If you’ve been anywhere near a screen in the last 72 hours, you’ve probably seen the name Nolan Wells trending next to a video of a man in a Patagonia vest staring at a pot of boiling water like it personally insulted his family.
Wells, a 34-year-old “lifestyle architect” from Austin, has achieved the rarest of internet feats: becoming universally mocked by both TikTok and LinkedIn in the same news cycle.
Wells posted a now-deleted video titled “I Rebooted My Dinner,” in which he explained that traditional pasta is “a legacy system” and that he had “optimized” carbonara by replacing the eggs with a plant-based protein slurry and the guanciale with “regeneratively farmed turkey jerky.” He then charged $47 for the recipe on his Substack.
The internet, as it does, responded with the warmth of a thousand suns.
Within hours, the duets started rolling in.
A Italian grandmother in New Jersey went viral for simply holding up a single egg and whispering “no.” A food historian pointed out that Wells had essentially invented a worse version of a dish that already existed in the 1950s.
And a guy named Dave from Ohio commented, “My brother in Christ, that’s not carbonara, that’s a crime scene with parmesan.” The comment has 2.3 million likes.
Wells, to his credit, has not gone gentle into that good night.
He posted a follow-up video claiming he was being “silenced by the culinary establishment” and that his critics were “probably just mad they still use olive oil from a plastic bottle.” He also announced a limited-edition merch drop: a $120 apron that says “I Disrupted Dinner.” Reddit’s r/iamveryculinary had a field day.
One top comment read, “This man is the human equivalent of a LinkedIn post about waking up at 4 a.m.” But here’s where it gets weirdly American.
Wells’s Substack gained 12,000 new subscribers in a day.
A venture capital firm in Palo Alto reportedly reached out about “a seed round for a kitchen SaaS platform.” We have officially reached the point where being publicly humiliated is a viable business model, and honestly, we deserve it.
This is the same country that made a reality star president and bought pet rocks.
It’s that somewhere, a 26-year-old product manager in Denver is going to serve this to his girlfriend’s parents on Thanksgiving and wonder why the room goes silent.
It’s that “disrupting” a 70-year-old pasta dish is now considered innovation.
And it’s that we’re all so bored and so online that we’ve collectively agreed to make this guy famous instead of just ignoring him like a normal, healthy society would.
Final Thoughts
The asshole is the algorithm that decided a man boiling jerky was worth more of our attention than, say, the actual news.