What happens when an AI-generated daddy has 20,000 followers and your actual human podcast has twelve listeners?
Ragan confronts the possibility that Gobbledygook may not have much of an audience—and discovers that the competition isn't necessarily other podcasters. It's computer-generated men with older faces pasted onto impossibly muscular bodies.
From there, he considers a strange paradox of aging: you may become more thoughtful and interesting while simultaneously becoming less visible in a culture that increasingly confuses attractiveness with value. With detours through Aristotle, gay pornography, Anthony Fauci, ancient Greek sculpture, horror movies, and the linguistic complexities of bottoming, Ragan asks what happens when we stop wanting other people and start wanting their simulations.
Returning to Obsession, he connects AI fantasy to the desire to strip another person of agency: perhaps the perfect object of desire is becoming something that looks human but doesn't possess inconvenient things like thoughts, feelings, or needs.
But this is Gobbledygook, so we're not surrendering to the robots yet. With a little help from Dynasty, Ragan ends with a defense of messy, thinking, aging, imperfect humanity—and a commitment to claw his way out of the metaphorical wine cellar for at least three more episodes.