You. Will. Eat. The. Bugs.

I have eaten bugs. I did not do so willingly.

You see, there is a restaurant in Houston called Hugo’s. It is a high-end Mexican sort of place - not Tex-Mex, but principally Oaxacan in influence. It’s the sort of place where you are more likely to find an oxtail soup or slow roasted pork shank with purslane, black bean tamal and huaxmole rojo than a cheesy ground beef enchilada in an unappetizing pool of refried beans.

They also serve chapulines. Grasshoppers. Usually fried or toasted on a comal to stay crunchy, they are served here sauteed with a bit of guacamole and salsa on the side for dipping. And when you are hosting a business dinner with guests from overseas, well, inevitably someone gets an idea in their head and 20 minutes later you are staring down a plate full of bugs and your Texan pride on the line. If an executive from a company based in London is willing to eat it, for God’s sake…

So yes, I have eaten bugs, but the funny thing is, I’ve never really felt like the world wanted me to eat bugs in that way that some people became convinced over the last few years. Basically, every year or two, some rich snobs would fly out to Switzerland for Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum boondoggle. At some point, a technologist turned TED talker would give the rich folks a spiel about insect protein as the future of food on account of cow farts and climate change or something, and for the next 6 months every right-thinking person on social media would shout into the void, “I will NOT eat the bugs!” like they were last line of defense for the west against The Cabal.

Never mind, of course, that Klaus is a buffoon who’s been running shtick like this for decades with no real impact on anyone’s lives. Just ask Ben, our co-founder here, who saw him milking wealthy foreigners for the opportunity to meet famous people at Harvard before the WEF ever became a Thing. Like just about everything else for rich people, it’s a glorified excuse to party. The idea that this guy is steering the sinews of world governance toward his nefarious ends like a balding Pickle Rick with an imperious German accent is preposterous.

And yet, maybe because of all that, and because there IS a certain obvious-seeming coordination to the propaganda promoting the shared interests of powerful states, institutions and individuals, it is not hard for us to imagine that there is an Actual Illuminati sitting there in cafes in Switzerland trying to decide what flavor of bug paste will prove most popular in early product tests in Lubbock. We are mindful of the conspiracies of the powerful, and as free men, when we hear about their machinations against us, we raise our voices as one: WE! WILL! NOT! EAT! THE! BUGS!

But a funny thing happens when those same people – no, more powerful people – tell us precisely what they intend to do. I don’t just mean being present with a glass of Alsatian Riesling for an 11am TED talk about protein pastes. I mean actually being the ones to put out a press release saying, “We are going to make you eat the bugs” and then asking their rich friends to get on social media to say, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to eat the bugs.”

That funny thing that happens? Nothing. Er, crickets, if you will.

That’s exactly what has happened this week.

That’s when the White House published its Genesis Mission, a plan to rapidly expand our investments in AI and datacenters (which Ben predicted on Epsilon Theory last week), which will require more power than we will be able to bring online (which Ben predicted on Epsilon Theory last week), and which will be sold to us as necessary for reasons of national security and national greatness (which Ben predicted on Epsilon Theory last week). That’s when tech oligarch and founder David Sacks jumped on the train to let us know that there’s no turning back.

WE. MUST. EAT. THE. BUGS.

YOU. WILL. EAT. THE. BUGS.

And since then, on social media and in opinion journalism, from the full-throated defenders of the west and liberty and rights of the individual, it's been nothing but crickets.