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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend Edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:26):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. As the labor market remains tight, in many cases,
employers have begun to rethink whether a college degree is
needed to work for them. Google, Delta Airlines, and IBM
have all relaxed requirements so they can open up their
pool of possible candidates. The shift helps employers focus more
(00:47):
on skills and experience, and it's a pathway for some
to hire paying jobs for more and why a higher
education degree is no longer needed in some cases. We'll
speak to Austin Hufford, economics reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
What employers are telling me is that they're both trying
to open up their pools adoplicants to more people because
for you know, there's about seventy million Americans who are
(01:09):
in the workforce but don't have a four year degree,
and so when any of those people see the job
opening and it says four year degree required, they immediately
close it out. And so what these companies tell me
is that they want to encourage more applicants to get
get kind of widened the pool of people who can
apply and eventually hired them if they have the experience
or the skills. Yeah, and we're still seeing a ton
(01:30):
of job opening. So we have ten point seven million
job openings this is coming from September, compared with five
point eight million unemployed. So there's a lot of people
still that they a lot of employers that still need
those jobs. And uh, you know, tell us a little
bit more about kind of what they're scaling back on.
These employers are looking for a little bit more experience,
hopefully to make up that gap. Essentially, the way you
(01:53):
can think about it is there's some jobs in the
economy that definitely require kind of an education, think about
doc's engineers, that sort of thing. And there's some jobs
in the economy that have never really required any sort
of education, maybe retail workers, fast food workers, that sort
of thing. And then in the middle there's just kind
of jobs that really depending on the economy, depending on trends,
(02:16):
sometimes they require a degree and sometimes they don't. And
so what's happening here is there should be sort of
a shift where because of the tight labor market and
also because of some of the concerns around our racial
disparities in the workplace, companies are saying, hey, we want
to try to get rid of some of these educational
requirements so that more people can get these jobs. Tell
(02:38):
me a little bit about what Google is doing, because
they have an online college alternative program that offers training, um,
you know in some top fields. I guess they're so
Google uses it. I guess a hundred and fifty other
companies are using this to hire entry level workers. And
so this is the kind of thing that you know,
some companies are even looking towards, you know, do some
of this stuff. You know, you don't need the four
year degree, we can go with something like this, and
(03:00):
then the rest of it is on the job training.
You know that may be experience from other fields, and
those could be the exact people that they need exactly.
So Google has this program that it says more than
a hundred thousand people in the US have completed, and
it basically is kind of an online certification program that
is very targeted at certain fast growing fields that is
(03:21):
digital marketing, project management, user experience design, and that sort
of thing. And Google says the idea is that this
is an online program that gives you the skills you
need to get an entry level job. And there's been
some funding that's going towards it, and Google has a
hundred and fifty partner companies that are all now using
this certificate as as kind of an entry point, saying, hey,
(03:42):
if you have this Entry i T Certificate from Google,
you're then able to potentially get an entry level job
at some big companies in the US. Now, it still
does seem to pay more to have a degree if
you over the if a four year college degree holder
has more lifetime earnings than somebody without. So let's say
if you only have a high school diploma, you can
(04:04):
earn a lifetime earnings of one point six million. If
you have a bachelor's degree, that jumps up to two
point eight million. But even in the story you spoke
to somebody you know a lot of people right, school
might not just be for them. He spoke to a
woman who got a scholarship, to a woman in computer
science conference. Then later on she transitioned to working for Google.
She's making six six figures right exactly. I spoke to
(04:26):
a number of people who had largely positive experiences who
basically say that maybe college wasn't for them, or maybe
they something happened earlier in their life. A lot of
people talk about the timing issue that for a lot
of people, they basically go to college early one, early
on in your life, and if you kind of miss that,
if you take a little bit longer to kind of
get your life in order, it's really hard to do
(04:47):
that later because later in life, you have more bills,
you might have kids, there's just more stuff going on.
So going back to college just becomes really challenging. And
so what somebody's workers told me is that it remains
a barrier to both getting hired and promoted. But in
this type labor market, companies are becoming more willing to
kind of look past the idea that you don't have
a degree and instead of focus on your experience that
(05:09):
you show their working in other places or your skill set.
One of the biggest examples here is the state of Maryland.
Maryland's governor basically did a program where they're they're kind
of examining all of the jobs in the states, and
they're saying, for public the government jobs, and they're saying,
do these jobs truly require a college degree or don't
they And it's at least so far they say the
(05:29):
program is working. Private companies have a lot a lot
more leeway in what they can do, government entities not
so much. So, Yeah, the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan had
to look into this and see what they could change
from it, and they're saying, so far it seems like
it's kind of a success. The number of state employees
hired without a four year degree jumped for cent for them,
(05:50):
so they're starting to see those numbers turn. I mean,
they're still kind of early in all this, but for them,
it's starting to work out. And and to your point earlier, right,
a lot of times people are saying, well, we're just
passing up people that are good fits for these jobs
because they don't have a four year degree. It's almost
like an instant disqualifier. And they said that they would
get applicants who they had to turn away because they
didn't meet the minimum qualifications. So these are really kind
(06:13):
of more mid level positions like administrators or HR people,
these positions that that are really important, but they don't
have legally required degree requirements. These these aren't doctors or
other types of things. And so what they're doing is
they basically are going through the process of they're examining
undred job qualification job classifications for nearly sixty tho state workers.
(06:36):
And so this is just one state, and Pennsylvania their
new governors also saying they want to do this when
they take over next year. And so it is really
interesting that that this idea might be spreading and that
more and more governments and companies have been going through
a similar process to say, hey, does this job really
require a degree? And if not, what can we do
to kind of incourage more people to apply for it.
(06:57):
Austin Huffard Economics Report at the Law Street Journal, Thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks so much. As
restaurants have been battered by high inflation, they're finally getting
a small reprieve from Chicken. They've been hit with rising
labor and operational costs. Chicken has now begun to drop
in price. The prices for chicken breasts has dropped about
(07:19):
seventy since the first week of June, and during this time,
restaurants have kept up with the promotions to keep people
coming back. For more on how dropping poultry prices will
hopefully be giving you a break soon, we'll speak to
Patrick Thomas, reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Restaurants, I mean,
they've been seeing escalating costs for months. Um, it's not
a year, just the broader inflation and all their costs
(07:41):
have been going up, and chicken kind of minute commodity
cycle had been along with various other meats had been
going through the roof in terms of prices in it. Um,
we've seen the same and other categories to deep pork
really from kind of a variety different factors, you know,
even going all the way back to the kind of
the geopolitical tension when the war Ukraine and grain prices
(08:02):
had skyrocketed and that had been part of the reason.
Going all the way back to the pandemic a couple
of years ago, you saw just kind of this big
demand for many of the proteins, and you had either
workers outsick or you had labor. The kind of the
tight labor market in the last year and a half
really just kind of hurt the supply of chicken. You
(08:24):
had problems employee getting employees into the plants, and the
grain prices and at a time of high demand and
all of those kind of things rose prices. There was
also an added kind of interesting nugget, no pun intended
in chicken, of the hatch of what's called hatch ability.
It's kind of a it's a wonkier thing that's unique
(08:44):
to chicken. And that's well, the kind of the rate
of chicks that are hatched by poultry companies. You know,
you have kind of a certain amount of chicks that
are produced and sent to the farmer, the independent farmers
or the contracted farmers that grow the chicks, and the
companies can pick them back up. For a while, you
had a problem, kind of a wide problem in the
industry of of really hatching enough chicks. Obviously, we heard
(09:04):
a lot about the Avian flu and having to be
called because of that, so we can it wouldn't keep spreading,
But the hatch ability problem was one that I had
not heard of that was a little less known. The
bird flu as, the avian influenza, the technical term, like
it's been been a huge impact of turkey and egg prices.
Chicken has been a little bit different. You've had kind
of this lingering problem that coupled with grain prices and
(09:28):
plant staffing, and the demand had just driven chicken breast prices,
the boneless skinless breast prices kind of the benchmark up
to these astronomical record high prices, and it just it
had like Tyson Food switched breeds to an older breed
of chicken that had used before. You know, these companies
just kind of tweaking what breeds of chickens are using
(09:48):
for broilers, which is the ones that are used for meat,
and the industry had basically over the last couple of
months kind of figured itself out. Companies like Tyson had
been working to increase their amount of words they were
producing to the capacity levels to have, which involves only
hatch ability, but being more efficient the plants improving their
supply chain. Pilgrims have made strides and hatch ability as well.
(10:11):
Kind of the whole industry kind of got itself together
a little bit there. Plants staffing is also improved broadly
with wage increases and more benefits. So anyway, all of
those kind of things combine to take down the price
of chicken. Then that has helped restaurants and has given
them some relief at a time when when other inflation
is some pretty some relief is the critical thing. They're right, Uh,
(10:33):
you know, there's the prices of grain, transportation, labor costs,
all that stuff that you were mentioning that still remains
pretty elevated. So it's just the price of chicken because
supplies have gotten better there, so it's still a pretty
tough time. And you mentioned to an article, you know,
for for these restaurants, they really still haven't stopped promoting chicken.
I mean it's you know, one of the big sellers.
I think promotions of chicken value meal deals were up
(10:54):
a hundred and sixty very recently. So those promotions have
been ongoing. Is you know, we know the chicken sand tours,
things like that. Everybody's still promoting those specific products. You're
absolutely right, Wingstop restaurant brands Popeyes all promoting the new
chicken sandwich and wing deals really trying to keep customers
coming to their restaurants es. I think those promotions are
(11:16):
key during potential economic down term too. I mean, part
of this is you want to keep that demand going
some of the things that the poultry processors were has said,
and one of the reasons that demand is a little flat.
So I think part of this promotion also, you know,
they want to keep promoting these chicken items to keep
the customers coming, and declining commodity chicken prices does give
(11:38):
them a little relief. And they've been telling investors that
that our costs are coming down at at least in
this one area, so that's been good news for them.
Patrick Thomas reported the Wall Street Journal, thank you very
much for joining us. Absolutely, thank you for so much
for having me. Elon Musk's other companies, The Boring Company
(11:59):
has been teasing cities with plans to dig out underground
tunnels to help relieve what he called soul destroying traffic.
So far, they've posed a lot of big ideas, but
rarely followed through after being confronted with the realities of
building public infrastructure. The only place where they've been able
to showcase a finished project has been at one point
six mile loop experience under the Las Vegas Convention Center.
(12:20):
For more and all, this will speak to Ted Man,
reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Back in team when
Musk tweeted something that a lot of people first assumed
was a joke that he was tired of traffic. He
was sitting in traffic in l A, I think, on
the flour oh five and said I'm just going to
get a tunnel boring machine and start digging, And that
joke turned into over the next several years, an actual company,
(12:40):
sort of a spin out from SpaceX one of his
other companies, and what they've been doing is going around
to cities all over the country and saying, if you've
got a traffic problem, we can solve it because we
have come up with a new way to build tunnels
that is faster and cheaper, and we will build you
a tunnel network that has usually they say, autonomous electric
vehicles in it, and that way people can ride around
(13:01):
underground and you won't have any traffic anymore. So we
set out to see if there was any truth to
both of those things, truth to the claim that they
have somehow made a major leap forward in the construction
of tunnels that the rest of the tunnel building industry
has not, and then to see what the things that
they are proposing to build actually eliminate traffic, which is
how they call it solving the soul destroying traffic. I mean,
(13:24):
there's not much evidence for either of those things. In Ontario,
they were planning to build a light rail connector between
the airport and the Rancho Cucamonga metro Link rail station,
and that was going to cost a lot of money,
one to one and a half billion dollars to build
a conventional light rail. And then Boring appeared, the Boring company,
and said, forty five million, will build you a tunnel
and it will have autonomous vehicles zipping back and forth,
(13:46):
and that will be your people mover to get people
to the airport. That is a deal right there, right
It's a pretty big discount right away. The authority went
for it and said that sounds great. They scrapped the
RFP for the light rail line and start been working
with Boring on their design and their concepts. But what
became clear in San Bernardino County is the same thing
(14:06):
that we see happening in cities all over the country
where Boring has appeared and made big claims about things
they could do and ultimately walked away. It happened in Maryland, Chicago,
l A. And that's that as they started to develop
the project, there was sort of evidence that they weren't
quite prepared for all of the permitting and the planning
and the testing and the review that goes into building
(14:27):
something that is so important and complicated and complex. And
then some of the initial promises didn't pan out at all.
For instance, they don't make autonomous vehicles, not even Tesla
doesn't have an autonomous vehicle fleet that they could have used,
so that dropped out of the contract. The price estimates
started to rise that currently sits it around five hundred
million dollars, not forty five. And then when they got
(14:49):
to a perfectly normal state environmental review process part of
the process, Boring dropped up and didn't submit a bid
in the end. And so this has happened a lot
where when the company has a r I have it
in towns and cities, lots of local elected officials are
very excited about what they say they can build, but
there has not been much follow through and there has
been no evidence whatsoever of the revolution that they're claiming
(15:11):
that they have made in how tunneling equipment works. You know,
and that's the tough spot, right, The bureaucratic hurdles are there,
and everybody knows it. Right, you have to clear out permits,
you have to do all sorts of stuff to do it.
And you know, Elon Muska is a visionary in many ways,
and he's even said, hey, the government needs to get
out of the way so we can do all this stuff.
And um, yeah, there's a there's a point there, a
(15:32):
point to be made there. So enter Maryland and Governor
Larry Hogan there. They wanted to get a project going.
They cleared a lot of stuff, they expedited a lot
of things, and like the way you put in the article,
I mean that somebody said, hey, they just need to
show up with the machine and start digging, and then
that didn't even happen. That's right. The Hogan administration got
involved after Musk said he wanted to build a what
(15:53):
he called his concept is called the hyper Loops high
speed vacuum to transportation system between New York and Washington.
That a proposal he got from someone else and has
sort of revived and popularized. And there's never been one
built for commercial use, but he got a lot of
attention because it was the beginning of the Trump administration.
They wanted to do new and different things. He was
a famous rich guy who said he could do it,
(16:14):
and Hogan at the time and still really but at
the time especially was a governor who was campaigning on
being a guy who could solve transportation problems in that state.
So they leaped at it and said, we'll do whatever
you need to do and get going. And so they
went as far as having a groundbreaking where Larry Hogan
was there in front of a sign saying this is happening,
and then nothing else ever came of it. So it's
(16:35):
the situation where the elected officials really leapt at the
notion of doing something new and different and outside the box,
but there wasn't a lot of there there once they
got farther down the road. Yeah, the company started in California,
they moved it to Texas. Now the only real thing
that they can show for and where you know a
lot of these other states and you know minnicipalities everybody's
(16:57):
kind of getting excited about is what they have going
on in Las Vegas. So it's a one point six
while loop experience is what they call it. Under the
Las Vegas Convention Center, and we've seen a bunch of videos,
you know, we've seen celebrities tour it already. This is
the one that they model a lot of the stuff on.
But even that project right what it is now, they've
already contracted with Clark County to build it out even more.
(17:19):
They want to do a thirty four mile loop, a
series of tunnels there. So tell us a little bit
about that. The existing loop, the one and it's the
only one of their projects on which a member of
the public can ride, is the one at the convention
Center in Las Vegas. And we should say that people
who run the convention Center in Las Vegas like this project.
They like the loop. They're proud to show it off.
I visited during a big convention and there were people
(17:41):
lined up to go down the escalators to ride in
the testclaff from one end of the convention center over
to the other. But it's a people mover. As we
noted in the story, the way this thing is permitted,
it's not permitted as public transit. It's an amusement transportation system,
the same thing a roller coaster or a Worlding Tea
cup ride would be permitted with it's a people mover
that works were a convention center. What's not clear at
(18:02):
all is whether that larger system in Las Vegas will
ever be built. The people who are und the convention
center have said they hope that it can be up
and going by the time Vegas hopes the Super Bowl
in four Even if that is true and they have
it up and moving, from what we observed on what
from from what people who have worked at the company
and others who have observed the operation of the loops say,
(18:22):
is this is not a system that's going to move
ninety people. It just is not. It's it's very inefficient
to move people in and out of individual vehicles that
are being driven by humans through two narrow tunnels for
a very short distance. That's just not a way to
move large crowds. Yeah, and there we have seen some
traffic build up in there already, so you know, we'll
see how that keeps going. Despite all these starts and
stops and and what's been happening states cities, all these places,
(18:47):
there's still very much interested in this technology and getting
something going. You're absolutely right that there is still interest
from mayors and council members in various places all over
the country. Fort Lauderdale, North Miami, el where places in
Texas where they see the Las Vegas project. It looks great,
it's fancy and nice, and they go and take a
tour of it, and they think, maybe I could have
(19:08):
something like this in my town. And so it remains
to be seen if Boring can actually deliver on any
of those Ted Man, reporter at the Wall Street Journal,
thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for your time.
Don't forget to join us on social media at Daily
Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook.
Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell
(19:31):
us the stories that you're interested in. Follow us on
I Heard Radio, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Oscar Ramirez and this is the Daily Dive Weekend
edition
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend Edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:26):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. As the labor market remains tight, in many cases,
employers have begun to rethink whether a college degree is
needed to work for them. Google, Delta Airlines, and IBM
have all relaxed requirements so they can open up their
pool of possible candidates. The shift helps employers focus more
(00:47):
on skills and experience, and it's a pathway for some
to hire paying jobs for more and why a higher
education degree is no longer needed in some cases. We'll
speak to Austin Hufford, economics reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
What employers are telling me is that they're both trying
to open up their pools adoplicants to more people because
for you know, there's about seventy million Americans who are
(01:09):
in the workforce but don't have a four year degree,
and so when any of those people see the job
opening and it says four year degree required, they immediately
close it out. And so what these companies tell me
is that they want to encourage more applicants to get
get kind of widened the pool of people who can
apply and eventually hired them if they have the experience
or the skills. Yeah, and we're still seeing a ton
(01:30):
of job opening. So we have ten point seven million
job openings this is coming from September, compared with five
point eight million unemployed. So there's a lot of people
still that they a lot of employers that still need
those jobs. And uh, you know, tell us a little
bit more about kind of what they're scaling back on.
These employers are looking for a little bit more experience,
hopefully to make up that gap. Essentially, the way you
(01:53):
can think about it is there's some jobs in the
economy that definitely require kind of an education, think about
doc's engineers, that sort of thing. And there's some jobs
in the economy that have never really required any sort
of education, maybe retail workers, fast food workers, that sort
of thing. And then in the middle there's just kind
of jobs that really depending on the economy, depending on trends,
(02:16):
sometimes they require a degree and sometimes they don't. And
so what's happening here is there should be sort of
a shift where because of the tight labor market and
also because of some of the concerns around our racial
disparities in the workplace, companies are saying, hey, we want
to try to get rid of some of these educational
requirements so that more people can get these jobs. Tell
(02:38):
me a little bit about what Google is doing, because
they have an online college alternative program that offers training, um,
you know in some top fields. I guess they're so
Google uses it. I guess a hundred and fifty other
companies are using this to hire entry level workers. And
so this is the kind of thing that you know,
some companies are even looking towards, you know, do some
of this stuff. You know, you don't need the four
year degree, we can go with something like this, and
(03:00):
then the rest of it is on the job training.
You know that may be experience from other fields, and
those could be the exact people that they need exactly.
So Google has this program that it says more than
a hundred thousand people in the US have completed, and
it basically is kind of an online certification program that
is very targeted at certain fast growing fields that is
(03:21):
digital marketing, project management, user experience design, and that sort
of thing. And Google says the idea is that this
is an online program that gives you the skills you
need to get an entry level job. And there's been
some funding that's going towards it, and Google has a
hundred and fifty partner companies that are all now using
this certificate as as kind of an entry point, saying, hey,
(03:42):
if you have this Entry i T Certificate from Google,
you're then able to potentially get an entry level job
at some big companies in the US. Now, it still
does seem to pay more to have a degree if
you over the if a four year college degree holder
has more lifetime earnings than somebody without. So let's say
if you only have a high school diploma, you can
(04:04):
earn a lifetime earnings of one point six million. If
you have a bachelor's degree, that jumps up to two
point eight million. But even in the story you spoke
to somebody you know a lot of people right, school
might not just be for them. He spoke to a
woman who got a scholarship, to a woman in computer
science conference. Then later on she transitioned to working for Google.
She's making six six figures right exactly. I spoke to
(04:26):
a number of people who had largely positive experiences who
basically say that maybe college wasn't for them, or maybe
they something happened earlier in their life. A lot of
people talk about the timing issue that for a lot
of people, they basically go to college early one, early
on in your life, and if you kind of miss that,
if you take a little bit longer to kind of
get your life in order, it's really hard to do
(04:47):
that later because later in life, you have more bills,
you might have kids, there's just more stuff going on.
So going back to college just becomes really challenging. And
so what somebody's workers told me is that it remains
a barrier to both getting hired and promoted. But in
this type labor market, companies are becoming more willing to
kind of look past the idea that you don't have
a degree and instead of focus on your experience that
(05:09):
you show their working in other places or your skill set.
One of the biggest examples here is the state of Maryland.
Maryland's governor basically did a program where they're they're kind
of examining all of the jobs in the states, and
they're saying, for public the government jobs, and they're saying,
do these jobs truly require a college degree or don't
they And it's at least so far they say the
(05:29):
program is working. Private companies have a lot a lot
more leeway in what they can do, government entities not
so much. So, Yeah, the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan had
to look into this and see what they could change
from it, and they're saying, so far it seems like
it's kind of a success. The number of state employees
hired without a four year degree jumped for cent for them,
(05:50):
so they're starting to see those numbers turn. I mean,
they're still kind of early in all this, but for them,
it's starting to work out. And and to your point earlier, right,
a lot of times people are saying, well, we're just
passing up people that are good fits for these jobs
because they don't have a four year degree. It's almost
like an instant disqualifier. And they said that they would
get applicants who they had to turn away because they
didn't meet the minimum qualifications. So these are really kind
(06:13):
of more mid level positions like administrators or HR people,
these positions that that are really important, but they don't
have legally required degree requirements. These these aren't doctors or
other types of things. And so what they're doing is
they basically are going through the process of they're examining
undred job qualification job classifications for nearly sixty tho state workers.
(06:36):
And so this is just one state, and Pennsylvania their
new governors also saying they want to do this when
they take over next year. And so it is really
interesting that that this idea might be spreading and that
more and more governments and companies have been going through
a similar process to say, hey, does this job really
require a degree? And if not, what can we do
to kind of incourage more people to apply for it.
(06:57):
Austin Huffard Economics Report at the Law Street Journal, Thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks so much. As
restaurants have been battered by high inflation, they're finally getting
a small reprieve from Chicken. They've been hit with rising
labor and operational costs. Chicken has now begun to drop
in price. The prices for chicken breasts has dropped about
(07:19):
seventy since the first week of June, and during this time,
restaurants have kept up with the promotions to keep people
coming back. For more on how dropping poultry prices will
hopefully be giving you a break soon, we'll speak to
Patrick Thomas, reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Restaurants, I mean,
they've been seeing escalating costs for months. Um, it's not
a year, just the broader inflation and all their costs
(07:41):
have been going up, and chicken kind of minute commodity
cycle had been along with various other meats had been
going through the roof in terms of prices in it. Um,
we've seen the same and other categories to deep pork
really from kind of a variety different factors, you know,
even going all the way back to the kind of
the geopolitical tension when the war Ukraine and grain prices
(08:02):
had skyrocketed and that had been part of the reason.
Going all the way back to the pandemic a couple
of years ago, you saw just kind of this big
demand for many of the proteins, and you had either
workers outsick or you had labor. The kind of the
tight labor market in the last year and a half
really just kind of hurt the supply of chicken. You
(08:24):
had problems employee getting employees into the plants, and the
grain prices and at a time of high demand and
all of those kind of things rose prices. There was
also an added kind of interesting nugget, no pun intended
in chicken, of the hatch of what's called hatch ability.
It's kind of a it's a wonkier thing that's unique
(08:44):
to chicken. And that's well, the kind of the rate
of chicks that are hatched by poultry companies. You know,
you have kind of a certain amount of chicks that
are produced and sent to the farmer, the independent farmers
or the contracted farmers that grow the chicks, and the
companies can pick them back up. For a while, you
had a problem, kind of a wide problem in the
industry of of really hatching enough chicks. Obviously, we heard
(09:04):
a lot about the Avian flu and having to be
called because of that, so we can it wouldn't keep spreading,
But the hatch ability problem was one that I had
not heard of that was a little less known. The
bird flu as, the avian influenza, the technical term, like
it's been been a huge impact of turkey and egg prices.
Chicken has been a little bit different. You've had kind
of this lingering problem that coupled with grain prices and
(09:28):
plant staffing, and the demand had just driven chicken breast prices,
the boneless skinless breast prices kind of the benchmark up
to these astronomical record high prices, and it just it
had like Tyson Food switched breeds to an older breed
of chicken that had used before. You know, these companies
just kind of tweaking what breeds of chickens are using
(09:48):
for broilers, which is the ones that are used for meat,
and the industry had basically over the last couple of
months kind of figured itself out. Companies like Tyson had
been working to increase their amount of words they were
producing to the capacity levels to have, which involves only
hatch ability, but being more efficient the plants improving their
supply chain. Pilgrims have made strides and hatch ability as well.
(10:11):
Kind of the whole industry kind of got itself together
a little bit there. Plants staffing is also improved broadly
with wage increases and more benefits. So anyway, all of
those kind of things combine to take down the price
of chicken. Then that has helped restaurants and has given
them some relief at a time when when other inflation
is some pretty some relief is the critical thing. They're right, Uh,
(10:33):
you know, there's the prices of grain, transportation, labor costs,
all that stuff that you were mentioning that still remains
pretty elevated. So it's just the price of chicken because
supplies have gotten better there, so it's still a pretty
tough time. And you mentioned to an article, you know,
for for these restaurants, they really still haven't stopped promoting chicken.
I mean it's you know, one of the big sellers.
I think promotions of chicken value meal deals were up
(10:54):
a hundred and sixty very recently. So those promotions have
been ongoing. Is you know, we know the chicken sand tours,
things like that. Everybody's still promoting those specific products. You're
absolutely right, Wingstop restaurant brands Popeyes all promoting the new
chicken sandwich and wing deals really trying to keep customers
coming to their restaurants es. I think those promotions are
(11:16):
key during potential economic down term too. I mean, part
of this is you want to keep that demand going
some of the things that the poultry processors were has said,
and one of the reasons that demand is a little flat.
So I think part of this promotion also, you know,
they want to keep promoting these chicken items to keep
the customers coming, and declining commodity chicken prices does give
(11:38):
them a little relief. And they've been telling investors that
that our costs are coming down at at least in
this one area, so that's been good news for them.
Patrick Thomas reported the Wall Street Journal, thank you very
much for joining us. Absolutely, thank you for so much
for having me. Elon Musk's other companies, The Boring Company
(11:59):
has been teasing cities with plans to dig out underground
tunnels to help relieve what he called soul destroying traffic.
So far, they've posed a lot of big ideas, but
rarely followed through after being confronted with the realities of
building public infrastructure. The only place where they've been able
to showcase a finished project has been at one point
six mile loop experience under the Las Vegas Convention Center.
(12:20):
For more and all, this will speak to Ted Man,
reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Back in team when
Musk tweeted something that a lot of people first assumed
was a joke that he was tired of traffic. He
was sitting in traffic in l A, I think, on
the flour oh five and said I'm just going to
get a tunnel boring machine and start digging, And that
joke turned into over the next several years, an actual company,
(12:40):
sort of a spin out from SpaceX one of his
other companies, and what they've been doing is going around
to cities all over the country and saying, if you've
got a traffic problem, we can solve it because we
have come up with a new way to build tunnels
that is faster and cheaper, and we will build you
a tunnel network that has usually they say, autonomous electric
vehicles in it, and that way people can ride around
(13:01):
underground and you won't have any traffic anymore. So we
set out to see if there was any truth to
both of those things, truth to the claim that they
have somehow made a major leap forward in the construction
of tunnels that the rest of the tunnel building industry
has not, and then to see what the things that
they are proposing to build actually eliminate traffic, which is
how they call it solving the soul destroying traffic. I mean,
(13:24):
there's not much evidence for either of those things. In Ontario,
they were planning to build a light rail connector between
the airport and the Rancho Cucamonga metro Link rail station,
and that was going to cost a lot of money,
one to one and a half billion dollars to build
a conventional light rail. And then Boring appeared, the Boring company,
and said, forty five million, will build you a tunnel
and it will have autonomous vehicles zipping back and forth,
(13:46):
and that will be your people mover to get people
to the airport. That is a deal right there, right
It's a pretty big discount right away. The authority went
for it and said that sounds great. They scrapped the
RFP for the light rail line and start been working
with Boring on their design and their concepts. But what
became clear in San Bernardino County is the same thing
(14:06):
that we see happening in cities all over the country
where Boring has appeared and made big claims about things
they could do and ultimately walked away. It happened in Maryland, Chicago,
l A. And that's that as they started to develop
the project, there was sort of evidence that they weren't
quite prepared for all of the permitting and the planning
and the testing and the review that goes into building
(14:27):
something that is so important and complicated and complex. And
then some of the initial promises didn't pan out at all.
For instance, they don't make autonomous vehicles, not even Tesla
doesn't have an autonomous vehicle fleet that they could have used,
so that dropped out of the contract. The price estimates
started to rise that currently sits it around five hundred
million dollars, not forty five. And then when they got
(14:49):
to a perfectly normal state environmental review process part of
the process, Boring dropped up and didn't submit a bid
in the end. And so this has happened a lot
where when the company has a r I have it
in towns and cities, lots of local elected officials are
very excited about what they say they can build, but
there has not been much follow through and there has
been no evidence whatsoever of the revolution that they're claiming
(15:11):
that they have made in how tunneling equipment works. You know,
and that's the tough spot, right, The bureaucratic hurdles are there,
and everybody knows it. Right, you have to clear out permits,
you have to do all sorts of stuff to do it.
And you know, Elon Muska is a visionary in many ways,
and he's even said, hey, the government needs to get
out of the way so we can do all this stuff.
And um, yeah, there's a there's a point there, a
(15:32):
point to be made there. So enter Maryland and Governor
Larry Hogan there. They wanted to get a project going.
They cleared a lot of stuff, they expedited a lot
of things, and like the way you put in the article,
I mean that somebody said, hey, they just need to
show up with the machine and start digging, and then
that didn't even happen. That's right. The Hogan administration got
involved after Musk said he wanted to build a what
(15:53):
he called his concept is called the hyper Loops high
speed vacuum to transportation system between New York and Washington.
That a proposal he got from someone else and has
sort of revived and popularized. And there's never been one
built for commercial use, but he got a lot of
attention because it was the beginning of the Trump administration.
They wanted to do new and different things. He was
a famous rich guy who said he could do it,
(16:14):
and Hogan at the time and still really but at
the time especially was a governor who was campaigning on
being a guy who could solve transportation problems in that state.
So they leaped at it and said, we'll do whatever
you need to do and get going. And so they
went as far as having a groundbreaking where Larry Hogan
was there in front of a sign saying this is happening,
and then nothing else ever came of it. So it's
(16:35):
the situation where the elected officials really leapt at the
notion of doing something new and different and outside the box,
but there wasn't a lot of there there once they
got farther down the road. Yeah, the company started in California,
they moved it to Texas. Now the only real thing
that they can show for and where you know a
lot of these other states and you know minnicipalities everybody's
(16:57):
kind of getting excited about is what they have going
on in Las Vegas. So it's a one point six
while loop experience is what they call it. Under the
Las Vegas Convention Center, and we've seen a bunch of videos,
you know, we've seen celebrities tour it already. This is
the one that they model a lot of the stuff on.
But even that project right what it is now, they've
already contracted with Clark County to build it out even more.
(17:19):
They want to do a thirty four mile loop, a
series of tunnels there. So tell us a little bit
about that. The existing loop, the one and it's the
only one of their projects on which a member of
the public can ride, is the one at the convention
Center in Las Vegas. And we should say that people
who run the convention Center in Las Vegas like this project.
They like the loop. They're proud to show it off.
I visited during a big convention and there were people
(17:41):
lined up to go down the escalators to ride in
the testclaff from one end of the convention center over
to the other. But it's a people mover. As we
noted in the story, the way this thing is permitted,
it's not permitted as public transit. It's an amusement transportation system,
the same thing a roller coaster or a Worlding Tea
cup ride would be permitted with it's a people mover
that works were a convention center. What's not clear at
(18:02):
all is whether that larger system in Las Vegas will
ever be built. The people who are und the convention
center have said they hope that it can be up
and going by the time Vegas hopes the Super Bowl
in four Even if that is true and they have
it up and moving, from what we observed on what
from from what people who have worked at the company
and others who have observed the operation of the loops say,
(18:22):
is this is not a system that's going to move
ninety people. It just is not. It's it's very inefficient
to move people in and out of individual vehicles that
are being driven by humans through two narrow tunnels for
a very short distance. That's just not a way to
move large crowds. Yeah, and there we have seen some
traffic build up in there already, so you know, we'll
see how that keeps going. Despite all these starts and
stops and and what's been happening states cities, all these places,
(18:47):
there's still very much interested in this technology and getting
something going. You're absolutely right that there is still interest
from mayors and council members in various places all over
the country. Fort Lauderdale, North Miami, el where places in
Texas where they see the Las Vegas project. It looks great,
it's fancy and nice, and they go and take a
tour of it, and they think, maybe I could have
(19:08):
something like this in my town. And so it remains
to be seen if Boring can actually deliver on any
of those Ted Man, reporter at the Wall Street Journal,
thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for your time.
Don't forget to join us on social media at Daily
Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook.
Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell
(19:31):
us the stories that you're interested in. Follow us on
I Heard Radio, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Oscar Ramirez and this is the Daily Dive Weekend
edition
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