TRASHFUTURE - Le Gavroche de Wyatt Koch

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

This week, we've got Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) discussing the phenomenon of "dark kitchens," remote cooking sites for restaurants to cater to delivery-only services. Do they have bad conditions and almost zero labour protections? How'd you guess? We also discuss the fate of a Los Angeles jam restaurant called Squirrel, which tried its hand at a self-run dark kitchen that involve inch upon inch of mould. As we learn in this episode, the only thing that made it illegal was that they didn't have a VC-funded startup handling all of the unethical practices for them. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture   Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project   If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.   *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

14,000 ostrich eggs. And finally, the RAF has called off the search and rescue mission for Matt Hancock after 42 days. The health minister has not been seen since parkouring off South End Pier during a charity demonstration last month. He is assumed lost at sea. Those are your headlines at one, I'm Tobias Mills. Hello and welcome back to The Big Debate with me, Keith James. We're talking about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected your local area. Jonathan Bezingstoke, you've been experiencing some issues, is that right? Frankly, Keith, there's not even half of it. The state have been collections during

this lockdown, there's been nothing short of a crisis. There was a time when an Englishman could rely on his refuse being collected on a weekly basis. But now we've allowed our rights to be chipped away to once a fortnight. And now with all this, it's less a fair collection when they feel like it. So, Jonathan, if I'm understanding you correctly, the bin collections have suffered recently in your area. Has Rubbish been accumulating? Honestly, Keith, Privet Lane Bezingstoke looks like mugged issue at this point. I'm surprised it's not attracting carrion birds. This is a national disgrace. I've recently been elected

to the Board of the Nationwide Bin Collections Concern Alliance and I've heard some honestly bone-chilling stuff. Their families in Cheshire haven't gotten a garden waste collection in three and a half weeks. You have to ask yourself, is this the kind of Britain we want to live in? Would Richard the Lionheart have stood for urinating into an overflowing chamberpot? It's disgusting. OK, some strong opinions on bin collections from Jonathan there. Let's go to Barry in Collacton on Sea. Barry, you there? Thanks, Keith. I was, this is your caller there about the bin collections and I have

to agree this country has gone to the dogs, quite frankly. Would Winston Churchill have stood for a monthly paper recycling collection? That is what World War Two was about. Ittler wanted to take away our bins and the state of things now, it is a betrayal of the people who fought and died for this country. So, Barry, just to clarify, are you laying blame at the door of the government here? No, no, not at all, Keith. Ultimately, you've got to bear in mind what a worse situation we'd be in if Jeremy Corbyn was in charge. The old lot of it would be a mess. We'd have a separate bin for jam and tampons and that. There'd be all sorts of left-wing inspections

to check what you was putting in each bin. Look, I don't say this lightly, but there would be a bin starzy and it is an Englishman's right to privacy about what he puts in his bin in the privacy of his own home. Very strong views here on the state of refuse collection. You can still call in the next 45 minutes. This is Here We Go by Jinsang. Hello, and welcome to the free TF that we are starting for the first time. Yeah. Oh, I can't believe it's the free one. Thank you, Andrew Law. And we wish you a speedy recovery.

Yeah, friend of the show, Andrew Law. Yes. Struck down by the woke left, also known as the appendix. The political correctness gone mad. The appendix is the wokest of the organs. That's right. Exactly. That's why it gets too frigged and it just decides, oh, I need a safe space. I'm going to explode.

It was originally the appendix, but they changed it to make it inclusive. They simply can't stand debating the other organs. We were very happy to see that friend of the show, Andrew Law, a host of Buntavista on Twitter at Illybosian has recovered from being canceled by his appendix. We wish him a swift and safe space. We wish him a swift and swift recovery as he triumphs in the octagon of reasoned debate and logic. Yeah, next week he's going on Trigapod to talk about his appendix's campaign against

him. And, you know, as always, yes, very good and warm wishes to him and do go listen to Buntavista. We're very irony poisoned, but we do actually like Andrew Law. We should make that clear. Taking the bold stance that we would prefer that our friends do not die. Yeah. Yeah. Whoa.

Anyway. Spicy take there. So we are not starting this a third time. So we're going to plow ahead. Yes, we are. Okay, so today we are actually going to be talking about another seismic transformation in the economy of most cities, this time pertaining to food and the stuff that you eat.

Yeah. Have you ever eaten food? Just a just a go, Andrew. Law or all the more. My appetite is quite all right. Thank you very much. My stomach is functioning normally. What?

Damn it. Stop. Stop. Ironically, making fun of her friend for getting unwell. We all actually care about him. In a classic mix up, Andrew and I go into the wrong hospitals and I wake up with no appendix. But doctor, oh no, it's you.

You gave me the wrong chapter. You gave me the wrong chapter. Damn my appendix. But Andrew, who do you think donated the penis? Andrew, two penises Law. Now they've replaced his appendix with a penis showing him on an altruist sound. Okay, come on. You can really see the penis.

What is appendicitis but your appendix, the dick of the stomach, just ejaculating everywhere. Well, you would think that the appendix and the dick are related because they're once vestigial. Yeah. Okay, for the love of God. Moratory. Yes. The last word on this is us wishing Andrew a swift recovery and we are glad that he's

okay. Yeah. No more about this. I don't want to have to keep doing this so that our position is clear. Enjoy your new penis. Okay. So we're talking a little bit about food. Sorry.

Fuck. Oh, this is going to be a good one, I can tell. So we're talking about food and restaurants specifically and how those have been transformed to be, again, not transformed by the pandemic, but transformed by the start-upification and tech-componification of more and more sectors of the economy. The horrifying words you've just invented, the tech-componification. Small levels of word usage there. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm very good with all of them. So basically, this is a trend that's been going on for a while and it is around something called dark kitchens. It has been accelerated by the pandemic, but they've increased in popularity, sort of, like exponentially. You have to be rendered to a CIA black site, but it's just making a big thing of pasta sauce. Yeah.

You're having electrodes attached to your testicles. You can't see anything because there's a hood over your head. It's really hot. You feel like you're in a tropical climate somewhere and then you just hear the chef's table music playing. I mean, those things actually exist, right? I remember that vice documentary about the chefs of Guantanamo Bay and it was such a super weird documentary because it was the weirdest place to be talking about how they

make special fried chicken mixture. What if Guantanamo Bay is still the horrific human rights abuse that we all know, but unironically, the food is really nice? They've just got a Michelin star chef in at Guantanamo Bay. No real reason. Just by accident. They've just come up with the combination of herbs and spices that makes the chicken really good.

It's been awful, but the lamb tajine to die for. Basically, I think that's totally realistic that that would happen. This is largely from something you and I talked about once, Alice, which is that so many people now, especially the chef's table types, feel the need to add some greater mission or personal story to any thing they're creating. We were talking about food in this example, how it can never just be a thing. Food always has to be some kind of expression of your past, your politics or whatever. That's why we make fun of recipes for being like, I first made lamb tajine and it's four

pages of that. And then at the bottom, it's like, yeah, you throw some chicken in the sauce and it's back pot. When the planes hit the towers on September the 11th, 2001. That was when I knew that I had a calling to make the best fried chicken that the US Navy and Cuba had ever had. I believe perfectly, I believe perfectly, perfectly honestly, that we are not more than two years away from like, I don't know, like chef's table, like sending some Michelin

starred chef to Guantanamo Bay to try to find some humanity in the, you know, illegal potential. You know Vice would send someone to the like the YPG and be like, yeah, what's up with the food? They would send like action. They would send action Brunson. We are getting back on track. Pop-up restaurant in the West Village called Guantanamo Bay Leaf. Yeah.

Thank you. So the concept of a dark kitchen is actually just a commercial kitchen without a restaurant attached. And so what these, what these do is they work exclusively for like delivery apps. So it is a kitchen that is exclusively does like prepares food that is then picked up by like Deliverer or whatever, which is all food now unless you live in like a plague state. Yeah.

So if you see, if you see something that says Deliveroo Editions on your Deliveroo app, the whole dark kitchen thing emerged in 2017, not 20, not actually 2017, but it started taking off a couple of years ago when apps like Deliveroo and Uber Eats and stuff were needing to serve more people more food than normal restaurants could, could produce. And so they just began starting up their own areas that then you could rent space in to become basically a restaurant without a kitchen. A restaurant, rather, a restaurant without a seating area. And in most cases, like multiple restaurants without a seating area.

So like you would have like just a dial on the front that like turns to different kinds of cuisines. And then all of the sauce that gets dispensed from a big pipe just changes in character from like ragu to Korma to whatever. That's right. The natural endpoint of this is that demand for Deliveroo becomes so high that they have to put a dark kitchen in everyone's house. That's not by you on a zero hours contract depending on when you order the food.

And then the guy on the bike just shows up with the ingredients and you have to cook them yourself. That's Blue Apron. That exists. Of course it does. So, so we're going to look at this through a couple of different ways. First, we're going to, we have one lens to look at this. That is going to be the ideology.

And then we have one little meaty sniff, by the way. You just really just inhaled that whole microphone there. You mean normal G-Jack? I don't want to open a small plates restaurant. So essentially, yeah, we're going to talk and wait a second. Milo, your G-Jack is just Slavik Joker. Yeah, it's just Slavik Joker. I like to be dumb.

Do you want to know how I got here's your scarf? It was all the sniffing. So here's a little bit more background. This is from an Australian, an Australian, a branch of CBRE, which is like a... Good morning. Lisa, thank you, Milo. A real estate lesser.

And essentially, they say, this is a great addition to the traditional bricks and mortar hospitality offerings, said Leif Olson, CBRE Australia's director of retail, Lisa. He said, wielding an axe and jumping from his longship. It is a low-cost rental option that takes the pressure off the bottom line and enables food providers to put product in front of a wider customer pool. I love product. I love consuming products.

I love taking pressure off the bottoms. It has also breathed new life into distressed real estate assets, such as car parks and abandoned mall. Every car park is now a kitchen. It's cool. I love to breathe new life into the mall from Logan's Run. That's right. You don't have to, guy.

You can have karma. You're getting made karma by a twink. You've got to be down. You have to order online. There's no seating area. It's just a kitchen. You only sell chicken karma. And it's not my twink.

That's what they want these days. I feel your depression never fails to delight me. It's so good. Food teleporter. So Olson noted that an increasingly popular trend is to fit out an array of 20-foot shipping containers with commercial kitchen equipment. Oh, fucking hell. I knew it would be like a containerized kitchen eventually.

Yeah, there it is. Yeah, welcome. Welcome to this because this is now a huge business that is that is taking over sort of great swaths of the of the of the UK restaurant market. And most and more and more people who work in the food industry, what jobs there will be left will find themselves working in or near dark kitchens. It's easy, right?

Because that way, when you traffic in your illegal workforce, you can just keep them in the same shipping container and just like bolt some ovens into it. Yeah, season two of the wire, but with more kitchens. Yeah, so effectively, right? You have to think about. So this has to be thought about as I, unfortunately, and all the research I was doing on this topic, they say that the dark kitchen

trend exists at the intersection of PropTech and Optech. Oh, it's intersectionality. What? Are those the name of the Winklevoss twins? PropTech is property technology. Optech is operational technology. As we've established, neither of these things generally involve technology other than that the company owns a computer, right?

Fine. Yeah, they have a website. Yeah. Yeah. It's the most as far as I can tell, like PropTech is not a thing. It's this is like this is what's interesting about this. And we'll see this as we get on is that the big investors in the like dark kitchen startups are real estate investment funds. They're not really VCs. Cool.

And so it's generally and we'll we have some some fun some fun stuff to get into about the specifics of some of these as we get in. But that's what we're looking at. Optech is basically like different kinds of Uber. We sort of operational technology like as as a whole can be understood as the the efficient connecting of two ends of a transaction, whether that's paying and paying an invoice or getting a taxi ride or whatever. So there is an infrastructural element and a real estate element.

And those things are coming together to try to like basically churn out this sort of high volume, low margin item. It's a but it's a buddy comedy. Between the property guys and the operations guys. Yeah, so those guys will never get on. I'm a fast, tedious property tech executives and you're a Bruce Cannon off tech executive. Yeah, I mean, you're just always inventing a bus.

I mean, this is this is absolutely like a Kevin Hart movie. Just waiting to be made, right? So global global providers include karma kitchen, cloud kitchens, ketopy and then deliveru itself. What was that last one? Sorry. Deliveru itself. I know. I know. Ketopy was the one I was.

Ketopy. Ketopy sounds like a nickname for someone at university who was called Sophie, but did loads of cat. Sounds like a posh nickname. Ketopy is. We were talking off air about like insane posh nicknames and it is it is the poshest girl thing to just like have a nickname that in no way relates to your actual name.

Look, in the poshest British families, the dogs have girls names and the women have dogs names. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's called Jessica. The mum is called Mufti. That's how it worked. Just for fun. I have most of my information here is about karma kitchen,

because it's the one that I find most interesting. But I did look up ketopy. They say we're passionate about creating a kitchen utopia, which presumably is where they got the name. Why wouldn't you call it ketopia? Yeah. Oh, that's them. Founded in 2018.

See, that's when it was most getting popular. We are the world's leading managed cloud kitchen platform that partners with restaurants to expand their delivery reach. Oh, it's on the block chain in the cloud. Just because you use the internet to book the kitchen doesn't mean it's in the fucking car. You can't just you can't just say things and just act like they're true. But that's not how it fucking works.

Is it kind of like, oh, well, you'd use a rideshare car. Oh, the car's in the cloud. No, it fucking isn't. There's a physical fucking car. You just don't necessarily know which one you're going to get. I think it is like, no, I think it is accurate. It's just in the way that like the cloud in its original sense always just meant someone else's computer.

So this is fine. This just this literally just means it's happening somewhere else. This labor is being obscured from you. That's what a cloud is. What's well, what's interesting here, right, is that ketopia and karma kitchen are sort of looking at this from two different ends. Ketopia is much more overtly a tech company or because they say we provide or much more overtly and as a service company or a tech company, necessarily.

They say we provide restaurants with access to state-of-the-art infrastructure at a minimal capital expenditure. So yeah, one shipping container. So essentially you pay you would what you would do is you pay a flat fee to ketopia and then they would hire all the staff and you would kind of just give them their menu, your menu, your ketopia, just going to the shipping container and they're just like pointing at like normal kitchen implements like a salt shaker, just going Wi-Fi.

But like this is just more like more elements of abstraction of labor, right? You don't know who your boss or your employer is because you're hired by a guy who owns a shipping container firm. How could you model? Yeah, literally, yes. You don't know who any of the other chefs are. You don't know their names. That's why you were cooking in Guantanamo is because you joined Kitchen Isis.

You don't even get to know what the dish is until you're almost finished on cooking it. You're just preparing individual ingredients. That's kind of how this works, right? This whole point is by abstracting away the entire... By abstracting away the labor from the capital investment, by being a middleman that's supplying all of that as a service, what basically means is that you can kind of become a restaurateur just with a laptop and then a couple of different services that you just sort of put together.

Kitchen Isis. Wait, Kitchen Isis. Anthony Warrell Alback Daddy. Look, you wouldn't download a Chicken Cormor. No, you wouldn't. But yeah, I think... Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. Alice, I think you're exactly right when you say this is about the abstraction of labor

because really what that means is that restaurant owners now are just customers of a service provider. And the idea for that service provider is to become a monopolist. Yeah, and it's just fully containerized into a box full of employees or wearing like blindfolds and shit. And a guy just comes around and turns the big dial that like means that it outputs Indian food or Italian food or French food or Thai food or whatever. Containerization is not just what's literally happening with the building,

it's what that the kitchen's in. Containerization is much more than just putting things in containers. Containerization, what it did was it revolutionized global shipping by making all shipping containers a standard size. Yeah, and almost breaking the longshoremen unions. Exactly. And so what it meant, but what that meant was that all of a sudden everything became modular and everything could be as a service.

That's where you get like fourth-party logistics providers coming out of now. Like that doesn't work unless you have containerization and everything is modular and swappable. And the idea behind the dark kitchen model is to make everything modular and swappable to abstract the labor from much of the capital investment, which becomes more about buying a service from where the real capital is, which is in the managed service providers. This is really mental because this is basically like dropshipping but for food. Just like you're a restaurant, but you don't have any idea how to make food whatsoever.

You've just hired a guy who's hired some other guys who are chefs. You don't know what kind of chefs they are. You don't even know what they're cooking. You all you're doing is taking orders and passing them. You're basically getting commission on sales for some chefs who you've never met who may be an Isis. I love to go to a Chinese room restaurant and eat Chinese room foods. I'm John Searle and this is the Chinese room restaurant.

Yes. That is what it is though. It's a series of like black boxes, none of which interact with one another except to like ship a little box full of bakora. Yeah, it's a restaurant where you just you order something and you have no idea what you're going to receive. I would go to that. It would be in Berlin.

It would be like every cell from the table would spin and you get the person to the left of you's meal. Oh, yeah. I ordered some spring rolls, but then a guy just turned up and pissed in my mouth. To give you a little bit of an understanding of like, if you like restaurants or work in the restaurant industry, this should worry you.

The market size went from being 0.65 billion in 2018 when a lot of these companies were started. It's projected to grow to 2.63 billion in 2026. You know what this is? Aside from Chinese room food, which is easily the best joke I've ever made. Yeah, that's yeah. I agree.

That's great. What it is? Steamed hams. But what if I were to take computerized food and pass it off as my own cooking? Seymour Skinner just has a bunch of like illegal immigration containers somewhere who are making knockoff crusty burgers. So let's talk a little bit more about Karma Kitchen,

which is less about the provider. Karma Kitchen is less like a service provider. And well, we'll get to this, but one of the founders said to the FT last year, our ambition is to be the we work of food. Awesome. Wow, we want to be the big white elephant failure of food. A good example of ambition, I guess.

Yeah. So Karma Kitchen, their tagline from their site is we're disrupting commercial kitchens. So come on. Cool. Just like running in there. They're jackasses. Bad Margeras company.

Just running in, running into the kitchen at Lagavrosh, just completely naked, wearing his own poo. It's more of a G.G. Allen time. We transform industrial space into beautiful functional kitchens and co-working for the food and drink industry. Our first site is in Hackney, very close to Riley's old flat. That's crazy. They actually bought your old flat

and they have turned it into an enormous kitchen. That's a weird flat. Our first site is in Hackney and we're opening three more in the next few years. It's easy to join, it's affordable, and you'll be in a real community of wonderful businesses who can help you grow. The only way it's going to be affordable

is if all of the staff are wearing fucking shock collars or something. Well, the idea is... Which you are completely divorced from because that's happening at the best of karma kitchen or whatever and you don't have anything to do with it. I sort of know what this is now because now also there's a concurrent thing

where the public schoolboys who used to become DJs are now becoming chefs. I've seen this transition happen. Like five or even 10 years ago, the guy who went to Westminster and did loads of care and got a 2-2 from Cambridge, he was a DJ guy. That's exactly what he was doing. Oh my God, yes.

I know this guy. I also know a guy in this similar thing who was a DJ in Peckham and he did a few sets on radar FM. Then he got really fucked on Coke for ages. And then when he came out of rehab, he read the Anthony Bourdain book about being a chef. Oh, that's me. And that made him kind of...

So now he... Out of rehab, just had to go back to Wilkshire for a bit. I look after my dad's sheep, you know? Just sleep at the time. Actually, that's not even that far from the truth because during his weeks, he runs like an artisanal fried chicken cart, I think. Every one of the weekends, he goes to his parents' farm

in Wilkshire to rear cows. Wow, that was very close. Wow, that really... You got it. I have got it. I have got like... Like to be fair, I've met these guys so many times. I've got a good...

This is bris... This is brisynology, right? Yeah, yeah. So, but this is what not started by private school boys. Private school boys. We'll provide kitchen space for businesses that can't afford the high rent of bricks and mortar, said Echie Newton. Again, named after a drug.

Yeah, old fucking... Fucking Pinger's Money Coots. She was conceived in the 90s when we were fucking partying at the warehouse... No, it wasn't the warehouse project, then it was the Hacienda. That's what... We were at the Hacienda. I thought a fucked-up girl in the toilet, she got pregnant, called her Echie. I think Tim Westwood.

No, it doesn't. Tim Westwood sounds like this, yo dog! I've had a child. I've named her after a drug, because I'm a fucking hustler. I'm stressed enough that I have a big dog. And co-founded Karma Kitchens with her sister, Jeannie Newton. Jeannie named after the coefficient.

Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, so basically we're gonna... So it's a little bit of a story here. When asked about controversial working conditions in dark kitchens, Newton said she, quote, hopes her kitchen spaces are viewed in a different light. Listen, we only have the shock collars for very good reasons. It's kink.

You're actually kink-shaming those workers. That's right, yeah. I'm pulling into another, a little bit more other information here, away from Karma Kitchens for a sec, so hold that in your mind. Where a report by the Royal Society for Public Health has described dark kitchens as, quote, small boxes where food is produced in dark, cramped and low-paid environments, which are frequently either too hot or too cold. And a former dark kitchen chef who asked not to be identified,

said in an interview with the outlet East London Lines, that he quit his job after feeling dispensable and isolated. Quote, no one seemed to care about us out of sight, out of mind. I feel like we'd been dumped there. It was really bleak arriving to work each day. It's not like anywhere else I have worked. And I should note here, there was no evidence that Karma Kitchens is like this. But that's the business model in general,

is to isolate and to abstract that labor. And of course, it's going to be fucking miserable. And of course, there's going to be every incentive for any business to just make it as cheap and as dark and as cold and as miserable as possible to work in. Because who gives a shit? Think about Boohoo, right? This is, Boohoo doesn't make any of its own clothes. It just buys clothes from manufacturers in Leicester.

And then Boohoo is able to turn around and say, not even though Boohoo is putting the pressure on those factories to abuse their workers. We don't own any sweatshops. We have a network of independent contractors. And what they're doing is their business. Whenever there's a human rights abuse Boohoo just does the Tim Allen noise. So that's that. Whenever there's a human rights abuse in a dark kitchen,

your dark kitchen's company will just be like, steamed him. Who would have thought the people producing these 10 pH t-shirts in Britain were somehow being treated unfairly? No one could have known. Looking forward to extremely cheap PCORA and then being like, I'm sure this is fine. I would say the story we're going to tell from here is that I would not be surprised in the future if something like that does happen.

Except it won't be PCORA. It will be something elevated. It'll be like, you'll get a fucking bun me, right? It will cost you very little, like suspiciously low amounts of money. And it'll just have a human finger in it. Exactly. Or it'll have a little note wrapped around the meat that's like, save us. And you'll just be like, huh, that's weird.

You you'll go on the Internet and complain. And like a fun social media intern will reach out to you and be like, we're looking into this very strongly with a smiley face. And then they just want strongly. Yeah. So Newton, Echie Newton says, drugs do pay. Pinkers Newton said, these kitchen, this kitchen should be viewed as a massive asset to the council.

We designed the perfect space to get a five star rating and take the pressure off the businesses themselves. So Riley, isn't one of your things. And like the reason why you like luxury goods like wine and stuff, the fact that it is like authentic and artisanal and hand produced. Is it not the case that like having a black box that dispenses Michelin star food is kind of antithetical to that kind of thing and also like, therefore the kind of whole Michelin racing system and like five star racing system and

whatever. Yeah. It depends what shade of black though. Shut up. A fan to black box. I go back and forth about this quite a bit. Because like, I like to think a lot about aura and sort of what Walter Benjamin talks about and so on.

And I, because you can make the argument that trying to appreciate a work of art that specifically isn't mechanically reproduced or reproducible or that is somehow original because of its connection to place and time is kind of a reactionary ideology. But at the same time, it's inherent to capitalism to destroy any kind of like non-mechanical forms of labor because, well, you have to do more efficiency and you have to make the steam loom and you have to make the fucking, in this case, I guess, the Barney machine that is a miserable dude going into work every day and making Barney while he's locked in a shipping container.

So I think the key for me, the key for this one, right, isn't the, it's not bad because it's being mechanically reproduced. It's being bad because what looks like sort of abstract, technologized, and repeatable mechanical services are actually, in many cases, end up being incredibly exploitative. Yeah, it's weird. It's almost like under capital, these technological innovations become means of exploiting people more efficiently. So much you make a podcast all about that. Weird, yeah.

Now, this is, I find this very funny, right? But this, and also don't forget, like, right, the Newtons have pitched karma kitchens as a, almost a lifestyle choice. They say, oh yeah, our kitchens are also very beautiful and you can come and like be photographed working in them and so on to like promote your brand or what have you. They're as much about spaces for like meeting and having fun as they're in trendy areas as well, like they're in, they're the one by London Fields and so on. Me and my sister, DiscoBiscuit, have spent a long time working on the interior design about it to make sure that they're absolutely jubbling.

And they rent out these very glam spaces to artisanal brands and so on. But that was before coronavirus, where now 85% of their trade has been take away and they're just about to grow a whole lot more. Currently raising Series A funding to fund further sites in London and is considering expansion UK and Europe, including Glasgow, Birmingham, Paris, and Madrid. Oh no, we're getting the mechanized five star Munchie box. Hell yeah. The thing is they went out seeking three million pounds of funding just to begin doing this.

Well, Series A funding is always very responsible. So I'm sure they, they had to justify every penny of that and they got the three million pounds and no more. So they have, what they have is they have right now, I believe, yeah, they have two kitchens, like one in Wood Green and one in Hackney. They have just gotten a quarter billion pounds from Vengro Vasset Management. That makes perfect sense. And that gives them a post money valuation of over a billion pounds.

Did they give that guy a post money, cash money, karma catching? What the fuck is a Vengro Vasset Management? Oh, I'll tell you that. Vengro are the people who secured and piloted all the WeWorks that are in the city of London. And that one really well. So they're responsible directly for both locations on Moorgate and East Cheap in the city of London. So if you wanted to be the WeWork of something, Vengro Vasset Management will just turn you, your company, into a billion pound valued company.

I had to do some estimates. The official valuation hasn't been published. But yeah, so if you want to think of this, not in terms of, don't think of it in terms of this company is getting this large and so on. Think of this as an example of this is where capital is going. This is the model that they're chasing. And this is what they're trying to turn restaurants into. And the real estate companies, the real estate funds are already basically making that happen.

But that change is currently occurring. The real estate funds that did exactly this to the office with WeWork and face, evidently, absolutely no consequences, learned less than nothing. Look, if there are any, if there are any capitalists listening to this, I'm going to give you a safer investment opportunity than, you know, Echie and Disco Biscuits Kitchen Company. What if instead there was a business where you just bought me a nice car? Yeah, what if you paid for my surgeries?

Yeah, it will depreciate in value somewhat, but not as much as this business, which is predicated on a completely fucked concept. I have to say, the number of workers that my new, your funded pussy would oppress is I'm not going to say zero. That would be ridiculous, but it's definitely fewer. Well, getting getting surgery in a shipping container. Getting a shipping container installed as a pussy. A guy from Serbia who's just following a YouTube video.

Again, I think the important way to understand this, right, is Franco Margeric. The important way to understand this is also not even that because they're saying, we want to be the we work of this thing, it's not that it's going to fail. I mean, if anything, it probably is a quite sound investment because assets, especially assets, commercial assets in the middle of cities right now are very cheap. Online, there is demand is outstripped supply in terms of online ordering of food. And also it's already a casualized and vulnerable workforce that is vulnerable to more casualization driven by this kind of trend.

I don't get in the box, get in the shipping container, get in the shipping container. I don't see that it's a business that's going to necessarily fail in its own merits, but it certainly is going to be relatively inhuman. Any case, so the whole trend around this as well mostly is that it's real estate firms who see this as a real estate play because they're trying to shape their investments and recover the value of like car parks that they own. It's Howie from Uncut Gems, but he's a real estate guy. In fact, Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber has his dark kitchen company,

and what he's mostly done is bought up disused parking structures and filled them with shipping containers. Absolutely. I love to get like my NCP ass on me. And they're planning to use this cash now to expand their model quickly across Europe. So again, like don't forget, right? This is something you see all the time. Companies are started and advertised as a kind of middle-class lifestyle choice. Like Uber was never supposed to be anyone's fault, or it was never said. No, it was a fun little adventure for like retired people who wanted like a fun way of making a tiny bit of money in their spare time. And you get to play taxi driver and meet interesting

people. And then people, whoops, what's this? It's all of the same people who would otherwise be taxi drivers. Just like OAP fake taxi. It's like your dad's struggling to pull out an even mild traffic and just going, oh, we'll get there eventually. So effectively, right? And again, what they say is, oh, this is if you have like a little food stall and like Broadway market and you want to like come and do your prep, you can rent the kitchen for like six hours, and then we'll clean it down and you can do all the prep and so on. But because 85% of the business is now catering to Deliveroo restaurants, which as we were talking about earlier, are so containerized that like,

I could just register a company called like Restaurant Concepts Limited or whatever. I could then- The Hontology Restaurants. I could then contract out through one of these dark kitchen as a service companies, whether that's a full service provider like Ketopia or just a space provider like Karma Kitchen. Then you could just eat, you could very easily like staff that with a bunch of people and then they basically go to work. You never meet them. And then they can create an ever-changing menu based on what your market research in the area says the area is desirous of. So effectively- Okay, why aren't we doing this?

Yeah, we have to move from becoming an oil warehouse. We have to get rid of all of this oil that we filled the studio with. It's like a legal pyramid scheme. So it goes back to this, it's also, I mean, and as much as it all is a pyramid scheme, I think it's more of an example of that old biscuit, all that is solid melts into air, because you no longer have a local restaurant that you know. You have a food provider that could be Lebanese food today, could be Peruvian food tomorrow. It's three different kinds of duff all coming out of the same pipe. Yeah, but it's basically a way to-

All I have tonight are Simpsons references. Hey, you're in the right place. It is essentially a way of demolishing all of those personal relationships that exist in the food, in like the provision of food, which is traditionally a very sort of loving and personal act. And so like this, again, if you like restaurants, this should worry you. So they say instead of raising money down the line from a venture capitalist to invest in all that capex and fit out the sites ourselves, we chose to partner with a real estate group who specialized in industrial real estate acquisitions, said Echie Newton. Awesome. The nature of what we were going to use the money for change from leasing sites and

putting them out ourselves to basically having a real estate partner who has a set fund to buy the freeholds of the sites and then fit them out for us. So I don't fully understand what Karma Kitchen is actually doing now other than just- Brandon, more of an ideas thing. It's more of a vibe, actually. Isn't it also just a way of convincing whoever can be convinced that these are restaurants? It's really there for PR and for show. But really, this is just like in the same way that every other one of these types of operations has gone, this is really just a way of artificially inflating or maintaining the already existing inflation of very expensive real estate.

That's exactly correct, yeah. But you have Echie and Genie Newton showing up to let you host an artisanal honey-producing workshop. And I think it's all, could you please meet my third sister? Alice hit me with the drop. Oh, fuck. What? Shit. You might know which one. Yeah. Steamed Hems. No. Please let me introduce my third sister. I was also going to add, it's probably also important to remember that part of, you know, it's very transparent what these people are doing when it comes to just maintaining the value of real estate and stuff. But it's also the idea that so much of their real estate value depends on this kind of imaginary idea of local communities existing.

So these types of kind of, quote, unquote, like restaurant companies are really there also to kind of present the idea that, oh, you're moving into this area where there are lots of like localized restaurants. And I wouldn't be surprised if they use kind of things like COVID-19 as a way of basically presenting themselves as like the people who may maintain those restaurants and like maintain, like able to maintain that presence and therefore they are also like the only people who were able to maintain these communities that weren't really communities anyway. They were just kind of big hubs of very large, empty property or very, very expensive property. Remember we talked about Taylor McWilliams, that Texan guy who was

like in a terrible EZM band, but like also was just evicting like cash and carries and restaurants from property in Brixton, right? All of those spaces are going to become like containerized kitchens and that's going to be extremely authentic. You're going to be able to pay- After the cash and carry which has successfully- Yeah, they have resisted him. It's the last restaurant. That's the last one. To say it's not even a restaurant, but it's the last one. So the way to understand this, I think, yeah, of course, like everything where real estate is

involved, it's basically just new and interesting ways of being a landlord and trying to preserve the value of that investment while pivoting to what the market requires. And just like we've talked about in our sort of macroeconomic sort of step back and look at the big picture episodes, is that the decision has been to rebuild the economy in a way that caters to the needs of capital while compromising on the needs of everyone else. And this is just one crucial way in which everything from- in which the workers are sort of further abstracted from the- or ownership is further abstracted from the production process allowing or creating an environment where there's a risk that abuses could crop up. And it's even like taking away

the idea of the local restaurant. It is depersonalizing and hollowing out and making worse everything because of the brute ledger logic of capital. It's all for and to the benefit of fucking Tina and Molly or whatever else. Also, by the way, this is portrayed as sort of a rags for riches story, but I'm a genius and disco biscuits day school in South Kensington was 22,000 pounds a year. Anyway, now, well, I'm sure that was paid by charitable foundation. Yes. So, you know, rich people fucking it up again.

Love to see it. So it consistent with this as well. I also wanted to talk about squirrel. Squirrel. This one's ripped from the headlines. We're not doing the usual thing of when something happens, we ignore it and we go into an episode about the opposite thing to that. Whoa, skull, skull, motherfucker. Whoa, skull, skull. Yeah. So, but I think squirrel is relevant to this. Now, squirrel has been in the news because they like...

Yeah, what the fuck is a squirrel and where is a squirrel? What is a squirrel? Thank you, Alice. That's a good question. They're called squirrel. It's called squirrel. So, squirrel is a restaurant in L.A. that very openly sort of is talked about as a massive gentrifier of its neighborhood. And it is... The vibe is like breakfast kind of so you can get like a $14 French toast with like homemade jams.

Yeah. And they're a big... Cool. They basically started as a... This woman, Jessica Coslow, had a jam-making company called Squirrel. And... Well, it did immediately. A big question is why the fuck would you have a jam-making company? I had some America.

Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah. So, this all came to light because workers in a dark kitchen, an illegal dark kitchen that was used by squirrel, were talking about sort of them being pressured to sort of just ignore numerous health code violations. It's like breaking bad, but they're just cooking jam. Literally, yes. That was exactly right.

What it was was they had a dark kitchen, not off-site and not legally, but illegally. They literally like locked employees behind a wall like fucking Pablo Escobar, while the health department inspected the place. And what they were doing back there was making... And again, this is such a fucking... Like, it's so easy to make the drug jokes, right? Making enormous vats of jam with, and there are photos of this, an inch-thick layer of mold covering fucking everything.

Blue jam. It's a special... It really enhances the flavor. So, basically, most of this came to light, yeah. When Jessica Kossel, the owner of this asinine jam restaurant in LA, started making pronouncements about police brutality and so forth, while basically having also staked her entire professional life on apparently screwing over people of color. She was posting rice on stuff about defund the LAPD, Black Lives Matter,

and then the replies would be, hey, didn't you employ me to scrape off the foot of mold off your jam? Make me hide from the health inspector. All of our mold scrapers are given the highest level of safety equipment and pastoral support. So, basically, this all blew up then when Joe Rosenthal, who's a scientist, investigated her food and hygiene practices and found all this disturbing shit. So, like I said, the infrastructural and the real economy of the transforming industry story is the story of Ketopia and Karmacite and Venkrove and so on.

Can I read Joe Rosenthal's thing? This is the ideology. What he says is, first of all, point one, there was an illegal kitchen space operating at Squirrel that was actively kept hidden from health inspectors. Just to be clear, as far as from what I understand, the reason that I say this is a dark kitchen, even though it's connected to a kitchen, is that it was offsite. So, it was basically a kitchen that delivered then exclusively to Squirrel that was brought by Squirrel.

This space contained all of the jam made at Squirrel inside the walk-in. The fan inside the walk-in freezer had mold on it and the fan spread mold spores over the jam. The jams were left with their lids off due to improper jam cooling procedures. I hate having improper jam cooling procedures. I think it's not good. You need to have good ones. The jam had a thick layer of mold, which one employee described as a quarter-inch thick and which was scraped off into a bucket. See moldbucket.clickbaittrash.com for a picture.

You have to go on eBalm's World for that. And then, the jam was deemed satisfactory once mold was scraped off. Employees say Jessica Coslow directly instructed them to scrape off the mold. Multiple employees have said they were locked in this illegal kitchen space with the lights off, so a literal dark kitchen, when health inspections occurred. Health inspectors were told that the jam was made off-site, and so they didn't see the mold and jam. And also, it was full of rats.

Oh, okay. So, I understand this now. So, this was, okay. So, I fully understand this now. So, it was a space that was connected to- It was a Pueblo Escobar fucking hidey hole. They were making this jam in a spider hole next to Saddam Hussein hiding from coalition forces. This is not properly a dark kitchen, but it- It's an extension to it, yes. Because the way they were able to swing this with the health authority was,

oh, yeah, we just do a dark kitchen, don't worry about it. And the health department was like, yeah, okay, we don't need to see where this kitchen is. We don't need to inspect it. That's fine. Jessica Coslow walks in wearing a head-to-toe white suit with a huge Panama hat, and she's using a cane. And they're like, please, Ms. Jessica, there is the inch layer of mold on Saddam Hussein. It's like, just scrape it off. I mean, yeah, it is a dark kitchen.

It's very much the same thing as we were talking about Wirecard and Greensill, where you get in trouble for doing the same thing illegally. The way you're supposed to do this is you just become a real estate firm. And you just fill a shipping container full of Romanians. If you do this illegally on the cheap, then you're in trouble. Yeah, it's like, if there's one thing we've learned in this show, it's that the difference between an illegal exploitative hellhole and a legal business is basically if you filed the correct paperwork. Otherwise, they're indistinguishable.

Yeah, Jan Marzalek just reading about this squirrel story in the paper and is like, oh, yeah, they had a secret compartment, yeah, yeah, of course. It's like the Greensill Wirecard thing, where Wirecard invented all the money, but they didn't do it right. So these are very, I think, sort of two sides of the same coin. Exactly. Responding to these allegations, Jessica Kozlo said, I filed paperwork and proactively contacted the Health Department to request an inspection in 2013. The truth is that at the time, I thought I could update the additional space

that the little funds I had saved, but the job ended up being bigger than I could afford and my bag would not give me a loan. Around that time, our secondary kitchen, so that's what they're talking about, fell off the radar of the Health Department. Fell off the radar. Yeah, just somehow, despite the fact that Squirrel's main kitchen received regular inspections, shamefully, I took advantage of their oversight and did the best we could as we used Squirrel's main kitchen for all our restaurant orders, including jam and use the secondary kitchen primarily for baking and prep.

Sir, it's a stealth kitchen. And I'm going to have to do this the old fashioned way. I love that. She's just like, yeah, I didn't want to pay for it and it seemed hard, so I just did. I love just like the language that she's using. It's kind of the very whole, is the whole like, I'm just a small bean, cultivating jam in my bizarrely small layer, which is registered to an island that we don't talk about very much. This is the other thing about Jessica Kossler, right, is that she does this whole like, oh, I'm a sole producer and I make the jam and like, we'll get into some of the press that

she's got not on the back of this. And when you look into it at all closely, it's just like, yeah, no, she told us to scrape the mold off the jam. Yeah, but then she's just like, oh, I'm 35, I'm new at this, I'm still learning. Yeah, look, the thing is that Jessica Kossler is being, she's being discriminated against here, right? Because I mean, you know, what if there's one thing that, you know, we can talk about is that jam for centuries has been the preserve of wasps. The preserve of wasps. Very good. I'm just imagining the idea of it, if this happened in the UK and how like,

you definitely would have like, one or two unhinged columnists, you'd be like, I'd much rather eat the moldy jam than Jeremy Corbyn's socialist, like, marrow paste. That's very funny. And the thing, right, the thing to understand about squirrel, we kind of emphasize it was one of these places in LA where everyone goes and they're like, one of the best things about it is there's a huge queue all the time. And toast is 12 dollars. Love to see that. There are a lot of places like that in LA and especially in Venice.

Like, whenever I got taken out for breakfast when I was there on a work trip last year, like we had all these places and it's like, I don't feel like it's not even because they're good, it's just because like the way that parking is car parking is done in LA is so weird, but like everyone sort of converges at the right time or like at like particular times. That's a Gladwell type of thing to say, though, right? Actually, car parking explains what restaurants in LA are popular and why Black Lives Matter is going too far. Look, that's, that's, this is going to be my new grift. So, practice it.

You go into Squirrel and they do that thing that posh restaurants do where they have like pictures of all the famous people who've been in there on the walls. What kind of posh restaurants are you going to? Some kinds. Are you talking about like all the like Pakistani like Lahore restaurants in London, where they like talking about the hard rock cafe? Because that's the posh restaurant I've ever been to because I'm a man of the people. Because you know, like, yeah, I was going to just go in there and you're looking at the pictures

and then you're like, is that, is that Saddam Hussein? He's in the kitchen making the jam. I just want to, like, I just want to recall his anecdote because I feel like I'm never going to be able to say this again, but in like the Lahore restaurants across London, like the guy like Lahore kebab house. Yeah, like the guys who run it. Like Tia's local favorite Lahore kebab house. Yeah. So next time you go to like any of the Lahore kebab houses or any like of the

Umbalo restaurants and stuff, have a look at the walls because the guy who runs those places, he photoshopped himself in pictures of celebrities. And like in there, like in there, like West Hambrunch, I remember like looking at this photo and being like, okay, so you, so you like was selling kebabs to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and also somewhere in various like Robert De Niro, they all came at the same time. He was like, they're all just holding big kebab spits that have also been crudely photoshopped into their hands. And he was just like, yes, yes, that's what happened. And then it was only when I got older, when I realized that, oh, that guy has photoshopped

himself into like all these photos. And he's the only guy who it's like, I'm not in a photo with Glay Maxwell, Glay Maxwell from Smoke Over Me. Sadly taking down my Epstein photo. So the follow, this is from one of the most famous people in the world. This is from LA Mag. From the opening of the restaurant, Coslow brought on a team, including opening chef, Rhea Dolly Barbosa, and later on hiring Javier Ramos as chef to cuisine. So remember what we were talking about earlier with regards to restaurants becoming these abstract brands built on containerized labor forces.

Imagine being chef to cuisine, but your only job is making huge vats of jam. They made other things, which we'll talk about later. So both Barbosa and Ramos have come out to publicly allege that they were uncredited originators of what would become Squirrel's best known recipes. They represent only a sample of a large number of workers, particularly by POC cooks, who were the real masterminds of Squirrel's cuisine, but never received recognition for their work on the Coslow kitchen. Ramos, who worked at Squirrel for two and a half years, directed cutting, this is one of my favorite exchanges in this entire...

It is such a bodies and spaces thing. Ramos, who worked at Squirrel for two and a half years, directed cutting criticism at Coslow in an Instagram comment claiming that not only did he not get recognition or payment for the recipes that he contributed to a cookbook, he also alleged that Coslow can't even cook at a domestic, let alone professional level. Savage. How can you not make toast? Well, that's the whole thing, right? I just wanted to be a chef, and all of these services are out there to make sure that if I have money, I can kind of play chef, and I assume there won't be

any consequences if I fuck up Catastrophe. I love Marie Antoinette's new style of milk churn. So what you have to understand... It's DJing, but for being a chef. What you have to understand, right, is that the only thing Coslow did wrong was she didn't... She did this all without hiring Cotopia or Karma Kitchens or whatever. Had she done all of this all of this this way, then the risk for bad food hygiene or whatever is put on to the Dark Kitchen provider. You get all the credit for all the recipes anyway, but you never actually meet anyone who's working for you. Yeah. And all you would have to go on is making fun of her name. So basically, what Coslow is wirecard to Karma Kitchen or Cotopia is Greensill,

where it's the same kind of thing. She just did it wrong. She just didn't do it with filing the right paperwork at the right time. So you have to... I think you have to understand, again, the story of Squirrel, expensive, massively gentrifying, because she says... Massively gentrifying and so on and so on, and sort of exploitative of these workers and all this. This is the business model. It's just... The paperwork is filed incorrectly. Anyway... Ultimately, Disco, Biscuit, Echies and Mandy are the kind of gatekeepers who keep working class entrepreneurs out of the business. In a comment on Squirrel's account, Squirrel responded to Barbosa saying, Jessica Coslow stole all my recipes and can't even cook

by saying, you are an incredible part of the Squirrel history and you brought a unique talent and thoughtful cooking here. Sashae away. Wow. Really trying to... Just rising above it. I appreciate that. Too stupid to be criticized. Yeah. No sympathy for anyone who signed up to work at a jam restaurant as the head chef either. Like, let's just get that out there. It's just like, yeah, it's like walking into a town where you don't speak the language, taking a big, huge shit in the town square, and then when someone comes out to yell at you for doing it, you just say, thank you for your wisdom. Yeah. Oh, no, no abloh, espanol. Speaking English. Coslow, so this is on

Coslow herself. This is from a profile in 2016 where she said the cheat behind Squirrel's success was quote, this shitty corner on Virgil and Marathon, two streets in LA, where rent is five dollars a square foot. I wonder why and I wonder what that neighborhood's like. Hmm. It's like demographically. Oh, the cheat is the cheat, Brent. Actually, it's human trafficking. So she said basically that one of... That she's trying to expand Squirrel at the time in 2016, the only thing standing in her way was this pesky neighborhood church where they wouldn't give up the lease. This community sense is a huge judge. Well, I'll say church isn't America,

quite often are storefronts. Still though. Yeah. So right, this is just... Yeah, I wish it's... This church is a de-consecrated JC Penney. I'm trying to kick out the population that lives here and can't afford to own it. Come on. Just like a guy ceremonially with four pairs of slacks hung around his neck has to come and do a little thing in the foyer of the JC Penney with, I don't know, like a credit card or something, and then it's allowed to become a church. So she says, yeah, the next door space where Costco and I ate lunch will at some point become part of Squirrel Away. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. That's really bad. Along in the Warcorks takeout spot with food that bears a squirrely fingerprint, but that's... Oh, there's the articles from

Eater. Squirrely fingerprints. It's actually mold. But that's ready, beautifully ready to eat on the go. Think salads that travel well, terrines and meat and meat or beet and three veg plates. In a Wall Street Journal piece from June 2015, Squirrely Away was slated to open imminently. And she told me it would be open already if the church that occupies the middle of the three-storefront she's planned to take over would agree to move. The church has roughly four members and her 92-year-old landlords don't have the heart to kick them out until Costco finds them a new home for their church. Awesome. I love to be the villain in a Disney movie about how the community center has to have a dance-off to raise a million dollars exactly within 48 hours.

Your church only has four members. That's not a church. That's a book club where you read the same book every week. And so what's also interesting here, right, is the extent to which Costco represents a brand and marketing operation on top of a food operation with which, apparently, according to some of these reports, just didn't really have much of an interest in or competence in. It was just like, okay, I'll bite. What the fuck is jam? Costco has been anointed by the East Coast food-based media as the bastion of all things Californian and vegetable forward and exciting and new. In New York Times, Mark Bitman deemed Costco's food downright revolutionary in a cuisine whose time has come. Mark Bitman.

You also would like to think of Costco as his culinary soulmate, which, coming from the author of Vegan Before Six, has a lot about the supposed virtue and perceived class of our food. She's in our food magazines and on our Instagram feeds at pop-ups around the country and in J-Crew ads at Mad in Copenhagen at a Yale Symposium chatting sustainability and doing Hellesthets with René Redzepi during their off hours. She's flying on this guy's plane. When our food arrived, this is a really long article. I've just pulled some fun paragraphs on it. When our food arrived, Costco forensically poked her fork through a salad of shaved plums, sliced string beans, dehydrated soy milk chips, and a lightly creamy dressing as

if trying to solve a riddle. The salad in question was one of the day's specials and not one of her recipes, her brow furrow. Whose salad, so her recipes, now we know what that actually means, the recipes of those two other people. Her brow furrowed. Who's salad is this? She asked, wanting to know who made it. She politely sent it back. It needs more. She started and then paused. Sarah Story, the general manager, jumped in. Acid? Correct. There was no demolition. Only Costco had trouble imagining something coming out of her kitchen that didn't excite her. Somebody help me tip the acid vat. You're telling me that this lady doesn't know how to cook. This lady who saw salt-fat acid hate on Netflix was like, it needs one of these four things,

probably, I guess. There's four ingredients that exist. The article continues, you know, after a few minutes, the salad returned, fluffed up with arugula, herbs, salt, and acidity jacked up to 11. Coslow nodded. Now it tasted like squirrel. You could have sent it back unaltered. Yeah, you could have sent it back unchanged. I would not know. No. Yeah. Again, this is someone who, had she got into the business a little later, could have done this entirely legitimately, just using a containerized restaurant where you just kind of get to play chef because you can pay a little subscription fee to a service provider or a cloud. Can I give you your own hat?

It's just her mistake was, I couldn't jam container. Her mistake, I think, was quite simply that the ambition was to become a cool cultural figure rather than, you know, a real estate mogul like drugs Newton. It's all these people want. Like, if she'd have just wanted to be rich, she's already rich, she must be. She'd have just done something else, something more conventional, like become like a landlord or something, right? Yeah. What she wants is the magazine profile about, like, sending back the salad because it doesn't have enough acid in it or whatever, because you're such a great fucking judge of salads.

It's just like chewing pensively on the salad and being like, I think you might have missed out the cum. More salad. Who's Steve Tams of those? More salad. Okay, more salad, more salad. Not too much salad. But yeah, so this is, to understand this, right, this is, again, just the pure application of just the stupidity that having capital sort of, it's the luxury of being kind of an idiot, it seems. Yeah. And also, like, you think the mold is bad in the, like, the illegal secret kitchen, you're going to love the legal ones. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's, and the way to think of this, right, is this is a little bit of peering over

the horizon as it pertains to an industry, what's coming, what's going to happen. And, you know, I think we have to get ready to see not just a lot more of the sort of exploit, the exploitative working conditions in the cut corners on quality and standards and so on, the weirdly low prices, but also to see more of the rise of that kind of a business. The restaurant is really just a vibe because its only interaction with you is branding delivered by Deliveroo. The platform economy is really about different pools of capital working together more efficiently to extract more value from you. The only authentic, personalized form of labor left is podcasting. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, the moral of the story here is, if you're a rich fail child, first of

all, thank you for listening. And second of all, if you're going to start, you know, business as a vanity project, you should follow in the example of the only good rich fail child, Wyatt Coke, and sell some big fat fancy guy shirts. Exactly. Perfect for the boardroom or the discotheca. Exactly. All the disco biscuit. The biscuit, the discotheque, they changed to Tattelis Island. Episode title, Legavrosh de Wyatt Coke. Yeah, that'll do. Let's do that one. Anyway, hey, look, I think we've made our point.

We've made ourselves pretty clear here. So once again, I would like to make it very clear that we would like to wish Andrew Law a speedy and healthy recovery. Yeah. Well, I hope I get that mold out of his appendix. He ate that salad that she sent back. Very ill-advised. Andrew Law was rushed to the hospital with an inch-thick layer of mold. That had to be removed. Yeah. So also, you know how what it is. This has been the free episode. You know, there are bonus episodes. Bonus. Bonus episode.

I'm the only one who's good at doing it. Milo's pretty good at doing it. I was not very good at it. Do you not like my sexy voice? Estradiol, right? Yeah, exactly. It's called Estradiol. Isn't the key? I want to try to do the ASMR bonus. So free to do it. Yeah, do it, do it. Bonus, bonus, bonus, bonus. Oh, pretty good. I like the echo. Reverb, yeah. Bonus. Anyway, that wasn't the echo. That was me repeating it. Yeah. Well, that's a human, an analog echo.

That's not these containerized echoes given to you by Ketopia. Anyway, here's the thing. Yeah, there is a bonus episode every week, five bucks a month. You can get that in your ears. You know what it is. We don't actually make the podcast. We're just a company, the holding company. You buy the podcast. It's actually produced by a bunch of Romanians and a shipping container. We've never met. I think we've been doing excellent voices. I was also going to say, listening to an episode is a great way to have a lovely meal inside a shipping container. Yeah. As more things get containerized,

ask yourself, what's going to be containerized next? Could it be podcasts? Anyway, help save us. If you're getting increasingly nervous, as I realized that I am the only member of Trash Eater who routinely works remotely and you could just replace me at any time. We're missing people in a shipping container. Exactly. Alice has to go to a home planet. Mike will now be taken by Andrew Law's removed appendix. Anyway, look, point being, you know, there's the bonus episode that you can listen to.

You also know that there are shirts and the bail fund link is still up because that is getting, if anything, worse, not better. Yeah, I know. Marcus Brown needs your help. Yeah, Marcus Brown incarcerated comrades at Wire. Remember, you don't have to talk to BA Finn. They are not your friends. BA Finn is not there to protect you. Defund BA Finn. Abolish Interpol Financial Crimes. Oh, and buy a shirt. Buy a shirt.

We still got shirts. Why not buy one? All right. I am going to go home and have a light dinner. Yeah, I'm going to go and meet someone for dinner. So yeah, fun. Pretty cool. I'm going to my shipping container to do stuff. Yeah, exactly. All right. Talk to you later, everyone. Bye.