So this is an audio now about the restaurant at the end of the universe. So there are many versions of this performance. I'm going to just have a go at getting down on paper one that I view to be particularly practical, a genuine kind of artwork, so it's interesting in that sense, and novel.

would work with hitchhikers, but be also very flexible so people can take it in different directions. So the basic idea is can we do a food event which is very easy for anyone to take part in that really is a global and decentralized event so it happens all over the world and can we do it in a hitchhiker way

So the basic idea would be that if you want to take part in an event and get a "ticket" what you do is commit to doing a cooking meal at home according to certain rules and tuning into the "radio"

That will usually mean a an internet stream. And you should invite people to this dinner. I mean, you can obviously just eat solo yourself if you want to. But it makes more sense if you're going to the trouble of taking part like this that you might invite a few friends. So maybe invite six people over or you have a family dinner or you

bigger ones that you basically invite some people over and you cook a certain meal and you listen to the radio and that's kind of it and that what we do is we lock put on the map pins that represent the locations

of people who are taking part. They will be anonymized so that you can't track people down precisely, but they will be given idea of the geographical spread. Now, what makes this dinner kind of interesting or different? That's work in progress. But I'm basically going to

take some inspiration from a previous event I did which was called Feast.FM which is Festival of the Arts and Sustainable Technology and it used radio and events in a local context and so there is every possibility that several of these restaurants become

these kind of feast like events. I'm not going to go into how the community festival works in this context. Just want to talk about the minimal kind of dinner that you can easily take part in, which wasn't part of the original feast. But I'm going to draw on the lessons of what worked with that previous event I did about 10 years ago. So what we will do

for the restaurant and the universe in terms of the radio station is that we're going to put on a kind of unique sound event collage radio program. And what that event and that sound college will be like is work in progress, but it will probably have some of the following

elements. One is you will tune in just to a website and it will work fine. Two, it will be live. So what that means is it's not just a podcast and pre-recorded, but it will be a live radio station which changes and things happen that are kind of unexpected because it's live radio, but live in the following sense.

So live in the sense that quite a lot of the material is already been pre-recorded. So there are a bunch of sound works. There's some music, there's some soundscapes, and there's some sound works on this radio program, which have resulted from workshops and things that have been done throughout the year building up to it.

So if we're imagining doing this on... A good day to do it would be November the 5th. For various reasons we're talking to. Because November the 5th is like restaurant at the end of the universe day. It's when Earth gets blown up if you like. But not just Earth, the whole universe. It's when stuff gets blown up and stuff ends. At the end of life, the universe and everything if you like.

But we could also do a similar or the same event. You know, we could do it on July the 4th or other dates. But let's imagine doing it on November the 5th 2026. Okay. And what does the sound scape and the sound of this radio

Look like and why is it interesting? Let's come back to that but let's talk about the food now. So the food that you agree to cook on this day has to come from a menu. And the menu is basically in the Hitchhiker's Guide and it's a Hitchhiker's Guide to various

and interesting dishes. So you obviously have things like the gargle blasters and the cocktails and fun things like that from the book. And also community members propose other recipes. And you must to take part choose and cook one of those recipes to be officially taking part.

You can make up your own recipe and take part or you can just look at some interesting ones and download them and cook them. But and we can explore a lot of interesting things now we can explore things like the food miles that the ingredients come from, we can explore the history and the genetic past and future

of potatoes, mushrooms, and all these interesting stories. We can do what I did before in very prototypical theory thing, this idea of a parliament of food, which is giving voices to the different ingredients in the menu, which is very much like the Hitchhiker's Restaurant in the Universe with the

the cow or pig or whatever it was speaking. We can have all the ingredients basically speaking in the menu. And we've got various material like so for instance, Henning with the Lexon project has a quite long white paper and proposal around farm to fork food chain stuff. All of that cut stuff can be the kind of fact, hard science fiction,

that informs all the menu which are in the guide. So if there's a tomato in the guide, well there's a guide entry about tomato. If there's pasta in the guide, then there's a guide entry about pasta. And we look for partners around this so that pasta can be delivered to, let's say, I don't know, let's say someone's doing a cooking something at a home in Ohio. Well,

There is pasta that can be delivered or picked up from a particular shop because there's something interesting story about that pasta. Maybe it's produced locally, maybe it's homemade, maybe some calculations have been made about the food mile stroke environmental impact of that particular pasta. But it's kind of on the menu for a reason. But it's also kind of all a bit bizarre and funny. Maybe some of the

are extremely extravagant. Himalayan mountain salt is flown in by helicopter from somewhere and it's a completely outrageous sort of thing that irresponsible people do. But then all the metrics and it's kind of humorous or it's done in an interesting way. What else can we say about the menu? So the menus can

should be a constituent part of the guide. So this is all about farm to fork, environmental impact, global impact, sustainable food production, guide to food production. But starting off with humorous fun menus that use various ingredients. What else can we say about the menus? Well, we invite basically like I did with Feast.

Chefs and restaurants in the local area. So you might start off registering to do restaurant at the end of the universe in your local in your flat and then as you bump around you find because you come across a great restaurant in your community and then you talk to the owner or the waitress and say,

"Would you be interested in doing a public event on November 5th, 2026?" And they talk about it and they decide, "Yeah, that's going to bring customers. That's an interesting event. We'll just cook an interesting meal in the restaurant on that day." So now the restaurant signs up and you've got the contact point of the original person who proposed the idea. And now that restaurant and that community is going to advertise

for people to come to that particular venue. Maybe it's got, you know, 15 tables there. And again, 40 people or 42 people can turn up or whatever it is. And the restaurant also must agree to play the sound track, the live tune into live radio. Now it can be breakfast cafe, and it can just be for breakfast. It can be lunch. It can be in the evening.

with wine, it can be a bar. That's how we did Feast FM before. I've got a little bit experience or a lot of experience with what works in terms of the soundtrack. For instance, if the soundtrack is going to be taking part in a breakfast radio, you don't want it to overwhelm and dominate. You want a sort of ambient or a particular cultural soundtrack to be there.

We had different musical groups. We had the North Africa, we had the Algerian, we had the Moroccan, and we had the Turkish. Because those were the restaurants, we switched from one to another, and we curated a nice playlist, and we made sure that it works with the sort of things that those cafes or restaurants or bars would like to do.

to play. Now, because of the technology that you can do with these live stations, which are basically kind of mixtures of podcasts and live stations, it means you can have multiple live stations that are largely playlists, but every now and then you have a live takeover. So that means that, for instance, if you want to do the breakfast station, you can have a certain feel to it.

If you want to do the breakfast station that is, let's say, in Spanish, you can use Spanish tracks and Spanish cultural things that works in that context. Well, if you want to do one that works in Singapore, you do a different one. So you can have multiple perspectives on the same kind of need and themes for

Breakfast Venues. Same for bars in the evening, you can have multiple feeds and what you often do is start off with one and you always have the ability if a community wants to kind of fork that DJ playlist, they can fork it and they start with this trailer and then they customize it and that, you know, it costs, let's say, 40 quid or something like that to do.

live bands and live musicians and they can play now to this global audience. So that's a, that's we did that with Feast. Nowadays you could team up with couch, sofa, sort of music sites, band camps type stuff, but we can do it directly with our own economy where people buy the music and so forth and then we do our own record label. I didn't do the record label with Feast FM but that's the

to make it hitchhikery. And then you can do as well for the restaurant at the end of the universe, talk shows, podcasts. So you can do live studio talks. These work best, obviously, at times which aren't necessarily in the cafe. You don't really want to

The restaurant doesn't really want to be tuning in to a talk show. But a talk show can come from the cafe. So you can invite some dinner guests and you can time it so there's some appetizers, some drinks, then starters, and then you can have a speech, a poetry reading, a panel discussion.

Then people can come back down and have the meal and then you can have some more content or after the meal you can do something in terms of voice and talking heads kind of thing. And for that you want to make it so that it's easy for the live audio to come from any of the dinner parties. And for that what you do is you give some information and help and say this you should get

this microphone and the clip microphones are really nice. You have some advice on how to do it and providing that people kind of do some tests and what have you, then they can take part in the live event. Otherwise they can also use that sort of thing to kind of produce material in advance, podcast material which goes in the playlist section. So you have a bunch of programs there.

can make partnerships with different companies, radio stations and podcast networks to syndicate content into this restaurant at the end of the universe. And that's all to do with music and talk show podcast stuff. And that's the kind of bread and butter, you want to be able to have some background music while you're having this restaurant event, and you want people around the meal to be able to have an interesting conversation.

about things. So that's another element of the soundscape in which what we can produce is what you'd call is provocations. These are audio pieces that are kind of intense, you could say, in some way or another. It's the end of the universe, after all.

So what you would then do is at a certain point of the meal, you kind of turn the volume up and everyone listens to it for maybe it's just effectively a single, maybe it's two, three minutes. And then it goes back down and then people can talk. And during that provocation, it can just be musical and emotional. And then you can talk about how it made you feel, the particular meal that you're conducting.

You can decide to leave the conversation in any way you want after that. Or it can be literally a talking point. So it can be, let's listen to this person, Greta Thunberg, talking about tomatoes. Let's listen to this person.

You have a bit of chat, you've got wine, you're serving some food, people are talking, and then maybe someone takes the microphone and feeds back a summary. So it's a kind of World Cafe format where we collect the audio at various stages during this restaurant at the end of the universe meeting. And that aspect of collecting the sounds, which can happen

And just with WhatsApp or a particular application we send out, and where we gather input from people listening to the radio station, makes it really kind of more interesting than just listening to the radio. It's part of the kind of participation and engagement methodology. It's like a global focus group about apocalypse, right?

What that also means is that during the work up to, let's say, November the 5th, we can imagine the Hitchhiker Guide to the Apocalypse, all the audiobooks being serialized and released beforehand, and then maybe a following on from it. And what that means is we can gather lots of interesting little audio pieces and things that people have sent in over the

from let's say January to November the 5th that are layered together and mixed into this kind of audio background. They can come from different languages, they can come from different locations, they can be about different concepts and topics and those sound pieces can be layered with instrumentation, background soundscapes, bird sounds like what I'm hearing now.

So that you can broadcast this kind of ambient musical background, which works quite nicely for a meal, restaurant in the universe, but can also play over maybe the 42 hours of the event. So that you can also tune into the radio station with headphones when you go for a jog or when you're driving in the car or at home outside the

and what's quite nice there because again I've done this a couple of times before with the Earth Day event, 72 hour Earth Day event and with Feast FM is when you hear your own contribution coming over the radio even if it just wafts over for a little bit and it's you going for a walk and talking or your kids saying something or a contribution you have and it's been

It's picked up by the person sound mixing it and it's been layered into a track and it's set to music and you know that you're hearing it but also people around the world are hearing it and when that's done with different languages and what have you it's quite an interesting form of participatory event that makes you feel connected to other people but this is just the background to the meal so primarily you just come having a great fun meal with other people.

And you've got an interesting taking part in an interesting kind of global radio station. Okay, so there's that aspect of Hitchhiker's restaurant at the end of the universe, theater performance or event. The other and those there's a very lightweight, all you do is

I agree to cook a meal, invite some people around, tune into the radio station. If you get more bold, you can actually record something, a summary of a discussion, send that off on WhatsApp to a certain number, and it will get put into the mix, either during the day or at some stage. And that's a minimal, but we can now start doing more layers on top of that. So, as I said, some spaces might happen

in a restaurant. Some of those restaurant spaces might go a little bit over the top and the waiters and waitresses might be in costume. You might have some video projection. It might become a theatre piece that takes part. Some of them can be dinner sort of talks where you have the dinner but then the guests stand up and talk and these are proper ticketed events. Some of them might be in schools and community centres. Some might be in art spaces and so

Some of them might be in a geographical area where you get a whole festival with people, various cafes all taking part. What we want to end up is cafes and restaurants and people at home cooking all over the world taking part in this November the 5th event every year. So it's got its own sustainable business model as part of the overall Hitchhiker's sustainable business models.

of their four events during the year. But the November 5th one, Restaurant at the End of the Universe, is one of the ones that we can plan quite easily because this is an explicit structure and it works quite well. It's been tested before. It's quite simple to organize. A school can just say, hey, as part of our final year show, we're going to do this food event. And they just then tune into the radio. They make contributions to the radio program.

and all the software is already kind of done. I can talk about the various platforms that you can use to do that. There's some good simple forms of interaction that people can do and it can extend to original musical pieces, compositions, sound, space mixes, all sorts of things, 3D sound. It can go quite high-end or it can be quite minimal and simple to take part.

That's the basics of it. I want to say another element of it. What works very well with the restaurant stuff, which I didn't do in the feast event, haven't done yet, but I know some, I know how to partners to work with. I know what would be great to do is to make some of these events basically like a kind of a game, a board game.

something that you can play. So you can do things like on the radio show, obvious things like throw in quizzes and quiz games and things like that that you can hold. Because it's basically an interactive sound streaming thing, you can time it. If you're doing your meal at 8 o'clock in London and someone else is doing their meal at 10 o'clock in Sydney in their local time, that doesn't matter. It's streamed. It's

It's a lot of the quiz happens. You as a host can kind of DJ the soundscape and the game to work with your timing and your local event. And that might sound complicated, but it really isn't. That compared with a lot of the other things, that infrastructure is already there. I've done it before. It's kind of as really good services that, you know, you can pay 30, 50 quid for and then serve

the whole of your geographical time zone with. There are some complexities I can go into with music licensing and so forth but that's also very doable. Especially in the UK. Now, but the element of a game or a board game, a restaurant of the end of the universe game,

I think it's particularly interesting to develop in line with the constitutional game, how you can take part, how your voice can count, the currency, voz voice, all of how that sort of stuff can work. That is something that works very well in terms of meeting people, having a cafe, playing a game, and

how that game stuff can kind of work. But we won't go into detail on that on this audio now. That's just how the restaurant at the end of the universe works. I think one other final thing we can say is that the musical side and the visual side of this event should kind of work like this in that there is a kind

of punk, symphonic idea of having this dramatic climax where the universe ends. And that's a fun musical sort of experience. You've got this element of all these multi-layered voices bubbling up and then merging, turning into sounds and then ending. That's a fun

kind of moving and disturbing experience. There is the idea of silence and space and the evolution of all of geological time. That's a fun, interesting musical experience. So composing those while kind of having all the normal kind of DJ cafe soundsets means that places or

Experiences that want to show what the end of the universe sounds like can play those. And those pieces can be commissioned. People can submit their own versions and remixes of those. They can be AI generated, they can be human generated, and that compositional show can work for the kind of spectacle of the end of the universe.

of the meal, if you like, of the experience of the food event. Then followed by people chatting and talking and time travel and going back to where they came from or whatever it is. And that can also be taken this year or next year to the visual aspect of accompanying visuals of that climate.

So certain places can project, immersively project, do all sorts of things, and we can work on the visual side of that kind of firework display, restaurant at the end of the universe kind of event. And then I think we publish the book, the Hitchhiker book, the post-apocalypse book, and we've introduced that during the AGM. And that's

It also gives students who do some work up to the summer the ability to produce work that will go into that theatre performance and then to take part in it like a few months later. So it's got some ongoing sort of experimentation and experience and that is the nature of the event.