Transcript of AE 1311 - The Goss: Phillip Island and AI

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

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

Hey, dad. What's going on?

Hey, Pete.

How are you going?

Good. Hang on. The obligatory. The obligatory.

You got both of them?

Well, you just didn't pick it up. There you go.

You didn't pick it up. Did we do an episode about Phillip Island?

No.

We should probably just do a catch up.

We should do a catch up.

Although it's one of those things, I think listeners, they're getting, like an episode a week or every fortnight at the moment.

And we're recording them.

Once every couple frequently.

Yeah, but a whole bunch of them at the same time, right.

Oh, hello. We've got invasion of the fat cat.

I know she's going to start meowing like crazy.

Well, that's alright. She can join in the party. She wants to pick her up.

Yeah. That's it. You'll hear in the background. She'll start meowing at about 2:00. And stop when she gets fed.

At about 5:00.

Yeah, you got to feed her earlier than that. Otherwise she's just.

Drives you nuts.

Yeah. She's so funny. She's just chilled out since we got the other cat. Scrappy.

Yes.

I'm a lot more placid. Anyway, so we went to Phillip Island recently.

We did.

It's always funny. I still, every time I say Phillip Island.

Phillip Island.

Phillip Island. For years when I was a little kid.

Philly Pisland.

Yeah. I thought it was Phillip Island. I thought it was like one word.

Phillip Island.

The place is just called Phillip Island.

Well, welcome to Australian English.

Yeah, but it's Phillip Island.

It's sort of like, sort of like German, where they just, yeah, combine words into one word, so.

Well, they add all of..

It's the Island of Phillip.

Yeah. Is that Arthur Phillip?

Yes.

And so why was that named after Arthur Phillip when he was in and around Sydney?

I think it was just like Port Phillip Bay as well, was named after him. I think it was when people were naming them. But I don't know who named Phillip Island. It might have been Bass or Flinders, but they were obviously naming things after all sorts of people, and Arthur Phillip was probably an appropriate person.

You wonder how they sort of determined what they were going to name things like..

A lot of times it was just, you know, the first sailor on board who saw something or there a lot of them were their British sponsors, you know. So there's a whole lot of things named after Lord whoever who was, you know, the admiral of the...

Lord Howe Island.

Yeah, Lord. Lord Howe. Yeah, exactly. Cape Howe, same thing. Oh hello? Speaking of Scrappy.

Yes. The other cats come, and he's hanging out as well.

Yes.

Anticipating food too, in the next hour or so.

Or a pat?

Probably both. But yeah, it's always interesting when you go around Australia and you find a lot of the same place names repeat again and again and again.

Yeah.

Especially the suburbs in the big cities, right. So I think there are like there's at least a Richmond in both Melbourne and Sydney. There's probably one in Brisbane.

Yeah.

There's a few of these different, um, suburb names.

A lot of those were named after suburbs in London.

Yeah.

Um, yeah. There's a lot of like, people who clearly, when they first came here, when Melbourne was first settled and when Sydney was first settled by Europeans, well, British Uh, people went, Oh, we can name this after the place we came from. Yeah, they would make a suburb.

But I feel like if I was, if I was sailing the world and I found a inhabited or uninhabited island that I claim for myself, I feel like I would be more imaginative than just thinking about the names of places back home and being like, You know what? Let's just repeat that.

Yeah.

And just create an equivalent here to really confuse everyone.

I know. I know.

So you mean Richmond? Richmond, back in London? Do you mean Richmond here? Do you mean in Sydney? Which one do you mean?

Yeah, exactly.

But. So we went to Phillip Island for your birthday.

We did!

Why is it so special to you? We've probably covered it before.

I don't know yet, um. I was, my first family holiday that didn't go to my grandfather's house in Dromana, which is now effectively a suburb of Melbourne. But at the time, it was a little town on the Mornington Peninsula.

Yeah.

The other peninsula around Port Phillip Bay, from where we live.

Yeah. So on the east.

On the East side. Yeah. Um, and my grandfather owned a building there which had some shops and a flat, you know, an apartment above it.

He showed me it on the way home.

Yeah. And we used to go to, um, go there almost every holiday and stay there and go to the beach and stuff. But the first family holiday that I think I say family because my father never came. He didn't take time off work to go on family holidays.

Why is that?

I don't know. He just wasn't.

Wasn't into it?

No.

Or he wanted an excuse to escape you guys. He was too tired.

Yeah. Um. So. Yeah. So we went on this family holiday down to Phillip Island. And so it was my first place of, Oh, this is there is a world other than going to Dromana.

Yeah. I'm trying to think where that would have been for me. Probably the farm in Bendigo or, um, Wilsons Prom. Would it be one of those two things, I think.

Well, we went to Wilsons Prom camping a few times when you were young. Oh, but the first time you were very young.

I wouldn't remember that, yeah.

I think you were probably 3 or 4.

No, I've seen the photos..

The second time we went.

Okay.

Yeah. Like the first time you were ten months old?

Yeah. Don't remember that. Besides the photos.

Yeah, but then we went a few more times when you were a child, but, um. But. Yeah. And then, um, when I was a university student, I did my honours and PhD work on Phillip Island, working on rocky shores around there. And so did your mum. She did her PhD work there? No, you were doing my PhD. I was working she was working on barnacles. Um, so we spent a lot of time there. So it's got that sort of, you know, developing romance, um, thing about it as well. And in the end, we decided to get married when we were sitting talking on Berrys beach at Phillip Island. So.

It's funny, isn't it? How when you're young, I feel probably when you're young, because you have those experiences of developing, you know, relationships or tastes or interests. You end up having those kinds of connections to places or things a lot more than I think you do as an older person. Like I'm still into the same bands that I was into when I was a teenager, and I don't connect with new music the same way that I did with music at the time when I was a teenager, because probably a lot of that music I was exploring for the first time, you know, and metal and rock and everything like that.

You're right. I think it's that first time experience of new styles of music. But when you're young, every style of music is new.

But that's what I mean, right, yeah.

And you get..

Gravitate.

On particular types of music.

Yeah.

Um, and yeah, like 60s pop music and 70s rock music is what I grew up on. Mhm. Um, and, and that 60s pop also included what at the time was called R&B and bears no relationship to the rubbish that they call R&B now.

Oh. Shots fired.

Well, it's not R&B. There's no rhythm and there's no blues involved. You know.

It has. But it's changed to become something that doesn't represent what it originally was.

That whole Motown sound, you know, the African American pop rock music that had its roots in jazz and blues, that came out of Detroit, ironically. Hence Motown. Motor Town. That's what I grew up on, and I still love it. And, uh, but there are every now and then, an artist comes along and you go, oh, you know that? And the two that I think of now, the sort of more modern ones, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.

Yeah.

Very different styles of music from that 60s 70s pop rock. Um, but I've listened to them now and go, Wow, you know, but there's a lot that I listen to and go, this is just rubbish.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing watching music. And the music, the world of music, change.

Yeah.

I don't think there's anyone like, it's the spoils tend to go now exponentially, more of the spoils go to the top few artists. Than back in the day where you would record a CD and you would still get a few dollars from each CD sale. But now you get pennies on the dollar for, you know, I think I heard..

You say c, CD there. You're showing your age as CDs being old.

I know, but.

Snoop Dogg. I was listening to him talking about, um, Spotify the other day. And he was like, you know, what do you think I got for a billion downloads? How much do you reckon I got paid?

$1,000.

And he was. I think it was like 45 grand.

Yeah.

I think it was like $45,000. So it was like 0.000045 of a cent per, per listen or something. Crazy. But you have like no other options now. If you want to get out there, you want to get known.

Very few people are buying physical copies of music buying. Although vinyls come back.

Yeah.

For who knows what reason.

I think it's probably that tactile, sensational. Like, sensational in that it's there's it involves the senses. You open something, you smell something. You have a machine that you put the thing on. Like much more than CDs. Cds were just like, you just slot..

It was electronic and you were sliding in a slot. The thing that I used to love about, you know, records, vinyl recording music was the record covers.

Yeah.

You know, they were are 12in, so 30cm square. The artwork and a lot of times they were they had, you know, big fold outs with all the lyrics and the stories about the songs and the band or the artist and stuff.

Well, that's an extension of the art.

It is. You just don't get in streamed music like..

Well, you can't really.

Try finding out who played the saxophone on a particular track now.

Yeah.

You've got to Google it and hope that somebody else has..

Just ask ChatGPT.

Yeah.

It'll, it'll give you an answer.

It'll give you an answer. And then and then it'll take you an hour to verify it. Well, you might as well just look it up in the first place.

I think it's one of those things, man, AI. Jesus Christ, that stuff is, is really starting to move along fast. One of my students that I'm giving private lessons to, um, was showing me one of his presentations recently for, um, he, he works in horticulture and the machines, the that he's using run simultaneously and they can do like, um, they use AI to mow at the same time as spray for weeds at the same time, as, you know, pick berries. Like there's multiple. These machines can just run 24/7. And they're programmed now to be able to do multiple tasks simultaneously. And you're just like, Good God. A year ago, this was unimaginable. Where are we going to be in a handful of years? But the overlords, well it's..

A combination, that stuff is a combination of AI, but also the engineering to build a machine that has the sensors to, to record data that the AI can actually use. To then drive what the machine does.

And how quickly..

It's a very quick loop that they have to go through. Like if they're rolling a machine at walking pace or a bit slower down a row in an orchard or a vegetable patch or whatever it happens to be,

The cat bit me.

They need that feedback instantaneously. And so it's it's a combination of physical engineering plus the IT, the, the digital technology. So.

It's pretty nuts to just think about how quickly that stuff is going to change and make so many jobs obsolete. I think they'll probably be a huge proportion of people listening to this podcast who work in fields that, within the next five years, will no longer have anywhere near the same number of people working in them, because it'll just be obsolete. Like I remember like working in my industry, you know, as a podcaster, the number of emails I get about people asking to do copywriting for emails and for sales pages and stuff since I started, you know, has been crazy. Because it is something that I think you, you know, with limited training, you can learn to do pretty quickly, especially if you're a good writer anyway. Like if you've already got that talent and then you start, you know, developing your eye, or your your what would you say your words for it. Um, you can do it. But now I can just ask ChatGPT to do it.

And then you've got the draft written.

When I say give me ten variations of the same thing.

Yeah.

And then I add my element to it.

Yeah.

But it gives me instantaneous. Like the other day, I've been using ChatGPT to create some new episodes for the podcast, and it's so good. In terms of creative writing, it's not necessarily good in that it's it's better than really good creative writers, but it's so good in how quickly it can generate ideas for you to then use or change and adapt and play on.

I find it, um, a little verbose that it throws in way too many adjectives and adverbs.

The fact that you can, like for instance, I did.

But in terms of generating data, of saying, give me ten facts that I need to know about this and some information about them, rather than saying, give me the final copy.

But for language learning, it's just insane. Like the applications. The recent video I did was I created a short story about, God, I've created a whole bunch recently, so I'm trying to test my memory and remember what it was about. Um, the most recent one is about a fight in a pub, right? This American guy coming into an Australian pub meets people and a fight breaks out. And then it's kind of like he experiences that and then wakes up the next morning with a hangover. And I want to insert I've got like 20 Australian slang words, words and phrases related to piss, getting on the piss, taking the piss, going to the pub, pints, schooners, all that sort of stuff. And I list that and then I say, write me a story about an American's experience going to an Australian pub in the outback.

Using these words.

Include two other interesting characters that have become his friends and have, um, you know, an altercation happen in the pub and it just spits out an arc. Like a story arc, and I'll be like, change this bit, do this bit. I don't like that. Can you expand on this? And then I'll be like, now write the full story and include all that vocab in there. And it just it literally takes 30s. It's just phenomenal. And again, you read it and it's not like it's it's IQ 100. You know, like it's pretty good. You'd get a B+. You know, as you say, sometimes it's verbose, sometimes it's too simplistic. But again you can just say give me five variations, um, in different levels of English, you know, or different levels of verbosity. Like how much is the different levels of how much, how much, how descriptive you want to be? Shorten this. Don't be as verbose with this and it just spits them out. And again, you still have to be the one at the top, kind of pulling the strings and changing it and adapting it. Because of course, the first thing that comes out is isn't necessarily ideal at the moment, but just the speed at which you can do it. You know, because we were working on on stuff previously for the Academy, some of the modules that we were writing, and it would be like the kind of thing that would take you a day or more to write an essay on..

And now you can do it in an hour.

And it's probably not as good. And it's not, I mean, but I think if you were to if you did it, you know, say you were if I gave you the task of write a story about XYZ, and you did it in conjunction with ChatGPT, it would just speed the process up because you just get like a format and everything and, you know, laid out in front of you. And it can do things like spell check and it's just. Yeah, but.

Yeah. So how does it go in languages other than English? Have you tried it in French or Portuguese that you can..

It apparently does it all in all of them. Like there was, I had one of those thoughts recently where I'm like, business idea wise, are there people out there who've created an app that just is a wrapper around an AI that can talk to you like a language buddy, and you can just have conversations with them in whatever language. Sure enough, someone had created an app that was effectively ChatGPT in a wrapper, um, through WhatsApp, and you could just have conversations with the different avatars that are there, right? In 380 languages. And obviously, you know, they're probably.

So is it doing it? Is it doing everything in English and translating, or is it doing it in the languages natively? Because I'm only thinking about like if it's creative writing, is it write me a story about this. You can do it in any language.

It depends on what you're asking, right? Like if you're asking about the history of George Washington.

Yeah, it's only going to be in American English..

In Spanish or English.

Yeah yeah yeah. It's not going to be in Chinese.

95% of the internet is in English. And so it's sourcing.

Yeah.

Pseudo factual information from there. But if you're just asking it to generate a creative writing piece, then it's just throwing random words together. It's a different thing. But.

Well yeah. But it's just it's absolutely blown my mind. Just the application. Like you can just use it for so many things. I had a chat to it the other day. You know, he was like, Hey, ChatGPT, you know, I'm thinking about doing this. What do you think of this? This person said this like, I've got a friend who talks to it like a psychiatrist at times and gets like this non-judgmental, very neutral kind of responses back, you know, of like..

If it was like a psychiatrist, it wouldn't get a response. Everything would be a question.

Yeah, exactly. And so it's really interesting.

Which is a cliche. I've never been to a psychiatrist, but.

Yeah. Anyway, we got off topic.

We did Phillip Island. Yeah. So we went to Phillip Island and we, for me it's I love it because it's got things for everybody. It's I love the beaches and the rocky shores and the scenery and stuff, but there's penguins, which. Yeah, which the penguins, which the kids really enjoyed. Um, and, um,

Do you want to explain the story there, with the little penguins?

Yeah. Well, little penguins, the smallest species of penguin in the world. The largest breeding population of them is on Phillip Island. And in fact, it's on one end of one little beach at the end of Phillip Island. Um, and some associated bits around there, but, um, and it's become a second or third biggest tourist attraction in Victoria. Um, it's been going for over 70 years and obviously it's continued to grow. Um, and the penguins, um, mostly are when they're in breeding, which they've just started their breeding cycle. Breeding starts around September, October and goes through till February, March. Um, they're mostly coming up every night, so they go out fishing, you know, feeding.

So they do that obviously locally.

Um, yeah. They can go up to 20km away, right? Um, in a day.

Wow.

Um, they can go further if they're not, if they're during the winter, they go further because they'll stay out for a week. They won't they won't come back at night. Um, but the. So they'll go out fishing during the day. Um, and then come back at night and they come back right, right at dusk, when there's still enough light for them to be able to see. But it's after most of the predators, which are mostly birds of prey and large gulls and things.

Yeah.

Um, have, uh, you know, are no longer going to be out looking for or hunting. Um, and so they and they've always come up in huge numbers at this particular beach. And so it became a tourist attraction in the 19, late 1950s, early 1960s. And it's just developed since then. So you go and you pay squillions of dollars now, but you, you know, you go and sit down on these concrete benches and get a running commentary behind you for a while. Um, in English and Chinese. Mandarin. Um, and, uh, the penguins will come up in little, they call them rafts, where they actually sit out at sea just beyond the break the shore, the waves breaking, um, and hang out until they get enough numbers, and they'll come up and march up the beach and go up into the, uh, the dunes where they're nesting. Um, so it's great to watch that sort of which is it's a completely contrived environment now, but it's still a natural thing that happens. The the penguins behaviour has not been altered by having this thing there. And now, of course, because it's been there so long, most of those penguins that are coming up will have been born there.

Isn't all of them, right?

They'll be.

It's been on for 70 years.

There'll be tens of generations old, where that's their world, is with this big concrete stand with, you know, a few thousand people sitting there watching them every night.

Yeah, it's not weird for them. It didn't just appear overnight. It's always been there. What was your experience raising them? Because you've got an interesting story there, right? With them having a bathtub full of little penguins?

Yeah. One of our, one of our friends from university used to be the. In fact, he was there for 40 years or something as the the professional biologist that worked at the penguin parade, running research programs there. Um, and, um, we were we were staying with him once when we went down to Phillip Island years and years ago. And it was it was the first year we were married because the house we were living in, I remember it. Um, and he'd had a couple of eggs that had been rescued from a poacher. Somebody had taken them out of a nest and was caught. Um, and because they, you know, they obviously don't know where they were taken from and the person's never going to admit it. So he had them..

What, they'd done to what? Eat them? Sell them?

Eat them.

Give them away? Really?

Yeah.

Jesus.

Um. And.

Get a chicken!

Yeah. Well, exactly. Um. But he. So he incubated them. And then by the time we were down there, they were, you know, half grown. Mhm. Um, and he was going away for a week on a, on a couple of weeks on a research project that he was working at down at Gabo Island, which is right on the, off the east coast of Victoria. And, and he just said, can you guys look after them for a couple of weeks? And so we took them home and we had them in our bath and with a little box in the bath so they could, you know, get under shelter and things. And um, and we had to go down to the market every couple of days and get fresh fish..

Pilchards or something..

Pilchards. Yeah. And feed them. And these penguins just squawking in our bath for a couple of weeks. And then we took them back down to his place when he was back.

What happened with them in the end?

He just, when they, when they got to the point where they have they have to fledge. So they have to moult. Because obviously fledging doesn't mean much in a penguin because normally fledging is when they can fly.

But they have to get rid of that.

To get rid of that downy.

Otherwise they'd sink like a stone.

Yeah. It's not waterproof. So once they got their waterproof feathers, they're proper adult feathers. Then he just released them back into the colony. So. Yeah. So that was fun. So, yeah, we've got a long history with Phillip Island and.

Yeah.

So it's a good place to go. So yeah, hopefully you guys and the kids had fun.

Oh, definitely. Well, you discussed that. So we got a place on Airbnb.

Yeah.

And backed onto the beach.

Backed onto the beach, which was one of the things to do. And it backed onto the, the bay beach.

Great.

Um, and.

What do you mean by that?

Well, the Phillip Island is, it basically blocks off about 90% of the opening of Western Port Bay.

Well, it's like yeah, it's like you've got you've got like Port Phillip Bay type thing. And then the interior of it is just a huge island in the middle of it.

Yes.

Taking up a lot of space..

With half of it is taken up by French Island, and then Phillip Island is sort of closes off the gap. So the east end of Phillip Island has a bridge that you can get over to it. So it's not you don't have to go to a ferry or anything, it's just a bridge driving across it. And so it's quite narrow. The western end is a few kilometres across back to the mainland, but so there's, there's the bay beaches on the northern side and then the ocean beaches, which are the surf beaches on the southern side. So yeah, I tried to find a house that has on the beach on the bay side. So it's a safe beach, and the kids just went and mucked around in the sand and the water.

And it was crazy because, yeah, it was, oh my God, I can't imagine what it would have been like growing up in your childhood sort of era and being able to afford those kinds of houses and just having a back on to the beach. Obviously you'd need a job that could allow you to be there, down there, or to have enough money to have a holiday house down there because it's a few hours away from Melbourne. But still, it's just like, good grief, you know, those houses would be what? Over $1 million now?

Yeah.

And but it's incredible that you've got somewhere so close to Melbourne where it literally backs onto the beach and you can just walk out and be like, Hey!

Yeah, exactly.

Just walk along the beach. So it'd be a good place to retire, right?

Yeah. Yeah, it's a good spot. So I like it down there.

Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, I guess that's this episode. See you in the next one, guys!

And AI!

Yeah. That's it. Now we're connected. See yah!

Bye!