The Hidden Supply Chain Making Every Menu Feel Familiar

If you go out to eat at a restaurant, whether it's a fast food chain or a Michelin-starred bistro, there's a good chance the ingredients on your plate came from the same source. Sysco is the dominant foodservice distributor in the US, using its massive logistics network to quietly supply the food that goes into meals in thousands of restaurants across the US. Sysco's scale and product standardization have helped define what American dining tastes like -- sometimes literally. But critics say its power has gone too far, leaving chefs and diners with fewer choices and blander outcomes. In this episode, we talk with Austin Frerick, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry, about how Sysco became the middleman shaping America's menus. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next, about the time it takes to grab a coffee. So, search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Your team is on a deadline, but moving all your enterprise data will take time your business simply doesn't have.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  IBM technology lets AI work with your data where it already lives, with an open hybrid cloud approach designed to build on your existing investments. It's another way IBM helps you put your data to work. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Visit ibm.com to learn more.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Congratulations, you've built a dashboard. But now comes the follow-up question and the follow-up to the follow-up and the dashboard for that. Meet Hex. Give everyone the power to ask their own questions, explore data and build with AI, all in natural language. Because every answer should spark another question, limited only by your curiosity, not your data team's bandwidth. Go deeper than dashboards. Join over 2,000 leading data organizations. Visit hex.ai.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 1:43Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 1:47Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:48Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I have a question.

• 1:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Go on.

• 1:51Tracy Alloway?

  What is your favorite chain restaurant? It has to be a sit down chain restaurant.

• 1:56Joe Weisenthal?

  A sit down chain restaurant? That's a really good question. You know, I actually really like Chili's. I think they have, their fajitas are absolutely legit. And I say this as someone who has eaten quite a lot of Tex-Mex fajitas from my time in Texas. And so I think I have credibility. And as a kid, and I haven't been there in years, but I still think my memory of the food is really good. I love Cracker Barrel.

• 2:17Tracy Alloway?

  Ooh, breakfast at Cracker Barrel is really, really good. Well, I bring it up because today we are going to be answering the question of where all of these restaurants actually get their food from.

• 2:27Joe Weisenthal?

  That's a great question. I don't, I don't know anything about, I don't know anything about a sit down chain restaurants. I mean, I don't know anything about most chain restaurants, period, let alone fast food ones. But the world of sit down ones that are real restaurants, where there's waiters, waitresses, et cetera. I don't know anything about.

• 2:43Tracy Alloway?

  You're not interested in my favorite restaurants?

• 2:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, sorry.

• 2:46Tracy Alloway?

  This is how it works. I ask you a question and you reciprocate.

• 2:49Joe Weisenthal?

  I was going to, and I was planning to, and then you like turned a 90 degree angle to talk about how like, to talk about, we are going to start answering the question of where these come from. I was like, oh, okay, I guess we're going on to some new direction here. We could just keep talking about favorite restaurants. Tracy, what is your favorite restaurant to sit down in?

• 3:06Tracy Alloway?

  I actually have many.

• 3:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, go on.

• 3:08Tracy Alloway?

  Red Robin.

• 3:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, I've never been to one.

• 3:10Tracy Alloway?

  They had a salad that was basically just a plate of chicken tenders. It was so good. But Bill does a salad. Fridays, you still love that place.

• 3:18Joe Weisenthal?

  That's so American.

• 3:19Tracy Alloway?

  I know. And there was one in London and it was like my anchor to America in the early 2000s. And Chili's, Chili's with my boys.

• 3:27Joe Weisenthal?

  You like Chili's too?

• 3:28Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's legit. Keep going. You know, we're going to make up for the fact that I didn't ask you, but now I'm just, keep going.

• 3:33Tracy Alloway?

  Well, one thing, one thing I did realize recently, I've never been to an Olive Garden. I don't know why that is.

• 3:38Joe Weisenthal?

  I've been a few times. It's not terrible. I don't think like, I've been, I've even been to the one in Times Square.

• 3:45Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. I feel like it's very hard to make carbs badly, right? It's just pasta and bread.

• 3:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Uh, it's good.

• 3:55Tracy Alloway?

  Okay. All right. I am going to move the conversation on now.

• 3:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Applebee's have been the one in Times Square there. Solid.

• 4:00Tracy Alloway?

  I do not like Applebee's.

• 4:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Why do we have to move the conversation on? I don't get it. Why can't we just keep talking about sit down restaurants?

• 4:06Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Well, we'll get back to them. We'll get to our recommendations, but on a serious note, uh, one of the reasons we are interested in this subject is because we did a series last year called Beet Capitalism, where we talked a lot about agriculture and the chicken industry specifically, and antitrust and monopolies and things like that. And one of the things that stood out to me from that series was a comment from Doha Mekki, who is the former Assistant Attorney General, where she talked about the tyranny of the middleman in the economy. And I think this is something that people are, you know, perhaps just waking up to. There are all these companies out there that you have probably never heard

• 4:48Tracy Alloway?

  of, but have massively dominant positions in the economy and charge a lot for their services. And one of those happens to be a very large company that provides food for all these sit down chain restaurants.

• 5:03Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I'm going to play devil's advocate on this episode because as you know,

• 5:07Tracy Alloway?

  Because you love Chili's so much.

• 5:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Because I love Chili's and I love food production at massive scale. And I love all of this. But it is true that there are all these companies that are really important that sort of sit between whether the retailer or the customer, or more in the case of food, more frequently the farmer and the retailer, the farmer and the restaurant that we literally know nothing about and they're huge and they're massive and they don't get any attention. Um, and so I am very interested in this topic.

• 5:35Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Well, we do have the perfect guest. It is someone who has been on the show before. Um, I think maybe a year or two ago now.

• 5:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Sounds right.

• 5:43Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. Um, wow. Time flies, but we're going to be speaking with Austin Frerick. He is an antitrust and agricultural expert and also the author of Barons's Money, Power and the Corruption of America's Food Industry. It's a great book. Even if you're not interested in agriculture or antitrust specifically, it says a lot about the US economy. So I would highly recommend it. And Austin actually has just written a new chapter for his book that is all about this particular company. And I guess I should just say what it is. It's called Cisco.

• 6:16Joe Weisenthal?

  It's not the networking gear company.

• 6:18Tracy Alloway?

  Not the networking gear company, although it does have the most generic origin story ever. So Cisco stands for Systems and Services Company.

• 6:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Mmm, yum. Yum, delicious.

• 6:31Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Austin, welcome back to the show.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me on again. And I just want to say, um, you guys having me on last year really changed the course of my book. So I appreciate that.

• 6:39Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, thank you. Well, it was genuinely excellent. I am not just saying that. I really enjoyed it. Okay, speaking of which, how does it work when you decide to add a new chapter to a book? And why did you decide to do that?

• 6:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the funniest thing about this book was when I would do book talks, people kept telling me about barons I missed. Like, I was in Idaho, they're like, let me tell you about a potato baron. When I was in Indiana, they're like-

• 7:01Joe Weisenthal?

  We're gonna get the name of the potato baron after the episode.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, I have a whole purgatory folder that I just put this information into. But Cisco kept coming up and it was the weirdest polite origin story where, so I talk fast and I know it. So I purposely been doing book talks in nursing homes.

• 7:18Tracy Alloway?

  So you have to slow down and practice? Okay.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  I blame it on, I listen to podcasts like 1.5, 2.5, especially midwestern, older people, you gotta take it down. And what kept happening when I was doing-

• 7:30Joe Weisenthal?

  You realize if you're speaking fast because you're used to it, then people who listen to you on those podcasts are now listening to you at 2.5 to 3X speed. Anyway.

• 7:38Speaker 05

  It's bad because my husband listens to them on 2X2 because we talk that way. And it's the, so, um, a lot of times when you do nursing home gigs, they'll invite you for dinner before and after. And it was, um, people kept complaining about the food. And I mean, anyone that's been to a hospital or a nursing home in America, it's pretty bad. I mean, we're serving our most vulnerable people the worst food. Um, and it kept coming up, but Cisco's one of those things everyone kind of complains about, but no one knows. And my mom used to have a bakery and I write about that in my coffee chapter and she had a broadliner and her broadliner disappeared. It got bought up by a bigger entity. And so I was just curious and then-

• 8:13Tracy Alloway?

  That's broadline distribution, right?

• 8:15Speaker 05

  Yes, thanks for, that's an industry term. I think of them as grocery stores for restaurants. They were Amazon before Amazon. They were the everything store.

• 8:23Joe Weisenthal?

  This is really important because when we're talking about food distribution. So there are broadliners, you get everything there from, you know, your huge jar of olives to cheese, whatever, but then also a restaurant might also have specialty distributors too that like just really focus on one thing, right?

• 8:40Speaker 05

  If they have the option.

• 8:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  In certain markets, usually most rural communities, there's very few options. But like, for example, New York has one of the most competitive broadliner market. So restaurants here have a lot of different sourcing options.

• 8:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 8:51Tracy Alloway?

  I should just say, this is going to be a very odd lotsy episode because it brings together baking, warehouses, logistics, trucking, antitrust, all that good stuff. So I'm very excited. Okay, well, on that note, how did Cisco get to be a dominant player in this particular space?

• 9:09Speaker 05

  I love this origin story. John Bott, he's a different type of character compared to the other Barons in my book. I really like him. Like, he's like a model businessman where he's one of those people comes out of Waco, Texas. His brother and dad died young, dropped out of college, bleep Baylor to support his mom, worked at AMP, got transferred to the AMP in Houston. And he's one of those people you see in business history that just saw things before other people. He saw two important things. Number one, the rise of frozen food. And we're talking like right after World War II and how that was going to, and then also frozen food mixed with women entering the workforce, knowing that they want to make quicker meals. So he thought, oh, people are going to eat out more. And the thing to keep in mind here is our norm of eating now is a very new thing in America.

• 9:53Speaker 05

  Like historically, you used to like bring a dish to something. It was like a church function. Now we eat out about once a day. So he saw that thing ahead of people and he didn't think AMP was moving fast enough. So he founded a frozen, potentially a frozen berry company. But going back to this point you made, Joe, about all these different things. That's how the idea from Cisco came from where literally some Irish oil man was opening a fancy hotel in Houston and he was working the loading dock that night. And he saw in the day, a frozen strawberry is a frozen strawberry. I don't have a competitive advantage, but what I can do is this food buyer has like 30 different vendors for all these different things. What I can do is offer him as much as possible. So the origin of Cisco was he brought nine companies together to create it. And he realized someone's going to fill this at some point.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  So even though they only did business in a few states, he registered in all 50 states. So that's how Cisco was created.

• 10:42Joe Weisenthal?

  I am fascinated by this idea because it's just one of those things that hadn't really occurred to me until like I read your chapter, just like. Yeah, like, it's really weird how much we eat out.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 10:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Or it's just really novel in terms of the prevalence of restaurants. I mean, I eat out way more than I did like when I was a kid growing up.

• 11:00Speaker 05

  I think about that all the time. We used to like Bonanza was like a buffet was like a special occasion once a week. And now I do it pretty often.

• 11:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Like I sit down Pizza Hut, that's another one.

• 11:07Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, that was such a big deal.

• 11:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. And now, yeah, now you just do it now.

• 11:11Speaker 05

  Well, let me pose a question to you. What do you think, and there's a new king? The number one sit down chain restaurant in America is where you order off a menu?

• 11:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh.

• 11:22Joe Weisenthal?

  This is tough.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Before I tell you, it's my favorite chain.

• 11:25Tracy Alloway?

  Your favorite chain?

• 11:27Speaker 05

  Maybe my husband says it.

• 11:28Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm worried that like I'm not gonna know it and then I'm gonna be really embarrassed at how out of touch. Cause then you're gonna say it is gonna be really obvious. What is it?

• 11:35Tracy Alloway?

  Cheesecake Factory?

• 11:37Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 11:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Now, are we, are we talking about by dollar volume?

• 11:41Speaker 05

  Dollar volume.

• 11:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay. Um, all right.

• 11:44Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, you're gonna have to tell us.

• 11:45Joe Weisenthal?

  I think I'm having stage fright. What's the answer?

• 11:47Speaker 05

  Texas Roadhouse.

• 11:48Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, I love Texas Roadhouse. Oh, my God, they have the best bread rolls ever.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  My mom brings Ziploc bags and like.

• 11:55Tracy Alloway?

  I should have said that was my favorite. They had one of those.

• 11:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I've never actually been to one.

• 11:58Tracy Alloway?

  When I was living in Abu Dhabi, they had one and it was absolutely fantastic.

• 12:03Speaker 05

  You want to understand America, go to a Texas Roadhouse on a Friday night.

• 12:05Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  I was in one in Dubuque, Iowa. I was on book tour last week and I got a steak, vegetable and mashed potatoes homemade, $14.

• 12:12Tracy Alloway?

  Unironically, their steaks are really good. Like, they're good. I always have the filet mignon.

• 12:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Where do they get their, where do they get their food?

• 12:19Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, who knows how they, I mean, you need to think about.

• 12:21Joe Weisenthal?

  But they get it from Cisco and they.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  You don't, I don't know.

• 12:24Joe Weisenthal?

  And they only charge $14 because of the incredible miracle of capitalism and scale.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  Joe, my hot take is two things. They do scratch cooking. Most chain restaurants now do frozen food. They actually cut up broccoli in the back. And number two, volume.

• 12:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 05

  Their servers only have three tables and they move you so quick.

• 12:54Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Running a business means keeping pace with the latest tech. You put a lot into building your enterprise software stack, and scrapping it to integrate AI is out of the question. That's why IBM Technology works with all the apps, data, and models you need. It's another way IBM helps you build on the technology you rely on. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Visit ibm.com to learn more.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  It's 9 a.m. Monday morning. Time to report out on last week. You're clicking around the weekly dashboard, looking at the same charts you've looked at hundreds of times, but still can't figure out what happened. Was it one region? A particular customer segment? Did conversion drop? Was there a change in the marketing funnel? Instead of waiting on the data team or spending the next two hours digging through spreadsheets, you just ask. With Hex, teams across sales, product, marketing, and operations can ask questions about their data in plain English, explore what's driving the numbers, and quickly get to the answer. And because Hex works with your data team, not around them, the analysis is built on trusted data and governed metrics your company can actually rely on.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  So the next time someone asks, "What happened last week?", you don't have to say, "Let me get back to you." Just ask Hex, the AI analytics platform for exploring your data together. Join over 2,000 leading organizations at hex.ai.

• 14:50Tracy Alloway?

  I love that you're doing in-person research on the subject of chain restaurants. But you know, you mentioned that we're not entirely sure where Texas Roadhouse gets its food from. How does it work, the contracts between a restaurant and someone like a Cisco? What do we know about those specific agreements?

• 15:09Speaker 05

  So a few things. One, we can kind of figure out what chain Cisco does based on its website. So it has a subdivision called Sigma. So if you go to Sigma's website, it will write about its corporate clients. Some of them are for Olive Garden, Red Robin's one, you know, different chains like that. The agreements, there's a, I mean, what I do know from these agreements is what we see with public universities, and even that are not transparent. There's a famous one at the University of Iowa. Someone wanted to know, what's the contract for food here? And it went up to Supreme Court in Iowa and it was rejected, which is kind of a weird thing. Like you think the agricultural state would have really good sourcing of food. You would know the contracts. There's not a lot of disclosure here.

• 15:47Tracy Alloway?

  But they filed to see the actual contracts.

• 15:49Speaker 05

  To keep it closed.

• 15:50Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, okay.

• 15:51Joe Weisenthal?

  So let's say a Red Robin is a, or an Olive Garden is a client of Cisco. Would that be a national contract that would cover every Red Robin or Olive Garden? Or would there be any variation in regional distribution or anything like that?

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Like, I would think, so I would contextualize Cisco as, think of it as like FedEx for food.

• 16:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 16:11Speaker 05

  A lot of these companies have patent products and Cisco's just moving their patent, patent in fries. You know what I mean? Like they all have their kind of, that's what Cisco's there to do, is outsource that part or handle that.

• 16:20Tracy Alloway?

  Is there some giant like Cisco food production center in like, I don't know, the wilderness of Wyoming or something? Or are they sort of like scattered around the United States?

• 16:30Speaker 05

  Scattered around. I mean, this is, this is harder to understand. There was a good Wall Street Journal article like 20 years ago, how a lot of your jalapeno poppers in a restaurant, all be, all be made at one factory in Mexico. You know, it's cheaper to pay someone offshore, essentially, you know, stuff it. But then you are sacrificing taste at some point. But Cisco doesn't own production facilities. It owned a slaughterhouse in Iowa at one point, but then it sold it off. Which I can't quite figure out why they got into that. My guess is, is for most restaurants, people pick their vendor based on, they call it center of the plate, the protein. So they were trying to probably do quality control.

• 17:03Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm sorry, you're saying center of the plate. A restaurant to refer to whichever protein I ordered. But this is, so they don't have production. What basically is, and you already said, it's like FedEx. At its core, it sounds like it's a logistics company.

• 17:19Speaker 05

  Yes, most of their employees are truck drivers.

• 17:22Tracy Alloway?

  Your dad was a truck driver, right? You talk about this in the book.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  He is, he works for a corn syrup company.

• 17:28Tracy Alloway?

  So what did that experience of growing up with a truck driver dad teach you about a company like Cisco?

• 17:35Speaker 05

  So my dad used to be, first, he used to be in the beer business, so he was a beer truck driver. And then he worked in beer sales. So that's actually where a lot of my, I'm looking at, looking at displays in grocery stores because my dad used to merchandise. So I love good merchandising. So like, my favorite grocery store is HEB in Texas.

• 17:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Love HEB.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  No one merchandise, no one merchandises like them.

• 17:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, this is a fact.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  And so you look at that, and so like, my dad always taught me, like, he could,

• 18:00Speaker 05

  he knew the type of demographics of a grocery store based on the number one beer. Like, oh, this is a Blue Moon Hy-Vee, or this is a, you know, red, red dog Hy-Vee. So there's different price points. And so my dad now does corn products, but just understanding, because there's independent truck drivers, there's in-house truck drivers, and there's kind of a hierarchy to these different worlds, all that kind of stuff.

• 18:24Joe Weisenthal?

  So let's talk about the competitive landscape, because that's in addition to the fact that, you know, you are a big fan of the steaks at Texas Roadhouse, that's why we're here. What does the competitive landscape for sort of this sort of broad line or food distribution or restaurant really look like?

• 18:41Speaker 05

  Um, so that, I mean, that's, that's the big question, antitrust. Market definition. I mean, that is, this is like my little pet peeve, is how you define a market's everything. So like Cisco tried to buy US Foods back in 2015, and they argued their competition includes Sam's Club.

• 18:57Speaker 05

  I think people like, I just remember personally, anecdotally, my mom, we only went to Sam's Club when she ran out of cups and needed to get cups between her next truckload. Most people would not include Costco and Sam's Club as a broadliner.

• 19:09Tracy Alloway?

  And Texas Roadhouse isn't going to Costco to buy steaks.

• 19:11Joe Weisenthal?

  But in theory, a restaurant, I mean, I, I take your point. It's not really a comp, but in theory, there probably are restaurants that source from some of these wholesale.

• 19:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, you can tell when you go into certain local restaurants, you'll, you'll see Costco branded products in the back. My bigger thing here is right now, a lot of what is a market is defined by highly paid economists. And these things aren't publicly disclosed usually. I kind of, like, keep in mind, I come out of the Treasury Tax Analysis Office. The beauty of that world is you have Treasury doing tax revenue estimates. You have CBO, then you have independent academic institutions like UPenn doing revenue estimates.

• 19:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 05

  So you have three different estimates coming at you for the same thing. I would love if we did something like this with market definition, because here's the thing, these markets are pretty stable.

• 19:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 05

  Having like, there should be a government agency doing market definition reports.

• 19:58Joe Weisenthal?

  So based on how you, so the, the merger attempt was blocked.

• 20:02Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 20:03Joe Weisenthal?

  So based on however the regulators at the time defined, okay, this is the market. This is the circle we're drawing. What are we talking about in terms of market share and so forth?

• 20:12Speaker 05

  So keep, so at the time too, there's basically three national broadliners. And they were number one, Cisco was trying to buy number two, US Foods. That was rejected, but what's really interesting here is basically even though Cisco got stopped, two things. Number one, number two is trying to buy number three right now. US Foods is trying to buy, I have to write it down, Performance Food. But then Cisco basically is, it's engaged in what people call rollups. To my calculations, it's bought over 216 companies. So even though it got, it got stopped once for this big merger, its market dominance really comes from rolling up, you know, the, a local Miami seafood place, local produce place in Anaheim, that kind of stuff.

• 20:51Tracy Alloway?

  So I know rollup strategies started to get more attention under the Biden administration. But historically, it does seem like regulators kind of go after the big M and A deals and they kind of ignore all the small ones. Even though once you add up all the small ones, it can get a company into a very, very dominant position like with Cisco.

• 21:13Speaker 05

  I think this is the biggest, one of the biggest loopholes in modern competition policy in America. I mean, go back to my coffee bearing JAB. Their second move they did was vet clinics because they this sounds awful. They realized people are economically irrational with their pets when it comes to healthcare. So they bought over like 1,500 vet clinics they rolled up. Commissioner Khan helped put a stop to that. I generally think with big companies like this, once you reach a certain size, you basically don't allow them to acquire because you just know they're not buying a company for pro competitive reasons. But a lot of this flies under the radar because the Federal Trade Commission, you know, it's very understaffed. They can't keep they're not tracking a seafood provider in Miami who's buying it.

• 21:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Talk to us more about what they rolled up or what they've been trying to roll it up. So I take it these aren't other broadliners. Are these specialty? Are these niche? Are these regional? Like what are they? What are the fragmented assets that they're consolidating under the Cisco umbrella?

• 22:10Speaker 05

  All of the above.

• 22:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  I mean, they generally don't compete. They buy. So like in Iowa, they came to Iowa because they bought a broadliner, a local broadliner. That's essentially what they did for earlier in their history. Now they tend to buy more specialties. So they'll buy like hotel things, you know, little soaps. They'll buy a company that does like Asian food. They'll all these little things and then they're starting to buy foreign, like an Irish broadliner, a Canadian broadliner, Costa Rica broadliner. It's just kind of a blob that keeps growing.

• 22:34Tracy Alloway?

  Am I a tomato broadliner? I brought Joe tomatoes this morning.

• 22:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy brought me tomatoes, yes, thank you.

• 22:39Tracy Alloway?

  Really nice tomatoes.

• 22:40Joe Weisenthal?

  You're a niche. I think you're a specialty distributor.

• 22:42Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, okay, fair enough. I certainly don't do it in volume, especially this year. Um, okay. Well, on that note, in your chapter, it says that Cisco has something like 27% market share.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  It's unclear what the market share is.

• 22:55Tracy Alloway?

  Okay.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  So originally.

• 22:56Tracy Alloway?

  This is going to be my question, like when we say that, what do we actually mean?

• 23:00Speaker 05

  We don't know. I originally in that chapter have quoted as a 50% market share, but you sometimes you'll see 40, sometimes you'll see 30. It really comes back to that market definition. That's why I want to go back to having some public entity debate this so it's transparent. But also partly what stopped that purchase of US Foods is when the FTC looked into it, they started looking at metropolitans and they realized like in like Las Vegas and San Diego, it would have like an 80% market share. So even with food, we tend to talk national. Food is so local. Food markets in particular, we really need to drill down regionally.

• 23:33Joe Weisenthal?

  What do they use this power for? Sitting aside the fact that they want to make a lot of money like all companies do. Like, when I think about the risk of anti-competitive abuse, or why I wouldn't want one company to have such a dominant, you know, share of a given market, I think, okay, what is the potential for abuse? So maybe they say, no, you're not, you can't get access to all of this stuff unless you buy our olives. Maybe it could be one sort of thing. Or they tell a restaurant, you can't buy X unless you buy our soaps. Like, what is the fear or what is the reality of what Cisco currently does with the amount of power that they have?

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so two things. Number one, so it's, it's not like you get a big sales book with the prices of Cisco. Those days are gone. Most of it's on an app, and this is a black box. My understanding from people I've talked to is they always want to make their margin. So they might sell you your center of the plate, the protein, at a loss or cost to get you in the door, but then they'll make the margins up by tweaking the napkin prices.

• 24:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 05

  Here's the thing, one could argue that's a violation of the Robinson-Batman Act. Because in theory, you should charge everyone the same price for X amount of units. But we don't know because of...

• 24:42Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, so we think it might be personalized pricing, but we're not sure.

• 24:47Speaker 05

  We're not sure.

• 24:47Tracy Alloway?

  Okay.

• 24:47Speaker 05

  That is what some people have accused. The other thing to keep in mind here, and the biggest, honestly, part of the reason why I wrote this chapter is just the quality decline. I feel like most eating out in America, especially local places, it's all kind of eh. Because this, companies like Cisco, they don't want to buy from like a local beef provider. They want one entity to do a bunch. And so it's just stifling out that kind of innovation, the quality, and especially in rural America. Cisco doesn't want to deal with local things. And so especially in rural, I think an undercurrent to my book, I realized after the fact was the communities producing our food are actually being hit hardest by the food system. We saw in the Kroger, Albertson merger case, failed merger, that they're gouging the most in rural communities. Most, the broadliner dominance tends to be highest in rural communities,

• 25:30Speaker 05

  and rural communities tend to have the most fast food. So it's kind of getting the worst of all these worlds. So like, New York has the best food, like... It's kinda the more yuppie you are in America, the probably the better food selection you have.

• 25:44Tracy Alloway?

  That that seems fair, actually.

• 25:45Speaker 05

  Seems right.

• 25:46Tracy Alloway?

  And again, like, that's pretty ironic, given that most of the food is grown outside of cities, obviously. I'm going to ask the question that is very close to Joe's heart, but with market dominance tends to come pricing power. But on the other hand, with market dominance and scale comes savings from volume. Do we have any idea of like, the net effect of a Cisco on food prices in restaurants?

• 26:13Speaker 05

  We don't. I mean, kind of what I realized writing this chapter and just in general with this book is, I just kind of view everything as Goldilocks. And you know, there is, there is beauty to scale, but things have just gone too far. And things are out of whack. And I think with price, and I brought this up last time, and it's the first slide I show people anytime I talk anymore, is Americans spend more on average on food than most Western democracies. And I think, and it's like cliche to say I went to Europe and had cheaper food and it was better. I think that's how you're seeing the system play out. Because you basically, big begets big, you have all these big boys kind of like going at each other. And it's just kind of this race to the bottom.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Your team is on a deadline, but moving all your enterprise data will take time your business simply doesn't have. IBM technology lets AI work with your data where it already lives, with an open hybrid cloud approach designed to build on your existing investments. It's another way IBM helps you put your data to work. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Visit ibm.com to learn more.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  It's 9 a.m. Monday morning. Time to report out on last week. You're clicking around the weekly dashboard, looking at the same charts you've looked at hundreds of times, but still can't figure out what happened. Was it one region? A particular customer segment? Did conversion drop? Was there a change in the marketing funnel? Instead of waiting on the data team or spending the next two hours digging through spreadsheets, you just ask. With Hex, teams across sales, product, marketing, and operations can ask questions about their data in plain English, explore what's driving the numbers, and quickly get to the answer. And because Hex works with your data team, not around them, the analysis is built on trusted data and governed metrics your company can actually rely on.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  So the next time someone asks, "What happened last week?", you don't have to say, "Let me get back to you." Just ask Hex, the AI analytics platform for exploring your data together. Join over 2,000 leading organizations at hex.ai.

• 28:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Talk to us more about the the food creator side of the business. If I'm, I don't know, if I'm growing tomatoes, or if I'm, or if me and Tracy are growing tomatoes, to what degree does Cisco play us off of each other or squeeze our margins in order to get within the Cisco distribution system?

• 28:59Speaker 05

  I think the best example of that is in seafood.

• 29:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 29:01Speaker 05

  The seafood, seafood in general America is just a dumpster fire, to be blunt with you. There's a really, and I'm going to make a comparison here. CNBC came up with a really good story the other day where Walmart and Amazon are in this big fight right now.

• 29:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  And Walmart basically has very low standards for its third-party platform. There's a lot of fraud, a lot of abuse going on in that platform because it's trying to get market share from Amazon. I would compare Cisco to that, where they don't, here's the thing, they don't really care how your seafood sourced. I mean, there's been so many allegations of the calamari coming from Chinese slave labor, fish that's saying it's Gulf shrimp from the, you know, from America. It's not. Just all these like, these constant abuses in this seafood system, but Cisco not caring because all it cares about is price. Think of Cisco like the Walmart food distribution.

• 29:47Tracy Alloway?

  That makes sense. So when you were reporting out this particular chapter, did you hear any specific stories from either restaurant owners or food producers about dealings with Cisco and what it's like to actually negotiate with them?

• 30:02Speaker 05

  The biggest critique I've heard is just the lack of selection. Cisco has such a dominance in a lot of these markets. Local restaurant owners really don't have a lot of choices. That's probably the biggest critique I heard and just my favorite phrase, and it's a subtitle of the chap- of this chapter is, uh, "Tonight's dinner fell off the Cisco truck." We've all had those meals. You know what I mean? You go to a wedding, you can just tell it's like the lowest tier of Cisco, where it's just so blah and tasteless. But a lot of restaurants, I mean, that's kind of this whole undercurrent of this book, this chapter is, I kind of think of this as my Frankenstein chapter. What started off as an aid to local restaurants to make their life easier is now undermining them because they're losing their specialness.

• 30:38Tracy Alloway?

  Oh yeah, on that note, didn't the founder at one point try to, I guess he retired, but was still connected to the company? And then he tried to correct some of what you're describing?

• 30:48Speaker 05

  Yes, I mean, I can't say this enough. He is a model businessman. I mean, this guy, he retired in the late eighties. He stepped aside, donated to charities, kept coming into the office each day, didn't want to sign parking. And he always trusted his people, especially the, he let basically each warehouse do its own thing. And I would compare it to like Whole Foods. Famously, Whole Foods let the managers do its own thing, pre-Amazon. So if they saw a good thing at the farmer's market, they could bring that producer in. He retires, few CEOs come along. One comes along and the old man hated consultants. Number one, he's like, "They don't know my business." Number two, they'll probably share, even though they're not supposed to, they'll share my secret sauce with my competitors. New guy comes in, hires consultants, and what the first thing he says is centralized procurement.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  You know, instead of having all these local different things, get all your berries from one person. And what John saw is he saw, uh, change in the numbers. So he wanted to go to the board to talk about this. CEO time was kept being like, "No, no, no." This is a nine-year-old man who built this company, this is his everything. He went around and got it to the board. According to one executive, he was escorted out the building. This broke the old man.

• 31:54Tracy Alloway?

  Did he like literally go into the building and like find the board and?

• 31:58Speaker 05

  No, he had a, uh, it could be, a certain staffer get it to all the board members. And he was shown the door. This broke the old man. And you see the quality decline, you know, centralized procurement, like you. I don't want to romanticize the jalapeno pepper or like this kind of stuff, but you are cutting corners at some point when you're doing these like not everything can be frozen and taste just as good as a fresh thing. Like a good example is actually tomato, like a good summer tomato. Like, there's no reason Iowa can't get a good summer tomato. It's so easy to grow a tomato there, but they're all the same blah tomato grown who knows where. And that's kind of the that kind of story. And part of it, the argument I'm making there is part of regulation, guardrails, whatever you want to call them, is almost to prevent companies from themselves to stop a race to the bottom.

• 32:42Joe Weisenthal?

  It's interesting, this idea that the restaurants can't distinguish themselves to the same degree because of the sort of decline in quality. And it strikes me, we did an episode with some guys who actually opened up a pizza restaurant right around the corner from Bloomberg. And in that case, we were talking about the delivery apps. And the idea was like, you know, at one point, in theory, service, delivery, et cetera, might have been a restaurant's calling card, right? We have really good, we really know you, et cetera. And we have

• 33:13Tracy Alloway?

  We'll get to your house in under 15 minutes, or the pizza's free.

• 33:17Joe Weisenthal?

  But then everyone, in theory, it's like this game theory thing where everyone feels compelled to, okay, we're going to distribute through the well-known delivery apps that everyone has heard about. And that's great. And on some level, it makes markets more efficient, perhaps, although they've gotten so expensive. I think it's for me, it's more efficient often to just go pick it up. But that's besides the point. But the long-term effect is essentially this sort of elimination of the specialness of the place. And so maybe there is more efficient, maybe the food is cheaper, maybe it does get too faster, maybe even gets too faster and hotter, et cetera. But this idea that we have this sort of textured economy with this sort of flora and fauna of businesses that are distinct and that have texture sort of disappears

• 34:02Joe Weisenthal?

  once they plug into these giant platforms.

• 34:05Speaker 05

  You just made a great neo Brandeis argument.

• 34:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, great.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  I mean, this might not shock anyone. I'm a neo Brandeis person, but that is My critique of the current antitrust framework is not everything can be put into Excel. How many hogs one person shown is a question society has to wrestle with. And I make that kind of point in this chapter was, um, at my wedding, um, I'm part Czech and we serve kolaches. Which kolaches in Iowa are very different than the ones in Houston. Houston, they put meat in them. But like, you can't buy kolaches from Cisco. It's like, these local little things make a place a place and you're losing this, the homogenization of the American food system. Everything's kind of the same. It's kind of blah. And that's what, it's hard to, you can't, that's what's the thing that's missing. That's why.

• 34:49Joe Weisenthal?

  It is a little, it does seem frankly, a little hard to quantify this effect that everybody feels.

• 34:55Speaker 05

  I, I think of two little examples is my mom had her own coffee store and then she went, worked at Starbucks. And what drove her the nuts the most were something called planograms. She was told where to put every single thing on the shelf. And my mom worked next to a General Mills plant. She knew that audience and she knew how to merchandise, but they didn't trust her. It's like the lack of trust in employee.

• 35:12Joe Weisenthal?

  We learned about planograms.

• 35:13Tracy Alloway?

  Oh yeah, that's right.

• 35:14Joe Weisenthal?

  I think it was with the Celsius CEO and he was talking.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was a good episode.

• 35:18Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. I have since walked into a CVSs, uh, looking at the shelf space very, very differently than I used to.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  I'll just add on, the thing to keep in mind is, no one gets rich, no one opens a restaurant to get rich. Everyone, it's a really, really hard industry. You're willing to sacrifice incomes because you do it because of what you love. And you just, you feel that pride in local places and they're just running, they're running uphill more and more based on, because of these structures.

• 35:42Tracy Alloway?

  You know, you mentioned frozen berries earlier and I know berry barons are in your book. Do the dominant companies like a Cisco or a berry baron, do they kind of like feed on each other, you think? Like, does Cisco naturally lean towards producers who are making stuff in huge volumes?

• 36:01Speaker 05

  Yes. I mean, I think it goes back to Walmart. I mean, part of it was people in negotiating power when they negotiate deals with these companies. So you've got to get big so you have some volume so you can negotiate. Like, I think of, I go back to Walmart just because I think of Walmart as a closest thing America's ever had to a Soviet Union style polyburo. That's the weirdest chapter people have reached out to me about is all these suppliers, like you don't negotiate with Walmart. Walmart dictates to you. I think with Cisco is they're just so big.

• 36:26Joe Weisenthal?

  These are centrally planned internal economies, absolutely.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  And it's, I think the best example of the bad qualities actually the produce system in America. Partly is because of the farm bill, we subsidize corn, we don't subsidize carrots. So our produce system went offshore. You know, because you can exploit labor, exploit environmental stuff. So that green pepper is coming from who knows where, traveling long things. And so, and it's also designed for durability, not for taste. And you're seeing this play out in your local restaurants where just the food's kind of eh.

• 36:54Joe Weisenthal?

  It's interesting, you used the phrase earlier, saving companies from themselves. I think even the companies seem to be aware of this. And, and you mentioned Starbucks is a great example. I forget, what's the name of the Starbucks founder? He could, everyone's.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  No, it's not Howard Schultz, that's who we think it is.

• 37:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, well, Howard Schultz, every, every few years, his name is back in the headlines. And he himself seems to rue the fact that this company, which early on sort of had a local coffee shop vibe, which I think he really liked, has not been able to sustain that in part because of, yeah, the required pilgrims and stuff. And he complains about that every once in a while. It's like, we gotta get back to feeling like a real Italian coffee shop. It never seems to happen.

• 37:35Tracy Alloway?

  Well, one of the Ben and Jerry's founders just quit as well because Ben and Jerry's was bought by Unilever.

• 37:42Speaker 05

  So the funding, each chapter, I realize there's, they all had these like niche, every commodity is different in America. And they all, like dairy is actually to me the most complex commodity. The whole dairy regulation in America is written in the 19, before we had refrigeration. So it makes no sense. The joke in dairy is only five people understand the dairy program and four are dead. And I was kibitzing with this dairy guy in Wisconsin last week, and there's a glut right now in the butterfat market. It's be engineered soybeans to increase the butterfat. And the rumor right now in the street too is they're feeding palm oil to the cows.

• 38:10Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, wow.

• 38:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Speaking of dairy, you know, when we, we did that episode with Mike Froman recently, and you mentioned that you asked him, what was the biggest surprise he learned as US Trade rep? And he's like, oh, there's 500 different things you could do with a dairy molecule. And because of trade rules, anyway, by the way, just, just following up, I am currently in touch with someone from the big New Zealand dairy cooperative, Fonterra. So I'm working on finding.

• 38:31Tracy Alloway?

  From big dairy.

• 38:32Joe Weisenthal?

  I am working on finding the dairy molecule specialist for that episode.

• 38:35Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, well, that's very exciting. Maybe we'll end up doing a three-part milk series.

• 38:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, we could.

• 38:40Tracy Alloway?

  Who knows? We better hurry it up since it's almost October. Um, okay. Is there anything that can be done about this? Like now that a Cisco has rolled up all these different companies and it has substantial market share, although as we were discussing, we can debate what that actually means. Is there, like, what swings that dominance the other way?

• 39:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean. To Joe's, I just want to add on to Joe's point early about the companies not wanting to have to do this, but if they don't engage this, like the system designed right now is they have to do this behavior. And I actually think about that with farmers now in America. The farm building right now is designed to maximize corn, so you have to overplant corn, even though it's bad for the environment or else you go broke. So everyone's behaving this way because we're in a laissez faire era. What to do about it? And that's kind of why I profiled this woman named Ellen in that chapter. She, I think people crave heroes right now. They, no one's really articulating hope on whatever your political party is. What is, what is a positive food system? And Ellen, Ellen's fascinating where she's a farmer. She has two kids. She opened her own restaurant and then she opened her own like Cisco.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  Because the problem she has with Cisco didn't want to take her product and sell to restaurants in Omaha and Des Moines. So she created a nonprofit, got it up. They would basically pull different farmers in Western Iowa to sell into these. It was using, and they were also doing schools. That was a big one, but then they got really hard hit by the Doge cuts. That to me is like maybe one possible thing is maybe extension. You have extension all across rural America. Maybe they can kind of get into that, help this kind of procurement.

• 40:12Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, maybe you don't try to compete against Cisco on volume, but you go like hyper localized.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  Hyper local, but also something we got to rein in Cisco. I mean, looking at the, the black box of the pricing strategy would be huge, but also I think we should put merger acquisition freezes on these large entities. At some point, it's like you can't buy anymore, like you've hit your cap.

• 40:33Joe Weisenthal?

  It's interesting to trace, like the other great homogenizing effect, of course, on society is big digital platforms, right? Instagram, et cetera. And everyone feels that they have to constrain whatever they do, whether it's a restaurant or a media company, et cetera, in order to serve the Elgo God that is sort of capricious and unpredictable in some way. And it feels like the story, whether we're talking about the physical world or the digital world, is that scale has this homogenizing effect, which nobody really likes these conditions.

• 41:07Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I think that's right. But also there are these like hidden tiers of scale vis these middlemen companies. All right, well, Austin, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots. Congrats on the new chapter and I'm sure a lot of people will be looking forward to picking up the revised book.

• 41:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you so much for having me on again.

• 41:38Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, that was really enjoyable.

• 41:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Tracy Alloway?

  I always love talking about food, although I haven't had lunch today, so.

• 41:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Me neither.

• 41:44Tracy Alloway?

  I'm a little bit hung- can we go to Olive Garden in Times Square? Let's do it right.

• 41:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's go soon. I'll go, I'm happy to go there soon.

• 41:50Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, um, I actually would like to go.

• 41:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, it's great. It's got great views. It's actually really fun and it's got great views.

• 41:57Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, you've been to that specific one?

• 41:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 41:59Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, I didn't realize.

• 42:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Tracy Alloway?

  Um, okay, so there's a lot to pick out.

• 42:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Tracy Alloway?

  From that, um, I know you're on the side of cheap and plentiful food.

• 42:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Tracy Alloway?

  But perhaps, perhaps, I guess, the homogeneity.

• 42:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Tracy Alloway?

  Of the offering, maybe that concerns you.

• 42:15Joe Weisenthal?

  It definitely concerns me and this idea that, no, and this idea that restaurants, if they, you know, so much of the preparation is done off-site, et cetera.

• 42:27Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Joe Weisenthal?

  For various things that you eat, and so what is the restaurant anymore?

• 42:32Tracy Alloway?

  Right.

• 42:32Joe Weisenthal?

  And so this is a thing where scale is great and cheapness is great. And I'm all for this and I think food should be a lot cheaper than it is because we've had a lot of food inflation in this country and I think it's very worrisome. And so food should be a lot cheaper and more efficient, et cetera, than this. But when we think about the things that sort of make a society nice, if a restaurant is really just a sort of Cisco manufacturing.

• 42:57Tracy Alloway?

  A giant microwave.

• 42:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, or Cisco manu- right, a giant microwave that can connect a Cisco manufact- distribution system to a Grubhub delivery system, what world are we living in?

• 43:07Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, and I think it gets back to the flora and fauna.

• 43:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Tracy Alloway?

  Point that you were making. So maybe you could have, you know, uh, food that's cheap and maybe not of the highest quality, but it is plentiful and inexpensive. But then you should have, you know, more local options.

• 43:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, you brought me those really nice tomatoes.

• 43:26Tracy Alloway?

  Yes.

• 43:26Joe Weisenthal?

  So thank you for those.

• 43:27Tracy Alloway?

  You're welcome.

• 43:27Joe Weisenthal?

  And so there are some nice tomatoes.

• 43:29Tracy Alloway?

  I'm doing my part.

• 43:30Joe Weisenthal?

  But I do not think that is a scalable solution for most people.

• 43:34Tracy Alloway?

  No.

• 43:34Joe Weisenthal?

  And I grew up hating tomatoes because I thought that they were all really bland because I only got them in the grocery store.

• 43:40Tracy Alloway?

  Supermarkets, yeah. It is phenomenal. How different a supermarket tomato taste from a homegrown one. Anyway, shall we leave it there?

• 43:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 43:48Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 43:54Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest, Austin Ferk. He's at Austin Ferk. And check out the new edition of his book, Barrens, which has a whole chapter about Cisco. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashal Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 44:22Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you want us to dig into dairy, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Congratulations, you've built a dashboard. But now comes the follow-up question, and the follow-up to the follow-up, and the dashboard for that. Meet Hex. Give everyone the power to ask their own questions, explore data, and build with AI, all in natural language. Because every answer should spark another question, limited only by your curiosity, not your data team's bandwidth. Go deeper than dashboards. Visit hex.ai.

• 45:43Speaker 06

  If you're a business owner, you need a card that can keep up. With the Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business American Express Card, everyday purchases transform into miles you can use towards future travel. So business as usual can lead to a well-deserved getaway. And for a limited time, card members can earn 200,000 bonus miles, the highest miles offered this year. Whether you're traveling for business or planning your next adventure, now's a great time to make every purchase go further. Apply today at www.delta.com/podcast. Offer ends November 4th. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply.

• 46:19Speaker 07

  The world of business is constantly evolving, and Comcast Business keeps you totally in step with secure AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries. They're powering over 90% of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. That's a lot of muscle. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2 a.m. like it's 2 p.m. One partner powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Most meeting note takers get the easy words right and the important ones wrong. The client's name, the acronym. Whisper Flow Note Taker is built to get the hard words right. It takes notes on any meeting platform, Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, even WhatsApp calls. Keeps every meeting searchable and connects to Claude or ChatGPT so you can ask, "What did we agree to last Tuesday?" Free to try on Mac and Windows at whisperflow.ai. That's W-I-S-P-R-flow.ai.