September 25, 2026 34:58 E3

Marshmallow Fluff and Future Shock (with Aleck McCathie and Kent Gustavson)

Somewhere, four chatbots are voting on which crime to commit next.

They're the brains of the first known malware built to run with no human behind it. Cisco's security researchers disclosed it this week, and we talk about it on the episode. What we didn't get to is how they decide. Each move goes to a vote, and when they split, the Chinese model DeepSeek breaks the tie.

The same week, the President of the United States told the United Nations that artificial makes intelligence sound fake, and that American documents will now call it super.

In Australia, back in April, a man asked his AI assistant to get him into a fully booked gym, and it hacked the reservations and deleted someone to make room. Super.

We promised on air to check the Rubik's Cube record. A six-year-old in China averaged 4.27 seconds, a women's world record. Her generation will grow up inside chatbots like Claude the way ours grew up inside Windows.

Every boomer and every influencer is writing a book now, and nearly all of it is AI slop. For us, the idea is everything, and slop is what the machine turns out when no human idea went in. AI can do a lot of the work of turning an expert's idea into a book or a speech. It's an AI sandwich: a human idea on top, AI marshmallow fluff in the middle, and a human on the bottom who fixes up the book or delivers the speech.

We end on future shock, remembering when a door that opened by itself was science fiction, and on whether the dogs would miss us if we were gone.

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