🥬 Lettuce Talk About Rising Prices

In today’s newsletter lettuce talk about rising prices, Stewie gets his own 2-season spinoff from Family Guy, YouTube is now the world's biggest media company, Jensen Huang’s Nvidia has booked $1 trillion dollars worth of new orders, the White House is getting a $10 billion dollar kickback for its role in the forced sale of the social media company TikTok (can you say corruption?), George Clooney is entering the non-alcoholic beer market with the launch of his new company Crazy Mountain, the U.S. Army has just awarded a contract to the defense technology company Anduril Industries for $20 billion dollars, and the NFL is in advanced negotiations with Paramount Skydance to restructure their media rights agreement for games on CBS.

Let’s get into it.

YouTube

Top Story

🥬 Lettuce Talk About Rising Prices

The other day I went into my local grocery store Hannaford, which is a big chain here in Upstate New York. I was shocked to see the price of a bag of lettuce. I've been buying bags of lettuce every week for my family of four, so this is literally part of my weekly routine. Now, I don't want to get ahead of myself. Let’s go back to last week, when I bought 2 bags of lettuce for $2.50 each, or “2 for $5” as their deal said, which isn’t much of a deal if you're selling it for the same price individually, but I digress. When I walked into the grocery store the other day they were selling that same bag of lettuce for $3.99. We're a little over a week into the war with Iran, and yes gas prices have jumped up, but are you seriously trying to tell me that the price of a bag of lettuce has gone up 59.6%, or $1.49 in the last week? Seriously!?!? 

I get that the price of gas and diesel has gone up in the last week, because of this latest war in the middle east. Just last week a gallon of gas here in Upstate New York was around $2.75. Today it's $3.50 per gallon. People still have to drive to their jobs, so it's not like they can really save much money by not driving. Sure, they could try and take public transportation, but if you live in rural America, or a suburban area, there's just not a lot of public transit options. 

I personally drive an 8-cylinder, 390 horsepower Nissan Armada in order to fit my entire family, and that thing averages about 16 miles a gallon. That's not a flex. I bought it used when my last truck died, and we’d gotten to the point that we couldn't fit the whole family for long trips. And I'd love to say we only use this gas guzzling behemoth of a truck for long trips, but most of the 90,000 miles I’ve put on it are from short 30 minute trips around town to pick up groceries, drive kids home from school and to their sports. Not to mention if you don’t have a four-wheel vehicle here in the winter you’d literally be stuck at home a few days a week because of how much snow we get. It’s almost mandatory to have a big truck if you live here, but yes, that’s obviously a personal preference.

I’m just lucky my truck doesn’t take diesel. Last week the price of a gallon of diesel was around $3.75 per gallon. Today it's $5 a gallon here in Upstate New York, and it's been reportedly as high as  $6.15 per gallon on average in California. You know what kind of vehicles use diesel fuel? Trucks. Do you know what percentage of our food and consumer goods is transported via trucks? Roughly 72.5% of all domestic freight in the United States is moved via diesel fuel burning trucks. That comes out to approximately 11.27 billion tons of food and consumer goods moved via trucks annually here in the United States. 

Trucks are literally the lifeblood of the freight industry, and they're how our food is delivered to grocery stores. So when the price of oil soars, because of the latest conflict in the middle east, the price of diesel shoots up almost instantly, and a few days later those added costs begin to be reflected in the prices of the food you pay for at the supermarket. In my case the cost of lettuce.  

You know what hasn't gone up in price? Everyone’s favorite indicator of rising prices in the last few years - eggs. Want to know why? First we have to talk about the history of egg prices. Back in 2022 the H5N1 strain of the avian bird flu began to affect flocks of chickens, resulting in supply chain disruptions and price volatility. Prices began to spike in January of 2023, but then farmers got the outbreak under control, and prices settled down a little. Then at the end of 2024, and into 2025, there was resurgence of the avian flu virus, and that caused a massive spike in egg prices to an all-time high. In some stores across the United States egg prices peaked at $8 per dozen in March 2025 as the supply chain shortages were at their worst. 

If you go back to 2021, before there was an outbreak of the avian flu, a dozen eggs will cost you between $1.40-$1.90. When the 2022 avian flu outbreak occurred the price of a dozen eggs spiked to $4.82 in January 2023. When the avian flu spiked again at the end of 2024 prices shot up to $4.95 per dozen eggs. This was largely because farmers began culling their flocks of birds en masse. I had to look this up, because I know absolutely nothing about hens or when they lay their eggs. Apparently it takes between 6-9 months to raise birds until they're of the age to begin laying new eggs. 

And what happens to prices when they're affected by supply and demand? That's right. Prices go up. When those hens began laying new eggs by June 2025 the wholesale price for a dozen eggs dropped 64% from their peak, while retail consumers saw the price of a dozen eggs drop by 27% to around $3.78. Today, a dozen eggs will cost you around $2.58. 

So I guess we can all be thankful that at least the price of a dozen eggs hasn’t spiked again in this crazy economy. Now if only the price of my lettuce would go back to normal.

Quick Hits

🤝 Business

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, announced at Nvidia’s annual developer conference, that the company sees a total of $1 trillion dollars worth of orders for its newest AI chips Blackwell and Vera Rubin. $1 trillion dollars people! That’s insane!

As of March 2026, NVIDIA is the world's most valuable company by market cap, with a market cap of $4.4 trillion dollars. The next most valuable companies are Apple $3.74 trillion dollars, Alphabet/Google worth $3.70 trillion dollars, Microsoft worth $2.97 trillion dollars, and Amazon worth $2.29 trillion dollars.

Jensen Huang expects the data center market will grow significantly in large part due to the shift toward accelerated computing and generative AI across nearly every major industry worldwide.

Sorry, I’m still hung up on that $1 trillion dollars in orders. WoW!

👶 Entertainment

Fox has ordered 2 seasons of a new animated series titled “Stewie”, which will be a spinoff of the popular show “Family Guy”. The 2 season order will consist of a combined 40 episodes, and is scheduled to premiere on Fox during the 2027–2028 television season. Seth MacFarlane, the original creator of “Family Guy”, will serve as an executive producer and voice actor for the upcoming spinoff series “Stewie”, and the project is part of his massive overall deal worth $200 million dollars with NBCUniversal Content Studios.

Seth MacFarlane moved his Fuzzy Door Productions company to NBCUniversal Content Studios in January 2020 after the 5-year deal was signed. As a part of the deal Seth MacFarlane has complete creative freedom across various networks for his various projects. But wait, the deal gets even better. Seth MacFarlane earns $40 million dollars per year for the production of his new shows and movies, including the new hit show “Ted” on the Peacock streaming service, which you’ll be forgiven if you haven’t seen it….since its on the Peacock streaming service. 🤣

🪖 Tech

The United States Army has just awarded a contract to the defense technology company Anduril Industries for $20 billion dollars. This agreement focuses on Anduril’s Lattice software platform, which is an AI-powered, open software platform designed to integrate, manage, and orchestrate diverse sensors and unmanned systems, turning vast data into actionable command-and-control decisions. WoW, that was a mouthful!

Anduril currently has a private valuation of $30.5 billion dollars. Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Anduril, has said the company is planning to go public by the end of 2026. With this new $20 billion dollar contract from the U.S. Army, I’m guessing their valuation just went up.

🍺 Celebrities

George Clooney, co-founder of the tequila company Casamigos, is entering the non-alcoholic beer market with the launch of his new company Crazy Mountain, and a line of lager and a lime-flavored non-alcoholic beers. Joining George Clooney in this new venture are his friends and co-founders from Casamigo, including Rande Gerber who’s married to supermodel Cindy Crawford, and real estate mogul Mike Meldman.

George Clooney and his co-founders sold their previous company Casamigos to beverage giant Diageo in June 2017 for $1 billion dollars. The friends originally came up with the blend of tequila while they were all building neighboring homes in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. They were struggling to find a tequila that was smooth enough that they could sip it all day without getting a  hangover. Now that’s the kind of market research I can get behind! They spent nearly two years, and tried over 700 samples in blind taste tests until they finally got the recipe right, and Casamigos was born. Back to George Clooney’s new non-alcoholic beer company Crazy Mountain.

The non-alcoholic beer industry was valued at $22 billion dollars, and is expected to grow to $40 billion dollars by 2032. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, it must be nice to be George Clooney!

💵 Kickbacks

The White House is set to get a $10 billion dollar kickback for its role in the forced sale of the social media company TikTok to a coalition of U.S.-based companies including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX as the primary stakeholders who own 80% of the new venture, and the former Chinese parent company ByteDance which will keep a 20% stake in TikTok.

This $10 billion dollar kickback has been described as a payment to the executive branch after the administration mandated the divestiture of the platform. Can we just talk about how this payment, or kickback, is completely unprecedented in the history of the U.S.!?!?

So if you’re new to the forced sale of TikTok, the Chinese owner of TikTok was forced by the administration of President Donald Trump to sell the majority of TikTok to a U.S.-based ownership group, who would set up U.S.-based servers and databases to run TikTok. Unsurprisingly the winning company that was awarded the deal to buy TikTok turned out to be some of the biggest donors to Donald Trump’s campaign when he was running for president this last time.

Funny coincidence, right? So apparently that’s how business is done now in 2026!

📺 YouTube

YouTube is now the largest media company in the world by revenue. The Alphabet owned platform brought in $62.3 billion dollars in revenue in 2025, which was above the $60.9 billion dollars that The Walt Disney Company made in the same year. Think about that for a minute!

In case you haven’t been keeping track in recent years, YouTube is actually a LLC that is a subsidiary of Google, which itself is a subsidiary of parent company Alphabet, who reported total revenue of $402.84 billion dollars for fiscal year 2025.

Of the $62.3 billion dollars in revenue YouTube earned in 2025, $40.4 billion dollars of that total was from advertising, and around $20 billion dollars from subscriptions and other revenue. If YouTube was a standalone company, some analysts estimate it would have a market cap of around $560 billion dollars. That would make YouTube bigger than IBM, Bank of America, or even Netflix. Damn!

🏉 Sports

The NFL is in advanced negotiations with Paramount Skydance to restructure their media rights agreement for games on CBS. Paramount Skydance currently pays $2.1 billion dollars yearly for these broadcast rights. A revised deal could increase that annual payment to over $3 billion dollars, or a more than 50% price increase. So why would Paramount Skydance be willing to fork over more money each year when they already have a 11-year deal that runs through the 2033–34 season? Well, Paramount Skydance is worried the NFL might exercise their opt-out clause in the contract that would result in them losing their media rights to show NFL games in 2029.

By securing their broadcast rights for several more seasons Paramount Skydance would be removing a liability, and financially it apparently makes sense to them. Kinda feels like extortion, so I’ll be curious to see if the NFL now begins to renegotiate their other broadcast rights agreements with other networks including NBC, Fox, and Amazon Prime.

Was this email forwarded to you? Did you not hate it?

Then consider subscribing to The Business Behind The News. The only newsletter that brings you the business behind the news, with a healthy dose of sarcasm - all delivered to your inbox once a week in an easily digestible 5-minute read.

The Business Behind The News is written, edited, and published by Chris Thompson.