TR.BIZ: 12.11.2025

From my anti-Timothee Chalamet sentiment to a failed McDonald's AI ad, this is your late-mid-week check-in 💫

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re exploring McDonald’s failed AI ad, how the trolley problem is playing out with AI, and Eurovision’s next political act.

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 ICYMI: I’ll be in the states for late December and January. Read more here and hope to see you at a December 28 and January 15 meet-up, along with a January 11 Trend Report Live™ event. Excited!

---

💥 Soft Powers: Timothee Chalamet

I cannot hold my tongue any longer, lest I bite it off: I do not like Timothee Chalamet. Sue me! He’s an actor, yeah, but there’s something so off with his aura, not just that it feels so forced given his origin, a non-industry plant who definitely has a hype machine banking on his success. The dislike is mostly that he represents a large modern type that has been getting to me, which you see done poorly via someone like Camila XCX and done well by Charli XCX. What is it? Alt-as-mainstream, which I suppose it actually is now but all the buzzwords around him — Vogue! A24! Safdie! Nahmias! — all feel alternative until you really squint and think about them critically: Vogue is a supermarket rag now in the arms of the Bezos regime, as Anna Wintour bequeathes the role to the riches; A24 is multi-billion dollar valued venture and funded by a Kushner, among other private equity firms; Josh Safdie still holds the indie line, although long-term work with Adam Sandler exposes mass appeals; Nahmias is a suspiciously “I just…did it all myself!” brand that references Summerland a lot, a town next door to Montecito. That last item is mostly benign but is what ultimately cracked open my annoyance: this “underground” brand and designer and its “buzzy” Marty Supreme jacket is an inside job, a marriage made by Kris Jenner. “We met because our girlfriends are friends,” the designer told GQ earlier this summer, as his girlfriend is Kylie Jenner’s former assistant. Thus the big rub, which is what makes the constant A-tee wearing and rap feigning feel so ridiculous given the Frenchman hon hon, oui oui of it all: he’s a trojan horse for the Black cultural appropriating symbiote that is Kylie Jenner, a trojan horse rolling back and forth between “the alt” and her family’s brand of rich, reality show, right wing nonsense. I know, I know: I’m a hater who hates sell outs — but he was “that” from the start, which is why his “charms” do not work on me, instead feeling really gross and yucky despite people going gaga. Unsurprisingly, all this coincides with Timmy and Kylie’s red carpet debut for his film, which makes the jacket and the Zoom of it all feel so contrived, less a genius and more a system working as it always does. But is it working as far as creating cultural capital? Has alt been repackaged as a singular mind? Sure. If it sells, it sells, but know that this twink is a rat. Take it away, Kristen Stewart!

📲 Tech Talk: The trolley problem, AI edition

The famous philosophical thought experiment the trolley problem goes, “You are driving a trolley that can be steered but not stopped. If you do nothing, four people will be killed. If you turn the trolley onto another track, only one person will be killed. Should you turn the trolley?” It’s an iconic conundrum, famous for its being used in such a diversity of human contemplation from The Good Place to The Last of Us. The problem has had some hiccups in the past few years, considering the likes of AI — and how such technology would solve the problem. This idea has trended for a few years given self-driving cars, wondering what computers would do in very real situations. The answer almost always revolves around reducing deaths versus no deaths. “The trouble with aspiring to ‘fewer’ deaths — rather than demanding zero — is that utilitarianism conditions us treat our roads like a trolley problem, in which we have only a narrow range of safety choices, all of which result in at least some level of slaughter,” Kea Wilson wrote a month ago on Streets Blog. “But in reality, our roads are a complex system, and if we make enough layers of that system safe, we can end road deaths entirely.” Such is the problem: tech people just don’t care about real people, more content to slaughter as they pursue their unequal utopia. (Ahem, Kimothee Khalamet.) Enter people on TikTok asking AI the trolley problem, inspiring ChatGPT to protect itself at the expense of human life (as Grok sacrifices itself for the human). While funny, it’s a small exercise in a bigger landscape of what AI is: from George Washington being summoned for an interview to the Department of War encouraging AI use, the results always value the maker’s values over that of greater humanity. What a terrible time we’re in for.

🩹 Branded: McDonald’s AI commercial