What Does It Profit Podcast

Welcome to WDIP Summer School. It's not summer school for those who have failed. It's summer school for those who want to catch up, and for those who want to get ahead.  Every two weeks throughout the summer, we'll look back on lessons learned from Season 3 which was all about making change… right where you are. In class today, we explain modern child labor. We are not talking about cutting the la...

Welcome to WDIP Summer School. It's not summer school for those who have failed. It's summer school for those who want to catch up, and for those who want to get ahead.  Every two weeks throughout the summer, we'll look back on lessons learned from Season 3 which was all about making change right where you are. In class today, we explain "Greenwashing" and "Social Washing"– two ethically similar i...

Welcome to WDIP Summer School . It's not summer school for those who have failed. It's summer school for those who want to catch up, and for those who want to get ahead.  Every two weeks throughout the summer, we'll look back on lessons learned from Season 3 which was all about making change right where you are. In class today, we explain the ESOP– the employee stock ownership plan and how it is a...

In this episode, Dr. Dawn wraps up Season 3 by sliding into home plate. She takes us on a journey inside professional baseball. We hear the incredible story of how an inspiring group of athletes, allied with social justice advocates, finally took a stand to demand that the work of minor league baseball players was worth a living wage.    Remarkably, and without much fanfare outside the world of ba...

In this episode, Dr. Dawn takes us on a trip to find her roots in rural North Carolina. She is the granddaughter of an orphan who worked in the NC textile mills in the 1940s. Without much to go on, Dr. Dawn leans on insights from James Benton, author of Fraying Fabric , and Jimmy Warlick, historian and documentarian of the Workers' Legacy Project to fill in the gaps.   Dr. Dawn gives us the contex...

In this episode, we are headed to West Virginia to flip the script on what we know about the energy business in the heart of coal country.  We introduce you to a new type of energy and a new type of business.  Meet Solar Holler, the "benefit corporation" that addresses some of the toughest economic issues in West Virginia.    Joseph "Joe" and Elizabeth Opoke are father-and-daughter descendants of...

In this episode, we head to Crete, Nebraska, America's heartland, in our quest to gain insight into the human cost of the meat we eat. We tell the extraordinary story of the "Children of Smithfield," the adult children of meatpacking workers at Smithfield Foods who stood up to Big Meat, the governor, and others in positions of power and authority to proclaim that their parents were not "expendable...

In this episode, we tell an almost surreal story. It is the origin story of "union busting" at Starbucks, one of the country's best-known progressive and socially-conscious companies, and the highest ranking food service company on the list of  Fortune's Most Admired Companies .   Our host Dr. Dawn Carpenter , a Starbucks shareholder, is encouraged by activist shareholder efforts to seek intervent...

In our Season 3 kickoff, we celebrate the resiliency of the human spirit. We step into the psyche of Gina Schaefer, the founder and CEO of A Few Cool Hardware Stores in-and-around Washington, DC.  Gina combined her entrepreneurial spirit and love of community into a space for people recovering from substance use disorder to rebuild their lives.  One of Gina's former employees, Shane, shares a deep...

To the loyal WDIP tribe, welcome back! We've missed you. Thanks for your patience as we re-vamped the show. We hope you like the changes. For those who are just finding us, thanks for giving us a listen. We're the podcast for those who think that there is a social and moral value in economic life. We believe in the power of the human spirit. Ultimately, we believe that each of us has choices to ma...

In this episode, Dr. Dawn is in conversation with Dr. Elisabeth Bik and Dr. Ivan Oransky . Dr. Elisabeth Bik is a microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant who has worked to call out fraudulent scientific papers. She became renowned in her fight against the bad science behind hydroxychloroquine as an effective therapy against COVID-19 that resulted in a global Twitter assault. Dr. Ivan Or...

As we head into the 4th of July holiday weekend, we dig into the WDIP back catalog to revisit a conversation from October 2020 with The Assassin, famed short-seller Fahmi Quadir.    Now that meme stocks are a thing and short-selling and hedge funds have made their way into social media lexicon, we thought it was time to take another listen.     We'll be back in two weeks to share with you a conver...

In this off-season episode, we dig into the WDIP back catalog to revisit a conversation with Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) CEO, Lisa Mensah where we talked about the idea of "finance justice." The original conversation was released in December 2020. The work keeps pressing forward as OFN seeks to build coalitions of investors that believe that investing in people pays rich dividends by buildin...

This weekend is Memorial Day weekend-- the unofficial start of summer... at last!  At What Does It Profit , we are officially in the "Off-Season" and busy cleaning house, tuning up, and otherwise getting ready for Season 3. During the off-season, we wanted you to get to know more about our host and the ethics work behind the show.  We also want to introduce new listeners to insights from our back...

We've reached the end of our second season.  This is the time when we take a pause and look back. In today's episode, it means looking back to our pilot episode about shareholder activism and our Season 1 bonus episode called The Price of the Ecuadorian Chernobyl . This is the story of Chevron and the decades of oil dumping in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this episode, we jump back into this epic Dav...

We've reached the last regular episode of Season 2. Hold on to your passport. We're still travelling.  We start in New York and then head to India with Megha Desai. Megha is the former ad agency protégé, who after a decade in the business, answered the call of the ancient Indian philosophy of Dharma. She has energized a newly transformed family foundation into a leading voice for economically and...

Despite being in the midst of a global pandemic, we're going to take a trip around the world. We're talking about the Economy of Francesco (EoF) with Paulo Santori, an economic historian in Rome and with Myrian Castello, a "human-right-to-dream" activist and facilitator in Brazil. EoF is a global youth movement inspired by Pope Francis and Saint Francis of Assisi whose members and their co-operato...

This week we stay in the co-op space a little longer and get a two-for-one. As an homage to Women's History Month, we talk with one of the most celebrated marketer of co-ops-- and one of less than a handful of women responsible for driving the development of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, DC. We talk with Roberta MacDonald, Senior Vice President for Brand Strategy at the Cabot Cream...

This week, we're going to switch things up a bit.  We are going to talk about the idea of inclusion, but from a slightly different perspective.  We are going to learn all about economic structure called a co-op.  Sure you likely have heard of housing co-ops, maybe even grocery co-ops… but do you know just how common they are?  Let's talk co-ops with Casey Fannon, President of the National Cooperat...

This week, we talk with Logan Scott, Manager for Diversity and Inclusion at The Walt Disney Company. Logan's work during Black History Month on the New York Times' 1619 Project inspired us. Logan talks about superheroes, diversity, equity, inclusion, and what it all means for business.

This week, we take storytelling to a whole new level. We learn that each of us is a "superhero" at something. We talk to the man whose Instagram feed has selfies with the Hollywood Superhero A-LIST. In some ways, we think of our guest today as a kind of superhero himself, building community where it's needed. Today, we talk with the legendary Gareb Shamus, former Chairman and CEO of Wizard Enterta...

The winds of change are blowing in corporate governance. Where will they take us? Time will tell. This week we have a shareholder perspective from a man whose name is well-known in the investor relations offices of many of the most well-known corporations in America. We like to call him a dean of the Shareholder Rights Movement, others like to call him a corporate gadfly. You decide: corporate gad...

In 2020, JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon's tenure at the helm of the Business Roundtable expired. But what about this whole new way of doing business? In 2021, shareholder activists put the stakeholder governance paradigm to the test, and JP Morgan said, no. The whole issue got us thinking. It's time for an update on this new vision for a stakeholder approach to corporate governance.  We talk with some...

In this episode, we're not talking about bulls or bears.  We're talking about the big, fat elephant in the room.  The finance industry is ethically-conflicted. We talk with JC de Swaan, hedge fund investor and Princeton finance ethicist, about Robinhood, Wirecard and a few other notable companies-- as a way to frame how to do finance better.  The hope is to inspire the idea that finance can be a f...

In this episode, we explore the idea that everyone who has retirement assets should have the ability to know where their money is invested and how it has an impact in the world.  With knowledge comes power-- the power to make sound economic and moral decisions. Our guest is Congressman Andy Levin, Vice Chair of the House Education and Labor Committee and author of legislation that could make that...