November 29, 2024 • 38 mins
Katie and Matt sit down with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal, hosts of the Odd Lots podcast, to discuss their new series on the chicken industry, Ray Dalio’s connection to McNuggets, cheap protein, the Victorian chicken bubble, factory farming and Chicken Libor.
You can listen to Odd Lots' Beak Capitalism here, here, and here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hello and welcome to a very special crossover episode of
The Money Stuff slash Odd Lots Podcasts. I'm Matt Levien,
and I write The Money Stuff com for Bloomberg Opinion.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and
an anchor for Bloomberg Television.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
And we have two very special guests in the studio
with us today, Katie.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Their names are Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway. Wow, this
is very exciting.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I like the pause to build suspense, Kate.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I've been told to pause and then say names slowly
for gravitas, so trying it's working.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
It worked, It worked, It worked all right.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
We established in gravitas.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
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 early the second time you've had external guests,
So don't feel any.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
My heart is counted.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Don't feel any anxiety about the guest. Do you remember
how we used to do it, Tracy?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
So it took us a while.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
How are we doing so far? Because I feel like
it's not going super well, it's going fine.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
What are we going to talk about?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
What someone should make it?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Flu brought us here?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
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 OOH market called pot Lots. This
one was a three part series about chicken, and the
code name for it was squawk Lots, but the actual
name was capitalism, and the idea was you can actually
(02:03):
explain a lot of really interesting themes in the American
economy through the medium of chicken.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
Yeah, you just think from like egg to chicken sandwich,
or egg to chicken tender, or egg to mc nugget.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I mean speak for yourself.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
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
(02:42):
who out 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 is versus Panda express verse 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.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
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 rinses, or you're like,
we need to talk about anti trust.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Chicken.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I actually I'm struggling to remember what the exactmber chickens
in your backyard. 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.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
To actually a love of chickens. Do you mean alive
chickens to hang out with or dead chickens to eat
or both totally different? Both like one then the other.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
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 so 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.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
The one day you kill them.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, it's sad.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
The other thing too. In additioned 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 flew, which unfortunately like is getting headlines again,
(04:22):
we talked to him. We've talked to Samuel Ryans and
analysts 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,
a wholesale Wings went up, they raised the prices aggressively.
When wholesale Wing prices went down, they did not cut
their prices. So we've done a lot of chicken related
(04:43):
content in the past. It's like, oh, why don't we
like put some of this together.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
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 eighty percent of them
we had actually spoken to before, so unknowingly we were
already a chicken podcast.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Yeah, it's like it found you guys.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yes, when you were putting together that list, where was
Ray Dahalia? Are you pretending to not know?
Speaker 4 (05:08):
Now? I feel really dumb.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Because it's like, does he have that huge chicken coop
London guy? Oh?
Speaker 4 (05:16):
What?
Speaker 1 (05:16):
No?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I feel like this is too good to be true.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
It's too good.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
To be true. So what's the urban legend.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Of course, this comes from Ray Dalia, like including on
podcasts and I think on like the Bridgewater website. When
he was working on Wall Street before I started Bridgewater,
he was like doing commodity 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
(05:47):
before they rolled it out nashally, and they were worried
apparently about volatility of chicken prices because they're like, wow,
we can't put chicken nuggets on the menu if the
price is going to go up and down because they
have to it off the menu. Were raised 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're like, can you sell us as? And
(06:11):
Ray Dalio is like, wow, there's not like a liquid
chicken market at the time. This is I think from
the Bridgewater website. He argued that since a full grown
chicken was nothing more than a baby chick plus corn
and soy mail, the price of the grains or the
volatile costs and they could hedge corn and soybean prices
and they could, And so he sold McDonald's a bunch
(06:32):
of cord and saw derivatives and they were able to
roll out the chicken McNugget.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
First of all, I love that Ray Dalio's like chosen
creationist story for himself. His background legend is I helped
invent chicken McNuggets.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
That's a good one.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Secondly, McDonald's did not invent chicken McNuggets, which is something
that we learned from the podcast.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
McDonald's did not invent the chicken nugget, but Ray Dalio
shepherded well chicken McNugget as a menu ad of me.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Of the chicken can I say, I have a carcharian 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
(07:39):
true father.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
I think that financial engineering underrated. Is that moving forward
in the real economy like this he did the financial
engineering behind the chicken. Tracy is shaking her.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Head, Well, you're right. It got to an interesting question
about what drives progress. Is there underlying technology or is
it the.
Speaker 5 (07:54):
Fan first, which came first? The nugget or the financial
engineer and get to bad rap And it turns out
if you need that.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Commercials easy to consume proteins.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Yeah, I take it. I now give the crown director.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
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, and like
the financing people are generally unheralded but well paid.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
And I think Dahlia is managing. Yeah, but this is
Joe's pitch to try to get right on the podcast,
I think to talk about chicken, we.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Should have him on our podcast to talk about you know,
who is the New York Mets manager who claimed to
invent the rap Do you remember that?
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Who is it? You know, the rap sandwich?
Speaker 3 (08:40):
I've heard of it.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
The New York Mets manager in the nineties claim to
have invented the wrap sandwich. I can't remember his name
right now. Anyway, it sort of reminds.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Me have that like claiming to invent the apple pie.
Like if you just say loudly enough, it's probably true.
Can we talk about why wings are the most valutile
part of the chicken? I did not know that. I
would have thought it was, I guess any other part
of the chicken.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
From your podcast. I thought it was that the supply
of chickens is set by the demand for chicken breasts,
and so for chicken breast goes down, the supply of
chickens goes down, and wings do not drive the supply
of chicken. So the wing price is just like thank
you for listening.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
That's exactly it. You learn something the chicken.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
The chicken breast is like the benchmark from which all
the other.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Parts part, and it's like the thing that's most used
and so like essentially if your wings not, you're buying
like a sort of like, yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:34):
I like thie by the way, it's more than the breast.
I think it's like a better it's like the best cut.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Have you guys had chicken feet? 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
women will eat them for skidcare purpose.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Do you just sort of slather it on your face?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
No? No, you eat it, you like nibble on it.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Oh man, you can get it at most dim some
place Chinatown here, So if we ever want to take
a trip and it's actually I really find them quite delicious.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I would love to watch you guys eat that. I'm
not very adventurous myself, but boy do I like being included.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
I have a new puppy, and I get served a
lot of ads for a lot of food products, and
there's definitely like an extremely foot looking chicken foot.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
My hat dried chicken hearts, Like that's a little crunch
of snack.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
You've had some hearts, yeah, I have? Or chicken liver?
Is that something? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Make a Thanksgiving stuffing out of chicken liver.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
It's really good timely.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, we'll provide our recipe for chicken liver Thanksgiving stuffing
after this podcast, can I say so?
Speaker 3 (10:46):
This is a three part series. The part that caught
my ears the most was just like the physicality of
the chicken and how it's changed that the idea that
like a chicken in the nineteen twenties looks so much
different than chicken in the twenty twenties. Like I feel
like I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind,
but this really brought it into stark focus for me,
(11:07):
just how much we've changed chickens.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
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.
(11:30):
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 eighteen fifties 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,
(11:52):
a bunch of other people got into it, and it
sort of became this fad where people were paying like
lots and lots of money to get real exotic.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Chicken, eating them or just breeding.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
They were just breeding them, they were pat game selling
them to other people. 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 evolutions. So the Victorian chicken bubble indirectly influenced our
(12:26):
understanding of evolution.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
This is like how the telecom bubble and then and
then yeah, then because of the we had the evolutionary
theories of Darwin. I didn't know that this didn't come
up to it on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
No, I kind of figure out where to put it.
I saved it for this podcast. Periectically, there's a really
funny book that was written sort of contemporaneously with the
eighteen fifties 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
(13:00):
you would expect, like the south Sea expeditions and railway
stocks and things like that, but then some of them
are shang his and coachins, which are types of chickens.
And then there's one that's labeled female novelists. So I
guess in the eighteen fifties they thought female novelists were
fat too many.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Pipe down, by the way, that was my favorite of
the three. Like every really like the consumer angle. Obviously,
it's fun to talk about the chicken sandwich warris it's interesting,
like the market structure and some of the anti trust
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 and expensive protein. And the
(13:40):
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
the trace you was talking to in a sort of
very tasty bird. Like to me, that's like, that's riveting,
that's exciting. That's progress, right, futures to make it more yeah, right,
(14:01):
and the soybet futures, which of course are crucial, which
we really like. That's the thing we could have done, Like,
because chicken is so good, we could have done episodes
on feed futures. Because chicken is just so inherently connected
to everything else.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
This could have been like a twelve part series easily.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
I think I was gonna say, you've got to get
Raydally on.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, well in a book more Victorian chicken bubble, the
grain market that underpins chicken nuggets.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Wait, I one time with the market structure. Yeah, there's
an episode and 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 Perdue, where they like
the integrators deliver hours old chicks to the farmers. The
(15:02):
farmers take care of them for a couple of weeks,
and then the integrators take them back and turn them
into chicken nuggets.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Why is it like that, 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 an
interesting fact if you don't know, chickens can still be
sent live through the US mail, So you can live
order baby chikes. No, but I don't really want to.
I would rather go to like a local agriculture tractor
(15:30):
and get yeah, exactly. But anyway, so the way it
worked is in the sort of nineteen twenties nineteen thirties,
we started getting these big broiler houses. So people discovered
this is actually one of Joe's favorite stories. The woman
in Delaware.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Well, yeah, there was a woman in Delaware who had
a great names to Seal Long Steal, and she ordered
what she ordered one hundred chickens.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
And ever it was like ten chicks.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
She ordered like ten chicks in the mail and accidentally
ordered a thousand. So she's like, all right, I guess
I'm gonna become.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
A farm that never happens to me.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
No, it doesn't happen to me either. The point about
uber and so then people get into the farming, they're 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
(16:22):
they compete against each other in what's called the tournament system.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
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 what medicines to use, what
kind of food, and so in the eyes of the farmers,
(16:47):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, you're pitted against each other.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
You pitted against each other. There's like a fixed pot
and then each round, you know, some people had the
best chick OUs or 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, which I think some
people still do, but I think we also know it's
(17:30):
big in dushow business, it's not that vision.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, it's sort of like retailers like not there, they're
real estate. It's like it's like weird that like the
capital requirement comes from the you know, individual small farmers
and like these big companies are making the capital investments.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
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 that light, 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
(18:07):
we spoke to had pretty similar complaints.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Right, 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.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Yeah, that's right, that's right. But you know sometimes like
when Uber is like 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's a cap on one's ability to be sort
of like actually a business owner. The sentence like even
(18:36):
how constrained.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
It is, Oh, you can be a farmer, you can like, yeah, farm,
but it's like no, really, you're just like following their orders.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
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
(19:03):
comes out of agriculture, farmers get like twenty cents. The
other eighty cents is going to someone else, and a
lot of the someone else turns out to be middleman,
like the you know, the distribution networks, the integrators in
some respect the packaging things like that.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
And there's the role of the pricing algorithm setting oh yeah, pitty.
So this is really interesting because we talked to all
these like anti trust experts, et cetera, and they are
like various targets for 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 as the lens to uncover other aspects of the economy,
(19:40):
is can you have tacit price setting systems not via
people getting in a smoke filled room and doing nefarious things,
but via a third party pricing entity that everyone uses
as some agreed upon oracle. And people make this claim
and all kinds of different industries these days. And again
(20:01):
I'm not an anti trust lawyer expert. I don't have
a view on this, but it is certainly one area
that the anti trust focused people are like eager to
sink their chief into.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
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 suggest that that that is
analogous to like, you know, the dj I brought a
case against the real page in the rental business, and
then you talk about they brought a case against acrostats
(20:32):
and the sort of big agriculture.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Business working beneath every antitrust case is a discussion over
whether you're actually breaking the law or it's it's just
good business.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Right. It's wild because it's like, you know, in the
olden days, like you'd get together in a room and
you'd be like, ah, these are our prices, these are
our prices, and you'd like wink or whatever, and yeah,
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, Yeah,
then there is an argument that I'm not really sure
it's true. It seems to be true. Yeah, there's an
argument that that like allows them all creating mechanism. Yeah,
(21:03):
it's a coordinating mechanism. If I know everyone's prices, I
can undercut everyone by a penny and I can gain
market share. And that doesn't seem to be I know.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
The question is in some of these instances, whether you
get penalized or whether Now I don't have any idea.
I do not know whether this ever came up in
the Agristats claim in some of the interests in Agristats.
But isn't one of the arguments, at least in real
page that some of the allegations or that there was
some penalty to landlords who deviated, or that there was
(21:33):
some right.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I don't think it's quite that, But I think that
that real page is both like providing the information and
also providing a prising recommendation, and so real page pushes
those Okay, let's say, but if you're providing pure information,
I think if I have.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
An s P y E. T. If I'm gonna look
at the ticker on the Bloomberg terminal first before I
sell it, right, you'll.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Do market research?
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Yeah, did that actually happen in the old day? Like
people like a smoke filled room?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Wink?
Speaker 4 (21:58):
Like did that really happen? Or is that just a
metaphor that we use to describe coordinators?
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Are you asking that if you miss there?
Speaker 2 (22:05):
As a lawyer, the most famous cartel is Opek where
they meet in the room, right, And there have been
recent cases, you know, like the FTC is a little
concerned about some like us shell producers go into 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 SEC says yes. It's like a
(22:27):
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 to
the 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 an antidress enforcement.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
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
(23:11):
are doing this. You know, first of all, the incentive
is not necessarily necessarily there to try to get into
a price war. This is the classic like antitrust argument.
If you consolidate companies, then 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, we had avian flu, we had labor shortages,
(23:34):
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
(23:54):
at the same time because of these same like exogenous shocks,
then where are you going to go to get cheap
eggs or chickens.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Check out Beak Capitalism on the Odd Lots podcast feed
wherever you get your podcasts. Do you guys know about
the Georgia dock?
Speaker 1 (24:26):
No like doc like dck. This rings a bell. Actually
I wrote it.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
It was 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 twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen that I used to
refer to as chicken libor. There's a thing an index
called the Georgia doc Index, which was set by a
guy his name was Ardie Schwantz. He worked for the
(24:53):
like Georgia Department of Agriculture or whatever, and he would
call chicken producers every day, every week or whatever and say,
what price you're 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 doc Index. And then
a lot of like chicken supply contracts were set as
(25:14):
like a you.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Know opinion, they were pushing it up so like.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
There were allegations that they were, you know, reporting two
high prices to.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Have another episode for our twelve part series.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
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's working
at Bloomberg actually, and there was like some scrap metal
interdex and it was just like you called there were
like a handful of junk metal yards that you call
(25:49):
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 you
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?
And then what's actually cool is you can read the
(26:09):
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 libar, and so they actually have
a whole set of rules about the collection process. The
addresses basically exactly this question.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I thought you were going to bring up the dog
kill index.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
That's obsession.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
But I don't think anyone is pushing up the price
of that benchmarkard.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
This this is one of our questions at a recent
quiz was like, which of these indexes is actually real?
Which of these terminal indexes? And the one that was
real was the dog kill index. Almost no one got that, right, Yeah,
that's no one believes that that actually exists. You know,
we used to have a Columbia Oh yeah, so it's
(26:57):
basically the number of dogs that die in the possession
of airplanes when they're in air transit. I know. But
speaking of the cob indexes, we used to have a
Columbia kidnapping index too, but I think they discontinued that
once died down a bit some deep lore.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
I do want to talk about the price of eggs more, because, yeah,
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
(27:40):
eggs has been so volatile, bird flu being one of them,
and I'm never quite sure 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.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Uh 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 twenty twenty two 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,
(28:19):
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. Yeah, so you know, cows,
pigs are the really worrying one because pigs have like
a genome that is very similar to humans, and so
(28:40):
the concern is that if it gets into pigs, it'll
mutate into something. That was my prey.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Question, like, at what point personally I need to be
concerned about contracting bird flu.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
In some way When more pigs start getting bird flu
and when it starts mutating.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
Some smart people I know are like anxious.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Yeah, you need a pig mutation index on the Bloomberg terminal.
That would be really worrying.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Gotta 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 thirty thousand chickens in twenty thousand square feet. It
(29:23):
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?
Speaker 1 (29:32):
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.
Joe 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.
(29:56):
I don't know why, but I would walk into these
like giant warehouses, thinking like, oh, this is gonna 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. So, yeah, this is the issue. So
(30:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Speaking on this point, you know, another interesting angle here
is the sort of externalities of industrial what's his name,
Austin Frerik, Yeah, one of the guys, and talk about
the waste water 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
(30:58):
have to take seriously, and one of them is environmental
and what it does to sort of the various water
streams in 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 they're also
(31:18):
the 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 and how
much everyone else's cheap chicken is sort of slow degradation
of the environment around it.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
So depressing we've left these speechless.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Is there like an artistical chicken farming oh ecosystem whereas.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Well, I mean backyard chickens would be one way.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
If you go to a started by like the fanciest
chicken you can find, as it's still from a giant
warehouse or that's actually.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
A good question. I know of one. Again, I'm slightly
obsessed with chickens. I know of one Avian geneticist in
the Northeast who breeds really interesting chickens, and he's sort
of like on a small scale, so maybe they do
except well.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
On a slightly bigger scale. I interviewed the Sea of
Vital Farms last week, and one of their advertising points
is that it's like one hundred and seven 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
(32:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
Are brown eggs just like better than white eggs? I
feel like we have they don't look as nice though.
I think people just assume they must be either better
for the environment or healthier. Is there anythink through that.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Have you seen the Easter Egger chickens. No, these are
the ones that lay eggs in all different colors, so
like blue and green, white and brown.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
You my stupid cush you get them related them different?
Speaker 1 (33:02):
No? No, they just do it. The one thing I
don't know is like whether one Easter Egger produces like
only green eggs and then another Easter Egger will produce
like only pink ones.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
I thought that the bunny rabbits laid the easter eggs.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Yeah, that's right, Katie, thinking that.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Chickenization, I said that, right. 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?
Speaker 1 (33:31):
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
(33:54):
it gets to interesting questions in business about who should
bear the ultimate costs of 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 and having to deal
(34:15):
with like manure runoff and stuff like that and spoiling
its water systems, but probably Iowa is not.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
The chicken ustry.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
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 are costs, whether it is the risk
(34:53):
borne by the farmers, the risk of disease, and the
risk of environment. It's a mix, right, Like I don't
but I don't pursue the whole project to be like
an anti chicken thing at all.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
No, I want both the people and the chickens to
be happy. That's my version of an ideal culture.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
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 yeah 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 have
(35:32):
another episode 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 what's happening to these animals.
Really showing my true colors on this podcast. No, it
was for several years, and then you know.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I lovets vegetarians.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
I was.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
I was raised vegetarian. I had my first week when
I was age twenty four, when I moved to New York.
I was like, all right, and there's just too much
good for I didn't and I like went straight. I
was like, I tried, uh wait, what was it?
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Do you remember?
Speaker 4 (36:08):
So I ate a piece of sushi, which is a
little weird, just people like I was raw, but it
looked at it peel like. And then a week later
I was like eating steaks a hard launch. Yeah, it's
a hard hard launch. Yeahs were hippo. And so I
was raised vegetarian.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Yeah, I was a vegetarian for like ages eleven to fourteen.
I feel like I stunned my growth. I'm shorter than
both my parents, but anyway, it doesn't matter your podcast, Thanks.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
For coming on, guys, Thanks.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
For having us. That was black.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Yeah, thank you for letting us talk about chicken.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
No one made a chicken sound or a pun yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
No, you made one, pun I did.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
I was very proud of me.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
What did I say?
Speaker 1 (36:44):
I can't remember, but you did make one?
Speaker 2 (36:51):
And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
I'm Matlvi and I'm Katie Greifeld.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
You can find my work by subscribing to the money
Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg dot.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Com, and you can find me on Bloomberg TV every
day on Open Interest between nine to eleven am Eastern.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
We'd love to hear from you. You can send an
email to Moneypot at Bloomberg dot net, ask us a
question and we might answer it on air.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening
right now and leave us a review. It helps more
people find the show.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anamasarakus and Moses
ondem Our.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Theme music was composed by Blake Maples. Special thanks this
week to Carmen Rodriguez.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Brandon Francis Newnim is our executive producer, and.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast. We'll be
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Thanks for listening to The Money Stuff Podcast. If you
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Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hello and welcome to a very special crossover episode of
The Money Stuff slash Odd Lots Podcasts. I'm Matt Levien,
and I write The Money Stuff com for Bloomberg Opinion.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and
an anchor for Bloomberg Television.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
And we have two very special guests in the studio
with us today, Katie.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Their names are Joe Wisenthal and Tracy Alloway. Wow, this
is very exciting.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I like the pause to build suspense, Kate.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I've been told to pause and then say names slowly
for gravitas, so trying it's working.
Speaker 4 (00:44):
It worked, It worked, It worked all right.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
We established in gravitas.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
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 early the second time you've had external guests,
So don't feel any.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
My heart is counted.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Don't feel any anxiety about the guest. Do you remember
how we used to do it, Tracy?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
So it took us a while.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
How are we doing so far? Because I feel like
it's not going super well, it's going fine.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
What are we going to talk about?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
What someone should make it?
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Flu brought us here?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
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 OOH market called pot Lots. This
one was a three part series about chicken, and the
code name for it was squawk Lots, but the actual
name was capitalism, and the idea was you can actually
(02:03):
explain a lot of really interesting themes in the American
economy through the medium of chicken.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
Yeah, you just think from like egg to chicken sandwich,
or egg to chicken tender, or egg to mc nugget.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I mean speak for yourself.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
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
(02:42):
who out 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 is versus Panda express verse 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.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
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 rinses, or you're like,
we need to talk about anti trust.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Chicken.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I actually I'm struggling to remember what the exactmber chickens
in your backyard. 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.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
To actually a love of chickens. Do you mean alive
chickens to hang out with or dead chickens to eat
or both totally different? Both like one then the other.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
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 so 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.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
The one day you kill them.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, it's sad.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
The other thing too. In additioned 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 flew, which unfortunately like is getting headlines again,
(04:22):
we talked to him. We've talked to Samuel Ryans and
analysts 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,
a wholesale Wings went up, they raised the prices aggressively.
When wholesale Wing prices went down, they did not cut
their prices. So we've done a lot of chicken related
(04:43):
content in the past. It's like, oh, why don't we
like put some of this together.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
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 eighty percent of them
we had actually spoken to before, so unknowingly we were
already a chicken podcast.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Yeah, it's like it found you guys.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yes, when you were putting together that list, where was
Ray Dahalia? Are you pretending to not know?
Speaker 4 (05:08):
Now? I feel really dumb.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Because it's like, does he have that huge chicken coop
London guy? Oh?
Speaker 4 (05:16):
What?
Speaker 1 (05:16):
No?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I feel like this is too good to be true.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
It's too good.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
To be true. So what's the urban legend.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Of course, this comes from Ray Dalia, like including on
podcasts and I think on like the Bridgewater website. When
he was working on Wall Street before I started Bridgewater,
he was like doing commodity 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
(05:47):
before they rolled it out nashally, and they were worried
apparently about volatility of chicken prices because they're like, wow,
we can't put chicken nuggets on the menu if the
price is going to go up and down because they
have to it off the menu. Were raised 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're like, can you sell us as? And
(06:11):
Ray Dalio is like, wow, there's not like a liquid
chicken market at the time. This is I think from
the Bridgewater website. He argued that since a full grown
chicken was nothing more than a baby chick plus corn
and soy mail, the price of the grains or the
volatile costs and they could hedge corn and soybean prices
and they could, And so he sold McDonald's a bunch
(06:32):
of cord and saw derivatives and they were able to
roll out the chicken McNugget.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
First of all, I love that Ray Dalio's like chosen
creationist story for himself. His background legend is I helped
invent chicken McNuggets.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
That's a good one.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Secondly, McDonald's did not invent chicken McNuggets, which is something
that we learned from the podcast.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
McDonald's did not invent the chicken nugget, but Ray Dalio
shepherded well chicken McNugget as a menu ad of me.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Of the chicken can I say, I have a carcharian 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
(07:39):
true father.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
I think that financial engineering underrated. Is that moving forward
in the real economy like this he did the financial
engineering behind the chicken. Tracy is shaking her.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Head, Well, you're right. It got to an interesting question
about what drives progress. Is there underlying technology or is
it the.
Speaker 5 (07:54):
Fan first, which came first? The nugget or the financial
engineer and get to bad rap And it turns out
if you need that.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Commercials easy to consume proteins.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Yeah, I take it. I now give the crown director.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
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, and like
the financing people are generally unheralded but well paid.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
And I think Dahlia is managing. Yeah, but this is
Joe's pitch to try to get right on the podcast,
I think to talk about chicken, we.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Should have him on our podcast to talk about you know,
who is the New York Mets manager who claimed to
invent the rap Do you remember that?
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Who is it? You know, the rap sandwich?
Speaker 3 (08:40):
I've heard of it.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
The New York Mets manager in the nineties claim to
have invented the wrap sandwich. I can't remember his name
right now. Anyway, it sort of reminds.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Me have that like claiming to invent the apple pie.
Like if you just say loudly enough, it's probably true.
Can we talk about why wings are the most valutile
part of the chicken? I did not know that. I
would have thought it was, I guess any other part
of the chicken.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
From your podcast. I thought it was that the supply
of chickens is set by the demand for chicken breasts,
and so for chicken breast goes down, the supply of
chickens goes down, and wings do not drive the supply
of chicken. So the wing price is just like thank
you for listening.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
That's exactly it. You learn something the chicken.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
The chicken breast is like the benchmark from which all
the other.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Parts part, and it's like the thing that's most used
and so like essentially if your wings not, you're buying
like a sort of like, yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:34):
I like thie by the way, it's more than the breast.
I think it's like a better it's like the best cut.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Have you guys had chicken feet? 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
women will eat them for skidcare purpose.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Do you just sort of slather it on your face?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
No? No, you eat it, you like nibble on it.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Oh man, you can get it at most dim some
place Chinatown here, So if we ever want to take
a trip and it's actually I really find them quite delicious.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I would love to watch you guys eat that. I'm
not very adventurous myself, but boy do I like being included.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
I have a new puppy, and I get served a
lot of ads for a lot of food products, and
there's definitely like an extremely foot looking chicken foot.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
My hat dried chicken hearts, Like that's a little crunch
of snack.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
You've had some hearts, yeah, I have? Or chicken liver?
Is that something? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Make a Thanksgiving stuffing out of chicken liver.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
It's really good timely.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, we'll provide our recipe for chicken liver Thanksgiving stuffing
after this podcast, can I say so?
Speaker 3 (10:46):
This is a three part series. The part that caught
my ears the most was just like the physicality of
the chicken and how it's changed that the idea that
like a chicken in the nineteen twenties looks so much
different than chicken in the twenty twenties. Like I feel
like I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind,
but this really brought it into stark focus for me,
(11:07):
just how much we've changed chickens.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
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.
(11:30):
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 eighteen fifties 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,
(11:52):
a bunch of other people got into it, and it
sort of became this fad where people were paying like
lots and lots of money to get real exotic.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Chicken, eating them or just breeding.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
They were just breeding them, they were pat game selling
them to other people. 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 evolutions. So the Victorian chicken bubble indirectly influenced our
(12:26):
understanding of evolution.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
This is like how the telecom bubble and then and
then yeah, then because of the we had the evolutionary
theories of Darwin. I didn't know that this didn't come
up to it on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
No, I kind of figure out where to put it.
I saved it for this podcast. Periectically, there's a really
funny book that was written sort of contemporaneously with the
eighteen fifties 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
(13:00):
you would expect, like the south Sea expeditions and railway
stocks and things like that, but then some of them
are shang his and coachins, which are types of chickens.
And then there's one that's labeled female novelists. So I
guess in the eighteen fifties they thought female novelists were
fat too many.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Pipe down, by the way, that was my favorite of
the three. Like every really like the consumer angle. Obviously,
it's fun to talk about the chicken sandwich warris it's interesting,
like the market structure and some of the anti trust
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 and expensive protein. And the
(13:40):
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
the trace you was talking to in a sort of
very tasty bird. Like to me, that's like, that's riveting,
that's exciting. That's progress, right, futures to make it more yeah, right,
(14:01):
and the soybet futures, which of course are crucial, which
we really like. That's the thing we could have done, Like,
because chicken is so good, we could have done episodes
on feed futures. Because chicken is just so inherently connected
to everything else.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
This could have been like a twelve part series easily.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
I think I was gonna say, you've got to get
Raydally on.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, well in a book more Victorian chicken bubble, the
grain market that underpins chicken nuggets.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Wait, I one time with the market structure. Yeah, there's
an episode and 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 Perdue, where they like
the integrators deliver hours old chicks to the farmers. The
(15:02):
farmers take care of them for a couple of weeks,
and then the integrators take them back and turn them
into chicken nuggets.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Why is it like that, 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 an
interesting fact if you don't know, chickens can still be
sent live through the US mail, So you can live
order baby chikes. No, but I don't really want to.
I would rather go to like a local agriculture tractor
(15:30):
and get yeah, exactly. But anyway, so the way it
worked is in the sort of nineteen twenties nineteen thirties,
we started getting these big broiler houses. So people discovered
this is actually one of Joe's favorite stories. The woman
in Delaware.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Well, yeah, there was a woman in Delaware who had
a great names to Seal Long Steal, and she ordered
what she ordered one hundred chickens.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
And ever it was like ten chicks.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
She ordered like ten chicks in the mail and accidentally
ordered a thousand. So she's like, all right, I guess
I'm gonna become.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
A farm that never happens to me.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
No, it doesn't happen to me either. The point about
uber and so then people get into the farming, they're 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
(16:22):
they compete against each other in what's called the tournament system.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
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 what medicines to use, what
kind of food, and so in the eyes of the farmers,
(16:47):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, you're pitted against each other.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
You pitted against each other. There's like a fixed pot
and then each round, you know, some people had the
best chick OUs or 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, which I think some
people still do, but I think we also know it's
(17:30):
big in dushow business, it's not that vision.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, it's sort of like retailers like not there, they're
real estate. It's like it's like weird that like the
capital requirement comes from the you know, individual small farmers
and like these big companies are making the capital investments.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
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 that light, 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
(18:07):
we spoke to had pretty similar complaints.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Right, 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.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
Yeah, that's right, that's right. But you know sometimes like
when Uber is like 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's a cap on one's ability to be sort
of like actually a business owner. The sentence like even
(18:36):
how constrained.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
It is, Oh, you can be a farmer, you can like, yeah, farm,
but it's like no, really, you're just like following their orders.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
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
(19:03):
comes out of agriculture, farmers get like twenty cents. The
other eighty cents is going to someone else, and a
lot of the someone else turns out to be middleman,
like the you know, the distribution networks, the integrators in
some respect the packaging things like that.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
And there's the role of the pricing algorithm setting oh yeah, pitty.
So this is really interesting because we talked to all
these like anti trust experts, et cetera, and they are
like various targets for 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 as the lens to uncover other aspects of the economy,
(19:40):
is can you have tacit price setting systems not via
people getting in a smoke filled room and doing nefarious things,
but via a third party pricing entity that everyone uses
as some agreed upon oracle. And people make this claim
and all kinds of different industries these days. And again
(20:01):
I'm not an anti trust lawyer expert. I don't have
a view on this, but it is certainly one area
that the anti trust focused people are like eager to
sink their chief into.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
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 suggest that that that is
analogous to like, you know, the dj I brought a
case against the real page in the rental business, and
then you talk about they brought a case against acrostats
(20:32):
and the sort of big agriculture.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Business working beneath every antitrust case is a discussion over
whether you're actually breaking the law or it's it's just
good business.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Right. It's wild because it's like, you know, in the
olden days, like you'd get together in a room and
you'd be like, ah, these are our prices, these are
our prices, and you'd like wink or whatever, and yeah,
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, Yeah,
then there is an argument that I'm not really sure
it's true. It seems to be true. Yeah, there's an
argument that that like allows them all creating mechanism. Yeah,
(21:03):
it's a coordinating mechanism. If I know everyone's prices, I
can undercut everyone by a penny and I can gain
market share. And that doesn't seem to be I know.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
The question is in some of these instances, whether you
get penalized or whether Now I don't have any idea.
I do not know whether this ever came up in
the Agristats claim in some of the interests in Agristats.
But isn't one of the arguments, at least in real
page that some of the allegations or that there was
some penalty to landlords who deviated, or that there was
(21:33):
some right.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I don't think it's quite that, But I think that
that real page is both like providing the information and
also providing a prising recommendation, and so real page pushes
those Okay, let's say, but if you're providing pure information,
I think if I have.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
An s P y E. T. If I'm gonna look
at the ticker on the Bloomberg terminal first before I
sell it, right, you'll.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Do market research?
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Yeah, did that actually happen in the old day? Like
people like a smoke filled room?
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Wink?
Speaker 4 (21:58):
Like did that really happen? Or is that just a
metaphor that we use to describe coordinators?
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Are you asking that if you miss there?
Speaker 2 (22:05):
As a lawyer, the most famous cartel is Opek where
they meet in the room, right, And there have been
recent cases, you know, like the FTC is a little
concerned about some like us shell producers go into 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 SEC says yes. It's like a
(22:27):
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 to
the 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 an antidress enforcement.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
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
(23:11):
are doing this. You know, first of all, the incentive
is not necessarily necessarily there to try to get into
a price war. This is the classic like antitrust argument.
If you consolidate companies, then 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, we had avian flu, we had labor shortages,
(23:34):
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
(23:54):
at the same time because of these same like exogenous shocks,
then where are you going to go to get cheap
eggs or chickens.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Check out Beak Capitalism on the Odd Lots podcast feed
wherever you get your podcasts. Do you guys know about
the Georgia dock?
Speaker 1 (24:26):
No like doc like dck. This rings a bell. Actually
I wrote it.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
It was 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 twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen that I used to
refer to as chicken libor. There's a thing an index
called the Georgia doc Index, which was set by a
guy his name was Ardie Schwantz. He worked for the
(24:53):
like Georgia Department of Agriculture or whatever, and he would
call chicken producers every day, every week or whatever and say,
what price you're 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 doc Index. And then
a lot of like chicken supply contracts were set as
(25:14):
like a you.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Know opinion, they were pushing it up so like.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
There were allegations that they were, you know, reporting two
high prices to.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Have another episode for our twelve part series.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
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's working
at Bloomberg actually, and there was like some scrap metal
interdex and it was just like you called there were
like a handful of junk metal yards that you call
(25:49):
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 you
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?
And then what's actually cool is you can read the
(26:09):
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 libar, and so they actually have
a whole set of rules about the collection process. The
addresses basically exactly this question.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I thought you were going to bring up the dog
kill index.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
That's obsession.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
But I don't think anyone is pushing up the price
of that benchmarkard.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
This this is one of our questions at a recent
quiz was like, which of these indexes is actually real?
Which of these terminal indexes? And the one that was
real was the dog kill index. Almost no one got that, right, Yeah,
that's no one believes that that actually exists. You know,
we used to have a Columbia Oh yeah, so it's
(26:57):
basically the number of dogs that die in the possession
of airplanes when they're in air transit. I know. But
speaking of the cob indexes, we used to have a
Columbia kidnapping index too, but I think they discontinued that
once died down a bit some deep lore.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
I do want to talk about the price of eggs more, because, yeah,
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
(27:40):
eggs has been so volatile, bird flu being one of them,
and I'm never quite sure 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.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Uh 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 twenty twenty two 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,
(28:19):
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. Yeah, so you know, cows,
pigs are the really worrying one because pigs have like
a genome that is very similar to humans, and so
(28:40):
the concern is that if it gets into pigs, it'll
mutate into something. That was my prey.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Question, like, at what point personally I need to be
concerned about contracting bird flu.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
In some way When more pigs start getting bird flu
and when it starts mutating.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
Some smart people I know are like anxious.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Yeah, you need a pig mutation index on the Bloomberg terminal.
That would be really worrying.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Gotta 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 thirty thousand chickens in twenty thousand square feet. It
(29:23):
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?
Speaker 1 (29:32):
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.
Joe 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.
(29:56):
I don't know why, but I would walk into these
like giant warehouses, thinking like, oh, this is gonna 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. So, yeah, this is the issue. So
(30:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Speaking on this point, you know, another interesting angle here
is the sort of externalities of industrial what's his name,
Austin Frerik, Yeah, one of the guys, and talk about
the waste water 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
(30:58):
have to take seriously, and one of them is environmental
and what it does to sort of the various water
streams in 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 they're also
(31:18):
the 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 and how
much everyone else's cheap chicken is sort of slow degradation
of the environment around it.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
So depressing we've left these speechless.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Is there like an artistical chicken farming oh ecosystem whereas.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Well, I mean backyard chickens would be one way.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
If you go to a started by like the fanciest
chicken you can find, as it's still from a giant
warehouse or that's actually.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
A good question. I know of one. Again, I'm slightly
obsessed with chickens. I know of one Avian geneticist in
the Northeast who breeds really interesting chickens, and he's sort
of like on a small scale, so maybe they do
except well.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
On a slightly bigger scale. I interviewed the Sea of
Vital Farms last week, and one of their advertising points
is that it's like one hundred and seven 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
(32:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
Are brown eggs just like better than white eggs? I
feel like we have they don't look as nice though.
I think people just assume they must be either better
for the environment or healthier. Is there anythink through that.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Have you seen the Easter Egger chickens. No, these are
the ones that lay eggs in all different colors, so
like blue and green, white and brown.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
You my stupid cush you get them related them different?
Speaker 1 (33:02):
No? No, they just do it. The one thing I
don't know is like whether one Easter Egger produces like
only green eggs and then another Easter Egger will produce
like only pink ones.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
I thought that the bunny rabbits laid the easter eggs.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Yeah, that's right, Katie, thinking that.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Chickenization, I said that, right. 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?
Speaker 1 (33:31):
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
(33:54):
it gets to interesting questions in business about who should
bear the ultimate costs of 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 and having to deal
(34:15):
with like manure runoff and stuff like that and spoiling
its water systems, but probably Iowa is not.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
The chicken ustry.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
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 are costs, whether it is the risk
(34:53):
borne by the farmers, the risk of disease, and the
risk of environment. It's a mix, right, Like I don't
but I don't pursue the whole project to be like
an anti chicken thing at all.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
No, I want both the people and the chickens to
be happy. That's my version of an ideal culture.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
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 yeah 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 have
(35:32):
another episode 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 what's happening to these animals.
Really showing my true colors on this podcast. No, it
was for several years, and then you know.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I lovets vegetarians.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
I was.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
I was raised vegetarian. I had my first week when
I was age twenty four, when I moved to New York.
I was like, all right, and there's just too much
good for I didn't and I like went straight. I
was like, I tried, uh wait, what was it?
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Do you remember?
Speaker 4 (36:08):
So I ate a piece of sushi, which is a
little weird, just people like I was raw, but it
looked at it peel like. And then a week later
I was like eating steaks a hard launch. Yeah, it's
a hard hard launch. Yeahs were hippo. And so I
was raised vegetarian.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Yeah, I was a vegetarian for like ages eleven to fourteen.
I feel like I stunned my growth. I'm shorter than
both my parents, but anyway, it doesn't matter your podcast, Thanks.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
For coming on, guys, Thanks.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
For having us. That was black.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Yeah, thank you for letting us talk about chicken.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
No one made a chicken sound or a pun yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
No, you made one, pun I did.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
I was very proud of me.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
What did I say?
Speaker 1 (36:44):
I can't remember, but you did make one?
Speaker 2 (36:51):
And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
I'm Matlvi and I'm Katie Greifeld.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
You can find my work by subscribing to the money
Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg dot.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Com, and you can find me on Bloomberg TV every
day on Open Interest between nine to eleven am Eastern.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
We'd love to hear from you. You can send an
email to Moneypot at Bloomberg dot net, ask us a
question and we might answer it on air.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening
right now and leave us a review. It helps more
people find the show.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anamasarakus and Moses
ondem Our.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Theme music was composed by Blake Maples. Special thanks this
week to Carmen Rodriguez.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Brandon Francis Newnim is our executive producer, and.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast. We'll be
back next week with Mars Stuff.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Thanks for listening to The Money Stuff Podcast. If you
never want to miss a story. Become a bloomberg dot
com subscriber today. Check out our special intro offer right
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