The Science behind the Chin, Hershey's degrading Chocolate, and Book Red Flags!

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1:14James Colley: Hey, this is Adam Grant, host of Ted's podcast, Rethinking with Adam Grant. Let me share with you why smart finance leaders turn to Bill. They know that clarity isn't just helpful, it's strategic. As the intelligent finance platform, Bill uses AI to automate the busy work for nearly half a million businesses so they can focus on intentional growth. Eliminate the friction and start scaling with the proven choice. Visit bill.com slash proven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a$250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply.

1:45James Colley: See offer page for details. Tired of your car insurance rate going up even with a clean driving record? You're not alone. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry compares rates side by side from over 50 top insurers and helps you switch with ease. Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over$1 ,300 a year. Switch with confidence. Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.ai slash ACAST today. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.

2:24James Colley: It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

2:35Alice Fraser: Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com. Welcome to Season 2 of The Gargle, the fortnightly tech and science pull-out section of The Bugles audio newspaper for a visual world, now available in a visual format via our YouTube channel, thereby directly contradicting the sub-headline of The Audio newspaper. And did you know, science fact, that the pull-out section is not ineffective as a contraceptive, but you can probably do better.

3:10Alice Fraser: I'm your host, Alice Fraser, and you can probably tell from my voice that the vaunting ambition that has led me to bring The Gargle back to life has immediately stricken me down. with some sort of hideous disease and also possibly the laziest dirty punchlines for every possible joke I've written today. So I apologise in advance for how many jokes will be about penises this week. Speaking of which, I would like to introduce our guests for this week. Welcome. Returning from the long trek across the deathly swamp with only a Bunsen burner and a rain hood for company, it's James Colley.

3:41Josh Gondelman: Hello. Thank you. It's so nice to be anywhere after that trek.

3:47Alice Fraser: And seeking forgiveness for the technological monstrosity he just cyber jacked into sentience, but now it's gone mad and turned all pornography on the internet into an AI deepfake of your mum. It's Josh Gondelman.

3:59James Colley: Thank you so much. I don't deserve forgiveness, but I will grovel for it. That's kind of a blanket statement about my personality.

4:08Alice Fraser: And the front cover of this week's magazine is a picture of a sexy space station flaps akimbo, hustly, tempting billionaires to shoot millions and billions of dollars into space. Also, science fact, jizzing into space is the number one cause of pregnant moon. And also the saying, shoot for the moon, which I cannot emphasize enough again, is about sex. I do actually have a running hypothesis that old men taking high doses of TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, is what is ruining the world. Like, you know, you're sort of meant to fight your way to the top with aggression and no mercy. And then you get to about sort of 55 and you wake in the morning at like 3 a.m.

4:54Alice Fraser: suddenly stricken with regret and fear and go, maybe I should build a library. you know you're sort of you're meant to come down off the testosterone high but now there's all these men who are like on 22 year old man jacked up levels of testosterone and instead of sort of considering how they might you know return some seed to the earth there you know they go i need to send my ticket to space very um i think doctors are to blame uh functionally speaking

5:20Josh Gondelman: well this used to be like the great the dream of particularly the Australian male used to be to become successful enough that you can buy the strangest car on the market and circle it around your town getting it's the only kind of like positive attention you can get at that stage and and now they're trying to make out in the back seat you're right it's a terrible idea

5:42James Colley: genuinely bad josh and alice i want to circle back to something you said which is that uh doctors are at fault and i don't know if you know this doctors are the number one cause of knowing that you have cancer without doctors you would just be like oh that's weird uh and go about your day and so i do i do think doctors are to blame for a lot of things i'm not sure if i've told you this

6:04Josh Gondelman: but i like something that like really undid any good there was a big push in my in my town for doctors without borders run and um i like put a donation in and i signed off each one with get yourself some borders, which I feel like undoes any positive of the actual charitable contribution because if it wasn't that funny, I wouldn't have done it, if I'm honest. I only donated for the joke.

6:30Alice Fraser: I believe we have a new charitable outreach program instead of charity muggers on the street to stand-up comedians. I take it back immediately. I'm contemplating this. It's a terrible idea.

6:44Alice Fraser: The headlines of this week in a world where any given explosion could be a domestic, a terrorist attack by disgruntled Reddit investors or a gender reveal party gone wrong, an environment of political discourse laden with so many straw men, it's got to be a fire hazard. We are the orally penetrative or glossy magazine to the Bugles Audio newspaper for a visual world. The headline this week, the front cover, is a picture of pervert Andrew Mountbatten-Windsner hideously deepfake mashup with beauty influencer Tati Westbrook and the monstrous chimera thus created is saying, and you did it on my birthday, which is only funny to the people who are into 2016 beauty YouTube scandal culture and also royals being arrested for general sex crime related grossness.

7:29Alice Fraser: Top stories this week. The Mankind with discussions on the rise about what constitutes humanity we have at last achieved an answer and it is chins. Yes, not self-awareness or language or couples therapy that takes us above the animals. It is chins. James Colley, as a man with a handsome chin, can you stare powerfully into the upper quadrant of the frame while you tell us a little bit more about this story?

7:55Josh Gondelman: Well, so this comes from the University of Buffalo. Now the team to run this research, the team at the University of Buffalo, investigated the collection of 532 skulls they just so happen to have lying about. Don't worry about it. Thank you for coming, Mr. Colombo. No further questions. Thank you. Now, this is a complicated story. I'm not sure how complicated they think it is because I'm going to quote new scientists here. In simple terms, the chin is a bony projection of the lower jaw that extends beyond the front teeth, to which the average new scientist subscriber probably went, oh, Oh, Jen.

8:34James Colley: We mean this in the dark. Okay, so. Is that how you spell that? I'd only been hearing it out loud. They found out why I have a chine.

8:45Alice Fraser: A chine? What's a chine? Oh, a chine.

8:50Josh Gondelman: We have our reason. Very, very exciting. Drum roll, please. And it is no reason. We just have them. Evolutionarily speaking, we were working on something else at the time and ended up with a chin. We acquired chins in the same way that I have children. It wasn't what I was trying to do, but it was more of an offshoot of what happened.

9:10Alice Fraser: Look, you were not not trying.

9:15Josh Gondelman: It's like if we get some research out of this, sure, who cares? But I think like, so as, and Alice, you're similar, as the owner and operator of a four-year-old child, like you can assure the question, why do we have chins was going to come up sooner or later and to be able to confidently answer, oh, don't worry about it, watch TV, is going to be really helpful for me. I tried to take a couple of punts at it for us. So none of our close relatives have chins. The simple scientific reason for this is that apes and other hominids do not have a soul and therefore cannot wear a soul patch. And so without the soul patch, They're simply evolution steps in and doesn't allow it.

10:00Josh Gondelman: And as homo sapiens evolved and slowly gained consciousness, football allegiances, acoustic guitars, hacky sax and penny farthings, there was suddenly a plethora of reasons we would need to be punched square in the jaw. And therefore nature provided one. So that's my theory of why it's happened.

10:16James Colley: There was previously a theory that the chin existed to protect the kind of tender parts of your neck and throat. But all that really means is it's way more likely for your face to get f***ed up if someone swings on you. Just a real pointy part at the bottom of your face to land an uppercut on.

10:36Josh Gondelman: Good news, we found a way to protect your thigh. We've put a ball bag right in front of it.

10:41James Colley: That's right. It's just kind of a soft landing pad for fists and knees against your thighs. Also, because there were many hypotheses before this current one, and others thought that the chin was attractive to potential mates, and that's why we selected for it as an evolutionary trade, which is interesting because I would always think that would go the other way. Like, what is a chin if not a canvas for soup and barbecue sauce rendering you unable to reproduce?

11:06Josh Gondelman: I would say as an exposed chin haver, like to me it gives me more the affectation of a cartoon bulldog than it has ever any kind of prowess or indication.

11:16Alice Fraser: I, you know, I am glad that this research has come out because it gives me something to point to when in conversation with my aforementioned four-year-old. Although I have to say I do appreciate the requirement to constantly deduce first principles from any order of magnitude. For example, I was asked today why you don't put your fingers in your mouth in public, and I had to explain that it makes people feel quite insecure to have attention brought to the places that lead to the inside of your body because people don't like being reminded that the inside of their body is squishy and disgusting.

11:53Alice Fraser: And so we don't touch any of our holes in public. And I feel like I can stand behind that as a principle.

12:00James Colley: That's not bad at all. Yeah, make sure it better for me

12:02Josh Gondelman: because I would have gone with it's yuck.

12:07James Colley: One interesting thing about this, I didn't know this before, but there is the idea of a chin is what's known in evolutionary science as a spandrel, perhaps, which is a feature that evolved incidentally along with a more crucial attribute. Although Spandrel does sound like the offspring of a spaniel and a mandrel. Who knows where they met? And it seems like the chin might be a result, right? Like, it's not like we need a chin, but it's because that's what comes along with our upright posture, large heads and small teeth, which is so funny to me to think about, like when you talk about a leading man in a movie having a strong jawline, What we're also impressed by are his itty bitty baby incisors.

12:50James Colley: Which I just, I don't know. It's so fun. And it's also like the idea of it makes me think that like maybe celery only exists because we also have buffalo wings and blue cheese dressing.

13:06Josh Gondelman: I just love the thought of being like, oh, that Gregory Peck, that Cary Grant, neither of them. They were soup only people. You've got to look at it.

13:15Alice Fraser: Look, if I know anything about evolution, and I do not, my guess is that this body protrusion was on its way to trying to become a crab. Dude.

13:27James Colley: Face crab. Very important.

13:31Alice Fraser: And that brings me to a chocolate tempest in a normal teacup. This is the news that the grandson of the Reese's family, Fortune, has accused Hershey of degrading his ancestral family's chocolate, making it, quote, not edible, end quote. Josh Gondelman, you are living in the loading screen of the ruins of a once great empire. Can you let us know more about this story?

13:58James Colley: Thank you for the credit you gave to the past of the United States of America. Yes. So in a letter to Hershey's corporate brand manager, the grandson of the inventor of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup allege that the company is hurting the Reese's brand. Hershey's now owns Reese's and is hurting the Reese's brand by using inferior ingredients. I say grandson, but he is 70 years old and there should be a different word for an old man who's someone's son's son, technically. But you already knew he was 70 years old from the fact that he sent a candy company a letter. He's upset that the Hershey's company And you started using lower quality milk, chocolate, and peanut butter.

14:40James Colley: And those are the key ingredients in the flagship peanut butter cup. If you replace all of those things with other ingredients but keep it in the same shape, you have what I would call a real ship of Reese's situation on your hand. Cup of Reese's? It doesn't make sense either way. Hershey has acknowledged that it changed the formula for some Reese's products. They've stopped claiming that the cups contain milk chocolate, which has a specific compositional ratio. and now they say peanut cream instead of peanut butter. And at this point, they might as well go ahead and call them peanut scented cups or brown smudge covered allergen paste.

15:14James Colley: Brad Reese, who's the name of the grandson, which Brad, great grandson name, often quotes his grandfather's philosophy. Give him quality. It's the best advertising, which is kind of a beautiful way to approach commerce. Yeah. Although it does feel a little old timey. Nowadays, the best advertising seems to be see if Matthew McConaughey is available or slightly change the words to a Backstreet Boys song since they appear to need the money. Even more unfortunately, this dispute has done nothing to clear up the company's longstanding controversy over whether it's Reese's Pieces or Reese's Pieces.

15:51James Colley: And we may never know.

15:54Alice Fraser: I mean, the degradation of the process of providing consumers with a product has become wildly extreme. I'm glad that people are noticing. The nature of modern capitalism is that soon all chocolate will become a subscription to the option to buy chocolate as a monthly service, and then the base product will become so adulterated you'll have to up your subscription to the option to buy chocolate that doesn't taste like shit, and then they'll start replacing every fourth square of non-subscription service chocolate with actual human or rat feces, and the people at the highest subscription levels will get to place bets on when their poorer friends and family go, what the f*** is that?

16:30Alice Fraser: and you can make your fortune.

16:32James Colley: The entire American economy then will become based on you can bet online whether your chocolate subscription will actually arrive or not.

16:41Josh Gondelman: I actually own a dot PNG of the part of the forest that the chocolate would have been gotten from if they could still produce chocolate or forests. I found there were parts of this that I became obsessed with. Mr. Peasy, as mentioned, penned his letter on Valentine's Day, a Valentine's Day LinkedIn post, which Hemingway eat your heart out. For sale baby shoes. Here are six lessons I learned about managing a team by selling my baby and its shoes.

17:14Alice Fraser: I never got why that was a sad story. People give you heaps of baby shoes that your child will never wear. Babies don't need shoes. They can't walk.

17:22Josh Gondelman: I have desperately wanted a shoe store to say,

17:26James Colley: for sale comma baby shoes never worn also if you think about it as coming from a store in that way then it's like well then it's not sad at all you don't expect someone to have worn the baby shoes in the store that's like the condition of a store i i do agree on this story i do agree

17:43Josh Gondelman: that uh the reese's pieces are cutting corners because they're little round chocolates uh and The other thing that's useful to say is that we have given the, again, and I feel we cannot overemphasize this, this very old grandson. One of the oldest grandsons you can imagine. Like, you know, like the first couple moments of Benjamin Button? That's him. That's who he is. um the that the the old grandson is um he seems to be as we've told the story so far quite dignified in his response but he also uh changed his home page to have an orange cap that has this phrase make Reese's great again which I guess is just the only way we can do protests now you have to pick a color and a hat and it's just tinge of fascism I I do get it though like this is this This is his grandfather's legacy.

18:38Josh Gondelman: His grandfather fought, died, and yes, killed for these chocolates. In World War I, he would capture krauts, he would scoop out their inards, and he'd replace them with peanut butter. And decades later, when he worked out it tasted even better in chocolate, the company took off. And I can understand wanting to preserve that memory.

18:57Alice Fraser: Speaking of preserving memories, farts, there is now a Fitbit for farts. It is allegedly very serious.

19:07James Colley: I'm getting word that you just won the Nobel Prize for segues.

19:15Alice Fraser: That is a science story. As some of our science stories, it looks like they're going to be very funny, but actually they're quite serious and important. So this story about farts, James Colley, because of your gourmand supertaster connoisseurship interest in this area, you are our farts correspondent. Please tell us a little bit more about this story. I'm also the scientist on the okay I do have my science screen it's and if you want to know

19:45Josh Gondelman: it's worth it is literally at this moment in a box holding up my laptop which is about as much use as I've ever gotten out of it but it's there um every every time I come on the gargle I am forced to once again explain that I do not hate science this show makes me hate science so the fifth bit for farts this is a era of quote smart underwear which i simply do not trust because any underwear of sufficient intelligence to become aware of itself and its purpose will be tempted to kill itself and obligated to kill me uh so up until now artificial intelligence hasn't gotten that far um up until now methods of gastrointestinal science relied on self-reporting which is notoriously difficult, not just to accrue data, but also get an accurate reportee because we all know it's the one who smells it that dealt it.

20:43Josh Gondelman: And scientists say this could have practical applications, a creation of this smart underwear that tracks your flatulence. I moved my glasses there as if I was making the important point. I just don't want to say smart a hundred times, but it's good. Like it could have practical applications, which is good because it's underwear and it should have practical

21:02Alice Fraser: applications uh all i need is like seen the women's lingerie section i see that there's three main functions for undergarments and they ought to be uh uh covering the bits you're meant to cover uh absorption and warmth and there are products on the market that offer none of those things

21:19Josh Gondelman: look all i really want and if if artificial intelligence can help with this sorry if artificial intelligence could help with this sure i just need a certainty meter that's something that works on like kind of the same accuracy as the feels like temperature that you're like farting coming 82 % certainty just so I know what kind of risk I am taking uh so this study on average before the study in the before times we'll always know it as the bf the before fart study uh it was thought that people had about 14 farts a day why did we think that much we just picked a number and no one questioned it for thousands of years.

22:00Josh Gondelman: And then in this study, it has been up to 32 as a more accurate number. And in one case, in one person studying this, 59. Now researchers considered studying this participant more than thought about it and went, no, actually, you know what, you're fine because be free. They also apparently created an artificial but for this project so they say which is also what i would say were i caught with an artificial butt that it's for the science program i'm doing that's helping people all over um this is for a study that is apparently going to be called the human flatus atlas flatus atlas uh but it should be called the human flattest actors should be called um and about this point i realized there are about 4 000 different ways to go with this joke so i went with the telltale fart but if you the dear listeners to the gargoyle send your idea to alice fraser for a penguin classic with one word replaced with fart i can guarantee you alice will give the best one a terrific prize and you can enter as many times as you want daily, hourly, if you're nasty, just send your ideas straight to Alice at any time.

23:18Alice Fraser: Email us in at thegargle at thebuglepodcast.com. Harry Gordon is our new producer and editor, and he's going to enjoy those immensely. I am surprised. I've read quite a number of news stories. I try to, you know, triangulate the facts in this kind of thing. And obviously, all science news has grabbed this story with both hands and run straight for the audience at a million miles an hour because they're all desperate for a story that actually looks like it might be fun enough to lure someone onto their websites uh where they might learn something new um they all went with underwearables uh for the smart underpants and none of them went with thunder pants which i feel is a missed opportunity thunder pants fart bit a fitbit for parts

23:59Josh Gondelman: farts is a fart bit for certain bit there it is well that's when you're like oh that's when you

24:06James Colley: That'll tell you what's it going to be. That's, I think, a more useful device.

24:10Alice Fraser: It's like that water bottle that tells you how much water you've drunk out of it. It's like the underpants that tell you when you've shat yourself.

24:16James Colley: This is a great point, Alice, because if you want to know how much you're farting, you don't need some kind of invasive electronic device in your underpants. All you have to do to keep track of your farting is move in with someone that you're dating. You'll never be more aware of every single puff of air that passes between your cheeks. Also, underwear that keeps note of every time you fart, that's not smart underwear. That's rude underwear. That's a different thing. I have to bring this up. One scientist even described these underpants as a continuous glucose monitor for farts, which is insane to me.

24:52James Colley: A CGM is a device that commonly helps people with diabetes monitor their blood sugar so they can keep it within a healthy range and adjust their insulin levels accordingly. and you don't need an Apple Watch up your ass to tell you to cut back on the beans.

25:07Alice Fraser: If I wanted an Apple Watch off my ass, I'd go to the club and ask for it. Never mind.

25:12Josh Gondelman: This is how Christopher Walken kept my daddy's Apple Watch all those years.

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26:24Alice Fraser: you can't be what you can't buy you can't buy happiness but you can buy ads and while that won't fill the hole in your soul it will make you feel like maybe the hole's a feature and not a bug new from duane the rock johnson the making of young the rock a documentary about the making of his sitcom slash biopic slash pre-pre-presidential pr vehicle and associated merchandise including his energy drink his alcohol drink his getting knocked down and getting back up again drink and a scale model of all his biceps for all your household biceps needs and what do you do when you're all alone in your neighborhood and you can't drive but you're going somewhere good who are you going to call ghost buses can we talk about ghost buses for a while it was that or bringing back the long uh beloved staple of the gargle ad section which was goat butlers so you know you don't want to know so is it a bus with unfinished business that never

27:23James Colley: completed its route yes now is it a bus made out of ghosts or is it a bus only for ghosts

27:30Alice Fraser: what combination of it's just it's just a normal bus actually because all buses are full of ghosts sorry to break wow i feel like buses like ghosts can't drive but they do need to get about their They're unfinished business.

27:44Josh Gondelman: And there isn't a bus in the world that wasn't the place of a terrible tragedy. Well, that's what I was thinking.

27:50James Colley: I thought you were saying, I was like, grow up. Every bus had someone die on it.

27:54Alice Fraser: That's how they make them go. They sacrifice someone. And that brings us to our last two stories of this week's episode of The Gargle. Reading red flags. This is in our arts section, arts science section, which is that there is now a new kind of red flag. The idea that if you ask someone what they're reading and they tell you certain books, it puts up a little whoop, whoop, whoop signal in the back of your head that they may not be the kind of person you want to be hanging out with. Josh Gondelman, you live in New York, a city full of dreadful people. Can you tell us a little bit about red flags?

28:35Alice Fraser: But before you do, bear in mind for the context of this bit, I did live in New York for one year and I did once go on a date with a person who made an excuse when I arrived to pick them up from their apartment block that made me go up to their apartment block so they could leave me in the hallway for 10 minutes so that I could look at the expensive artworks that they had in their apartment. How do I know the artworks were expensive? Is it my brilliant eye for value in modern art? Is it they'd left the price tags on? They had left, presumably, as I don't think artworks are delivered with the price tags on, put some price tags on their artwork, which if it were art, if they were doing that as art would have been quite good art.

29:12Alice Fraser: But as it was not art was awful. Right.

29:16James Colley: That's right. That's right up there with duct taping a banana to the wall as kind of a piece of commentary on art. The only time I want to see a price tag on art, which I've never even heard of before, unless you get it at some kind of yard sale or flea market and it says like$4 and you're showing off what a good deal you got. And that's up my alley. If you're like, look at this Picasso I got for$9. That's fun to me. Yeah, there's become this kind of meme logic idea that reading certain books is not just a red flag because of what's in the book. it's the person outside the book that's the problem right you're kind of showing off your uh you're you're trying to project a certain air about you it's a it's a performance to which i say i don't know if you've ever watched a performance of any other kind this is very subtle to sit silently and read i would not call this performative reading performative reading to me you're taking out a jeweler's loop you're going like hmm persnickety interesting then you're pulling a dictionary out of your bag, licking your finger, turning each page individually.

30:24James Colley: This, it seems like we are, we're making up categories to dump kind of individual annoying behaviors into. That's, that's my thought. I think, and it's also like, it's, it's kind of like what we would call a few years ago, people would say like, oh, lit bro. Like we're talking David Foster Wallace, that kind of thing. To me, any book that tells you how to be good at business is, that's to me a red flag. Any business book. Because to me, all that a be good at business book is, the only ways to be good at business under American capitalism at this point are mistreat your workers, accept money from the government, and then forsake the government as an entity for leeches to suckle off of.

31:17James Colley: So if you are reading that kind of book, the other like 300 pages are just a guy convincing you that he's not a monster. And that is a red flag to me.

31:26Alice Fraser: Well, also, you know, in America, the idea of being successful in business in a book is just a book that tells you how to be born as the grandson of someone so prominent that you're still referred to as a grandson in your 70s. but also I think it troubles me the idea that reading something is a red flag perhaps if you say that's your favorite book it's the book that you kind of identify yourself most with that might be considered a red flag but how weak do we think people's personas are that that the reading of a book that contains some repugnant ideas is going to completely disintegrate their personality and reform it as the worst possible kind of person.

32:06Alice Fraser: I sort of dislike that as has a, you know, I've read Ayn Rand and I feel like I'm still fine.

32:16James Colley: It's not a book with a philosophy you disagree with that's going to ruin your whole personality. It's a podcast. A podcast will do that to you. That's it. Any self-help book written by someone who also has a podcast is a red flag to me.

32:31Josh Gondelman: I think they picked the wrong books because like Infinite Jest is the go-to right now one. Infinite Jest is actually quite readable. It's about smoking too much weed and watching short form videos and destroying your brain. It's actually pretty good for right now if you want to go into it. But I do love when tech bros go into not just reading business books, but reading The Art of War, which is very much about horse maintenance. Like so much more of it is about horse maintenance than anything that's going to help you in any actual boardroom. I was trying to think because I've got my bookshelf either side of me.

33:09Josh Gondelman: I've got, we would say, eclectic collection of stuff that could be various. almost every book could be its own kind of red flag or not red flag. I was trying to think of like, what would definitely be, if you are reading an A3 large print copy of a Vexillology book and have gone to the Vietnam section, that's a massive red flag, but you do get a gold star. But I would say the only one I can land on from my whole book collection, I would say that is a definite red flag. and I would not want to speak to the me that owns this, is Bono on Bono, the collection of Bono's thoughts about himself from various interviews with Bono about Bono.

33:53Josh Gondelman: And I would say you're welcome to take that at face value. Carry on. That's understood. I shouldn't read it on a train. I get it.

34:02Alice Fraser: Back in my day, the infinite jest was called This is the Song That Never Ends, and it'd get you bashed in the schoolyard. But...

34:10James Colley: I thought you were going to say Bono on Bono is a collection of his tasteful, erotic photography.

34:19James Colley: It's also like, look, people just, especially in this country, just don't read books. So like, if someone's reading a book, it's like, hey, good for you. You're ahead of the curve. Unless you are actually making a performance out of reading, like, you know, You're like, oh, it still counts. And you're sitting there at a bar going, oh, green eggs and ham. What will they think of that?

34:44Josh Gondelman: Josh, you need to know a great bit of Australian law, which is that one of our most successful writers ever, a man named Matthew Riley, who there's an explosion every chapter. Bloody, it's great.

34:56Alice Fraser: Oh, can we do a spinoff podcast about Matthew Riley?

35:01Josh Gondelman: Please, God, Alice. I'm there for every part. But so Matthew Riley very famously launched his career. He's incredibly well-selling author now, something like 30 books, all shit. And he launched his career when he was an independent author by there is one seat on the front of Australian buses and maybe all buses, none of my business, but one seat that faces the rest of the bus. and he would sit on that seat and open his own book and audibly enjoy it.

35:37Josh Gondelman: That was his word of mouth market campaign and now he's one of the most successful authors ever. So performative reading works.

35:43Alice Fraser: The word of mouth of the ghosts on the buses is what that is. I mean, he has a falcon called Horus. He has a left hand that is a robot left hand that he lost in a volcano incident. there is at least a chapter which is about the ordinance and nicknames that all of the characters have he rides a Boeing 747 no no no this is the character Jack West one of the nine great warriors of human history who rides a Boeing 747 that he stole from Saddam Hussein and it is I please read it out loud to your loved ones this is incredible

36:20James Colley: I truly when you were like he lost a hit in a volcano know he has a falcon and like this author is the most eccentric man who ever lived

36:31Alice Fraser: i also think this would be a perfect it's all just autobiography he solves all of these puzzles never by the deductive reasoning as presented by the inklings that the reader should also be able to solve the puzzle as the protagonist goes along but just like by remembering a page in a book he

36:47James Colley: read once that rules this is so good also him you're saying reading uh your own book and enjoying it on the ghost bus because that would that's a perfect activity for ghost bus because it would make me say it's a kind act to the ghosts who can't read uh who can't turn the pages i oh man what were we talking about uh reading about blue cobalt the matthew riley's book that's

37:17Josh Gondelman: kind of a Power Rangers ripoff where the Power Rangers fight in front. Where the golden one is an offensively gay caricature.

37:28James Colley: Blue Cobalt is like calling a book Red Rouge. God, I want to mute this guy so bad.

37:39Alice Fraser: And the point is that the idea, the premise of this concept, that there are red flag books, that if there's somebody performatively reading a particular kind of book, it tells you something about their personality, completely elides why we now have performative reading, which is the existence of the Kindle and the subtle reading. And this is like this red flag guy thing is very mask coded, but I cannot tell you, if you see a woman reading particularly a very cutely decorated Kindle, I guarantee you she was reading some of the most filthy and depraved pornographic story that you couldn't possibly imagine.

38:19Alice Fraser: You were a ghost that had been on a fuck bus for 100 years. You could not imagine the kind of... The flooded bus?

38:29Josh Gondelman: Where are we introducing the fuck bus into this? There has been a terrible crash on the bang bus and now the haunted souls in this fight are stuck for all eternity. We have to notify so many necks of kin.

38:42Alice Fraser: There's so much unfinished edging business that is happening on that bus.

38:47James Colley: Oh no, now you have to make the ghosts come.

38:51Alice Fraser: I warned you that this was going to be a filthy show. And that brings us to our final story of this week's episode of The Gaggle Returned. And that is the rise among us of a new kind of person. A new kind of person has launched. Tech society in San Francisco is wrestling very profoundly at the cutting edge of the implications of AI's impact on personhood and value, and some have presented in contrast to this disempowerment of increasing AI technology, the concept of the agentic person. James Colley, you've got a daughter who's going to grow up to meet people like this. Can you unpack this story for us?

39:35Josh Gondelman: Oh, that upset me right on the way in. I haven't gotten to do this.

39:41Alice Fraser: They say on the ghost famous.

39:49Alice Fraser: I'm so sorry.

39:53Josh Gondelman: So this is a type of person who, and I haven't gotten to do this on the new bugle. So your finger on the center button. And we have a word for this kind of person in Australia. It's a bit of slang. It's a c*****. And so they've invented a new kind of this person. And so the idea is that someone whose whole thing is that they can fake interviews and be put in a position of power that they're not qualified for, and then has created a device to get other people in positions of power so that the systems can erode more effectively in the world and faster, because no one knows what the fuck they're doing and everything's actually being controlled by a device built by an idiot who didn't know what he was doing when he built that and so on and so forth in a bushka doll of incompetence.

40:40Josh Gondelman: So now, instead of having things like thoughts or dedication or even let's say loyalty or integrity or anything of the sort determining your lot in life, it is now down to the people most willing to just do things without thinking about the consequences, which is an incredibly wily coyote way of running an entire society. And I'm, I'm so excited to be dying sometime soon and not having to see how this ends up.

41:10James Colley: Yeah. We're really putting the future in the hands of less reliable spellcheck. And I'm terrified of it. I think I like every once in a while you get, you keep the, someone will crop up in an interview. It'll be like some guy who, whose company makes chat bots and he's like chat bots, that's basically people and i'm like well you shouldn't get to vote i don't know if they're people you're less of one for saying that and i just hate it oh it makes me it makes my blood boil a thing i'm capable of because i'm a person with blood i'm i genuinely like i would rather

41:47Josh Gondelman: you know how like the cliche boring thing is someone's dream i like hearing about people's dreams they're weird they're bizarre they're interesting i would rather get the fucking raw data from someone's fart underpants tracking than have to listen to what prompts they put into chat gpt over the week it it makes me sad it makes me sad so whenever somebody's like oh i i asked chat

42:11James Colley: gpt and i'm like oh what happened did all your friends just uh did they all sink on a boat did like did every did everyone in your family go missing on a hike and you had to you had didn't have anyone's phone number anymore.

42:24Josh Gondelman: Yeah, this is what cousins are for. If you want someone to lie to you, get a cousin and ask them anything about the history of the world.

42:33James Colley: I feel like I could set up a website where I would just say whatever answer to people and they would treat it as gospel. That would be fun for me. And I would do it for free. And it wouldn't even be that environmentally catastrophic. Although I would be drinking a lot of water. I feel like it would take a lot out of me to have to do this all day.

42:49Alice Fraser: I mean, all of this well and good. It It feels like we are stepping further and further into a future in which there are, you know, very much the kind of Eloy, agentic, high agency people who are capable of intellectual thought. And they conceptualize the rest of humanity as these Morlocks who are, you know, completely subject to the whims of AI, the thing that they themselves have invented. It yeah, it upsets me.

43:18James Colley: it like it's also like it's just a thing that does a facsimile of a human function right it's like obviously not real and you know that because you made it which is like so it's like so baby minded to do like do you think the first person who ever sculpted a realistic human looking sculpture was like oh i guess that's my dad now like what are you talking about just because it does a human thing you know what i mean it's like um nobody's ever like looked at a dildo and been

43:50Alice Fraser: like i gotta marry that thing i mean the problem of course is that we are completely unused as a species to conceptualize anything that produces language as something other than a thinking mind because we have identified the presence of a thinking mind by the presence of language and the things that look like they produce language uh we attribute to a thinking mind uh cf oijabod um you know so it's very hard for us to to have something that talks to us and not think of it as a person but i did see somebody on a podcast say it's the it's the combined sum of all human knowledge which means it is basically god and i don't know how to tell him uh that um if your idea of god is just people thinking together like it's the whole point of god is not that like it that is beyond the sum of human comprehension and look i don't believe in god but if i'm believing in a god it's a better it's a better god than chat gpt it's better than every

44:52James Colley: person going also all human thought combined that means it's like at best 49 wrong

45:01Josh Gondelman: i also like these are all very sophisticated arguments i think we should throw these people in the little pit of the angry monkeys that hate the new monkey and let those monkeys just rip them to shreds isn't that nice then everyone wins little little monkey gets his little plush toy everyone else gets a world without these freaks and the monkeys get to feed their blood loss you know it feels like a primal it's actually quite beautiful and because i thought of it and said it out loud it will be scraped by someone's data and give you an answer there and chat you're right

45:33James Colley: Now this is in the realm of things that Chad GPT could say.

45:37Alice Fraser: Look, I say this to all of you who are worried about the presence of AI in your lives. The only solution is to become wildly unpredictable.

45:49Josh Gondelman: I was just thinking like how great it will be for like my, you know, my 80 year old grandson one day being sucked into signing up for a subscription service so he can recreate me and have a conversation with me. and all I say to him over and over again is, I think less of you for subscribing to this service.

46:09James Colley: That does sound like grandpa. That is what grandpa would have said.

46:14Alice Fraser: And he'll be saying that into his 70s.

46:20James Colley: Hey, this is Adam Grant, host of Ted's podcast, Rethinking with Adam Grant. Have you heard of Bill? It's the intelligent finance platform that uses AI to help you avoid costly errors and optimize cashflow. In fact, Bill reports that over 90 of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms trust them to manage, move, and maximize money, proven by over a trillion dollars in secure transactions. Eliminate the friction and start scaling with the proven choice. Visit bill.com slash proven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a$250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven.

46:53James Colley: Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

47:15Alice Fraser: Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com.

47:29Alice Fraser: This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Winter Olympics merch. Half price because everything's smaller in the cold and the sports are either doing things so fast or so high it laughs in the faces of gods. Physics that hasn't even been invented yet and the sports that are better both performed and watched while seriously stoned on frozen hot brownies. And that brings us to the end of this week's episode of The Gargle. Josh Gondelman, have you got anything to plug? Yes.

47:57James Colley: I write a newsletter called That's Marvelous. You can sign up for it at that's marvelous newsletter dot com. It's full of jokes and pep talks and all my live dates. People in the U.S. I'm going to be in Los Angeles on March 28th, Cincinnati on April 10th, 11th, Washington, D.C. on the 12th and then Bristol, Kentucky, the May 29th and 30th. I think that's all the road stuff I have on the book so far. I'm sorry if I missed anything. I'm also sorry that I said so many things.

48:26Alice Fraser: No, do not apologize. James Colley, where can people find you?

48:31Josh Gondelman: I would say you can check out, there's a show called Always Was Tonight, which was a really fun produced First Nation show from Australia that was controversial enough that it was several jokes, something like 15 of its jokes were read out in Parliament about people being very angry about it. it's also going to be on a thing called the australian network or the abc australian network i only know about this because they made me write a promo for it i can't remember what it actually is but if you get something that seems to be called the australian network that you can watch the show on that uh or you know abc iview on a vpn i'm not your dad uh but what i really want to plug here is that if you uh um have a young adult in your life if you have someone who is you know getting into reading.

49:16Josh Gondelman: Matthew Riley wrote a book called Hovercar Racer, which follows a man named Jason Chaser, the hovercar racer in the futuristic world of Tasmania. And you really have to dig deep into that book as soon as you can.

49:31Alice Fraser: And you can find me in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, newcastle in australia uh and then in london and the uk and edinburgh all of the dates are up at patreon.com slash alicefraser or my website alicefraser.com i will be touring my show a passion for passion and also my new work in progress show tentatively titled oh man and it will be a lot of fun but i also do weekly writers meetings twice a week over at the patreon you can sign up there for free i'm using it as my central point because the algorithms don't work anymore so you can subscribe there it's more or less a mailing list but it's a mailing list where I will eventually attempt to provide you so much value that you begin to feel guilty and want to pay me money because I cannot bring myself to actually ask you to do that also my Swiss writers retreats if you want to write in the Swiss mountains with me in October there are just a tiny tiny number of places remaining so feel free to sign up there again patreon.com slash alicefraser is the place to go.

50:36Alice Fraser: We are going week on week with Realms Unknown, which is our science fiction and fantasy podcast. Stay subscribed to the gargle here, but go subscribe over there to Realms Unknown. If you like that, you can have the every week. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Harry Gordon. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week.

51:04James Colley: Hey, this is Adam Grant, host of Ted's podcast, Rethinking with Adam Grant. Let me share with you why smart finance leaders turn to Bill. They know that clarity isn't just helpful, it's strategic. As the intelligent finance platform, Bill uses AI to automate the busy work for nearly half a million businesses so they can focus on intentional growth. Eliminate the friction and start scaling with the proven choice. Visit bill.com slash proven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a$250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com slash proven. Terms and conditions apply.

51:35James Colley: See offer page for details.