June 8, 2021 • 19 mins
Since the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, there has been a growing community of sedition hunters who comb over hours of video and thousands of photos in the hopes of identifying those that stormed the Capitol building. These internet sleuths have even set up their own infrastructure to help with the effort with facial recognition databases and websites to help track suspects. The FBI appreciates the help and said that some of these tips have been helpful in dozens of cases. David Yaffe-Bellany, reporter at Bloomberg News, joins us for the sedition hunters looking for insurrectionists.
Next, virtual brands are taking over your favorite food delivery apps. The pandemic has transformed the food industry and in a time when many restaurants were closing, food brands have proliferated. Big chains and even mom and pop restaurants are expanding the brands housed in their kitchens and offering burgers, pizza, and especially chicken wings all coming from the same kitchen, just under different names. Uber Eats estimates that there are over 10,000 virtual brands on its platform alone. Josh, Dzieza, investigations editor at the Verge, joins us for the rise of virtual brands and how to spot them… keep an eye out for those chicken wing spots.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Tuesday, June eight. I'm oscar Ameras in Los Angeles
and this is the daily dive. Since the January six
Capital riots, there have been a growing community of sedition
hunters who comb over hours of video and thousands of
photos in the hopes of identifying those that stormed the
(00:20):
Capital building. These internet sleuths have even set up their
own infrastructure to help out with the effort, with facial
recognition databases and websites to help track the suspects. The
FBI appreciates the help and said that some of these
tips have even been helpful in dozens of cases. David
Yaffy Elenie, reporter at Bloomberg News joins us for the
(00:41):
sedition hunters looking for insurrectionists. Next, virtual brands are taking
over your favorite food delivery apps. The pandemic has transformed
the food industry, and in a time when many restaurants
were closing, food brands have proliferated. Big chains and even
mom and pop restaurants are expanding. The brands housed in
their kitchens and offering pizza, burgers, and especially chicken wings,
(01:03):
all coming from the same kitchen, just under different names.
Uber Eats estimates that there are over ten thousand virtual
brands on this platform alone. Josh Jessa, investigations editor at
The Verge, joined us for the rise of virtual brands
and how to spot them. Keep an eye out for
all those chicken wing spots. It's news without the noise.
Let's dive in. It's like nothing that the Justice Department
(01:27):
has had to deal with ever in American history. And
you know, it strains the resources even of the SBI,
and so it makes sense that they would want the
public system in finding these people. Joining us now is
David Yappi Bellini, reporter at Bloomberg News. Thanks for joining us, David,
thanks for having me on. I want to talk about
an interesting story you wrote up about the growing community
(01:50):
of self proclaimed sedition hunters. So this is just a
growing group of Internet salutes, really who are pouring over
hundreds of hours of video and photos all related to
the Capital riots on January six, and these people are
just looking for connections and and trying to identify people,
hopefully passing on that information to the FBI and then
(02:13):
you know they can make arrests and all that. I
think to date, the FBI has has a little more
a little over four hundred arrests that they've made in
all of this, you know, So these people are just
kind of consumed with it, spending hours and hours pouring
over this stuff, trying to find these people out. So
David tell us a little bit more about it. So
it's really a kind of unlikely assortment of ordinary people
(02:34):
around the country and around the world who were appalled
by the events of January six and wanted to do
something about it. I spoke to an out of work
after in Canada who in January start spending eight hours
a day ago through this footage trying to kind of
draw connections between different images and different videos, figure out,
you know, which rioters have done what particular locations and
(02:57):
sort of ultimately build up a portfolio and formation that
could be useful to the said, you know, official investigation.
And I talked to a stay at home mom in
the Pacific Northwest who is now kind of going through
footage of a particular group of Proud Boys that marched
on the capitol to try to track their movement to
figure out what they were doing as a way to
kind of gather evidence of potential planning and coordination that
(03:20):
could be useful to the official investigation. So it's really,
you know, it's it's a it's a broad swath of
people who have all sorts of different motivations, from kind
of righteous indignation about what happened to a sort of
nerd us fassination with the technical challenges of going through
all this material to spearhead in this efforts. The out
of work actor in Canada kind of struck me as interesting.
(03:42):
Obviously he doesn't even live in this country, but he
was so interested in what happened. I think his thing
ended up being just wanting to know why. I think
that was his big question, and it just kind of
consumed him to the point where I think he spends
like forty hours a week pouring over this evidence. One
of the questions I had is how does the FBI
and law enforcement officials react to these people kind of
(04:04):
doing these investigations, let's say, connecting these thoughts. I know
the FBI cited some of the stuff and when they
made some of these arrests and all, but how do
they feel overall about this? Yeah, so the FBI really
has nothing but good things to say about these groups.
They're encouraging the public to come forward with tips. The
FBI spokes when and I talked to, said that there
(04:25):
have been dozens of cases in which these sorts of
tips that kind of played a beneficial role, and and
that makes sense. I mean, this is an investigation of
unprecedented scope. It's like nothing that the Justice Department has
had to deal with ever in American history. And you know,
it strains the resources even of the FBI, and so
it makes sense that they would want the public's assistance
(04:46):
in finding these people. Now, let's talk a little bit
about what these so called sedition hunters are doing. You know,
I mentioned it briefly. They're looking at videos, looking at pictures,
but what exactly are they're doing. And they've because they've
also set up their own infat structure where they have
websites with pictures and pretty detailed stuff. I kind of
cruised through some of them, and they have pictures of
(05:08):
the day of the event, social media pictures. You know,
they're connecting a lot of dots there. So so walk
me through what they're doing with it. I mean, to me,
that's what's really fascinating about this. I mean, we've seen
internet crowdsourcing movements happened in the past. After the Boston
Marathon bombing after Charlotte'esville, for instance. But I think that's
maybe the first time that we've seen a crowdsourcing project
(05:29):
that's been sustained over such a long period of time
and whose members have kind of developed this internal infrastructure.
So you've got facial recognition databases, of course come with
all sorts of civil liberties concerns, but these are places
where exedition hunter could drop a photo of somebody that
they saw up the riot and then pull up other
images in which the same person appeared as a way
(05:50):
of kind of cataloging what the person did on that day.
You've got interactive maps where you can sort of click
on specific GPS yes coordinates and find the footage that
was taken at that particular location close to the capital.
Their galleries of sort of photos, basically, each of which
has its own kind of distinctive hashtag as a way
(06:12):
of sort of organizing these images so that members of
the online community communicate about a specific person who name
they might not know, who they want to avoid naming,
you know, for fear of a side of misidentification. So
it's this really sort of elaborate setup that's that's evolved
over the test few months. Yeah, I definitely went to
sedition hunters dot org, which you mentioned in your article,
(06:32):
and and that is one of the things I noticed
is the hashtags that they have for cataloging people, vague
descriptions of a person with you know, coupled with other things.
They had Lion Maine Insider, who was a guy with
long white hair, which was kind of funny, serious forehead,
airhead boy, you know, just different names just to kind
of help people move along through it. But they had,
like I said, just tons of photos and multiple angles
(06:54):
from videos and other social media things where you can
clearly see that it's the same person in different parts
of that capital. They did have some high profile misfires,
which seems to happen with a lot of this stuff.
You know, tons of people working on something. There are
some mistakes made along the way. They falsely accused some people, right.
So the most famous example of the kind of an
(07:15):
Internet crowdsourcing project going raw is probably the Boston Marathon bombing,
where you had Reddit users misidentify a suspect and you know,
to their credit this time around, a lot of the
Twitter accounts that have been mobilizing these January six. Efforts
have really tried to steer their followers in the right
direction and encourage them to submit identifications to journalists or
(07:35):
to the FBI rather than making public proclamations about who
did what. But it's impossible to control everybody. And yeah,
we've had misfires. I mean, there was a retired firefighter
in Chicago who was misidentified pretty early on. Chuck Norris
was misidentified at one point. Various people who look alike
has happened to be there, and you know, we're falsely
(07:55):
accused online and obviously this is a big risk. And
I spoke to some sort of more stable, wished to
open research groups who kind of expressed frustration that this
was still happening. But you know, like I said, this
is a this is a more mature effort than we've
seen in the past. And certainly at this point, you know,
there are molds of the road that these groups and
individual users have have established their design to prevent these
(08:16):
types of mistakes from happening. Tell me a little bit
about the mental toll that has been taken on some
of these edition hunters, because they're pouring through hours of video,
lots of yelling name callings, you know, lots of bad
stuff that was happening on that day, and some of
them take a break from the project that it's at
certain times because you know, it's a little too much
for that. Yeah. Look, I mean we've all seen this footage.
(08:39):
It's disturbing to watch. It was disturbing to watch small
snippets of it on the nightly news, and you can
imagine how disturbing it is to be constantly watching this
on a loop for months on end. You know. Interestingly,
a lot of the sedition hunters I spoke to said
that they actually found the audio more disturbing than the visuals,
that that kind of angry comphony of yelling and wearing
(09:00):
became too much for them, and they started, you know,
watching the videos on mute. And I talked to one
guy who basically plays classical music in the background, so
I'll have Tchaikovsky on while he's watching the Proud Boys
march on the Capitol. And you know, there are there
are others who have had to take breaks from doing
this work just because they thought it was sort of
messing with their heads. And you know, it's definitely it's
(09:21):
definitely owners and certainly does take a psychological tool. David
Yappy Belani, reporter at Bloomberg News, Thank you very much
for joining us. Thanks for having me kind of independently
(09:41):
early in the pandemic. A lot of restaurants that, you know,
we need extra revenue, the kitchen sitting idol will launch
a Wings brand, and then you have the large franchises
that got on board, and then you have these branding
companies that come along and say, you know, we have
ten different virtual Wings brands that you can put up
and try to get some of that Wings traffic. Joining
(10:01):
us now is Josh Jessa, investigations editor at The Verge.
Thanks for joining us, Josh, thanks for having me. I
wanted to check in on the food industry, the restaurant
industry and kind of what's going on. Something that we've
seen start to develop before the pandemic get really accelerated
by the pandemic, and now kind of looking at the
(10:22):
current state of things and into the future, and we're
talking about virtual brands in the restaurant industry. For a
lot of time, we had been hearing about ghost kitchens,
which is a very similar concept, but these virtual brands
seem to be taking off and if you are ordering
stuff off of any food delivery apps. I'm sure you've
noticed an increase in chicken wings, you know, specifically. We'll
(10:44):
get to that in a moment, but Josh start us
off with this concept of virtual brands and how it
relates to ghost kitchens. So a ghost kitchen, which is
sort of the better known concept, is basically a restaurant
that only does delivery, and so it's kind of like
a commissary kitchen, and you might have a couple of
different restaurants working out of it, and the idea is
(11:07):
that there will be more efficient, have lower overhead, and
be able to operate in this very tight environment of
food delivery. A virtual brand is related, but it can
be in a traditional restaurant. So you might remember last
year Chuck E Cheese launched a brand called the Scalley's
Pizza and Wings. It was not clear at the time
(11:29):
that that was Chuck E Cheese, but people were ordering
from it discovering it was actually Chuck E Cheese, and
so that the Scalies was an example of a virtual brand,
something that a brick and mortar restaurant puts up on
delivery apps in order to get new customers. Tell me
a little bit about Ty Brown and a restaurant called
The Bergen, because you focus on him a lot in
(11:51):
your article about how he expanded through all these virtual brands.
I mean, you know, he started off as one restaurant,
but all when all of a sudden, done he kept
adding so many other brands to this thing. I mean,
he was running I don't know, eleven restaurants, made me
more out of just the one. I launched his restaurant
through just before the pandemic and approached pretty quickly by
(12:13):
one of these there's virtual brand companies in his case.
I think the first one was Future Foods, and so
they offer restaurant owners menu of brands to choose from.
And you know, it sounded like a great deal. You know,
he's already sort of the takeout spots making burgers and wings.
Future food says, we have these other burgers and wings brands,
(12:35):
will run them. When an order comes through, you just
fill the order, you get a cut of the revenue.
So he did it, and you know it worked well.
Sort of helped him get on his feet in the
restaurant business. And then he kept adding more and more
sort of these other companies launched they started recruiting more aggressively,
and so when we last spoke, he was running a
(12:57):
dozen or so brands of this one restaurant, opening other
restaurants that he was going to open with also a
dozen brands. And he's a big fan of the concept,
you know. He it's it's instant, instant sales for him.
He's been quite happy with it. Yeah, so you had
a list of them, and I just need to run
them down so people kind of kind of understand how
many different concepts he can run out of the one kitchen.
(13:19):
So he had Chef Burger, Burger Mansion, Hey Burger, Mr
Beast Burger, and then Wings. He had Chicks, Wild Wild Wings,
Crispy Wings, Killer Wings, Firebilly Wings. You know, the list
goes on and on, and that's also part of the magic.
I guess you can say about these virtual brands is
a lot of it has to do with search optimization.
You go onto an app and you're searching for product type,
(13:41):
not necessary product names. So you're looking for burgers, you're
looking for wings, you're looking for pizza, and then uh,
you know whatever else. You know, the menu and everything
kind of entices you to pick one at that point.
So that's also one of the things that's really key
to a lot of these virtual brands is the names
of these brands are pretty I guess, familiar enough to
(14:01):
know what you're getting, but generic enough just to show
up on the search engine. The optimization is a big
part of it. If you think about a restaurant like
Denny's or Applebee is one of these big chains that
have started getting into it. You know, they have wings
on the menu, but you don't go to them for
wings necessarily, so they'll launch something cosmic wings or neighborhood wings,
(14:22):
and now they're showing up when people search for wings
on the delivery apps, and so yet so ties restaurants,
they all I actually found him because I was just
scanning groove install, one of those wing businesses. You know,
after you've been reading about these businesses for a while,
they all start to sound the same, and so I
think it was a wing dynasty that pop doc and
(14:43):
so that seems like it's probably a virtual brand, and
search the address and came up with all these others
that he was operating out of that location. As a
restaurantur business owners, these are opportunities for them to obviously
make more money, get names out there, and keep afloat,
especially during the time like the pandemic. On the consumer side,
we're looking for things to eat, we're looking for fast delivery.
(15:06):
You don't know what you're getting sometimes you don't know
where who you're actually ordering from. You see a name,
you see a product you want, and you're going for it.
So one of the truest tells of all of this
is you kind of mentioned we're Wings. Wings are experiencing
this kind of gold rush moment right now where it's
so easy to do, everybody's doing it, and you're going
to see a lot of these things popping up on
(15:27):
your delivery apps. That's right, Yeah, Wings. Uh. You know,
a lot of restaurants made Wings already. If they didn't,
they're pretty easy to spin up, and so kind of
independently early in the pandemic, a lot of restaurants said,
you know, we need extra revenue. The kitchen sitting idle
will launch a Wings brand, and then you have the
(15:47):
large franchises that got on board, and then you have
these branding companies that come along and say, you know,
we have ten different virtual Wings brands that you can
put up and try to get some of that. Wings
traffic and so wing sales have really been through the roof.
It's been kind of a bright spot for the industry.
One of those one of the stats I heard from
an analyst was that well, restaurant visits declined by about
(16:11):
eleven percent the period roughly span the pandemic. Wing sales
went up tempercent. Prices have gone up, wings orders have
gone up. Everything has gone up partly because all of
these restaurants have launched wing brands. I didn't want to
mention the other side of things. You know, some restaurants
and restaurateurs don't like this trend for a number of reasons. One,
(16:32):
the fees associated with the apps can get pretty high sometimes,
so they're losing some money there. The other part of this,
as you mentioned, there's these virtual brand kind of companies
that are pitching out these companies to restaurants and things
like that. You know, there's some in the industry that
are worried that these uber eats, door dash, which have
these kind of arms of their business coordinating these types
(16:53):
of things, you know, might start opening up their own
kitchens in their own restaurants and kind of you know,
taking out the mom and pop shops and regular restaurateurs.
There are several concerns that restaurateurs have, and the first
one is sort of just the logistical issue that you know,
it's sometimes it sounds too good to be true. You know,
if you have ten wings brands and everyone starts ordering
(17:15):
wings from you, you can't actually keep up. You have
to hire more people, it becomes more expensive, maybe your
main operation could suffer, and you're sort of the in
house dining if when you're trying to fill all these
delivery orders. And then the other is this sort of
larger strategic sphere, which is that in the same way
that Amazon competes with some of the sellers on its
(17:36):
marketplace by finding what's popular and then making its own
version at lower costs, that the big delivery apps will
start making their own virtual brands like this, or promoting
restaurants that pay higher fees and hosts one of their
sort of company produced virtual brands. Right now, the collaboration
(17:57):
has been increasing between the brand companies and the apps
hasn't quite reached that level yet, but you have grub
pub promoting virtual brand companies trying to recruit restaurant owners,
and so restaurant owners who are more skeptical. The delivery
apps are kind of watching that warily. You know, we
had been seeing this trend of farm the table, locally
(18:18):
sourced ingredients, keeping it you know, very chef centric even,
and now things with the delivery apps have kind of
changed that. As I mentioned, you don't know who you're
ordering from, just that you're getting wings and you're getting
these flavors and stuff or the same thing for burgers
or anything. So the trends of these restaurants are changing
in this digital world, which is interesting to think about.
(18:39):
I think it really raises some questions about what a
restaurant is or will be. You know, yeah, you it
feels a lot more like e commerce, where you don't
exactly know where it was made or where it came from.
What you care about is how quickly it will get
there and the price. And so you end up with
these situations. You order wings and they're well reviewed and
they'll get are fast. But maybe it's a brand name
(19:02):
that was invented by some company in Silicon Valley and
it's being run out of local restaurant that's also running
ten different brands in addition to its local to its
main dining business. You don't really know where it came from.
Josh Jessa, Investigations editor at The Verge, Thank you very
(19:22):
much for joining us, Thanks for having me. That's it
for today. Join us on social media at Daily Dive
Pod on both Twitter and Instagram. Leave us a comment,
give us a rating, and tell us the stories that
you're interested in. Follow us on I Heart Radio, or
(19:43):
subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This episode of The
Daily Divers produced by Victor Wright and engineered by Tony Sarrantino.
I'm Oscar Ramirez and this was your Daily Dive
It's Tuesday, June eight. I'm oscar Ameras in Los Angeles
and this is the daily dive. Since the January six
Capital riots, there have been a growing community of sedition
hunters who comb over hours of video and thousands of
photos in the hopes of identifying those that stormed the
(00:20):
Capital building. These internet sleuths have even set up their
own infrastructure to help out with the effort, with facial
recognition databases and websites to help track the suspects. The
FBI appreciates the help and said that some of these
tips have even been helpful in dozens of cases. David
Yaffy Elenie, reporter at Bloomberg News joins us for the
(00:41):
sedition hunters looking for insurrectionists. Next, virtual brands are taking
over your favorite food delivery apps. The pandemic has transformed
the food industry, and in a time when many restaurants
were closing, food brands have proliferated. Big chains and even
mom and pop restaurants are expanding. The brands housed in
their kitchens and offering pizza, burgers, and especially chicken wings,
(01:03):
all coming from the same kitchen, just under different names.
Uber Eats estimates that there are over ten thousand virtual
brands on this platform alone. Josh Jessa, investigations editor at
The Verge, joined us for the rise of virtual brands
and how to spot them. Keep an eye out for
all those chicken wing spots. It's news without the noise.
Let's dive in. It's like nothing that the Justice Department
(01:27):
has had to deal with ever in American history. And
you know, it strains the resources even of the SBI,
and so it makes sense that they would want the
public system in finding these people. Joining us now is
David Yappi Bellini, reporter at Bloomberg News. Thanks for joining us, David,
thanks for having me on. I want to talk about
an interesting story you wrote up about the growing community
(01:50):
of self proclaimed sedition hunters. So this is just a
growing group of Internet salutes, really who are pouring over
hundreds of hours of video and photos all related to
the Capital riots on January six, and these people are
just looking for connections and and trying to identify people,
hopefully passing on that information to the FBI and then
(02:13):
you know they can make arrests and all that. I
think to date, the FBI has has a little more
a little over four hundred arrests that they've made in
all of this, you know, So these people are just
kind of consumed with it, spending hours and hours pouring
over this stuff, trying to find these people out. So
David tell us a little bit more about it. So
it's really a kind of unlikely assortment of ordinary people
(02:34):
around the country and around the world who were appalled
by the events of January six and wanted to do
something about it. I spoke to an out of work
after in Canada who in January start spending eight hours
a day ago through this footage trying to kind of
draw connections between different images and different videos, figure out,
you know, which rioters have done what particular locations and
(02:57):
sort of ultimately build up a portfolio and formation that
could be useful to the said, you know, official investigation.
And I talked to a stay at home mom in
the Pacific Northwest who is now kind of going through
footage of a particular group of Proud Boys that marched
on the capitol to try to track their movement to
figure out what they were doing as a way to
kind of gather evidence of potential planning and coordination that
(03:20):
could be useful to the official investigation. So it's really,
you know, it's it's a it's a broad swath of
people who have all sorts of different motivations, from kind
of righteous indignation about what happened to a sort of
nerd us fassination with the technical challenges of going through
all this material to spearhead in this efforts. The out
of work actor in Canada kind of struck me as interesting.
(03:42):
Obviously he doesn't even live in this country, but he
was so interested in what happened. I think his thing
ended up being just wanting to know why. I think
that was his big question, and it just kind of
consumed him to the point where I think he spends
like forty hours a week pouring over this evidence. One
of the questions I had is how does the FBI
and law enforcement officials react to these people kind of
(04:04):
doing these investigations, let's say, connecting these thoughts. I know
the FBI cited some of the stuff and when they
made some of these arrests and all, but how do
they feel overall about this? Yeah, so the FBI really
has nothing but good things to say about these groups.
They're encouraging the public to come forward with tips. The
FBI spokes when and I talked to, said that there
(04:25):
have been dozens of cases in which these sorts of
tips that kind of played a beneficial role, and and
that makes sense. I mean, this is an investigation of
unprecedented scope. It's like nothing that the Justice Department has
had to deal with ever in American history. And you know,
it strains the resources even of the FBI, and so
it makes sense that they would want the public's assistance
(04:46):
in finding these people. Now, let's talk a little bit
about what these so called sedition hunters are doing. You know,
I mentioned it briefly. They're looking at videos, looking at pictures,
but what exactly are they're doing. And they've because they've
also set up their own infat structure where they have
websites with pictures and pretty detailed stuff. I kind of
cruised through some of them, and they have pictures of
(05:08):
the day of the event, social media pictures. You know,
they're connecting a lot of dots there. So so walk
me through what they're doing with it. I mean, to me,
that's what's really fascinating about this. I mean, we've seen
internet crowdsourcing movements happened in the past. After the Boston
Marathon bombing after Charlotte'esville, for instance. But I think that's
maybe the first time that we've seen a crowdsourcing project
(05:29):
that's been sustained over such a long period of time
and whose members have kind of developed this internal infrastructure.
So you've got facial recognition databases, of course come with
all sorts of civil liberties concerns, but these are places
where exedition hunter could drop a photo of somebody that
they saw up the riot and then pull up other
images in which the same person appeared as a way
(05:50):
of kind of cataloging what the person did on that day.
You've got interactive maps where you can sort of click
on specific GPS yes coordinates and find the footage that
was taken at that particular location close to the capital.
Their galleries of sort of photos, basically, each of which
has its own kind of distinctive hashtag as a way
(06:12):
of sort of organizing these images so that members of
the online community communicate about a specific person who name
they might not know, who they want to avoid naming,
you know, for fear of a side of misidentification. So
it's this really sort of elaborate setup that's that's evolved
over the test few months. Yeah, I definitely went to
sedition hunters dot org, which you mentioned in your article,
(06:32):
and and that is one of the things I noticed
is the hashtags that they have for cataloging people, vague
descriptions of a person with you know, coupled with other things.
They had Lion Maine Insider, who was a guy with
long white hair, which was kind of funny, serious forehead,
airhead boy, you know, just different names just to kind
of help people move along through it. But they had,
like I said, just tons of photos and multiple angles
(06:54):
from videos and other social media things where you can
clearly see that it's the same person in different parts
of that capital. They did have some high profile misfires,
which seems to happen with a lot of this stuff.
You know, tons of people working on something. There are
some mistakes made along the way. They falsely accused some people, right.
So the most famous example of the kind of an
(07:15):
Internet crowdsourcing project going raw is probably the Boston Marathon bombing,
where you had Reddit users misidentify a suspect and you know,
to their credit this time around, a lot of the
Twitter accounts that have been mobilizing these January six. Efforts
have really tried to steer their followers in the right
direction and encourage them to submit identifications to journalists or
(07:35):
to the FBI rather than making public proclamations about who
did what. But it's impossible to control everybody. And yeah,
we've had misfires. I mean, there was a retired firefighter
in Chicago who was misidentified pretty early on. Chuck Norris
was misidentified at one point. Various people who look alike
has happened to be there, and you know, we're falsely
(07:55):
accused online and obviously this is a big risk. And
I spoke to some sort of more stable, wished to
open research groups who kind of expressed frustration that this
was still happening. But you know, like I said, this
is a this is a more mature effort than we've
seen in the past. And certainly at this point, you know,
there are molds of the road that these groups and
individual users have have established their design to prevent these
(08:16):
types of mistakes from happening. Tell me a little bit
about the mental toll that has been taken on some
of these edition hunters, because they're pouring through hours of video,
lots of yelling name callings, you know, lots of bad
stuff that was happening on that day, and some of
them take a break from the project that it's at
certain times because you know, it's a little too much
for that. Yeah. Look, I mean we've all seen this footage.
(08:39):
It's disturbing to watch. It was disturbing to watch small
snippets of it on the nightly news, and you can
imagine how disturbing it is to be constantly watching this
on a loop for months on end. You know. Interestingly,
a lot of the sedition hunters I spoke to said
that they actually found the audio more disturbing than the visuals,
that that kind of angry comphony of yelling and wearing
(09:00):
became too much for them, and they started, you know,
watching the videos on mute. And I talked to one
guy who basically plays classical music in the background, so
I'll have Tchaikovsky on while he's watching the Proud Boys
march on the Capitol. And you know, there are there
are others who have had to take breaks from doing
this work just because they thought it was sort of
messing with their heads. And you know, it's definitely it's
(09:21):
definitely owners and certainly does take a psychological tool. David
Yappy Belani, reporter at Bloomberg News, Thank you very much
for joining us. Thanks for having me kind of independently
(09:41):
early in the pandemic. A lot of restaurants that, you know,
we need extra revenue, the kitchen sitting idol will launch
a Wings brand, and then you have the large franchises
that got on board, and then you have these branding
companies that come along and say, you know, we have
ten different virtual Wings brands that you can put up
and try to get some of that Wings traffic. Joining
(10:01):
us now is Josh Jessa, investigations editor at The Verge.
Thanks for joining us, Josh, thanks for having me. I
wanted to check in on the food industry, the restaurant
industry and kind of what's going on. Something that we've
seen start to develop before the pandemic get really accelerated
by the pandemic, and now kind of looking at the
(10:22):
current state of things and into the future, and we're
talking about virtual brands in the restaurant industry. For a
lot of time, we had been hearing about ghost kitchens,
which is a very similar concept, but these virtual brands
seem to be taking off and if you are ordering
stuff off of any food delivery apps. I'm sure you've
noticed an increase in chicken wings, you know, specifically. We'll
(10:44):
get to that in a moment, but Josh start us
off with this concept of virtual brands and how it
relates to ghost kitchens. So a ghost kitchen, which is
sort of the better known concept, is basically a restaurant
that only does delivery, and so it's kind of like
a commissary kitchen, and you might have a couple of
different restaurants working out of it, and the idea is
(11:07):
that there will be more efficient, have lower overhead, and
be able to operate in this very tight environment of
food delivery. A virtual brand is related, but it can
be in a traditional restaurant. So you might remember last
year Chuck E Cheese launched a brand called the Scalley's
Pizza and Wings. It was not clear at the time
(11:29):
that that was Chuck E Cheese, but people were ordering
from it discovering it was actually Chuck E Cheese, and
so that the Scalies was an example of a virtual brand,
something that a brick and mortar restaurant puts up on
delivery apps in order to get new customers. Tell me
a little bit about Ty Brown and a restaurant called
The Bergen, because you focus on him a lot in
(11:51):
your article about how he expanded through all these virtual brands.
I mean, you know, he started off as one restaurant,
but all when all of a sudden, done he kept
adding so many other brands to this thing. I mean,
he was running I don't know, eleven restaurants, made me
more out of just the one. I launched his restaurant
through just before the pandemic and approached pretty quickly by
(12:13):
one of these there's virtual brand companies in his case.
I think the first one was Future Foods, and so
they offer restaurant owners menu of brands to choose from.
And you know, it sounded like a great deal. You know,
he's already sort of the takeout spots making burgers and wings.
Future food says, we have these other burgers and wings brands,
(12:35):
will run them. When an order comes through, you just
fill the order, you get a cut of the revenue.
So he did it, and you know it worked well.
Sort of helped him get on his feet in the
restaurant business. And then he kept adding more and more
sort of these other companies launched they started recruiting more aggressively,
and so when we last spoke, he was running a
(12:57):
dozen or so brands of this one restaurant, opening other
restaurants that he was going to open with also a
dozen brands. And he's a big fan of the concept,
you know. He it's it's instant, instant sales for him.
He's been quite happy with it. Yeah, so you had
a list of them, and I just need to run
them down so people kind of kind of understand how
many different concepts he can run out of the one kitchen.
(13:19):
So he had Chef Burger, Burger Mansion, Hey Burger, Mr
Beast Burger, and then Wings. He had Chicks, Wild Wild Wings,
Crispy Wings, Killer Wings, Firebilly Wings. You know, the list
goes on and on, and that's also part of the magic.
I guess you can say about these virtual brands is
a lot of it has to do with search optimization.
You go onto an app and you're searching for product type,
(13:41):
not necessary product names. So you're looking for burgers, you're
looking for wings, you're looking for pizza, and then uh,
you know whatever else. You know, the menu and everything
kind of entices you to pick one at that point.
So that's also one of the things that's really key
to a lot of these virtual brands is the names
of these brands are pretty I guess, familiar enough to
(14:01):
know what you're getting, but generic enough just to show
up on the search engine. The optimization is a big
part of it. If you think about a restaurant like
Denny's or Applebee is one of these big chains that
have started getting into it. You know, they have wings
on the menu, but you don't go to them for
wings necessarily, so they'll launch something cosmic wings or neighborhood wings,
(14:22):
and now they're showing up when people search for wings
on the delivery apps, and so yet so ties restaurants,
they all I actually found him because I was just
scanning groove install, one of those wing businesses. You know,
after you've been reading about these businesses for a while,
they all start to sound the same, and so I
think it was a wing dynasty that pop doc and
(14:43):
so that seems like it's probably a virtual brand, and
search the address and came up with all these others
that he was operating out of that location. As a
restaurantur business owners, these are opportunities for them to obviously
make more money, get names out there, and keep afloat,
especially during the time like the pandemic. On the consumer side,
we're looking for things to eat, we're looking for fast delivery.
(15:06):
You don't know what you're getting sometimes you don't know
where who you're actually ordering from. You see a name,
you see a product you want, and you're going for it.
So one of the truest tells of all of this
is you kind of mentioned we're Wings. Wings are experiencing
this kind of gold rush moment right now where it's
so easy to do, everybody's doing it, and you're going
to see a lot of these things popping up on
(15:27):
your delivery apps. That's right, Yeah, Wings. Uh. You know,
a lot of restaurants made Wings already. If they didn't,
they're pretty easy to spin up, and so kind of
independently early in the pandemic, a lot of restaurants said,
you know, we need extra revenue. The kitchen sitting idle
will launch a Wings brand, and then you have the
(15:47):
large franchises that got on board, and then you have
these branding companies that come along and say, you know,
we have ten different virtual Wings brands that you can
put up and try to get some of that. Wings
traffic and so wing sales have really been through the roof.
It's been kind of a bright spot for the industry.
One of those one of the stats I heard from
an analyst was that well, restaurant visits declined by about
(16:11):
eleven percent the period roughly span the pandemic. Wing sales
went up tempercent. Prices have gone up, wings orders have
gone up. Everything has gone up partly because all of
these restaurants have launched wing brands. I didn't want to
mention the other side of things. You know, some restaurants
and restaurateurs don't like this trend for a number of reasons. One,
(16:32):
the fees associated with the apps can get pretty high sometimes,
so they're losing some money there. The other part of this,
as you mentioned, there's these virtual brand kind of companies
that are pitching out these companies to restaurants and things
like that. You know, there's some in the industry that
are worried that these uber eats, door dash, which have
these kind of arms of their business coordinating these types
(16:53):
of things, you know, might start opening up their own
kitchens in their own restaurants and kind of you know,
taking out the mom and pop shops and regular restaurateurs.
There are several concerns that restaurateurs have, and the first
one is sort of just the logistical issue that you know,
it's sometimes it sounds too good to be true. You know,
if you have ten wings brands and everyone starts ordering
(17:15):
wings from you, you can't actually keep up. You have
to hire more people, it becomes more expensive, maybe your
main operation could suffer, and you're sort of the in
house dining if when you're trying to fill all these
delivery orders. And then the other is this sort of
larger strategic sphere, which is that in the same way
that Amazon competes with some of the sellers on its
(17:36):
marketplace by finding what's popular and then making its own
version at lower costs, that the big delivery apps will
start making their own virtual brands like this, or promoting
restaurants that pay higher fees and hosts one of their
sort of company produced virtual brands. Right now, the collaboration
(17:57):
has been increasing between the brand companies and the apps
hasn't quite reached that level yet, but you have grub
pub promoting virtual brand companies trying to recruit restaurant owners,
and so restaurant owners who are more skeptical. The delivery
apps are kind of watching that warily. You know, we
had been seeing this trend of farm the table, locally
(18:18):
sourced ingredients, keeping it you know, very chef centric even,
and now things with the delivery apps have kind of
changed that. As I mentioned, you don't know who you're
ordering from, just that you're getting wings and you're getting
these flavors and stuff or the same thing for burgers
or anything. So the trends of these restaurants are changing
in this digital world, which is interesting to think about.
(18:39):
I think it really raises some questions about what a
restaurant is or will be. You know, yeah, you it
feels a lot more like e commerce, where you don't
exactly know where it was made or where it came from.
What you care about is how quickly it will get
there and the price. And so you end up with
these situations. You order wings and they're well reviewed and
they'll get are fast. But maybe it's a brand name
(19:02):
that was invented by some company in Silicon Valley and
it's being run out of local restaurant that's also running
ten different brands in addition to its local to its
main dining business. You don't really know where it came from.
Josh Jessa, Investigations editor at The Verge, Thank you very
(19:22):
much for joining us, Thanks for having me. That's it
for today. Join us on social media at Daily Dive
Pod on both Twitter and Instagram. Leave us a comment,
give us a rating, and tell us the stories that
you're interested in. Follow us on I Heart Radio, or
(19:43):
subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This episode of The
Daily Divers produced by Victor Wright and engineered by Tony Sarrantino.
I'm Oscar Ramirez and this was your Daily Dive
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