Odd Lots Talks Beak Capitalism on Money Stuff Talking Chicken

Back in November, we released our series called Beak Capitalism, which took a look at the entire US economy through the lens of chicken. Then we went on the Money Stuff podcast, hosted by Matt Levine and Katie Greifeld, to talk about our work. Here is a replay of that conversation, for those who missed it. You can subscribe to the Money Stuff podcast here. You can listen to Beak Capitalism here, here, and here. Become a Bloomberg.com subscriber using our special intro offer at bloomberg.com/podcastoffer. You’ll unlock deep reporting, data and analysis from reporters around the world, plus access to a suite of subscriber-only newsletters. See 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

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• 0:45Tracy Alloway?

  Hello, Odd Lots listeners. We have something very special for you. Joe and I appeared on an episode of Bloomberg's latest podcast. It's called Money Stuff and it is hosted by two people that I think you will recognize from Odd Lots. Matt Levine, the esteemed financial columnist and chronicler of capitalism, as well as Katie Gryfeld, who knows all things ETFs and horses as well. And Joe and I were there to talk about chicken.

• 1:14Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. So if you recall, back in November, Tracy and I released a three-part series called Squawk Lots, where we explained how the US economy can be understood through the lens of chicken, basically taking the entire industry from egg to sandwich, so to speak. And so we were delighted to go on with Matt and Katie and talk about our work.

• 1:36Tracy Alloway?

  Technically, it was called Beat Capitalism.

• 1:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:39Tracy Alloway?

  But Squawk Lots was our code name for it for a long time.

• 1:42Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right, it was called Beat Capitalism, that's right.

• 1:43Tracy Alloway?

  All right.

• 1:43Joe Weisenthal?

  It's been a long time.

• 1:44Tracy Alloway?

  Yes, it has. Okay, so we hope you enjoy this special episode of Money Stuff and definitely give it a listen.

• 1:55Tracy Alloway?

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to a very special crossover episode of the Money Stuff slash Odd Lots Podcasts. I'm Matt Levine and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.

• 2:13Speaker 05

  And I'm Katie Gryfeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  And we have two very special guests in the studio with us today, Katie.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  Their names are Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:25Speaker 05

  This is very exciting.

• 2:28Tracy Alloway?

  I like the pause to build suspense, Katie.

• 2:30Speaker 05

  I've been told to pause and then say names slowly for gravitas, so trying it out.

• 2:36Tracy Alloway?

  It's working.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  It worked?

• 2:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it worked. It worked.

• 2:38Speaker 04

  All right. We've established some gravitas.

• 2:45Joe Weisenthal?

  For what it's worth, Tracy and I like spent three years of Odd Lots workshopping ways to introduce guests. And I know we're only the second time you've had external guests, so don't feel any.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  My heart is pounding.

• 2:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Don't feel any anxiety about the guest. Do you remember how we used to do it, Tracy?

• 2:59Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, we used to pretend that neither of us or one of us didn't know what we were going to talk about. And it was like, guess what we're going to talk about, but it didn't make any sense because like we clearly knew what we were going to talk about. So.

• 3:10Joe Weisenthal?

  It took us a while.

• 3:11Speaker 05

  How are we doing so far? Because I feel like it's not going super well.

• 3:14Joe Weisenthal?

  It's going fine.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  What are we going to talk about?

• 3:18Speaker 05

  What? Someone should make a clocking noise.

• 3:19Tracy Alloway?

  You brought us here.

• 3:21Speaker 05

  Let's talk about chickens. You guys obviously have a lot to say. You did a three-part series on chickens recently, which was pretty cool because I feel like this was something different for you guys.

• 3:32Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, every once in a while, we like to shake things up and do something slightly different. Last year, we actually did a three-part series on the rollout of New York's legal marijuana market called Potlots. This one was a three-part series about chicken and the code name for it was Squawklots. But the actual name was Beat Capitalism and the idea was. You can actually explain a lot of really interesting themes in the American economy through the medium of chicken.

• 4:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you just think from like egg to chicken sandwich or egg to chicken tender or egg to McNugget.

• 4:09Tracy Alloway?

  I mean, speak for yourself.

• 4:10Joe Weisenthal?

  There are just so many interesting, like the sort of premise is there are just so many really interesting things that can be discussed along that entire supply chain. So whether it's avian flu and how to keep the flock of the birds, whether it's concentration in the poultry market, whether it's the nature of the labor market, how the big poultry companies contract with independent growers and so forth, who raise the chickens themselves, which is interesting. Then there's questions about pricing and so forth, and then commodity prices, and then the chicken sandwich wars and the consumer experience of why Papa's versus Panda Express versus whoever. There's a million different things, even within all these things where it's like, we can learn a little something about how the economy works through that trajectory.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  How did you decide on that? Was that like, you're like, we want to talk about chicken first and then later you realize there are a lot of lenses or were you like, we need to talk about antitrust?

• 5:03Tracy Alloway?

  So chicken. I actually, I'm struggling to remember what the exact genesis.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  You were looking for chickens in your backyard?

• 5:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I have a long-term love of chickens and my great ambition in life is to one day have backyard chickens and I'm inching closer to that dream.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  When you say love of chickens, do you mean alive chickens to hang out with or dead chickens to eat or?

• 5:25Tracy Alloway?

  Both.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Totally indifferent?

• 5:27Tracy Alloway?

  Both. All forms.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Like one, then the other?

• 5:30Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I would raise chickens and I would have eggs and that way I would be immune to egg inflation, but I know some people who raise meat chickens and I don't think I would do that. It seems hard. It's depressing because meat chickens are very different to egg-laying chickens. They look different, they don't really do anything, they kind of just like waddle around and flop over.

• 5:50Joe Weisenthal?

  And then one day you kill them.

• 5:51Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, it's sad.

• 5:52Joe Weisenthal?

  The other thing too, in addition to Tracy's affinity for chickens, we've done a lot of chicken episodes in the past. So there's this guy Glenn Hickman that we talked to, we've talked to him twice on the show, he has a. Big egg operation in Arizona. And so we talked about when egg prices were surging. We talked to him when avian flu, which unfortunately like is getting headlines again. We talked to him. We've talked to Samuel Ryan's, an analyst who thought that wings stopped the country's biggest chicken chain and the biggest single buyer. And there are certain lessons about pricing power that we learned because, you know, as wholesale wings went up, they raised their prices aggressively. When wholesale wing prices went down, they did not cut their prices. So we've done a lot of chicken related content in the past. It's like, oh, why don't we like put some of this together?

• 6:37Tracy Alloway?

  This was the surprising thing when we were putting together, you know, the list of people that we wanted to speak to for this series. Like 80% of them we had actually spoken to before. So unknowingly, we were already a chicken podcast.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  Wow. It's like it found you guys.

• 6:51Tracy Alloway?

  Yes.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  When you were putting together that list, where was Ray Dalio on the list?

• 6:57Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, what does Ray Dalio say?

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Do you not know?

• 6:59Tracy Alloway?

  No.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Are you pretending to not know?

• 7:00Tracy Alloway?

  No, I honestly don't.

• 7:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Now I feel really dumb because it's like.

• 7:03Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, does he have that huge chicken coop?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  No.

• 7:05Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, no, that's the London guy. Oh, what?

• 7:08Speaker 05

  So I feel like this is too good to be true.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  It's too good to be true.

• 7:12Joe Weisenthal?

  He didn't. He didn't. Cause we talked about the history. So, okay. So what is, what's the urban legend?

• 7:18Speaker 05

  According to Ray Dalio.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  This comes from Ray Dalio, like including on podcasts and I think on like the Bridgewater website. When he was working on Wall Street before he started Bridgewater, he was like doing commodities stuff. And one of his clients was McDonald's and McDonald's were, I think this is like, according to your history, like this is a few years after they had like introduced the chicken nugget, but before they rolled it out nationally. And they were worried apparently about volatility of chicken prices because they're like, well, we can't put chicken nuggets on the menu. If the price is going to go up and down because they have to pull it off the menu or raise the prices, it would be terrible. We need to take the volatility out of chicken prices. And they came to Ray Dalio allegedly and they were like, can you sell us?

• 8:01Speaker 05

  As one does.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  And Ray Dalio was like, well, there's not like a liquid chicken market at the time. This is, I think from the, um, the Bridgewater website. He argued that since a full grown chicken was nothing more than a baby. Chick plus corn and soy meal. The price of the grains were the volatile costs and they could hedge corn and soybean prices.

• 8:20Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  And so he sold McDonald's a bunch of corn and soybean derivatives and they were able to roll out the chicken McNuggets.

• 8:26Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, first of all, I love that Ray Dalio's like chosen creationist story for himself. His background legend is I helped invent chicken McNuggets.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a good one, though.

• 8:37Tracy Alloway?

  Secondly, McDonald's did not invent chicken McNuggets, which is something that we learned from the podcast.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  McDonald's did not invent the chicken nugget, but Ray Dalio shepherded the chicken McNugget as a menu item into the world.

• 8:50Tracy Alloway?

  Sure, okay, fine. We'll let him have that one. But the interesting thing is we did learn about volatility in pricing because this is something that the Wingstop CEO actually brings up. One of the reasons we saw chicken wing prices specifically go up so much in the aftermath of the pandemic was that it turns out they're the most volatile like part of the chicken.

• 9:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah. Can I say, I have a current theory and opinion. I think Ray Dalio did invent the chicken McNugget. Anyone could invent a fried lump of chicken. It takes a true genius to invent the financial hedging instruments that allows it to be commercialable. So I now accept the premise that actually he and not the person who like put the chicken meat in batter should get actually be the true father of the chicken McNugget.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  I think that financial engineering is underrated as a moving force in like the real economy.

• 9:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I like this take.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  And he did the financial engineering behind the chicken McNugget. Tracy is shaking her head.

• 9:40Tracy Alloway?

  Well, you're right. It gets to an interesting question about what drives progress. Is it underlying technology or is it the finance?

• 9:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Which came first, the chicken McNugget?

• 9:49Speaker 04

  The soybean futures.

• 9:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Which came first, the nugget or the financial engineer gets a bad rap? And it turns out if you need that to commercialize.

• 9:57Tracy Alloway?

  But it brought us easy to consume protein.

• 9:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I take it. I now give the crown to Ray.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Do you think that, right, like every, every like major innovation, like there's the step of physical invention and then there's the step of like working out the financing for it. And like the financing people are generally unheralded but well paid.

• 10:12Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, they're okay. I think Dalio's managing.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:17Tracy Alloway?

  But this is Joe's pitch to try to get Ray on the podcast, I think, to talk about chicken.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  We should have him on our podcast to talk about.

• 10:24Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, um, who is the New York Mets manager who claimed to invent the wrap? Do you remember that? Who is it? You know, the wrap sandwich?

• 10:32Speaker 05

  I've heard of it.

• 10:32Joe Weisenthal?

  The New York Mets manager in the 90s claimed to have invented the wrap sandwich. I can't remember his name right now. Anyway, it sort of reminds me of that.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  It's like claiming to invent the apple pie. Like, if you just say it loudly enough.

• 10:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  It's probably true.

• 10:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  Can we talk about why wings are the most volatile part of the chicken? I did not know that. I would have thought it was, I guess, any other part of the chicken.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  From your podcast, I thought it was that the supply of chickens is set by the demand for chicken breasts. And so the demand for chicken breasts goes down, the supply of chickens goes down. And wings do not drive the supply of chickens.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  So.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  And so the wing price is just like.

• 11:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you for listening.

• 11:11Tracy Alloway?

  That's exactly it. You learned something.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  The chicken.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  I think that's cool.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  The chicken breast is like the benchmark from which all the other parts.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Well, it's like the big part, and it's like the thing that's most used. And so like, essentially, if you're a wingstop, you're buying like a sort of like.

• 11:24Tracy Alloway?

  Leftover.

• 11:24Joe Weisenthal?

  The discarded. Yeah. I like thigh, by the way. It's, uh, uh, more than the breast. I think it's like a better, it's like the, the best cut.

• 11:32Tracy Alloway?

  Have you guys had chicken feet?

• 11:33Speaker 05

  No.

• 11:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:35Tracy Alloway?

  They're really good. And in Asia, people always say they're a really good source of collagen. So like, a lot of young women or older women will eat them for skincare purposes.

• 11:44Joe Weisenthal?

  I believe it.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Do you eat it, or do you just sort of slather it on your face?

• 11:47Tracy Alloway?

  No, no, you eat it. You like nibble on it.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 11:49Joe Weisenthal?

  You can get it at most dim sum places in Chinatown here. So if we ever want to take a trip, and I, it's actually, I really find them quite delicious.

• 11:57Speaker 05

  I would love to watch you guys eat that. I'm not very adventurous myself, but boy, do I like being included.

• 12:05Speaker 04

  I have a new puppy and I get served a lot of ads for a lot of dog food products. And there's definitely like a extremely foot-looking chicken foot.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  I do feed my cat dried chicken hearts. Like, that's a little crunchy cat snack.

• 12:19Joe Weisenthal?

  I've figured.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  You've had some vital chicken hearts?

• 12:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Chicken hearts? I've had, yeah, I have. Or chicken liver. Is that something?

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Chicken liver is.

• 12:26Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Joe Weisenthal?

  I think I've had chicken hearts too.

• 12:28Tracy Alloway?

  You can make a Thanksgiving stuffing out of chicken liver. It's really good.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  Timely.

• 12:32Tracy Alloway?

  Yep. We'll provide our recipe for chicken liver Thanksgiving stuffing after this podcast.

• 12:37Speaker 05

  Can I say, so this is a three-part series.

• 12:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  The part that caught my ears the most was just like the physicality of the chicken.

• 12:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Hmm.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  And how it's changed that the idea that like a chicken in the 1920s.

• 12:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  Looks so much different than a chicken in the 2020s. Like, I feel like I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind, but this really brought it into stark focus for me, just how much we've changed chickens.

• 13:01Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, so chickens, like a lot of domesticated animals, are like the products of, you know, centuries and certainly decades of evolution. Chickens, in case you're wondering, I think they originally came from forests of Indonesia. And back then, they were like skinny little jungle birds. And I think they were mostly like black. Anyway, they spread around the world. It turns out everyone loves chicken. One of the most fascinating parts of chicken history, and I don't know why I know this, but for some reason I do, is in the 1850s, there was a chicken bubble. So what happened was Queen Victoria got really into chickens, like breeding chickens, exotic chickens. And because she was the queen, a bunch of other people got into it.

• 13:46Tracy Alloway?

  And it sort of became this fad where people were paying like lots and lots of money to get really exotic chickens.

• 13:52Speaker 05

  Were they eating them or just breeding them?

• 13:54Tracy Alloway?

  No, they were just breeding them. They were pets, selling them to other people.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:58Tracy Alloway?

  The bubble eventually burst, by the way, and the really interesting. Probably. But the really interesting thing is because exotic chickens became cheap, Charles Darwin started doing research with all these different chickens from around the world on evolution. So the Victorian chicken bubble indirectly influenced our understanding of evolution.

• 14:19Joe Weisenthal?

  This is like how the telecom bubble in 99 to 2000. And then we had the broad everyone. And then, yeah, then because of the. We had the evolutionary theories of Darwin. I didn't know that. This didn't come up, did it, on the podcast?

• 14:31Tracy Alloway?

  No, I couldn't figure out where to put it in. I saved it for this podcast specifically. There's a. Really funny book that was written sort of contemporaneously with the 1850s all about. It's called Hen Fever and it's about the chicken bubble. And it has the most amazing illustrations, including it has this picture of a guy blowing a bunch of different bubbles and some of them are like what you would expect, like the South Sea expeditions and railway stocks and things like that. But then some of them are Shanghais and Cochins, which are types of chickens. And then there's one that's labeled female novelists. So I guess in the 1850s, they thought female novelists were fat.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  Too many.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  Pipe down.

• 15:11Joe Weisenthal?

  By the way, that was my favorite of the three. Like, I really liked the consumer angle. Obviously, it's fun to talk about the chicken sandwich wars. It's interesting, like, the market structure and some of the antitrust questions and the power. But like, I do think like, one of the great sources of wealth in modern society is abundant access to fairly inexpensive protein.

• 15:31Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Joe Weisenthal?

  And the story of the chicken getting plumper and plumper, the antibiotics that are used to keep them alive and keep them growing and avoid sickness, the sort of feeding mechanisms and so forth that have turned the sort of scrawny bird that Tracy was talking to into sort of very tasty bird. Like, to me, that's like, that's riveting. That's exciting. That's progress right there.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  Then it did turn.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  And the soybean futures to make it more.

• 15:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right. And the soybean futures, which of course are crucial, which we really like. That's the thing, we could have done like, because chicken is so rich, we could have done episodes on feed futures because chicken is just so inherently connected to everything else.

• 16:05Tracy Alloway?

  This could have been like a 12 part series easily, I think.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, you've got to get Ray Dalio on.

• 16:11Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, well, Ray Dalio.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  Now we're in a booking war.

• 16:13Tracy Alloway?

  Victorian chicken bubble.

• 16:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Tracy Alloway?

  The grain market that underpins chicken nuggets.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Grease, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 16:40Speaker 06

  We're seeing a lot of insocial players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service insocial clients.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Rhys Merrick of Ripple says.

• 16:56Speaker 06

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

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• 18:42Speaker 04

  Wait, I want to talk about the market structure. Yeah. There's an episode on essentially like how chicken is like Uber where Yeah. like the farmers who farm the chickens don't own the chickens. They're outsourced from like these big, they call them integrators, like Tyson and Purdue, where they like. The integrators deliver hours old chicks to the farmers. The farmers take care of them for a couple of weeks and then the integrators take them back and turn them into chicken nuggets. Why is it like that?

• 19:11Tracy Alloway?

  That's a really good question. I think it's just like an outcrop of the way the chicken industry evolved. By the way, I have a interesting fact if you don't know. Chickens can still be sent live through the US mail, so you can live order baby chicks.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  Have you done that?

• 19:25Tracy Alloway?

  No, but I don't really want to. I would rather go to like a local agricultural shop.

• 19:30Speaker 05

  Like a tractor supply?

• 19:31Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, exactly. But anyway, so the way it worked is in the sort of 1920s, 1930s, we started getting these big broiler houses. So people discovered, this is actually one of Joe's favorite stories, the woman in Delaware.

• 19:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, there was a woman in Delaware who had a great name, Cecile Longsteel. And she ordered what? She ordered 100 chickens and actually got...

• 19:53Tracy Alloway?

  No, it was like 10 chicks.

• 19:54Joe Weisenthal?

  She ordered like 10 chicks in the mail and accidentally ordered 1,000. So she's like, all right, I guess I'm going to become a farmer.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  That never happens to me.

• 20:01Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it doesn't happen to me either. The point about Uber, and so then people get into the farming business. It's like, oh, I like the idea of farming and it doesn't seem that bad to be a chicken farmer. But like they're extremely highly constrained. The integrators, they deliver them the chickens, they tell them the exact specifications of the barn, the temperature, the feed, how much feed and so forth. And then they compete against each other in what's called the tournament system.

• 20:26Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, so you as the farmer are actually responsible for a lot of the capital investments that are needed to raise chickens. Meanwhile, the big integrators like a Tyson or Purdue, they provide a lot of the inputs. So the baby chicks themselves, they'll tell you like what medicines to use, what kind of food. And so in the eyes of the farmers, they feel like they are absorbing a lot of the big risks here while not really having a lot of control over stuff that ultimately affects the end product.

• 20:57Joe Weisenthal?

  And then the tournament is you have this pool of farmers in an area and your pay for some period is how far above or below the average of that pool.

• 21:08Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, you're pitted against each other.

• 21:10Joe Weisenthal?

  You're pitted against each other. There's like a fixed pot. And then each round, you know, some people had the best chickens or the the heaviest chickens or whatever it is, and some had the worst and so forth. And so it's very constrained type of farming. If you imagine farming in Iowa in some idyllic sense.

• 21:27Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Which I think some people still do, but I think we also know it's a big industrial business. It's not that vision.

• 21:33Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  It's sort of like retailers, like not owning their their real estate. It's like, it's like weird that like the the capital requirement comes from the, you know, individual small farmers and like these big companies aren't making the capital investments.

• 21:46Tracy Alloway?

  It seems to be a super beneficial way of structuring their business for the big companies, right? You could see why they like it. And by the way, like

• 21:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Asset light.

• 21:55Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, that's exactly it. And they will argue that, like, actually, providing the initial round of chicks and the food and the medicine is like a big cost center and they are taking that on. But again, like all the farmers we spoke to had pretty similar complaints.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Right. Because it's not like Uber. It's not like literally they're just like, you know, like a matching app. Like they have a lot of

• 22:15Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. But, you know, sometimes like with Uber, he's like, oh, you could like be an entrepreneur, you know, like they pitch it that. But in the end, the rules of the business are heavily constrained and it's all within the context of Uber and policy changes that Uber can make, et cetera. It's similar to that in that there is a cap on one's ability to be sort of like actually a business owner in the sense of given how constrained it is.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  Oh, you can be a farmer. You can like, yeah, but it's like, no, really, you're just like following their orders.

• 22:42Tracy Alloway?

  Speaking of Uber, it also gets to something else in the modern US economy, which is sort of the prevalence of the middleman and the power that they wield over the economy. So Uber basically matches passengers with drivers and it makes a lot of money from doing that. If you look at the farming industry, for every dollar that comes out of agriculture, farmers get like 20 cents. The other 80 cents is going to someone else. And a lot of the someone else turns out to be middlemen, like the, you know, the distribution networks, the integrators in some respect, the package. Things like that.

• 23:19Joe Weisenthal?

  And there's the role of the pricing algorithm setting.

• 23:22Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:23Joe Weisenthal?

  So this is really interesting because we talked to all these like antitrust experts, et cetera. And there are like various targets to the integrators themselves, whether they're uncompetitive things. And this has come up over the years. But another thing that's come up across a range of industries, again, chicken is the lens to uncover other aspects of the economy is can you have tacit price setting systems not via people getting in a smoke filled room and

• 23:50Tracy Alloway?

  Doing nefarious things.

• 23:51Joe Weisenthal?

  But via a third party pricing entity that everyone uses as some agreed upon oracle. And people make this claim in all kinds of different industries these days. And again, I'm not a antitrust lawyer expert. I don't have a view on this, but it is certainly one area that the antitrust focused people are like eager to sink their teeth into.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  We talked about this on our podcast about farmers markets because there's like a Cornell project that like gives basically like market price information to people running stalls at farmers markets. And I sort of jokingly suggested that that is analogous to like, you know, the DOJ brought a case against RealPage in the rental business. And then you talk about they brought a case against Agrostats and the sort of big agriculture business.

• 24:34Tracy Alloway?

  Lurking beneath every antitrust case is a discussion over whether you're actually breaking the law or it's, it's just good business.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Right. It's wild because it's like, you know, the olden days, like you'd get together in a room and you'd be like, oh, these are our prices, these are our prices. And then you'd like wink or whatever. And it'd be like, oh, we've agreed to set prices. Here, there's no like explicit agreement, but it's just like if everyone has each other's prices.

• 24:56Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Then there is an argument that I'm not really sure is true. It seems to be true.

• 25:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  There's an argument that that like allows them

• 25:02Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a coordinating mechanism.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a coordinating mechanism. If I know everyone's prices, I can undercut everyone by a penny and I can, you know, gain market share. And that doesn't seem to be

• 25:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I know the question is in some of these instances, whether you get penalized or whether, now I don't have any, I do not know whether this ever came up in the Agrostats claim in some of the interests in Agrostats. But isn't one of the arguments, at least in RealPage, that Some of the allegations are that there was some penalty to landlords who deviated or that there was some, right?

• 25:34Speaker 04

  I don't think it's quite that, but I think that RealPage is both like providing the information and also providing a pricing recommendation. And so RealPage pushes those up, let's say. But if you're providing pure information, like I think if you have a literal penalty.

• 25:47Joe Weisenthal?

  If I have a SPY ETF, I'm going to look at the ticker on the Bloomberg terminal first before I sell it, right?

• 25:54Tracy Alloway?

  You'll do market research.

• 25:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah. Did that actually happen in the old days? Like people were like, oh, a smoke-filled room wink. Like, did that really happen? Or is that just a metaphor that we use to describe coordination?

• 26:04Tracy Alloway?

  Are you asking Matt if he was there?

• 26:05Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm asking Matt as a lawyer.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  The most famous cartel is OPEC, where they meet in a room, right? And there have been recent cases, you know, like the FTC is a little concerned about some like US shell producers going to those meetings. And like, there's like a dinner and like, was the dinner to discuss raising prices or not? Like, the people say no, the FTC says yes. It's like a little, there was definitely a dinner. What did they talk about at the dinner? There's a famous story, and I'm not forgetting on where it was. There's a famous story of a company, like, there was a formal policy that they would say, we are not going to collude with competitors. And then they'd wink, say they were. And then like, they sent out a memo or like, there's like a recording of someone saying, I didn't wink. Like, it's like, it's like a famous story in antitrust enforcement.

• 26:50Tracy Alloway?

  But Matt, to your point, your point earlier about like, okay, if you could see everyone's prices or you have like a rough guideline about what's going on with prices, why don't you just undercut your competitors? This is something that we talk about in the first episode when we're talking about the consumer experience and inflation. And the answer is, well, if you only have a handful of big companies that are doing this, you know, first of all, the incentive is not necessarily there to try to get into a price war. This is the classic like antitrust argument. If you consolidate companies and they raise their prices, they have more market power. But there's another aspect going on in the past few years, which is we had the big pandemic,

• 27:31Tracy Alloway?

  we had avian flu, we had labor shortages, we had all these massive one-off specific events. And when that happens, you know, consumers hear about them. And so if companies say, well, we have to raise our prices because of avian flu or because of the pandemic, consumers are more willing to kind of accept that. And they have fewer alternatives, right? If everyone is doing it at the same time because of these same like exogenous shocks, then where are you going to go to get cheap eggs or chickens?

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Check out Beak Capitalism on the Odd Lots podcast feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Games on a break? Don't doom scroll. Try rips on Underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open and reveal a real physical card. Football, basketball, even Pokemon. Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get five free packs. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 28:46Tracy Alloway?

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Millions of Americans are taking peptides, short strings of amino acids that can act as biological signals for cells. Bloomberg's Anika Inam Pooty reports peptides may be exploring their next frontier, the brain. People are taking peptides for mental clarity and cognitive benefits and to gain a competitive edge or stave off the effects of aging. Both insulin and semaglutide are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Because importing or selling unapproved peptides for human use is not legal in the U.S., many people turn to online forums for guidance and overseas vendors with questionable credentials to obtain them. Unapproved peptides, which are marketed as research chemicals, have been circulating

• 29:30Tracy Alloway?

  in what's become a billion dollar gray market amid the rise of do it yourself medicine as people increasingly turn to social media or artificial intelligence for medical help. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  Do you guys know about the Georgia Dock?

• 29:57Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  Like dock, like D O C K? This rings a bell, actually. I wrote about this years ago, and I don't know if it's still a thing. There have been like periodic waves of antitrust interest in the chicken industry. And there was one in like 2017, 2018 that I used to refer to as Chicken LIBOR. There was a thing, an index called the Georgia Dock Index. Oh. Which was set by a guy, his name was Artie Schrems. He worked for the like Georgia Department of Agriculture or whatever. And he would call chicken producers every day, every week or whatever and say, what price are you getting for like two and a half pound chickens? Which, as I learned from your podcast, no one produces two and a half pound chickens anymore. So the people would like make up a number and they'd tell him the number and he'd write it down. And that would go into the Georgia Dock Index.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  And then a lot of like chicken supply contracts were set as like a, you know, premium. So presumably they were pushing it up, right?

• 30:48Joe Weisenthal?

  It's Chicken LIBOR.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  So like there were allegations that they were, you know, reporting too high prices to. We have another episode for our 12 part series.

• 30:58Joe Weisenthal?

  It's interesting, over the years, you learn like how many indices that exist that you can find a chart of are essentially put together like this years ago, probably about like nine years ago. I remember talking to someone who was working at Bloomberg, actually. And there was like some scrap metal index. And it was just like you call, there were like a handful of junk metal yards that you call up and then you get the price. Actually, you know, speaking of another one is lumber. And what's really interesting, so the company that creates the lumber index, I think it's called Random Lengths, actually. And they're the ones who create the benchmark futures. They also have a very interesting thing. So they do this, they call various places, how much did you sell a piece of lumber for each day?

• 31:38Joe Weisenthal?

  And then what's actually cool is you can read the contract and they talk about all of the ethical things that like the rules of the question. Because they are aware that all indices such as these create situations potentially like Georgia Docks or LIBOR. And so they actually have a whole set of rules about the collection process that addresses basically exactly this question.

• 31:59Speaker 05

  I thought you were going to bring up the dog kill index that's.

• 32:02Joe Weisenthal?

  This is Tracy's obsession.

• 32:03Speaker 05

  But I don't think anyone is pushing up the price of that benchmark artificially.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  This was, um, this was one of our questions at a recent Bloomberg quiz was like, which of these indexes is actually real? Which of these terminal?

• 32:16Tracy Alloway?

  Indices and the one that was real was the dog kill index. Almost no one got that right.

• 32:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's a hum.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  I should have been there.

• 32:22Tracy Alloway?

  No one believes that that actually exists. You know, we used to have a Columbia.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Listeners that.

• 32:27Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah. So it's basically the number of dogs that die in the possession of airplanes when they're in air transit.

• 32:34Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a very macabre episode.

• 32:35Tracy Alloway?

  I know.

• 32:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:36Tracy Alloway?

  But speaking of macabre indexes, we used to have a Columbia kidnapping index too, but I think they discontinued that.

• 32:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Really?

• 32:44Speaker 05

  I didn't know that.

• 32:45Tracy Alloway?

  Died down a bit.

• 32:46Speaker 05

  Some deep lore.

• 32:47Joe Weisenthal?

  This is lore.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  I do want to talk about the price of eggs more.

• 32:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  Because.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  That's another index, right? There's like.

• 32:53Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, there's a benchmark. Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 05

  Well, it's sort of become one of, at least in my circles, one of the most watched indexes because you talk about inflation and the thing that people complain about is gas and eggs. And I mean, Tracy, you were mentioning that there's well explained reasons why the price of eggs has been so volatile. Bird flu being one of them. And I'm never quite sure where we are in the cycle of bird flu because it's an issue and then it feels like it died down again. Now we're talking about bird flu again, and I just don't know where we are in terms of how worried I should be about bird flu.

• 33:29Tracy Alloway?

  So when we started the series, we did not really expect eggs to become this huge political talking point, but they did during the election. And where we are with bird flu. Okay, so we had a really big spike in 2022 and we saw the price of eggs shoot up. That since died down, but if you look at the egg price index on the Bloomberg, there's more than one, by the way, we have a bunch of different ones. You can see they're starting to go back up again, and that's because we are getting more bird flu reported. The interesting thing is we're starting to get it in other animals too.

• 34:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Tracy Alloway?

  So, you know, cows, pigs are the really worrying one because pigs have like a genome that is very similar to humans. And so the concern is that.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  If it gets into pigs, it'll mutate into something that would be very bad for humans.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  That was my next question. Like, at what point personally I need to be concerned about contracting bird flu in some way?

• 34:21Tracy Alloway?

  When more pigs start getting bird flu and when it starts mutating.

• 34:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Some smart people I know are like anxious.

• 34:28Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, we need a pig mutation index on the Bloomberg terminal. That would be really worrying.

• 34:34Speaker 05

  Kind of get our best and brightest on us. That's worrisome. Well, before I spiral, let's just keep it to like the chicken industry. Because I do wonder, I mean, how does it spread? One of the parts that was a hard listen when it came to this episode was listening to, I think it was Craig Watts describing how he had like 30,000 chickens in 20,000 square feet. It sounds like these birds are just on top of each other. So, I mean, how quickly does bird flu spread and what does that mean for the industry?

• 35:03Tracy Alloway?

  So you're right. This is one of the downsides of industrial scale chicken farming, which is you have a lot of birds and you have them in a relatively crowded space. Jo has heard me tell this story before. Not many people know that I was born in Arkansas. And so I spent time there with my grandma and she used to take me to like chicken farms for fun or something. I don't know why. But I would walk into these like giant warehouses thinking like, oh, this is going to be fun. I'm going to play with like fluffy baby chicks and I love chickens, blah, blah, blah. And you'd walk in and you'd be like looking around and there are a lot of dead chickens. They're just like lying there. You know, they get cleaned up once a day or so, but there's a lot.

• 35:48Tracy Alloway?

  So yeah, this is the issue. So you have crowded conditions. It's very difficult to segregate farm chickens from the wild bird population. Like wild birds that have avian flu can still get in, they can eat the grain, infect it that way. And so that's one reason why it's been really hard to stamp out.

• 36:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Speaking on this point, you know, another interesting angle here is the sort of externalities of industrial, what's his name, Austin Ferrer?

• 36:15Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Joe Weisenthal?

  One of the guys, and talk about the wastewater runoff, et cetera. And so like, like I said, I am an optimist about the existence of cheap protein. And I think it's a marker of a wealthy society. But there are some interesting costs that we have to take seriously. And one of them is environmental and what it does to sort of the various water streams and some of these areas where there is a lot of industrial farming and excrement gets in the water, which is really bad, obviously. And so there are, you know, obviously bird flu itself and the potential for that to move into other animals is scary. But then there are also this sort of like slower burn issues and why in some farming communities, there's been like a pushback about like, how much more of this do we want?

• 36:58Joe Weisenthal?

  And how much everyone else's cheap chicken is sort of slow degradation of the environment around it.

• 37:05Tracy Alloway?

  So depressing. We've left you speechless.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Is there like a, is there like an artisanal chicken farming ecosystem? Or is that just?

• 37:14Joe Weisenthal?

  There must be at those.

• 37:15Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I mean, backyard chickens would be one way of doing that.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  If you go to a store to buy like the fanciest chicken you can find, is it still from a giant warehouse or?

• 37:25Tracy Alloway?

  That's actually a good question. I, I know of one, again, I'm slightly obsessed with chickens. I know of one like avian geneticist in the Northeast who breeds really interesting chickens. And he's sort of like on a small scale. So maybe they do exist.

• 37:40Speaker 05

  Well, on a slightly bigger scale, I interviewed the CEO of Vital Farms last week. And one of their advertising points is that it's like 107 square feet per chicken. So that was really interesting. He also said, I thought this was interesting too. On his most recent earnings call, our challenge right now, as always, is that I can't get the chickens to lay more eggs in the short run. So a lot of demand and not a lot of eggs. But I mean, that's interesting again, that they're advertising on that point that we give these chickens all this space.

• 38:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Are brown eggs just like better than white eggs? I feel like we have, they don't look as nice. So I think people just assume they must be either better for the environment or healthier. Is there anything to that?

• 38:20Tracy Alloway?

  Have you seen the? Easter eggger chickens?

• 38:23Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 38:23Tracy Alloway?

  These are the ones that lay eggs in all different colors. So like blue and green and white and brown.

• 38:28Speaker 05

  How do you, my stupid question, do you feed them different?

• 38:33Tracy Alloway?

  No, no, they just do it. The one thing I don't know is like whether one Easter eggger produces like only green eggs and then another Easter eggger will produce like only pink ones.

• 38:44Speaker 05

  I thought that the bunny rabbits laid the Easter eggs.

• 38:47Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, that's right, Katie. Thinking that.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  Chickenization, I said that right?

• 38:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 05

  Do other animal industries look like this? Does the pork industry look like this? What does the cow industry look like? Is it as depressing?

• 39:02Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, so this is another talking point from the podcast, which is this very, you know, up until now, unique model of producing chickens where the big integrators are outsourcing a lot of those big capital risks is becoming more common in agriculture itself. So the big example, Joe brought this up earlier, would be pig farming in Iowa. And it gets to interesting questions in business about who should bear the ultimate costs of a business. We kind of talked about that earlier. But again, to Joe's point earlier, it gets to interesting questions about who should bear the environmental costs. So maybe all of America is okay with Iowa like being responsible for raising our pigs

• 39:45Tracy Alloway?

  and having to deal with like manure runoff and stuff like that and spoiling its water systems, but probably Iowa is not.

• 39:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Can I just say, like, after having done this series, I don't really view it as depressing. I don't want this to be seen as like, you know, some sort of Jeremiah against the chicken industry. I just think there's a lot of interesting tensions, right? Like, there's benefits to industrial scale chicken farming. There's complicated market aspects of industrial chicken scale farming. There's amazing consumer outcomes like the chicken sandwich wars and like, those are very delicious. And there are costs, whether it is the risk borne by the farmers, the risk of disease and the risk of environment. It's a mix, right? Like, I don't, but I didn't perceive. The whole project to be like an anti-chicken thing at all.

• 40:35Tracy Alloway?

  No, I want both the people and the chickens to be happy.

• 40:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Tracy Alloway?

  That's my version of an ideal future.

• 40:41Speaker 05

  Well, that's like, I can't, as an animal freak, can't get past the chickens and like, you know, them falling over because like, they've been

• 40:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  mutated to this point where, you know, they can't stand up straight. I don't know if this came up in any of your discussions, but like, where are we on lab-grown chicken? Because I

• 41:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Another thing, yeah, we did.

• 41:03Speaker 05

  I agree with you that like, cheap protein is great for a society. It's the marker of a successful society, but surely there's a way to achieve that without

• 41:15Speaker 05

  what's happening to these animals. Really showing my true colors on this podcast.

• 41:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Are you a vegetarian?

• 41:20Speaker 05

  No.

• 41:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay. No, it's fine. There's no judgment.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  I was for several years and then, you know, I lost.

• 41:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 41:26Tracy Alloway?

  Joe was vegetarian.

• 41:27Joe Weisenthal?

  I was. I was raised vegetarian. I had my first meat when I was age 24.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 41:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. When I moved to New York, I was like, all right, and there's just too much good for here.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  He never looked back.

• 41:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I didn't. I didn't. And I like went straight. I was like, I tried.

• 41:39Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, what was it? Do you remember?

• 41:40Joe Weisenthal?

  So I ate a piece of sushi, which is a little weird because people are like, it's raw. But I'd looked at people and then a week later, I was like eating steak. So I was like, oh, that's so good.

• 41:46Speaker 05

  That's a hard launch.

• 41:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's a hard, a hard launch, yeah. My parents were hippies, and so I was raised vegetarian, yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  I was a vegetarian for like, ages 11 to 14. I feel like I stunned in my growth. I'm shorter than both my parents, but anyway.

• 42:00Joe Weisenthal?

  It doesn't matter. You're a podcaster.

• 42:01Speaker 05

  Nothing does.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  Thanks for coming on, guys.

• 42:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Thanks for having us. That was a blast.

• 42:06Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, thank you for letting us talk about chicken.

• 42:09Speaker 05

  No one made a chicken sound.

• 42:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Or a pun.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:12Tracy Alloway?

  No, you made one pun.

• 42:13Joe Weisenthal?

  I did?

• 42:13Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I was very proud of you.

• 42:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, what did I say?

• 42:15Tracy Alloway?

  I can't remember, but you did make one.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  And that was the Money Stuff Podcast. I'm Matt Levine.

• 42:24Speaker 05

  And I'm Katie Greifeld.

• 42:26Speaker 04

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• 42:30Speaker 05

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• 42:36Speaker 04

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• 42:42Speaker 05

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• 42:48Speaker 04

  The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andung.

• 42:52Speaker 05

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• 42:57Speaker 04

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• 42:59Speaker 05

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• 43:01Speaker 04

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• 43:16Speaker 05

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• 43:34Speaker 01

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