In this no-holds-barred episode of _Futuristic_, Cameron and Steve riff on the explosive Musk–Trump bromance breakup, likening it to the fall of the Roman Republic’s first triumvirate—yes, molten gold makes a cameo. They dissect the potential death of democracy via Section 70302 of Trump’s new bill, the myth of AI regulation in the U.S., and whether AGI is already here. Steve introduces his “Three S’s of Sentience” while Cameron defends LLMs as sanity check partners. They debate whether Sam Altman is sounding the alarm or just building the bomb. Plus: shrunken-head humans, punk rock AI songs, and China’s “Three Body” space supercomputer. It’s wild, it’s weird, it’s wicked smart.

### **Timestamps & Segment Breakdown**

– **00:00 ** – Cameron vs. Steve: FUPO or FUP? Naming the post-truth age

– **01:00 ** – Musk & Trump: The “Dumvirate” falls apart

– **03:00 ** – Ancient Rome parallels: Pompey, Crassus, Caesar… and Elon

– **06:00 ** – Who’s more powerful: The billionaire or the guy with the red pen?

– **08:00 ** – Section 70302 and AI regulation ban in the “One Big Beautiful Bill”

– **10:00 ** – Why AI regulation in the U.S. is a fantasy

– **12:00 ** – Steve’s “Three S’s” of AI sentience: Self-awareness, preservation, direction

– **16:00 ** – Professors vs. ChatGPT: Ancient History plagiarism wars

– **19:00 ** – How to teach with AI: Real-world classroom hacks

– **24:00 ** – Cameron’s fact-checking workflow with LLMs

– **26:00 ** – Brain atrophy vs. augmentation: The Mind Gym

– **29:00 ** – Fake Everything: Steve’s AI-generated punk song debut

– **38:00 ** – VEO3 sketch comedy, sitcoms, and AI-generated content

– **41:00 ** – AI-generated ads and the rise of synthetic influencers

– **43:00 ** – Willy Wonka was a chocolate marketing gimmick?

– **45:00 ** – Australia’s limp AI policy response

– **47:00 ** – The Australian AI Expert Group: Missing in inaction

– **49:00 ** – Sakana’s Darwin Gödel Machine: AI improving itself

– **54:00 ** – Altman & Anthropic sound the “scary times ahead” alarm

– **56:00 ** – Should the AI builders be allowed to warn us?

– **60:00 ** – China’s orbital AI supercomputer and the Three Body Constellation

– **63:00 ** – Dark Forest theory: Why SETI might doom us all

– **65:00 ** – Fox channels Liu Cixin; Voyager dissed

[00:00:00 ]

Cameron: well, let’s do it. Futuristic episode 40, Steve. The big four zero. We’ve reached that time in a young man’s life when, um, he can do other things. I dunno what that means, but, uh, we’re back two, two weeks in a row. This is, uh, getting to be a bit of a habit, Steve. It’s a kind of habit that

Steve: I can believe in Mr.

Riley because some habits send you to the grave and some send you up into the clouds with AI and God and all of those things that no one understands. But today, on the futuristic understanding will be something you have more of at the end of it, who we have reverb.

Cameron: What I’m not understanding is your glasses, Steve.

That’s what, look,

Steve: here’s what I had the conclusion. I’ve been busting out the chemist warehouse model. I’ll show you what they are. I lost my ray bands, not the Zuck ones. They’re, they’re, they’re the standard. [00:01:00 ] RayBan Ripoffs. And I just, when I was watching the playback last week, I wasn’t that happy and I thought I need some chunky, funky, which say, this guy’s got a level of arrogance to wear these sunglasses that he must know what the fuck he’s talking about.

That’s my strategy and I hope you like it.

Cameron: I do. I, I, I wear that and I, um, I was at a thing for Fox’s, um, high school last weekend and was talking to a guy I, I know a little bit, Mike Chambers, who works for Amazon Web Services, and immediately I said, Hey Fox, look what he’s wearing. He had the meta, uh, glasses on and uh, we had a big chat about AI and he’s gonna come on the show.

He’s over in the US launching something for Amazon at the moment. When he gets back, he’s gonna come on the show and we’re gonna chat about Meta and the thing he just launched, and we had this argument about whether or not. Open source, LLMs are really open source. He is. Got some strong opinions on that.

So look forward to having [00:02:00 ] Mike on the show hopefully in a few weeks time.

Steve: Terrific. Sounds good. Sounds like the kind of thing I can believe in. Cameron.

Cameron: Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what you can’t believe in anymore, Steve. Is anything you ever see online? That’s true. The big, that’s true. There’s been a lot of things drop this in the last week.

A lot of big news. Um, OpenAI has just bought, Johnny i’s, uh, design firm for six and a half billion dollars, but not Johnny. He’s not part of the package. He will not be bought, but he’s gonna be a consultant. But it sounds like they’re taking on the iPhone. Sam has said that the first thing that they’re gonna come out with isn’t an iPhone, but it’s so, so big, so big and beautiful and huge.

It’s gonna change the world forever. He hasn’t tell us, told us what it is, but it’s gonna be big open. A also released Codex in the last week, which is their new [00:03:00 ] coding platform, which is like cursor on steroids. Um. But the big news that I think you and I really wanna talk about today is the ton of stuff that Google released in their IO conference this week.

AI Mode Project Astra, project Mariner. But the big, big thing I think, and I think you agree with me, is VO three, the new generation of their ai, LLM based video generating tool. And the big thing about this compared to Sawa and all the other things that we’ve seen before is it now does audio with the video, you can make the characters talk and already.

In the last week, we have all seen examples of this being [00:04:00 ] created by developers, creators out there, which are absolutely earth shattering and mind blowing, I think, for a whole bunch of reasons. So I’m prepared to call it. Right now, Hollywood is done, actors are done, and I’ve been saying this for a couple of years.

You know, one of my sons Hunter just got back, I picked him up from LA at 5:00 AM 6:00 AM this morning. He just flew back in. He’s trying to break in into the movie business. He’s the one with a couple of million followers on TikTok. He wants to be an actor, he wants to make movies, and I’ve been telling him for the last couple of years, dude, I don’t think Hollywood’s gonna be around much longer like you want it to be.

I, I think the days of the a hundred million dollars superhero blockbusters are gone because I. You know, 14-year-old in Manila is gonna be able to make a superhero movie for $10 a year or two from now, and it’ll be a masterpiece and there will be no [00:05:00 ] actors. It’ll just be prompt generated. Hollywood is clinging to a dying model.

It’s, I mean, there will, yeah, we’ve talked about this before. I think that real humans acting in film or TV a few years from now, not a few, five, 10 years from now,

Cameron (2): less will,

Cameron: will be like doing amateur theater today. It’ll be something you do for the love of it. You don’t do it for the money, you don’t do it for the fame, you don’t do it for the glory.

I think we have seen the last generation of professional actors who, you know, uh, the rich, famous Hollywood style acting, I think is. Gone