In Episode 37 of Futuristic, Cameron Reilly and Steve Sammartino speak to a “digital human”!. They also get into a provocative discussion ranging from Donald Trump’s car yard antics to the implications of advanced artificial intelligence and China’s rising technological dominance. They explore the intersection of crypto, agentic AI models, and new breakthroughs in AI-driven tech developments like humanoid robotics, diffusion-based language models, and synthetic voice AI. Wrapping up with conspiracy theories about tech manipulation of human perception of time, the hosts challenge listeners to reconsider assumptions about where technology is heading and who might ultimately hold the power.

FUT 37 Audio

Cameron: [00:00:00 ] Hey, hey, it’s futuristic time. Cameron Reilly with Steve Sammartino. It’s been a while. Steve, how have you been since we last did one of these things?

Steve: I’ve been good, but anxious. There you go. Just dropping that on everyone, but

Cameron: Anxious.

Steve: Yeah

Cameron: Not that there’s anything going

on in the world to be

anxious about, Steve. everything’s

Steve: Well,

Cameron: going completely smoothly and fine. Perfect. You’re going

Steve: but my favorite thing I

Cameron: it is.

Steve: yeah, that’s true. Well, it’s certainly not boring but my favorite thing this week was Donald Trump turning the White House into a secondhand car yard. I love that I cannot tell you how much joy that brought me. I and my favorite bit is he said, wow, everything’s computer.

That was the best thing. computer. And as soon as I [00:01:00 ] saw it, I went on

and I, you could

buy t shirts within a second. There’s, there’s a meme coin on pump. fun called everything’s computer, which I

loved. I want to buy it.

Look, people are investing in Bitcoin, not

1. I’m investing in everything’s computer meme coin.

Cameron: Mm. I’m pretty sure, you know, Trump’s such a brilliant strategist that that was deliberate. It’s his meme coin. He’s the guy selling the t shirts. Because he needs all

the money he can get. So does Elon, right now.

Steve: Imagine if this was all

strategic, and he’d

just taken us for a ride for a really long time. Even going broke in the late 90s, that could have been part of his strategy, the TV show,

getting back on, money, money, money, the apprentice, all this, who knows.

Cameron: I’m sure there are people out there who believe that to be true. That it’s all part of a cunning plan. This is

episode 37 of Futuristic, just in case you’re counting. Uh, it’s been a crazy few weeks since we [00:02:00 ] spoke, Steve. Seeing the President of the United States turning the White House into a car yard probably not the craziest thing that I’ve seen happen in the last few weeks.

Uh, but it’s up there. Before we get into the news of the last couple of weeks though, the futuristic news, tell me about what you’ve been doing you feel is futuristic, Steve.

Steve: I attended policy week in Sydney this week, which was,

Cameron: that sounds exciting and futuristic y.

Steve: well wait a minute, it was policy week for the future of finance. So it was filled with A lot of blockchain, tokenization, sovereign funds, mean coins, and crypto people. Some of whom arrived on private jets. It was pretty interesting. It was run by blockchain APAC. Vallis, you might know him, runs that. And he invited me along to sit in some rooms and do some roundtables. I realized that that that [00:03:00 ] whole, uh, cryptography, future of finance, DLT world is just deep and so many wormholes that you’re in it full time, it’s one of those things you just can’t keep up with and even though I’m more I think this year there’s going to start to be a bit of an overlap there with the agentic stuff that’s coming through.

So that, that was interesting. And, uh, they, they live in a different world. They, they, uh, talking about things that, May never happen, it’s funny how if you have one piece of super financial success, and many of them are riding on the coattails of Bitcoin, it’s built this entire new ecosystem underneath there that is almost unto itself.

The assistant treasurer came up and did a little talk at the one of the drinks, so they are getting the attention of policy wonks, but think it’s just because there’s so much money there, they have to pay [00:04:00 ] attention. But a lot of the stuff that they’re talking about, whether or not it comes to fruition, I’m clearer now than I was when I went and spent three days there.

Hahaha.

Cameron: to me what DLT is and how it’s different from a BLT, which used to be my favorite go to lunch in the nineties. So

Steve: which is really what blockchains And so distributed ledger technology gives the ability for any, any type of coin. Uh, but one of the big areas that they talk a lot about now is tokenization, which is you can take things from the physical world. And split them up into pieces and liquefy assets that are illiquid. So people can own parts of something. I mean you can do that and people do that all the time now with things like companies and boats and houses. But it makes it highly liquid and easy for people to transfer, uh, assets and get access to assets that are too expensive in their raw form. [00:05:00 ] And obviously with the housing crisis is one of the key topic areas.

Cameron: I guess the most important thing I want to know about all of that is how is Donald Trump going to exploit it to make a buck in the next six months? Yeah.

Steve: Well, I think he’s, he’s already done that with his, his own meme coins, I guess, I think it’s just so easy for anyone to create DLT technologies now. And I think agentics going to make it even easier. There’s a website called pump. fun, which is really interesting way where meme coins get minted and made. And every day there’s a couple of meme coins that have market caps of anywhere between 10 and 15 million. it’s, and it’s insane. It’s this insane world. I think making financial tools easier to use, which are still highly unregulated, it just creates [00:06:00 ] the potential for financial tyranny.

Cameron: Or, as is one of the conspiracy theories around the Trump coin, a really easy way to raise a lot of untraceable funds from places like China that go straight into your bank account and can see. Come for their meeting at the White House and show you the ledger records, the DLT records that say that they bought 10 million of that Trump coin.

Therefore they want to get a seat at the table. Uh, well, Steve, my, um, thing I wanted to mention for this week is I played around with OpenAI’s deep research again. I think I told you last time I tried it on my Task where it didn’t work very well. I then tried to get it to write some code to help me do that.

That didn’t work very well either, but been doing a lot of shows for one of [00:07:00 ] my other podcasts on what I call the foreign aid shell game. And I’ve been talking about NATO funding as part of that. NATO economics and how it’s basically a shell game. And, I went into deep research and I said, here’s what I want to know.

I want to k