had such a historical context of where these brands fit within the consumer viewpoint and the cash flow, and it had all the other, there was a whole lot more in it.

It talked about why it’s picked those and how they fit within this and all of the Warren Buffet way ideologies. It was a bloody

Cameron Reilly: extraordinary. So as you guys know, um, you know, my main income, my bread and butter for the last three or four years has been my investing podcast that I do with Tony kk, who is one of the people that has consistently beaten the market.

He’s got a, his average is double market returns for the last 30 years using his methodology around it’s 19 and a half percent on average over the last 30 years. It goes, yeah, some years it’s higher, some years it’s lower. Some years he underperforms, but then he catches up the next year. But on average it’s double market over 30 years.

And so we teach his methodology, uh, the Qav v [01:02:00] methodology on the podcast and most of our members who follow it are also beat the market. But one of the things that Tony always teaches us, this is the first thought I had reading this article, is that, uh, forecasting is dummy’s game. Nobody can forecast anything.

Anyone who tells you they can forecast what a company’s gonna do or what a sector’s gonna do is full of shit. We have a rule on our show. We don’t forecast anything. We don’t believe forecasts, we don’t forecast. Everything that we do that he does to decide which stocks he’s gonna buy is based on historical data.

How is that company performing? How much cash is it generating? How good is the management at adapting to changing situations and running a tight ship? You know, the way that you, uh, an investor like Tony Invests isn’t based on future predicting because we all know no one can predict the future. And anyone who says they can is lies to you.

Right? And everyone who tries, fails, and I know Steve, you’re a futurist, but from an investing perspective, no. No one can do [01:03:00] it. That’s right. Justin Industry doesn’t take

Ian Farmer: into account new. Technologies that will change what happened before.

Cameron Reilly: And even like, okay, we’re all tech guys. We’ll come out of tech and Right, I remember the dot-com boom of the nineties.

How many of the businesses that were predicting the future actually survived and managed to make that future come true? There’s, there’s always a couple, there’s a handful and the rest become roadkill and, but we have this survivor bias. We look at the five that succeeded. We go, oh, look at that. Yeah, of course.

I remember a couple of years ago when we were doing our podcast and after pay, everyone was all about after pay and pay, buy now, pay later stocks. And except me. And except us. And Tony was like, yeah, wait, we’ll see what happens when interest rates go up. Everyone thinks interest rates are gonna stay at zero forever.

That’s not gonna happen. What, what?

Steve Sammartino: It was a feature, not a company. They were, they were a total hoax. Those company absolute hoax by the way, they circumvented law by redefining things they’re really credit cards in disguise. With, [01:04:00] with, yeah. Without, without. And, and tech has a really ugly history of changing the definitions of things to squirt between the law

Ian Farmer: because the law can’t keep

Steve Sammartino: up that you’re exactly right.

Yeah. They use language. I mean, and language is our killer app. I always say that. And that’s why large language models are so interesting because they, horizontalized across and tech have been doing this for a long time, subverting language to get away with things which are, we’ve already thought about in a largely illegal, but, you know, in the long run, the truth, the truth bubbles out, and I, I’ve wrote about the music’s about to stop on these.

They’re the, they’re the worst investments of all time. The fact that, uh, after pay salt 39 B and is, is now with zero. Zero. Like none have ever made a dollar. They’re an absolute hoax.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. So I guess the bottom line is I do believe, and I think you guys probably agree with me, that AI is gonna be incredible, an incredible tool for investors in the next couple of years.

Absolutely incredible. I think it already

Steve Sammartino: is like I’m tempted to, to throw some money into that [01:05:00] AI portfolio. So I’ve got some skin in the game just as an experiment.

Cameron Reilly: I wouldn’t invest in AI companies again because I don’t know which ones are gonna survive and which ones are gonna explode like Starship did this morning.

But I will use them as tools.

Steve Sammartino: I didn’t explode as a rapid deconstruction. Just one thing on that futurist ideology, and it’s important to to point this out, and I tell people this. My job isn’t to predict the future. My job is to show people plausible trajectories. And who will win is impossible to predict, but which technologies will emanate and evolve is really, really easy to plausibility.

Ian Farmer: That’s

Cameron Reilly: what the AI does. It’s plausible plausibility. Yeah. I do want to quickly end with the one segment that we’ve sort of figured out hits and misses. What have you done successfully using AI or any other emerging technology over the last couple of weeks and what have been your failures? Uh, who wants to go first?

Ian, you’re our guest. You got any [01:06:00] hits and misses you wanna talk about?

Ian Farmer: I can name a hits one. Hits in education. Um, they were early beta tester of CHATT is Academy and, and they have a really good kind of charter. They’re trying to bring free education to the. And they do primary, secondary, a little bit of tertiary, but they’ve basically got a tool where they put a ring fence around a chat G P T AI, and use it for education.

And it’s generating some really cool results, such as teach someone maths, but they love soccer. You can put math into soccer speak. Do you know what I mean? And another one. You wanna actually teach people how to critical think. That is to debate things. So as you learn something, it says pick a side. It, you as a student, pick one side.

It then engages you in conversation to debate that. So yeah, Khan Academy, for me,

Cameron Reilly: that’s what I say. Fantastic. I love that debating thing, right? I use, uh, Twitter and Facebook in a [01:07:00] limited fashion these days and have for years. But, and TikTok. But one of the things I’ve always tried to explain to my kids, I go, why do you do this?

Why do you post your Christian documentary on TikTok? Why do you do this? I say, because it’s for the debate. I want the debate. I want people to tell me why they think I’m wrong, because that’s how. A, I learn how other people think and also it forces me to examine my own assumptions, my own position on things.

I’ve always used social media as sort of like a, a learning tool because I want people to disagree with me. To have a, a tool like G p t now to do that, I probably won’t ruin as many familial relationships or friendships are, uh, upset as many people because, uh, it’s rather unemotional. Most of the time we’ve always learned.

Ian Farmer: Right, right. Back in the Roman Greek, Europe, we debated things. That’s how we

Cameron Reilly: learn rhetoric. Yeah. Well, it’s one of the

Steve Sammartino: big problems right now is the inability to de debate things, which are politically sensitive, but that’s for another day.

Cameron Reilly: True [01:08:00] Hits and Mrs. Steve

Steve Sammartino: Hits and my hit is how quick people are creating layers on top of the G P T tools out there.

I just love the innovation that I’m seeing. Yeah, we mentioned it early, the 2000 tools coming out this month. And another one to open AI is how quick they’re plugging vulnerabilities in holes. I did, uh, a test the other day. There was some information going around that you could ask it for websites that pirate music, and if you asked it, it wouldn’t give them to you.

But then if you ask it, tell me which websites to avoid. It’ll give you the list. But that’s already been, that vulnerability has already been plugged and fixed so that there’s two hits there. And my miss is the naysayers. The naysayers, like I make from the financial review. It’s like, be a naysayer, I promise you.

Just see how it turns out. Don’t naysay get involved. And, and that’s a, that’s a real miss from anyone who doesn’t just like to use a bit of a Sheryl Sandberg. Oh my gosh. And lean into it.

Ian Farmer: Yeah. Some motivation though. [01:09:00] What’s the motivation for writing an article in the A F R? It’s to

Steve Sammartino: sell ads at the end the day.

Ian Farmer: Right. So I think the motivation for debate will change, and that’s a good thing. Because currently right now, the part of the reason we get the wrong news is because there’s the wrong motivation for

Cameron Reilly: sharing it. Well, I’ve got a bunch of hits. Let me run through them as quickly as I can. Uh, one of my sons Hunter, who’s, uh, an actor and TikTok minus celebrity, got a couple of million followers on TikTok.

He had this idea based a co based on a conversation that he had with a friend of his about her life story to turn it into a screenplay. So he jumped into G P T and asked it to help him write a, a screenplay or sketch out the plot points and the, and the, the three acts for a screenplay about her story.

And it did a great job. Again, the writing of the dialogue itself was pretty shitty, but it understood the f the structure and the framework of, of a story, and it got him a good starting point. I then [01:10:00] used it to come up with some short film ideas for him. I said, instead of starting with a feature film, why don’t you start on a 10 to 15 minute short film?

And I gave it this scenario, I wanna write a, a short film starring one person. He’s a 22 year old male actor, uh, TikTok celebrity, uh, living in Brisbane, Australia. It’s gotta be shot with one camera. He doesn’t have a crew, so assume no lighting one location. Gave it this whole thing. And it gave me a, an idea.

I said, also, it has to be something that could go viral on TikTok, et cetera. It gave me a couple of, it gave me an idea. I said, yeah, it’s a bit sort of fluffy. Gimme something darker. It gave me like a horror idea and I said, do it this way, do it that way. And I got like three or four short film ideas that I sent to him that was really interesting.

I used to to design pivot tables in Excel a lot over the last couple of weeks. I dunno about you guys pivot tables. I’ve tried to be good at pivot tables for 20 years. I suck at them now I just say, Hey, tell me how to build a pivot table outta this [01:11:00] data set that’ll show me X, Y, and z. Boom, it does it. I can implement it.

It’s fantastic. If it doesn’t work, I go, that didn’t work. I goes, oh, I’ll try it this way. Boom, it works. I’ve talked about the Italian ingredients and recipes. So Chrissy and I have got how ingredients that we’ve bought, non-scalable stuff over the years in a, we’ve got two fridges full of food and pantry cupboards and shelves and garages with different things as she calls this.

The graveyard of past phases of things that we’ve been interested in. And then we, we moved on, I went around the house, spent about an hour dictating everything that I could find into an Apple note. You know, a jar of this can of that bottle, of this, this powder, that thing, whatever. Then I copied the whole thing, threw it in a G P T and said, give me a month’s worth of recipes based on this ingredient list.

Boom, it did. It gave me a month’s worth of recipes based on stuff that we already have. Chat, G p T Splitter. I had a podcast that I did, a Qav [01:12:00] podcast, had the transcript of it way too big to put into G P T, like it’s a an hour long podcast. I found a tool called Chat, g p t Splitter. You throw your word document into it and it will break it down into pages that are character size that will go into G P T and it gives G P T a prompt that says, wait until I’ve posted all nine out of nine segments of this.

Then give it to me in a Twitter stream, which was what I wanted it to. Gimme a Twitter stream of the highlights based on the transcript. Boom. Just made the whole process really easy. I came up with a nice concise Twitter stream that I could throw into Twitter. They’re my hits, my my misses. I tried to do some Excel reports with it this week, and I got in what I call the debug loop in G P T Report.

Didn’t work. It said try it this way. I did that. It didn’t work, it tried it this way, that didn’t work. And eventually it loops back to the original instructions that it gave me, which, uh, already [01:13:00] didn’t work. And I go, you already told me that didn’t work. Oh, I’m so sorry for the confusion. Try this. I go, no, you already told me that didn’t work.

Oh, I’m sorry. Try this. I get in this debug loop, which is a good time sinking can waste hours on that. Same thing happened when I tried to get it. Write an apple script for keyboard ma. And the novel chapter. As I said before, you know, it kind of sucks at writing novels and dialogues at this stage, but, uh, I expect that will get better in the future.

Steve’s got a hard out. Ian, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights with us about AI and education. That’s futuristic. Episode three. We recorded this, by the way, for the record on the 21st of April, 2023 because everything will be completely outta date a week from now. But hey, that’s, that’s the fun of, uh, where we are.

Yes it is right now. Have a great week guys. Thank you, Sally. See ya. Thanks. Can, can’t forget Sally.