Finally one more thought the German World War Two General
Irwin Rommel said, don't fight a battle if you
don't gain anything by winning. I learned that lesson
at my first annual shareholders meeting of capital cities ABC
. I was a brand new General councils and I
was proud that we'd won the battle of keeping a
shareholder initiative off the ballot after taking it to the
SEC as I sat in front of hundreds of shareholders
on the day. As with the chairman CEO and
CFO, I watched in dismay as person after person
stood up and told us we should be ashamed for
not putting their idea on the ballot for the meeting
. And every one of those shareholders won a nun's
habit or a priest's collar. It turned out that
the initiatives had come from a group of Roman Catholics
and my chairman and CEO were devout Catholics. As
we walked off that stage, the CEO said to
me quietly but firmly make this go away. Which
of course I did this week, we had more
than one example of people fighting battles with questionable results
even if they win farmers from the United States to
India to Spain are up in arms about higher costs
on climate regulations. With the most militant in France
where they shut down the capital. We share the
goals, for example, the protection of nature because
we all live in nature and with nature and the
best ambassadors for nature are the farmers themselves. Um
And important is for us that we find common solutions
, but it's not clear what farmers will gain given
what climate change is doing to their livelihood. If
you take, for example, the Western United States
, everything west of my house in Colorado, the
combination of uh specialty products or a portfolio of different
types of products which are having different price and supply
and demand dynamics exacerbated, of course, by terrible
drought conditions unevenly distributed across the entire Western United States
. Uh The story there is of a net decline
of net farm income on a consolidated basis. We've
known all about Elon Musk's odd battle with Bob Iger
for not advertising on X. But then again,
Bob may now be picking his own battle with an
important partner of his reports. Are that the NFL
is none too pleased with plans for ESPN to form
a joint sports streaming service with Fox and Warner Brothers
. Discovery something put together in secret. At the
same time, the reported of the NFL was considering
an investment in ESPN is certainly an unusual situation.
They haven't decided who's going to manage it yet.
But you can imagine there'll be fights over control and
payments and strategy and things like that. Of course
, the most renowned of battles may be our former
president, Donald Trump who has made no secret of
his skepticism about NATO. This week, the former
president raised the decibel level by taking on pretty much
all of NATO saying he told at least one NATO
member that he would welcome President Putin's attacking them if
they didn't meet their commitments for defense spending. They
said you got to pay up. They asked me
that question. One of the presidents of a big
country stood up and said, well, sir,
uh if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia
, will you protect us? I said you didn't
pay, you're delinquent. He said, yes,
let's say that happened. No, I would not
protect you. In fact, I would encourage them
to do whatever the hell they want. And then
there was the biggest battle of them. All that
is of course the Super Bowl where everyone expected a
knock down, drag out fight to the finish between
the San Francisco 49 Ers and the Kansas City Chiefs
, which is what we got with the Chiefs winning
in overtime. But what we might not have expected
was a separate battle on the sidelines between Chiefs star
tight end Travis Kelsey and his coach and re triggered
apparently by Kelsey's displeasure at not being on the field
. He subsequently equipped that rather than cursing him out
the way the lip readers said he had, he
really said something much nicer. I was just telling
him how much I love him. But in the
end, despite picking a battle with his coach,
Mr Kelsey did get the big reward of a kiss
from none other than, of course, Taylor Swift --> .