ATR: Ethanol Wars, 1 Billion for Eggs and Postal Census Bureau with Ryan Cooper

About this episode

Vance hosts Ryan Cooper, a Missouri startup farmer and founder of the Milk Men Co-op local food distribution business, for an Ag Tribes Report centered on the intersection of government intervention and market distortion — a recurring theme across three of the four headline stories. The ethanol segment covers Congressman Thomas Massie's viral X post (amplified by a Grok AI analysis) arguing renewable fuel mandates increase food prices, with Cooper unable to steel-man the mandate beyond marginal emissions benefits, and Vance advancing a durable-intervention thesis: that ethanol demand exists only because of government mandates, not organic market adoption, evidenced by the prediction that removing mandates would trigger rapid defection despite built-out infrastructure. The billion-dollar avian flu funding story becomes the episode's most substantive economic discussion, with Cooper predicting the government cash injection will "create a giant bubble" by incentivizing rapid, low-quality egg production capacity buildout that will eventually crash prices from oversupply — a specific, falsifiable market-timing claim. Vance layers on a related critique that the USDA's own aggressive culling policies (destroying healthy flocks near outbreak sites) directly caused supply shortages the funding is now meant to fix, questioning the coherence of DOGE-era spending-cut rhetoric alongside a new billion-dollar appropriation. The Secretary Rollins segment continues Vance's now-recurring "FFA super officer" critique of performative agricultural leadership, with Cooper offering a structural counter-proposal (relocating USDA to Kearney, Nebraska to naturally filter for committed rather than careerist bureaucratic staff) as a way to shrink the agency by ~80%. The postal-service-as-census-bureau segment features a striking clip of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's efficiency argument for repurposing USPS infrastructure (625,000 existing employees, vehicles, and household routes) to replace the $40 billion decennial census and Social Security Administration field services, which both hosts cautiously endorse despite ambivalence about mail carriers directly counting household occupants. Cooper's Peter Thiel paradox prediction — drawing on the book "Super Abundance" — argues that decades of manufacturing productivity gains have been effectively "stolen" through currency debasement, illustrated by the claim that a 1960s $5,000 vehicle should cost roughly $600 in 2025 dollars if productivity gains had passed through to consumers rather than being absorbed by monetary expansion, earning a "seven five" score from Vance who acknowledges near-total agreement with the underlying inflation argument. The episode closes with Cooper's worthy-adversary pick, his local school superintendent pushing a property tax increase, framed through a notably uncompromising anti-redistribution lens that questions whether local government service provision constitutes legitimate authority at all.

“The reason that you know that this system does not free float on its own is that, you know, if the government wasn't there mandating it, it wouldn't have happened... if people stop getting paid to do something, typically most of 'em stop doing it.”

“I think a billion dollars going into that is gonna just create a giant bubble... they're gonna way overshoot and you're gonna have so much production, it's gonna drop the price way down... it's not possible for them to do anything other than create bubbles.”

“I really believe that a brand new car in 2025 should be about 600 bucks... the whole delta between a $600 car in 2025 and a hundred thousand dollars car, all of that's been stolen.”

Key moments

• Vance's durable-mandate thesis — ethanol demand only exists because of government mandate, evidenced by predicted rapid defection if mandates were removed.
• Cooper's specific market-timing prediction that the billion-dollar egg-industry bailout will create a supply bubble and subsequent price crash from oversupply.
• Vance's critique that USDA's own aggressive culling policy directly caused the shortage the funding now aims to fix.
• Lutnick's postal-service-replaces-census-and-Social-Security efficiency pitch clip.
• Cooper's "Super Abundance" productivity-theft argument — a 1960s $5,000 car should cost $600 in 2025 if productivity gains had passed through instead of being absorbed by currency debasement.