Oil Deals at the Climate Summit? & Finding Love on Duolingo

0:03When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. 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.

0:45It's Tuesday, November 28th. Let's ride.

0:52Toby, it's Giving Tuesday, which is not only what a Gen Z-er 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-Hodgkin's lymphoma a few years ago. He's 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.

1:26You can find it at lls.org or we will link it in the show description. Okay, now time for a quick shout out to the sponsor of today's episode, Brex. I can't believe it, but we only have a few more days left of Brex ads. You know what they say, time flies when you're increasing compliance, accuracy, and efficiency via an AI-powered expense management platform. Is that what they say? Hey, we made Let's Ride a thing. We can probably make this work as well. You're so right. We are influencers. We are tastemakers. And today we recommend you check out Brex.com for all your expense management needs. I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back, and Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL.

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2:30The COP28, the world's biggest climate summit, is set to begin later this week in Dubai, but there's already major controversy swirling around the event. Documents leaked yesterday showing that the host United Arab Emirates plan to use side meetings at the COP28 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 COP28. It is a gleaming city literally built on oil money.

3:07The 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 leaked 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 interests. Yeah, you look at the point of the summit, you're trying to assess how far along humanity is in hitting its goals to kind of slash our carbon emissions.

3:42And 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 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 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 our carbon emissions, but also we cannot do it without involving the private sector.

4:23So 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 is doing these deals or wanted to do these deals. It's a guy named Sultan Al-Jabber. 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 Adnok. And there is a renewables energy kind of subsidiary of that 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.

5:04He 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 Jalbers 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, too, 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.

5:42India and 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, an Atlanta-based gang with ties to the Bloods.

6:19So they are going after him using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a.k.a. 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 Thug's song lyrics as evidence, a decision both defense attorneys and freedom of speech advocates denounced, calling it discriminatory and infringing on First Amendment rights.

6:55Neil, so many different angles to unpack 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. You know, this was supposed to start a long time ago. For people who have never heard of Young Thung, 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 won a Grammy. He also was on Havana by Camila Cabello.

7:34So 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.

8:12And 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 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 use any other type of genre. You don't use theater lyrics. You don't use anything else in criminal cases.

8:51But you have seen a lot of rap lyrics used. 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 in these cases. But you have the district attorney saying, look, if you don't want to don't admit to rap, don't admit to crimes using rap lyrics and we won't have to use it as evidence. Yeah. 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.

9:25And 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 OK being out of their job for the good part of a year. So we'll have to watch this play out.

9:58Basically, prosecutors have to prove that Young Thug was the leader of a criminal enterprise under the RICO Act. OK, I've got a major IPO alert. Xi 'an, 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. Xi 'an 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. Sheehan has been one of the most incredible success stories of the pandemic, when people jacked up their online shopping.

10:38The company does far more in U.S. sales 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 but, Sheehan is on a hotter seat than a Panthers coach. which 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.

11:17But also remember the Piper Sandler survey, which asked teens what their favorite brands are. Amazon was their favorite e-commerce brand, but Shein was right behind it in second. So this is not only just a pandemic era flash in 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 US. It's making strides. It has a partnership with Forever 21 in store as well as online.

11:51And then they also had this big deal where they struck up an 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, well, 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, Xi 'an, of getting cotton from the Xinjiang province, which has been the site of alleged genocide on Uyghur Muslims by the Chinese government.

12:31Shein has denied that it does manufacturing there, that it used forced labor, 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 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 this paperwork.

13:08It 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 their second favorite e-commerce brand.

13:30Raise the rudders! Raise the sails! Raise the sails! Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sails solution? Reach sails professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life.

14:10They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not Play Play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best I do win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. 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 Duolingo.

14:49The 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 interest. 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 cita de cafe, depending on how well you're studying is going.

15:21Even 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?

15:54Yeah, 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. and 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.

16:27But 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 Letterboxd was another one, the movie review website.

17:06So 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 Letterboxd or whatever, all these apps, do you like lean into this? I don't think so. Because it just, it kind of corrupts the entire purpose of it, which is a safe space to indulge in your passions.

17:38but 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 comment 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 I've, that has been interesting to me is this date me Google doc where people, 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 what they, who they are and what they want.

18:22So 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 US, topping both UPS and FedEx in parcel volumes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

18:56Amazon will 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 partial 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 a 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.

19:37Yeah, 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, if you look back just a decade ago, of people saying, I don't know, I think 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.

20:08FedEx 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 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.

20:46You 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 trees 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.

21:22Merriam-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 ChatGPT 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.

22:00There'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 in the age of ai so i think that kind of drove uh lookups what was funny to me is merriam webster had to strip out a lot of five letter words because a lot of people look up stuff for wordle oh interesting yeah so that kind of inflates the numbers out there yeah so that kind of inflates the numbers and they're like all right well we can't do any of the wordle uh the wordle options so we'll stick with with the longer 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 hurricane 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 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 neil i always thought yours were funny because 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 uh i was i was expecting the u.s economy to bounce back in the roaring like in the terms of the roaring 20s and i think it has I stick by Renaissance.

23:36And 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. Hurriquake 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.

24:12But this year's shortlist on the shortlist are Riz, Situationship, Prompt, Swifty, De-Influencing, Beige Flag, Parasocial. Those feel all pretty good to me. I do think Riz will eventually take the crown there. It just was so indicative of 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 and make raise the uh the word of the year so I don't think Riz needs our help that is true like that random like that random bird that John Oliver did okay we have to wrap it up there 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.