February 26, 2026 • 13 mins
FIRST WITH YESTERDAY'S NEWS (highlights from Thursday on Newstalk ZB) Business or Leisure?/Or Just Old?/Replacing One Smoke with Another/AI Apocalypse Update/A Toast to Toast
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from News Talk sat B.
Follow this and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio,
Used Talk SED be you Talk.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, my beautiful beanies, and welcome to the Bean for Friday.
First with yesterday's news, I am Glen Harten. We're looking
back at Thursday when you talk about benefits and pensions,
vaping and how successful it's been, is helping stopping people smoking.
(00:44):
AI update for you and some toast toppings thanks to Marcus.
But before any of that, who gets acc and who doesn't?
It looks like this there's a bit of cleaning up
to do here around this.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I can't even believe we're having to discuss this, but
we are. It seems absolutely ludicrous that drunk drivers who
say kill their passengers, maim their passengers, smash their own
selves up after crashing their vehicles, hopefully not into innocent victims,
(01:21):
but sometimes it will be. They are able to claim
acc But the volunteer firefighters and the first responders who
are volunteers who respond to the crash and have to
deal with the horror of the aftermath, quite often they
will know the people involved. If it happens in a
small community, if they're the ones that have to unwrap
(01:45):
a kid from a drive shaft, they are not able
to claim acc for trauma counseling or PTSD. What they
do is considered a leisure activity. The very least we
can do when they finally get back to bed after
working through the night has helped them sleep soundly and
(02:10):
not have to live with the recurring nightmares that come
with PTSD that is left untreated. We owe it to them.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
That's probably right. I've always thought it's strange that people
who injure themselves mountain biking can claim acc that because
they're just constantly, you know, breaking bits of their body
use off and you know, unless you're mountain biking your
(02:38):
way to work, maybe do something that's not quite so dangerous. Anyway,
News Talk been just having a hymn about that. I
would rather hate that. I'm thinking that they were discussing
benefits and pensions in the Afternoon Show yesterday.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
The pension is a benefit, and it's a benefit you
don't have to prove anything to tap into. Is that
really good for society if that's your way of thinking.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
Okay, would you accept this tyler that if they're going
to tighten up on superannuation entitlement. They should. They should
also tighten up on how hard it is to get
the benefit and what you have to do for the
benefit and stuff. Don't you think that should tighten up
at both ends.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
Yep, yep, yep. Absolutely, I'd agree with it, because.
Speaker 5 (03:20):
For what you're saying, to work would mean that the
benefit is very hard to get on and very hard
to stay on, and that you have to be trying
to get to work and you have to be trying
to get back into the workforce. As long as that's true,
then what you're saying is fair.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Yeah, if I just look at it as a bit
of an analogy in that situation. So say you're on
the benefit and the government says, if you get a job,
because you've put the work in to actually get off
the benefit and stop being suck to our fund and
the textpayer money, we're going to give you an extra
two K. That's your wee bonus for getting a job.
We're going to give you two K because you've actually
got yourself off the benefit.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
It's my two K for having a job.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
You get your two k every fortnighte mate, and then
some But yeah, so then you look at the benefit
and what people's proposing is the incentive is that you
defer and you do what is right for New Zealand
in this hole that we're in with how much we're
paying for superannuation. To me, that's the same deal, right.
Incentivize people to do the right thing, then hopefully they
will do the right thing. But if people don't do
(04:15):
the right thing, they don't get as much money.
Speaker 5 (04:17):
You're just angry because you're twenty five years away from
sixty five and you know you're not getting nothing.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I am getting nothing, and I'm pissed about it.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Like so many of these discussions, there are a lot
of people who feel obliged to contribute and have an
opinion about the issues who aren't directly affected by Always
the drinking age is the classic one for me, and
also the voting age. You know, there's a lot of
sort of fifty to sixty seventy year old too. We've
(04:46):
got very strong opinions about what sixteen seventy eighteen year
old should do. It always makes me laugh.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
You's talk said.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Okay, So a bit of a rumbustification this week over
vaping and whether it helps people stop smoking or not
and how successful are forty nine success per cent success rates.
Speaker 6 (05:06):
Nearly half of them stopped smoking, which ordinarily you would
think would be a good news story. Not so for
Calli Burrow's Auckland University vaping researcher. She said this on
news Talk ZB Basically, it's not.
Speaker 7 (05:20):
I mean, I don't know if it's working, but I
guess just the main point I think is that vaping
is not a registered medicine for smoking testation. It's not
been approved. It's not as stringently registered or regulated and
tested as other smoking testation products that are already available.
So to me, it seems quite crazy that they are
giving these free vapes out.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
Okay, so yesterday I spoke to Robert beegel Hol, Yes
the Robert beegel Hole, former boss of the World Health Organization,
public health expert. He said this about these anti vaporsts.
Speaker 8 (05:52):
It's a mystery, but clearly some of the search is.
The one you refer to in particular, is a laboratory
based scientist who has no epidemiological, no public health experience,
doesn't have the big picture in mind. One of the
other antagonists to this approach clearly doesn't comprehend the evidence.
(06:13):
I mean, it's a mystery to why someone would to
pose something. It is much less harmful, helps people stop,
and it's cheaper.
Speaker 6 (06:23):
I don't know about you, but to me, this feels
a little bit like the COVID days, you know, when
you had the so called experts piping up about the
harms of a disease without taking a helicopter view of
the best way that a society should actually manage the
risk for the least overall harm. You know, you have
your people who are your specialist in your wei area
(06:43):
and they say this is evil, and we're like, yeah,
we know that's bad. But what is the best way
for a society to deal with it? That's a very
different question, right. There's also a political element to this,
I think, because we know there are certain politicians who
were out there desperate to paint Casey Costello as some
sort of big vape lobbyist in drag. But the choice, really,
I mean, when individuals need to come and choose and
(07:05):
decide if it's really a choice, and you can call it,
that seems to come down to the devil we know
versus the devil we don't.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I mean, I still maintain that if you want people
to stop vaping, because I think that's the argument, isn't
it that people are addicted to vapes now instead of
being addicted to smoke, and they might be doing themselves
just about as back time. I think that's the argument.
(07:34):
And I think if you want to get people off vaping,
all you have to do, surely is just film them
doing it and then play it back to them, and
they'll see how stupid they look, sucking on their stupid
little things and then flowing out all that pretend it's
so weird. I don't get it, but they can to
love it AI. If we talk AI. Certainly Samsung was
(08:01):
talking AI yesterday when they launched their laterst range of
bagship phones. In fact, it was more about AI than
it was about the phone, as far as I could.
Speaker 9 (08:08):
This whole saga started with Chris Hopkins's extremely boring State
of the Nation's speech earlier this week. It was so
boring and so full of platitudes that Nicola Willis quipped
that chat GP could have written it so that gave
the guys its stuff an idea. They ran it through
a program that cataliff AI has written it. And actually no,
it was mostly that boring speech was mostly written by
a clearly very boring human because I got a seventy
(08:31):
nine percent human score. So then the guys at stuff
decided to run a speech that Nicola Willis's had given
to the New Zealand Economic Forum and Hamilton through the
same tool, and it turns out one hundred and fifty
nine of the speeches one hundred and ninety seven sentences
were probably AI generated or AI assisted. Now I am
guessing the fact that this is a story suggests that
either the guys at stuff don't like the use of
(08:53):
AI or they think the public will not like the
use of AI, which I find odd because I take
the complete opposite view. AI is here. It's a proven
tool to lift productivity by doing your menial tasks so
you can free up time to do more important tasks.
In which case, if a politician or more likely one
of their staffers isn't using AI to write speeches, might
(09:14):
be questioning why why are they ignoring it a tool
readily available? Why have they not got a lot of
work to do? Have they got too much free time?
But also I feel that being disappointed that AI is
writing the speech suggests that people are laboring under the
impression that politicians are writing their own speeches.
Speaker 10 (09:31):
They're not.
Speaker 9 (09:32):
There is someone in the office that does that. And
maybe you think that the speeches are uniquely tailored to
that particular audience because they're so special.
Speaker 10 (09:40):
They're not.
Speaker 9 (09:41):
They're just the same political messaging pumped out every single time.
So I would say that political speeches are a perfect
example of exactly what AI should be used for. And
if we could all do a little bit more of
what Chris and Nikola, or more likely their staffers are doing,
we might actually see some productivity in New Zealand. Lift
a wee bit.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
I think we could take it a step further and
get rid of the politicians altogether and just get AI
to do it. Surely it couldn't do any worse than
what they do.
Speaker 8 (10:08):
Talk zep bean.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Another thing you could do with AI is get it
to suggest things to put on your toast. Perhaps it
was International Toast Day yesterday. Apparently I thought that was
making a toast, but apparently it's making toast now.
Speaker 10 (10:27):
I don't want to contaminate your palette by suggesting some
of mine. I will share those with the group later on.
But if you've got Kenner and basil or I don't
know what it is, but you will have done something
with toast you think cheapest creeper is. The world needs
to hear about this. So what is it? What is
your life changing palette shattering discovery on toast or cooked
(10:52):
bread that you need to tell the world about because basically,
probably and you look at the Italians with their pasta
and all the different pasta dishes, I think probably the
national dish. The snack we probably have most often is
something on toast, not really a sandwich because it's a
(11:13):
bit different with two bits of toasters, is it? But
one bit of toast and you chunk it on and
just unbelievable. It provides a dry receptacle the debtibil. Put
the stuff on top, you'll have something and phone those
through to me. Please your remarkable toast discovery. I'm kind
of curious to say what it is. It could be
(11:38):
a Barber Gnusian born veta. It could be me so
and marmite. It could be I'm thinking of different letters,
fijoas and fermented father beans, so you'll have invented.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Something vomented father beans and fijos. It sounds like something
Hannibal leg would try. I think the most disgusting combination
I who recently was bananas and caviat I think that's
what the guy said who had that. It was part
of a flash sort of deger station at a Michelin
(12:22):
Star restaurant. That was the course that he wasn't particularly
keen on. And I think that is a bit of
a warning, isn't it. Just adding caveat to something doesn't
necessarily make it better. It's the same with gold flakes.
You know, when they put gold flakes and things. How
many gold flakes can you eat or drink? They had
(12:44):
a bottle of vodka recently that had gold flakes sitting
in it. Do they just pass through your system the
gold flakes? Do you absorb the gold flakes? What happens there? Anyway,
I'll leave you pondering that. In fact, I'll give you
the whole weekend to ponder that, and then by Monday
(13:05):
we will have forgotten all about it, probably and we'll
be on something else. I'll see you there.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Used Talking Talking zi Bean For more from Used Talk
zt B. Listen live on air or online and keep
our shows with you wherever you go with our podcasts
on iHeartRadio,
You're listening to a podcast from News Talk sat B.
Follow this and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio,
Used Talk SED be you Talk.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, my beautiful beanies, and welcome to the Bean for Friday.
First with yesterday's news, I am Glen Harten. We're looking
back at Thursday when you talk about benefits and pensions,
vaping and how successful it's been, is helping stopping people smoking.
(00:44):
AI update for you and some toast toppings thanks to Marcus.
But before any of that, who gets acc and who doesn't?
It looks like this there's a bit of cleaning up
to do here around this.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I can't even believe we're having to discuss this, but
we are. It seems absolutely ludicrous that drunk drivers who
say kill their passengers, maim their passengers, smash their own
selves up after crashing their vehicles, hopefully not into innocent victims,
(01:21):
but sometimes it will be. They are able to claim
acc But the volunteer firefighters and the first responders who
are volunteers who respond to the crash and have to
deal with the horror of the aftermath, quite often they
will know the people involved. If it happens in a
small community, if they're the ones that have to unwrap
(01:45):
a kid from a drive shaft, they are not able
to claim acc for trauma counseling or PTSD. What they
do is considered a leisure activity. The very least we
can do when they finally get back to bed after
working through the night has helped them sleep soundly and
(02:10):
not have to live with the recurring nightmares that come
with PTSD that is left untreated. We owe it to them.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
That's probably right. I've always thought it's strange that people
who injure themselves mountain biking can claim acc that because
they're just constantly, you know, breaking bits of their body
use off and you know, unless you're mountain biking your
(02:38):
way to work, maybe do something that's not quite so dangerous. Anyway,
News Talk been just having a hymn about that. I
would rather hate that. I'm thinking that they were discussing
benefits and pensions in the Afternoon Show yesterday.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
The pension is a benefit, and it's a benefit you
don't have to prove anything to tap into. Is that
really good for society if that's your way of thinking.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
Okay, would you accept this tyler that if they're going
to tighten up on superannuation entitlement. They should. They should
also tighten up on how hard it is to get
the benefit and what you have to do for the
benefit and stuff. Don't you think that should tighten up
at both ends.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
Yep, yep, yep. Absolutely, I'd agree with it, because.
Speaker 5 (03:20):
For what you're saying, to work would mean that the
benefit is very hard to get on and very hard
to stay on, and that you have to be trying
to get to work and you have to be trying
to get back into the workforce. As long as that's true,
then what you're saying is fair.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Yeah, if I just look at it as a bit
of an analogy in that situation. So say you're on
the benefit and the government says, if you get a job,
because you've put the work in to actually get off
the benefit and stop being suck to our fund and
the textpayer money, we're going to give you an extra
two K. That's your wee bonus for getting a job.
We're going to give you two K because you've actually
got yourself off the benefit.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
It's my two K for having a job.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
You get your two k every fortnighte mate, and then
some But yeah, so then you look at the benefit
and what people's proposing is the incentive is that you
defer and you do what is right for New Zealand
in this hole that we're in with how much we're
paying for superannuation. To me, that's the same deal, right.
Incentivize people to do the right thing, then hopefully they
will do the right thing. But if people don't do
(04:15):
the right thing, they don't get as much money.
Speaker 5 (04:17):
You're just angry because you're twenty five years away from
sixty five and you know you're not getting nothing.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
I am getting nothing, and I'm pissed about it.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Like so many of these discussions, there are a lot
of people who feel obliged to contribute and have an
opinion about the issues who aren't directly affected by Always
the drinking age is the classic one for me, and
also the voting age. You know, there's a lot of
sort of fifty to sixty seventy year old too. We've
(04:46):
got very strong opinions about what sixteen seventy eighteen year
old should do. It always makes me laugh.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
You's talk said.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Okay, So a bit of a rumbustification this week over
vaping and whether it helps people stop smoking or not
and how successful are forty nine success per cent success rates.
Speaker 6 (05:06):
Nearly half of them stopped smoking, which ordinarily you would
think would be a good news story. Not so for
Calli Burrow's Auckland University vaping researcher. She said this on
news Talk ZB Basically, it's not.
Speaker 7 (05:20):
I mean, I don't know if it's working, but I
guess just the main point I think is that vaping
is not a registered medicine for smoking testation. It's not
been approved. It's not as stringently registered or regulated and
tested as other smoking testation products that are already available.
So to me, it seems quite crazy that they are
giving these free vapes out.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
Okay, so yesterday I spoke to Robert beegel Hol, Yes
the Robert beegel Hole, former boss of the World Health Organization,
public health expert. He said this about these anti vaporsts.
Speaker 8 (05:52):
It's a mystery, but clearly some of the search is.
The one you refer to in particular, is a laboratory
based scientist who has no epidemiological, no public health experience,
doesn't have the big picture in mind. One of the
other antagonists to this approach clearly doesn't comprehend the evidence.
(06:13):
I mean, it's a mystery to why someone would to
pose something. It is much less harmful, helps people stop,
and it's cheaper.
Speaker 6 (06:23):
I don't know about you, but to me, this feels
a little bit like the COVID days, you know, when
you had the so called experts piping up about the
harms of a disease without taking a helicopter view of
the best way that a society should actually manage the
risk for the least overall harm. You know, you have
your people who are your specialist in your wei area
(06:43):
and they say this is evil, and we're like, yeah,
we know that's bad. But what is the best way
for a society to deal with it? That's a very
different question, right. There's also a political element to this,
I think, because we know there are certain politicians who
were out there desperate to paint Casey Costello as some
sort of big vape lobbyist in drag. But the choice, really,
I mean, when individuals need to come and choose and
(07:05):
decide if it's really a choice, and you can call it,
that seems to come down to the devil we know
versus the devil we don't.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I mean, I still maintain that if you want people
to stop vaping, because I think that's the argument, isn't
it that people are addicted to vapes now instead of
being addicted to smoke, and they might be doing themselves
just about as back time. I think that's the argument.
(07:34):
And I think if you want to get people off vaping,
all you have to do, surely is just film them
doing it and then play it back to them, and
they'll see how stupid they look, sucking on their stupid
little things and then flowing out all that pretend it's
so weird. I don't get it, but they can to
love it AI. If we talk AI. Certainly Samsung was
(08:01):
talking AI yesterday when they launched their laterst range of
bagship phones. In fact, it was more about AI than
it was about the phone, as far as I could.
Speaker 9 (08:08):
This whole saga started with Chris Hopkins's extremely boring State
of the Nation's speech earlier this week. It was so
boring and so full of platitudes that Nicola Willis quipped
that chat GP could have written it so that gave
the guys its stuff an idea. They ran it through
a program that cataliff AI has written it. And actually no,
it was mostly that boring speech was mostly written by
a clearly very boring human because I got a seventy
(08:31):
nine percent human score. So then the guys at stuff
decided to run a speech that Nicola Willis's had given
to the New Zealand Economic Forum and Hamilton through the
same tool, and it turns out one hundred and fifty
nine of the speeches one hundred and ninety seven sentences
were probably AI generated or AI assisted. Now I am
guessing the fact that this is a story suggests that
either the guys at stuff don't like the use of
(08:53):
AI or they think the public will not like the
use of AI, which I find odd because I take
the complete opposite view. AI is here. It's a proven
tool to lift productivity by doing your menial tasks so
you can free up time to do more important tasks.
In which case, if a politician or more likely one
of their staffers isn't using AI to write speeches, might
(09:14):
be questioning why why are they ignoring it a tool
readily available? Why have they not got a lot of
work to do? Have they got too much free time?
But also I feel that being disappointed that AI is
writing the speech suggests that people are laboring under the
impression that politicians are writing their own speeches.
Speaker 10 (09:31):
They're not.
Speaker 9 (09:32):
There is someone in the office that does that. And
maybe you think that the speeches are uniquely tailored to
that particular audience because they're so special.
Speaker 10 (09:40):
They're not.
Speaker 9 (09:41):
They're just the same political messaging pumped out every single time.
So I would say that political speeches are a perfect
example of exactly what AI should be used for. And
if we could all do a little bit more of
what Chris and Nikola, or more likely their staffers are doing,
we might actually see some productivity in New Zealand. Lift
a wee bit.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
I think we could take it a step further and
get rid of the politicians altogether and just get AI
to do it. Surely it couldn't do any worse than
what they do.
Speaker 8 (10:08):
Talk zep bean.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Another thing you could do with AI is get it
to suggest things to put on your toast. Perhaps it
was International Toast Day yesterday. Apparently I thought that was
making a toast, but apparently it's making toast now.
Speaker 10 (10:27):
I don't want to contaminate your palette by suggesting some
of mine. I will share those with the group later on.
But if you've got Kenner and basil or I don't
know what it is, but you will have done something
with toast you think cheapest creeper is. The world needs
to hear about this. So what is it? What is
your life changing palette shattering discovery on toast or cooked
(10:52):
bread that you need to tell the world about because basically,
probably and you look at the Italians with their pasta
and all the different pasta dishes, I think probably the
national dish. The snack we probably have most often is
something on toast, not really a sandwich because it's a
(11:13):
bit different with two bits of toasters, is it? But
one bit of toast and you chunk it on and
just unbelievable. It provides a dry receptacle the debtibil. Put
the stuff on top, you'll have something and phone those
through to me. Please your remarkable toast discovery. I'm kind
of curious to say what it is. It could be
(11:38):
a Barber Gnusian born veta. It could be me so
and marmite. It could be I'm thinking of different letters,
fijoas and fermented father beans, so you'll have invented.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Something vomented father beans and fijos. It sounds like something
Hannibal leg would try. I think the most disgusting combination
I who recently was bananas and caviat I think that's
what the guy said who had that. It was part
of a flash sort of deger station at a Michelin
(12:22):
Star restaurant. That was the course that he wasn't particularly
keen on. And I think that is a bit of
a warning, isn't it. Just adding caveat to something doesn't
necessarily make it better. It's the same with gold flakes.
You know, when they put gold flakes and things. How
many gold flakes can you eat or drink? They had
(12:44):
a bottle of vodka recently that had gold flakes sitting
in it. Do they just pass through your system the
gold flakes? Do you absorb the gold flakes? What happens there? Anyway,
I'll leave you pondering that. In fact, I'll give you
the whole weekend to ponder that, and then by Monday
(13:05):
we will have forgotten all about it, probably and we'll
be on something else. I'll see you there.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Used Talking Talking zi Bean For more from Used Talk
zt B. Listen live on air or online and keep
our shows with you wherever you go with our podcasts
on iHeartRadio,
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