Flock Safety: Your Town Bought a Camera. It Joined a Nationwide Network.
Those small black cameras on poles at the edge of town? There’s a good chance they belong to Flock Safety, and they’re doing a lot more than reading plates.
This week we dig into the company that sold license plate cameras to thousands of police departments, HOAs, and businesses, and turned them into one of the largest vehicle-tracking networks in the country. We break down how the system works, what it records (it’s not just your plate), who can search it, and why a camera your city bought for stolen cars can be queried by agencies hundreds of miles away.
We discuss it all: How is Flock different than other security platforms? Why does its growth model depend on the network getting bigger? What limitations do authorities have in using Flock (cough- little)? Why are people vandalizing the cameras?
Grab a drink and stay a while.
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1 Oct 2026
Tyson Foods: The Real Story Behind America's Meat Supply
Four companies control 85% of the beef in this country. One of them has been paying for its own misconduct for thirty years and still produces one in five bites of American meat.
This episode is about Tyson Foods, but it's really about what happens to a food system when the buyers consolidate and nobody with a vote has to live with the consequences.
We get into the actual structure of the American beef supply chain: who raises the cattle, who slaughters them, and why a rancher with a great herd still has almost no leverage. We break down why beef prices keep climbing even as imports hit records, what the New World screwworm has to do with it, and why the cattle herd sitting at a 75-year low means this isn't getting fixed quickly.
Then we go at Tyson specifically. Not because they're uniquely evil, but because they're the clearest window into how the whole system works. Started in 1935 by a guy hauling chickens to Chicago in a borrowed truck. Today it's a $54 billion company that is still controlled by his descendants, through a share structure that gives the family roughly 72% of the voting power. The people who bear the consequences of Tyson's decisions, meaning workers, contract growers and plant towns, have no vote at all. The people with the votes are insulated from the market discipline that would normally apply.
We cover the labor record, and it is grim: a CEO paid 798 times the median employee in a year when median pay went down, nearly 5,000 workers cut in Nebraska and Texas, a town of 11,000 that lost a third of its workforce in a single announcement, OSHA severe injury numbers that put Tyson fifth among all American employers, and a federal child labor investigation into the contractors who clean their plants overnight.
And we work through the lawsuits, because once you line them up, they stop looking like scandals and start looking like a budget line. A federal guilty plea in 1997. A $221.5 million settlement over fixing chicken prices. A $115.5 million settlement over fixing what plant workers earn. A settlement where Tyson agreed to stop calling its beef "climate-smart." In fiscal 2025 alone the company booked $653 million in legal contingency accruals against sales. Whatever else that is, it's planned for.
Grab a drink. This one's a lot.
27 Aug 2026
Line 5, Explained: 73 Years, 645 Miles, and One Question Michigan Still Must Answer
A Canadian pipeline has been running under the Straits of Mackinac since 1953. In July 2026, the Michigan Supreme Court threw out its key permit and told state regulators they had spent eight years asking the wrong question.
We're doing this will strolling through the grounds of Northwood University during Gus Macker, where we really stir it up about what the culture of Midland, MI is like during the fun Gus Macker games.
Who has been a guest on StirredUp
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Tory Burch
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24,393
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Apple Podcasts (US)
4.6 / 5
8 ratings
Spotify
4.8 / 5
18 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 54 / 100
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Quality
57
Social presence
0
YouTube
76
Engagement
51
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