It's long been the stuff of science fiction: humans achieving immortality by uploading their consciousness into a silicon virtual paradise, ruled over by a benevolent super-intelligent AI. Or maybe one dreams of leaving a dying Earth to colonize Mars or other distant planets. It's a tantalizing visionary future that has been embraced by tech billionaires in particular. But is that future truly the utopian ideal, or something potentially darker? And are those goals even scientifically feasible?

These are the kinds of questions astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker poses in his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Becker's widely praised first book, What Is Real?, focused on competing interpretations of quantum mechanics and questioned the long dominance of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation championed by Niels Bohr, among other luminaries. This time around, he's tackling Silicon Valley's far-reaching ideas about the future, which have moved out of online subcultures and into mainstream culture, including our political discourse.

"It seemed like it was only going to become more relevant and someone needed to speak out about it, and I didn't see enough people connecting the dots in a way that looked right to me," Becker told Ars. "One current critique of Silicon Valley is that they moved fast and broke democracy and institutional norms. That's true. Another is that they're contemptuous of government, and I think that's true, too. But there wasn't much critique of their visions of the future, maybe because not enough people realized they meant it. Even among Silicon Valley critics, there was this idea that at the very least, you could trust that the statements they made about science and technology were true because they were experts in science and technology. That's not the case."

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• Google's AI answers will give you a definition of any made-up saying. I tried: "You can't lick a badger twice."
• This is exactly the kind of thing AI should be really good at — explaining language use. But something's off.
• Is it a hallucination, or AI just being too eager to please?

What does "You can't lick a badger twice" mean?

Like many English sayings — "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," "A watched pot never boils" — it isn't even true. Frankly, nothing stops you from licking a badger as often as you'd like, although I don't recommend it.

(I'm sure Business Insider's lawyers would like me to insist you exercise caution when encountering wildlife, and that we cannot be held liable for any rabies infections.)

If the phrase doesn't ring a bell to you, it's because, unlike "rings a bell," it is not actually a genuine saying — or idiom — in the English language.

But Google's AI Overview sure thinks it's real, and will happily give you a detailed answer of what the phrase means.

Greg Jenner, a British historian and podcaster, saw people talking about this phenomenon on Threads and wanted to try it himself with a made-up idiom. The badger phrase "just popped into my head," he told Business Insider. His Google search spit out an answer that seemed reasonable.

I wanted to try this myself, so I made up a few fake phrases — like "You can't fit a duck in a pencil" — and added "meaning" onto my search query.

Google took me seriously and explained:

So I tried some others, like "The Road is full of salsa." (This one I'd like to see being used in real life, personally.)

A Google spokeswoman told me, basically, that its AI systems are trying their best to give you what you want — but that when people purposely try to play games, sometimes the AI can't exactly keep up.

"When people do nonsensical or 'false premise' searches, our systems will try to find the most relevant results based on the limited web content available," spokeswoman Meghann Farnsworth said.

"This is true of Search overall — and in some cases, AI Overviews will also trigger in an effort to provide helpful context."

Basically, AI Overviews aren't perfect (duh), and these fake idioms are "false premise" searches that are purposely intended to trip it up (fair enough).

Google does try to limit the AI Overviews from answering things that are "data voids," i.e., when there are no good web results to a question.

But clearly, it doesn't always work.

I have some ideas about what's going on here — some of it is good and useful, some of it isn't. As one might even say, it's a mixed bag.

But first, one more made-up phrase that Google tried hard to find meaning for: "Don't kiss the doorknob." Says Google's AI Overview:

So what's going on here?

The Good:

English is full of idioms like "kick the bucket" or "piece of cake." These can be confusing if English isn't your first language (and frankly, they're often confusing for native speakers, too). My case in point is that the phrase is commonly misstated as "case and point."

So it makes lots of sense that people would often be Googling to understand the meaning of a phrase they came across that they don't understand. And in theory, this is a great use for the AI Overview answers: You want to see the simply-stated answer right away, not click on a link.

The Bad:

AI should be really good at this particular thing. LLMs are trained on vast amounts of the English written language — reams of books, websites, YouTube transcriptions, etc., so being able to recognize idioms is something they should be very good at doing.

The fact that it's making mistakes here is not ideal. What's going wrong that Google's AI Overview isn't giving the real answer, which is "That isn't a phrase, you idiot"? Is it just a classic AI hallucination?

The ugly:

Comparatively, ChatGPT gave a better answer when I asked it about the badger phrase. It told me that it was not a standard English idiom, even though it had the vaguely folksy sound of one. Then it offered, "If we treat it like a real idiom (for fun)," and gave a possible definition.

So this isn't a problem across all AI — it seems to be a Google problem.

This is somewhat different from last year's Google AI Overview answers fiasco where the results pulled in information from places like Reddit without considering sarcasm — remember when it suggested people should eat rocks for minerals or put glue in their pizza (someone on Reddit had once joked about glue in pizza, which seems to be where it drew from).

This is all very low-stakes and silly fun, making up fake phrases, but it speaks to the bigger, uglier problems with AI becoming more and more enmeshed in how we use the internet. It means Google searches are somehow worse, and since people start to rely on these more and more, that bad information is just getting out there into the world and taken as fact.

Sure, AI search will get better and more accurate, but what growing pains will we endure while we're in this middle phase of a kinda wonky, kinda garbage-y, slop-filled AI internet?

AI is here, it's already changing our lives. There's no going back, the horse has left the barn. Or as they say, you can't lick a badger twice.

It's not every day you get a trailer for a new, live-action Predator movie, but today is one of those days. 20th Century Studios just released the first teaser for Predator: Badlands, a feature film that unconventionally makes the classic movie monster a protagonist.

The film follows Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young member of the predator species and society who has been banished. He'll work closely with a Weyland-Yutani Android named Thia (Elle Fanning) to take down "the ultimate adversary," which the trailer dubs a creature that "can't be killed." The adversary looks like a very large monster we haven't seen before, judging from a few shots in the trailer.

Some or all of the film is rumored to take place on the Predator home world, and the movie intends to greatly expand on the mythology around the Predators' culture, language, and customs. It's intended as a standalone movie in the Predator/Alien universe.

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It's been a long, long wait, but we're finally getting a second season of the Netflix supernatural horror comedy, Wednesday. The streaming giant dropped the first teaser and several first-look images to whet our appetites for what promises to be an excellent follow-up to the delightful first season.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, director Tim Burton famously turned down the opportunity to direct the 1991 feature film The Addams Family, inspired by characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams for The New Yorker in 1938. Wednesday showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar—best known for Smallville—expected Burton to turn them down as well when they made their pitch. He signed up for the project instead.

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My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can has cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.

It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the Internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for Internet culture and an anonymous way station for the Internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world—a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.

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Last Friday, in an op-ed piece on the Trump administration's war on American universities, we called for academia to 1) band together and 2) resist coercive control over hiring and teaching, though we noted that the 3) "temperamental caution of university administrators" means that they might "have trouble finding a clear voice to speak with when they come under thundering public attacks from a government they are more used to thinking of as a funding source."

It only took billions of dollars in vindictive cuts to make it happen, but higher education has finally 1) banded together to 2) resist coercive control over its core functions. More than 230 leaders, mostly college and university presidents, have so far signed an American Association of Colleges and Universities statement that makes a thundering call gentle bleat for total resistance "constructive engagement" with the people currently trying to cripple, shutter, and/or dominate them. Clearly, 3) temperamental caution remains the watchword. Still, progress! (Even Columbia University, which has already capitulated to Trump administration pressure, signed on.)

The statement largely consists of painful pablum about how universities "provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce," etc, etc. As a public service, I will save you some time (and nausea) by excerpting the bits that matter:

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A Democrat has entered the manosphere.

Pete Buttigieg, the former Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration and a presidential candidate in 2020, sat for a three-hour appearance on Andrew Schultz's Flagrant on Wednesday to discuss current events, the state of politics, and the culture wars - his latest foray into breaking outside of the Democrats' preferred "echo chamber," as he put it, and his first into the world of online, woke-skeptical bro media.

Sporting a beard, Buttigieg criticized his colleagues in the Democratic Party for shirking podcasts such as Flagrant, which conducted an interview with Donald Trump during the election. According to co-host Akaash Singh, Flagrant, which has drawn controversy for its hosts' willingness to engage with racist content, was unable to get Democrats to agree to come on the show, prompting Buttigieg to call them out for turning down the invitation. "We have to be encountering people who don't think like us and who don't view the world the way we do, both in order to become smarter and better and make better choices and take better positions, and also to persuade," he said.

Calling Buttigieg "the Democrats' secret weapon," S …

Read the full story at The Verge.

• Kin is an Idaho prix fixe restaurant with a work culture rooted in collaboration and equality.
• The business, owned by Kris Komori and Remi McManus, offers salaries to all full-time staff.
• This article is part of "Made to Order," a series highlighting the business strategies driving today's food industry.

At Kin's prix fixe restaurant, the menu changes every five weeks, and it's always a group project.

Having five or more staff members work together to brainstorm a tasting menu, divide up the cooking, and gather ingredients may seem like a recipe for disaster, but Kris Komori and Remi McManus, the co-owners of Kin, don't mind the challenge. Collaboration is integral to their restaurant, even if it requires some trial and error.

"We don't necessarily have general managers and things like that," McManus said. "We all work as an entity and as a unit."

This mindset even extends to how Komori and McManus tackle payroll and prioritize pay equality. The owners offer all full-time staff a salary with benefits like paid time off and health insurance. This differs from the typical restaurant model in which some staff receive the minimum wage for tipped workers, while mainly relying on optional gratuities.

In a rapidly changing industry known for burnout and top-down management, Kin's approach to work culture might be less common. But Komori, who's also Kin's head chef, said the Boise restaurant had always been an outlier.

"We're not trying to change an entire restaurant industry or even Boise itself, but we did know that we could create something a little bit different," Komori said.

Their efforts have paid off. In 2023, Komori won a James Beard Award, and in 2024, Food & Wine listed the restaurant as one of the top 20 restaurants in the country.

On separate calls, Komori and McManus spoke with Business Insider about how they foster employee well-being at Kin — and how other restaurants can adopt a better workplace culture, too.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Business Insider: Tell me a bit about Kin's work environment. How do you try to set yourself apart when it comes to employee well-being?

Remi McManus: For years in the restaurant industry, there's been a big discrepancy in pay, especially from the front and back of the house. We try to develop equality through equal pay for all staff members. Our goals have been to develop more professionalism in the industry in Idaho and provide for our staff and our community more than we used to at my previous restaurant, State & Lemp.

Kris Komori: Part of the core competency of the business is connecting to our guests and community, but it's mostly about connecting with our crew. It's still long hours and stressful at times, but if we can have people be excited to come to work instead of dreading it, it's just a happier place to be.

How have you developed a sustainable business model that can account for having staff on salary?

McManus: It's important for employees to take ownership of their duties. This means engaging them in different responsibilities that play to their strengths and discussing things they would like to see done in the restaurant. We have a graphic designer who is a service staff member and helps us to do social media posts and graphic design for menus. We've had a bartender who moved on to be our full-time bookkeeper. We have individuals who have experiences outside the restaurant that we can utilize to change the dynamic of what this space really is. While most people see us as a restaurant, we see ourselves more as a community engagement center with food and beverage as the vehicle.

Komori: Since our tasting room is reservation-only, we know how many people are coming in and what their allergies or dietary restrictions are. Based on our capacity, we also know how much to order and prep. We can be efficient on the cost of goods and then put that into the payroll.

Why do you think a community-focused work culture is a less common approach in most kitchens and restaurants?

McManus: It's very expensive. Restaurants are fairly transient, and other owners don't potentially have the time or desire to invest as much into their employees. We're called Kin for many reasons, but one is because 100% of the staff that was with us at State & Lemp came over to Kin. It felt like we were a family creating a new establishment.

Komori: One reason why a lot of places don't do it is because you have to also get a lot of buy-in from the team in terms of rotating schedules, knowing that everyone deserves the time off. Sometimes that requires stepping in. If someone's on vacation, then everyone's got to pull a little bit more, but then you yourself go on vacation and the other people do that for you.

It's a compromise to staff saying you can have a career, sustainable finances, and days off in a restaurant. Because we have more people on staff, we can rotate schedules. As long as everyone has buy-in and supports each other, it works really well.

How does prioritizing collaboration and creativity help foster a more welcoming workplace?

McManus: Any employee wants to feel like they're valued at work. Because we are a small staff, we're able to engage with them on a day-to-day basis. Whether it be collaboration on a dish or activities outside the workplace, developing these intimate relationships is baked into our ethos.

When we come up with menu ideas, it's not necessarily just Kris or myself. Being able to rely on the individuals that have been here for years and also some of the new individuals for ideas is probably the best thing that we can do. People who have been doing something over and over and over again for years — they need new ideas. The collaboration process is probably one of the most effective things that we have in the restaurant right now.

Komori: Everyone that comes in here wants to create. What's cool about our tasting room is that it starts with one dish, but over time, the staff is creating dozens of dishes, and they start to notice their own style. They're also learning how to plan, order at a cost, and write a prep schedule. It's really important because probably a quarter of the kitchen will want to have their own place, or at least become a chef with their own team. It's a lot to change the menu, but it's also fun.

How can other chefs and owners adopt this workplace culture and sustain these practices?

McManus: We accept gratuities, but we use them to fund the salaries. I believe, in some larger cities, there are restaurants that have gone away from optional gratuities and just added them to the bill or increased the pricing so they can have a similar pay structure.

Komori: We're always wondering if the way that we're doing things is the best way to do it. You just have to be wanting to change. You ask your staff, "Hey, we want to try something to benefit the business and to benefit you. Are you willing to experiment with it?" And then you course-correct.

We have good retention, and our guests are happy to support a place trying to healthily and sustainably support its crew. So we get loyalty from customers, which stabilizes the revenue and helps sustain the system.

How do you think restaurants can be more than just places to eat and places to work for guests and staff?

McManus: It just comes down to culture. If you take the time and energy to learn more about the staff, have those conversations, communicate, and give ownership, then that shows in the staff members and that shows to the guests and community.

Komori: Partly the reason we're named Kin is not only because we try to be like a loose-knit group of people that really align with each other, but also we want to have a feel like we're inviting people into our home. Because of that, we know a lot about our regulars. Sometimes we feel like a restaurant, but other times, we're more than a restaurant — we just happen to have our product be food and beverage. If we're going to work so hard, we want to feel good about it, and just cooking for someone over and over and over behind a wall, you lose that connection.

Sshh! Don’t look suspicious. Keep your head down. We’re on our way to a really secret organization in suburban Virginia just outside Washington, D.C. As we drive along Dolley Madison Boulevard, don’t bother looking at the razor wire, tall gates, and armed guards on the right. Everybody knows that’s CIA headquarters—there’s a marked sign out front (and a gift shop inside, at least for employees). No, we’re going a couple more miles and hanging a left until we reach a squat, rust-colored two-story building with meager windows, a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign, no identification, and all the character of a brick storage shed. The front door is locked. Some locals have called the place the Kremlin. In the upstairs reception area, you’ll see half-a-dozen portraits of the owners and their relatives. Admire them if you like, but taking photos of the portraits is strictly prohibited.

Welcome to the astonishingly modest world headquarters of Mars, the third-largest private company in the U.S. (behind Cargill and Koch Industries). With about $33 billion in global revenue last year—we talked it out of them—Mars would be in the top 100 of the Fortune 500, ahead of McDonald’s, Starbucks, and General Mills. It employs 72,000 people, more than a third of them in America. (Only about 80 work in the McLean, Va., headquarters; it’s so small that when the chairman of Nestlé once paid a visit, he thought he was in the wrong location.) Its diversified galaxy of brands for man and beast are iconic—from chocolate favorites like M&M’s and Snickers to Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit and Lifesavers to pet-care products like Pedigree and Whiskas, as well as Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice. The company says it does 200 million consumer transactions a day. But despite that reach across civilization and into customer pockets, Mars is among the most secretive, insular, and little understood multinational companies around.

It is still 100% family-owned—now by the three elderly offspring of Forrest Mars Sr., who launched Mars onto its trajectory as a confectionery colossus after taking over the business from his father, Franklin C. Mars, who died in 1934. That family is either extraordinarily private or weirdly reclusive, depending on whom you ask, though asking them isn’t an option, since the last time any family members gave an interview was during the administration of Bush 41. The three owners are all multibillionaires—each is reportedly among the 20 or so richest Americans. Ask employees—while officially called “associates,” they sometimes refer to themselves as Martians—about a member of the Mars family, and you’re about as likely to get a revealing answer as if you’d asked about the proprietary process in which they stamp “m” on the little colored candies. The shortest time interval in the Martian universe is that between when you ask about a Mars family member and when someone on the astronomically high-strung public-relations team snaps to attention and rules the question out of order. Mars can make Willy Wonka’s workplace appear downright normal.

What becomes striking is that Mars is in fact a sweet company at which to be an employee. For the first time, the company has made it onto Fortune’s annual U.S. roster of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. At No. 95 on the 2013 list, Mars boasts employees who love not only the products they make but also the office culture and the company’s long-standing principles. That might seem surprising on the face of it. After all, punching in every day at most Mars sites—the president has to do it too—can seem anachronistic, even if the time clock is now a digital screen; if you’re late, you get docked 10% of your pay. While compensation is very good in comparison with that of competitors, Mars offers neither stock options nor company-driven pensions. Its work sites are utilitarian rather than comfy. There are no Foosball tables or sushi chefs. “A lot of really good companies invest in the wrong architecture,” says Paul S. Michaels, the nonfamily president of Mars. “Does it add value for the consumer [for] Snickers bars to pay for marble floors and Picassos?”

And yet employees thrive. Once they get a job, they stay: Turnover in the U.S. is a low 5% or so (excluding the sales force). Some families can claim three generations of employees. The 78-year-old woman who runs the in-house candy shop at the plant in Slough, England, has loyally worked at Mars since the reign of George VI—more than six decades. The demographics of the Mars workplace in the U.S.—about 70% of it in manufacturing, almost entirely nonunionized—are diverse; women constitute 38% of the managers. There are even some unusual perks, like every kid’s fantasy come to life: vending machines that dispense free candy all day long. Chewing gum at meetings is encouraged (as long as it’s Wrigley’s).

Perhaps most significant, employees have great latitude for advancement, both within their divisions and in the larger Mars ecosystem; if you’ve had enough of Skittles brand management, you might find satisfaction in quality control of Cesar Canine Cuisine Sunrise Breakfast (“with smoked bacon & eggs in meaty juices”!). The company prizes the idea of developing cross-division talent—and fortunately, nobody confuses Starbursts with Little Champions Butcher’s Stew. Consider Jim Price, who’s now the site-quality and food-safety manager at the chocolate plant in Hackettstown, N.J. Almost 27 years ago he began his Mars career as a janitor in a boutique chocolate operation in Henderson, Nev. His supervisor urged him to attend community college at night; Mars paid for tuition and books. If “you ask some companies for their mission statement, they have to pull it out of a drawer,” he says. “Here you just have to look around.” Such a story reflects corporate decency—and shrewdness.

The irony of the company’s very privateness, employees stress, is that it turns out to be a boon. Because there’s a resolute lack of interest in the public markets—which Mars says would subject it to the vicissitudes of shareholder whim and the tyranny of earnings reports—employees have autonomy to experiment with ideas and management has the patience to train. It doesn’t work that way elsewhere. Employees won’t cite competitors by name, but the big ones—Hershey’s, Nestlé, Mondelez—are all publicly traded. “I get the benefit of a longer learning cycle,” says Osher Hoberman, U.S. director for Snickers and Twix, who works in Hackettstown, the home of Mars Chocolate North America.

Many Martians get a mentor—even the executives, some of whom go through a “reverse internship” in which a younger employee introduces them to social media. “This is probably the only company in which I was told, ‘You’re not investing enough in your brand,’ ” says Debra Sandler, president of the chocolate division, who previously worked at two public companies, Johnson & Johnson and PepsiCo. They also have the luxury of catering to the whims of the owners: Every Christmas season, the factory churns out a few hundred tubs of private-stock Dove Peppermint Bark ice cream. It’s just for the family. (We tried some. We want more.)

And Mars continues to grow, if incrementally. Late this year it will open its first new chocolate plant in the U.S. since the mid-1970s; on what used to be cornfields, the $250 million Topeka facility will create 200 full-time jobs. Within its various offices, Mars is shockingly transparent. When Fortune isn’t visiting, the company displays on big flat-screens its current financials: sales, earnings, cash flow, factory efficiency. The data disclosure is designed to motivate employees whose bonuses are based on the performance of their respective divisions. Many employees—the company won’t specify a number—get bonuses from 10% to 100% of their salaries if their team has performed well financially; the higher your rank, the more you have to gain.

Outside the office, Mars encourages community involvement through two initiatives: Mars Volunteers and Mars Ambassadors. The first offers paid time off to clean parks, aid medical clinics, and plant gardens; in 2011, 9,600 employees volunteered 37,000 hours at 290 organizations. The second, a highly competitive program, allows a select few—80 in 2011—to spend up to six weeks working with Mars-related partners in remote areas; for example, six employees spent a week in Ghana with growers of cocoa beans.

Now in its 102nd year, Mars is taking baby steps toward corporate glasnost. In an online video apparently aimed at both potential recruits and us, a few family members actually speak. “Associates … you are valued for you,” declares Victoria Mars, a great-granddaughter of founder Frank Mars and the company ombudsman. But the 61-year-old Michaels makes clear that openness goes only so far at the moment. He won’t tell you who’s on his board of directors or its size or even if the board has a chairman. (In fact, according to a regulatory filing for 2011 in the State of Delaware, where Mars is incorporated, there are six members, all grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Frank Mars. One is Victoria Mars.)

Until sitting down with Fortune shortly before Christmas, Michaels hadn’t agreed to an interview since 2008—which is rather a shame, as he’s altogether charming and witty. He talks proudly of his own 10-year-old daughter, who isn’t supposed to bring home non-Mars goodies on Halloween; but she outsmarts him, successfully arguing she’s “just doing testing.” One time when he went to Canada on business, a border agent inquired about the purpose of his meeting. “Global chocolate domination,” he replied. They still let him in.

Mars’s decision to let us peek inside is part of a conscious, self-described “campaign to build a more visible employer brand.” The company has always said its people don’t talk much because it is the brands that are the stars. “I’m not from the Jack Welch school of heroic CEOs,” says Michaels, who’s seated at his bare open-office desk at headquarters in McLean, bounded by oversize stuffed M&M characters (yes, those you can take pictures of ). But in an age of web-driven openness, as well as increasing interest among consumers about who makes what they buy, Michaels acknowledges his company may have to modify its ways. “It’s about recruiting new people and retaining talent,” Michaels says. “We have to change.” At least a little.

Much as religions worship their tablets, the company believes in the “Five Principles of Mars”: quality, responsibility, mutuality, efficiency, freedom. The principles are emblazoned on the walls of its 400 offices and manufacturing sites in 73 countries, including such faraway lands as China, Madagascar, and Saudi Arabia. At, say, pet-care headquarters, the first thing you see on walking in is floor-to-ceiling wall art featuring carefree golden retrievers frolicking in a field—and above them each of the Five Principles. Some conference rooms bear the name of a principle, as in: “Meet me at five in Mutuality.” The principles are what unify Mars employees across products and geography. “A very important tenet of Mars is we don’t want to be a holding company of different companies,” says Martin Radvan, the president of Wrigley, who took over the division in 2011 after 24 years in other Mars positions. “At the end of the day, I think there’s a strong feeling we’re all Martians.”

Every Mars employee gets a glossy 27-page booklet explaining the principles in action, signed with the names of 13 family members. The principles, righteously explains the booklet, “set us apart from others, requiring that we think and act differently towards our associates, our brands and our business.” For example, according to the Mars credo, the freedom principle undergirds all that makes the company exceptional. Freedom means being financially answerable to no one. And for freedom to flourish, the family is requisite: “Many other companies began as Mars did, but as they grew larger and required new sources of funds, they sold stocks or incurred restrictive debt to fuel their business … We believe growth and prosperity can be achieved another way.”

Employees can, and do, recite the Five Principles as if they were handed down from the managerial heavens. They’re cult as much as culture, but “they don’t tattoo ’em on us or anything like that,” says Will Turnipseed, a commercial sourcing manager in the pet-care division. While the principles weren’t codified until 1983, they date to the early days of Mars. The company has always viewed itself as a paragon of rectitude, initially prospering in the depths of the Depression. The products had to be perfect, no matter the cost: fresh, uniform, unblemished. Ingredients weren’t fudged. How Mars got its DNA—an innovative management philosophy combined with familial eccentricity—is the story of an American original.

A childhood victim of polio, Frank Mars spent much time in his house in Tacoma. His mother entertained him in the kitchen, where he learned the art of candymaking. By his late twenties, he had turned making butter creams into a business, Mar-O-Bar. His ambitious son, Forrest Mars Sr., with a degree in industrial engineering from Yale, then helped expand the company nationally. Together, in 1923, the Marses came up with the nougat-laced Milky Way. It was an ingenious creation because it was both cheaper and bigger than a regular chocolate bar made by, say, Hershey’s. Milky Way’s cousin—the Snickers bar, named after a favorite family horse—followed seven years later.

By 1933, Mars was taking in $25 million annually, but father and son couldn’t get along. Forrest Sr. departed for Europe, with $50,000 and the Milky Way recipe from his father. He was a natural entrepreneur. After working in the Swiss chocolate factories of Henri Nestlé and Jean Tobler, Forrest Sr. developed the Mars bar—pretty much an even sweeter Milky Way—and in England he pioneered the notion of food for pets. Along the way—when he saw what soldiers were eating in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s—he discovered a tiny treat of chocolate pellets encased in candy shells.

Thus was born the idea for M&M’s. The “M’s” were Forrest and R. Bruce Murrie—a son of the president of competitor Hershey’s, which Mars asked to supply the chocolate because of limited cocoa availability during World War II. M&M “plain chocolate candies,” in four colors, began selling in 1941, becoming the most popular candy in America. After his father’s death at 50, Forrest Sr. eventually returned to the U.S. and finally in the 1960s merged both parts of the business after warring for decades with heirs of his father and other investors.

As the Mars business burgeoned over the years, its culture was also taking hold. Forrest Sr. eliminated private offices and divisive trappings like the chauffeured $20,000 Duesenberg. He installed those time clocks. And he boosted salaries. At the same time, he became known as an austere, ruthless boss who believed that management consisted of “applying mathematics to economic problems.”

His devotion to his brands was passion or fixation—it depended on whether you were the one on the receiving end of a tirade over an improperly stamped M&M. He reportedly liked to humiliate one executive by writing FAILED on his memos and displaying them in the bathroom. After assuming full control of the company, on an early visit to the chocolate plant in Chicago, Forrest Sr. sank to his knees and proclaimed to his employees, “I’m a religious man. I pray for Milky Way. I pray for Snickers.” His own kids didn’t get allowances—or free candy. But despite his ways, or perhaps because of them, the workforce at some level appreciated his commitment, along with the ample pay, lack of hierarchy, and opportunity for professional development. While the boss wasn’t beloved, he was accessible and deeply respected.

In 1973, with annual corporate revenue at about $1 billion, Forrest Sr. turned control of the business over to his two sons, Forrest Jr. and John, who—like their father—were both Yalies who went overseas to learn the ropes. Like their father as well, according to press accounts, they were harsh. (Mars declined to make any family members available. Forrest Jr. is now 81; John, 77.) They even clashed with each other. “This company doesn’t need McKinsey as much as it does Freud,” Fortune suggested in 1995.

One of the great “oops” moments in product-placement history happened on the sons’ watch: In 1982, Mars passed on the chance to have E.T. lured out of the forest by the M&M’s of a young boy named Elliott. Mars thought the creature too scary. The movie used Reese’s Pieces instead and gave Hershey’s a marketing coup. When the movie was remastered in an anniversary edition, Michaels briefly looked into whether M&M’s could be substituted into E.T. No luck.

Forrest Sr. died in 1999, but not before inspiring in his hardworking sons their own peculiarities. According to various press accounts, employees were prohibited from even mentioning the father in the presence of the sons. Such was the psychodramatic legacy of being raised to inherit a chocolate kingdom from a father with impossible expectations. The sons were famously frugal: One story had it that John slept in the parking lot in his Winnebago when inspecting a plant. Among the sons’ strategic contributions was to focus on global expansion, like into Russia. They also in 1979 were among the first to persuade merchants to put candy displays near cash registers, the better to generate impulse purchases.

Today Mars has 11 billion-dollar brands (see graphic). Snickers and M&M’s are the most popular candies in the world, and in the U.S., Mars’s chocolate business is eclipsed only by Hershey’s. Almost every dollar of profit gets reinvested in the company. Each Mars division functions with vast independence—subject to the core principles. When Chicago-based Wrigley was acquired by Mars in 2008, the storied 117-year-old chewing-gum manufacturer had to gut its interior offices to change to Mars’s open-floor plan; such is the value of approachability and communication that is presumed to go along with an egalitarian workspace.

Forrest Jr. and John retired as Mars co-presidents in 1991 and 2001, respectively, setting the stage for different nonfamily members to run the company day to day. In 2004, Michaels became president—he gets no CEO title—after 11 years as an executive at the company and prior stints at Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson. The Mars family members are intimately involved with the business. “The owners have a lot of sweat equity in the company,” Michaels says. “So when they give you advice or feel strongly, they have a level of credibility.” He says he hears from Mars family members “a lot,” which seems to mean several times a week. Employees on the line say that when they get a call out of the blue from the family, they’re more tickled than threatened.

During Michaels’s tenure as president, Mars revenue has doubled (in part because of the Wrigley purchase, which was partly funded by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway). Adweek credits him with driving Mars’s “creative renaissance” in advertising, like the commercial for Snickers Peanut Butter Squared featuring man-eating sharks. He’s also probably had a role in loosening things up a bit after the regime of the two Mars sons. Michaels concedes the incongruity between his company’s enigmatic privateness and its immense public footprint in a consumer business. “We’re not making nuclear weapons,” he says. “This is a company you’re not embarrassed to tell people you work for.” And this is the first time he’s comfortable saying so since 2008? On the topic of being interviewed, he tap dances as well as any ambivalent corporate leader can in his position. “Think of it as a journey. This is a big step for us.”

In the Musconetcong River Valley of northwestern New Jersey, in the old village of Hackettstown, is Mars’s second-largest candy plant, along with the executive offices for Mars Chocolate North America (the largest is in Cleveland, Tenn.). Out front of the low, 500,000-square-foot building are four enormous leggy M&M characters—green and brown on the roof, red and yellow on the sides. Their plasticized celebrity is what passes for Mars corporate pizzazz.

It’s here in Hackettstown, along Chocolate Avenue, that employees make, by our count, about 192 million M&M’s in 25 colors—every eight hours. That’s about half of all M&M’s made in the U.S. Although the process is mostly automated—from the swirling and molding to dozens of sequential coatings and “m” printings—it’s still time-consuming: From cocoa and sugar to package and box, an M&M takes a day to make, with half the time spent in the special coating process that creates the hard shell that, of course, means M&M’s “melt in your mouth, not in your hands.” About 2% are rejected for quality. If the winds are blowing right, the students at Centenary College a mile south can smell the cocoa cooking; on a good day they can catch a whiff of peanuts roasting too. At the plant, some unnamed employees are known to eat 1½ pounds of free M&M’s a day.

Built in 1958, the plant and the chocolate command center next door together employ 1,230 today. Despite the location in the wilds of New Jersey, the employees—relentlessly earnest all—seem to adore coming to work. Upon interrogation, they’ll even share why. “My kids jumped for joy when I told them ‘Mom’s working for M&M’s!’” recalls Jennifer Mahoney, who does supply planning. “We’re working on really cool five-year plans,” says Rima Sawaya, the brand manager for 3 Musketeers. “We had a temporary richer chocolate taste, and now we’ve gone back to the original formula!”

Twenty of the employees like it so much that they make the 114-mile daily commute from the Upper West Side of Manhattan—part of an informal carpool. It’s not exactly the free, Wi-Fi-enabled, eco-harmonious shuttle service that Google provides in Silicon Valley. But in return for their dedication to keeping the world safe and prosperous for chocolate, they get a precious front-row CARPOOLERS ONLY spot in the sprawling Hackettstown parking lot. With a sweetener like that, it’s no wonder that Mars can surely be a great place to work.

—Research associate: Marilyn Adamo

This story is from the February 4, 2013 issue of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode seven, "Goldeneyes," which was released on April 10.

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