TRASHFUTURE - Michelin-Starred BLEMTRO

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

A rare assemblage of November, Hussein, and Nate discuss the happenings of the day: Europeans deploying forces to Greenland to stave off Trump actually doing the thing; Trump's coterie of freaks claiming they're going to offer refugee status in America to British Jews; an article about an AI-powered restaurant chain where the machine not only cooks your food, but also invents your food. It doesn't sound great, if we're being honest! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Welcome to a free episode of Trash Future, the podcast about how we live in the future and why it's trash. I'm November Kelly. I'm joined by Nate Bithay and to St. Kisfarney. Sadly, it's all gotten too much for our fearless leader Riley Quinn, however. And to recover his mental health, we've had to send him up the Magic Mountain to a restful sanatorium in Germany called Birkheim, until he gets well enough that he can read us business inside our articles again. unfortunately all of us well I for one I'm stuck in the UK the country that is infested with might everyone in this country has fucking scabies and

so too listener will you very soon I mercifully do not have scabies yet yes but this is the prime time of year I always presume that they're they're like passed through intimate contact but I imagine like a lot of things they probably can get other ways too and this is a country

this particular region of the country is one where lots of British people come to go skiing this time of year. So who knows, maybe I'll get infested. I really hope not. But I was going to say, because you mentioned the Magic Mountain, can you imagine if you showed Thomas Mon Bergheim? I think we should. I think we should go back and we need to show him what it all led to.

I think he might have been thrilled. I don't know. But yeah, everyone in Britain has scabies. That's the sort of my favorite news story that I've read today and The Guardian is, why does everyone have scabies? I don't know. It's gross. But if we've learned anything in the last few weeks of politics, it's that might makes right. And that leads me right on to our first segment.

I've got three segments today. We've got some British news. We've got some world news. And we've got a big helping of dessert. I'm really excited for the articles today. Riley sent me this. It's magical. It is life-changingly good, not to over promise.

But I thought we'd start with some world news. In a segment that I'm sort of unwieldily calling the Jesus Christ, the senile pedophile in charge of the United States is actually serious update. It really seems like maybe they're going to do it in terms of occupying Greenland. I have been surprised because, so I live in a building with, there's a little TV screen on the elevator, and it's just showing like kind of like a rotation of news stories for some reason and like the weather. And I kept seeing stories of like France sends troops to go. Greenland, like photos of Greenland with like, you know, European military formations and protests and nuke and all these things. And it's like, oh, wait, I hadn't checked the news. And then I did. And I saw

Trump's, uh, truth social post. And it's just sort of like, this seems insane. Every, every kind of news. Anytime I go by a screen showing news, I feel like just, I've being hit in the head with a hammer. It feels like I'm sort of like everything collides in my brain. And it's like there is one hour left of oxygen on the Ocean Gate Titanic's of Merciful. Fucking Will Smith has slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. Charlie Kirk has been assassinated. It's bad. It feels like we didn't start the fire in here.

And right now, the thing is that Trump has sent a letter to the Norwegian prime minister in which he just confirms sort of oath theory and just says outright, here's what my motivations are. And I'm just going to read this letter for you both. Dear Jonas, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars plus, and pluses in all caps, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a right of ownership anyway? there are no written documents. It's only that a boats landed there hundreds of years ago,

but we had boats landing there also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now NATO should do something for the United States. The world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland. Thank you, President DJT. So I feel as though I am in some kind of hellish strategy game playing against the like animating spirit of every next door commenter in America, every four square review that's one stars in all caps because someone's mad that fucking like

they didn't get a smile or whatever it is they wanted. I've never seen this level of like annoying boomer slash silent generation old freak who's mad at customer service get kind of transmuted into like geopolitics. That's the thing. Normally there's layers in between insane guys. I mean, America's had a senile moron in charge many a time. Ronald Reagan was seen out for quite some time. There were just, I mean, he did some insanely horrible stuff, but there were also kind of people in the way. They didn't actually launch the nukes when Nixon got drunk and said he wanted to

fucking nuke chide or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, there were things in the way, and now this just kind of happens. I have a theory about this as well. And it's interesting that you mentioned strategy games, because I think that it's about the maps with this guy more than it is anything. Oh, 100%. Mercator projection is fucking going wild right now.

This is not a novel observation, right? The sort of Gulf of America stuff was also Donald Trump wants to permanently change the map in his sort of like favor. He wants to have that kind of legacy. The same with like annexing Canada. But he's kind of list on something that is doable in a sense. And as you say,

the McKays of projection, it makes Greenland look very big. Not that Greenland isn't important, but it makes it look huge geographically. And he's map painting. He wants that to be American for the sake of kids being taught in schools, generations hence that Donald Trump did that,

which is wild. I would like to tell you that just so that I could make a comment that was hopefully not stupid, hopefully didn't come across like an ignorant person or someone who just hasn't bothered to do their research, I actually pulled up Google Earth in order to confirm the thing that is quite true that if you actually go and look at, say, for example, Brazil versus Greenland, like, goodness,

Greenland's not that big, but it looks big in the Mercator projection. However, I also want to tell you that I first typed out Google Earth for some reason. So maybe I'm going to be Donald Trump before too long. And I'll be posing insane customer service complaints about how I should be allowed to annex. Also, I do find it very funny because right, okay, obviously Norway is where the Nobel committee is based. Yes. But at first, there was a part of me that was hoping when I first read this, that he was yelling at Norway because he got Norway and Denmark mixed up. It's almost as bad in the sense

that the Norwegian government doesn't control the Nobel Prize. It just happens in Norway. It's like in the same way that like the British government doesn't control the results of the traces, right? The BBC does that. But it's...

Well, now. Like, this is true. Like, ultimately, once we sort of exterminate woke from the BBC, then, you know. But it's fascinating because Maria Cunerumachado, the Venezuelan sort of like opposition figure

who got the Peace Prize instead of Trump, she went to the White House to give him it and be like, please, my country Venezuela yearns for freedom and by freedom, I mean making me president of it. And she literally, she like left without the medal but with a like Donald Trump branded gift bag. And for a while, people kind of thought

that this would be, you know, the thing that would sort of be the Trump And then the Nobel Prize committee put out an announcement saying, yeah, but you can't just give it away. You can't transfer it. We gave it to her. And now because of that, maybe the US is going to try and occupy Greenland. The weird thing about this as well is European countries are trying to sort of triangulate

an opposition to this. The funniest part in this, as ever, is Britons, right? because Germany sent some like Luftwaffe planes, you can't be calling them that, and immediately sent them straight back, not sort of super useful. France is claiming to be doing some stuff. We sent one guy.

We send the one guy that controls Britain, yeah. Yeah, it's all we have left. We sent the one army officer left. We have boot on the ground. And on the one hand, this is potentially extremely powerful because as we learned from a little documentary called Lawrence of Arabia,

if you send a lone British army officer somewhere, he will get deeply psychosexual involved with the culture of that place. And we will have a guy who doesn't realize he's gay wrapped in whatever kind of traditional Greenlandic garment leading an anti-American insurgency in a couple of years time. Mark my words. Yeah, he's going to lead the Danish Taliban.

It also kind of suggests the existence of like a kind of Greenlandic Terry Peck. like one guy who will like fight the Americans. But so because of this, Trump has gone to tariffs. And so he's announced every European nation that even sort of made like a whimper of protest is getting a 10% tariff that's going to rise to 25% in June, which is I think maybe the biggest impact on the British economy one guy has had. And by that I mean the guy we sent, as far as I can remember, that one guy has made Americans

buying stuff from Britain pay 10% more instantly, which is beautiful. Do you remember when Mitt Romney kind of did the grovelling thing and after Trump won because Romney had that like hostage looking photo while he was eating turtle soup or whatever and they still of course didn't give him anything.

It was just to make fun of it just to humiliate him. It's like I feel as though, not that I am in any position to give advice to Kirs Starrmer because Kirs-Thermer doesn't need advice. has guys who are obsessed with fucking fighting militant tendency 45 years later running the Labor Party and running it into the ground. But I feel as though at this point

we have enough contemporary evidence that if you suck up to Trump this will happen to you. Eventually this will happen to you. There is no way to avoid it unless you're Zoran Mandani and Trump's in love with you in which case, you know. Yeah. You have to project strength and handsomeness. This is the thing.

We need a hotter prime minister. And that's why I'm saying, West Streeting, it is your year. I'm just laughing at the idea that's like, look, everyone that I know back home is talking about how fucking broke they are, like how expensive everything is, how much more expensive things have gotten, basically every sort of like everyone's learning all about interlocking supply chains

because of the tariffs and all of the stuff that's happened that's just driving prices through the roof on top of all the other kind of fuckery that happened during COVID. And then the, you know, America wasn't hit anywhere near as hard with the energy crisis in 2022, post the invasion of Ukraine as the United Kingdom and Europe were, but America as a country founded on many things to include price gouging and price gouging being permanent. So the price rise in inflation in the U.S. is worse from what I can tell.

And it's just like the thing about the tariffs is like, yeah, you're going to own the Europeans, I guess, but you're going to own Americans more. Well, they're genuinely looking at firing the EU anti-coercion instrument, which is the kind of like, we do our best to sort of detonate your economy, like the EU sort of divests from treasuries and all of the rest of it. I think there's something interesting here as well,

which is there are kind of two options, it strikes me, strategically for Britain. And one of them is to kind of go for Wofferandum, right? And to throw in with Macron and the sort of rest of Europe and try and sort of make that a kind of a thing that works. Or, and this is my preferred option, we embrace Mark Carney thought. And I'm so sad right. isn't here for this. Mark Carney went to Beijing and he was offered a share of the mandates of

heaven, quite frankly. Visa free travel with China. Like, there was a trade deal in there. It's like, okay, sure, the human rights aren't great, right? American human rights obviously not great either. Our human rights aren't great. So setting that aside, if we could get the 5G that works and the electric cars that work, that's at least something where we could at least be sort of involved. Right now, it's Just like, a guy who Donald Trump vaguely remembers picking up some papers at his feet like a dog is going to like fuck our economy. Incidentally, I sort of anticipated Neso would collapse in my lifetime, right? But I'd never imagined it would be as stupid as this ever. I did not think it would be the president of the United States wants to put a flag over Greenland and is going to like, I don't know, maybe, maybe like,

And get involved in like some actual shooting with the Danes. Vice had some guys on the docks in Nuke and there's like Danish special forces like loading their shit off of boats and into SUVs in case the Americans try to like Maduro the Greenlandic government. I feel as though this is this is a situation where a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, I would have been a lot more sanguine. And I said this, I think I said this on the last episode when we talked about Venezuela, which is, I have now experienced so many instances in my lifetime of waking up and reading the news and be like, oh, they did that fucking psychotic thing we thought they wouldn't do because it's crazy. They invaded Iraq. Russia invaded Ukraine. They attacked Maduro. They sent helicopters to Venezuela.

You know, they, UAV strike Kossam Soleimani. All of these things where you're like that, that's, that's really stupid and really insane. They did it anyway. I genuinely do not want to predict anything along these lines because I'm just, I feel as though that's the surest way to make worse things happen. Apparently, I also have the mandate of heaven brackets negative. This has been a horrible time to have OCD, right? Like Donald Trump got elected because I didn't do all of my little rituals properly. And now, there's any number of things we could just fucking speak into being, right? Because he's the guy who does the thing that is unthinkable.

Well, one of the things that I find really funny, when I was a little kid, I flying back when I lived in Germany as a kid, we moved back to America when I was all. almost nine. And back in those days, I don't know, the flight routes don't seem to go this way anymore, but the flight from Amsterdam to New York went over Greenland during the daytime. That's a big ass fucking island with a lot of snow. I'm just saying, I remember being eight years old and looking at me like, wow, it's been hours and we're still over this snow scape, endless flat, snow, ice-covered rock. I just feel as though, while the United States really does love to fucking sell his capabilities with Arctic warfare, not that I know anything about this having been in Alaska,

I feel as though, I think the Danes probably know how to do it better, just flat out. We put our faith in a bunch of guys in Danish special forces who look like various scars guards and one deeply troubled British man, right? I believe that whoever that person is, they might be the kind of protagonist of the next bit of reality. And whatever I do, my sort of OCD thing doesn't matter nearly as much. as them falling deeply in love with a beautiful Greenlandic man and sort of like putting out matches on themselves and so on and so on. Conflicted geyser puts his army on the road to peace. I just, to me, I guess the one thing I'd say is that having seen this in Iraq when the US invaded,

whenever the US sends military deployments, like combat deployments, to environments, like climates that it's not particularly accustomed to operating within, this thing happens called No One Can Fly Helicopter. And I'm just saying that if they do, presumably they're not going to do an airborne insertion

with fixed-wing aircraft, I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of black dots on Google Earth or Google Earth if you're keeping track. This is, yeah, I have no idea

what's going to happen. Well, let me make a prediction, right? Please. So this all hinges on the British guy, the one British guy who's there for some reason.

And my feeling is that the American will come and they'll invade, and this British man's job will basically be to round up the local Greenlandic people who will see him as a Messiah figure. And he's going to learn to ride the ice worm.

Yeah, the ice worm's going to be there. Yeah, he's going to like launch the Danish jihad. Well, speaking of Danish jihad, right? If we're going by the US's capacity for nation building, what they're going to do is they're going to create like Fair Isle sweater ISIS.

You give it like five years time and like the entire Greenlandic power structure. I don't even know what that looks like has completely fractured. Like and you're getting fucking... Everyone has to unite behind Gaza treaties. Well look, yeah, like the Snow Taliban, I think is a very, is a very sort of like new and novel phenomenon. I think it's like it'll be like really good material for like the US film industry. Bradley Cooper probably will be looking for work at that point.

And maybe that might be like a kind of project he wants to sort of on. Yeah. We'll get some good movies out of it. And in like a few years time, if the world doesn't end, which it might. That's my world politics update. Now we're going to narrow in. And we've got to focus in a little bit on a worse place, the United Kingdom.

And we got to talk about anti-Semitism because it turns out that as we have long suspected, only the full force of the United States of America can prevent every Jewish person in Britain from being assassinated by the West Midlands police brigades of Hamas. I did say a few episodes ago that like it would not like considering like Trump is sort of on a mad one, it would not surprise me for him to sort of eventually talk about before the year is out, sending US troops to White Chapel to occupy to save, to save Britain's white population from the evils of Islam. And this has come closer than I ever expected in my entire life. Yeah. Now you get to read a shoot and cry novel from guys who were deployed to Watney Market for some reason.

Yeah, so there's the story going around that Trump is considering reusing the thing he did for like white South African, like victims of supposed white genocide, right, of offering them asylum in the US for British Jews, which in itself would be kind of funny, but it's actually weird than this. I dug into this a bit, right? This is one of his former lawyers, a guy called Robert Garson. He used to be like a barrister in the UK, moved to the US, became one of Trump's lawyers, sort of loudly announcing that he suggested this to Trump's anti-Semitism guy, saying Trump's anti-Semitism guy doesn't narrow down. Trump's anti-Aemitism guy, Yehuda Kaplan. No one knows if they're actually going to go for it or not. Like, you have to get this through the sort of chud-filled White House,

but he's sort of like going to the papers with it trying to force their hand. And I got kind of interested in this guy, Robert Garson. He was Trump's lawyer when Trump sued Bob Woodward for $50 million for releasing some like interview tapes of him on a kind of specious basis. He got laughed out of court. But like he's literally, I found a telegraph profile of him. If we go to the notes, there's a beautiful photo of this guy. In Chudworld, he's got his, he's got his AR, he's got an NRA hat on. he's at the range, and he's sort of established a niche for himself, which is very, it's a very

weird trajectory to go from, like, jobbing kind of criminal barrister in London to being sort of one of Trump's guys. I want to say this. If you get refugee status in the United States, you don't have permanent residency for the first year. You have asylum status, and that's a pretty fragile status to have. And I don't think this will happen, but if it does happen, I mean, anything's on the table with Trump being as stupid and insane as he is. And if it does happen, there is a non-zero chance that someone might take advantage of this and then get ice rated by the most anti-Semitic fucking guy who's got the incorrect Plato quote from the start of Black Hawk down tattooed on his back. Like, it is entirely possible because you don't have a green card. You don't have

legal permanent residency. You typically get it after a year. If it were that good, you would then get a kind of like Russia-Israel situation, right, where you get a bunch of people speciously identifying as Jewish in order to claim asylum, right? Which would be a pretty funny bit, I think, for like the asylum program of the US to just be absolutely choked with non-Jewish British people being like, let me in. But I don't think they're going to do it. It's just kind of, it's all PR for basically this guy. And I heartily recommend the telegraph profile of him, which is just wonderful.

He, I mean, it does sort of petally observe that he is five foot five. which there's no need to do. That's a violent act. But he says, the first time I met Donald Trump, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl. I was completely starstruck. Hmm.

What struck, interesting choice of words. What struck me was when I first met him was how blue his eyes are, very, very blue. And so now he's like in meshed, right? There's a detail in this article where he's like,

his law firm is doing some business in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and he won't say what it is. And it's just like, this is a trajectory. This is an odd way of getting in on this world. But he's sort of positioning this along sort of fairly obviously racist lines. He's said to another paper that this is an attractive proposition in his eyes to the State Department because he says, it's a highly educated community that speaks English natively that is educated

and that doesn't have a high proportion of criminals. Right. And amidst all of this, the chief constable of West Midlands Police has finally been forced into retirement over the the Markeby Tel Aviv stuff, right, of banning the fans of an Israeli football club, which is notoriously sort of hooliganish from like a match in Birmingham. And they like, the sort of media and like bits of particularly the Labour Party had been dug in on this for months at this point. It took them sort of weeks of trying to get this guy to eventually retire rather than resign. And what's interesting to me is the reason why, ostensibly, is a very us thing, which is that the report that they issued to justify making that decision, which was the right decision,

included a bunch of AI bullshit because they had done it on Microsoft co-pilot, which is just magical. Well, I mean, it could be worse. you could be the Israeli defense forces and put your entire border security wall on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. I mean, you do sort of have to ask who told the police that they needed to be using

AI in their software in the first place, right? Like, this is kind of downstream of that, but also, it's not really because they included some AI hallucinations about exactly how many Dutch police they needed to sort of contain Tel Aviv hooligans at like another match.

It's like, transparently, no, you have to protect these football hooligans. These are our boys, you know? You've got to sort of take care of them and let them sort of do whatever they want. Wasn't there that whole thing in the Netherlands where like they, you know, was it Maccabee Tel Aviv? I think it was.

Yeah, it was. Who had like an exhibition match against Iax and like they just went around basically like trying to beat up anybody who looked Muslim or who had a Palestinian flag or a pin or just. Yes. Basically anyone who wasn't deferential to them. And it's like great, great fucking.

idea guys go to the greater Benelux area. I'd be like, I'm going to dabble in football hooliganism. That's going to go fucking spectacular for you. And sure enough, and it's like, oh, it's a, it's a pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam. It's like, no, it's a bunch of shitheads thinking that they can go in and just be, B, dicks, and get away with it. And, you know, they got their ass to speed. And similarly, it's like the United Kingdom, like, has done quite a lot. I don't really know that much about football, but I don't know this much. It's been quite a lot to reduce the level of football hooligan violence. And so, like, a club that has just recently made headlines because their altars are like, we love beating this shit out of everyone we can

find when we travel because we are horrible bastards. It's like, yeah, it's probably not going to go well. Well, there was a really sort of fun drumbeast of stories whenever, like in between that time and this, where whenever you got a kind of serious labor faker talking about how this was, you know, a sort of anti-Semitic by the police, there would immediately like clockwork be a story about how a bunch of Maccabee Tel Aviv fans had like kicked the shit out of someone for no reason and set their store on fire. Yeah, exactly. It's like, uh, we,

we've got a bunch of interviews from Israeli football fans who are all in a telegram group called Dachau for Arabs and they're like, God, we can't believe we were treated so badly. Yeah, it's, it's just insane. But this is the thing. It has finally worked in the sense that they have

gotten someone fired over this. So there's a sort of salient lesson going forward for, like even the cops and that is that you just have to let all of this stuff happen. I am taken aback by the idea that no one is ever

allowed to dislike an Israeli person for the shit that they do. That's that is a hate crime like de facto a hate crime because it's like I mean stepping out of obviously the total shittness of Israel's government and its military and the

occupation and the genocide like any person from any country can be a cunt, for lack of a better word, and you have a right to dislike them. And the fact that, like, these guys, like, people aren't concerned about this because they're Israeli. They're concerned about this because, like,

they're famously violent and shitty. And Birmingham's a city with a lot of non-white people. And, like, it's a very good chance these guys are just going to go around doing fucking, like, you know, skin tight jeans, crystal knocked on people. And it's like, so they made a decision because that's their job.

They're the cops. Like, I'm not fucking in love with the cops. But if the cop's job is, like, can we reduce the, like, you know, chaos and pandemonium and violence unless we're the ones doing it. Like, you tell them that's their brief, they look at the situation like, this is a bad idea. Yeah, you don't

have to be a kind of devious anti-Semite or particularly a genius to see that this was trouble in the making, right? And the fact that they made that decision and then asked fucking GROC or whatever to be like, yeah, sure, like put some numbers on this.

Well, that confirms that the, you know, the cops are idiots. It doesn't invalidate the idea that this is a, this was a terrible fucking idea. Yeah. And it would have led to serious disorder, absolutely. And also like the idea that, I don't know, there's just this weird kind of fictitious narrative that it feels like every British politician has bought off on that like somehow the obvious thing in front of them isn't real and

that this must be an act of prejudice or like at best, you know, overcautious short-sightedness. And it's like at a certain point, it just, I, like, they can do this, you know, in the same vein is fucking this guy can try to lobby Trump to give the South African asylum treatment for British, British Jews if they want to. And I can't imagine many people would want to take them up on that offer. But they just, there's an extent to which it's like, I don't know, man, it doesn't get you anything. Because the kind of like gadfly, you know, activists in the British Jewish community are going to be huge pieces of shit about stuff regardless. Because A, like, they've always been rewarded for it. And B, they're feeling kind of like puppy that's not cute.

anymore syndrome now that, you know, the dreaded Corbyn has been vanquished. And so, like, this is going to keep happening. It's like, and if you try to placate those people, nothing's good enough because this is, you know, now they're, eventually, now this guy has had to, you know, had to resign. They're going to be like, oh, well, fucking actually it goes all the way to the top and Kirstarmer must resign. Who knows? Well, I mean, the thing is, if you, if you want to keep Trump's attention, right, the direction that you want to pivot with this, is to say that actually Greenland is Hamas. Yeah, exactly. Greenland is Hamas. I can't believe I'm talking like a British person. Greenland is Hamas. The Nobel Prize,

Committee a Hamas. Yeah. Norway actually created them to rule Greenland so that Denmark could never actually achieve any kind of political unity. But they got out of control. The Norwegians basically take a 10% tithe on offshore wind platforms and Stalin Scarsguard movies to basically funnel the money in suitcases. The idea of a Norwegian venue in Netanyahu. Yes, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, really, what more can you say about this? This is just sort of the course that politics is taking in the United Kingdom, the most serious country on the face of the earth is like while the really consequential but stupid stuff is happening, right?

We've got to be focused on the like inconsequential and stupid stuff. Like this is how I feel about a lot of the trans stuff as well. Like one of the big sort of like cause celebrities is just now maybe sort of wrapping up, which is, hey, what if a bunch of nurses just bullied a trans doctor who like worked in their hospital and like this got dragged through the courts? And it's like, obviously this is, this is terrible for the doctor, but for like, and for, you know, every other trans person. But it's like, we're talking about this at a moment when like everything is on fire.

And so, by the same token, we're here sort of going, well, these, these like obvious football hooligan should not have been allowed to do obvious football hooliganism at a thing months ago. And because of that, you know, the police of Hamas. And it's like, I feel insane because everything is sort of like terrible, terrible things happening all the time that are just sort of, I feel completely overwhelmed by it. And yet you go to sort of like the UK politics tab of any website. And it's like, yeah, it's just this. It's just this. It's all we're capable of focusing on. We want, we want our sort of like, like our slop, our entertainment.

Yeah, well, they're A, B testing slogans. They're going to land with the people they think are their constituency, the reform voters and completely psychotic, you know, anti-trans. What's the lack of a better word, you know, head bangers, etc. Yeah. And it's like, at a certain point, it feels like they are just trying to make the problem go away by by saying whatever they think is being shouted the loudest. And I feel as though this is maybe a platitude or a kind of anodyne thing to note.

But like everything about Starmer since he became prime minister seems to indicate that like he makes decisions based on the idea that somehow that's going to make the person who's probably teeing up a post right now about I bet they know the difference between man and women in Greenland. or some other kind of fucking whatever thing they're on. He thinks that that person will be converted to like a nice Fabian society labor member by him saying, you know, very mealy-mouthed saying the thing that they're saying. And it's like it never, it's much like cozying up to Trump if he thinks you're weak, it doesn't placate or please anyone. They just, they're like, cool, we made him say it in the same vein as we made him drink out of the puddle to prove he's not gay, but we're still going to call him gay.

Like, that's what it is. Entire nation drinking out of the puddle. Exactly. It's like the macro scale geopolitics version of drink out of the puddle to prove you're not gay. Well, yeah, and I think this is also like, you know, it's also worth sort of saying, but like this is also symbolic of like kind of quite big media failure as well. And like what I mean by that is like a sense of, you know, we have a sort of media climate in the UK that is it's a very sort of exclusive club

and that exclusive club has decided that like only the stupid stuff really matters. because they're largely incapable of actually explaining anything else that's going on. Like, I don't really like watch the BBC very much, but whenever I sort of catch BBC radio stuff, it is remarkable just how like unable they are to really talk about sort of the way in which the world works and the way in which like what Britain's place in the world is or what it ought to be. They are much more comfortable sort of talking about who's up and who's down in British politics, who's like the big personalities. And I think a lot of our focuses on like the very stupid cultural stuff.

And I think the thing to bear in mind also is that like the Starma government really sort of emerges out of like the dumbest cultural bullshit you can imagine. Because they readily exploited that in order to kind of get rid of their enemies. The sort of war on kind of the Labour left was very much thought on like, you know, who has like the worst for like can we sort of frame these people for having like bad vibes of being sort of nefarious and sinister and like, you know, they succeeded at doing that. But now like the winner of that can no longer like no longer gets to play culture or stuff. he has to sort of actually be a statesman. He actually has to sort of be a politician and he's completely incapable of doing it. And the people around him are completely incapable of doing it because all they know how to do is like be kind of passive party.

Like they want to be participants in a cultural, but they also don't really have like the energy to do it. And so like their efforts to do so are like incredibly lackluster and incredibly like ineffectual. And they sort of wonder why they are not being taken seriously. But it's just like, I think it's not to sort of save there's a solace in this. But it is, this is very much a like place. stupid games win stupid prizes thing. It's just about the stupid prize that they probably will win

will be like kind of a destroyed economy, destroyed country. It's sort of undignified in the sense that like to be sort of like told that, you know, you are in Hamas or you can't use this bathroom or whatever by someone who is properly insane. I mean, it's not great. Obviously, I would prefer that it didn't happen. But it makes, it contains its own logic.

To be told these things by someone who doesn't care but is trying to placate that person who also hates them, that's undignified. It's also worth knowing that the people who really won in the past few years, like in cultural stuff, one because they realized that they could just be the most annoying way could be, and as long as they were sort of given attention,

they could eventually use that to get attention. And so the most successful people in British politics are the most annoying and the most persistent. We need an annoying left. I am doing my part. I mean, this is sort of true, though, in the sense that if you want the sort of attention economy, if you want media to be able to grapple with these things,

then you need the people who are really online and consequently really annoying. Like trying to understand Trump's foreign policy in relation to Greenland by talking to, I don't know, like Frank Gardner say, it doesn't make sense because he's not equipped for this. What you need to be talking to is like a 19-year-old Discord mod who like operates a channel for a,

very niche fascist hearts of iron four, like political ideology. I guess to wrap this up, I would just say, I really cannot envision a significant number of people taking advantage of this thing.

If the story, you know, about the idea of being able to grant refugee status. Yeah. And if you, if you are Jewish and you want to, like,

emigrate to somewhere like Chud-like, Israel exists already. Well, that's the thing is that like, okay, not to say that everybody ought to, but if people were,

looking at the option between, like, if this was a thing that you were actually considering, if you wanted, you were a British Jew wanted to leave Britain, like the route to emigrating to Israel is not particularly opaque. It's certainly not anything new. Whereas this is something, and as I understand it correctly, if you do, you are granted legal residency and then citizenship quite quickly. Whereas in the United States, like, like I said before, you have a year of basically having almost no status and then you have permanent residency and it takes a while before we become a citizen. obviously like that permanent residence residency means very little at the hands of you know whatever meat stick goon squad happens to be the ones checking your paperwork and also Israel has

decent weather I mean like I'm just not to want the place I'm just saying that like the I'm from the United States it's my home country and like looking at what's happening now like I I can't imagine that somebody who was in the position to you know as Robert Garston says like you know thinking of highly educated established you know English speaking people you know thinking of like his probably his classmates, his neighbors, people he grew up with. It's like, you have some options and you probably have options in the United Kingdom, whereas in the United States, like, you're going to go and live in a country where you don't actually have, you know, like, it's a different country. There's a whole different fucking system. I learned this in reverse moving to Britain. And also, like,

it's kind of going through a thing right now about foreigners and people who don't have citizenship. And it's like, I just, I can't imagine this actually being a thing. And the part of me is like, who is this meant to own? Because at the end of the day, that's the question. It feels like, Who is this meant to own? Is it meant to own Kier-Starmer? There is a family somewhere in like deep harring gate, but yearns to live in South Bend, Indiana. You know what this is? You know what this is, right?

Genuinely, if we want to talk about like Civil Wars as Brother Wars, this is an Uncle War. This is one million percent intended to trigger, like, your one relative with pronouns, right? Who you see at the holidays and is like, you think maybe in Hamas. And so as a result of that, you're like, because of that, I'm going to go and I'm going to live in, like,

South Florida and spend my time in like an entirely cigar-filled gun club. Hey, you could move to Arizona and live next to Glner. That could be fun. Cool. I can't wait. Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, all these people are going to welcome you with open arms. They're really into Kabbalah.

That's why they have 1488 written everywhere because they just love numbers so much. Like, I'm sorry, man, but like the level of just overt Nazism in America, like, I'm not saying it's a huge percentage, but it was, it's a lot louder and more pronounced and more conspicuous than it was 25 years ago because this same kind of deranged internet, you know, Discord mod phenomenon that you're describing. And it's like, I don't know, whatever your perception of risk or threat or danger is in the United Kingdom, like... The United States seems like so much stranger and weirondi, you know, let me go to the country where the politicians are putting like sort of black sun iconography in their videos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And quite frankly, also, it's like,

you know, Britain's got a lot of downs for the ups that it's got. It's got plenty more downs. But, like, Very rarely are you like waiting in line at Costco and someone just decides to fucking like unload on you with it with, you know, a Sig Sauer or whatever because like, I don't know, they had a bad day online. Whereas in America, like they don't even report that on the news anymore. Like it's genuinely horrific. And so, yeah, I, I, this is, to me, it's like, I still ask the question, who is this meant to own? Is it to meant to own Birmingham, Birmingham City, the West Midlands Police, Kirst Armour, the United Kingdom? It's just more, more and more people need to be getting owned.

and triggered by these. And it's like Robert Garson is doing this to be annoying. Most of the time you, if you want to be annoying, if that's your guiding principle in life, you move to Berlin, all right? So like, Riley catching strikes.

I mean, the thing is, right, ultimately, and this is the kind of button I want to put on. Ultimately, this is in old school terms, we have been successfully trolled

and we did talk about this for a bit. And, you know, that we are sort of like engaging with this as if it's serious, because we know that it doesn't. And that's kind of where everything in this country feels like. I think there's, I still think there's a family in Haringabe, but wants to move to South Bend. And so for them, and so then this is extremely important.

Yeah, because they want to send their kid to the same school as Mayor Pete. But I have a beautiful dessert for us. It's your favorite. It's articles. Specifically, an article from Bloomberg. Num, num, num, num, num, delicious. By Joshua Brewstein called Do You Want Your Food Made by a Robot? A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Wonder Group Incorporated, a startup trying to to redefine what it means to be a takeout restaurant, spend $186 million on robotic lunchmaking. The investment centered on a contraption, which could fill a small room, consisting of a track that carries single serving bowls beneath a series of four foot high tubes, each holding one

ingredient. Guided by recipes, the system prompts various tubes to release arugula or roast chicken or green sauce at the appropriate moment, while gently rotating the bowls to keep everything evenly dispersed. Can I just interrupt for a second? That one group incorporated sounds like the publisher of an app that you'd get an alert be like, don't let your kids install this on their phones. It has no moderation or safeguarding. It sounds like a German center-right party.

Yeah, I actually voted for Wonder Group. So yeah, this is what they have bought is the Duff Tubbs from The Simpsons. When a tube starts running low, an alert shows up on a monitor, letting a human worker know it's time to climb a walkway that runs across the top and refill it. If an ingredient is unavailable,

as a bowl passes by, that bowl takes the entire journey again. A half-made meal will continue circling indefinitely, stuck in purgatory until those breadcrums are finally ready. Once everything has been added, an employee plucks the bowl off the line to attend to those tasks that's too delicate for the machine to handle, like adding a portion of salmon steak or squeezing a lime.

The creators of the system, dubbed the Infinite Kitchen, say it can make 500 bowls an hour, approximately 10 times the capacity of a human worker. I'm sorry, the Infinite Kitchen sounds like a fucking Jean-Cucco novel. Why is this so stupid? Sweet Green Incorporated, acquired the startup that made it in 2021 for approximately $70 million and have since installed it at 30 of the chain stores, but it's been a rough stretch for the company. By early November, Sweet Green's share price had lost 85% from the same time a year earlier,

and offloading the proprietary technology for some cash looked like a good idea. The most logical buyer was Wonder, which has been hoovering up at big discounts, a who's who of food tech startups, including meal kit company Blue Apron, delivery service grubhub, and food media company Tate. made. It paid $100 million in cash for the tech and the team that runs it, along with $86 million and won at equity, and allowed the salad chain to continue adding infinite kitchens to its own stores. So we have this company that is just buying things from failing food tech businesses, including like the company that sells you the salad that you eat at your desk. And let me say,

we got a guy running this company. Anyone who knows anything about Wonders founder and chief executive officer, the billionaire e-commerce veteran Mark Law, wouldn't be surprised. by his interesting kitchen automation. An upbeat, Cubell-Headed guy from New Jersey, law sold the parent company of diapers.com to Amazon for $550 million in 2010. He then built Jet.com and sold it to Walmart for $3.3 billion. What a fucking career trajectory on this guy.

I'm sorry. I'm diding large on diapers. Yeah, he was, he was, listen, he made the first million on diapers. And then he made the first billion off of jet.com. You got to scale up from just being the diapers.com. Well, no, exactly. He's basically tracing the course of career progression for the boss baby. I mean, if you go diapers, jets, it's Howard Hughes in reverse.

Now he's aiming to have wonder due to restaurants what these e-commerce giants did to retail. For those who live on the East Coast, when 90 or so wonder locations have opened since February, 2023, the future is already here. The standard setup includes menus of 20 to 30 restaurants on a round. Some of these are for concepts by famous chefs such as Marcus Samuelson or established destinations like Brooklyn's DeFara Pizza. Others are for restaurants that don't actually exist, like lime salt, which sells Chipotle-style bowls or Royal Greens. Orders are punched into one of the several iPad stations in the shop or Wonder's smartphone app. Anyone peeking past the counter and into the back room at one of these food halls, as Wanda describes them, will notice they don't have microkitchens. Instead, the dishes are partially prepared at a centralized food manufacturing facility.

So Wonder employees without specialized training can do the final cooking and assembling on site. Wonder workers, for example, might immerse vacuum bags of sauces into water heated to specific temperatures or slide steak sitting on proprietary pans into rapid cook ovens programmed for the precise number of seconds required to achieve well-doneness. So like a wonder, right, is it's a store that doesn't have a dark kitchen in the back so much as it has like the last step of a full-futable. fulfillment center in the bag. I guess there's a part of me that's like, we heard the description of Arugula, roast chicken, green sauce. Yeah, the Arugula tube, the roast chicken tube.

These are, I mean, hook me up to the roast chicken tube, to be honest. But I'm wondering because it says, what's, it doesn't say what the fourth ingredient is. It's got three, but what's that four? What's that mystery one? You know, like, oh, well, so here's the thing, right? The infinite kitchen deal to hell law tell it is the biggest step yet towards this transformation of the food service. When he first told me about it, he said that adding the new automation tech to his software-powered kitchens

would allow Wanda to expand to 100 menus per location, while also offering 80 to 90% of all sauce recipes in the world on demand. I demand that you make me a banana split with Beschimel because I fucking said so. I punching, going to the fucking, like, because this thing wants to be the replicator from Star Trek so badly because it doesn't want to have to have. have labor involved, which means you can roll up to a wonder in Brooklyn and be like 5,000 packets of velutain, no container, and leave. I need a buriani and it needs to have sauce burnets on it. You said all sauces in the world, 80 to 90% of all sauces. So what are the 10 to 20% of sauce?

The forbidden that are unknowable. It's like, it's like Plato's, what is it, was it Aristotle's second poetics in the name of the rose? Those sauces that can't be made? the source that you can't fit in a chip. But Laura's the kind of person who rarely leaves well enough alone. And let me tell you, this article is a study in ADHD. A month later, we talked again, and he said the maximum menus per location could eventually

be closer to a thousand. He then described a new business called Wonder Create that would allow anyone, a first-time entrepreneur, a restaurateur who wants to test an idea, or someone who has a lot of followers on Instagram, to use Wonder's software to hatch a restaurant brand and recipes. These recipes can be programmed into Wonders' automated kitchens, which will make and sell them through the app. The influencer never has to slice a single tomato. Wonders first create virtual restaurants will go live this form, Law says. The company says we'll eventually step back with basic guidelines in place to ensure food quality and appropriate branding.

But give his partner's freedom to experiment, uploading meal ideas in the same way you might post a video on YouTube. And this next sentence will cause you psychic damage if you're a person who enjoys food. I'm sad, rightly, isn't here for this? With Generative AI, you can basically say, I'd like you to build me a fast, casual Mexican concept geared for Gen Z at a very approachable price point, law says, explaining that artificial intelligence would come up with the restaurant name, menus, recipes, descriptions, and prices.

You are literally going to be able to build a restaurant in a matter of minutes. We have every data center and supercomputer working on this. We have all the science. of human knowledge, and yet for some reason we cannot make the robots create anything close to a fucked up Guy Fieri meal. It's just not possible. You have to be

insouled to be Guy Fieri. It's just everything is AI slot, but the kind of selling point here is, okay, you'll be able to order off an iPad with like a thousand different menus, but the menus will be nothing. It will be nothing that makes sense.

I mean, I guess the idea is is if you're a content creator, we're a content creator. Say we wanted to come to this guy and we're like, we're going to do you a restaurant. Trash future restaurant. Trash future restaurant. Where we make the forbidden sources, right? Only the forbidden sources. And we have sort of like AI generated art, AI generated menu. And it's just like, it's called just sources. And you can order the fucking veluté or whatever. And it just comes out like loose. It just squirts out of a nozzle onto a flat tray. Right. It's like, yeah, it's got, it's got fucking Haya Biazaki art. fucking all.

Yeah. And he's, he's gonna let us do it. He's gonna let everyone do anything. Like, we've got studio Ghibli dispenser. It's got a secret sauce. It's basically a sauce Olendez,

but it's got Gamer Girl bathwater in it for some reason. Just stealing and recombining every piece of intellectual property in the way that AI already does. And yeah, it's gonna be a beautiful idea. Here's the restaurant concept, right? Okay. It is every single bad British meal that we've seen online.

And I'm thinking about the job. Sweeney, Bolognese, the Sam Bowman roast chicken, that horrible soup. The horrible... The horrible... The horrible... Yeah, like the Great Beyond, the fucking steaming that. The lady was like, yeah, whatever... I think it was like chicken soup or something, but it basically

looked like the remnants of someone who jumped into the Geyser at fucking Yellowstone National Park. Like... The thing is, we don't... equally, it could happen to us, because, you know, they say that they're going to have guidelines. We don't know, right? We know that AI doesn't. So, for all we know, someone else is going to found

the Trash Future restaurant and it's going to be making money off of the Hussain Burger or whatever. Yeah. Which it is a soup, crucially, but we don't see any money from that. Exactly. Our intellectual property has been stolen. These people think that they're getting the branded authentic trash future experience of having a burger that also has the puddle water on it. And they're being duped.

We're being taken advantage of two. Yeah. However, there's more from this guy, however. Like many of Law's undertakings over the years, creators implausible enough to be compelling, at least as a thought experiment. I first met him in 2021 to discuss another such project, which we talked about at the time,

his plan to build a city from scratch as a way to rescue capitalism from himself. This was Telosa. This was going to be like libertarian diapers.com bioshok. It hasn't happened yet, partially because this guy keeps getting new ideas, like, what if we could have the drinking from the puddle suit? Right.

And so he claims that he has, this vision where a restaurant is no longer a place, it's an idea. I was going to say it's an idea as a joke. Yes, literally. It's just, it's a prompt. And part of the reason why this is happening, right, is you remember we talked about ghost kitchens before, right? There was this huge, huge rise in, and like delivery.

So the point that it's something like, you know, 70% of restaurant traffic or something like that. And that's what led to ghost kitchen. The ghost kitchen is like a centralized, unbranded kitchen that makes all the branded stuff and send it out separately, right? And so, like, that's the shit that like Uber Eats serves you. That's why, like, whenever you kind of order Wagon Mama from the restaurant,

like, it always comes out a bit cold and, like, oddly, quite sweaty. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Or why you can order something from, ostensibly not a chain that actually will be from a chain because the chain is using a fake name on the app, right? So for a while, when this was like most, the thing is none of these things are making money. And while we're sort of dealing with the AI bubble and we're sort of getting Ed Zitrin on to explain that to us, we're also kind of dealing with a door dash bubble where all of this stuff is meant to start being a lot more profitable sooner.

And for a while, the idea was that it was going to be through ghost kitchens. And so Wonder used to be one of those. and they kind of don't like talking about that. The idea was that Wonder was going to be like celebrity chef ghost kitchen. And it's interesting because they got the chef Mark Murphy, he's on the Food Network. And he got in on this in part he says because he fucking hates delivery, as chefs do, right? It kind of kills the restaurant. And what he wanted was a restaurant where people actually came and ate.

And then the delivery stuff just got handled by someone else kind of off to the side. in the same ways it's happening to like, you know, like reading or film, right, where you have some, some slop for most people and then you have the elevated experience for a few people. And so Wonder was engaged in this and it says in the article, Wonder initially decided to focus on New Jersey, betting the suburbanites would jump in a convenient way to eat meals associated with famous chefs who didn't have restaurants nearby. It set up its own app and planned to cook the food and kitted out Mercedes Sprinter vans. And we talked about these two. And this was February of 2020. But while ghost kitchen businesses seemed ideally positioned to bring about a generational shift in the way people eat, none lived up to that promise. Companies were bedeviled by the economics of commercial real estate and couldn't escape the delivery platform's high fees.

They also found, as all restaurants do, that it's not easy to reliably produce high quality food. When the COVID-19 lockdowns eased, many customers lost interest in virtual-only restaurants and opted for the real thing. And so a bunch of these startups disappeared or have moved into automation. Law has consistently objected to being lumped in with the Ghost Kitchen trend, saying that Wonder's vertical integration makes it fundamentally different. But by 2022, he decided to shift focus from mobile kitchens to food halls. His backers continued to pour money into the company as it fired hundreds of workers and sold its fleet of vans. So if you worked in the dark kitchen, you're gone now, right?

Even as the Ghost Kitchen industry faded, the delivery app's impact on restaurants is evident to anyone who goes out to eat. Wonder, therefore, set out to design. its own retail outpost to serve large amounts of delivery food. Lightly staff counter, iPad ordering stations and tables as space allows. Its kitchen appliances mostly use electricity rather than gas, so they don't have to do any venting and they don't need permits. And they started in Manhattan and just bought everything. This is the other thing about this guy is Wonder as a company is on this huge spending spree.

It's buying the like source creation machine. It's buying the sort of like roast chicken tubes. It's like creating new, in sort of heavy air quotes, restaurants, making new food halls wherever. And the way this works is just it gets made offsite. The food gets shipped there and then the finishing touches are done by, I don't know, just someone, not a chef, really. I had a brief period when I lived in New York when I worked for a guy who ran a chain of restaurants. It wasn't like a big chain, but it was in New York and New Jersey area. And this was, you know, 2014, 15, 16.

and even at the time Grubhub and DoorDash were, their fees were exorbitant. And if you didn't pay higher commission percentages, your restaurant would get buried in search results. And so like that, even at the time, even before the kind of like massive acceleration of this and also just the skyrocketing of commercial real estate post, you know, the COVID kind of slump in prices, like it was already untenable because there wasn't really any way out of it without all of your profit margin getting. eaten up by these delivery services, which people obviously use, especially in big cities.

But like, reading about this, though, I guess the thing about it is, is that they never seem to home in on the idea that like, maybe you should also have a thing you offer for people to eat that's memorable and good and therefore they want to eat it again. It's more like, we can make any day. It's like, it's like the world's biggest version of if you've been to New York, those like strange cafes, always on like corner, corner store, like corners of, you know, North, South, East West Streets in Manhattan that have a menu that's like the fucking phone book because they have infinity dishes

and none of them are good. Yes. It's the slop. It's absolutely the slop. And so they go into this sort of back of the food hall, right? Aside from the ovens and fries, there are three production stations where employees garnish cooked meals, repair bowls and salads and box everything up before 50s the end of the belt.

At the end of the belt, so robot grabs the meals and places them into bins so another employee can bag them up and bring them to customers. Cameras around the kitchen, monitor employees' movements. After observing that workers were walking around a lot while assembling meals, Wonder decided to install a second set of conveyor belts to run along each production station, bringing food to them instead of having to go find ingredients.

The company is also testing cameras outfitted with computer vision for employee workstations to make sure the correct ingredients go into each bowl and to monitor employee performance. I can recall as a kid when it was treated like a scandal that Burger's, King or not, yeah, was Burger King, had the like Whopper machine where they put the burgers in and it went on a conveyor belt and got, you know, grilled that way and then subsequently got, you know, distributed out when they assembled it hamburgers.

And it's like, this feels as though you've kind of M.C. Eshered it and also made it into like a torture nexus. It's sort of like, it's that and you're, you're sort of like, you used to be able to be a line cook, but now you have to get built into the locomotive from Snowpierce. Exactly. It's like, yeah, you have to start

your culinary career somehow. And apparently you started as the guy moving the levers in metropolis. I think it's just like a real shame that like they're just including more of these like very inhuman machines and AI into the burger making process. All I can think about is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it will be to imagine a burger. Well like you're your only way into the food industry now which is going to be for this like very elevated class of people. Everyone else is getting the slop. You have to be the I guess we're doing circles now guy. You have to be there as the thing spits out like a bunch of loose basham out and go, I guess somebody

order from trash future again. I mean, for me, it's like, you talk about the idea of restaurants are no longer places, but their ideas. It's like, I kind of just want to go to a place where the food is good. It's like a nice obvious, like a sit down and eat. Like, granted, I live in a place where if you buy, if you get takeout, the pickings are slim and it costs like 100 pounds for a meal. And so like, I don't want to visit, you know, a guy's American kitchen and grill of the mind. I just kind of want to like have a place I can go. Eventually you'll yearn for guys American kitchen not of the mind, right? Because like, this is the thing. This extremely surveillance

driven thing is going to sort of give you food that is, first of what, it's not good, right? But it's also like, you just have it as like an idea. I go back. Yeah. As executive show me around the kitchen, it's apparent they're being pulled between their admiration for e-commerce logistics and their acknowledgement that as Wonder president Jay Nike puts it, nobody wants a robot making the food. Nike says Wanda's kitchens owe a lot to innovations made in e-commerce logistics. All the software, the screens, the low-skilled labour,

all those principles, the cameras, all come from the fulfilment centre world, but it's really tough to tell people, oh, your food got made in a fulfilment centre. Which is so fucking reprehensively

evil to be crying that you're like, yeah, we use, like, low-skilled labour that we surveil the absolute fuck out of to, like, you know, put slop in the bowl. But people don't like it for some reason. You're telling me that my Dubai chocolate latte is unethical? There's a great quote in here from Graham Humphrey's president of the culinary edge, a consulting

group, which is a beautiful piece of consultant mindset of needing to be told that, you know, it's raining outside. Food is complex because it's emotional. It's important to people. And then they cut to some reviews such as old and rubbery, awful, fibrous and gooey. and the world's most boring sandwich on a pisser so stale it might serve as a catcher's mitt. So what you're basically saying is the terminal destination for all of this is everyone will just be eating MREs. Basically, the need for some kind of large-scale triumph is palpable in the food service industry.

Restaurant profit margins, always thin, have dropped more than 30% since 2019. Once promising change, such as sweet green and carver have stumbled in the face of rising costs for labor and supplies, and startups are struggling too. Food tech investors are closely tracking Wonders' plans to go public in the hopes it will be successful enough to validate the broader industry, which is, again, the industry is food, it's eating food. Law has said Wonder will do so as early as spring 27 and no laces in the first quarter of 2008.

But there's a feeling among some of the food service industry that the company is trying to do too much too fast, and this is the part where we get to, it's not just evil, it's also stupid. In addition to opening two locations a week, Wonder is operating a major deluxe delivery service and meal kit business and working to integrate the companies it's already bought while continuing its acquisition spree. It says it intends to buy more restaurants, even as observers note, its current locations are often sparsely populated. The multidimensional velocity is a direct reflection of law's own energy. Besides his city building project, which hasn't yet acquired land, but he says plans to begin populating in 2030,

he's a co-owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and plans to raise round after round of investment. for Wonder. He says it's raised about $2 billion, but Law who has put up hundreds of millions of his own money tells me he's raised more. He's declined to share any details. Every time we discuss the startup, Law seems to mention some new twist. He's talked about, and I'm just going to give each one of these some air, launching delivery drones from restaurant roofs, which, fantastic, and one day drawing blood from customers, analyzing it and using an automated system to feed them. As in does the blood, is the blood part of like the infinite soup that his restaurants will make? Or? The perpetual blood, yeah. No, I think they're going to do Doordash Gattaca on you and tell you what meal you're supposed to be eating. Doordash Theranos at least.

You basically take all agency of what you're going to eat away and you just let AI feed you every meal. You'll be much healthier, he said, at a conference in Riyadh in 2024. I love taking away all agency. is the thing that makes me the happiest. Law says he eats at Wonder about once a week, but he's also been testing an AI planned menu on himself, requiring his personal chef to cook what the computer

tells him to. Law then trains the system by racing everything on a 10 point scale. His chef isn't always happy about this, he says, but every meal I eat now is at least an 8.5. Most are a 9. I love everything I eat. He loves it be a onion of the bashmail sauce.

Exactly. The French chef will tell him No, no, this is an insult to my art This is an insult to the cordon bleu This is the insult to the president of France This is the insults of the French Revolution And he'll just be like, nope, more bechamel Please, sloppy sloppy.

Seconds, thirds. Yeah, it's so childish. Like, yeah, for some reason, I'm really happy Because the AI keeps agreeing to give me a plastic bowl full of vanilla ice cream with some jelly This guy is really mad Because he did the entire, you know,

formal education in French Ode Cuisine and now I'm basically making him do oh tacos on me nonstop. I love the idea particularly of launching drone launching as well drones from restaurant roofs where it's just like yeah, like a hypersonic

sort of like glide vehicle is coming towards you to take your blood and determine what you want as a burger. I feel like I'm fucking hallucinating. I feel like this is Ubik. I feel like this is straight up Philip K. Dick's stuff. Like everyone is really excited to live in a shoe and get fed from a hamster tube. Like I

I just, I genuinely feel like I'm dissociating with every detail that you've been revealing here. It's beautiful as well because like, not to keep coming back to Snowpiercer, right, but at least the kind of meshed up bugs, buzz, right? Nobody was happy about them and nobody was telling you to be happy about them. They just like froze your arm off if you didn't like them. Whereas this, you have to be sort of persuaded, I guess, because, and again, I really can't stress enough, This guy might be stupid enough to let AI feed him, but he thinks that you are too.

The actual like chefs involved, the actual people with restaurants, they still want restaurants to exist. It's just that they want restaurants to exist for like 1% of people. And everybody else is just, you're getting this. You're getting the thing that draws your blood and goes tacos. It's like normally when you're on a podcast

and people are howling about how they want to feed you from tubes and make you eat bugs, it winds up being like some kind of, yeah, like alt-right, psycho-phor. chain kind of thing. But in this case, I never expected it to be like in a business magazine and the guy doing is like, also I co-own the Minnesota Timberwolves. Like, that's

what makes it so alarming, I guess, is like the enthusiasm. And also the fact that like, this is one of those guys where he's got the money force field that bends reality around him. Like, it does seem that way. Yeah. But now at least. Maybe, maybe he'll be successful. I hope not. I mean, I don't know. It just feels the economics

of making restaurants profitable enough that people can make a living and, you know, They're not like, you know, having to count every single bean. Like, that's the thing that can be resolved. But the idea of getting rid of the concept of people having skills acquired over, you know, careers over their lifetimes to cook, to make meals of people enjoy me. Like, no, a machine can make it up and do it better. Like, we can cook it for you wholesale. Like, I just, I don't like this at all.

Sorry. It's fantastic as well, like, as a kind of like distribution of resources thing, right? that we've managed to make, not restaurants necessarily so much as just like eating food, something that isn't just unprofitable, but is actively like has a bubble in it, right? But so last little paragraph here, which is it is a threat and you should treat it as one. Law brushes off critics who contend that Wonder lacks focus. Soon enough, it might be selling every kind of food at every price point. When Wonder's open restaurant marketplace creators up and running,

aspiring restauranteurs will pay a small fee, perhaps $10 a month, law says, with a caveat that everything about the project is still being developed, create partners will give Wonder a cuss of each order to pay for ingredients and the time it takes its infinite kitchen equipment to produce it, paying more or less if orders are produced during downtimes or surges. Users could then promote their restaurants however they want, including perhaps by buying more prominent placement in the Wonder app.

The Law isn't concerned that he'll drive customers away by making them sort through a slog of weird virtual brands. Whenever Wonder has added restaurants so far, says, people order more. If that happens when it adds two new menus, why not 20? Or 2,000 or 200,000. After all, e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Walmart have many thousands of products for sale. The bigger the canvas law says, the better.

So I hope we're all excited to get dinner tonight from just an AI hallucinated thing whose name is just letters. I just really like the idea that like, you know, this period of history or this period of like that we're living in, I think it's like really defined by the sort of corporate like Tuesday afternoon slot bowl, right? Yeah. Just like just kind of a sort of mesh of random things that sort of tastes all right for the first couple of bites. And then afterwards you regret it. But you kind of realize that like that's really the only option that you have. But you are buying it from an actual person and you can see that person.

Like grilling the hummus for some reason. That doesn't make sense to you. I might have mentioned this detail before. but my partner had a real kind of seeing through the Matrix moment of getting the train from London up to Glasgow and seeing the guy opposite them, just normal office-looking guy

lock in for the entire journey on an Itzu protein bowl and the entire season one of SAS Roak Heroes and this guy looked at this and went yeah, it's pretty good, but we could actually make that kind of spiritually deader, maybe. What if we, yeah, well, like this guy is sort of

thought to himself, what if we sloppify the slot ball? Yeah. You know, what if you could get like, and in many ways, because he says, and I think he's sort of mentioned it directly, but he's sort of taking inspiration from like this sort of contemporary internet that is filled of slop. And I think it's like really testament to like the way in which certain kind of like AI guys really think where they look at like, you know,

I unfortunately watch a lot of reels at the moment because I have a child that doesn't sleep and like what else are you supposed to do at free in the morning except for look at really weird shit while your kids screams in your face and you can't stop him. And like, I don't feel better after watching. I feel worse. But like, as I mentioned, in the same way that the slot bowl, I feel like the slot ball's a good example of this again.

Like, you know, the first few reels, ha ha, that's funny. What is that guy doing? You know, like, why is his dog got two heads, etc.? It's crazy that that woman dumped that boulder into the, like, glass bridge. Why is the big,

why is the woman like some assaulting into a slot ball? I don't understand. But like, these guys watch this sincerely and they're just like, oh, like, this is how people watch content in the future. And when people watch stuff, they eat something, right? And so what if they, what is, and all I can think of, as you were sort of saying this, was that sort of fucking old exhibit mean, that's like, yo dog, I heard you like slop with your slop. So we made a big slop bowl so you can like chow down while you, like, I don't fucking know.

You dog, I hear you like slaps. We're sloping your slop so you can slap while you slop. I mean, the thing is they know, they know that people don't like this because they have the consultants telling them people connect emotionally to food. And they're like, no, fuck that. We can change that. want. It's like every time we talk about AI with Ed and like anyone else who sort of like actually pays attention to how people actually respond to this stuff, which is that we just disregarded because ultimately it's like, no, this is the new thing. We're like, we're sort of putting all our resources into it and people will learn to like it. People will learn to sort of and, you know, I can't in some cases, it's like, you know, if they were truly honest, it's like they don't even care other people like it. It's like, no, this is just the way things are and people

are going to deal with it. It doesn't really matter and I just want to make money from that. And to be clear, like the AI bubble, right? If this doesn't work, if this doesn't work, if this doesn't make sense. If this doesn't make sense when it goes public, the, like, eating food industry is fucked, which is just a great place for society to be in, I think. Yeah.

That we let it come to this. Everything is terrible. The future is trash. I mean, it's funny that you mentioned the falling on the glass bridge with the rock, because one of those videos crossed my timeline, but it was auto playing and I had music going in headphones. So I just watched one of those videos on Loop Transfixed

while the song, Ghost Rider, by Suicide, was playing over and over again. And I felt like I was having a, like a kind of negative religious experience. But like earlier today, actually, like, I had, I had some leftovers and I was like, I need to make lunch. And I had this idea to take,

November, you spent time in Switzerland. There's thing called, like, Silzer Crohn's or like, corondises, like the kind of like roll, like a, they're kind of like pretzel bready rolls. And I had some of those. I had some meatballs that I made as kind of an Italian recipe sort of from scratch that have adapted. And I had just tomato sauce,

like the Marcella has and tomato sauce I had made like, butter, tomatoes, onion, that's it. And I cut up in one of the silcer chrons and then put slices of those meatballs that had heated up and then put some of the tomato sauce on and it was like, oh, it's basically like a subway sandwich, but worse. I love this. I'm the slopking. I'm disgusting. I'm going to roll in my own filth. I'm so happy at this gross ass meat.

It was actually really good, but it still felt disgusting. Yeah, but what if you took the kind of realization that you had done that with your human brain by accident? And instead of that, it had come through. You know the kind of like off-brand like Amazon retailers? Yeah, yeah, yeah, like Blemtreau and Wexie and shit and it's always some fucking all-casts. All restaurants now.

All restaurants are Blemtro. So I hope we're all excited to eat our Blemtro bowls in the future. Michelin-starred Blemtrow. I think that's the episode title in a buzzerbeast at the last second. Oh my fucking God. Thank you so much for this episode November.

This is tremendous. I'd say it was my pleasure, but this has done me a sort of great deal of psychic damage. Riley, please come home. We all miss you. I was going to say, I'm really excited because I live in a country that has a lot of gun manufacturers,

but they make really big weird guns and I can't wait to find one and put it in my mouth. Thank you so much for listening to Trash Future. If you want to hear more trash feature, and you should. It's all like this. It's all good. Then we have a Patreon.

You can subscribe to $5 a month. We get slightly more money out of it if you subscribe directly rather than through the Apple like the iOS app because Tim Apple takes a cut of that. Tim Apple takes a cut of everyone holds the payouts hostage for two and a half months. So look, do

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