Morning Brew Daily - Oil Deals at the Climate Summit? & Finding Love on Duolingo

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

Episode 201: Neal and Toby explain the reports that officials from the UAE are looking to cut oil deals at the COP28 Climate Summit. Plus, Young Thug's racketeering case and Shein files for a US IPO. Toby shares how you can find love on Duolingo or Strava, and why Amazon is becoming the biggest package delivery service in America. And finally, what is the word of the year. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Disclosure: This is a paid advertisement for Autonomix’s Regulation A+ Offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.autonomix.com Visit the at Leukemia and Lymphoma Society at https://lls.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, major drama ahead of the climate summit in Dubai later this week. Then the trial of Atlanta rapper Young Thug kicked off yesterday, and it could have big implications for Donald Trump. It's Tuesday, November 28th. Let's ride. Toby, it's Giving Tuesday, which is not only what a Gen Zier would say about today, but the Tuesday after Thanksgiving when people open up their checkbooks to donate to various causes and charities.

I know there's one you want to highlight for people. Yeah, my charity is the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. One of my best friends was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma a few years ago. He since made a full recover and he actually ran the London Marathon in honor of this charity. I've donated in the past. It's dedicated to helping cure leukemia, lymphoma, and other blood cancers. Great cause if you're looking to get in the giving spirit on this Giving Tuesday. You can find it at LLS.org or we will link it in the show description.

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plan to use side meetings at the COP 28 to pitch more than a dozen countries on oil and gas deals. I don't need to point out the irony of using a climate summit to further your fossil fuel interests. Plus, it goes against standard practice to use a diplomatic summit to negotiate business deals. And this was the worry, right, about having Dubai host the COP 28. It is a gleaming city literally built on oil money. The UAE is the world's seventh largest oil producer in the world, and fossil fuels account for 30% of the country's GDP. Critics have said for months that there would be a conflict of interest in having the UAE host a climate summit. A spokesman for the event said the leak documents were inaccurate and unverified, but this is sure to only fuel speculation that this event, which is supposed to be about countries'

coming together to stake out emissions targets is already compromised by oil and gas interest. Yeah, you look at the point in the summit, you're trying to assess how far along humanity is in hitting its goals to kind of slass our carbon emissions. And then you're also trying to convince some of these richer countries to finance these big climate change-related efforts. And then you have these backroom deals emerge that not only is that not happening, but almost the opposite is happening where you're negotiating these business deals. That being said, there is this theory kind of surrounding this climate change summit that diplomacy is not the only way to attack climate change.

You need to get the private sector involved, and that there is going to be a future where we're still relying on oil and gas for the foreseeable future. So this is kind of what they're balancing at this particular COP28 is, yes, we need to make progress on slashing air carbon emissions, but also we cannot do it without involving the private sector. So that's kind of why we're seeing kind of these themes emerge from this particular summit. Right. That is the philosophy espoused by the guy, this is the name to know around this summit and who's who was doing these deals or wanted to do these deals. It's a guy named Sultan Al Jaber. He is the president-designate of this year's UN Climate Summit. He also happens to be the CEO of Abu Dhabi's oil and gas giant, which is called Adnock. And there is a renewables energy, kind of subsidiary of that. he also heads up. But this guy is the one who is running these meetings, and he is at the

centerpiece of that theory that you just talked about, that he is the middleman. He is the person for the job to be able to bridge the gap between oil and gas, which we've been using for centuries, to a renewable energy future. And without bringing oil and gas companies to the table to have them invest in renewables, this transition will not happen. Yeah, Al Jalbarez describes his approach as realism. He's saying, realistically, we are going to be using these oil and gas into the middle of the century. And then if we want to zoom out to, in theory, the UAE is technically on good diplomatic terms with most of the major players here. The U.S. and Europe have historically been a little resistant to kind of being held accountable for some of the emission standards.

Indian China have resisted the demands to phase out coal, but the UAE could hypothetically bridge some of those gaps. So that's another reason why maybe we're seeing the conference where it is. All right, the trial of Atlanta rapper Young Thug finally began yesterday in Fulton County, Georgia. Almost a year after district attorney Fannie Willis arrested the Grammy Award-winning rapper for allegedly leading a street gang that has committed violence stretching back over a decade. Prosecutors say that YSL, the acronym for his record label, Young Stoner Life, also stands for Young Slime Life in Atlanta-based gang with ties to the bloods. So they are going after him using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, aka the RICO Act, which, if you remember, is the same law the district attorney used to indict Trump in 18 co-defendants back in August over their alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 elections.

Outside the similarities to Trump case, rap lyrics are also set to play a central role. The judge presiding of the trial made the controversial decision to allow some of young thugs song lyrics as evidence. a decision both defense attorneys and freedom of speech advocates denounced calling it discriminatory and infringing on First Amendment rights. Neil, so many different angles to impact here. This case has it all. Yeah, well, it took 10 months for jury selection, I think, is indicative of the epic, sprawling nature of this case. That is very not common for 10 months.

This was supposed to start a long time ago. For people I've never heard of Young Thong, maybe we should just do a quick resume. He is a rap icon of Atlanta, which is a hotbed of hip hop for many years. One of his, I would say, people may know him most from co-writing, This is America with Childish Gambino, Donald Glover, for which he wore, for which he won a Grammy. He also was on Havana by Camia Cabo. So this guy is a big deal in the rap community, and he's collaborated with everyone from Drake to future to Travis Scott. So this is kind of a trial about Atlanta rap as well. Yeah, no, absolutely. And we mentioned rap lyrics are going to play a central role here.

Basically, what it comes down to is a lot of freedom of speech advocates say, these rap lyrics are protected under the First Amendment right. They are not indicative of anything truthful, actually. It's just, it is art, so you can say what you want to say. But then the district attorney is saying, no, there is truth behind these. We've put together this massive case supporting our argument. And when he says things like, I am the leader of so-and-so, I mean, you have the actual rap lyrics there, but it's definitely one of those things where depending on whether the jury takes into account these rap lyrics or not is probably the central to this case.

Right. So California, there's been a push to remove rap lyrics from criminal cases because they have been, they have been found in more than 700 cases going back over decades. So they're saying advocates to kind of remove these from cases are saying, but you don't, any other type of genre. You don't use theater lyrics. You don't use anything else in criminal cases, but you have seen a lot of rap lyrics to use. So there's been a push in policy circles. California recently signed a bill. The California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that actually restricts the use of lyrics in these cases. But you have the district attorney saying,

look, if you don't want to, don't admit to crimes using rap lyrics, and we won't have to use it as evidence. Some of the lyrics are, got a lot of flowers, a perfect leader. I'm a boss. I call the shots. So they're pointing to it and saying, is this not you saying, I am the leader of this gang? So very interesting. And we mentioned Trump.

And one of the reasons why we mentioned Trump, too, is that his social media posts could also be looked at as protected under the First Amendment. Or you could say that they were also saying, I am inciting violence or I am saying, let's try to overturn this election. So those are the parallels there. just a wild two court cases to have to be compared to each other. This trial is expected to take well into the next year, which is why it took so long to find jury as well, because you need to find people that are okay being out of their job for the good part of a year. So we'll have to watch this play out.

Basically, prosecutors have to prove that young thug was the leader of a criminal enterprise under the RICO Act. Okay, I've got a major IPO alert. Sheen, the China founded Fast Fashion Giant, that sells $9 jeans, filed, confidentially to go public in the U.S. yesterday, which is the first step a company takes in order to IPO. This is going to be a biggie. Sheean is aiming for a valuation of $90 billion when it IPOs, making it one of the biggest public listings of the past years. The timeline isn't certain, but reports say it's aiming to ring the bell sometime next year.

Sheen has been one of the most incredible success stories of the pandemic when people jacked up their online shopping. The company does far more in U.S. cells than H&M and Zara combined. In 2019, its net income was $137 million. This year, it's expected to post a profit of $2.5 billion, just hockey stick growth. But, and there's a huge butt, Cheyenne is on a hotter seat than a Panthers coach. It's been criticized for a range of alleged offenses, and its overall mysterious vibe was nicely summed up by The Verge as quick, cheap, and not quite what it seems. So even though business is booming, it's got a lot to come clean about to have a successful IPO.

Yeah, it's been plagued by bad PR, mainly the allegations of stealing designs and then questionable labor and environmental practices. But also remember the Piper Sandler survey, which asked teens what their favorite brands are. Amazon was their favorite e-commerce brand, but Cheyenne was right behind it in second. So this is not only just a pandemic era flashing the pan, clearly by the amount of revenue it's bringing in. This is also a brand with real kind of loyalty from some of the younger audiences as well. So I do think that one of their big plays when they're debuting, when they're trying to set up this IPO, is establishing a foothold in the U.S. And it's making strides. It has a partnership with Forever 21, in store as well as online.

And then they also had this big deal where they struck up a agreement with, let me find the name real quick, Spark Group, which is this joint venture between authentic brands, which owns a million clothing brands, and then Simon Property Group, which is a mall group. So they're definitely trying to establish their foothold in the U.S. Yeah, I just want to dial in on one of the main criticisms because that has come from Congress at the highest levels, which is about their supply chain, where they source the cotton for their garments. The lawmakers have accused them of getting cotton, Sheehan, of getting cotton from the Xinjiang province, which has been the site of alleged genocide on Uighur Muslims by the Chinese government. Sheehan has denied that it does manufacturing there, that it used force, forced law. but it did admit that 2% of its cotton comes from that region. And that to me just signals what it's going to have to be, what's going to have to do as it gears up for its IPO because there is no business disinfectant like an IPO.

We saw exactly what happened with WeWork when it tried to go public in 2019. It had this business governance structure that was shrouded in mystery. And when all of that came clean, the company collapsed. And Sheen is going to have to be a lot more transparent than it has been because it has to file all of this paperwork, paperwork. It has to disclose all of its financials, everything about this business, because it has to drum up support from the public for it to go public. So over the next year, it's going to have to be a lot more open than it has been. And it's unclear what we'll find under the hood. Okay. Let's take a quick break before any of the U's get mad at us by criticizing

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. For all the single people out there listening to this episode, maybe you're looking for love in all the wrong places. For today's Toby's trend, I'm going to tell my wise millennial friend, Neil here, how people are finding love not on hinge or on Tinder, but on apps like Strava and Duo Lingo. The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece where they interviewed couples who had found each other on apps not necessarily set up for dating, take Strava a sort of social media for fitness where you can post your workouts publicly. If you're single and ready to mingle, commenting or giving kudos to whoever has your eye, can be an easy icebreaker to express your initial interests. Duolingo, the language learning app, has a public leaderboard where you can congratulate your friends on their achievements, and some users have parlayed that into a coffee date or a sita de cafe, depending on how while you're studying is going.

Even Yelp, according to the article, can help you find love if you know where to look, as in the comment sections of the places you frequent. Now, I should state, approaching someone romantically on an app, not geared for that, can easily come across as creepy, so don't do that. But if you find yourself genuinely connecting with someone over your shared Strava runs, duolingo study habits, or choice of burrito spots on Yelp, maybe keep an open mind on how that relationship could grow. Neil, this Wall Street journal piece got me thinking where else would be a good spot to meet your future soulmate? Yeah, I don't want to say anything because, like you're saying, it does verge on creepy

because I was looking at stats for LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a big place where women get approached and they're like, I'm here for professional opportunities and you're like hitting on me. That's very weird. So there is a very, you have to be extremely tactful in all the examples that the Wall Street Journal provided in the article were all so super cute and charming. But to me, I was thinking, hey, this is even more incentive to learn a language. If I get on the leaderboard for whatever language, I become suddenly the hottest bachelor in the duolingo universe. But these stories were really cute to know that the Yelp example that you brought up. Some guy just left a

review for a bakery. And it was such a good review that someone contacted him from across the world and said, wow, I really appreciate your review. And then they hit it off and now they're married. Yeah, they really did choose the most upstanding and very cute examples. But this does make a lot of sense to me because dating apps don't give a great sense of who you are as a person. You actually are probably much more your authentic self when you are entering these spaces of your passions like duolingo like letterbox was another one the movie review website so if you are showing who you are through your languages food movies fitness it gives a much more authentic way to portray yourself so even though you are right it is such a fine line between you don't want to overstep your boundaries

but if you find a genuine connection and you see someone that you genuinely like maybe reach out in a respectful and responsible way if you're duolingo or yelp or letterbox or whatever all these apps Do you, like, lean into this? I don't think so. Yeah. Because it just, it kind of corrupts the entire purpose of it, which is a safe space to indulge in your passions. But I was also thinking about other places you could find love.

My first thought was the New York Times cooking section, comment section, because, again, food brings people together. And I've seen comments left under those recipes that are really, really long, so you could get to know someone there. But also maybe the Morning Brew Daily YouTube comment section, our Instagram comments section, I don't know. Maybe it will be the first podcast to kind of create a love that was meant to be. Another alternative dating format on a website that has been interesting to me is this date me Google Doc. It's definitely more overt rather than using another app, but people have

been using Google Docs just to write up a profile of them and be very specific about who they are and what they want. So there's a lot of opportunities out there besides the hinge and the tinders of the world. That's what we're learning. Okay, quick story time ahead of this next headline. So this weekend, I was driving down the Jersey Turnpike to Philly, one of the most heavily trafficked freight corridors in the country, zig and zagging around trucks. And I'm looking around and I realize most of these trucks are Amazon-branded semis heading to and from its warehouses. And a new report shows I wasn't hallucinating. Amazon is now the biggest delivery business in the U.S., topping both UPS and FedEx and parcel volumes, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon will, will deliver.

deliver 5.9 billion packages this year, a 13% increase from its 5.2 billion delivered last year. Meanwhile, UPS will hit 5.3 billion packages this year, and FedEx delivered 3.05 billion last fiscal year. For what it's worth, the USPS is still the largest parcel service by volume in the country. But in toppling FedEx and UPS, Amazon has done what was once unthinkable, building out in a matter of years of vast logistics network that rivals the infrastructure UPS and FedEx have had been establishing for decades. It's a remarkable feat and one that few expected just a decade ago when Amazon was a major customer for UPS and FedEx and in distant third place.

Yeah, and what's even crazier to me is that Amazon's figures only include packages that it shipped from beginning to end. UPS and FedEx include packages that they hand off to the Postal Service for Final Delivery. So technically, Amazon is not only delivering more packages, it is delivering more from start to end. So these numbers are staggering. There's great quotes. back just a decade ago of people saying, I don't know, I think it's a little, it's wishful

thinking to think that Amazon will compete with the big boys, but here they are surpassing them. Yeah, FedEx CEO, I have one of those quotes. FedEx CEO, Fred Smith back in 2016, said concerns about industry disruption continue to be fueled by fantastical articles and reports. So you had a bunch of analysts when Amazon was starting to think about getting into the logistics space in a big way, saying FedEx and UPS, they have hundreds of planes, hundreds of fulfillment centers, hundreds of warehouses. This takes tens of hundreds of billions of dollars to build out all of this infrastructure. There's no way Amazon can do it. And over the matter of a few years, they have. I didn't know this, but Amazon has this route franchise program. So in 2018, they launched this

program where you could start your own franchise delivering Amazon packages. You pay Amazon $10,000 and you can set up your own kind of micro-delivery business. So that's dramatically helped Amazon establish a foothold in certain markets. It might not have. So, Just a crazy rise to the top, and it's only getting bigger. Shipping by Amazon, that's what it's called. Shipping by Amazon. Neil, the air has changed. People are wearing scarves out, and I smell Christmas treats when I walk down the street.

That must mean it's word of the year season. Every year around this time, various dictionaries start to crown their so-called word of the years. And for 2023, according to Merriam-Webster, the word of the year is authentic. Marion Webster said it saw a substantial increase in online searches for it this year. quote, driven by stories and conversations around AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media. But Merriam-Webster isn't the only dictionary out there. The Cambridge Dictionary named Hallucinate as its word of the year, as in the thing that large language models like ChatGBT do when they spout off false information.

So clearly, AI is a major theme this year, and I'm sure we'll see other candidates emerge as December continues. But, Neil, happy with this year's batch so far? Well, I think authentic was chosen and was highly looked up because there's a kind of a debate about what it means. There's a lot of nebulousness around it. Does it mean real? Does it mean the essence of something? And so I think there's multiple definitions.

And people were probably looking up like what authentic actually means in the dictionary because it gets thrown around a lot from authentic food to your authentic self to what is authentic in the age of AI. So I think that kind of drove lookups. What was funny to me is Miriam Webster had to strip out a lot of five-letter words because a lot of people look up stuff for wordal. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so that kind of inflates the numbers. Yes. So that kind of inflates the numbers. And they're like, all right, well, we can't do any of the wordal options.

So we'll stick with the longer words. Longer ones. We also made some of our own predictions back in September for what we thought the word of the year might be. And we're going to play them for you right now. Huracquake. That word came out when the hurricane hit California recently and then an earthquake also hit California. And so the word hurricane came out and just has enough of that extreme weather. It's just big enough that it signifies a larger movement. I think it's going to be we are so back. Neil, it's a word of the year. Word. A couple other options I thought could be strike algorithm, indicted potentially if they wanted to go the political route or Renaissance. Neal, I always thought yours were funny because you. You first of all did a phrase to start out with, and then you ended with Renaissance. What was your thinking around Renaissance? Renaissance was, I was expecting the U.S. economy to bounce back in the roaring, like,

in terms of the roaring 20s, and I think it has. I stick by Renaissance. And then you also have the double meaning with the Beyonce tour. I think Renaissance would be great. I mean, our economy is booming right now. I know people don't think it is, but the economy is doing well. So we're in our Renaissance era. and Beyonce kind of dominated the summer

along with Taylor Swift. So I stick by Renaissance. I do not stick by mine. Hurricane was an awful guess. I was definitely, I was wrapped up in the moment for sure. The funny thing is too, Oxford Languages also hosts a fan-voted

word of the year competition that is still open right now. And in 2022, Goblin Mode won, which felt appropriate at the time. But this sheer shortlist on the shortlist are RIS, situation ship, prompt, Swifty, D-influencing, beige flag,

parisocial. Those feel all pretty good to me. I do think Riz will eventually take the crown there. It just was so indicative of like the TikTok culture this year. But also remember we talked about the John Oliver Bird competition in New Zealand. Maybe we get Morning Brew daily listeners to rally behind one of these words and make Riz the word of the year. I don't think Riz needs our help. That is true. Like that random bird that John Oliver did. Okay, we have to wrap it up there. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day. Can you believe? December is on Friday. If you want to reach us, send an email with thoughts, questions, concerns to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our

editor and producer. Samantha Vela's and Raymond Liu are associate producers. Yucena Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio. You can call hair and makeup a lot of things, but they are always authentic. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.