Ed Elson

You typically don't walk out of fast food thinking, great idea, great idea.

You need cheap calories because it's gotten so expensive.

We subsidize beef, we subsidize water, and people are so time-starved from working so fucking hard that if you're a single mother, I used to eat fast food all the time when I was growing up with my mom, because quite frankly, it was the most affordable means of getting cheap calories.

and it was convenient, it was fast, it was easy.

Unfortunately, it is really bad for you because they're engineered to addict you with salty, sugary, and fatty food that we couldn't find on the Savannah several thousand years ago.

And it's just really bad for you.

And what do you know, GLP-1s come... There's something like 20% of America eats at McDonald's once or twice a day.

And I gotta think GLP-1s are starting to kick in here.

I just don't...

The economics of a franchise model are somewhat at play here, and that is the labor model worked, or the franchise model worked when labor was cheap, interest rates were low, and consumers weren't counting calories.

All of that is broken, but more than anything, people are having an easier time driving by a jack-in-the-box and driving by it.

and just saying, I'm gonna go home and eat kale, or I'm gonna go home and have a bowl of, you know, whatever it is, a bowl of cereal, or I'm just not that hungry.

And I think this is, I think GOP, I mean, I've said this before, I think GOP ones are bigger than AI.

So I think that this is, sure, I'm sure it's something about the franchise model, interest rates, all that, you know, labor, inflation, I'm sure all their concerns are real.

But if everybody was eating more,

That would roll over the anomalies in the franchise model.

This is the oxygen is being sucked out of the room.

And there's just, it's like when a company is shrinking, everybody starts blaming each other and they're questioning the business model.

And it's like, no, people just aren't buying newspapers any longer.

They're reading, they're getting news from different sources.