Transcript of AE 1231 - The Goss: What Will Australia Look Like in 2063?

G'day, you mob. Pete here. And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news. Whether locally down under here in Australia or non-locally, overseas in other parts of the world. Okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in the Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time.

Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird. And let's get into it.

All right, Dad, What's going on?

Hey, Pete. We're getting old.

Why is that?

Well, you know, the...

Sitting on the couch.

The Intergenerational Study of Australia just got released by the federal government with this study. Yeah, This study of what are we going to look like in 40 years time?

Well, I know what you're going to look like.

A bit skinnier and smellier, I suspect.

Well, I think the smell would have left by then. I'll be a little bit of only just ash floating around in the sea.

So, yeah, that's it. I can't. I don't even know if I'll be around in 70 years. Right. I'll be in my 70s.

I can't.

Sorry. Yeah. 40 years in my 70s.

I can't imagine I'm going to be 106, but.

Yeah, well, I don't think most people are. It's crazy. But my grandparents, mum and dad, mum's parents that are still alive. How old? Nana's 90. Right.

She turns 90 next month.

Yeah. And Grandpa's 93. 94?

93.

93. It must be. I have those moments all the time where I'm like, even now, I'm like, I could get cancer tomorrow. I could get. You have that sense of I could die at any moment now. Like when you're a child. It's kind of like all that crap so far. Like, I don't have to worry about that.

I'm bloody eternal, mate. I'm, you know, immortal. And you get to my age now. And now that I have kids and even seeing other people's kids getting things like cancer and that, you're just like, whoa, that is a massive amount of mortality. Just sort of like smacked in your face and you're like, This is not lasting forever. But I was I always think like, what did that in Grandpa. What is it like to be in your 90s where you're kind of like, well, I think I could be dead tomorrow..

But anyone could be. Your mum and I were talking about this the other day, not specifically with her parents, but you know, people in their 90s as an example of. You don't plan for the future.

Yeah, well, that's it. You don't sit down and go, you know..

Sit down and go French. Yeah. Where where's the next overseas holiday we're going to plan to do? Because firstly, because you get to be incapacitated, it's probably a bit strong, but you get to the point where it's harder to sort of travel and stuff is just much more difficult to do.

And you're also probably not going to go to places where like Indonesia, where again, no offence to any Indonesians, but but you..

.. Go to a developing country where you're much more likely to get a disease.

Yeah.

Because you know..

Or get sick.

Yeah. Well you just get sick when you're there and so on.

I can't imagine. Yeah. That you and grandpa going to Delhi in India or whatever and just walking through the slums or something, it's like, yeah, this is a pretty quick way to end it if you're 90 years old.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Want to die of dysentery, Really?

I know, But yeah, I've had those thoughts where I'm just like, I wonder what like, do they just, you know, Well, I guess I'm still alive this week, so I'll plan for next week, you know, or next month or. And is that liberating? Is it a prison? You know, do you imagine it's just a day by day, kind of just potter around..

You can plan for the short term future. It's not like, oh, I'm just I'm living in a lost world. I got nothing to do. But but there isn't that. Oh, what are we going to do in five years, ten years time? You know, where are we going to invest our finances? You know, all of that sort of stuff is, well, we're just cruising now. Let's just enjoy it.

Yeah, I wonder. It must be just so weird, too, when you get to Grandpa's age in particular. Well, it may even be weirder for Nana. In fact, it's probably weirder for Nana where Grandpa has almost been retired for my entire life.

Yeah.

Like, so, you know, for my entire life, he.. It's been, you know, 30 something years since he's had a job, a proper job. And for Nana, it's probably even longer, right? Because since she started really having kids, I think they went, she went back to work for a little while. While they were small.

They paid off the farm.

Yeah. And then, you know, she just tapped out and was a stay at home, you know, mum effectively. So she probably hasn't worked for 50 plus years. Right. And it just must be such a weird position to be in where..

Work has not been in paid employment.

Yeah. Income, I mean yeah. But yeah. So I have those thoughts all the time where I'm like, Yeah, you just always assume you're going to get to 100 or so, right? When you think of the future, Well, I'm not going to die when I'm 60, right? What about 70? No. And then you're like, Well, there are plenty of 70 year olds that die. So, you know, look at the curve of of, you know, age.

Yeah.

But yeah. So what do you think of things in that, in those sorts of, I don't know, terms. Do you, are you planning for 50 years out, 20 years out, ten years out, five years out?

Five.

A week?

Well, you plan for the rest of your life in the broad sense. Not in a specific sense.

Yeah,

That's because obviously, you know, your mum and I have just been retired now. Well, I've been retired for four years. Her for a year and a half. Two years.

Yeah.

And you sort of plan for your retirement and then when you get there you go. Okay, well what's the next plan? And it's a lot less significant, I think. So. You know, I've been working on this camper van. That was a plan for a while, and now that's nearly finished.

Yeah, I feel like I don't know what most people are like.

Projects, rather than life.

Grandpa. I don't know. Nana's probably like that to some extent. Mum's like it, where you do, you need something to be working on, or working towards or..

Project? Yeah, that's what I look at it and go, There's got to be something to do.

Yeah. So anyway, Intergenerational Report. Six charts that show what Australia could look like in 40 years.

Older, more skilled.

40 years older. Yeah, it was interesting. So I guess number one is an ageing population, right? Australians are living longer and they're having, having fewer children. Even with net migration accounted for, the Government is predicting slower population growth and lower workforce participation due to ageing. This is probably going to be seen everywhere, you know, in the Western world in particular. I think probably places in Asia and maybe Africa might not experience this.

What are they suggesting? In 40 years time Australia's population will be about 40 million.

I assume that's what it's going..

In my life. So my memory, 60 years. Australia's population has tripled.

Yeah.

In 60 years. So they're saying in the next 40 years Australia's population will probably only add about 60% to its current. So it's not even going to double.

Yeah.

So that's a significant slowdown in population growth.

Well, there's so many reasons underneath that, right? But yeah, what does it say here? What does this mean: With older Australians spending more years in good health, it's predicted they'll be- they'll- there will be rising demand for government funded services like aged and disability care. And with fewer children, it's predicted the size of the workforce relative to the dependent population will fall. Yeah, so that's, I guess, Japan's kind of ahead of the curve with that. Way ahead, right? Because they have had very few children per person for a long time.

Yes.

And I think their migration is very, very, very limited. How many people actually migrate there and integrate into the Japanese population. And they live so long. Yeah, that's the other double edged sword. I think Japanese people tend to be healthier and live much longer lives. At least that's the stereotype. You always hear about The oldest person in the world is this little Japanese woman from a tiny island where they're all vegetarians.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, and they all live with ten cats and it just keeps them calm and.. But yeah. What do you think it's going to mean for me, if I get to 70 years old? I guess that would be probably about the time I'm retiring. I imagine the age of retirement is going to push back slightly because the cost of living..

Again, retirement is a difficult one when you're self-employed like you are. That, you could keep working forever, you know. How much time and effort you put into it is different. Whereas if you're working in paid employment and somebody else pays you to do a job, then that's a sort of a much more of a cold cut off. But look, I think there's there's going to be less of that, though. I think there'll be more people working part time into their old age. Because we're just not going to be, we as a country, and individuals therefore, are simply not going to be able to afford a whole lot of things. We have the, the interesting challenge with this, that was the number one thing that came out of that intergenerational report. The consequence of that is that we just have to increase taxes now to pay for people in their retirement in 40 years time. And increasing taxes is a very unpalatable thing to do. Even if every person in Australia agrees that it is the right thing to do. 50% of the population who are more conservative in their politics will say, Oh no, we can't.

We'll just leave it up to the market. We can't increase taxes. That's just the, you know, you're just hammering people, you know, where where it hurts and know, well, you're going to hammer them later when it hurts, when there's no health care, no aged care. No.

Or you'll be hammering..

Disability care..

Hammering the working population at that point later. Right.

But but that working population will be a smaller proportion of the current population. So you're going to hit them even harder to be able to do it. So and that's one of the challenges when you do these sort of long term reports is so what what are the what is a government, not necessarily this government, but what's the next 2 or 3 governments, given that we live on a three year government cycle in federal politics. What are they going to do to respond to this? And I suspect the answer will be nothing. Because it's, anything you do is going, is likely to be unpalatable to a majority of the population. And so you don't want to be the government that comes in and says we're going to plan for 40 years time, so we're going to increase taxes because the opposition are just going to go, well, we're not. And who who's going to get the votes, you know, So.

Do you think? Like, what do you think is going to happen with aged care? Do you think more people are going to go into aged care homes, facilities, or do you think that they would remake how it works and change that?

Well, there has to be there has to be something happen. I don't know what it will look like.

Because aged care for the average person is pretty horrifying, right? Like you don't want to go to aged care.

Well, most people don't, don't see that as a, as the the goal optimal choice.

Yeah.

The optimal end of life choice. Because when you go into aged care, there's no coming back. You know, there might be a few people time. Yeah, it's sort of. Well, here we go. I'm just going to go and sit there for ten years.

And then I'll come out.

Then I'll come out and live by myself again. It's just never going to happen.

Yeah.

And I'm saying it quite flippantly, but it's, you know, it really is the the end of life sentence, not a death sentence, because you could live in aged care for 30 years. But it's the end of your life choices, I suppose.

Yeah. And giving up so many of your freedoms. Right. Because I think you can't really just walk out of..

Well, a lot of them you can, depending on the style of care you're in. If you're in a care where you are incapable of looking after yourself, then you're effectively locked down. You're not going to be allowed. I'm just going to go and walk down the street, go go for a coffee or something. But plenty of aged care places. It's, it is just a place to live that you no longer have to worry about..

Retirement living.

Yeah. Retirement living where there is, you know, low level medical care on on call or available but you're not in a hospital bed being looked after.

Yeah. Okay. Number two was a higher skilled workforce. It's no surprise, right? The ongoing digital and technological transformation is expected to continue to raise incomes and quality of life. It's also expected to increase the demand for specialised skills and to change the nature of work. In particular, employment is anticipated to grow in the service services industries, including things like health care and social assistance, education, blah blah, blah. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. I guess it'll mean that people, in order to get jobs that pay a decent amount of money and you know, there'll be more of those jobs available probably because of, you know, AI taking over all the simple ones or automation. You're going to have to go to university or, you know..

Some form of further education.

Of education. Yeah. And it seems like that's, when you look at the graph, it has like, you know, the graphs got a bunch of different lines for Certificate one and secondary education, then certificate two and three, CERT four, and then associate degree, advanced diploma or diploma and then bachelor's degree or higher. And pretty much the only one that is really skyrocketing is the bachelor's degree or higher. And that's, yeah, going from 20 to 34%. It's almost doubling.

And there's obviously this is modelled and we don't know what. I haven't read the whole report. I presume the report has the, you know, the way the modelling was done described. But I my immediate reaction to that is if you just look now, if their assumption is that people are going to want to get university degrees because I think they're going to get paid more money, that has never stood up because certainly not in my lifetime and, you know, earning more money over your life. And you're a good example. I'm a good example. You know, your mum and I, you know, we were unemployed as such until our late 20s because we were university students all that time. We were earning a bit of money along the way. But you were the same.

Well, I felt totally behind the curve.

You got three degrees.

Yeah.

But until you're..

11 years at university, almost as long as..

Until you were 30 years old..

.. In high school combined.

You weren't working full time. And and so people who went left school at 18 did not go to university. They might have gone to some form of further education, but went out and got a job or an apprenticeship or went into retail and service. You don't need a degree or a qualification to go and work in a cafe or a shop assistant and you end up going into a management stream in in retail as an example. That's a natural thing. They were earning a reasonable amount of money from the age of 18.

I think that's one of those things,

Not as much as most people who who who, when they step out of, say, a university degree, will be earning more money in their first year than somebody who 4 or 5 years before went into. But five years on, that person is going to be earning more money and they've got five years of earning behind them.

Yeah.

So and but you then throw on top of that, trades. Building trades is a good example. Your average electrician and plumber is earning much more than your average person with a degree.

Yeah.

You know, 2 or 3 years out of finishing their qualification..

It's crazy because that's not the norm in most other countries.

It's not. It's not. And you know, realistically, I'm perfectly happy with that. If I go to the bank and want financial advice, I'm perfectly happy to think I can evaluate that and judge it. If I want a plumber to come and fix my toilet. I want somebody who can fix the bloody toilet!

And do it well.

And do it well! Because I can't do it, you know? That's so.

And no amount of really Googling..

And no amount of training..

.. That you would actually become a plumber.

Training, in inverted commas, is going to help me. So I think I think there will be an element of that. And this one was clearly this graph was just clearly related to level of qualification. But that will depend on the type of qualification somebody who goes and does a cert for in childcare is never going to be earning a lot of money. Now that's a disgrace for me. But, but somebody who does a cert for a certificate level four in Electrical engineering. They're not going to get a university degree in engineering, but they're going to become an electrician, is going to be earning quite a lot of money potentially. Or plumbing or carpentry or know.

I remember that there was a guy at school called Rick. I remember a primary school, and he was the year ahead of me and I remember him. I think he left high school in year ten and became a tradie. I'm not sure exactly what if it was an electrician or a builder or a brickie or whatever, but I remember seeing him, I think, when I was like in year 11 or 12. So towards the end of high school and he was already driving around in like a brand new V8, you know, Ford or Holden. And I was just blown away at the fact that he could afford something like that. I think he bought his own house when he was still a teenager, maybe early 20s. And I remember just thinking, what the hell? Like, why are we still at school? Why are we going to uni? This guy's clearly crushing it and making, you know, a decent living and we thought he was a drop kick for leaving school at 16 or whatever in year ten.

One of my favourite stories of those is that I've told you this one before, I suspect is one of the smartest kids I ever taught. I was a high school teacher for ten years. For those who were listening and don't know, one of the smartest kids I ever taught left school after year ten. And when I was talking to her about it and just said, What are you going to do? And she said, I'm going to become a hairdresser. And I looked at her and just went, What? She said. I just like the beauty industry. And. And I bumped into her five years later. She was 21 years old. She owned two hairdressing businesses. Not just the business owned the building that one of them was in and was managing these two businesses. And I went, okay, yeah, It's like, this is a this is clearly a smart kid. And, you know, she went through and did her apprenticeship and everything else. But three years into the business, after finishing her apprenticeship and getting a job, she owned two businesses and including the building that one of them was in. Yeah. And we'll they owned the bank, owned it and allowed her to operate out of it. But.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that's so it just depends on people's motivations and what they want to do. And yeah, obviously this sort of survey, national survey and stuff is, is based on highly generic modelling, but.

Well, and the hardest thing is I think for kids at school, you know, so many of them probably want to leave because they don't like school, but there's probably only such a small fraction of those who are wanting to leave because they are genuinely like, This is a waste of my fucking time.

Yeah, generally.

I could be out there crushing it, doing other stuff.

Your cousin, good example. He became a bricklayer.

Yeah.

And then he's moved into landscape paving and doing that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

You know, I don't have no idea how much he earns, but I'm sure it's a lot more than I earned when I was, you know, certainly when I was 30 years old.

Yeah, Well, and that's it, I guess. But yeah, high school, all that sort of thing. It's sort of for the, the average, right, for the majority in terms of it's built to be able to take care of what the average avatar of you know a child.

Yeah.

In educating them is, and those outliers who could just leave and do a lot better unfortunately you know, quite often just get pushed through the system and get convinced to go to uni.

And the hard thing now is, is that, you know, I grew up in about the changeover period in the 60s and the 70s from, you know, most well when I grew up, it was men who had lifetime jobs. You know, women didn't. But you know, obviously by the time I started working, women were working and stayed working. But, you know, so my parents and grandparents, it was, you know, my father and my grandfathers and things, they went out and got their job and they had this. My father was quite unusual because he was in the military. And then, you know, he worked in. But when he came to Australia the second time, when he after he'd married my mum, he had the same job for the rest of his working career. He worked in insurance, car insurance. Very few people now are going to be going through school thinking, what do I want to do for the rest of my life? What training do I need in school? And immediately after school that is going to set me up to do this job for 40 years.

I'm going to be a scissor put-er it together-er.

Scissor put it together. Yeah, I know. And and so that just that doesn't happen now. Education now is much more around a combination of making you employable in a job that you start off in, but also giving you the skill set to be able to change jobs. And you're much better off learning how to learn than you are learning specific skills and information to do a job.

.. Focussed that so much more heavily at school that like learning how to learn well, learning how to went to a school is..

.. Never going to do that. Yeah.

But just in general, it seems like the school systems are not really set up for teaching kids how to be entrepreneurs.

Yeah, but I was. I was a science teacher and, and I remember writing a long response to the in the 1980s. Late 80s. Yeah. Late night. I was a late 80s, early 90s when the national curriculum was being developed. So in nine different curriculum areas. And I wrote a long response to the science curriculum, one that just said, There's no science in this. There's a whole lot of information in it. There's a whole lot of facts that you're expecting people to know. But it's not science. Science is a process. You need to teach people how to think what the scientific method is about evidence and and understanding, you know, experimentation and those sort of things.

And I actually got a response, a written response, because I actually knew the guy who was the coordinator of the science curriculum development, and he said, Yep, I know, but here's what it is. Nobody, nobody's ever going to care. It's it's you need to know these facts and that's not science. So.

All right. Number three, hotter temperatures. So, yeah,

Well, yeah,

Climate change.

Well, and this is an interesting one because clearly this is not a predictive modelling based on human behaviours. This is just a fact of science, funnily enough.

Well, yeah. What does it say here? The government anticipates hotter temperatures basing its projections on data from the from BOM Bureau of Meteorology under a scenario where global temperatures increase by up to three degrees Celsius by 2100, Australia's national average temp is projected to increase by 1.7 Celsius. I guess that's by 2063. So, yeah, it's interesting. They've got like two heat maps of Australia.

Yeah.

Showing the sort of increase in. Yeah. You would hate to live in regionalist Central Australia or the WA Western Australia.

The consequences, the consequences of that is not just humans putting up with increased temperatures. The consequence is mostly for agriculture.

Well, and people working outside though, right? Like many of those jobs where you're outside hot places.

But yeah, human behaviour, we can we can work our way around that.

Yeah.

But in the case of agriculture, if we increase and there was some modelling done in the background to this thing of if we increase the, the average temperature in the country by two degrees Celsius in that 40 year period, I think there would be they were talking about something like a 20% decrease in productivity, agriculturally. If it goes to four degrees, effectively agriculture stops.

You wonder though, like I mean they make those sorts of predictions, but you wonder. One, how long it would take people to work out ways around that. Because you know, it's not going to happen overnight. It'll be a gradual thing and you should hope.

But we're talking about it happening in 40 years.

Yeah, but you should expect people to have enough time to work out a solution, hopefully a local one, where we work out different ways of irrigation or cooling or whatever it is. But then you also wonder how long does it take for the agriculture? Well, the different types of crops to adapt or the different types of animals that are, you know, to adapt to those hotter temperatures or for us to select for, you know, and that I guess that ties into the first bit finding a solution.

But 40 years is a, that's a pretty rapid change.

Yeah. But you look at things like the chicken, the size change in, in chicken mass. Right. How long it takes for a chicken to grow to to maturity for it to be harvest killed and harvested to be bought as a a chicken at Woollies and the size of the ones that we actually get today. And it's only been I think since like 1960. So the last 60 years the the animals have like tripled in size and that's more than halved that speed.

That's a combination of of selective pressure where where artificially selecting to increase the growth rate and the ultimate size of these animals. But it's also about, you know, what drugs can we provide to to increase that growth. Whereas when we're talking about and mostly look at crops, if we ignore animals, then looking at crops, very difficult to grow wheat and rice in places where the current wheat and rice grain simply won't grow because that's what where we currently grow them is going to look like in 40 years time.

I wonder how much that's related to the temperature affecting growth or if it's just a water related thing, in which case it's probably as long as you have water..

I'm sure the modelling is holistic, it'll be based on water and so on. But but again, with water, it's we need we've had irrigation in Australia for 150 years in our agriculture industry, certainly in south eastern Australia, and we've destroyed a whole lot of land because of salination. So we can't just keep taking water, natural water out of our water sources and dumping it onto farmland.

We need to be able..

.. To desalinate.

Yeah.

We have to desalinate ocean water and put pure water in.

That's the most sensible thing, right?

Of course it is. And that's that technology is available. But it is so expensive.

Yeah. At least currently.

Currently, yeah.

You wonder. It's like I keep thinking of AI and how that only in the last few years has kind of popped up and the way in which we were talking about AI being a threat to humanity or the kinds of impacts it was going to have only five, ten years ago is completely different from how it's actually impacting us currently. Where the real issue is things like ChatGPT, you know, this blind thing that is able to. You know, answer all these questions, but also fabricate essays and do all of these Like you can now write a novel. Spontaneously.

The problem with that is that that's not true AI.

Well, it depends on how you define..

Because it's. I know, I know. But.

It's morphed into- my point, I guess, is that it's morphed into a thing at the moment that is has all of these other repercussions and issues that we didn't see coming.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's that's something that and I can't remember whether I don't think any of these actually talks about the risks of technology and, and how we're going to overcome that. AI is a good example of that. And you know, ChatGPT is a good example of one where people call it AI, but it's not AI. It's just very good crowdsourcing of information. It's not creating information of its own.

The mimicry, yes. And in terms of things like fraud and scams and.

Oh yeah, of course.

That sort of stuff. And then also obviously that it that it undercuts a lot of jobs that otherwise employed people and require people to do a lot of training, you know and whereas now you can just outsource that to this effectively a dumb AI that's not. It's not conscious but it's able to produce these things that took humans a long time.

They did. But, but.

It's positive and negative.

You have to then have the ability to, to judge the quality of the response. And ChatGPT is, you know, this is this is the the scum on the bottom of the barrel of AI, because that one, you still look at it and go, well, it can only be as good as the input that it's got. It's not making any intellectual decisions of its own.

Not yet.

Yet, exactly.

But I guess my point in bringing that up was it's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next 40 years with climate change and the issues that it poses and the solutions that may arise for certain aspects of it, because you're kind of like what are going to be these kind of like hydrogen bomb discoveries where it just changes the world forever. Like if we can work out a cheap way of desalinating ocean water, what does that mean on a worldwide climate temperature increasing kind of..

The the irony or the irony of these things is that most of the solutions are related to the problem. Because the single problem, the one problem that we have in technology is and it doesn't matter what technology we're talking about is energy. We need energy to drive technology. And the problem that we've got ourselves into is that we've been using really bad forms of energy for technology for 250 years. And so we've got into this climate problem because of that. Now we need new technology to get out of it and what are we going to replace it with? And I was having this, you know, argument would be a. It would be probably an exaggeration, but with your grandmother the other day where she just said we should all just go nuclear, and I said, Well, what are you going to do with the waste? You can bury it in your backyard. I don't want anything to do with it. And, you know, and she sort of looked at me and went, What do you mean?

The problem is, Dad, though, she can bury it in her backyard and it's still your problem.

Well, exactly. But I was making a metaphorical point that.

Yeah.

Yeah. And if we have that knee jerk reaction to Yes, we could solve the world's energy problems tomorrow. By going nuclear across the world, it would cost us trillions of dollars. But what's the outcome of that going to be in 50 years time? We have to have a way of handling those..

It should be in the toolbox. It's one of many options, but it's just it's never that simple of just, Oh, we just do one thing.

I know, but it's but it's one of those things where we don't. And I was just using that as an example of we, we need to be able to look further down the track and predict the consequences of making the decisions that we're making, not just make those decisions under the pressure to fix the problem we currently have, because you don't want to make a bigger problem down the track, that is going to be fatal in a sense that you can't get out of it.

It's interesting, like we're getting slightly sidetracked, but I guess to finish up here, it's sort of interesting at how it seems like from my limited understanding of history, the technologies and the things that we are creating are obviously exponentially increasing in their complexity and advancement, but also the time with which you have to be able to assess the dangers and what's going to happen. And everything is becoming a shorter and shorter time frame like when we started, you know, going through the industrial Revolution and burning fossil fuels.

We've had 300 years or 200 years to sort of see the impacts of that and, you know, try and work it out. AI it's going to be like a number of years, maybe decades, to really, maybe a decade, to be able to plan ahead and not completely fuck ourselves. Right?

See, I don't think it's a decade in AI.

Yeah.

I think it's five years.

Exactly. So it's that's one of those interesting things. Are you finishing up like the last bit here- are you sort of pessimistic or optimistic with humans and their ability to overcome things like climate change? Because it seems like. The annoying thing and the frustrating thing with being a human, and looking at other humans, is that we have the ability. It's like being at university or high school and exams. There's always 1 or 2 students that do everything they're meant to do and they go home. They study every night and they they, you know, work consistently throughout the term to be able to pass the exam and get an A+. Right? 100% maybe. But the average person is like, fuck that. I'm going to cram right at the end with with a week or two to go enough. And it seems like and you get through. And that's kind of been the story of my life with things where I've never been able to consistently chip away at, say, a subject and then be like, go into the exam and be like, I didn't even need to cram. I didn't have to do any heavy study and it worked. I did everything ahead of time. I was prepared, boom. Instead I got passed and I often got good marks, or at least okay marks because I crammed.

And I feel like humans are like that with climate change in particular, where- and so I'm optimistic in the sense that I think we'll come up with solutions. But it really has to be that kind of there's no getting away and the problem has to become significantly worse before we're like, okay, now we're going to pull all our resources and do something about it. Because it's like, yeah, telling the kid there's an exam coming at the end of the semester. He's like, Well, I'm not freaking out and going home and studying tonight for it. I'll study when it gets closer and it gets closer and closer and everyone has their own threshold with like, Fuck, it's tomorrow. Okay. Probably should study. Yeah.

See, for me, there are three parts to this answer. I'm optimistic about the science that we will come up with solutions.

Yeah.

But the other two, the social and the political, I'm extremely pessimistic about.

Do you think that's because the systems and how they're set up?

Well, psychosocial. Humans by their, are in this sort of really bizarre space, socio or psychosocially. In that we are a social species we rely on living with and communicating with and cooperating with other people. But we are inherently selfish.

Yeah.

And so.

It's this game theory.

It is. We are constantly gaming everything. And you throw politics on top of that. And you look at what's happening in the United States at the moment as a good example of that.

Trump just handing himself in.

Well, yeah, but and Trump is the is the pointy end of of the the right wing religious Republicanism that has been going on for the last 30 years in the US. And it's just accelerated to the point of complete stupidity. Now where the majority of individuals that are there, I'm sure, do not actually believe the things that they are saying or the things that they are supporting.

Well, they're just wanting to stay in power.

But they want to stay in power and they want to get in power and they keep force feeding rubbish to people. It's the same as the no vote that we're getting in Australia with the with the voice to Parliament, the Indigenous voice to Parliament. There is not one argument that I have seen in the no vote that actually makes any sense. They're all either lies or misdirection, straw man arguments or just opportunistic grandstanding..

.. start from that base of we need to be against the no vote because we're conservative.

Exactly.

How do we justify it?

We justify it by- exactly. And we find a way of justifying it that even individually they know is not true. But you would rather lie than vote yes to something that the opposition that your opposition came up with.

You know, it's easy to pick on conservatives because we're not particularly conservative, but it does happen on either side. It's the same with the Labour.

Yeah, but no..

Not necessarily with the no vote and the yes vote. But in that idea of we're on this side of politics..

I was just using that as an example..

Toe the line with this and we can't be open minded to change our minds.

The broader political, the broader political pessimism that I have is that because we have this effectively binary political situation in most democracies in the world where you have a right wing, conservative and left wing, more socialist views of the world. The selfish side of that is always going to be politicians are always going to choose to get re-elected rather than do the right thing. And and so the short term decisions are never going to be the good ones. They're never going to be the ones that you go, you know. And we started this conversation up. What's the best thing we could do for Australia in 40 years time? Increase taxes. I'll lose the next election if I say that. So I'm not going to say it.

Yeah.

Therein lies the problem. And and so it's the same with climate change. The best thing we can do is to put a whole lot of time and effort and money into doing things. The only way we can get that money is to spend less money on something else. Whatever we spend less money on is going to be unpopular, so we're not going to do it. And so that's where I'm pessimistic. So I don't know whether that answers the question or confuses it even further. But.

And the last point here is slower labour productivity. This is an interesting one. So I didn't really understand it too well because they only give it like a few sentences. But effectively with all of these changes considered, the government has revised down its long term productivity projections. It moved from a 30 year productivity growth rate of 1.5% per year to a 20 year growth rate of 1.2%. And then, yeah, what does this mean? The Australian economy is projected to grow at a slower pace.

Yeah.

Over the next GDP. So gross domestic product is the productivity over all, not individuals.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. I'm like, why would that happen? I guess climate change could be argued for that for people say..

Everything is going to be living, living in Australia is going to cost more money.

Yeah.

And so there is only so much that we can do to make money, but we're going to need to spend more. So our overall productivity.

.. be able to sell heat, heat and light.

Well we do. Yeah, I know.

How do we, how do we monetise sand, you know, or desert. Desert land.

Well, we cook the sand. Yeah.

All right, cool. Well, hopefully it wasn't too much of a rant, a negative podcast or a rant, but I wanted, I like that we covered a lot of these topics. We're using a lot of advanced English, so hopefully the people are interested in listening to this episode.

I think we swore once. Well, you might have.

I did, I swear all the time. So.

So do I. But I didn't this time.

It's one of those things you see a lot of people online, especially influencers in this kind of area. They're just like, avoid it. But I always want to try and just be authentic.

Yeah.

This is how I talk. This is the way that people talk.

But that's your..

.. come across.

Yeah. Your business is enabling people to understand how normal conversation goes in this context.

Yeah.

So if you whitewash that and say, Oh, I'm not going to swear, I'm only going to simplify things so you can understand the concepts, then you're missing the point of the conversation.

Yeah. That there's a pun in there somewhere.

Stop fucking swearing.

All right. See you guys.