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- [00:16]
A
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 Bethay and Hussain Kasfani. 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 sanitary auditorium in Germany called Berghain until he gets well enough that he can read us Business Insider articles again. Unfortunately, all of us, well, I for one am stuck in the uk, the country that is infested with mites. Everyone in this country has fucking scabies. And so too listener, will you very soon.
- [00:50]
B
I mercifully do not have scabies yet, I suppose, but this is the prime time of year. I always presume that they're passed through intimate contact, but I imagine 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 Mann Berghain?
- [01:20]
A
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 favourite 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. We'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 article today. Riley sent me this. It's magical. It is life changingly good, 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 gonna do it in terms of occupying Greenland.
- [02:22]
B
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 then like the weather. And I kept seeing stories of like France sends troops to 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 Truth Social post and I was just sort of like, this seems insane.
- [02:53]
A
Every, every kind of news. Anytime I go by a screen showing news, I feel like just I'm being hit in the 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 Oceangate Titanic submersible 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 boat 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.
- [04:23]
B
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 somebody'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 guy who's. I mean, America's had a senile moron in charge many a time. Ronald Reagan was senile 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 China or whatever, you know what I mean? Like, there were things in the way, and now this just kind of happens.
- [05:17]
A
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.
- [05:28]
B
Oh, 100% Mercator projection is fucking going wild right now.
- [05:32]
A
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 annexing Canada. But he's kind of lit on something that is doable in a sense. And as you say, the Mikasa 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 want that to be American for the sake of kids being taught in schools generations hence that Donald Trump did that, which is wild.
- [06:13]
B
I would like to tell you that just so that I could maybe 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 posting 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.
- [06:50]
A
Yes.
- [06:51]
B
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.
- [06:59]
A
It's almost as bad in the sense that the Norwegian government doesn't control the Nobel Prize.
- [07:04]
B
It.
- [07:05]
A
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 now like, this is true. Like, ultimately, once we. Once we sort of exterminate Woke from the BBC, then, you know, but it's fascinating because Maria Caroline, the like, 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 whispering. 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, we gave it to her. And now because of that, maybe the U.S. 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 Britain's right, because Germany sent some Luftwaffe planes, you can't be calling them that, and immediately sent them straight back. Not sort of super useful. But France is claiming to be doing some stuff. We sent one guy.
- [08:35]
C
We sent the one guy that controls Britain.
- [08:36]
A
Yeah, yeah. That'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 psychosexually 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.
- [09:09]
C
Yeah, he's going to lead the Danish. He's going to lead the Danish Taliban.
- [09:14]
A
It also kind of suggests the existence of like a kind of Greenlandic Terry Peck, like one guy who will 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.
- [09:54]
B
Do you remember when Mitt Romney kind of did the groveling thing and after Trump won, because Romney.
- [10:01]
A
Yeah. He had that like hostage looking photo. Yeah.
- [10:04]
B
While he was eating turtle soup or whatever. And they still, of course, didn't give him anything.
- [10:08]
A
Yes.
- [10:08]
B
It was just to make fun of him, just to humiliate him. It's like I feel as though, not that I am in any position to give advice to Keir Starmer, because Keir Starmer doesn't need advice. He 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, like, if you suck up to Trump, this will happen to you.
- [10:29]
A
Yeah.
- [10:29]
B
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.
- [10:36]
A
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, Wes Streeting it is your year.
- [10:48]
B
I'm just, 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 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 20 post the invasion of Ukraine as the United Kingdom and Europe were. But America is a country founded on many things to include price gouging and price gouging being permanent. So, like, prices are. The price rise and inflation in the US 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.
- [11:32]
A
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. 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 full wooferandum. 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 Riley isn't here for this. Mark Carney went to Beijing and he was offered a share of the mandate of Heaven, quite frankly, visa free travel with China. 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 NASO would collapse in my lifetime, right? But I 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 like get involved in like some actual shooting with the Danes. Weiss had some guys on the docks in Nuuk and there's like Danish special, Special forces, like loading their shit off of boats and into SUVs in case the Americans try to Maduro the Green Landing government.
- [13:29]
B
I feel as though 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, UAV strike cost them Soleimani. All of these things were 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.
- [14:17]
A
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.
- [14:32]
B
Well, one of the things that I find really funny when I was a little kid flying back, when I lived in Germany as a kid, we moved back To America when I was almost nine and back in those days, I don't know, 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, looking at me like, wow, it's been hours and we're still over this snowscape. Endless flat snow, ice covered rock. I just feel as though, while the United States really does love to fucking sell its 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.
- [15:09]
A
Just flat out, we put our faith right in a bunch of guys in Danish special forces who look like various Skarsgrds 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 up matches on themselves and so on and so on.
- [15:43]
B
Conflicted geezer 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.
- [16:20]
A
This is. Yeah, I have no idea what's going to happen.
- [16:23]
C
Well, let me make a prediction.
- [16:25]
A
Right, please.
- [16:26]
C
So this all hinges on the British guy, the one British guy who's there for some reason. And my feeling is that the Americans will come and they'll invade and this British man's job will basically be to round up via the local Greenlandic people who will see him as a messiah figure.
- [16:44]
A
And he's going to learn to ride the ice worm.
- [16:48]
C
Yeah, the ice worm's going to be there. Yeah, he's going to launch the Danish jihad.
- [16:55]
A
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 feral sweater isis. You give it five Years time. And the entire Greenlandic power structure, I don't even know what that looks like, has completely fractured.
- [17:14]
B
And everyone has to unite behind Gaz Atreides.
- [17:17]
C
Well, yeah, the Snow Taliban, I think, is a very sort of new and novel phenomenon. I think it'll be really good material for the US film industry. Bradley Cooper probably will be looking for work at that point and maybe that might be a kind of project he wants to sort of go on.
- [17:33]
A
Yeah, we'll get some good movies out of it in a few years time if the world doesn't end, which it might. That's my world politics update. Now we've got to narrow in and we got to focus in a little bit on a worse place, the United Kingdom. And we got to talk about antisemitism. 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.
- [18:03]
C
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 Whitechapel 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.
- [18:27]
B
Ten years from now, you get to read a shoot and cry novel from guys who were deployed to Watney Market for some reason.
- [18:34]
A
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 weirder 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 antisemitism guy, saying Trump's anti Semitism guy doesn't narrow it down. Trump's anti antisemitism guy, Yehuda Kaplan. No one knows if they're actually going to go for it or not. 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 interview tapes of him on a kind of specious basis. He got laughed out of court. But he 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 ar, he's got an NRA hat on, he's at the range and he's sort 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.
- [20:09]
B
I will 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. And if it does happen, there is a non zero chance that someone might take advantage of this and then get ice raided 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.
- [20:45]
A
Well, 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 pettily observe that he is 5 foot 5, which there's no need to do. That's. That's a violent act. Act. But he says, the first time I met Donald Trump, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl. I was completely starstruck.
- [21:33]
C
Interesting choice of words.
- [21:35]
A
What struck me was when I first met him was how blue his eyes are. Very, very blue. And so now he's enmeshed, 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 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.
- [22:18]
B
Right.
- [22:19]
A
And amidst all of this, the chief Constable of West Midlands police has finally been forced into retirement over the Maccabi Tel Aviv stuff. Right. Of banning the fans of an Israeli football club, which is notoriously sort of hooligan ish, from a match in Birmingham. And the sort of media and 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 Copilot, which is just magical.
- [23:14]
B
Well, I mean, it could be worse. You could be Israeli Defense Forces and put your entire border security wall on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
- [23:23]
A
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 hoolig. These, 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.
- [23:55]
B
Wasn't there that whole thing in the Netherlands where, like, they, you know, the. Was it Makimi Tel Aviv? I think it was, yeah, it was. Who had a. Had like an exhibition match against Ajax 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, be like, I'm going to dabble hooliganism. That's going to go fucking spectacular for you. And. And sure enough, everyone'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 fucking thinking that they can go in and just be b dicks and get away with it. And, you know, they got their asses beat. 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 know this much, has done quite a lot to reduce the level of football. Football hooligan violence. And so, like, a club that has just recently made headlines because their alters are like, we love beating the 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.
- [24:56]
A
There was a really sort of fun drumbeat of stories in between that time and this where whenever you got a kind of serious labor figure talking about how this was sort of anti Semitic by the police, there would immediately clockwork be a story about how a bunch of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had kicked the shit out of someone for no reason and set their store on.
- [25:20]
B
Yeah, exactly. It's like 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.
- [25:31]
A
Yeah, 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.
- [25:51]
B
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, that is a hate crime. Like, de facto a hate crime because it's like, I mean, stepping out of obviously the total shitness of Israel's government and its military and the occupation and the genocide, like, any person from any country can be a, 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 gonna go around doing fucking, like, you know, skin tight jeans, Kristal 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 cops job is, hey, 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 badass idea.
- [26:51]
A
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 Grok or whatever to be like, yeah, sure, like, put some numbers on this. While that confirms that the cops are idiots, it doesn't invalidate the idea that this was a terrible fucking idea and it would have led to serious disorder. Absolutely.
- [27:20]
B
And also the idea that, I don't know, 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, over cautious shortsightedness. And it's like at a certain point it just, like, they can do this, you know, in the same vein as fucking, this guy can try to lobby Trump to give the South African asylum treatment for British shoes 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 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 the dreaded Corbin has been vanquished. And so this is going to keep happening, and if you try to placate those people, nothing's good enough. Because you can see now they're curious eventually. Now this guy had to resist. They're gonna be like, oh, well, fucking. Actually, it goes all the way to the top. And Keir Starmer must resign. Who knows?
- [28:28]
A
Well, I mean, the thing is, 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.
- [28:35]
B
Yeah, exactly. Greenland is Hamas. I can't believe I'm talking like a British person. Greenland is Hamas.
- [28:40]
A
The Nobel Prize Committee are Hamas.
- [28:43]
B
Yeah. Norway actually created them to rule Greenland so that Denmark could never actually achieve any kind of political union community. But they Got out of control. The Norwegians basically take a 10% tithe on offshore wind platforms in Stellan Skarsgrd movies to basically funnel the money in suitcases.
- [29:03]
A
The idea of a Norwegian venue in Netanyahu.
- [29:09]
B
Yes, exactly.
- [29:11]
A
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. Like, while the really consequential but stupid stuff is happening. Right. We've got to be focused on the inconsequential and stupid stuff. This is how I feel about a lot of the trans stuff as well. One of the big sort of cause celebres is just now maybe sort of wrapping up, which is, hey, what if a bunch of nurses just bullied a trans doctor who worked in their hospital and this got dragged through the courts and. And it's like, obviously this is terrible for the doctor and for every other trans person, but it's like we're talking about this at a moment when everything is on fire. And so by the same token, we're here sort of going, well, these obvious football hooligans should not have been allowed to do obvious football hooliganism at a thing months ago. And because of that, the police are himself, us. And it's like, I feel insane because everything is sort of like terrible, terrible things happening all the time that I 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 our sort of like, like our slop, our entertainment.
- [30:49]
B
Yeah, well, they're ab 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 better, lack of a better word, you know, headbangers, et cetera.
- [31:02]
A
Yeah.
- [31:03]
B
And it's like at a certain point it feels like they are just trying to make the problem go away by saying whatever they think is being shouted the lie loudest. And I feel as though this is maybe a platitude or a kind of anodyne thing to note, but everything about Starmer since he became Prime Minister seems to indicate that 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 woman in Greenland or Some other kind of fucking, whatever thing they're, 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 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 gonna call him gay. Like that's what it is.
- [32:03]
A
Entire nation drinking out of the puddle.
- [32:05]
B
Exactly. It's like the macro scale geopolitics version of Drink out of the Puddle to Prove youe're Not Gay.
- [32:12]
C
Well yeah, and I think this is also like, you know, it's also worth sort of saying that 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 see sort of catch BBC radio stuff it is remarkable just how unable they are to really talk about the way in which the world works and the way in which 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 the big personalities. And I think a lot of that focuses on the very stupid cultural stuff. And I think the thing to bear in mind also is that the Starmer government really sort of emerges out of the dumbest culture war 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 fought on. Who has the worst. Can we sort of frame these people for having bad vibes of being sort of nefarious and sinister? And they succeeded at doing that. But now the winner of that no longer gets to play culture war 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 are completely incapable of doing it because all they know how to do is like be kind of passive parties. They want to be participants in a culture war, but they also don't really have the energy to do it. And so their efforts to do so are incredibly lackluster and incredibly 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 say there's a solace in this, but it is. This is very much a like play stupid games, win stupid prizes thing. It's just that the stupid prize that they probably would will win will be like kind of a destroyed economy, destroyed country.
- [34:07]
A
It's sort of undignified in the sense that to be sort of told that 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 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.
- [34:32]
C
It's also worth noting that the people who really one in the past few years in cultural stuff one because they realized that they could just be the most annoying they 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.
- [34:52]
A
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 a and for political ideology.
- [35:33]
B
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 about the idea of being able to grant refugee status.
- [35:47]
A
Yeah. And if you are Jewish and you want to emigrate to somewhere chud like Israel exists already.
- [35:54]
B
Well, that's the thing. Is that. Okay, not to say that everybody ought to, but if people were looking at the option between 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 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 you become a citizen. Obviously. Obviously, like that permanent 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 vaunt the place. I'm just saying that, like, I'm from the United States, it's my home country. And like, looking at what's happening now, like, I can't imagine that somebody who was in the position to, you know, as Robert Garson says, like, you know, thinking of highly educated, established, you know, English speaking speaking people, thinking of 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 you're going to go and live in a country where you don't actually have. It's a different country, there's a whole different fucking system. I learned this in reverse moving to Britain. And also it's going through a thing right now about foreigners and people who don't have citizenship. And it's. I can't imagine this actually being a thing. And the part 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? Keir Starmer.
- [37:28]
C
There is a family somewhere in deep harangue, but yearns to live in South Bend.
- [37:32]
A
You know what this is? You know what this is, right? Genuinely, if we want to talk about civil wars as brother wars, this is an uncle war. This is 1 million percent intended to trigger your one relative with pronouns. 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.
- [37:59]
C
Hey, you could, you could, you could move to Arizona and live next to Glenna. That could be fun.
- [38:03]
A
Cool.
- [38:03]
B
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's a lot louder and more pronounced and more conspicuous than it was 25 years ago. Because this same kind of deranged Internet 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, the United.
- [38:37]
A
States seems like so much stranger and weirder an idea. Let me go to the country where the politicians are putting sort of black sun iconography in their videos.
- [38:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And quite frankly, also, it's like, you know, Britain's got a lot of downs for, for, 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 Sour 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, 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 Kirstar of the United Kingdom?
- [39:20]
A
More and more people need to be getting owned by and triggered by these.
- [39:26]
B
It's like Robert Barston is doing this to be annoying most of the time. If you want to be annoying, if that's your guiding principle in life, you move to Berlin.
- [39:32]
A
All right, so like Riley catching surprise. 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 isn't. And that's kind of where everything in this country feels like.
- [39:55]
C
I still think there's a family in Haringey that wants to move to South Bend. And so for them, and so then this is extremely important.
- [40:00]
B
Yeah, because they want to send their kid to the same school as Mayor Pete.
- [40:04]
A
But I have a beautiful dessert for us. It's your favorite. It's articles, specifically an article from Bloomberg Nom. Nom nom nom nom Delicious by Joshua Brustein called Do youo Want your Food Made by a Robot? A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Wonder Group Incorporated, a startup trying to redefine what it means to be a takeout restaurant, spent $186 million on robotic lunch, making 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 bowls to keep everything evenly dispersed.
- [40:50]
B
Can I just interrupt for a second that Wonder 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.
- [41:01]
A
It sounds like a German center, right? Party. Yeah, I actually voted for Wonder Group. So yeah, what they have bought is the Duff tubes 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 breadcrumbs are finally ready. Once everything has been added, an employee plucks the bowl off the line to attend to those tasks that are 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.
- [41:46]
B
I'm sorry, the Infinite Kitchen sounds like a fucking John Cocteau novel. Why is this so stupid?
- [41:52]
A
Sweetgreen 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, Sweetgreen'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 Tastemade. It paid 100 million in cash for the tech and the team that runs IT, along with 86 million in wonder 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 the company that sells you the salad that you eat at your desk. And let me say we got a guy running the this company. Anyone who knows anything about Wonder's founder and chief executive officer, the billionaire E commerce veteran Mark Law, wouldn't be surprised by his interest in kitchen automation. An upbeat cue ball 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.
- [43:13]
B
I'm sorry, I'm dieting large on Diapers.com.
- [43:17]
A
Yeah, he was, he was. Listen, he made the first million on Diapers.com 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.
- [43:29]
B
He's basically tracing the course of career progression for the boss, baby.
- [43:33]
A
I mean if you go diapers, jets, it's Howard Hughes in reverse. Now he's aiming to have Wonder do to restaurants what these ecosystems ecommerce giants did to retail. For those who live on the East coast, where 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 rack. Some of these are for concepts like famous chefs such as Marcus Samuelsson or established destinations like Brooklyn's Di Farra Pizza. Others are for restaurants that don't actually exist, like limesalt, which sells Chipotle style bowls or Royal Greens. Orders are punched into one of the several iPad stations in the shop or one dismal 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 micro kitchens. Instead, the dishes are partially prepared at a centralized food manufacturing facility, so Wanda 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 steaks sitting on proprietary pans into rapid cook ovens programmed for the precise number of seconds required to achieve, well, well doneness. So a Wonder, right? It's a store that doesn't have a dark kitchen in the back so much as it has the last step of a fulfillment center in the back.
- [44:54]
B
I guess there's a part of me that's like we heard the description of arugula roast chicken green sauce.
- [45:02]
A
Yeah, the arugula tube. The roast chicken tube. These are. I mean, hook me up to the roast chicken tube, to be honest.
- [45:07]
B
But I'm wondering, because it says, what's the. 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.
- [45:14]
A
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 Wonder to expand to 100 menus per location while also offering 80 to 90% of all source recipes in the world on demand.
- [45:37]
B
I demand that you make me a banana split with bechamel because I fucking said so.
- [45:46]
A
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 labor involved. Which means you can roll up to a Wonder in Brooklyn and be like 5,000 packets of Velotine noka and leave.
- [46:00]
B
I need a biryani and it needs to have sauce bearnaise on it. You said all sauces in the world, 80 to 90% of all sauce. So what are the 10 to 20% of sauces forbidden that are there? Unknowable. It's like, it's like Plato's. What is it? Was it Aristotle's second poetics in the name of the rose? The sauces that can't be made?
- [46:21]
A
The sauce that you can't fit in a tube? But Laura's the kind of person who rarely leaves well enough alone. And this, let me tell you, this article was 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 Wonder's automated kitchens which will make and sell them through the app. The influencer never has to slice a single tomato. Wonder's first create virtual restaurants will go live this fall, Law says. The company says it will eventually step back with basic guidelines in place to ensure food quality and appropriate appropriate branding, but give his partners 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 Riley 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.
- [47:44]
B
We have every, every data center and supercomputer working on this. We have all the sum 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 ensouled to be Guy Fieri.
- [48:02]
A
It's just everything is AI slop. But the kind of selling point here is, okay, 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. And I mean, I guess the idea is if you're a content creator, we're content creators. Say, we wanted to come to this guy and we're like, we're gonna do you a restaurant.
- [48:22]
C
Trash Future restaurant. Trash Future restaurant. Oh my God.
- [48:25]
A
Trash Future restaurant. Where we make the forbidden sources, right? Only the forbidden sources. And we have sort of like AI generated our AI generated menu. And it's just like, it's called just sources. And you can order the fucking veloute or whatever and it just comes out like loose. It just squirts out of a nozzle onto a flat tray, right?
- [48:44]
B
It's like, yeah, it's got, it's got Hayaobiyazaki art fucking all.
- [48:48]
A
Yeah. And he's, he's gonna let us do it. He's gonna let everyone do anything.
- [48:52]
B
Like, we've got Studio Ghibli dispenser. It's got a secret sauce. It's basically a sauce Olindez, but it's got gamer girl bath water in it for some reason and just stealing and.
- [49:03]
A
Recombining every piece of intellectual property in the way that AI already does. And yeah, it's going to be a beautiful idea.
- [49:11]
C
Here's the restaurant concept, right?
- [49:12]
A
Okay.
- [49:13]
C
It is every single bad British meal that we've seen online. And I'm thinking about the John Sweeney Bolognese, the Sam Bowman roast chicken, the.
- [49:21]
B
Horrible soup, the horrible fucking cold. Yeah, like the great beyond the fucking steel. Leaving 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 Yellowstone National Park.
- [49:36]
A
Like, the thing is, we don't equally. It could happen to us because, you know, they. 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.
- [49:56]
B
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 too.
- [50:09]
A
Yeah. However, there's more from this guy. However, like many of Law's undertakings over the years, Create is 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 from scratch as a way to rescue capitalism from itself. This was telosa. This was going to be like libertarian diapers.com BioShock. It hasn't happened yet, partially because this guy keeps getting new ideas, like, what if we could have the drinking from the puddle soup. Right. And so he claims that he has this vision where a restaurant is no longer a place. It's an idea.
- [50:53]
C
I was gonna say it's an idea as a joke. And yes, literally, it's just.
- [50:58]
A
It's a prompt. 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 like, delivery to the point that it's something like, you know, 70% of restaurant traffic or something like that. And that's what led to ghost kitchens. A ghost kitchen is like a centralized, unbranded kitchen that makes all the branded stuff and sends it out separately. Right. And so, like, that's the shit that, like Uber Eats serves you.
- [51:26]
C
That's why, like, whenever you kind of order Wagon Mama from the restaurant, it always comes out a bit cold and like, oddly quite sweaty.
- [51:33]
A
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 Adzitranon to explain that to us, we're also kind of dealing with a doordash 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 way as it's happening to like, you know, like reading or film, right, where you have 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 at 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 too. 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 outside to that promise. Companies were bedevilled 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 Wanda's vertical integration makes it fundamentally different. But by 2022, he decided to shift focus. 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, like, 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 staffed counter, iPad, ordering stations and tables as sports 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 source creation machine, it's buying the sort of roast chicken tubes, it's creating new in sort of heavy air quotes restaurants, making new food halls wherever. And the way this works is just it gets made off site, the food gets shipped there, and then the finishing touches are done by, I don't know, just someone. Not a chef, really.
- [54:55]
B
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 the New York and New Jersey area. And this was 2014, 15, 16. And even at the time, GrubHub and DoorDash, their fees were exorbitant. And if you didn't pay higher commission fees, 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 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 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 the world's biggest version of if you've been to New York, those, like, strange cafes always on, like, 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're like, they have infinity dishes and none of them are good.
- [56:11]
A
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 fryers, there are three production stations where employees garnish cooked meals, prepare bowls and salads, and box everything up before placing it on a Conveyor belt. At the end of the belt, a 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 me movements. After observing that workers were walking around a lot while assembling meals, Wanda 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.
- [57:00]
B
I can recall as a kid when it was treated like a scandal that Burger King or not. Yeah, it was. Burger King had the, like, whopper machine where they put the burger and it went on a conveyor belt and got grilled that way and then subsequently got distributed out when they assembled the hamburgers. And it's like this feels as though you've kind of mc Eschered it and also made it into a torture nexus.
- [57:20]
A
It's sort of like it's that. And 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 snowpiercing.
- [57:28]
B
Yeah, 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.
- [57:35]
C
I don't know, I think it's just like a real shame that they're just including more of these 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.
- [57:48]
A
But you're only way into the food industry now, which is going to be for this 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 a bunch of loose bechamel and go, ah. I guess somebody ordered from Trash Futures again.
- [58:06]
B
I mean, for me, it's. 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 ambiance so I can 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 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.
- [58:31]
A
Eventually you'll yearn for Guy's American Kitchen. Not of the mind, right, because, because like, this is the thing, this extremely surveillance driven thing is going to sort of give you food that is, first of all, it's not good, right? But it's also like, you just have it as like an idea. I go back to that. As executives 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 Naik puts it, nobody wants a robot making the food. Naik says Wonders Kitchens owe a lot to innovations made in E commerce logistics. All the software, the screens, the low skilled labor, all those principles, the cameras, all come from the fulfillment center world. But it's really tough to tell people, oh, your food got made in a fulfillment center. Which is so fucking reprehensibly evil to be crying that you're like, yeah, we, we use like low skilled labor 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.
- [59:37]
B
You're telling me that my Dubai chocolate latte is unethical.
- [59:41]
A
There's a great quote in here from Graham Humphries, president of the Culinary Edge, a consulting group, which is a beautiful piece of consultant mindset of being need to. Of needing to be told that, you know, it's really 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 pitter so stale it might serve as a catcher's mitt.
- [60:09]
B
Uh, so what you're basically saying is the terminal destination for all of this is everyone will just be eating MREs, basically.
- [60:17]
A
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 Sweetgreen 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 Wanda's plans to go public in the hopes it'll be successful enough to validate the broader industry, which is again, the industry's food. It's eating Food law has said Wonder will do so as early as spring 2027, and no laces in the first quarter of 2020 28. But there's a feeling among some in 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 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 multidirectional velocity is a direct reflection of Law's own energy besides his city building project, which hasn't yet acquired land, but he says begins 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 has 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, analysing it and using an automated system to feed them.
- [62:04]
C
As in is the blood part of like the infinite soup that his restaurants.
- [62:09]
A
Will make or the perpetual blood?
- [62:11]
B
Yeah, no, I think they're going to do doordash Gattaca on you and tell you what meal you're supposed to be eating.
- [62:16]
A
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.
- [62:29]
B
I love taking away all agency. It's the thing that makes me the happiest.
- [62:33]
A
Law says he eats at Wander about once a week, but he's also been testing an AI planned menu on himself, requiring his personal chef what the computer tells him to. Law then trains this 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.
- [62:57]
C
He loves. He loves the biryani of the best chemel sauce. 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 of the predecessor 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.
- [63:15]
A
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.
- [63:24]
B
This guy is really mad because he did the entire formal education in French haute cuisine and now I'm basically making him do o tacos on me nonstop.
- [63:34]
A
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 that what you want is a burger.
- [63:50]
B
I feel like I'm fucking hallucinating. I feel like this is Ubik. I feel like this is straight up Philip K. Dick stuff. Everyone is really excited to live in a shoe and get fed from a hamster tube. I genuinely feel like I'm dissociating with every detail that you've been revealing here.
- [64:05]
A
It's. It's beautiful as well, because not to keep coming back to Snowpiercer, but at least the kind of mashed up bugs buzz, right? Nobody was happy about them and nobody was telling you to be happy about them. They just 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 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.
- [64:48]
B
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. Psycho4chan 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 Middle Minnesota Timberwolves. Yeah, 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.
- [65:15]
A
It does seem that way. Yeah. For now at least.
- [65:18]
B
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 a thing that can be resolved. But the idea of getting rid of the. The concept of people having skills acquired over careers, over their lifetimes to cook, to make meals that people enjoy and be like, no, a machine can make it up and do it better. We can cook it for you wholesale. I don't like this at all. Sorry.
- [65:50]
A
It's fantastic. As well as a kind of distribution of resources thing that we've managed to make. Not restaurants necessarily so much as. As just like eating food. Something that isn't just unprofitable but is actively, like, has a bubble in it.
- [66:07]
B
Right.
- [66:07]
A
But so last. Last love paragraph here, which is.
- [66:10]
B
It is.
- [66:10]
A
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 restaurateurs will pay a small fee, perhaps $10 a month. Month, Lore says, with the caveat that everything about the project is still being developed. Create partners will give Wonder a cut 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. But Law isn't concerned that he'll drive customers away by making them sort through a slog of weird virtual brands. Whenever Wanda has added restaurants so far, he says he people. 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.
- [67:16]
C
I just really like the idea that this period of history or this period of that we're living in, I think it's really defined by the sort of corporate Tuesday afternoon slot bowl, right? Yeah, just like this 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?
- [67:47]
A
I may 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 Rogue 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.
- [68:13]
C
What if we, yeah, like this guy sort of thought to himself, what if we sloppify the slop bowl? Yeah, you know, what if you could get like. And in many ways, because he says, and I think you sort of mentioned it directly, but he's sort of taking inspiration from this sort of contemporary Internet that is filled with slop. And I think it's really testament to the way in which certain kind of AI guys really think where they look at. I unfortunately watch a lot of reels at the moment because I have a child that doesn't sleep. And what else are you supposed to do at three in the morning except for look at really weird shit while your kid screams in your face and you can't stop him? And 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 bowl is a good example of this. Again, like, you know, the first few reels. Haha, that's funny. What is that guy doing? You know, why is his dog got two heads, etc.
- [69:01]
A
It's crazy that that woman dumped that boulder into the glass bridge.
- [69:06]
C
Why is the woman like somersaulting into a slot bowl? I don't understand. But like these guys watch this sincerely and they're just like, oh, this is how people watch, watch content in the future. And when people watch stuff, they eat something, right? And so what if they what if. And all I can think of, as you were sort of saying, this was that sort of old exhibit meme 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.
- [69:30]
B
I, I don't, yo dog, I hear you like slops. Put slop in your slop so you can slop while you slop.
- [69:36]
A
I mean the thing is that they, they know, they know that people don't like this because, because they have the consultants telling them people connect emotionally to food and they're like no, fuck that. We can change that if we want.
- [69:48]
C
It's like every time we talk about AI with Ed and anyone else who sort of actually pays attention to how people actually respond to this stuff, which is that it is disregarded because ultimately it's like, no, this is the new thing. We're sort of putting all our resources into it. And people will learn to like it. People will learn to sort of and against in some cases, it's like if they were truly honest, it's like they don't even care whether people like it. It's like, nope, 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.
- [70:13]
A
And to be clear, like the AI bubble, right? If this doesn't work, if this doesn't make sense, if this doesn't make sense, when it goes public, the eating food industry is fucked. Which is just a great place for society to be in. I think that we let it come to this. Everything is terrible. The future is trash.
- [70:35]
B
I mean, it's funny that you mentioned the falling on the glass bridge with the rock because one videos crossed my timeline, but it was auto playing and I had music going and 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, I had, I, 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 Silzer Krons or like this is like the, 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 I've 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, I cut open one of the Silzer crons and then put slices of those meatballs that had heated up and then put some of the tomato sauce on. And I was like, oh, it's basically like a subway sandwich, but worse. I love this. I'm the same slop king. I'm just, I'm disgusting. I'm gonna roll in my own filth. I'm so happy at this gross ass meal. It was actually really good, but it still Felt disgusting.
- [71:39]
A
Yeah, but what if. 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.
- [71:51]
B
Like, like Blemtro and weeksy and shit. And it's always in fucking restaurants now.
- [71:56]
A
All restaurants are Blemtro. So I hope we're all excited to eat our Blemtro bowls in the future.
- [72:03]
B
Michelin Starred Blemtro.
- [72:05]
A
I think that's the episode title in a buzzer Beast at the last second. Oh, my God.
- [72:11]
B
Thank you so much for this episode. November. This is tremendous.
- [72:15]
A
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.
- [72:21]
B
Yeah, I was going to say I'm really excited because I live in a country that not only 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. So.
- [72:31]
A
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. It's $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.
- [72:48]
B
Tim Apple takes a cut of it and holds the payouts hostage for two and a half months. So we look, do what you got to do. However, you're going to do whatever is easiest for you. But just understand that, like, if they charge you more, it's not us being. It's Tim Apple taking more just because he can.
- [73:01]
A
Yes. And in the meantime, we will see you next time. Bye, everyone.
- [73:06]
B
Bye. Bye, Sam.