FRIDAY WRAP: transcript 12/2

SHOW on SPOTIFY

SHOW on APPLE

LIVE from room 1202 at the ESG Holiday Inn, downtown Canada,? it’s the Michael Bloomberg’s favorite ESG Friday show featuring Ari the data queen, Jessie the money whisperer, and “You can’t spell Moscardi” without M.S.C.I. I’m ES-D. On today’s show: which co-CEOs actually hate each other,?

Story of the Week (DR):

1. CEO change AB JS
2. With Bret Taylor’s departure from Salesforce, just 7 companies in the Fortune 500 have a co-CEO
4. According to OUR data… here’s who else should be leaving soon (Benioff 63%/Taylor 6%):
5. Workday
6. Aneel Bhusri (65%)
7. Luciano Fernandez (5%)
8. Tradeweb
9. Lee Olesky (70%)
10. William Hult (4%)
11. Netflix
12. Wilmot Reed Hastings (67%)
13. Ted Sarandos (5%)
14. Others are pretty balanced
15. Monster Beverage
16. Rodney Sacks (25%)
17. Hilton Schlosberg (20%)
18. Markel AND Lennar…. Exactly even!
19. Bob is back; Bob is gone
20. Florida prepares U-turn on Disney’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ punishment
21. China problems DR
22. Historic protests
23. ?in China against 'zero Covid' policy
24. Foxconn Apologizes After Workers Revolt At World’s Largest iPhone Factory
25. China brings in ‘emergency’ level censorship over zero-Covid protests
26. Crackdown on virtual private networks, which protesters used to access banned non-Chinese news and social media apps
27. China set to loosen COVID curbs after week of protests
28. A GOP congressman says TikTok should be banned in the US and is introducing legislation to do so, calling the app 'digital fentanyl'
29. "TikTok is digital fentanyl, addicting our kids," Gallagher added. "And just like actual fentanyl, it ultimately goes back to the Chinese Communist Party."
30. World Cup ESG stuff:
31. Qatar World Cup chief says between 400 and 500 migrant workers have died in projects connected to the tournament… that was from wednesday
32. Last year the Guardian published a piece: 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded: Guardian analysis indicates shocking figure over the past decade likely to be an underestimate
33. First All-Female Referee Team Planned For World Cup
34. From Scientific American: The World Cup In Qatar Is a Climate Catastrophe
35. Large sporting events often claim to be carbon neutral. But often this assertion is greenwashing, and it hides the incredible amount of pollution they actually create
36. When the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), the world’s governing body for soccer, proclaimed that the 2022 World Cup in Qatar would be “a fully carbon-neutral event,” the collective chortle that emerged from environmentalists could have powered a wind farm. The environmental nonprofit Carbon Market Watch blasted what it called FIFA’s “creative accounting” and issued a report charging that World Cup organizers’ stated goal “to reach carbon neutrality before the tournament kicks off” was fanciful at best. Carbon footprint calculations, the report noted, “can only take place after the event,” so heralding net-zero status beforehand “is premature and unworkable.”
37. Random ESG tidbits:
38. Kimball’s brother: 'ESG is the devil'
39. Tyson Recalls Ground Beef for Having 'Mirror-Like Material' In It
40. A few days later:
41. Tyson CFO Pleads Not Guilty to Public Intoxication, Trespassing
42. How?? He already apologized
43. AND: Tyson Foods executive found sleeping in a stranger's home while allegedly intoxicated has his board's 'continued confidence in his ability to lead'

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. The Rail Strike
2. Warren Buffett (64%), Lance Fritz (24%), Steven Leer (15%), James Foote 13%), Keith Kreel AB DR JS
3. Those are the most influential people at each of the railroads according to our data
4. Berkshire owns BNSF, one of the five railroads represented by the NCCC that’s negotiating with the unions
5. Unionized worker demo:
6. Canadian Pacific: 95% male
7. CSX: 96% male
8. Union Pacific: 95% male
9. Norfolk Southern: 96% male
10. BNSF: undisclosed
11. So you have five white millionaires and billionaires negotiating with a 95% male cohort of workers - what could go wrong?? When does the dick measuring start?
12. Sequoia Capital and the man-baby VCs funding our doom
13. Let’s review some of the stellar due diligence one of the largest PE/VC firms in the world has done:
14. Twitter (Elon)
15. Paypal (Thiel)
16. Uber (Kalanick)
17. Citadel (Ken Griffin, billionaire GOP donor)
18. FTX (SBF)
19. According to Preqin data, venture investment in crypto has been MORE THAN $62BN DOLLARS in the last decade - $62BN DOLLARS.? CAN YOU IMAGINE IF DUDES WEREN’T HANDING OTHER DUDES MONEY TO MAKE FAKE MONEY WHAT WE COULD DO WITH THE MONEY INSTEAD.
20. Mark’s Oversight Board
21. This is so much cleaner…:?
22. Musk breaks promise to form Twitter moderation panel, blames activists
23. Elon Musk says Twitter will offer 'amnesty' to suspended accounts
24. Elon Musk suspends Kanye West from Twitter for inciting violence
25. Elon Musk referenced the Bible and said he won't allow Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones back on Twitter on the same day he reinstated Trump's account
26. Than this…:
27. The Oversight Board has overturned Meta’s decision to remove a UK drill music video clip from Instagram.
28. The decision came down last week for a case FROM JANUARY 2022 about Chinx (OS)’s song that may or may not have a “veiled threat” against a gang.? Lyrics here.
29. “Meta lacked sufficient evidence to conclude that the content contained a credible threat, and the Board’s own review did not uncover evidence to support such a finding. In the absence of such evidence, Meta should have given more weight to the content’s artistic nature.”
30. Can we just stop pretending that Zuck isn’t Musk wearing cool sweatpants and birkenstocks instead of a space age diaper?
31. This guy: Sam Bankman-Fried apologized to an FTX customer who said he lost his life savings of $2 million, and accused the former CEO of stealing it
32. WHO PUTS THEIR LIFE SAVINGS IN A FAKE MARKET OF FAKE MONEY WITH NO DUE DILIGENCE OR GOVERNANCE
33. This is like every person who invested with Madoff after not asking what he actually does with the money
34. The customer is an idiot

Goodliest of the Week (AB):

1. Physician referrals can be a brutal and lengthy process. This telehealth startup wants to help you avoid them altogether
2. Q: How long do you think it takes patients in major US cities to get an appt with a specialist physician?
3. Sitka, a telehealth platform founded by Kelsey Mallard, connects primary care physicians with specialists and aims to cut down the wait time from weeks or months to hours.
4. The biggest problem: Specialty physicians were getting unnecessary patient referrals from PCPs. 85% of consultations help avoid these “clinically inappropriate” referrals and give providers the specialty knowledge without making the patient have an unnecessary appt.
5. US Women's National Team equal pay agreement settled earlier this year is in effect as they earn money from the men reaching the knockout stage DR JS JS
6. US Soccer became the first federation in the world to equalize FIFA World Cup prize money in May 2022. Even if the men lose against the Netherlands, the team will earn $13 million which will benefit both the women’s and men’s team equally. If every country did this, FIFA would feel the pressure to invest in the women’s game because the lack of resources they give to the women’s team would ALSO be felt by the men. And you can’t have that. And even if it never happens at the FIFA level, I am proud that the US federation did this. For reference: FIFA’s total prize money for this men’s world cup is $440 million, 14x the last women’s world cup.
7. If you don’t like this you are basically saying that democratic agreements between multiple parties are dumb.?
8. Heinz Spent 185,000 Hours Redesigning Their Ketchup Bottle Cap to Be 100% Recyclable
9. 185,000 hours, 8 years, 45 iterations, $1.2M later, Heinz has a new superior plastic top that is completely recyclable saving one one billion plastic caps from the landfills every year. Enough to fill 34 Olympics swimming pools. Heinz wants to share the design with other corporations, like shampoo bottle makers.

Exhausting-est of the Week (JS):

1. A dystopian world is closer than we think- at least for San Franciscans
2. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted (8-3) to allow the San Francisco Police Department to use lethal robots against suspects
3. The robots would be remote-controlled- not autonomous- and would use explosives to kill or incapacitate suspects when lives are at stake
4. SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie told the AP, “Robots equipped in this manner would only be used in extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives."
5. I just see this going very wrong. Have they ever thought about extensive negotiation training, instead of simulating a war zone?!
6. Women make up only 5% of the music tech industry. That’s probably because there’s a long history of being sexualized. AB MM
7. There’s 5% of women in the music tech industry- only 2.8% are music producers and less than 1% are women of color
8. DJ Glade, founder of Saffron, shares that she’s often sexualized while working in the industry. “I’m here to work, I’m not here to be your pretty woman DJ for the night”.?
9. Her company Saffron is a record label, hosts mix nights that create safe spaces for female and trans DJs and hosts educational courses for aspiring producers, engineers and broadcasters.?
10. Their mission is to change those statistics and the industry as a whole. No more being called a “women DJ” and receiving unsolicited feedback from men
11. Billionaires continue to exhaust me: This one Got the Chicago Mayor’s Support to Lease Public Land and Then Wrote Her Campaign a Check DR
12. For months, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has pushed a controversial plan to turn over public housing land to a professional soccer team owned by an influential billionaire. But that changed in mid-November when billionaire owner of the Chicago Fire Football Club, Joe Mansueto, donated $25,000 to the mayor’s reelection campaign.
13. Mansueto was reportedly an ally of Lightfoot but had never given to her political fund before his Nov. 17 contribution
14. Mansueto made the donation the same week Lightfoot released the first ads in her bid for reelection in February. And it came as officials work to finalize a deal that would let his team take over 23 acres of valuable land that have long been set aside to house low-income families.
15. Alderman Raymond Lopez wrote, in a letter to the city’s inspector general and executive director of the city’s Board of Ethics: “I believe this represents a gross & familiar abuse of power and, at a minimum, a potential violation of the City of Chicago’s Governmental Ethics Ordinance,”
16. Merriam-Webster has chosen the word of the year: Gaslighting. And Guess where the word got its origins? Yep, the fossil fuel industry.
17. The term, which describes a type of lie that leaves the target doubting their perception of reality, saw a 1,740% increase in searches on the dictionary’s site this year, with steady interest over the course of the year.
18. The mind-manipulating connotation came from a 1938 play called Gas Light, later turned into a movie. The plot: A husband tries to trick his wife into thinking she’s losing her mind — and thereby getting sent to an asylum — so he can steal the priceless jewels she’s inherited. His strategy involves sneaking around the house and making the gaslights flicker and dim, while insisting that the lights look totally normal to him.
19. Climate advocates have increasingly using the term to describe the actions of the oil industry, which mastered “gaslighting” long before it found its place in our vernacular
20. In the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists warned executives that carbon emissions could lead to catastrophic warming — and then the oil giant proceeded to act as if climate change wasn’t real, publicly doubting the science and working to block legislation to address rising emissions.
21. Oil companies portray themselves as problem solvers — BP’s motto is “reimagining energy” — while continuing to make the problem worse.

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: Hate in America
2. AB: US WNT
3. MM: Business Insider - there may be an airport strike!? Imagine the stories about dogs stranded inside luggage on a luggage carousel because of the callous workers looking to make $15/hour!
4. JS: US Women’s National team!!!!

Predictions

1. DR: Luciano Fernandez takes off his co-CEO bunny ears after he listens to this prediction and finally realizes that his co-CEO, who is only 4 years older, holds 65% influence while he holds just less than 5%
2. AB: McDonald’s is going to try to buy Slutty Vegan.
3. MM: Elon implants a Neurolink chip in his trans daughter’s head to make her a Republican (Elon Musk says he'd be comfortable implanting a Neuralink brain chip in one of his children), moves from California to Florida to join the Desantis administration and convinces them to divest from any asset manager that invests in the woke Tesla corporation because electric vehicles discriminate against diesel cars.
4. JS: