The Two Blokes Talking Tech podcast – Episode #741 – Albo AI and Telstra Wash Up

[00:00:00] Trevor Long: But now, you know, I can’t control what camera’s on when I hit record, so sometimes it’s like on you, like a millisecond, and then on me. I’m— look, if I was diligent, I could actually pull the vision and clean it up at the start, but I just don’t care that much.

[00:00:14] Stephen Fenech: All care, no responsibility, eh?

[00:00:16] Trevor Long: I mean, you know, basically, if you’re on YouTube, you’re probably scrolling down to the comments looking for the start time. Thanks. Cheers. We appreciate it.

[00:00:27] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that person.

[00:00:27] Trevor Long: Yes, it’s a woman, isn’t it? Yes. I don’t think we’ve got a name.

[00:00:30] Stephen Fenech: She also contributes to the— she also must watch the EV podcast.

[00:00:35] Trevor Long: Yeah, big fan.

[00:00:35] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, there’s no need for her to tell her when the show starts.

[00:00:38] Trevor Long: The show just starts. Actually, could you jump in the comments there every week and just say 0.00 amazing start? Yeah, something like that.

[00:00:46] Stephen Fenech: Maybe. Yeah, if she’s an EV driver, we’ll get her on.

[00:00:48] Trevor Long: It’s funny because we won’t name names, but It’s a podcast that we were referring to at the end of the private feed, which you can watch now if you want on YouTube. I was sampling one this week on YouTube and—

[00:01:04] Stephen Fenech: One of our ones?

[00:01:04] Trevor Long: No, no, someone we were talking about, another person.

[00:01:07] Stephen Fenech: Right.

[00:01:07] Trevor Long: Okay.

[00:01:08] Stephen Fenech: Their podcast?

[00:01:08] Trevor Long: Yes.

[00:01:09] Stephen Fenech: Yes.

[00:01:10] Trevor Long: And I went, oh, it’s an ad. So I skipped forward. And at the end of me skipping, YouTube went forwarding to a commonly skipped part. And I went, like, that’s the worst thing you could have if you’re entirely reliant on YouTube and sponsorship is just constantly skipping.

[00:01:27] Stephen Fenech: So when they insert the ads?

[00:01:29] Trevor Long: Well, no, no, no, embedded. Like, so YouTube knows that if, like when we do a Netgear ad, if people are skipping forward, YouTube knows that.

[00:01:36] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, right.

[00:01:37] Trevor Long: ‘Cause what happens is the peak, often with, like I’m watching Theo Vaughn or someone and they normally do about 2 and a half minutes worth of ad reads. And so I’ll just like click, click, click, click, click on the mouse to go forward. And you’ll notice the little graph comes up of, you know, peak moments. Yeah, well, it’s not actually a peak funny moment. It’s just so many people have come to this point because it’s the end of the ads. So you can see where the end of the ads are, it’s where the peak of the audience is.

[00:02:00] Stephen Fenech: There’s no ads in this, in this show, is there?

[00:02:02] Trevor Long: On YouTube? No, no, just apart from only ours. Only the ones they show up as ads because people are skipping through them, I assume. Why would you do that?

[00:02:08] Stephen Fenech: Why would you do that?

[00:02:10] Trevor Long: What the hell?

[00:02:11] Stephen Fenech: Support the— what the hell? People who support us.

[00:02:14] Trevor Long: Jeez, that’s outrageous. It’s rude.

[00:02:18] Stephen Fenech: I think, isn’t there the 30-second, is the 30-second, if you’re listening on, well, all of them pretty common, 30-second skip forward, 15-second skip back, is that how you find it?

[00:02:30] Trevor Long: On YouTube, it’s 5 or 10 seconds.

[00:02:32] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, on every podcast app, it’s usually 30 forward, 15 back.

[00:02:36] Trevor Long: Right.

[00:02:36] Stephen Fenech: In case you’ve over—

[00:02:37] Trevor Long: 2 steps forward, 1 step back.

[00:02:38] Stephen Fenech: In case you’ve overstepped.

[00:02:39] Trevor Long: Overcorrected. Yeah. Yeah. I love, you know, a great plug for our great movie sponsors Fetch. If you’re in like 16, 32 times fast forward and you go, play, it goes, you know what, he doesn’t wanna be where I was gonna be. He probably wants to be—

[00:02:54] Stephen Fenech: Goes back a bit.

[00:02:54] Trevor Long: Yeah, it knows to not go all like it’s smart.

[00:02:57] Stephen Fenech: That’s intuitive, we like that.

[00:02:59] Trevor Long: Just simple programming like that is genius.

[00:03:01] Stephen Fenech: Smart.

[00:03:02] Trevor Long: But here the thing is, you know, our sponsors are here. They’re right here. You can’t skip that.

[00:03:07] Stephen Fenech: See them all the time, there you go.

[00:03:08] Trevor Long: Can’t skip that. Maybe, you know what, do you think we should be so overt as to put them here? What are your thoughts?

[00:03:15] Stephen Fenech: Why not? Have we had this? I’ve just had a moment of déjà vu then. Have we discussed this before?

[00:03:20] Trevor Long: I love that you just had déjà vu.

[00:03:22] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:03:23] Trevor Long: I feel like early on—

[00:03:24] Stephen Fenech: Déjà vu all over again.

[00:03:26] Trevor Long: I feel like early on when we switched to the screens and then we was only a couple of weeks before we went to the static instead of the moving.

[00:03:32] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:03:33] Trevor Long: I think we talked about it. Here’s what I think. I don’t think it should be bold. Maybe it should, ’cause you know what I hate? I hate football clubs and the way they do press conferences now in front of 65 sponsors.

[00:03:47] Stephen Fenech: Well, I think it looks tacky. That’s how it works, mate.

[00:03:49] Trevor Long: I know, but I think it looks tacky. Yeah, I think it— and I get it, it means from every angle. Yes, but even if they’ve only got 2, they’re all, you know, diagonally. Like, I’m not—

[00:03:56] Stephen Fenech: you understand? I just think it’s like a checkerboard background with all the ads.

[00:04:00] Trevor Long: I think just a nice, um, probably on this side for me, just a nice little couple of logos here.

[00:04:07] Stephen Fenech: Maybe. And don’t forget, like, you would talk— you only see it in the two-shot. So that’s why I’m saying, yeah, should we put it on the individual shot? How it is is good, mate. You know, that’s the right level, I reckon. Yeah, look, two-shot.

[00:04:20] Trevor Long: But what about the great people?

[00:04:22] Stephen Fenech: Well, that’s up to you, mate. I think you don’t want to be a— you just complained a moment ago about the players talking in front of billboards.

[00:04:30] Trevor Long: Yeah, but I’m saying I wouldn’t do it like this as well. It’s like a nice little Just another.

[00:04:35] Stephen Fenech: So which on your side will be what? Nicky on my side will be Arlo and we swap them around.

[00:04:38] Trevor Long: That is how it works.

[00:04:39] Stephen Fenech: Is that how it goes, mate?

[00:04:42] Trevor Long: That is how it works. Well, it puts the price up of my one, that’s all.

[00:04:49] Stephen Fenech: They might ask for a discount on my one, is that what you’re saying? They might say, oh, we deserve a discount there.

[00:04:54] Trevor Long: You think so? No, I don’t think so, mate. They pay big dollar to be next to your mug. Hey, maybe. You need a smaller logo because you’ve got a bigger head.

[00:05:01] Stephen Fenech: That’s right. Yeah. Big head, big brain.

[00:05:03] Trevor Long: That’s all I’m saying. Oh, is that what you’re saying? Fat brain. Really? Do you think your brain has expanded with your weight? I know mine didn’t.

[00:05:13] Stephen Fenech: Whenever we, like, what do we do? I had to wear a helmet. We did like Amazon.

[00:05:18] Trevor Long: Amazon.

[00:05:19] Stephen Fenech: I don’t know why I need to wear a helmet for that, but anyway.

[00:05:21] Trevor Long: It was crazy, wasn’t it? Yeah, that was OHS gone mad.

[00:05:24] Stephen Fenech: Biggest one you got, please. And they went straight to the end.

[00:05:28] Trevor Long: Right. They just went to the triple XL.

[00:05:31] Stephen Fenech: That’s it.

[00:05:32] Trevor Long: Is that what helmets are measured in? Yeah, they are. When you go go-karting, it’s like small, medium, large, XL.

[00:05:37] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, yeah, XL.

[00:05:38] Trevor Long: Yeah, I think it’s pretty simple. Yeah, that’s the last time I put on a, you know, public helmet was probably go-karting. Oh yeah, remember hairnet? And then the boys wear a hairnet at go-karting too. There’s a new go-karting place open up in Western Sydney. I want to take the boys, but I keep forgetting, and now I’m bloody traveling. Like, the next couple of weeks is pretty, pretty weirdly brutal for us. I’m excited to do some car events with you, Steven. We’ve never done a car event together, have we?

[00:06:00] Stephen Fenech: No, we haven’t. I don’t think we have, have we? No. Oh yeah, we did. BMW in Spa.

[00:06:03] Trevor Long: Oh yeah, but no, I’m talking about a, you know, with a bunch of also, like, and I don’t care if this gets back to them, with a bunch of motoring journos, ’cause it’s not fun. And you know, one of the things I said to them, oh, ’cause, oh my God, we just spent so long planning our week and there’s another event which I didn’t tell you about on Wednesday the August the 5th.

[00:06:23] Stephen Fenech: Oh, on Wednesday?

[00:06:24] Trevor Long: Yeah. It’s a car that we talked about in the EV show. The new Geely.

[00:06:30] Stephen Fenech: Geely. I was at a lot. I think I got invited to that.

[00:06:34] Trevor Long: That’s— yeah, they invited me and I said, can I bring Steven?

[00:06:37] Stephen Fenech: I think I got invited anyway.

[00:06:39] Trevor Long: Yeah, trust me, you got invited because I told them to invite you. Yes, but it’s on a Wednesday and I thought, oh, we’ll do it on the— on the— we’ll record on the Thursday. But now we’re going to Perth.

[00:06:48] Stephen Fenech: Oh boy.

[00:06:49] Trevor Long: We might not be able to do that. I think, I think that might be a problem.

[00:06:51] Stephen Fenech: Live Diaries with Trevor and Steven.

[00:06:53] Trevor Long: But anyway, you go to a motoring event and it’s a bunch of motoring journos and Often you have to share a car. Like there’s not one car for everyone.

[00:07:01] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:07:01] Trevor Long: And look, on a long drive—

[00:07:03] Stephen Fenech: Will you and I be partnered up then?

[00:07:05] Trevor Long: Mate, yes.

[00:07:06] Stephen Fenech: Okay.

[00:07:06] Trevor Long: That’s a requirement of you coming. Is you cannot— You cannot abandon me. Okay. Because if you leave me with a motoring journo, there’s two things that go wrong with a motoring journo. One, there’s someone who I don’t have anything in common with. So you’ve got— it’s just quiet time driving. Two, you get a bloke who thinks he’s Ayrton Senna. And so you’re driving through, you normally like Byron Bay to the Gold Coast, it’s gonna be hinterland driving, right? I don’t wanna be driving around a mountain, you know, twists and turns with some bloke who thinks he’s God’s gift to drivers. And I can tell you right now, mate, that’s not me. So when we’re driving, I’ll be driving like my kids are in the car, which can be a bit frightening.

[00:07:39] Stephen Fenech: Fair call.

[00:07:39] Trevor Long: But if I’m driving, you’ll be safe. Know what I’m saying?

[00:07:42] Stephen Fenech: I agree.

[00:07:43] Trevor Long: I know you will. So we’re doing a BMW and a Mercedes event in one week.

[00:07:45] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I know, crazy. The German car companies have got it.

[00:07:48] Trevor Long: The Germans!

[00:07:49] Stephen Fenech: The Germans have got it.

[00:07:50] Trevor Long: Can we say that?

[00:07:51] Stephen Fenech: You just did. So there you go. You didn’t have to ask, you just did it.

[00:07:56] Trevor Long: What I’m asking is, should I be editing that? No, I don’t think so. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?

[00:08:00] Stephen Fenech: They’re Germans.

[00:08:00] Trevor Long: They’re Germans. They’re Germans.

[00:08:03] Stephen Fenech: I drive a German car. I know, but in fact, the car we’re going to see, I’ve already bought it.

[00:08:08] Trevor Long: That’s the best part of that. We’re going to the launch of a car you’ve already bought.

[00:08:11] Stephen Fenech: Car I’ve already put my money down for.

[00:08:12] Trevor Long: I hopefully will get a dollar for every time Steven tells people that that’s happened.

[00:08:17] Stephen Fenech: Mum’s the word, mate.

[00:08:17] Trevor Long: What are you talking about?

[00:08:18] Stephen Fenech: Mum’s the word.

[00:08:19] Trevor Long: As if you— when you meet Gerry from Mercedes, you’re gonna go, “Mate, I’ve already ordered this car.” Well, he found that out on email already, so I’m not going to remind him.

[00:08:26] Stephen Fenech: He already knows.

[00:08:28] Trevor Long: What’s that strategy?

[00:08:29] Stephen Fenech: He knows already. Why would I have to remind him of something I’ve already told him?

[00:08:35] Trevor Long: It’s a trait.

[00:08:36] Stephen Fenech: Well, no, no, it’s not. I’m a— mate, I’m a— I’ll just sit in the background. No problem. No problem.

[00:08:44] Trevor Long: All right. I’m excited to drive your new car.

[00:08:46] Stephen Fenech: There you go.

[00:08:47] Trevor Long: She should have done a deal where we get one of the press cars. Just you own it. Yeah. You steal it, you drive it, you own it.

[00:08:54] Stephen Fenech: Well, I think I’m hoping by then—

[00:08:56] Trevor Long: Have you not got tracking on it? Yeah.

[00:08:58] Stephen Fenech: No. Remember I shared it. Remember I took my EQE in for some work. There was a 200 there and I’ve ordered the 350+. Of course. And I think, I think, yeah.

[00:09:09] Trevor Long: And by the way, that sounds like he’s gone mad, but that’s so much cheaper than the car he’s already got.

[00:09:13] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, it is. It is. But Yeah, they’re not in the country yet. Right. The first 200 orders are just arriving. That’s the one I showed you. Right. And so I’m hoping they’ll have all of them up at this event. Surely they’ll have them all.

[00:09:25] Trevor Long: I would think they would have the variants. Yes.

[00:09:27] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, you’d think so.

[00:09:28] Trevor Long: Yeah. And that’s a Gold Coast to Gold Coast. So I think it would just be hinterland driving again. You go up into the hinterland, you do some driving, they put on a fancy spread and off you go.

[00:09:36] Stephen Fenech: Boom.

[00:09:37] Trevor Long: All right, well, it’s been wild. Let’s do this.

[00:09:42] Stephen Fenech: Welcome to Two Blokes Talking Tech.

[00:09:44] Trevor Long: Not a bad price.

[00:09:45] Stephen Fenech: With Trevor Long from eftm.com. Really handy device. And Stephen Fenech from techguide.com.au.

[00:09:53] Trevor Long: Nothing more official than the little notebook that could. Okay, it is nearly finished. Officially 741. That’s 740. Now I know what episode it is, folks. It’s not up here. It’s not up here. It’s down here.

[00:10:05] Stephen Fenech: So we’ve got still a few pages.

[00:10:07] Trevor Long: Heaps.

[00:10:07] Stephen Fenech: I’ve still got, you know, got like another 4 of them in the drawer.

[00:10:10] Trevor Long: Also, they were old CES pads. And I’m sorry not to get directly into tech here, but when you were at like News Limited, was the stationery room/cupboard like a locked, held?

[00:10:19] Stephen Fenech: No, you can go grab a pad, pen, whatever you want.

[00:10:22] Trevor Long: See, when I worked at Deloitte Touche Tomatsu, the accounting firm in the mailroom in 1995, you know, like stationery was at a premium. I remember nicking a bit and sending it to a friend at uni and thinking I’d just, had the hall, right?

[00:10:35] Stephen Fenech: I remember you said—

[00:10:36] Trevor Long: But the reason I ask is because at Channel 9, there’s just the cupboard’s just open and I was just going through and I went, oh, there’s little pads. They’re a bit wider than this though, so I didn’t know they’d meet our mark.

[00:10:44] Stephen Fenech: Well, these are the ones from CES.

[00:10:45] Trevor Long: CES.

[00:10:46] Stephen Fenech: They don’t do them anymore. So I, over the years, I’ve just grabbed heaps of them. They’ll last me forever.

[00:10:51] Trevor Long: They don’t do this anymore?

[00:10:52] Stephen Fenech: No. No pads at CES at all. They have little ones, this big, little tiny ones.

[00:10:56] Trevor Long: Oh, that’s no good.

[00:10:56] Stephen Fenech: No good. No good. That’s—

[00:10:58] Trevor Long: Oh, speaking of— Yeah. Sky News is replaying last night’s Paul Murray Live.

[00:11:04] Stephen Fenech: Oh, there you go.

[00:11:04] Trevor Long: I’m like, what’s going on? Anyway, today is episode 741. Thanks to the great people at Netgear and Arlo. They support this show. They don’t ask for logos behind us here, but we may give it to them. You never know. That’s just part of the package.

[00:11:17] Stephen Fenech: Yep.

[00:11:18] Trevor Long: And we just ask that you support them when you are shopping for new security cameras. Give Arlo a holler. Have a look.

[00:11:23] Stephen Fenech: Have a look at the box.

[00:11:24] Trevor Long: Have a look at the reviews online. And when you’re thinking about Wi-Fi for your home or small business, but certainly your home, check out Nicky’s range of Orbi products and Nighthawk products as well.

[00:11:34] Stephen Fenech: Today, Wednesday is the day of recording.

[00:11:36] Trevor Long: Thursday, day of release. It’s Albo AI day.

[00:11:38] Stephen Fenech: Yep.

[00:11:39] Trevor Long: Now, Albo AI, would you sign up?

[00:11:42] Stephen Fenech: Uh, no. Oh, well, you know what, or we’ve just— well, today was the day where he actually gave a speech at the University of Sydney, uh, all about AI in Australia’s best interest.

[00:11:53] Trevor Long: This was super well hyped up. Like, I did Sky News this morning, they were like, what is this gonna happen? I’m like, I don’t know. It’s like, what could possibly— my first thought was, honestly, I don’t know what they could announce. So I’ll be honest straight off the bat, and it’s been announced literally minutes, hours ago. So we’ve been recording all morning. We haven’t had a lot of time to digest this. Yeah, but I am initially impressed.

[00:12:15] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Now they’ve hit the right notes here because I think the concern even before Albo gave his speech today was all about protection of copyright, copyright and also to just jobs and how AI could potentially replace a lot of jobs.

[00:12:33] Trevor Long: And then when you think about people people’s hatred of AI, it often comes— sorry, the camera has been on me the whole time.

[00:12:38] Stephen Fenech: I didn’t say— yeah, it has.

[00:12:39] Trevor Long: My apologies. Um, the people’s hatred of AI often is because, oh, it’s big buildings that use a lot of water and use a lot of power. So the first thing I want to talk about is just that they’ve come up with data center location, energy, and water obligations. Yeah. So basically, as part of the new standards, the big data centers will face legal requirements to underwrite their own power supply, pay the full cost of their grid connections. Um, that means that, you know, the local council and the energy companies aren’t then passing those costs on. And become net generators of energy rather than net users, building new renewable generation and firming capacity. They’ll also have to minimize water use and pay for additional water infrastructure they require given the climate. Now, yeah, this reminds me of Apple’s announcement like last year, I think it was. Lisa, hmm, their head of environment was here. I know, yeah, I’m forgetting her last name. Anyway, they you know, big farms and solar farms and literal farms, macadamia nut farms. And it’s, it’s not often them building them. It’s them essentially contracting to buy the electricity so that they can account for it. And this doesn’t mean that a data center is going to be built next to you as well as a windmill, right? Yeah, that’s— that doesn’t— what it means, what it means is if a company like Microsoft says we’re going to build this big data center, it needs 25 gigawatts of electricity per day. They need to invest in either building a solar farm or buying the energy So new energy for the grid.

[00:14:02] Stephen Fenech: You’re not talking about on-site of the data centre?

[00:14:05] Trevor Long: Obviously they’ll throw solar panels on the roof, but that is not going to power those.

[00:14:08] Stephen Fenech: Minimising water usage, that’ll be on-site though.

[00:14:10] Trevor Long: But well, minimising is about— that’s what that says is data centres can be more efficient than they are. So they’re saying if you’re going to build one here, it needs to be one of your best ones. Yeah, it needs to have efficiency in mind. And they’re just saying make sure that if you need Sydney Water, in the case of Sydney, to connect new pipes and infrastructure, you’re paying for all that.

[00:14:29] Stephen Fenech: For those who don’t understand, you need water to cool things down. So there’s a lot of servers and things in there that are, again, processors that are running hot. So you need to keep them cool. But this also, I remember we were in the States when, when Donald Trump did his State of the Union address back in February, remember, for the, the Samsung launch back then, the S launch. And he said that all these data centers, the tech companies have to create their own energy to—

[00:14:58] Trevor Long: which is why Meta is building nuclear power plants.

[00:15:01] Stephen Fenech: Well, that’s what I was going to say too. So all your Amazons and Microsofts and Googles, they’re all building nuclear power plants to run their data centers. Now, I don’t think Albo’s gonna let the, ’cause nuclear energy in Australia is at this point illegal. Investing in nuclear energy is illegal. Yeah, that’s right.

[00:15:20] Trevor Long: We need that to change.

[00:15:21] Stephen Fenech: So if they’re not gonna, will they change that for that? Will they, imagine if Microsoft said, well, hey Albo, we’ve just, they made a decent investment, right? How about this? We’re gonna build this massive data center. Can we build a nuclear power plant out here to power it? And help generate power for the community. What do you think his answer to that will be?

[00:15:41] Trevor Long: His answer is going to be no, we don’t support it. But if he goes, if Microsoft go to Angus Taylor and say, listen, just so you know, if you go to the next election with nuclear again, you can count on one of your data, one of your nuclear power stations being funded. I can imagine that conversation’s already, already being framed because again, we don’t, we can get political on this show. I’m happy to, I don’t care. But you know, for me, nuclear is a no-brainer.

[00:16:05] Stephen Fenech: Me too. And they just announced a deal. They’re selling like $1.3 billion worth of uranium to India. What’s his name? The Indian Prime Minister Modi was in Australia last week. Yeah. And yeah, no problem. We’ll sell coal to you. We’ll sell uranium, but we won’t use it ourselves.

[00:16:24] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:16:24] Stephen Fenech: Let you create the pollution over your way.

[00:16:26] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:16:27] Stephen Fenech: Or take the risk. We’ll just take the money.

[00:16:30] Trevor Long: So the concept here is very similar to the US and basically it And I’m a big fan of this concept of— and by the way, there’s an Office of AI being created, right? So that means that all the AI decisions will come through the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which is the department it’s in. It doesn’t mean that there’s just one room. It means that there’ll be a bunch of people. They didn’t talk about how much funding that would get or anything like that, because that’s important.

[00:16:51] Stephen Fenech: I said this to you before the show. I reckon this will eventually become someone’s portfolio, a ministry. Yeah, there’ll be a defense minister, there’ll be the communication minister, and there’ll be an AI minister. Whether you fold that into the communication portfolio, this will be a tentpole ministry for the future governments.

[00:17:10] Trevor Long: I’m disappointed that Ed Husic seems to be on the outer of the government front benches because he’d make a great minister for AI. He’s a bloke that understands innovation. He understands the—

[00:17:19] Stephen Fenech: That’s what you want, eh? Yeah. Somebody who knows what they’re doing.

[00:17:22] Trevor Long: Yes.

[00:17:22] Stephen Fenech: What they’re talking about.

[00:17:23] Trevor Long: That’s what Australia needs is someone who’s, you know, forward-thinking enough to understand the problem, but also, you know, smart enough to understand that it’s not as easy as just saying— See, this was my problem problem this morning. I was worried they were just going to say we want to legislate that this happens and that happens and this doesn’t happen. I’ll tell you what I’m disappointed about before we get on to copyright. I’m disappointed they haven’t really— or maybe there’s deep devil in the detail, but I would have liked to have seen some sort of talk about sovereignty. So essentially ensuring that any, um, company that invests in AI data centers here and gets any governmental support of any sort, um, is able to create sovereignty for Australians. So for example, I use Anthropic, I use Claude, I use OpenAI, ChatGPT. I would frankly, I would pay another $5 a month if I could choose Australia and local, you know, like I don’t want anything that I do here to go offshore.

[00:18:11] Stephen Fenech: Okay, that’d be great. So you’re saying the data that’s used to generate your query and the what it learns from yours stays in the country?

[00:18:18] Trevor Long: Stays here, right? And also, I don’t think they’d ever agree to that, mate. I think they would because I think the government also needs that facility, right? Department of Defence, Department of Home Affairs, all these departments need to be able to use AI. Like if we’re going to have an Office of AI, we need to accept that it is powerful and useful. Okay, of course. So if it’s powerful and useful, we should ensure that the Department of Defense can do a deal with Microsoft to say, yeah, we want to have a slice of your data center AI knowledge for sovereign use only. And maybe that does already exist, maybe I don’t know that. Yeah, you know, and the other thing, there’s a little, little point in there about jobs. It’s— they talk about having to ensure that the data centers create more jobs than just in the construction.

[00:18:59] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:18:59] Trevor Long: ‘Cause there’s no receptionist at a data center.

[00:19:01] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I understand. Yeah, no, well, I think that’s critical too. I think sort of ethical use of AI should include, you know, it not replacing jobs willy-nilly, you know, sway the jobs, thousands of people out of work because of someone’s got a new AI trick up their sleeve. But you gotta realize there’s an economy they’ve gotta look after here. And it’s AI, we wanna ensure that we all benefit, not the companies aren’t just coming here to get rich off us. Which probably leads us to the next point about the copyright.

[00:19:33] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:19:34] Stephen Fenech: And how that’s a serious, that’s a serious argument, especially if you work in the arts, you’re a creative person, you’re a musician or filmmaker or whatever you happen to be. A lot of people don’t realize that whenever— yeah, it’s a laugh, you have a giggle creating a song using AI, but that AI model has scraped, has listened to every song ever written. Yeah. Including Aussie artists and watched every movie ever made and then comes up with a result for you. And so who deserves compensation for that?

[00:20:03] Trevor Long: And in his speech today, he says new laws will explicitly guarantee Australian writers, musicians, artists, and journalists retain ownership and control of their work, including control over pricing when it comes to AI training.

[00:20:13] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:20:13] Trevor Long: Companies won’t be able to use Australian books, music, art, or news to train AI without the creator’s consent. Right.

[00:20:18] Stephen Fenech: So with consent, there would come what, some sort of compensation?

[00:20:21] Trevor Long: Well, you would think so, right?

[00:20:22] Stephen Fenech: How do you—

[00:20:23] Trevor Long: how do you— kind of comes under the news bargaining laws with the search engines as well. Like, if you want to use it, you have to pay for it, right?

[00:20:28] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, fair enough.

[00:20:29] Trevor Long: But the thing is How do you prove it? Like, Albanese called anything short of that theft and noted no country had yet solved this problem, positioning Australia as trying to lead on it, right?

[00:20:42] Stephen Fenech: Could it be?

[00:20:42] Trevor Long: Yeah, but how do you solve that problem? How do you know that, you know, Delta Goodrem’s latest album hasn’t already been ingested by Anthropic? How the hell do you know?

[00:20:50] Stephen Fenech: Do you reckon it should be up to the artist, like, to say, I don’t want my music included, to say, look, don’t touch mine? And so yes, I think, I think go to school on my music by default.

[00:21:00] Trevor Long: Yeah, Australian copyright laws and these new legislations will essentially say that by default you can’t use it, right? But you can opt in if you want to, if you want to have a call with Anthropic.

[00:21:10] Stephen Fenech: And so would it be like a Spotify type deal where they get a couple of cents if they, if their music is used in the—

[00:21:16] Trevor Long: but see, that’s a problem with the Spotify. It’s like Spotify, you probably looks at a million people listen, you get, you get 50 bucks. But if it’s used once ingested into an AI and trained, how do you have ongoing compensation for that?

[00:21:28] Stephen Fenech: You know, it opens up a whole can of worms in terms of the sort of the creative arts and creativity in general. I should, like, yeah, I see things in my feed about let AI write a book for you and create your subject and boom, it’ll pump a book out for you. And you know, you can even, there’s, you can make music with AI. So I think Seth Rogen said it the best. He said something along the lines that if you use AI to write or make music, you’re not really the writer or musician. So should it be that creative endeavors with AI should be off limits? Should it be illegal to create things using AI like that?

[00:22:11] Trevor Long: I think that horse is bolted. Because how do you put that back in the—

[00:22:15] Stephen Fenech: that would then protect the rights of the artist.

[00:22:17] Trevor Long: That genie can’t go back in the bottle. Okay. Yeah, because it’s—

[00:22:20] Stephen Fenech: it’s—

[00:22:20] Trevor Long: so I think, I think what you raise a great point. Should it happen?

[00:22:23] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:22:24] Trevor Long: Or more importantly, how do you reverse it? But secondly, how do you know? Yeah. So my point is, if you go to Suno, which is probably one of the best known music generation things, and you go, I want you to create a fun song about a couple of blokes on a road trip to look at stargazing in the bush and do a podcast while they’re there, right? Okay. In the style of country with a female voice. Well, that’s what you can do. Boom.

[00:22:46] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:22:47] Trevor Long: How do we know? How do we prove what was used to train that model?

[00:22:52] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I know. It’s an honor system, innit? Yeah. You don’t know.

[00:22:55] Trevor Long: And how does it ever change from being an honor system?

[00:22:56] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, you don’t know. Just like now. Although now if you make a query with Google and say someone’s asked, oh, what are the best TVs to buy? And they scrape your site and my site, we get credit though.

[00:23:07] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:23:07] Stephen Fenech: So we still get that little credit. And that, even though we don’t get the click, that credit actually is very, it’s a big deal. That’s because we’re considered to be part of that, the best information online to supply that answer. So I don’t know, if they can do it that way with queries of AI, can’t they then say, well, we created a country song and we used well-known country artists and here’s their money? Or are they gonna look at every single country song? And like you said, how do you know? How are they gonna, I mean, police that?

[00:23:43] Trevor Long: So if you go to Suno and say, I want a country song in the style of a specific famous artist, it’ll say, I can’t do that. It’ll say outright, I can’t do that. Right. Because they don’t want to look like they’re copying. But if they allow you to have that query in that style, do they then give money to the artist? But that artist probably won’t agree, because she just wants the music knowledge to be paid for, not to have her style imitated. Right. So what artists are going to want is a check for just, you know, the knowledge. But I think the challenge is the horse is bolted. It’s already been trained.

[00:24:14] Stephen Fenech: Like, shouldn’t they? Like, if you’re, say you’re a global pop megastar who’s a billionaire and tours for billions of dollars. Should it be that each artist, depending on their popularity, is compensated accordingly? So say, you know, you sell 100 million albums a year, you get this much. If you sell this many albums, you get this much, just like a retainer so they can— so they can go to school on their music. Would that be— Google could afford that. All these big tech companies can afford that. And are they not making money? By doing that. So they’re making money themselves.

[00:24:46] Trevor Long: What’s fascinating is there is already some weird voluntary ethics going on here because I was using Claude. I use Claude primarily, right? And I’ve been ad nauseam listening to a well-known country song about hitchhiking down the coast of America.

[00:25:05] Stephen Fenech: I didn’t know you were a country guy, mate. You like country music?

[00:25:07] Trevor Long: Yeah, I don’t mind it. Anyway, so it’s a good song, but I listen to it and sing it in the car and I’m learning words and places, right? All these places. And I had in my head, I went, geez, where— I’d like to see a map of America and understand where this journey is, right? So I said to AI, I said to Claude, hey, um, with this song, I want to understand the journey that he took. So using the lyrics, can you show me a map, right? And it went, I can’t do that when I can’t use the lyrics. I I’m not allowed, all right, basically. So I just went to Google, found the lyrics, copy-pasted them into Claude and said, using these lyrics, can you do this? So bypassed it, right?

[00:25:43] Stephen Fenech: So it didn’t have to— oh really?

[00:25:45] Trevor Long: Well, it wouldn’t let me do it.

[00:25:47] Stephen Fenech: Interesting.

[00:25:48] Trevor Long: Um, I can probably find exactly what it said to me because, um, I asked it to retrieve the lyrics. It said it couldn’t reproduce song lyrics, then clarified something. And I had the name of the song wrong or the artist wrong. And then I asked again to see the lyrics. It said it couldn’t reproduce the lyrics, that song lyrics are copyrighted regardless of who’s performing them, and that applies whether it’s original or a cover.

[00:26:12] Stephen Fenech: Yet you can Google the lyrics.

[00:26:13] Trevor Long: And then I, then I wrote, okay, read these lyrics and generate an infographic style representation of the journey. So hey, I just pasted them in.

[00:26:20] Stephen Fenech: So it’s got a copyright issue if you ask for it, but you can go on to Google and find them in 2 seconds and paste them in and do exactly the same query. Oh yeah, that’s the, the world’s easiest fence to get around.

[00:26:30] Trevor Long: Sure, but But it’s at least a form of copyright respect as shown by Claude, no?

[00:26:38] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:26:40] Trevor Long: And I got my map, so, you know.

[00:26:42] Stephen Fenech: And?

[00:26:43] Trevor Long: It didn’t quite make sense.

[00:26:45] Stephen Fenech: It’s a bit, uh, going out of the way, was it?

[00:26:48] Trevor Long: Yeah, so it’s a map.

[00:26:49] Stephen Fenech: Okay.

[00:26:49] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:26:50] Stephen Fenech: Oh, they were the stops.

[00:26:51] Trevor Long: I thought it was—

[00:26:52] Stephen Fenech: Mate, that’s— yeah, how much time have you got on your hands to be doing that sort of thing, mate?

[00:26:56] Trevor Long: Dude, that was 5 minutes.

[00:26:57] Stephen Fenech: Oh, okay.

[00:26:58] Trevor Long: Claude, I didn’t make a map, Claude did.

[00:27:00] Stephen Fenech: I wonder what journey this bloke took on.

[00:27:02] Trevor Long: Have you never listened to a song about a journey and wondered physically where it was?

[00:27:06] Stephen Fenech: Not that many times, no.

[00:27:08] Trevor Long: Oh mate, listen to that song sometime.

[00:27:10] Stephen Fenech: Well, just, I think they should be giving us a clip of the ticket. We’ve mentioned it 20 times already.

[00:27:15] Trevor Long: Mate, that’s gonna rock it to the top of the Spotify charts. Yeah, well. But yeah, so I mean, look, I think the copyright thing, so there’s definitely, see what I mean? There’s some respect for it.

[00:27:25] Stephen Fenech: Yes, of course.

[00:27:26] Trevor Long: But yeah, I assume ChatGPT doesn’t have that same respect.

[00:27:30] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but I think so. The idea of this whole thing, this approach from Albanese and future governments, let’s face it, is that this is an opportunity for Australia. Yeah. AI and investments in our economy. There’s an opportunity here. They’re just going to make sure that they keep ahead of the game because politics has famously been way behind the improvement in technology in the past.

[00:27:56] Trevor Long: Of course.

[00:27:57] Stephen Fenech: So this is at least at least a sign that they’re trying to keep up with developments.

[00:28:01] Trevor Long: And we are certainly behind. Like, this is—

[00:28:03] Stephen Fenech: Oh yeah. This is so many things that—

[00:28:06] Trevor Long: But for a government, this is actually pretty snappy.

[00:28:08] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, it’s not too bad. Although, how do we compare? Like, does the US have something like this or?

[00:28:12] Trevor Long: No, I don’t. I believe this is— I wouldn’t say it’s world-leading ’cause I understand that the UK has something, but the idea of an Office of AI is, Pretty strong. I believe the UK version got a billion dollars in funding.

[00:28:29] Stephen Fenech: They did need it. AI is such a big thing and will only get bigger. They needed to have this kind of formal setup.

[00:28:36] Trevor Long: I’m going to ask ChatGPT about the same song.

[00:28:40] Stephen Fenech: I wonder if it’ll say, yeah, here are the lyrics right here. Different copyright laws, you think?

[00:28:48] Trevor Long: You could talk, but that’s fine. Okay. You’re meant to fill the dead air of me typing.

[00:28:54] Stephen Fenech: Sure.

[00:28:54] Trevor Long: I’m just curious because I’ve asked basically the same thing. I think it will just reject you. No, I think, I feel like Claude has more respect to the boundaries.

[00:29:08] Stephen Fenech: Okay. And ChatGPT is still thinking.

[00:29:11] Trevor Long: So interpreting the song’s meaning. So I think it’s working.

[00:29:14] Stephen Fenech: Okay. Or maybe it’s going to look at the lyrics but not reproduce them with your answer.

[00:29:19] Trevor Long: Oh, now that’s an interesting point. Maybe I could have been more explicit.

[00:29:23] Stephen Fenech: It’ll go off and read the lyrics and then give you the answer.

[00:29:25] Trevor Long: Because I did, I did say, can you retrieve the lyrics, thinking, can you show them to me?

[00:29:30] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:29:31] Trevor Long: And maybe I misworded it and didn’t need to say that.

[00:29:34] Stephen Fenech: Like, full transparency here, when I, when I set up the movie podcast every week, yeah, I’ve got a few AI models and I ask them, give me the scene, scene details of these certain movies just so I can understand the structure. So I’ve got the structure on paper.

[00:29:48] Trevor Long: Okay, hey, Claude is so much faster. ChatGPT is still thinking, but Claude has already come back with— because I’ve asked a fresh question, what would you say the song is about? Yeah, and it’s come back with a song about a hitchhiker traveling south.

[00:29:58] Stephen Fenech: So it went off and read the lyrics. Yeah, probably heard the song.

[00:30:01] Trevor Long: Yeah, so if I— I think if I asked that same question about retrieving the lyrics, maybe ChatGPT would have that problem. That’s right, that just goes to the point of, yeah, you know, how you work with the copyright.

[00:30:18] Stephen Fenech: That’s right. So reading it and reproducing it are two different things.

[00:30:21] Trevor Long: Yes.

[00:30:22] Stephen Fenech: So asking it about if you know it about it, correct, tell me the answer.

[00:30:24] Trevor Long: Yeah, there’s a big difference.

[00:30:25] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Okay. So that’s, that’s intelligent.

[00:30:27] Trevor Long: I don’t, look, this stuff’s not going to affect anyone, but I would like to think that Australians, I mean, I’d like to think that Australians would use AI that’s based here, you know, broadly is the concept. But I wonder whether You know, you think Australian made, it does well, but people buy on price. They don’t really buy on Australian made, do they?

[00:30:45] Stephen Fenech: How do you, you know, the internet’s pretty decentralised and it’s everywhere.

[00:30:48] Trevor Long: To be clear, ChatGPT has come back with the same thing. I can’t provide the lyrics, but I can summarise the song. Ah, there you go. So that’s, there you go.

[00:30:57] Stephen Fenech: You do have ethics.

[00:30:57] Trevor Long: By the way, just as a pitch, both AIs summarised the song as being about a restless, broke musician hitching home to the woman he loves. Oh, there you go.

[00:31:04] Stephen Fenech: Is that what it’s about? Is that it? Would you agree with that?

[00:31:06] Trevor Long: It’s not set in one place. Follows an imagined journey through the eastern United States, through Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina.

[00:31:14] Stephen Fenech: Can you give us a few bars, mate?

[00:31:16] Trevor Long: You know when you’re singing, you think, oh, I sound really good. Trevor confessed—

[00:31:21] Stephen Fenech: was that on the private feed, or did you tell me that? Did you say that in the private feed, or am I spilling the beans here that he loves singing in the car, gets into it?

[00:31:27] Trevor Long: Yeah, it was in the private feed. I thought you’re going to say something else.

[00:31:30] Stephen Fenech: So what was I going to say? But he loves to sing a sing-song in the car.

[00:31:34] Trevor Long: Yeah, they are. There’s recorded songs of me.

[00:31:37] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:31:37] Trevor Long: Yeah. And I have MP3s of me singing with mates. We’ve talked about that. Yeah. He’s McDrugs, the band.

[00:31:42] Stephen Fenech: Wow.

[00:31:43] Trevor Long: Good times.

[00:31:46] Stephen Fenech: Was this a while back, mate?

[00:31:47] Trevor Long: Yeah, back in the day. Did you have high voices like this?

[00:31:49] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Well, you’re a great man, were ya?

[00:31:50] Trevor Long: Well, I’ve got a cassette tape over here of me.

[00:31:53] Stephen Fenech: A cassette tape?

[00:31:54] Trevor Long: Of me on talkback radio in 1995.

[00:31:58] Stephen Fenech: Just the sideline of a bus. Well, we’ve heard that.

[00:32:00] Trevor Long: No, no, no, no. This is me calling David Tapp on the radio talking about motorsport. So as a talkback caller going, hi, what do you think of this? Yeah. And Tappy was here the other day. I said, man, I can’t play it to you. It’s so embarrassing. I just, I just can’t. It’s just because I listened to it.

[00:32:12] Stephen Fenech: I went, hi, hi, David.

[00:32:13] Trevor Long: And Tony Longhurst was in the studio with him and I’m like, and Tony, what do you think of the BMWs? And I’m like, oh, it’s just embarrassing. It’s crazy.

[00:32:21] Stephen Fenech: We played you at Courtside at Kings. Yeah, yeah.

[00:32:25] Trevor Long: Those were good times. Wow. So look, what are we giving Albo out of 10 on that one then?

[00:32:29] Stephen Fenech: Mate, I reckon a solid 7.

[00:32:32] Trevor Long: I’d give it a 7, 7.5.

[00:32:33] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, 7, uh, about, you know, good. That journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. This is his first step. Let’s hope that he maintains our standards and our ethics and copyright. And there’s a lot of balls to keep in the air with this one. Hopefully he does the job.

[00:32:48] Trevor Long: All right, yeah, well done, Albo. Hey, that’s not something you hear here often, especially over the last month. This is Two Blokes Talking Tech.

[00:32:57] Stephen Fenech: Two Blokes Talking Quick check, as the logo says behind me, proudly supported. We are— the show is supported by Arlo, and Arlo is a great place to go if you need your security cameras. And let’s face it, you want a bit of peace of mind at home, so it’s a great idea to set up a security system. Really easy to start. You can start with one camera, one camera, the Essential camera, under $100. You connect that to your Wi-Fi, takes 5 minutes, and you’ve got a camera. You can look at the notifications on your phone. If you want to then take out the subscription, the subscription plans for about the cost of a cup of coffee per month. You’re able to then start storing your video and access your video in the cloud for up to 30 days, get smart notifications, really make a great job of it. And then of course, if you want to expand, they have their Essential cameras, they have the Ultra cameras, 4K cameras, but also their pan and tilt cameras, wired floodlights, video doorbells as well. So there’s plenty you can create and build into your ecosystem and at the end of the day, your home is even more secure than when you started. So give them a try. Check out all their products. And if you order through the Arlo website, you can bundle and save when you buy multiple products. You can save up to 20% when you do bundle them together. So check it out. Arlo.com. This is Two Blokes Talking Tech with Trevor Long and Steven Fenech.

[00:34:20] Trevor Long: Well, it was a week, the week that was for Telstra. It was massive.

[00:34:24] Stephen Fenech: Yep.

[00:34:24] Trevor Long: And look, it didn’t actually get better, frankly, after we finished recording because the next day they had to admit that they found a secondary problem that had continued to affect, you know, Camping On and Triple Zero.

[00:34:35] Stephen Fenech: Yes.

[00:34:35] Trevor Long: They are at the end of this week going to hit solid ground with the Parliament having to face an inquiry about Triple Zero, which is a pre-existing inquiry that’s happening about Triple Zero. But I had a really good chat this week with Graeme Lynch from Commsday. Graham, that’s on the EFTM podcast if you want to have a listen to that. It’s like 20 minutes. And Graham is honestly the smartest bloke in the room when it comes to telcos. And he was very, he’s very honest about not wanting to really make— I was making assumptions about things and he was like, look, I wouldn’t go that far yet because we don’t know. And I thought that was very bold of him to just go, look, I’m not going to make assumptions about something we don’t know yet. So, but he did, he did confirm that it was a piece of equipment called a time sync server that simply ran out of time and went back 20 years. The question is now whether or not they knew this was a problem and were working on it. So they were essentially testing a failsafe or a workaround, right? Whether this happened by surprise, because they just say software defect still, right?

[00:35:35] Stephen Fenech: Software bug. Yeah.

[00:35:36] Trevor Long: But what has happened since is Vicki Brady got home.

[00:35:39] Stephen Fenech: Yep.

[00:35:39] Trevor Long: Rightly. She got home super fast. She was on Friday morning from a Wednesday morning issue, right? She was clearly—

[00:35:45] Stephen Fenech: she literally dropped everything and came home.

[00:35:47] Trevor Long: On my guess, I did some work workbacks. My guess is she had 12 to 15 hours of packing and sorting and getting to the airport.

[00:35:54] Stephen Fenech: She got on the first flight.

[00:35:55] Trevor Long: And then the rest was travel from, I think it was somewhere in the eastern United States. Anyway.

[00:36:00] Stephen Fenech: I thought she was in Europe, she wasn’t in—

[00:36:01] Trevor Long: Well, no, see, she said in a press conference, they said, what time was it where you were?

[00:36:06] Stephen Fenech: She said it was in like New York.

[00:36:07] Trevor Long: She said it was early evening. And I looked at the time zones, it kind of works out to be more like the New York area. Anyway, who cares? She got home. She had a press conference almost immediately. But she’s also been online, you know, well, not her, but her team has been online writing, thank you, thank you and apology messages to people. But there’s a really fascinating thing that she wrote in the apology, which was, you know, for customers that have been disadvantaged by this, please contact us online. So on their Telstra page now, there’s essentially a complaints form. And you can, you know, at the top of their page, there’s a service update page, and then there’s a whole, you know, list of what went wrong. And then there’s a link to an online complaints form. And so I’ve been saying to people, Listen, fill it out. Doesn’t matter whether you’re a business that lost money. And if you did, you’re gonna have to prove it. You’re gonna have to go, our Wednesday revenue is normally this. On that day it was this. We were disadvantaged. But if you’re a mum who couldn’t call her brother or son or mother or husband or whatever, and that happened, it was frustrating, or you struggled to get the kids to school for whatever reason.

[00:37:12] Stephen Fenech: Could have kept the train.

[00:37:13] Trevor Long: I would still complain. Complain. Yeah, I think everyone should complain.

[00:37:16] Stephen Fenech: Like, not everyone’s going to get compensated, but if they know the scope—

[00:37:19] Trevor Long: but I think everyone will.

[00:37:21] Stephen Fenech: And how do you— how will that—

[00:37:22] Trevor Long: I think they’ll go, fine, here’s a day of free data, or here’s, you know, an extra 3 days.

[00:37:27] Stephen Fenech: Do that anyway? No, haven’t they done that in the past?

[00:37:30] Trevor Long: Remember they had a cable cut and all this kind of stuff? Yeah, that’s the strategy here. And I think it’s a little disingenuous from Telstra, but that’s the strategy here, is rather than going, hey, everyone gets this, we’re going, if you’re disadvantaged, we want to from you. Okay.

[00:37:42] Stephen Fenech: And so they’ll just, those individuals they’ll look after.

[00:37:45] Trevor Long: Most people won’t bother, right? And they may only give you—

[00:37:48] Stephen Fenech: Unless they’ve lost a ton of money.

[00:37:50] Trevor Long: Yeah, but that’s business. So I’m talking about individuals. I think most people won’t bother. And I think you should bother because the other part of this is at no point in any of the Telstra communications about this have they said at what scale this occurred.

[00:38:05] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. So how many, like the percentage of the network—

[00:38:07] Trevor Long: Remember we said this last week, it was like some issues and potential problems and da da da da. Pockets that were working, pockets that weren’t. This is 10 million people were affected, right?

[00:38:16] Stephen Fenech: 90% of them.

[00:38:17] Trevor Long: This is a lot of bloody people and they haven’t said that. So I think that’s why they don’t want to do a blanket buyback.

[00:38:23] Stephen Fenech: How do you think, I know Vicki Brady was away, but how do you think, should they have spoken up sooner, maybe been a bit more transparent?

[00:38:28] Trevor Long: They didn’t speak any sort of, they were talking by 9:30, weren’t they?

[00:38:31] Stephen Fenech: They didn’t know what was wrong for a start. So you can’t talk about something you don’t know.

[00:38:36] Trevor Long: I have two problems with last week and none of them are how quickly Telstra did things. It’s really more about just how it was more broadly reported. Obviously the Vicki Brady thing was one part of it, but because was that before or after we were on it, we recorded after you did your little rant against the Daily Mail. Yes, Daily Mail bag, plenty of places for being on holidays, they’re stupid, just stupid.

[00:38:58] Stephen Fenech: But you know what, that’s the frustration in these situations.

[00:39:01] Trevor Long: What about you?

[00:39:02] Stephen Fenech: You know, you had a little go at them online. Well, isn’t that a rant? It’s anyway What my issue is that often when these things happen, normal, regular general journalists are covering a technical story.

[00:39:15] Trevor Long: Yes.

[00:39:16] Stephen Fenech: And they, they don’t have a lot of— most of them don’t have the knowledge to ask the right questions and assume a lot of stuff.

[00:39:22] Trevor Long: Yes.

[00:39:23] Stephen Fenech: It happened with Optus. Remember last year with Optus? It was, it was a— that was totally different. But this year the same, same sort of thing happened. No one called for her resignation, which is smart because she wasn’t even here. Here, but the people who were thinking, oh, how dare she go on a holiday? I think, well, even on like all the interviews I did over the weekend, the presenter sort of implied, oh, she should have been here. I said, well, how does she know that she’s not gonna be? How does she know there’s gonna be like, you’re told to have a holiday with your family.

[00:39:49] Trevor Long: You don’t plan for a bus crash. You don’t plan for a network outage.

[00:39:52] Stephen Fenech: So that was a bit below the belt. But the other things that have come up though is the triple zero.

[00:39:57] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:39:58] Stephen Fenech: How many times, we mentioned this last week, Weekend. So we were talking about the 000 and how the, the camping on is, uh, is 60 seconds of silence. And I reckon half the— well, they reported 600 and something calls ever went through.

[00:40:11] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:40:11] Stephen Fenech: How many of those were people not waiting that 60 seconds? Probably half of them.

[00:40:16] Trevor Long: I would think three-quarters of them. Yeah, I would say at least half.

[00:40:18] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. So that’s another issue they’ve got to deal with. And I think we also talked about the fact, why can’t you do it? Why can’t you connect on WhatsApp to 000?

[00:40:25] Trevor Long: Yeah. And so that’s become, that’s become the next thing. And I had a good chat with Graeme about this again on the EFTM podcast, but the So this Triple Zero inquiry that the government is undertaking now is essentially because of Optus, right? It went bad and they want to know what went wrong.

[00:40:38] Stephen Fenech: So that was scheduled already before this happened?

[00:40:40] Trevor Long: It was already scheduled.

[00:40:41] Stephen Fenech: That was already in the books?

[00:40:41] Trevor Long: There was already an inquiry going on, or, you know, a review. And that’s fine, but, you know, the number of things that get done in government quickly can be counted on this many fingers. None. It just doesn’t happen, right? We need, we should set a target by 2030 We should have the most modern emergency call system in the world, right? Absolutely. And I said, this is what I said, what you do is you get Telstra, Optus, AT&T, TPG, ACMA, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and a few other, because they’re involved too, right?

[00:41:11] Stephen Fenech: Absolutely.

[00:41:12] Trevor Long: The devices are at fault too. Yeah. And you get them all in the room and you get the triple zero people, the emergency people, and you say, rightio, on a big long whiteboard, you go, here’s the customer, right? And there’s the call center operator. What can happen in between? What are the ways? And so you’d have satellite phone call, satellite message, you’d have satellite app, you’d have direct phone call, you’d have SMS, you’d have iMessage, you’d have WhatsApp, you’d have Facebook Messenger, you’d have FaceTime. You’d just list all the ways people communicate, Snapchat, whatever. And then you go, listen, Snapchat, let’s make that not a triple zero thing, right? Let’s decide the priorities here. And then you’d say by 2030 we should have a triple zero call center that can read SMSs and can receive satellite phone calls. And Apple should say, oh, so just so you know, here’s how our satellite messaging system works by emergencies. We can plug that in because I bet you any money they just have a document that says, here’s how we can plug into an emergency call system. Um, you know, Starlink, how do you make sure that the calls are routed correctly?

[00:42:12] Stephen Fenech: The NBN.

[00:42:13] Trevor Long: Yeah, but the thing is, there’s always going to be this I respect that we have Triple Zero and it’s great, but it was built in 1961. Yeah, that’s pretty archaic, yeah. And you know what, in 1961, if you walked, let’s say you were in this area and you walked out the front there and you saw someone fall and break their arm and it was like bone out, broken arm. In 1961, you’d have to walk and find a house that had a phone. Yeah. Because there probably wasn’t many houses here. There was no payphone nearby. There was no mobile phones, so it was 20 minutes before this person got help. It’s already pretty amazing what we can do because we’ve got mobile phones.

[00:42:53] Stephen Fenech: True.

[00:42:53] Trevor Long: So I think my, my challenge and concern is they’re going to come up with a system that requires that if a call is made on satellite and it’s via Starlink, that it must be routed and connected within 23 seconds. Some things just technically won’t be possible. We have to make sure that we understand that different ways will mean different things, but You know, if you send an SMS, then the call center receives it instantly. Someone calls back, you know, what are the, what are the rules around that? And how does that work? In America, if you called 911 in a lot of places, not all, just by making the call, your location is sent adjacent, not even from GPS on the phone, but from the network, your location is sent with the call. Like, that doesn’t happen in Australia. That’s amazing that we don’t have locations.

[00:43:36] Stephen Fenech: What did you say, 1961? It’s now 2026. You think I think in—

[00:43:40] Trevor Long: What’s that? 65 years?

[00:43:41] Stephen Fenech: That you need to be above, on top of things like that. And we can put a man on the moon. How about we make it easy to ring 000 from over the internet?

[00:43:51] Trevor Long: I just worry about ministers and politicians setting rules and creating guide rails that are frankly too hard to jump over.

[00:44:00] Stephen Fenech: They’re not achievable, yeah. Yeah. Not immediately achievable.

[00:44:03] Trevor Long: Yeah, they should, mate. The inquiry that’s going on received submissions from right across the telco space. Do you know who did not make a submission? Samsung, Apple.

[00:44:13] Stephen Fenech: Really? Screw this inquiry.

[00:44:16] Trevor Long: Yeah, like, that’s insane. Now, that’s not on Apple. Two biggest— yeah, were they invited? Did someone ring them and say, hey, can you share with us your knowledge of triple emergency calling? Did anyone try? No. Um, anyway, I just think that’s the biggest challenge going forward, is both the hysteria around Triple Zero during a network outage. Yeah, because there will be more network outages, folks.

[00:44:37] Stephen Fenech: Because you know what, take out the Triple Zero dramas and the outage was still inconvenient, but it was at least wasn’t life-threatening.

[00:44:47] Trevor Long: Yes, but, and if you take it out, what you do is you spend that week that we’ve spent talking about Triple Zero, yeah, you spend talking about businesses learning about redundancy like we talked about last week, different SIM cards, different Wi-Fi.

[00:44:56] Stephen Fenech: What about the call to open up roaming streaming? Is that— would that, would that cause problems? I don’t know logistically how it would work, but wouldn’t it? Or I’m asking logistically, would it, would that then just flood another network and just crash that network?

[00:45:10] Trevor Long: That’s the problem.

[00:45:11] Stephen Fenech: Is that the problem?

[00:45:12] Trevor Long: So if you, if you ask Telstra, it’s an absolute no-go because they say if, if our— if we had 10 million customers on the network and they suddenly appeared on the Optus network, it couldn’t cope. Yeah. Now I think Optus and TPG would disagree with that, but they’re not fighting for it because we had this fight 10 years ago and the ACCC decided decided no. The ACCC, the Australian Competition Commission— they should have— the Consumer Commission decided that it wouldn’t be good for competition. And that’s BS, because it would have been unbelievable for competition. It would have been great. But the horse has bolted, because since then we’ve had regulatory and, and spectrum frameworks that basically build networks a certain way. So, you know, a single network can only have a certain amount of the capacity, and that capacity limits how many calls they can actually have on their network. So If you opened up the spectrum more or allowed them different slices of spectrum, then perhaps roaming could happen. But it would also cost a bucketload. Yeah, because they’d all have to invest in, in all this technology and spectrum changes to do this. So that’s going to be passed on to the consumer.

[00:46:11] Stephen Fenech: Easier said than done.

[00:46:12] Trevor Long: Bottom line, yeah, the horse is bolted on that. But, but couldn’t I just focus on Triple Zero?

[00:46:17] Stephen Fenech: Let’s go back to the roaming. Couldn’t it be that, um, say the Telstra outage, couldn’t then the, the amount of people wanting to connect be distributed to both Vodafone and Optus Networks.

[00:46:28] Trevor Long: Yeah, but in some places they’re the one.

[00:46:30] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, okay. Yeah, but in those areas it’s not very heavily populated, right?

[00:46:33] Trevor Long: So it should be able to cope. Yeah, but then their towers wouldn’t be heavily powered either. Like, it’s all about— everything is built on constraints. Yeah, look, I, I wish we had domestic roaming because it would mean that people 10 years ago could have chosen a discount mobile brand and actually use the Telstra network and might have had a premium for it on our most basic plans and prices, but it’s not going to happen now. I think that horse has bolted. And while it does happen in other countries, I think it would create as many problems as it currently does. So when you’re internationally roaming, and again, this is from Graham Lynch from my chat yesterday, when we’re in London next week and you got to make a call, it doesn’t just go ring ring, it goes searching around, ring ring. You know, it does some stuff. The same thing would happen with domestic roaming. So the same challenge of triple zero would probably still exist.

[00:47:22] Stephen Fenech: You’ve got to camp on to another network.

[00:47:23] Trevor Long: Yeah, you’re right. I’m not sure it would be the same amount of time as camping on, but it would certainly be still a challenge.

[00:47:29] Stephen Fenech: One thing we’re all agreeing on though, it needs to improve. There needs to be a better way to connect in to triple zero.

[00:47:38] Trevor Long: In case of emergency, Australians should have many more options than they currently do. Because go back to the outage, it’s 7 AM someone’s having a heart attack. I call 000, it doesn’t work, and I go, okay, the network’s down. I’ll open up a WhatsApp chat or I’ll text. You just do the next thing. People would be taught to do the next thing because you’d be on Wi-Fi at home. Yeah, right. So there’d be an alternative.

[00:48:02] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, of course. It’s— you use every avenue is what I’m saying. Like, we can, we can connect easily through over the NBN and on our Melbourne cellular networks, data, Wi-Fi, Let’s pull every lever.

[00:48:16] Trevor Long: Pull every lever. Yeah, but can we not do it from a government regulatory framework point of view? Can we just get people in, smart people in a room, people together, yeah, to come up with a plan?

[00:48:25] Stephen Fenech: Some engineers, get them in.

[00:48:26] Trevor Long: And then just prioritize them. Okay, step one is we’re going to need a new— because it’s going to cost a lot of money because sometimes you’re going to allocate millions and millions of dollars to Triple Zero to say the computer systems for a line, that’s all going to have to change because they’re based around taking calls. So what we need is to change the input to the Triple Zero call center and invest in that in a heavy way, and then slowly switch on on more levers. SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, whoever the hell cares, whatever they are, switch them on.

[00:48:50] Stephen Fenech: Should be easy to do. Should be. I mean, at the end of the day, for a customer, it should be a lot easier.

[00:48:55] Trevor Long: Put it to you this way, at this very day, you could be standing anywhere in Australia and make a phone call if satellite was enabled for phone calls, which it can be. I say can. Yeah, because it’s happening around the world. Other places around the world have enabled that. We haven’t enabled that. And I’m very confident because it wouldn’t meet the call service obligations that Telstra has. And that’s why they haven’t enabled calling on Starlink.

[00:49:21] Stephen Fenech: Because. Yeah, right. But that was another question I had was, you know, surely satellite backup or satellite augmentation of the network, wouldn’t that maybe have helped in this situation where—

[00:49:32] Trevor Long: Absolutely.

[00:49:33] Stephen Fenech: So, but you’re saying they haven’t, they haven’t flicked the switch for calls yet. Yet.

[00:49:37] Trevor Long: Nope.

[00:49:37] Stephen Fenech: Is the technology ready?

[00:49:39] Trevor Long: Yes, T-Mobile uses it in the States.

[00:49:41] Stephen Fenech: Yep. And data, not quite yet, but voice calls, you reckon?

[00:49:46] Trevor Long: All happening in the States. Yeah, not here.

[00:49:48] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, not here.

[00:49:49] Trevor Long: And I genuinely blame regulation and legislation. Yeah, that’s 100% why. Okay, anyway, what’s— is there a drama?

[00:49:57] Stephen Fenech: My phone’s ringing. I felt something. I felt something vibrating in my pants and it was my phone.

[00:50:03] Trevor Long: I thought you were bringing some new information to the show.

[00:50:05] Stephen Fenech: No, mate.

[00:50:06] Trevor Long: Turns out it was just a missed call.

[00:50:07] Stephen Fenech: That’s it.

[00:50:08] Trevor Long: Anyway, Two Blokes Talking Tech. If you get compensation, tell us as soon as you do because we want to know what they’re offering to everyone. This is Two Blokes Talking Tech with Trevor Long and Steven Fenech.

[00:50:22] Stephen Fenech: Mate, would I be right in saying that you don’t fly Qantas because they don’t have Wi-Fi?

[00:50:26] Trevor Long: Yep, 100%. It.

[00:50:27] Stephen Fenech: Okay.

[00:50:28] Trevor Long: That’s why I choose not to fly Qantas.

[00:50:30] Stephen Fenech: And so internationally— Qantas domestically have it, but I prefer not to fly them anyway.

[00:50:35] Trevor Long: Um, no, no, they’re fine. I’ve got no dramas with them. But internationally, I like to be connected. If I can’t sleep, I want to be able to work. Yeah. So it’s really that simple.

[00:50:42] Stephen Fenech: That’s a reflex action for me too. Whatever airline I’m on usually has Wi-Fi, and I connect as soon as we take off.

[00:50:47] Trevor Long: I’m on Wi-Fi, mate. I’ll be able to watch the Formula 1 when we fly to Melbourne because Qatar’s got Starlink.

[00:50:50] Stephen Fenech: Really?

[00:50:51] Trevor Long: Livestream Formula 1, no dramas at all.

[00:50:53] Stephen Fenech: Okay. When we fly to London. London, sorry. Yeah, wow. I was gonna say, where are you going to Melbourne?

[00:50:57] Trevor Long: And so I reached out to Qantas this week and I said, where are you at with your fleet of planes? And it turns out they’ve got 14 787s done. So if your flight is on a 787, yep, you will have Wi-Fi.

[00:51:10] Stephen Fenech: So it’s Starlink?

[00:51:11] Trevor Long: No, that’s the catch. It’s the crappy old Wi-Fi. Oh, it’s not great, but it’s still slow, but it’s there. At least you can get it. And this month, the first A380 goes in. That’s going to take 4 months or something. It’s going to be done in October. So I imagine it’s going to be years before that fleet’s finished.

[00:51:25] Stephen Fenech: What about when the— so you’re saying it’s not Starlink? And so when they have— yeah, they’ve announced Project Sunrise, you know, so to go— imagine flying Sydney to London in one hit or Sydney to New York in one hit and not have an internet. You’d want to kill yourself.

[00:51:43] Trevor Long: Yeah, I would not be happy.

[00:51:44] Stephen Fenech: So you’d want to have some connection on those flights, surely. Are they the aircraft?

[00:51:48] Trevor Long: I mean, you would assume the A350.

[00:51:50] Stephen Fenech: Are they Airbuses?

[00:51:50] Trevor Long: They’re Airbuses, aren’t they?

[00:51:52] Stephen Fenech: On those for that.

[00:51:53] Trevor Long: But they’ve done some A330s already as well. So, okay, they’ve done a bunch of planes already. Yeah, but here’s the thing, it must be— it’s either the first time you put Wi-Fi in a plane is really difficult because that A380 is taking way too long.

[00:52:04] Stephen Fenech: Retrofitting, it must take longer.

[00:52:05] Trevor Long: No, retrofitting— retrofitting a different Wi-Fi is easy because Qatar rolled out Starlink a year faster than they thought they were going to because it was just really quick. Yeah, it’s from converting from the old satellite, which is what Qantas is putting in right now, to Starlink was really quick and easy for Qatar. Qatar got That’s what I’m saying. Qatar’s got that.

[00:52:22] Stephen Fenech: They already got that. But I went Emirates last time. My other question is, do they have live, do they have those live channels too on Qatar?

[00:52:28] Trevor Long: Yeah, you just scan a QR code, just bring it up on your iPad. Yep.

[00:52:31] Stephen Fenech: Oh really? So you can do that?

[00:52:32] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:52:32] Stephen Fenech: Great.

[00:52:33] Trevor Long: ‘Cause that’s what I just said. I’ll be watching the Formula 1.

[00:52:35] Stephen Fenech: On the way home, Souths are playing on the Friday night, so I’ll be in the air. And on the way over, the World Cup is on.

[00:52:42] Trevor Long: World Cup final, yes.

[00:52:42] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, World Cup final is on.

[00:52:44] Trevor Long: It’s kind of, it’s basically while we’re in—

[00:52:45] Stephen Fenech: Right in the middle of our flight.

[00:52:46] Trevor Long: Is it in the middle of the flight or just as we’re getting on a flight, I think?

[00:52:49] Stephen Fenech: It’s as we get on the flight from—

[00:52:52] Trevor Long: Doha. So just to be clear, yeah, England, if they get through tomorrow, yeah, could be in the World Cup final and could win the World Cup while we’re in Wheeling.

[00:53:00] Stephen Fenech: And it’s party time.

[00:53:02] Trevor Long: Could you imagine what London will be like?

[00:53:04] Stephen Fenech: Or if they lose, it’s riot time.

[00:53:07] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:53:08] Stephen Fenech: So either way, we’re going to see something.

[00:53:11] Trevor Long: Yeah, it’s going to be wild.

[00:53:13] Stephen Fenech: Wow.

[00:53:13] Trevor Long: Crazy.

[00:53:14] Stephen Fenech: Anyway, so look, Spain’s already through, by the way.

[00:53:16] Trevor Long: Shout out to Qantas for getting their act together. A bit late, but all power to to them. Yeah. And I was only excited because we’re flying a 787 to CES. So I’m like, thank God.

[00:53:26] Stephen Fenech: Oh, are you going to do the direct flight?

[00:53:28] Trevor Long: Yeah, we’re going direct.

[00:53:29] Stephen Fenech: With Qantas?

[00:53:29] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:53:30] Stephen Fenech: Direct to Vegas?

[00:53:30] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:53:31] Stephen Fenech: Booked already, eh?

[00:53:31] Trevor Long: It was cheaper. Yeah.

[00:53:32] Stephen Fenech: Oh really?

[00:53:33] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:53:33] Stephen Fenech: Cheaper? Yeah. Giddy up.

[00:53:35] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:53:35] Stephen Fenech: Be sold out by now, wouldn’t it? So none of the driving in from Vegas, LA anymore.

[00:53:41] Trevor Long: Hey. Weird, yeah.

[00:53:41] Stephen Fenech: The EFTM crew, boom, on the ground straight away.

[00:53:45] Trevor Long: Yeah. Yeah, it’s like a day late too. ‘Cause we’re like, you know what, I’m compressing the time just ’cause you can. Direct flight, why wouldn’t you take it?

[00:53:53] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, of course.

[00:53:54] Trevor Long: It’s unbelievable. I don’t think it’ll happen again the year after.

[00:53:55] Stephen Fenech: I’m investigating. It would’ve been, is it, was it cheaper than the regular going through LA? It would be one flight, I guess.

[00:54:02] Trevor Long: Yeah, I look at the flight and I go Delta, United, Qantas, what are the options? And Qantas was the cheapest way to get there. Yeah.

[00:54:11] Stephen Fenech: ‘Cause this year I’m staying back. I’m going to Disneyland.

[00:54:13] Trevor Long: Well, you can’t go through Vegas then.

[00:54:15] Stephen Fenech: Well, on the way over, I can.

[00:54:17] Trevor Long: Oh, booking one way on a different flight. Yeah, I’ll probably—

[00:54:21] Stephen Fenech: probably not do that because I’m going to drive from Vegas to— so you’re out same way? Yeah. Out. Okay. Wow. Straight away.

[00:54:27] Trevor Long: Yeah. Return.

[00:54:28] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. I’m going via LA.

[00:54:30] Trevor Long: Yep. Because you got to do Disneyland.

[00:54:32] Stephen Fenech: Oh, it’s all changed, mate. Galaxy’s Edge has all changed. This will be my third, fourth time to Galaxy’s Edge. Fourth.

[00:54:40] Trevor Long: I think we’ve convinced Amanda to go to Disney World, Florida. Hey, she doesn’t want to, weirdly.

[00:54:44] Stephen Fenech: I’m trying to convince Jo to join me over there, see how we go. I hope to get her there.

[00:54:51] Trevor Long: He’s trying to convince her to dress as Princess Leia over there. Yeah, that won’t happen.

[00:54:55] Stephen Fenech: That’d be bonus.

[00:54:57] Trevor Long: All right, well done, Qantas. I don’t know what we’re talking about.

[00:55:01] Stephen Fenech: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech.

[00:55:03] Trevor Long: Thanks to the great people at Netgear. And when you’re thinking about how fast your internet is, think about how fast it is in every room of the house. Are you really getting the speed you’re paying for down in the back room? Are you getting in the man cave? You’re getting in the TV room, because if you’re getting buffering on your TV, it’s because your internet’s not as good as it could be. Yeah, but you’re probably paying fast high-speed NBN. The time to upgrade is now with Netgear. You can get a Netgear Orbi Wi-Fi system and improve your Wi-Fi immensely. Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7, doesn’t matter as long as it’s one of the latest generations of Wi-Fi. Every room in your home will be covered with high-speed internet. The speeds you’re paying for in every room and all the latest devices will connect with the absolute best speeds, and it’s the best thing you can do for your home. It’s a utility in your home— power, water, internet. And Netgear can be the provider of that internet right throughout your home. Don’t settle for just the modem your internet provider supplied you to give you Wi-Fi. Get yourself a mesh system and Orbi’s going to be the one to get. You can find out more details and buy directly at netgear.com.au.

[00:56:02] Stephen Fenech: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech.

[00:56:05] Trevor Long: What does that say? Oh, there you go.

[00:56:07] Stephen Fenech: You can’t read my writing?

[00:56:09] Trevor Long: Uh, from here, no. Like, honestly, I’m like—

[00:56:11] Stephen Fenech: slide on without your glasses, mate. Come on, mate, slide on without your glasses.

[00:56:14] Trevor Long: Hang on, put me glasses on. Slightly, the second word was slightly easier.

[00:56:19] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:56:20] Trevor Long: So iOS, macOS, all the betas are out. The public betas are done and ready. And here’s, I wanna start talking about Siri because I’ll be honest, I haven’t stress tested it, but I’ve just used it like normal and then tried to think of times that it might be better. I’ll give you the best example of Siri that I had. Two examples. And I used both these in a video if you’ve seen it. But last week we were sitting here, remember it was Telstra Day, it was hectic. We did a lot of shows.. And sometime during the show, I got a message from a Today Show producer asking me about Payphone Tag, which is a video I did and a story I pitched to them. And it said something like, did you ever end up doing that story? Because we’re thinking about doing this weekend. And like a day later, I’m like, oh man, I didn’t get back to them. And I look for the email, like, where’s the email? I couldn’t find it. So I said to Siri, hey, I’ll read it to you. Payphone Tag. I said to Siri, someone sent me a message the other day about Payphone Tag on the weekend. But I can’t remember whether it was an SMS or an email. Siri said it was an SMS from Caitlin. Oh, don’t talk, Siri. Siri’s listening to me, I don’t know how to turn it off. There we go. On Wednesday, July 8th, asking if you ever ended up doing the payphone segment. Link to this, link to the SMS, so I can just click on it and I could reply.

[00:57:31] Stephen Fenech: There you go.

[00:57:32] Trevor Long: Now the other one, and this was a little bit deeper, I was doing an MC gig in the city at like Barangaroo, and I knew, I remember clearly that the thing was at Barangaroo, like, ’cause I had a briefing, it was in Tower 1 or something like that. So I know where I park when I go to Barangaroo. I just drove there, parked there, and I’m walking along going, I looked at the calendar invite, no address, you idiot. I just put it in as, you know, event. So I said, what’s the address and location of the ACS function I’m hosting tonight? Someone email me all the documents. That’s all I said. The ACS function you’re hosting is on Level 27, Tower 1, Barangaroo. And it had a link to the, um, to the email, and it had a link to my calendar thing, and it told me, you know, everything that was in the email. And to be clear, I checked the email. The address wasn’t in the email, it was in the attached document. Ah, so it read the document, it had read the document, kept all that information in. Beautiful. And that to me is that stuff Siri could never have done.

[00:58:23] Stephen Fenech: That’s next level stuff.

[00:58:24] Trevor Long: That’s stuff Siri could never have done before.

[00:58:25] Stephen Fenech: Well, the new Siri, a new and improved Siri. No, that’s right, is much better. Yeah, great stuff.

[00:58:30] Trevor Long: So I really, really like that one.

[00:58:33] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. And well, the other feature, I suppose, Apple Intelligence. I did try out the, uh, you know, when you can re-angle your photos, reframing.

[00:58:39] Trevor Long: Yeah, I did that with our our photos at Amazon. I reframed it because, you know, we were kind of side on, so I kind of made it a bit less side on.

[00:58:47] Stephen Fenech: I did it with Joe and I, our photo on Aaron’s wedding day. We sort of changed, I changed an angle there.

[00:58:53] Trevor Long: I’ll tell you the biggest—

[00:58:54] Stephen Fenech: Flawless from every angle.

[00:58:55] Trevor Long: Biggest gripe I’ve got though is something I have been using since Apple Intelligence launched is writing tools. So I’ll use, I normally write everything in Notes. I write an article, I write it in Notes.

[00:59:06] Stephen Fenech: Really?

[00:59:06] Trevor Long: Then I highlight it.

[00:59:07] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:59:08] Trevor Long: The reason I write in Notes, ’cause if I do this in WordPress, it doesn’t often bring up the option. So if I highlight it and click, right-click, I want the writing tools option. Then you go proofread.

[00:59:17] Stephen Fenech: Well, if I write all my stuff in Word, it does that.

[00:59:20] Trevor Long: So what I do is I highlight it in Notes and I go right-click, writing tools, proofread. I want it to proofread, not rewrite like Stephen Fenech would. No, just proofread. So it finds all my misspellings and stuff, right? It’s gone.

[00:59:33] Stephen Fenech: Oh, proofreading’s gone.

[00:59:34] Trevor Long: The writing tools is gone.

[00:59:36] Stephen Fenech: What, what, altogether or just that part? So if I go, um, wow, because I, I tried to use it the other day and said, oh, that’s not available at this time. Is that what you’re getting, that message, not available?

[00:59:47] Trevor Long: I’m trying to find an actual article somewhere in my notes.

[00:59:51] Stephen Fenech: You want them in your notes? Wow.

[00:59:53] Trevor Long: Yeah, well, that way I can get them from PC to PC as well. But anyway, if you, if I highlight a piece of text, right? Yeah. And right-click, there’s no— oh my God, there says writing tools, proofread. It’s there now. Maybe that’s the latest beta, but it wasn’t there before. And you had— what you had to do was ask Siri, you know, bring up Siri and go, can you proofread this for me?

[01:00:12] Stephen Fenech: Wow.

[01:00:12] Trevor Long: So kind of Apple intelligence is gone, and it’s now just embedded in the system, and Siri can summon it.

[01:00:20] Stephen Fenech: But it doesn’t have the little symbol, the writing tool thing?

[01:00:23] Trevor Long: Doesn’t have that symbol. I actually think that that’s just a normal proofread. I don’t think that’s Apple Intelligence. No, that looks the same as Apple Intelligence.

[01:00:31] Stephen Fenech: Because you know when you’re writing something, you normally can see a little symbol in the corner.

[01:00:34] Trevor Long: I think we— I think they’ve brought it back. See, there’s now that little icon there. So maybe in the last beta, which we’ve just got, it’s back. Well, the last beta that you’ve got, which is developer beta, is basically the public beta. I was told that the latest developer one is as close to what’s being released. So basically in between the two. So let’s say I’m a developer 3, Developer 2. Developer 2 is not what was released to the public, it was somewhere in between, right, is what I understand.

[01:01:02] Stephen Fenech: So you can participate with this, you can, you can go macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS.

[01:01:09] Trevor Long: And I really, you got to firstly encourage people to remember this is a beta, it’s test software, it’s not fixed. I haven’t had any dramas on, I’ve been running on a Mac, iPads, and phone. I did have a couple times where the phone just turned off, that was Weird.

[01:01:22] Stephen Fenech: I put on my iPhone, put on the iPad, put on this, this MacBook here, and, and I think it’s been, it’s been flawless.

[01:01:28] Trevor Long: Haven’t seen any battery life issues, but, but here’s the thing. I, my biggest, my issue right now is, I know it’s a genuine issue, I, if I’m searching for contacts, it just doesn’t work.

[01:01:38] Stephen Fenech: And searching what?

[01:01:39] Trevor Long: Contacts. I’ve got 12,000 contacts in my phone, so it’s probably something to do with the indexing. So if you find an issue, please log it. Yeah, you go to the feedback, take a screenshot, you go to the feedback app and you tell them what what the issue is that you’re seeing. They are genuinely monitoring that to try and fix problems. And so I really encourage people to be engaged in the process.

[01:01:58] Stephen Fenech: One of the first things I noticed, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this too, AirDrop way faster.

[01:02:04] Trevor Long: Yeah, because it’s constantly working.

[01:02:06] Stephen Fenech: AirDrop is amazing.

[01:02:07] Trevor Long: You don’t have an iPhone there, but yeah. But yeah, so AirDrop is basically—

[01:02:10] Stephen Fenech: I’ve got a computer here though.

[01:02:10] Trevor Long: Yeah, I was just going to say, so the difference now is AirDrop used to, you’d click AirDrop and then it’d take a second to fill. But look at that, already pre-populated.

[01:02:18] Stephen Fenech: Although there was one I remember I was wanting to send something from my phone, iPhone to my MacBook.

[01:02:24] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[01:02:25] Stephen Fenech: And the MacBook didn’t appear in the AirDrop selection on the phone. But when I was sending from the Mac Studio to the, to the phone, it found this Mac Studio but not the MacBook.

[01:02:34] Trevor Long: Yeah. Well, it’s been far more reliable for me.

[01:02:38] Stephen Fenech: I just know that like, and I sent like I think 5 or 6 images and straight in. —boom.

[01:02:44] Trevor Long: Are you saying the actual speed is faster? Yeah. All right.

[01:02:47] Stephen Fenech: Didn’t you?

[01:02:47] Trevor Long: Is that what you—

[01:02:48] Stephen Fenech: that’s what I meant. It just went brrt, done.

[01:02:50] Trevor Long: No, I mean the finding of people is so much faster. The transmission was faster. If you have everyone on iOS 27, you’ll find they pop up so much faster in the list as well. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:03:00] Stephen Fenech: Well, not due to get back on iOS for another couple of months.

[01:03:02] Trevor Long: No, it’s going to be a while now, isn’t it? Because we’re going to be, you know, if all things go to plan, we’ll be using something else soon. For any other major things?

[01:03:12] Stephen Fenech: Uh, you mean in the betas? Yeah. Uh, well, I haven’t had a good enough— I like the wallpaper. I’m trying to macOS the nice Golden Gate Bridge.

[01:03:20] Trevor Long: Yeah, animated. That’s only come in the latest dev beta too. It’s really nice, just, and you know, I’ve got Tide.

[01:03:25] Stephen Fenech: I’ve got my— it’s on my Mac Studio as well. I got my 57-inch monitor and it looks beautiful. It went from the Tahoe, which is all blue. Yep. Now it’s all gold and orange.

[01:03:36] Trevor Long: Now that’s the other one that is unbelievable, and it’s on Mac as well. It’s shortcut shortcuts. Now I’ve always loved the idea of shortcuts, but it’s always seemed to me to be nerdy as hell.

[01:03:48] Stephen Fenech: Excuse me. Yeah. So for you, you just now got to tell it what it wants.

[01:03:51] Trevor Long: Yeah. So I’ll give you an example. This, I’m just showing Stephen, but this is a shortcut. It’s like, do this, then this and this and this. And it’s a really bloody complicated set of instructions, right? But now you can just go, okay. And what I do is I dictate it. You can just dictate it and go, whenever I leave home, send an iMessage to Trevor Long reminding me to say hello to my wife. So you get— you can just say that and it’ll make a shortcut.

[01:04:20] Stephen Fenech: And then genuine reminder too. Yeah, that’s, that’s 100% spot on.

[01:04:24] Trevor Long: So I set one up yesterday that, um, whenever I click this button, the shortcut will get the current location, generate an Apple Maps URL, and send an iMessage to Trevor Long. And I I’ve saved it on my home screen. Boom. If I click that, wait for this.

[01:04:37] Stephen Fenech: Oh, so that’s the shortcut. Okay. I click that, message comes through.

[01:04:41] Trevor Long: There it is there, location. So that’s how I remember where I parked. And mate, honestly, Shortcuts can be super powerful.

[01:04:48] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, well, now that you just gotta explain what you want it to do. That’s it. And it just works it out. A lot less complicated.

[01:04:54] Trevor Long: Mate, I reckon it’s gonna be the thing that takes off over the next few months when people discover it. They’re gonna be creating with it, mate. Yes. I’ll read this out, it was a fascinating one. I haven’t replicated it yet. Excuse me, I need a drink. Stephen, talk amongst yourself. Uh, yeah, that was all you needed. Download it right now. No, um, I’m pretty sure it was a comment on my TikTok, and it was a woman because I said, you know, tell me ideas, uh, and she had this really crazy thing about when she lost her phone. It’s from a viewer. She says, my favorite shortcut that I created, is when I send myself, send a message to myself from any phone that includes the word lost, can be whatever keyword you like, it will turn the volume on my phone to its highest level and turn off silent. That way I can find my phone in my house when it’s on silent and locate it. So she can just call her phone.

[01:05:46] Stephen Fenech: That’s smart. Really, that’s really cool.

[01:05:49] Trevor Long: What she’s given up though, because she said you can send the word lost from any phone, is if someone else has her phone number, they can just text the word lost and then call call her. If she’s in bed, it’ll ring.

[01:05:58] Stephen Fenech: Oh, we just told everyone about how to do that now.

[01:06:01] Trevor Long: But the concept, just that, just that simple logic concept is unbelievable. Yeah, the things you— I don’t think we understand the things that you can do. Oh yeah, I think the biggest limitation though is the number of apps that actually have integrated what they call app intents. So for example, our family just uses WhatsApp, right, for everything. Same with us. So WhatsApp isn’t integrated into Shortcuts, so I can’t say send a WhatsApp message to someone. I haven’t tried that, but that’s— I understand they haven’t integrated it. So you kind of need it to be Apple ecosystem.

[01:06:28] Stephen Fenech: We’ve got a family chat too, and it’s just been a lot of chat about little Jack, a lot of photos of a baby, of the—

[01:06:33] Trevor Long: of a little—

[01:06:33] Stephen Fenech: our little grandson. Fair enough too. And Aaron, Aaron’s travels too. Aaron and his wife Samantha have been traveling around Europe, and they’re in Egypt now. They went to the pyramids.

[01:06:42] Trevor Long: And yeah, it’s time for Jacqueline to one-up them.

[01:06:44] Stephen Fenech: Well, you never know. Yeah, you never know. And what about Aaron and Samantha.

[01:06:50] Trevor Long: No, but Aaron and Samantha have got the big travel, so they’re sharing photos of trip. Hayley’s got the photos of the baby.

[01:06:57] Stephen Fenech: Jacqueline’s sharing photos of what I’m saying, actually house hunting. They’re looking to buy a house soon. Yeah, okay, so that’s their little adventures.

[01:07:04] Trevor Long: Lovely. Anyway, if you’re on the public betas, if you want the public betas, beta.apple.com, I think it is.

[01:07:10] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, beta. So just, just type in Apple beta software and you’ve got to sign up.

[01:07:13] Trevor Long: You’ve got to sign up with Apple ID and on F10.

[01:07:15] Stephen Fenech: No, there’s not.

[01:07:16] Trevor Long: There’s a link on Tech Guide. And then yeah, just click. You got to sign your device up and yeah, it’s good to be at the forefront. It’ll be available to the public in around September.

[01:07:24] Stephen Fenech: September. Yeah, it’d be loaded on the new iPhone 18 Pro, the alleged iPhone foldable. Oh man. What? Yeah.

[01:07:33] Trevor Long: Someone the other day. Oh, I was saying, I think I said at the end of the F10 podcast and I’ll say it to you because I think it’s interesting. Imagine this because we all believe that iPhone foldable will be called either the iPhone Fold or the iPhone Ultra. Ultra, right? Yeah. Samsung next week, the rumor is going to announce a Fold, Flip, and a wide, right?

[01:07:51] Stephen Fenech: Passport shape.

[01:07:52] Trevor Long: What do you think the wide will be called?

[01:07:54] Stephen Fenech: Uh, the Fold 8. And the big, the tall one will be the Ultra. Fold 8 Ultra.

[01:08:03] Trevor Long: Like, do you think Apple can release an iPhone Ultra? Yeah, with their one Ultra. Yeah, true. If Samsung calls their—

[01:08:10] Stephen Fenech: yeah. Well, that’s been the rumor for Galaxy, for Samsung for months, that it’s going to be called the Ultra. I just think, I think that rumor came to the surface at the same time, both those companies. So you’re saying it could be a situation?

[01:08:22] Trevor Long: I don’t believe Apple will call it the iPhone Ultra if Samsung’s doing the same thing. Well, isn’t it?

[01:08:25] Stephen Fenech: If they do, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, I think will be the wide one. No, I disagree.

[01:08:31] Trevor Long: I think the— they can’t rename the Fold. The new one will be the Fold.

[01:08:35] Stephen Fenech: The new one will be the Ultra because that, I think that’s going to be the more expensive expensive one. The wide? No, no, the wide will be cheaper. The wide will be the middle product. The fold will still be the premium, the, the top of the line one. And I think the, the wide, or whatever that’s called, will be the, the middle product.

[01:08:53] Trevor Long: You’ll know next week, folks. Yeah, we won’t be a video episode next week, but it will certainly be a podcast next week, live from London at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked. Stephen, I look forward to seeing you there, mate.

[01:09:02] Stephen Fenech: I will see you there.

[01:09:03] Trevor Long: Travel safe. All right, buddy. See ya.

[01:09:04] Stephen Fenech: Bye. This is Two Blokes Talking Tech!