Reply All - #187 Flying the Coop

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

A community of chicken lovers faces an unlikely foe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Replyal is brought to by dark matter. You know that feeling when the galaxy irons spirals together in a kind of harmony, rather than just flinging off into the outer reaches of space? That's thanks to the massive gravitational pull of dark matter. And even though we can't see or touch or even detect it, we like it. All right, here are the rest of the ads. From Gimler, this is Replyu. I'm Immanuel Jochi.

And I'm Alex Goldman. Hey, Alex. Hi. We are joined today by... Someone we are never joined by, our editor, the mysterious, Tim Howard. Hey, guys. Hey, man. What's going on?

Hello. So what do you have for us? I'm very excited to say that I have a story for you today. Okay. So I heard from a listener named Iris. Where are you? I am in Des Moines, Iowa. Ah, cool.

Exotic. She'd written us a very delightful email about something just absurd that it happened in this Facebook group devoted to backyard chickens. Okay. So Iris said like a couple years ago, she was in grad school. And she had this friend from Oregon who had started chicken farming in their backyard. And her friend would always tell her about it and like send her pictures. So Iris started to be like, oh, maybe I want to get into chicken farming.

What was your chicken dream? What did it look like? Well, at the time I was cooking very little meat and a lot of eggs. So I was like, oh, well, I'm buying the really expensive egg to the grocery store. So what if I just had five chickens one day? you know, like how fun would that be? And so when she was looking into chickens, she came across his Facebook group.

It was called Backyard Chickens. She joined it. Backyard Chickens is a huge group. It's like 90,000-ish people. Amber's sweatsh sweetie. That's cotton. Hi, Ziggy. I had 15 new chickie babies to the flop today.

It's a really interesting mix. You have like suburbanites, off the gridders, librarians, teachers, tech people. All these people all over the world who are getting to live out their farm, homesteading dream with their little flock of birds behind their house. I have turned into this guy,

the guy who sits in a rocking chair at night holding his chicken. So they're posting their corny chicken memes, their chicken videos, chicken love. I know, I know, you want a hug. Okay, ready hug. Oh, hug. Any one other?

A lot of them are doing it for the first time, like Jessica Arroyo. I guess you could call me a city girl. And I had not ever been around anyone with chickens ever before. Never. Jessica said she landed on this page, and it was just like tapping into a treasure trove. Just pride and true tricks just passed down from generation to generation, basically. Yeah. I just picked it up from reading the group.

posts like it was a book every day. A thing that I didn't realize is that chickens are very sensitive creatures with a lot of medical emergencies. Like there's this kind of infection called bumblefoot. Bumblefoot, which is like a bulbous infection in the foot. Oh, yeah. And they get, you know, they get parasites, but they're also just getting constantly mulled by whatever animal is able to make its way inside their coop.

Now Iris, the original woman who had got in touch with me, she read me some of those posts. While Chica was dying, she fecal vomited these two brown shapes. Can anybody identify if they're parasites or what? And then it's like a post of a completely dead chicken. Oh, God. It's like, look at this photo. My chicken got attacked by a fox and its eyeball is hanging out.

What do I do? What do you do? Yeah. It's over. Matt, at that point it's over. Put that creature down. You guys would be good in this group. Iris is realizing that chickens live their whole lives on this like little tightrope over

this yawning chasm of death. There's always something coming for them. And so she decided, I don't want to get chickens. But I thought the group was fun. And I just stayed in it. She's in it for like three years. And then she said that in the October, at the end of October, of last year, there was a very strange development, which is that the administrator of the group,

this guy named Connor, he posted something. I'm just going to share it with you. And you know what, and you guys elect which one of you is going to read it. I'd like to read it. All right, Alex wants to read it. All right. This is from Connor. Good afternoon. We know all good things must come to an end. Sadly, this group is no longer for chickens. No longer for chickens? Don't worry. Tons of backyard chicken groups have been made. Did not want to leave y'all hanging.

So please join those. However, if you're interested in crypto and maybe want to learn, you're free to stay. Until then, God bless. Oh, fuck. Yeah. What? That's what Iris said. It was a chicken group.

It wasn't like a game. group where you could maybe think like, okay, these are computer people. Like, there's some overlap. No, it's like people who take their chicken to the county fair. I talked to a bunch of people who were on backyard chickens at the time, and they were very baffled by this post, like Ashley. I was just, like, shocked. Like, obviously this was like a community that we had had for years.

So it was just like a lot to process when I read that. I talked to another backyard chickens member named Alex who hadn't actually noticed the changeover yet. Like, all she knew was that she could no longer find her beloved backyard chickens. So I asked her if she wouldn't mind just, like, looking through her Facebook groups. Wallham High School show choir alumni. Let me tell you, that's an active one. Greenfield, Mass, moms, parents, and caregivers.

Crypto with Connor. I'm not sure what that is. I showed her Connor's post, the one where he changed the group. Do you want to read this? Oh my God! You're blowing my mind right now. Oh my God, good afternoon. We know all good things must come to an end.

Sadly, this group is blowing my mind right now. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So that's why you can no longer find backyard chickens. That is bonkers. Crypto has like infiltrated my life

in every way at this particular juncture but I have absolutely no interest in it Alex couldn't help but find it funny that crypto has reached the very last place that it belongs which is like this community of people who are trying to turn back to traditional techniques away from modern life

and you know I've seen it popping up in surprising places too like a good friend of mine, really lovely, sweet person who one evening over drinks with me and my wife, starts telling us about the promise of decentralized autonomous organizations, or the friendly guy at the dog park who gives me his business card and he's an NFD evangelist. It's a trippy feeling. It's like the whole world went to a seminar that I slept through. And I can't help but feel skeptical. Like, I'm being invited to a gold rush that's really only going to benefit the very first people who show up.

And the people in Backyard Chickens, they're extremely skeptical, especially because this admin guy, Connor, who had suddenly turned the group into a crypto group, he had appeared out of nowhere. And everybody was like, wait, who is this? Did you have a sense of who ran the group? No, I had never even considered it until I saw that post from Connor. Yeah. We didn't even know who this, I never knew who this guy was. That's Jessica Arroyo again. Like, how do I even know this Connor is a Connor?

I don't know. You know what I'm saying. So Connor changes the name of Backyard Chickens to Crypto with Connor. And he immediately starts posting about crypto, coins like YoCoyne and Comrocket and he's posting pulls. Hold on, hold on. You can't just blow past Come Rocket. That's a kind of crypto currency. I'm glad you said that because I didn't want to be the person to. I'm happy to be the person who does that. That's what the hell is Come Rocket? Oh my God. Okay. Well, Comrocket looks like it's sort of like a crypto only fans. Oh. Wait, but sorry. What does that mean? How does that work?

creators make sexy NFTs. You buy the currency of the Come Rocket website, which is called Cummys. Uh-huh. Naturally. And then you buy the NFTs with the comies. Huh. Okay. So that's Cummys. Iris and I noticed he also had a post about this coin called Fux, P-H-U-C-S. Connor writes, it's a long-term gem.

Give it three years and I'll be smoking the good stuff on my yacht. But then if you scroll down, there's this woman, Jessica, who every single one of these posts, she posts, please report this group. She's pissed. I was so upset and I wanted to do more and I was totally refraining. My heart was broken so I couldn't handle it. And then he blocked me.

Yeah. And I just have to kind of go on the corner and sit down and be quiet. But Jessica wasn't the only one protesting. People were commenting on his post about crypto and being like, this is lame and I hope you get Bumblefoot. But then he started blocking those people too, of course. Here's Iris again. So people would, I assume we're trying to post chicken things still.

But there's like new posts about chickens have stopped appearing. The members of the backyard chickens group, they had all sorts of theories about what was going on. They were like, the group's definitely been hacked or it's been sold for followers. Jessica, her mind just went to the most conspiratorial place and she was like, maybe it had something to do with Russia. This other woman pointed out that Connor claimed to have started the group four years ago, but he'd only been an admin on the group for two years.

So like everybody in the group, I really want to know who is this person and how did he seemingly come out of nowhere to take control of the group and turn it into this crypto thing. So I message Connor and I get a response immediately. Oh, wow. What did they say?

I'll tell you that after the break. Nice! Are you serious? Like, are we doing this right now? Can you just tell me? No, we're in the middle of ads right now. Welcome back to the show. show. So I reached out to Connor on Facebook, asked him, would you be interested in talking to me?

He said he would. Okay. But scheduling was tricky because the nefarious owner of this chickens turned crypto group, he had baseball practice every day after school. Conner is 17. He's still in high school. Wow. But eventually one night in February, we finally connected. You want me to go ahead and press the audio record? Oh, yes, please. Yeah, thank you. Connor lives in Monroe, North Carolina, which is this small-towny suburb of Charlotte. And you're, are you like a senior in high school? I'm a junior. I just turned 17. Oh, okay, you're a junior.

Yeah. Right off the bat, Connor just wasn't who I expected. Like, he talks with this flat affect of a teenager, but he's actually a really open, curious person. I'm really interested in this whole podcast thing. When did y'all start Gimlet Media? He was asking me all of these questions. Gimlet is based out of New York City, right? He said these days he only listens to podcasts.

All the kids are like, dude, what? You don't listen to music? I'm like, no, podcast. I get to learn while I'm just chilling in school. As we were chatting, I was wondering, how the hell did this 17-year-old kid find himself in charge of this 90,000 person group? I told him I would love to hear the story. And I want to start all the way at the beginning.

Okay, yeah, I can do that. Connor said the story starts back in 2017. Yeah, so at the time I was only, I think, 12 or 13. I was in fifth grade, I think. And I'm not like, I'm not a country person. I just had this fascination of how you could turn an egg into a living creature. My neighbors, they own a farm where they have like zebras, camels, all types of exotic animals. And so they got me into it because I went over there one summer to help them out.

His neighbors, they showed Connor all the different birds they had on the property. Ostriches, peacocks, emos. The emus, they were just scary because I was 12. I was just a kid and these big birds with long necks and beaks trying to poke you and stuff. Oh, wow. I didn't really hang around them much. Have you heard of the Guinea that's native to Africa? No.

But what it does why most people have them down here is one Guinea can clean one whole acre of ticks. Do you know what a tick is? Connor had this habit that I'm just not super used to in teenagers, which is that he would regularly interrupt himself to make sure that I was keeping up, like that I knew the thing he was talking about. It was actually sweet. Over the course of the interview, he asked me if I was familiar with use case, fomo, homesteaders, Gary V, federal mediators, tractor supply, and ticks. Okay.

So anyway, more than even just like the exotic birds. at the farm, it's really the eggs that catch Connors' attention. For instance, the emu egg, I looked this up, and it is this gorgeous, like, massive, sparkly blue-green egg. It's like the size of your hand. Here, I'm just going to send your picture. Holy moly. That thing looks like... It looks like...

If you told me that was like a fake dragon's egg off of, like, Game of Thrones or something, I would tell you. I would say, yeah, that makes sense. And I've never seen an egg like that ever, like not even online or anything. And I just became obsessed with it. And I was like, wow, I want to get into it. Connor unexpectedly really gravitated toward his neighbor's chickens. Because these weren't just any old chickens. They had chickens like the silky bantam, which is like this adorable tiny Muppet chicken.

Basically like a huge cotton ball. And their eggs, their eggs are so small. It's like the size of your thumb. There's the IAM Samani out of Indonesia. Everything on them is black. Black eyes, beak, feathers, feet, even tongue. Connor had never seen anything like it. I fell in love with it.

There's the Polish chicken, a very friendly bird with this like blow-dried pompadour. They have a funky look to them. This thing's gorgeous. I have never felt... Totally. I have never thought to myself, I bet they're aesthetically pleasing chickens out there. But holy shit.

And Connor, he doesn't respond to his newfound fascination by deciding to become like a veterinarian or a scientist or a farmer. he goes in a very different direction. Like, Connor has this dream. He has a dream of one day running a 40,000 square foot hatchery, just full of chickens, pumping out chicks day and night. He wants to be a chicken mogul. And so he starts hatching chickens himself at home. I talked to Carol, his mom, about it.

I remember one time he actually hatched a chicken in his bedroom when he was first starting out. You know, me personally as a mom, I'm like, okay, that's gross. I mean, I know that's where we get eggs from. I know it's where we get chickens from. But still, it's like, that is in your bedroom. But what are you going to tell a young boy? You know, I was just like, okay, I guess there's always worse things that, you know,

could be happening. He takes over his parents' garage with his giant incubator, gets a license to sell chickens in North Carolina. He starts his own business. He calls it Connors' chickens. What is he doing? Is he selling eggs? He's actually selling chicks by mail.

They can apparently live off their yulks for like 72 hours after they hatch. And his mom also starts bringing him around to these auctions in the area where he can sell his chicks. The one that sticks out most to me was it was like November. It was cold. It was foggy. And it was up on a hill from what I remember. And there was like probably 150 to 200, just old people there, you know, with all their trucks. They had all their foul there and stuff.

So it was kind of weird, you know, me being. and 10, 11, 12-year-old, you know, I was kind of intimidated, creeped out, because I was the youngest one there by like five decades. I try to get along with everyone, but I mean, it's like they're not the people I go and hang out with it, if that makes sense. Connor's really not into these auctions. He needs to find a different way to find customers. So he goes on Facebook.

He sees that there are already other groups devoted to chicken farming, and he decides he's going to start his own. And he does. He calls it backyard chicken. He told me that he had actually janked the name from another group that already existed that was also called backyard chickens, and he decided to target them to get some of their members. So he took his link, and he went over to that group's page.

So what I would do is I'd spam it in the comments of the post for, like, the first week. That I think 500 people. Wait, how did this work? So there was already a group called Backyard Chickens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would take my link and I would like spam, spam promote it, which was, I mean, very, I guess, unethical. But I was like, whatever it takes, you know. Connor was running circles around the adults that ran the other chicken boards.

And he notices a weakness in the competition, which is that a lot of the time they were getting so many posts and they only had maybe like one mod. So people's posts weren't getting approved fast enough, which if you have a chicken who's like injured or ill, that could actually just be a death sentence. Right. So Connor, he's like, join my group and you'll get instant post approval. But, of course, for it to work, he realizes that he can't actually just be the moderator. Like, he needs to have multiple mods, ideally in different time zones so that the chicken owners, no matter where they are, they get their answers really fast.

And his plan works. The group takes off. And in the first year alone, there's like 20,000 members. Oh, wow. But even as the group is exploding, Connor is starting to feel like he might have made a mistake because he just didn't take into account who this page would really be attracting.

It wasn't people like him. Honestly, the majority of it was moms posting their version of cute pictures. They're like four to six chickens they have in their backyard. And don't get me wrong, I mean, chickens are a fascinating bird, this and that, but I was like, well, this group, you know, it's not really for me,

so I kind of like stepped down. I actually got kicked out. Someone got a hold that I was only 13 or something or 12. So Connor was too young to even have a Facebook account. And so he's banished. He's locked out of the group that he himself created. He was like a deposed king who would one day return, take over again. But I didn't understand how he would pull it off, let alone why.

Connor, meanwhile, he moves on from chickens. He's over chickens. He sells off his flock and his incubators. and he begins high school. He does not enjoy it. But honestly, I get very bored in school because I look through it and it's like, man, all these kids are just going through the motions,

even the teachers, like, they don't really know what they want to do in their life. So that's very depressing. And it's very hard because I don't really know anyone at my school that thinks the same way that I do. Other kids are going to parties, they're having fun, but Connor doesn't want to do all that. Like, he's way too distracted by the fact

that adulthood is screaming down on them. All around him, he is seeing grown-ups force into nine to five jobs. They're not getting a chance to go anywhere, see the world, have new experiences. They're getting married because they think that's what they're supposed to do. They have one to two kids. But then they're not even seeing the kids because they're working all the time and they're exhausted. And Connor is just like, these are my options, really?

And it's just like, I wasn't expecting Connor to hit on my favorite subject. I feel like more than anybody I've ever met, you have talked about why we shouldn't be working nine to five, which I agree with. I remember when I first started the team, anytime I would be like, I have a good weekend, or have a good long weekend.

Like, if you're going into Memorial Day or something, you'd be like, this is not a long weekend, Emmanuel. This is a regular weekend. We should start changing the culture just through our own vernacular

when talking about these measly three days we have. So a three-day weekend is a regular weekend, a two-day weekend is a short weekend to Tim Howard. Exactly. Like, we need to reject the idea that weekend means this shitty little thing. We have to start calling Saturday and Sunday what it really is. Call it the short weekend. That maybe we can change it. Anyway, it's not like Connor's some raging anti-capitalist,

but he's definitely feeling desperate to find a way out. And that's when he comes across what feels like an escape hatch. Is crypto a thing actually that everybody like in your school talks about? Oh, no. People at my school, they don't know what crypto is. Okay. Even the teachers and stuff. And if they do, they think it's a scam.

They're like, oh, man, that's, that's fake. It's going to go to zero one day. What do you say to them? What I say to them, I'm just like, hey, you know, that's what people said to people that bought Bitcoin in 2009, 2010. And now they're on their yacht in the middle of the Caribbean. Sometimes after school, Conner would go to the local gym, and he would get into these conversations with these dudes there who were a little bit older. They were already in their 20s. They're already

working jobs. And they were like, hey, kid, check out this thing called crypto. So Connor does, and he throws a few dollars on Dogecoin. At the time, it was basically known as like a joke coin. And this was really not long before the whole thing when Elon Musk goes on Saturday Night Live. Oh, yeah. Okay, Doge father. So what is Doge? Well, it actually started as a joke based on an internet meme. But now it's taken off in a very real way. Okay, but what is dogecoin?

Yeah, like I said, it's a digital currency. In the dogecoin community, all the hollabaloo about Elon Musk going on SNL, it had driven the price of the coin through the roof. Tell me about watching Dogecoin go up. Like, when you, I don't know. I don't even know what my question is. It just feels surreal to me. Like, it feels illegal almost.

When the numbers kept going up and up as Saturday Night Live was going on, I felt like a, like El Chopper, just doing something very illegal, you know. But then Dogecoin actually tanked in part because Elon called it hustle on the SNL skit. A lot of people lost money. Did you end up making money with it or did you hold on? Like, because what's it at right now? Isn't it? Didn't it like go back and do? I sort of, because I knew it was going to tank.

I wasn't a total nub at the time. Oh, wow. Yeah. So for a 16-year-old, a new 16-year-old, that was like, wow, this is crazy. I mean, you don't have to tell me how much you made if you don't. But like ballpark, like what are you talking about? How much did you make like tens of thousands? I could buy a G-wagon with it.

I looked it up. On the low end, you can get a used G-wagon for like $75 grand. Connor finally felt like he'd found a way out. And he went all in on crypto. He's throwing a couple hundred bucks on a ton of different small coins that you've never heard of, hoping that one day one of them will skyrocket. Then when evening he's hanging out with a couple friends, and they bring up his backyard chickens group.

And they point out that it's this huge platform that he could do really anything with. They're like, dude, you have this group with like, I don't know if it was 80 or 90,000 people. They're like, why don't you just do it with your crypto now? I was like, you know what? That's a pretty good idea. Okay, sure, but how was he going to actually regain control of the group? Like, that's what I was wondering. Totally. It turned out to be pretty simple, actually, because Connor, he had been too young to start backyard chickens in the first place on Facebook.

Right. So he had had to make his mom an admin of the group. So when he wanted to get back in, he just made a new Facebook account and said, hey, mom, will you reinstate me? And she did. Later, Connor carefully drafted the note that would affect him. effectively end backyard chickens and make it crypto with Connor. He said he didn't want to upset people. He tried to be graceful about it.

He wrote, we appreciate all the love we have gotten and the 91K we've got. And he added, I don't want to leave you all hanging, so just check out one of the other chicken groups. You thought that would work. He showed it to his mom, make sure she thought it looked good, she gave him a couple notes, he tweaked it, and then he posted it. It did not go as he had hoped. You wouldn't believe how mean chicken people can be. when something doesn't go their way. Really?

Yeah, over something like this. What were some of the things that they were saying to you? They were saying, well, I can't repeat it on the podcast, of course, but they were just saying terrible things. Connor quickly found himself on the receiving end of 90,000 wounded chicken people. They're sending him angry DMs, telling him he's lame and shady. Somebody else tracked down his mom's business and left her bad Google reviews. And I was telling my mom was like, mom, these chicken people are crazy.

It's just a chicken group. Chill out. And as quickly as the storms came in, clouds cleared, and the chicken people, they tuned out Conner's new group. There were no more cute photos of silky bantoms, no more chicken memes, no more quick answers to tough bumblefoot questions. Do you feel bad at all? for the people who were posting it in a lot and who are really into the chickens? I don't feel bad because there are so many other groups,

but also, when I say these people were on this page 24-7, these people were on this page 24-7, like do something else and be on Facebook talking about chickens and other fowl, you know? Conner admitted to me that what he done was a little selfish. And in the end, I think Conner just wasn't a chicken person. Because the chicken people that I've talked to, their lives are already like fully intractably in motion. They're married, they have kids, full-time job, maybe all these things, some real thick grown-up shit.

And they need some sort of like small, accessible escape from all of these pressures. Connor hasn't experienced all those things yet. So to him, the kind of escape that chickens provide just looks like giving up. up. That's just my hypothesis as a guy who's into plants. At this point, Connor is still figuring out what he wants his life to look like. Right now he's busy visiting colleges. He's like finally sampling the future that he might actually get to experience. He might even get to play college football. He can't wait. Oh yeah. Last question. Is summer's coming up? I'm already thinking about summer like crazy, even though I'm not even in high school. Do you have summer plans? Honestly, my plan

will probably be going to more universities. So it's not going to be like the regular kid summer, but it should be fun, I think. I'm still going to go to the beach and all. I mean, I'm still going to, like, half summer. You know, I'm going to chill, go to the pool, like pool parties, stuff like that, hanging out, maybe four-wheeling, dirt biking, fish.

So that's the story of how backyard chickens became crypto with Connor. And I feel like if there's any lesson in it, it's just that the suffocating promises of capitalism make people do weird things. Like, sacrifice a chicken community, or buy cummies, or go to work five days a week for decades, or perform minor surgery on a bird's foot in the kitchen sink. Because after all, that's actually how most of the milder cases of Bumblefoot are treated. The bulk of the work is done just with some Epsom salt and water, followed by a gentle massage

of the foot, accompanied by some tender words for your chicken, your familiar voice. She enjoys keeping her calm. Today's episode of Reply All was produced by Anna Fully and Sanya D'Souci. It was edited by Damiano Marquetti and Sanyo Dissani. This episode also wouldn't have happened without the rest of the Reply All production team. Fia Ben-Wang, Kim Naderfen-Pieterza, Aaron Edwards, and Bethel Hoppe. The show is hosted by Alex Goldman and Emmanuel Jochi. Our intern is Sam Gabauer.

This episode was mixed by Rick Kwan with fact-checking by Isabel Christo, and music and sound design by Luke Williams, who also made this very beautiful song that we're listening to right now. Additional music by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, Mariana Romano, and myself. Special thanks to Jonathan Goldstein and Jorge Just. Thanks for listening.