Normalize Venison

Summary

Slate Money Podcast Summary

Episode Title: Normalize Venison
Date: July 17, 2021
Hosts: Felix Salmon (Axios), Emily Peck (Fundrise), Stacey Marie Ishmael

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Overview

In this energetic and food-centric in-person episode of Slate Money, the hosts dive into the latest business and finance news with a focus on inflation, the chip shortage’s effect on car prices, food price dynamics (including a passionate plea to "normalize venison"), and Netflix’s foray into the gaming world. The conversation spans from serious macroeconomic concerns to humorous personal anecdotes and quirky observations about food trends and urban deer. The show ends with their signature "numbers round," delivering surprising statistics and offbeat stories.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Inflation Realities and Perceptions

[00:44–14:48]

• Is the inflation spike cause for panic?

  • Emily’s take: “Everybody needs to calm down. It’s one month.” [02:33]
  • Much of the June inflation was driven by used and new car prices—roughly half, due to ongoing supply chain and chip shortages.
  • Felix: “It is the highest it’s been in a while...and it has got a lot of people worried.” [01:45]
  • Emily highlights the pandemic’s impact on supply chains, emphasizing this is not a long-term macroeconomic problem but an adjustment period.

• Why are car prices so high?

  • Used car prices are spiking due to chip shortages, which had causes ranging from a fire in a Japanese chip plant to the Texas ice storm.
  • “Some cars have 1,400 separate computer chips in them!” — Felix [04:10]
  • Automakers are triaging scarce chips to expensive models or shipping cars without certain high-tech features.

• Should the Fed act?

  • Felix points out the logical leap: “The reason why people get very upset whenever anyone mentions inflation is because the logical inference...is, oh, well, in that case the Fed has to hike rates.” [06:17]
  • Stacey observes the rhetoric among economists is shaped by worries of premature intervention: "There's an overcorrection...some dismissal of the reality of inflation." [06:17]

• Psychology and policy:

  • Emily warns, “Not freaking out around inflation is really important because if everyone does start to freak out...there will be inflation.” [06:59]
  • Felix notes two arguments: Inflation expectations can be good (stimulating economic activity), or they can be self-fulfilling and spiral, as feared in “the 1970s argument.” [07:24]
  • “Since the early '80s...this kind of self-fulfilling inflation expectations, vicious circle has never been seen in any rich country anywhere on the planet.” — Felix [08:57]

• Unions, workers, and the 1970s comparison

  • Emily references EPI research showing that worker bargaining power (via unions) enabled wage-price spiral dynamics in the 1970s era, which is not the case today.
  • “Workers really don’t have that power anymore...their backs have been broken by the Reagan’s and the who what’s and the Larry Summers.” — Emily [09:30]

• Food inflation: personal baskets and culture

  • Stacey shares, “One of my favorite examples is like, oxtail...it’s been columbused.” [10:39]
  • She tracks personal food inflation, noting the sharp rise in vending machine snack prices and how trendy foods spike and sometimes normalize at higher price levels.
  • “When the Austin hipsters discover a food, it goes up in price.” — Felix [12:27]
  • Core inflation strips out food and energy prices due to their volatility.

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2. The Plea to ‘Normalize Venison’

[14:48–22:01]

• The deer problem:

  • “Too many deer. They are pests. They are rats on legs!...They cause Lyme disease. They’re the deadliest animal in America, even if you don’t include Lyme disease, just from, like, car crashes.” — Felix [15:01]
  • Emily adds a personal story: “This morning, I went for a jog, and I ran into at least five deer, possibly more.” [15:43]
  • There's an overpopulation of deer, damaging local ecosystems, gardens, and songbird habitats.

• Why don’t we eat the deer?

  • The US bans the sale of wild game, so venison in restaurants comes from farmed deer.
  • Felix is baffled: “This is a solved problem. The only unsolved bit of the problem is this bizarre rule...You can’t sell game.” [17:53]
  • Stacey asks about legal workarounds and wonders who lobbies against wild venison sales: “Could that...infringe the spirit of the law?” [18:29]
  • Felix suggests: “Just normalize venison because there is not nearly enough of this really delicious, low fat, nutritious, fantastic meat in this country.” [19:44]
  • The group wonders if listeners will write in with counter-arguments, and Felix notes pushback typically comes from concerns about prion diseases and people blaming cars rather than deer for their deadliness.
  • Humor and mild horror emerge with anecdotes about creepy deer and (jokingly) possible campaigns for eating pigeons: “Do not come back here next week and make the case for eating pigeons.” — Emily [21:32]

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3. Netflix’s Gaming Ambitions

[22:02–33:42]

• Netflix’s new strategy:

  • Stacey introduces the topic: “Netflix is getting into video games.”
  • Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO) famously said Netflix’s biggest competitor is “Fortnite”—and even “sleep.” [22:09, 26:54]
  • Netflix aims to expand into gaming to compete for user attention, plugging into broader trends of digital stickiness (gaming as a way to keep subscribers within the ecosystem).

• Big market, tough execution:

  • Other tech giants have struggled with similar moves: Google’s Stadia, Apple Arcade, and Amazon’s less successful efforts.
  • “The big question...Netflix is an app in the Apple App Store, and Apple is famously very strict about video games...You cannot have a mini games app store within the App Store.” — Felix [23:45]
  • Stacey proposes Netflix might offer games as individual apps requiring a Netflix login.
  • The “killer feature” is cross-platform interoperability, as seen in Fortnite. Netflix needs games to run on everything from TVs to phones to PCs.
  • “It makes all the sense in the world that if Netflix goes down this route, then they’re going to want people to be able to play games together across different devices.” — Felix [26:54]

• Is Netflix likely to succeed?

  • Emily: “Unlike a TV show...a game, you can play it for a long time. You can get really into it.” [27:13]
  • Stacey notes the technical, licensing, and platform challenges are formidable: “From licensing, the IP, the development timelines...there’s a whole bunch of devil and a whole bunch of details.” [29:11]
  • Felix is skeptical: “I think they are going to try and I think they’re going to fail.” [29:08]
  • Stacey agrees: “Video games are hard as hell.” [31:04]
  • Emily is more open-ended: “I have high expectations. I think they could do it, sure.” [31:16]

• Gamification and media:

  • The group discusses how even non-game applications (like Duolingo, NYT puzzles, and TikTok) use game mechanics to boost engagement.
  • “Everything is a game right now.” — Felix [28:30]
  • Stacey: “Video games have figured out how to keep your attention on a completely fantastical, zero stakes set of tasks to such an extent that you are willing to pay real world money...” [33:15]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On inflation panic:

  • “Since the early '80s...this kind of self-fulfilling inflation expectations, vicious circle has never been seen in any rich country anywhere on the planet.” — Felix [08:57]

• On food price increases:

  • “One of my favorite examples is like, oxtail… it’s been columbused.” — Stacey [10:39]
  • “When the Austin hipsters discover a food, it goes up in price.” — Felix [12:27]

• On deer overpopulation and venison:

  • “Too many deer. They are pests. They are rats on legs!...They cause Lyme disease. They're the deadliest animal in America.” — Felix [15:01]
  • “Do not come back here next week and make the case for eating pigeons.” — Emily [21:32]

• On Netflix and games:

  • “I think they are going to try and I think they're going to fail.” — Felix [29:08]
  • “Video games are hard as hell.” — Stacey [31:04]

• On gamification:

  • “Everything is a game right now. You know, I mean, Duolingo is a game.” — Felix [28:30]
  • “Video games have figured out how to keep your attention...to such an extent that you are willing to pay real world money to better achieve those tasks for absolutely meaningless awards and streaks and other things like that.” — Stacey [33:15]

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Numbers Round

[33:42–39:55]

• Stacey: “926,000” – French people who booked their first dose of the vaccine after being told they'd need one for cafes and shops. “We’re living through a nightmare set of social experiments about nudges...” [33:45]
• Felix: “$11.7 million” – Average price for a single-family home in Palm Beach in Q2 2021; only 25 homes are for sale there. [35:28]
• Emily: “158” – Bowling balls found under a Michigan man’s staircase, relics from a defunct local factory. [38:01]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:44–14:48: Inflation deep dive: causes, implications, and why panic isn’t warranted
• 14:48–22:01: Deer overpopulation & the campaign to eat wild venison
• 22:02–33:42: Netflix moves into gaming; tech/gaming industry challenges
• 33:42–39:55: Numbers round – French vaccines, Palm Beach real estate, the bowling ball saga

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Tone & Style

The conversation is witty, irreverent, and full of banter, with a sharp blend of economic insight, skepticism, and humor. Food and personal stories add a grounded, accessible layer to the finance-heavy topics. The episode’s running joke—Felix’s campaign to have Americans eat local deer to tame both their numbers and food prices—makes for particularly memorable and amusing radio.

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For Further Listening

• Slate Plus segment: French pastry deep dive (almond croissants, pain au chocolat)
• Listener question: “What’s more fun to do badly than well?” — Write to [e-mail] with your thoughts.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to the normalized venison episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck of Fundrise.

[B]

Hello.

[A]

We're here with Stacey Marie Ishmael.

[C]

No affiliation. Hello.

[A]

And when I say we are here, I mean we are literally here, physically here. We can touch each other.

[C]

Not that we have, but we could.

[A]

It's a very exciting in person episode. Stacey is in New York City. We are all in Brooklyn. We are recording the show, which is why we sound so good. Many thanks to June Thomas for making that happen. We are going to talk about all manner of types of inflation. Inflation is a big topic right now in the econoblogacy such a thing exists anymore. So we're going to talk about inflation. We're going to talk about a little bit about cars, a lot about food. We're going to talk about one food in particular, which is venison. We are going to talk about video games and whether Netflix is going to be able to successfully get into such things. We have a whole Slate plus segment on French pastry.

[C]

Correct.

[A]

Stacy is going to drop some incredible knowledge about almond croissants, which you need to basically subscribe to Slate plus for that alone. You can do that for a dollar. It's awesome. Introductory rates. We love them. All of that and more coming up on Slate Money. So let's start with inflation, because we now have what the finance folks would call a five handle.

[C]

Oh, no.

[A]

If you look at a basket of consumer prices, it turns out that the stuff in that basket is more than 5 more expensive than it was a year ago. And there are lots of caveats and asterisks we can apply to that number, but it is the highest it's been in a while, in quite a long time. And it is also higher than most people were expecting. And it has got a lot of people worried. And so we should talk about whether they should be worried or is this merely a temporary blip? And if it is a temporary blip, what does temporary mean? We had a long conversation in the Axios Slack about the meaning of the word transient or temporary. And people, no one can seem to understand what that means. Emily, what's your view?

[B]

Okay, my view is that everybody needs to calm down. It's one month.

[C]

It's one month.

[A]

It'S been like two or three months.

[B]

All right, guys. My other mystery from that, the other thing is that coming out of the pandemic, it's a very weird Time. And it's continues to be a weird time. We haven't settled from weird into a new normal yet. I think cars is the best example.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Used car prices are still really high and really I think pushed up the number that was reported this week.

[A]

Yeah. Roughly half of the monthly inflation in June was due to cars.

[B]

Yeah. So let's not go crazy and raise interest rates because used cars and regular cars are more expensive. Because automakers and chip makers, which remember are like the problem here, are gonna figure it out at some point. And this isn't a macroeconomic problem. The fact that the car supply chain is all messed up. This is because the pandemic happened and automakers didn't respond in the way that would have made sense only in hindsight, like they didn't know. Right.

[C]

That this was.

[B]

People were gonna wanna buy lots of stuff with chips.

[A]

And that was that. And there was also the fact that there was a massive fire and a chip making factory in Japan. There was actually Stacy's favorite ice storm in Texas caused a huge problem. Because these are not high tech chips that we're. Some of them are high tech chips. The vast majority of them are very low tech chips. They're what's known as trailing edge chips, which chip manufacturers don't have a lot of interest in. Investing a lot of money in manufacturing facilities for 40 nanometer chips which they're not even going to be making much of in the future. So there's a bunch of reason why the chips shortage is probably going to be around for a while. My favorite fact I have to drop this in here is that some cars have 1,400 separate computer chips in them. It's not like you build a car and then you plug in the chip and then it works. There are so many. Which actually makes sense when you think about it because like if the chip goes skewif which we all have electronics and we know what happens when they go.

[B]

Is that an English thing? Is that what they say in England?

[C]

Is that because I used mmhmm last week, you suck. The ASMR podcast.

[B]

What is that?

[A]

If the chip breaks, then like, you know, if it's a chip that is in charge of the left rear window going up and down, then the worst thing that happens is the left rear window stops going up and down. If it's one chip governing the entire car, then that's much more of a problem. So you want lots of chips. But it does make this chip problem more complex a bit bigger.

[B]

Although some automakers are now leaving chips out and going back to manual. A couple, there's a few examples that I can't, I didn't write down. You can't see what they.

[A]

There's some automakers like shipping cars without some of the high tech features. Other automakers basically just pushing the few chips they can get into their really high end cars, which means that no one's making the cheaper cars anymore. There's a bunch of workarounds. We're hoping that it will get better in the second half of the year, but according to Volkswagen, it probably won't.

[B]

But the main point is that we shouldn't freak out about inflation broadly because there's a problem with cars specifically.

[A]

So you said something really interesting earlier. You said like, we shouldn't start raising interest rates just because, blah, blah, blah. And so I think this is the subtext to the inflation freakout thing. No one is actually saying, oh my God, inflation's so bad we should hike rates right now. That's a little bit of a straw man, but it is. The reason why people get very upset whenever anyone mentions inflation is because the logical inference of if there's inflation is, oh, well, in that case the Fed has to hike rates.

[C]

Right? And you can definitely see this sort of in the rhetoric among economists themselves where there's, oh God, Larry Summers is going to come out and say something again, Felix's favorite person. But I also think that then extends into, in fairness, some dismissal of the reality of inflation. Right? There's an overcorrection of we don't want to freak out because then someone at the Fed is going to be like, oh, inflation people, it's a problem for people. But simultaneously, I think we can acknowledge that if you are in the market for a car, your cost of living has significantly increased in the way that it would not have been true if you were trying to do that two years ago.

[B]

I would say though, that not freaking out around inflation is really important because if everyone does start to freak out about inflation, there will be inflation. Like if everyone's like, oh my God.

[A]

So this is, I want to, prices.

[B]

Are going up, I got to go buy a car right now because soon they'll be even more expensive, blah, blah, blah. Then there's more demand for stuff because people are afraid it's going to get even more expensive. That's the way the argument goes, right?

[A]

So there's two different versions of this argument, right? One is inflation expectations are actually a good thing because they cause people to buy now instead of tomorrow. And if people are front loading their purchases today that means you get more economic activity today, you get faster GDP growth today you get the opposite of Japan and you get a bunch of people contributing to the economy to the maximum they can. And that's great for the economy. The flip side of the argument about why inflation expectations are bad is this idea that they become self fulfilling and everyone's well if I'm going to be raising my prices tomorrow, I may as well raise my prices today. And then you wind up getting inflation that is literally caused by inflation expectations. And this is what I call the 1970s argument. Everyone's like if we have inflation we're going to go back to the 1970s and it's going to be the 1970s all over again. And for those of you who are bad at maths, the 1970s are 50 years ago. We are not in the 1970s. And I'm honestly sick and tired. And I think actually Robin Sloan made this point a few weeks ago. Really? Well, if someone is just using 1970s as a boogeyman, they're not actually being serious about inflation. And basically since the early 80s this kind of self fulfilling inflation expectations vicious circle has never been seen in any rich country anywhere on the planet.

[B]

Right. I'll give you one more thing to tell me I'm wrong about, which is I was reading a post from an EPI economist and one of the points he made about the 1970s inflationary cycle, blah blah blah, was that workers used to have power. They used to see workers used to play a role in inflation because prices will go up and workers with actual power boggles the mind would be like give me a raise, prices are going up and companies would be like okay, here's a raise. Then they would raise prices.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Then they would ask for more money. And then that's what happened. Since then, 50 years ago, as you've pointed out, workers have lost all their power. Workers backs have been broken by the Reagan's and the who what's and the Larry Summers. I don't know, I just like to say him as a bogeyman.

[A]

But I mean if in doubt like.

[B]

Just wheel out Larry Summers, Larry Summers, blah blah blah. But anyway, workers really don't have that power anymore. So the true reason for that 70s.

[A]

Inflation is like, and when we say workers we specifically mean unions and we specifically mean unions who are negotiating union contracts on a one year or two year basis. Looking forwards and saying like over the next two years we expect there's going to be a bunch of inflation. So you need to pay us more money now in order to make up for the fact that there's going to be inflation in the future. And even if more people are slowly unionizing now and workers have slightly more power now than they did a few months ago because there's a worker shortage and stuff, literally. This is not an argument that anyone is making.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

So let's not.

[B]

And I mean, are you guys seeing prices go up for things you buy?

[C]

One of my favorite examples is like, oxtail.

[A]

This is going to be a very food heavy show. Just warning you here.

[C]

So where I grew up, oxtail is. It's a delicious. First of all, oxtail is delicious. Second of all, it's been columbused. And so a few years ago, you know, it's just the idea of, you know, Caribbean brown, black people are like, oxtail is great. It's amazing. And then suddenly, like food bloggers and bon appetit are like, ah, oxtail. Have you heard Columbus? It's the same thing that happened to ghee when Whole Foods started selling ghee. They're like, here's this ghee is going to cost you $8.99. And you go to Patel Brothers and like, are you out of your mind? So I have been actually actively monitoring of oxtail and my own personal basket of goods that includes what I would consider to be various types of staples that are cooked by the kinds of people who are not reading Bon appetit necessarily. And I have definitely noticed, I'd say food price inflation over the past couple of years, going into the pandemic, certainly, but after. And one of the weirder things that I saw in the inflation coverage is that where there's been the biggest spike in food price inflation is vending machines.

[A]

Right.

[C]

That the cost of a Snickers bar in a vending machine has like increased significantly, partly because of supply chain madness, but also a bunch of people going back to offices. Amazing. And it's like restocking and everything else. And so I'm always fascinated. I do think, Emily, to your point, there are certain things in which the expectations of different kinds of behavior do drive price adjustments. And for me, so, you know, avocados, limes, oxtail are some of of my kinds of examples of like, where I'm like, no, actually it is true that when more people are like, oh, we should get in on this particular thing because it's like getting popular when the.

[A]

Austin hipsters discover a food, it goes up in price. I mean, yes, But I do have to say that we had over the past couple of years Major price spikes in both avocados and limes, which then came back down again. So what?

[C]

Higher level than they were before.

[A]

Right.

[C]

So they normalized more expensively than previously, whereas lumber's given up all the gains.

[A]

Lumber is way back down to like before, where it was at the beginning of the year.

[B]

If food prices are a little higher, there are people for whom that is going to be a really significant thing. But there are ways to ameliorate that, like sending out checks to parents every month or more funding for snap, things like that.

[A]

Yeah. And again, one of the huge differences between now and the 1970s is that in the 1970s, food expenses were 20% percent of your household budget, and now they're 5%. In general, the I can't afford to buy feed my family thing, while it does still exist, is much less prevalent than it was back then. And also food prices. What the government does when it releases inflation statistics is it always has what they call core and headline. And for the core inflation, they strip out food and energy prices. Energy being like gasoline and stuff like that. Because food and gasoline are by their nature just very volatile commodities. And you can't really extrapolate from whatever's happened this month to the price of oxtail.

[C]

As I learned during that same winter storm in February, there are people on non fixed rate electricity and gas pricing all over Texas. And so when those prices spiked, people were looking at tens of thousands of dollars in bills. It was wild.

[B]

That's wild.

[C]

Oh.

[B]

Everyone should also listen to this recent episode of the Indicator on Planet Money where they talk to a lady economist inside the BLS whose job it is to call around to places and find out how much stuff costs.

[C]

Oh, that's awesome.

[B]

It was incredible. She called one store, asked about butter. They gave her the wrong number. She was like, are you sure about that butter? And then the guy had to go check, and he was like, I was wrong about the butter.

[A]

You know what they should do? Add some value to that butter, is just melt it, skim off the top and call it.

[C]

And then Whole Foods will sell it to you for $8.99.

[B]

Okay, so this is inflation, then. We did it.

[A]

But we should stick on food, right? Because I have a solution to food price inflation.

[B]

Oh, my God, Felix, my daughter's really mad at you.

[C]

I don't have a daughter to be mad at you, but I'm sure she would be. In theory.

[A]

My solution to food price inflation is very simple. There are too many deer. They are pests. They are rats on legs. We do not like them. They are the deadliest animal in America. So we should.

[C]

Lyme disease is a thing.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. They cause Lyme disease. They're the deadliest anim America, even if you don't include Lyme disease just from, like, car crashes. And we all understand supply and demand here in Slate Money Towers. And so what we understand is if you increase the supply of food that is available to people, and especially the supply of meat that is available to meat eaters, then that will decrease the price of it, and everyone will be happy, and that will be deflation rather than inflation. And that's good because food becomes more affordable. So what we should do is. Is eat the deer.

[B]

And what Felix is talking about is eating the deer that roam free through your suburban town. This morning, I went for a jog, and I ran into at least five deer, possibly more. I don't know if there were repeats. I thought, should I be out here running with a rifle on my back?

[C]

Just taking.

[A]

That would be awesome.

[C]

It's a very Mark Zuckerberg of you. You have to, like, kill what you eat.

[B]

But there was this whole essay in the Wall Street Journal. Right. By a horticulturist.

[A]

Yeah. Because they're very bad for the arguing for this.

[B]

They've taken over the suburbs. There are more deer now than ever before, even at the founding of the nation, according to this guy.

[A]

And it's not just bad for humans, it's bad for animals. The songbirds. Do we care about songbirds? We love the songbirds, but they tend to nest on the ground in the brush. But the deer come along and they eat all the brush, and then the songbirds can't nest and they die.

[C]

I feel like I'm being radicalized against deer. Like, you're undoing, like, Bambi propaganda.

[A]

Bambi is total propaganda.

[B]

Everyone in the suburbs hate the deer. I was at a party a few years ago, and the woman hosting it was just like when I first moved here, I was like, oh, Bambi. And then after they ate all the flowers in my garden, I was like, how do I kill Bambi?

[A]

There's this person on my TikTok who literally invites deer into his garage and feeds them. And I'm like, you are the Antichrist. What are you doing? No, they are not cute animals. They are terrible pests.

[B]

But how do you regulate people just going around shooting deer and eating them? That seems like a recipe for bad vibes.

[A]

So this is something that already happens, right. That there is hunting in America. Remember, this is the country of The Second Amendment, everyone who supports guns, they never say that it's for killing people. They say that it's for killing deer and other animals. And so everyone has guns, and they're allowed to use these guns. Not in New York, to be clear, to kill deer. And there are pretty strict rules about where you can treat the deer, what time of year. There are very regulated places that will hang them and butcher them and turn them into good meat for you. And this is all like, this is a solved problem. The only unsolved bit of the problem is this bizarre rule, which exists in the United States and in no other country that I have ever come across in my life, that you can't sell game. You can't sell any meat that you have shot that has been wild. So if you order venison in a restaurant, which is quite easy, it turns out, get this, it is farmed venison. It is deer that have been raised on, like, corn in the Midwest somewhere. And you're like, really? And you're like, this is pointless. We already have way too many deer. Why don't we just take the deer that are out there, which are genuinely tastier than the farmed venison, and eat them instead?

[C]

Til so many things. This reminds me of when I was kind of covering. I was starting to understand how people in Texas were trying to get around, like, alcohol rules. And one of the things that folks were doing, they were like, the alcohol is free, but this sandwich will cost you 25.99. Could that, if you're technically not selling the venison, you're just bundling it with something else that costs? Like, would that infringe the spirit of the law?

[A]

I think. Well, I mean, it's very hard. And there are definitely one or two food banks that have managed to work out a deal that if you donate your game to them, that's okay because you're not selling it. So there are ways of doing this and providing food to people that, you.

[C]

Know, how do you get this law repealed? What is the, like, big lobby group someone has to support to get this, to get venison on tables.

[A]

It's Venison Farmers of America, man. We should rise up against them. The real answer is that, you know, bless America for being a federal government. Like, you just have one or two states starting to say, like, okay, if you shoot a deer, we're going to allow you to kill it, to sell it, and we're going to loosen up the restrictions on when and where you can kill them. And we're going to make sure that, you know, if you kill deer to sell them, then you're doing it in the right way and you're making sure that people don't get some nasty prion disease or whatever else it is that people are worried about. But. But just normalize venison because there is not nearly enough of this really delicious, low fat, nutritious, fantastic meat in this country.

[C]

Okay. I feel like I'm persuaded.

[B]

I am curious because I feel like we are on Felix's side about the venison. I wonder if listeners will write to us and tell us why we're wrong.

[C]

Yeah, I love to be told why we're wrong about venison.

[A]

So as the person who wrote this.

[B]

There'S a personal stake in it.

[A]

As the person who wrote this article for Axios.com I can tell you that I got pushback along a lot of different lines. One of which was prion disease. Another one of which was. This is my favorite one. You say that deer are deadly because they cause a lot of car crashes, but really, it's not the deer, it's the cars.

[B]

So, I mean, team war on cars.

[C]

That's fair. Yeah. Fine. Take them both away. Just more bicycles.

[B]

Deers are creepy, too. Again, a running story. But, like, recently was running in the heat. It was so hot, and I was very unhappy. And I looked over and there was just a deer in the woods staring at me.

[A]

They do that.

[B]

And I felt like I was going so slow in slow motion and it was all hot and hazy and this, like, evil deer eyes staring at me. It was.

[A]

I went snowshoeing over the summer, and I was trudging along the path, and there was this deer just smack dab in front of me on the path. And I was trudging along towards this. Yeah. And he would just look at me and not move. It was creepy as fuck.

[B]

Seriously, it's super creepy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. I'm really.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

I'm adding deer to my shit list that's currently like, pigeons and rats. So. But, I mean, I'm not eating pigeons or rats, but I will consider venison.

[B]

Yes. Do not come back here next week and make the case for eating pigeons.

[A]

Well, do you remember that guy who was running around Trafalgar Square with a big cardboard box and, like, scooping up all the pigeons and then selling them to Greek restaurants? What?

[B]

I do not remember.

[C]

This is a horrifying story. I'm not going to look this up because I would prefer to believe that this is not true. Just move on.

[A]

What are we moving on to?

[B]

We're going to talk about games and Netflix.

[C]

This is the moment I've been waiting for this entire time.

[A]

Okay, Stacey, what is Netflix doing?

[C]

Among as many things that Netflix is doing is they are getting into video games. I want to just remind our audience that a couple of years ago, Reed Hastings made headlines because he said that Netflix's biggest competitor is Fortnite, which was, at the time one of the most popular video games in the world. Still makes a bunch of money for all involved if you play Fortnite. If you don't play Fortnite, you've probably seen it. It's really infiltrated popular culture in interesting ways. And this is coming at a time when various of the other major platforms have also been trying to figure out video games. So you have Stadia from Google, you have Apple Arcade from Apple. Amazon's foray into video games is less successful, shall we say?

[A]

Well, they own Twitch.

[C]

They do own Twitch, which. And that's definitely part of, I think, the video games content ecosystem. In the same way that folks are very interested in Discord, which was like, it started off as slack for video games. So there's a lot about this in terms of stickiness, that makes a lot of sense for Netflix, right? Because people who play video games, which, spoiler alert, very many of them are women, and women are the ones who spend more money on video games, particularly mobile games, across a range of different categories. But once you sort of get into video games, it gets into other parts of your life, right? And I think for Netflix being like, oh, we were actually competing with how you spend your evenings or how you spend your time on your phone. So we're still gonna get your money for Netflix. We're just going to give you another thing that you were looking to do that you were looking to a substitute to do previously.

[A]

So the big question I have here is around the fact that Netflix is an app in the Apple App Store, and Apple is famously very strict about video games. And it says that if you want us to approve a video game, you need to submit that video game as its own app. And then we will say yes or no. And what you cannot do is just give us a platform and just say.

[C]

Yes, you cannot have a mini games app store.

[A]

You cannot have a mini games app store within the App Store. And is Netflix, if we take this at face value, not basically becoming a little mini games app store, and is going to be running its own games within the Netflix app, which is totally against the Apple rules.

[C]

There are various possible permutations to get around this. For example, they could have a system in which they make those games available as what are called individual binaries on the App Store. But you log into them with your Netflix account, for example. Right. So it's sort of like this idea of a distributed delivery mechanism, which would still then conform to the letter, if not necessarily the spirit of the guidelines. They may argue, for example, that they're only going to make those games available on certain platforms. Like, there's a tremendous number of people who play games on desktop, which will be. There are fewer people who download apps on desktop through the Mac App Store on Mac. And then, of course, you have the entire universe of PC gaming, which is really dominated by Steam. So I think that if I were them, if I were somebody at Netflix trying to figure this out, I would absolutely be looking at, do we want to make this a big screenplay? And Netflix has for years been about the idea of the living room, about really being the destination for when you want the bigger screen to really enjoy something. Or might they look into ways to say, okay, it's going to be a little bit more fiddly for you as a consumer, but you will still be able to, like, through your Netflix subscription, access this potential library of games that are there.

[A]

When Reed Hastings talked about Netflix competing with Fortnite, the reason why, the very big reason why Fortnite was so dominant and successful was precisely because it is completely interoperable. It works on desktop, it works on phones, it works on iPads.

[C]

It is theoretically interoperable. The experience is very different.

[A]

The experience is different. The experience is very, very different across platforms. But the fact is that people use it on all those different platforms and they prefer to use it on one particular type of platform, even though, like, that one platform will change from person to person. And it does mean that if you are talking to your friends because it's a social network and it's all about talking to your friends, that you can be on one kind of device, they can be on another kind of device. You don't all need the same hardware to be able to play this game together. And Netflix, too, is an app that lives on every single kind of device. And it makes all the sense in the world to me, and it's increasingly social, and it makes all the sense in the world to me that if Netflix goes down this route, then they're going to want people to be able to play games together across different devices. So even if the value proposition is big screen things that you play on the TV in your living room. Like, they're going to want that to work on an iPhone, too.

[B]

I think this is just a really smart move by Netflix if they can pull it off. Because Reed Hastings, in addition to saying Netflix biggest competitor is Fortnite, has also said its biggest competitor is sleep. In other words, like, they just. They want your attention all the time, like when you're awake. And video games definitely take up a lot of people's time. It is a big. A big competitor. And unlike a TV show that Netflix has to spend a bunch of money on, like, you'll binge the TV show and it's over, like, in a week, maybe a week for some of us, I don't know. But a game, you know, you can play it for a long time. You can get really into it.

[C]

Well, it really depends. Right. So there are, and this is, again, Felix, kind of elaborating on your point. Certain types of games are designed for certain types of experiences. And a lot of the games that are what was traditionally kind of described as like, either desktop centric or console centric are going to take over your life.

[A]

Right.

[C]

You know, you're looking at hundreds to thousands of hours. Some of them are open world. There's a lot of variability and permutations. And for a long time, the games that were on mobile were really thought as kind of more standalone. There's this feeling that they need to be finite. That's less and less true, especially in certain categories of games. But again, depending on if Netflix is like, hey, this can be something that you do for half an hour while talking to your friends, that is one approach versus we're gonna try to compete with Breath of the Wild two.

[B]

Right, Right. Although.

[C]

And none of your friends we've seen.

[B]

For weeks like the New York Times, you probably don't think of them as a gaming company per se, but I log on to the New York Times every day to play Spelling Bee, and they do that. They have all these new games.

[C]

They all just have a way to editor for games. Yeah.

[A]

But also, everything is a game right now. You know, I mean, Duolingo is a game.

[C]

It's gamified. It's not a game. Absolutely not.

[B]

But I think as more media companies, whether it's Netflix or the New York Times, they're all competing for your attention when you're not sleeping. And they're gonna have to do stuff like give you games. So if you get bored of the TV show, if you get bored of the articles, you can play A game or something like it just makes sense.

[A]

So I agree that the strategy is logical. I'm just gonna take the under on this actually working.

[C]

This is hard to do.

[A]

I think they are going to try and I think they're going to fail.

[C]

I mean from the licensing, the ip, the development timelines, if you are actually gonna say hey this, somebody has to be able to play this on iOS and Android and desktop and TV. Like there is a.

[A]

Like is. Is Nintendo going to allow Netflix to go onto the PlayStation?

[C]

Many PlayStation. Sony, Felix, same thing. So Nintendo physically can't.

[B]

Well, I'm sure it would like to control what's on the PlayStation.

[A]

PlayStation, that's a principle.

[C]

Sure. You know, so yeah, how they will proceed with this is going to be like there's a whole bunch of devil and a whole bunch of details. So. But it is ambitious and it will be interesting.

[B]

One thing I don't understand, they keep saying Netflix has hired someone from Facebook to head up gaming. And I'm like why is that exciting? Facebook, what'd they do? Farmville. Like I don't.

[C]

Facebook didn't do farmville. They bought it. So they made it big.

[A]

Do you remember the rise and fall of Zynga?

[C]

Zynga was the company that figured out that you would pay in your and your friends attention for non consumable items in a game. And that mechanic is really at the heart of a lot of games now where it's like including Fortnite.

[A]

Right.

[C]

It's like oh, you want this really cool emote or you want this bunny costume. You can pay us real money or you can unlock it through other sort of social mechanisms. And that's why I do think the social element of this is interesting. Netflix has mostly allowed third parties to solve the problem of how do I watch a show with my friends. So this may also be a way to try to figure out like how to own the do something with my friends experience and then apply that to other parts of the business.

[A]

Quick prediction here is. As I say, I'm pessimistic. I don't think it's going to succeed in games. I don't think it's going to succeed in becoming a social network. Stacey, you're slightly more optimistic than me.

[C]

Not about video games, no. Video games are hard as hell.

[A]

Do you think Netflix will ever be a social network?

[C]

I hope to God not. Like I just want to be able to do things without other people sometimes.

[A]

Emily, I don't know.

[B]

I am off predictions so I would like to sidestep this Question. I think Netflix is a very successful company that's proven to do things that a lot of people said they couldn't or wouldn't do. So I have high expectations. I think they could do it, sure. Do you play games, Felix? That's what we want to know.

[C]

That's really what we want to know. Duolingo does not count.

[A]

There is an amazing game developer who we ought to have on this show one day called Zack Gage. He's one of the smartest people I know, Mr. Solitaire. He has a game, let me call it up on my phone because I can never remember what it's called. It's called Pocket Run Pool. I love that one. I play that one a lot. There's another game which is a million years old called Strategery, which I play on my phone. I've heard of that little thing. I like to just while away a few minutes. But yeah, I feel like in terms of the sort of quick dopamine hit that I get from calling up those games and playing them for one minute is basically the same as the quick dopamine hit I get from opening TikTok. You know, I feel like they're not as far away as Stacy would like to.

[C]

No, I actually think the dopamine hit is identical. But you said TikTok and not Duolingo.

[A]

Okay. Is TikTok a game?

[C]

Oh, TikTok has, again, like, many social networks gamification elements. Right. So there are loops, right? We're like, we're going to get you into this. There are rewards, whether you are a streamer or a participant, you know, they attempt to kind of incentivize you with like, here are ways you can customize your experience. So a lot of. I remember, I think it was at one of those times when everybody was trying to make both QR codes and gamification happen in New York in like the early 2000s, that very specific window. And I remember listening to all these people talking about how gamification is the future of technology. And it was immediately apparent how you would use that shit for evil. Right. Because the thing that video games have figured out is how to keep your attention on a completely fantastical, zero stakes set of tasks to such an extent that you are willing to pay real world money to better achieve those tasks for absolutely meaningless awards and streaks and other things like that. And so I do think that things like TikTok, when we talk about algorithms and we talk about machine learning, I think we underestimate how many of those dynamics are pulled directly from what video games figured out how to do.

[A]

Let's have a numbers round. What's the number, Stacey?

[C]

My number is 926,000.

[B]

Solid good number.

[C]

It's how many French people booked their first dose of the vaccine within a day of being told that they would not be allowed to go to cafes, bars or shops unless they were vaccinated. And hundreds of thousands of people immediately were like, excuse me, pardon, and went and booked their vaccines. And one of the things I keep thinking about is we're living through a nightmare set of social experiments about nudges and what people will respond to in terms of public health campaigns. And so it seems like telling people who have a very strong cafe culture that they can't go to cafes is even more effective than like lotteries or a million dollar prize or anything that the US has tried so far to get folks vaccinated.

[B]

What is the US equivalent of the cafe? It's definitely not the cafe.

[A]

One of the things that I take great heart in here is that it disproves what I was worried about in the early days of the pandemic, long before we actually had vaccines, which was this question of people just lying. If you're French and you go up to a cafe and you want your pain au chocolat, which we will talk about in slave purse, then you have two choices at this point, right? Either you make sure you're vaccinated, or you just lie and say that you're vaccinated. And one of the interesting things that I have been quite heartened by is that unvaccinated people, the overwhelming majority of them do not want to lie and won't lie and they won't go in somewhere where they're not allowed, or if they're told they need to wear a mask, they'll wear a mask. And that people are being honest about it. And given the choice between lying and getting the vaccine, don't get the vaccine.

[B]

Yeah, that is heartening. I guess.

[A]

My number is $11.7 million.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Which is the average price for a single family home in Palm beach in the second quarter.

[B]

Oh, wow.

[C]

What?

[A]

And you say there's no inflation?

[C]

I super did not say that, but usually.

[B]

What was it?

[A]

Wow.

[B]

How much increase? What are we talking about?

[A]

I mean, yeah, these are single family homes, right? So like, it was definitely. I mean, okay, it was probably in the low millions.

[B]

Unreasonable question.

[A]

I don't have a year on year inflation percentage for you, but yeah, Palm beach is going crazy right now. There's a lot of Hedge fund types who don't want to pay tax and they want to live somewhere expensive. I don't know.

[B]

Big demand for expensive.

[A]

I honestly do not understand the, the attraction of Palm beach. But apparently There are only 25 homes for sale in all of Palm beach right now.

[B]

So, you know, home prices are up everywhere, 14%.

[A]

My favorite one, my favorite Palm beach home was this guy, you know, the Toll brothers, who build houses. One of the Toll, one of the Toll brothers bought a little sort of man made private island in Palm beach, just over two acres, and he paid, I think $7 million for it. And it came with this 12 and a half thousand square foot house with a swimming pool and it has its own pier for your yacht and all of that stuff. Right.

[C]

It's one must.

[A]

And he just sold it to a developer on spec who bought it for $80 million and who has this plan that. Because clearly 12 and a half thousand square feet is big enough. He's turning this, he's turning the 12 and a half thousand square foot house into like one wing of a much bigger house. He's adding a second swimming pool.

[C]

What's the person needs a house? Like if you have to sort of drive to get from one wing to another.

[A]

The house comes with its, it comes with its own segues.

[C]

You can get around perhaps if one is into rollerblading. I don't know.

[B]

That could be fun.

[A]

But yeah, Palm beach property man is going crazy right now.

[B]

That's disappointing because I was very seriously considering moving.

[A]

If you don't, if you don't have $11 million, you should have bought it.

[C]

Two years ago when you had the full lunch.

[A]

Emily, what's your number?

[B]

Well, apparently I have a new beat. You'll see what I mean in a second. My number is 158.

[A]

Is that beats per minute?

[B]

No, My new beat, my friends, is bowling balls. There are 158 bowling balls found underne staircase out on David Olson's house in the small Michigan town. The small Michigan town was home to a bowling ball plant and it operated there for 100 years. 1906 to 2006. The Muskegon Bowling Ball Plant. And I don't know why, but this guy's house, underneath the foundation, there were all these bowling balls. He put a video of it on Facebook and it's pretty incredible. There's a shot of him with his baby and all these bowling balls. Some are blue, most are black, some have no finger holes.

[C]

Okay, weirder and weirder. Are they cannonballs?

[B]

They're bowling balls. From the plant? I don't know. And he's not gonna get rid of them. He said in the Facebook video and in the news report he's going to use the balls, the bowling balls, for good.

[A]

Is he gonna put them to a good cause? Yes.

[B]

They're gonna be decoration in his garden because we know he cannot send them to recycling plant. As I've already reported on Slate Money, and that's been Emily Peck's bowling ball update report.

[C]

Yes. Oh, my gosh. Brilliant.

[A]

Absolutely brilliant.

[C]

I have learned so much more about bowling balls than I ever thought I would need to know in my life.

[B]

We should probably go bowling next.

[C]

I am terrible at bowling.

[B]

No, I'm bad, too.

[C]

It's just.

[A]

Is it something which gets better if you're good at it?

[C]

Yeah, of course.

[B]

Everything's better when you're good at it.

[A]

I'm not sure that's true.

[B]

Really. That's definitely true. Well, doing dishes, I guess, doesn't really get better.

[A]

I'm glad your mind went straight to doing dishes.

[B]

I was just trying to think of things that I don't like that much doing.

[A]

I feel like doing things badly can be a lot of fun.

[B]

I don't think that's true.

[A]

Okay. All right, so what are we talking about in pluses? So wait. So first of all, I need to ask all of you lovely Slate Money listeners to please Write in to slatemoneylate.com with examples of things which are more fun if you're bad at them than they are if you're good at them.

[C]

Fantastic.

[A]

And I need to thank you all for the emails and the ratings and everything. It's wonderful that you're still listening to this after however many years. We are very thankful and that you're subscribing to Slate plus, where we are going to talk more about weird foods. We're going to talk about the pain au chocolat and rotisserie chickens. All of that's coming up on Facebook.

[B]

Those are delicious things.

[A]

They are delicious things. And I need to just give a big thanks to June Thomas who opened up the Slate offices in Brooklyn, New York. And we are all together in person and it feels fantastic. And we are sounding good this week.

[C]

It's. Cause these mics are awesome.

[A]

It's all thanks to the amazing June Thomas.

[C]

Thank you, June.

[A]

And yeah. And thanks to Jessamine Molly for turning this whole show into something vaguely coherent show. So we will be back on Tuesday with another Slate Money goes to the movies this week. It's going to be parasite. We have dodi Stewart from the New York Times talking about Parasite. Shout out to Dodi. We love her. She's our favorite person here. We'll be back with a regular slate next Saturday.