Who is the ‘most fairly paid’ CEO in America—and what does that even mean?
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Welcome to Most Innovative Companies. I'm your host, Yasmin Ghani, joined by my producer, Josh Christensen. Hey, Josh. Hey, Yas. So today we're going to be talking a little bit about CEO pay, but first I want to know, tell me about your worst ever boss or CEO. Okay, well, this is actually really serendipitous because I've been having frequent stress streams about the worst boss I've ever had. What?

I keep having stress dreams that we hire my first store manager boss for my first job ever, which was a cashier at Walgreens. And I cannot for the life of me remember this guy's name, but he was just like a short, older white guy with a tiger tattoo on his upper arm. He sounds awesome. What was so bad about him? Yeah.

I mean, I think I've given enough. I think the tiger tattoo is really telling of his management style, but he was just like so mean to all of us 16-year-old kids working our first job ever. I'm just like, why? It's funny. I had a boss. I worked in politics for a while who threw an internet router at me. Yep. Yeah, you told me this story before. Yeah, that was rough. It's funny. You know, what's that quote? It's like,

all happy families are the same, but all sad families are like sad in different ways or something. I've never heard that quote before. And I think like, because I was so young, I was just like, oh, I guess this is what workplaces are like. Like the movies also tell you that this is what workplaces are like, kind of. Yeah, kind of. But it shouldn't be like that. But it

is at far too many places. And we're going to get into some specific areas of those inequities in a little bit. But I should tell a very quick last time you'll ever hear this from me or housekeeping is Fast Companies Innovation Festival is next week. You're listening to this on a Wednesday, maybe a Thursday or Friday. Maybe you're listening to it as it's happening. But next week in New York City, the 18th through the 21st,

at Convene and other various locations throughout the city with some really interesting fast tracks, as we call them. We have such great programming at our Innovation Festival. Tickets are still available. Buy your tickets. Come see Yaz and I. We'll be there. Yaz is hosting a couple panels. Many of the guests you've heard on this podcast will be hosting panels and we'll all be wandering around Convene. So come say hi. Yeah, come say hi. Well, anyway...

Later on today's episode, we'll hear a conversation one of our producers, Julia Xu, had with Michelle Carre at VidCon earlier this year. They discussed Carre's YouTube channel, Challenge Accepted, where she learns how to do different jobs, including clown school. But first of all, let's talk about some other clowns. Across Hollywood studios and other industries, CEOs are taking home compensation packages that are hundreds or thousands of times greater than their workers' salaries.

Fast Company put together a special report on CEO fair pay, and here to break it all down is Fast Company Deputy Digital Editor Morgan Clendaniel. Hey, Morgan. Hey, Az. What's up? Just, you know, not making as much money as some CEOs. Yeah, we don't know our CEOs. I assume it's not nearly as high as the Hertz CEO salary, which was the one that really got me in this article. Why did that one get you so bad? It's Hertz. Yeah.

You mean the mediocre car rental company? I can't. I thought Hertz went bankrupt. It did. And then he is the new CEO, and that's why he's making so much money, because he's gotten a huge amount of stock front-loaded as part of his new contract. Make it make sense, Morgan. I saw one analysis that put the medium CEO to worker pay...

at Standard & Poor's 500 ratio at 324 to one. That's kind of a crazy number. - Yeah, I mean, that's huge and that's the average. So many of the CEOs make way more than that in comparison to their workers. Just to take a famous example,

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, made more than $99 million in 2022. That's both salary and stock. But that's 1,117 times the company's median worker pay of $84,000 a year, give or take, which includes both people as

at Apple HQ, developers and stuff, but also people at the Apple stores. So you take that median worker, they would have to work for more than a thousand years to make Tim Cook's annual salary in 2022.

So I want to talk a little bit about, because this is something I noticed in the report, you said that that number, sort of the 84,000, includes people who work on the shop floor. The report seems to also include hourly workers, right? So one of the biggest discrepancies I saw was the Abercrombie & Fitch CEO. But presumably that's also taking into account the employees who are picking up occasional shifts. We worked with a company called MyLogic to sort of pull these numbers, and they are pulled from...

company's SEC filings, which are something companies have now been obliged to do since 2017, which is to post numbers about their CEO's pay and their median worker pay. But the rules are a little loosey-goosey in terms of how you define your median worker pay and which workers you include. So there's definitely some discrepancies between companies that, say, include all their overseas workers in all their factories versus the people who will sort of tilt it more towards their corporate HQ.

So that will definitely tip the numbers one way or another. But this does give you a sort of general sense of the sort of workforces that the companies have. And so you'll see some very tiny numbers for companies meeting an employee pay. And that is partially because they have a lot of workers who they pay really badly. Hell yeah. Now...

I also want to talk a little bit about the role of stock grants. So Josh alluded to the fact that like the Hertz CEO had a lot of stock that was front loaded. But there's a fair amount of CEOs that sort of make a lump sum that may seem kind of low, but actually get a lot of compensation via stocks.

Tell me a little bit about what role that plays in this whole thing. So I think there's two ways to look at that, right? One is there are some CEOs who just have a small annual cash salary but are receiving a lot of stock. And one thing you'll see is, like we were talking about with Hertz, there's a sense that the CEO should have

a fair amount of stock in the company, right? And so when a CEO first starts, they are given a lot of stock upfront as part of their initial pay package, and that can dissipate over time. So one thing that's really important to think about when looking at this list is it is really snapshot in time and things can change very quickly year to year. Another thing to think about is some of the lowest paid CEOs might be founders who are sitting on

50% of the stock in the company anyway. So, you know, someone who is listed as making $200,000 a year, in a lot of senses, that's probably good for company morale, and they could be making way more. But, you know, they might be a billionaire who just happens to be making $200,000.

$200,000 a year in cash salary. And it sort of has minimal effect on their day-to-day net worth. I am curious, you know, some of the numbers you've thrown out are just kind of too big to wrap their heads around. It's like, you know, if you imagine somebody giving you a billion dollars, like when I think about trying to spend that beyond donating to charity, it's really hard. But

But some kind of argue that CEOs should be paid that much because they're taking on more risks than the average worker and shouldering more stress or public expectation or what have you. What would you say to that? Certainly, a person who founds the company, you can understand the argument that they should be extracting a fair amount of value from it. Though, I guess then you also have to ask, like,

at the point that they've gone public, how much of that value has been contributed by the workers and not them. But then I think you have these sort of just corporate men and women who are hired into a job, not to keep knocking on the Hertz guy, but he was the exec at Goldman Sachs and then he's good at business and now he's the CEO of Hertz. Maybe he's judged more on the annual performance of

hurts year to year. But I think obviously, you know, there are workers who are handling a lot of risk, whether that be dying on the job or whatever else. And there are certainly a lot of jobs that take on a lot of risk that are poorly remunerated, certainly like a lot of government jobs and whatever else. I think you're sort of viewing this through your own prism in terms of how much you think a CEO is adding value to the company.

But some of these ratios, I think you would be hard pressed to fit into your worldview, no matter how CEO friendly it is.

The owner of Ticketmaster, which has obviously been in the news for basically like price gouging tickets and the amount of there makes an absurd amount in a ratio. But it's like even if you can justify they add that value, which I think is tough to say. I mean, there's just like the kind of broader like moral scope of it, like he has alluded to, is that there's no possible way like.

How much money do you need? That's where it comes down to. And I guess that's a different conversation than what you earn and what you're, you know, we're a business magazine. We're not really necessarily equipped to handle the philosophical questions about what we owe to each other. But like, it's just, it's hard to wrap your mind around it from a logical or a moral standpoint.

But Morgan's CEO pay wasn't always this crazy, right? Yeah. This is we are at a sort of high point. In 1965, I think it was somewhere around 20 to 1.

And then by the late 80s, it was up to 58 to 1. So that's like, you know, more than a factor of five and under 35 years. Reagan, maybe. Yeah. I don't know that like CEOs got more valuable right in that time. How did that happen, though? I mean, how did those numbers come about? Trickle down economics? Yeah, exactly. Like I said, Reagan. It's all Reagan. Sorry, I cut you off, but you were talking, you were sort of leading us into talking a little bit about kind of income inequality more broadly. I think.

I think it's part and parcel to a world where income inequality has increased broadly. The total wealth held by the top 10% of U.S. families grew from

$24 trillion to $82 trillion in roughly that same amount of time. So it's just a concentration of wealth and a concentration, I think, of stock and equities. And as those things have gone up hugely over the last few decades, the people at the top are reaping the rewards. That is obviously an incredibly depressing stat. But what is the broader impact of these numbers coming out? How does that affect employee morale?

I think it infects employee morale pretty badly. I think especially, you know, as employees are sort of being asked to do more, having more rules, more monitoring from corporate, the idea that like all these things continue to come with only sort of marginal increases in pay, if anything, while the CEO is

continues to rake it in and often continues to rake it in, in spite of any changes in company performance, that can't be good. And I think we've seen sort of boost in union organizing over the last few years. And I think it's some of the more visible in public campaigns, CEO pay has become a big issue. You've seen it a lot in the Starbucks workers, the

Spent a long time calling out former CEO Kevin Johnson's pay package and his huge golden parachute, which I think was like $60 million. This summer, there's been a lot of discussion of Bob Iger's pay as part of the Hollywood strikes. There's a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic.

and they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing. - Fran Drescher, who's the president of the Screen Actors Guild, which is one of the Hollywood unions that has been on strike this summer, has been really going after Disney CEO Bob Iger for his pay and these comments he made where he said that what the writers and actors were

asking for was, quote unquote, excessive, where, you know, I think Drescher and everyone else has pointed out that his pay is the actual thing that's pretty excessive. It's definitely a thing that is driving workers to be upset at their management and then instigating factor and taking more action. There's also, you know, an element of like CEOs are often granted stocks with the idea that it's sort of

their incentives the same. So you run a company well, stock performs well, you get compensated more. But outsized CEO compensation can also lead to kind of misaligned incentives, right? Sure. I mean, to take examples from the last couple of decades, we've had pharma companies pushing opioids to boost their stock price. Obviously, we have fossil fuel companies trying to

pump more oil to boost their stock price. We have companies skimping on safety protections for their workers. And all these things can do a temporary juice to your stock price that would help you as the CEO, but perhaps are not aligned with broader societal interests. So there

There's definitely some negatives to the idea that CEOs should be fully invested in just their short-term stock performance. So these numbers have all been public since 2017, as you mentioned. Who do we have to thank for the increased scrutiny on CEO pay? This came from an SEC rule that

that was passed in 2015 and then went into effect in 2017. I think certainly, you know, from a policy perspective, this is the kind of stuff that Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren have been making a

since their time in the spotlight. More broadly, as we said, unions, protest movements, you know, a lot of the stuff you can sort of hear faint echoes of the Occupy Wall Street protests in. I think now the question is, we've had this information for a while. It comes out every year. And as we are doing right now, people are sort of shocked by it. And then what are people going to do about it? The organizing campaigns are certainly something, but... So that was going to be my follow-up. Well,

Like, are we going to see anything? Yeah, I mean, I think there's some movement. I know Senator Sanders has a bill about adding tax increases to companies with a high CEO pay ratio. A few cities have passed, like, additional taxes on companies with bad ratios. San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, perhaps not surprisingly. Then there's the question of sort of, can it come from shareholders?

There are now a lot of votes that are called say-on-pay votes, where shareholders can voice displeasure, I guess, at CEO pay packages. They're non-binding, so the board can decide to pay the CEO whatever they want anyways, but you are seeing more and more...

say, on pay packages voted for, which is to say that the shareholders think the CEO is making too much money. Can you give us any examples of companies where shareholders have, you know, expressed their displeasure at CEO pay? Sure. You know, I think in 2001, Starbucks...

voted down a CEO pay package, which then the CEO ended up getting anyways, like we said. Was that Howard Schultz? Was that Howard Schultz era? No, I think it was Kevin Johnson. It was like Kevin Johnson's last one. We've seen in

In the past couple of months, the CEOs of Gap and Walgreens have both been let go. I think they both got pretty nice golden parachutes. So it's a little hard to say that it was about their pay, but they were both quite highly paid CEOs and perhaps boards are starting to look at this a little more closely. I, for one, hope so. We're going to take a quick break, followed by Julia Xu's interview with Michelle Carre about finding the novelty in your desk job.

So before starting the channel, how much experience did you have in different work environments? Well, you know, what's interesting is my YouTube channel is me trying a bunch of different jobs. So that's one thing. But before I had my YouTube channel, I worked for another YouTube channel, BuzzFeed, and I was a video producer there. And before that, I had a couple really cool internships. I interned at Google and

I interned at DreamWorks Animation and I also interned for Steve Carell. So I kind of had a bunch of different both creative background job experience as well as corporate experience. And each of those had such unique value sets that I like to bring to the way that I run my own business today. What would you say about like somebody who has just like the same career and like

I think a lot about my parents who stayed in like the same job for their whole lives and just like talking to them about my career and that it's already so different because they're not used to so many changes and you're like trying something new every time. Do you think it's kind of outdated to have the same thing the whole time or how would you bring novelty to something that is different?

the same job you've had for a long time. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I think about the times I was working for another company at my desk every day, it was always about finding novel experiences, even in the everyday. Something that my husband Garrett talks about all the time and has kind of become a mantra for my channel at least, is that the people who experience the most novel experiences

feel like their lives are longer because you have these tentpole memories to reflect on. And so something we try to do at the channel is create novel experiences all the time. But even when I think back to working at another company, the memories that are most powerful to me were those novel experiences and the moments when I took ownership and created opportunity for myself or even decided, you know what, I'm going to helm this project, even though I

haven't been asked to, stepping outside of my comfort zone really made those positions really exciting. And how much do you think of that like novelty is also like physical change? Because I know there's like so many videos where it's like really stressful physical things. So,

So many people just have like, you know, a desk job or an office job. Having physical change is necessary to like feel like something's changing or? I think so because I think that's why in the pandemic so many people found jobs

joy again by being able to work from home. And I think it's important for companies to listen to their workforce and employees and as to what like your own passions are and how you can inject them into the workplace. And it can be as simple as instead of working at my desk today, I'm going to go work in the office kitchen or something or work outside. But I feel that a lot of companies neglect those opportunities for the people who work for them.

And at that point, you're faced with an opportunity to either try a different job altogether, which is a privilege that not everyone has, or to create an opportunity for a new change of space or pace or project style within your own company that you're working for. Of all these different videos you've made, have there been places where you feel like

your values run counter to like the place that you're at or the new co-workers that you have. Whenever I take on a new challenge and challenge accepted, I'm going into a new community and they're allowing me in and going to Butler Academy, for example, was a really good example of, I don't know if I would do it this way myself. This International Butler Academy is very strict

run. There are a lot of rules. The fork has to be exactly three centimeters from the knife. I don't know. Don't quote me on that. That's probably wrong. But the point is there are high stakes for things that I didn't feel necessarily I would put as much high stakes for, but I can also appreciate their perspective. And so being with these new co-workers really actually opened my eyes a lot and

Some of the butlers I met were 19 years old, and this was their first higher education learning opportunity. One butler I met was a software engineer who quit his job as a software engineer to go to this butler academy because he wanted to learn how to serve others better. And in doing so, he felt he would become a better leader.

And those are all perspectives I wouldn't have had had I not gone through the difficulty of the program itself. And so I think that challenge and failure and obstacle allow so many opportunities for personal growth. And I think that's why I am kind of addicted to doing it over and over and over again, because I learned so much about myself. And I also...

realize a lot of preconceived notions I may have had about one thing are oftentimes wrong. And I think that's important for everyone to challenge your own beliefs. What's something where there was something that you changed your mind on? Clowning. I went to clowning school. I was like, this will be fine. I went to Marine Boot Camp. How much harder can it be? Clowning is really hard, y'all. Clowning is really hard.

And so I kind of have just learned to appreciate that the highest level of any art form or job or lifestyle, when you're working with passionate people, it is a passion. It's to be respected and cared for. And I have so much respect for anybody who has a dream and goes after it to pursue it fully, whether it is becoming a clown, joining a circus or becoming a ballerina, whatever it may be. The people at the top are

are always putting in so much love and care into what they do. Do you feel like somebody has to love, love their job? I would encourage everyone to find a large percentage of your day doing something that brings you joy. For some people, that's

I'm going to work my desk job. And then when I go home, that's where I find my joy. As long as that is occupying a large portion of your day and it really truly is the place where you find joy, then by all means, yeah, work, work, job, go home, do the thing for me.

I needed to find passion in what I was doing. And I thought originally I would find that at a company where I would rise the ranks and over time get to do exactly what I wanted to do. And the hard truth for me was realizing that at the company I was at, I was reaching a ceiling of

And I had to go towards the difficult thing, which was to go off and do my own thing and become a leader and learn all the skills of management and business development that I was a little scared to do on my own. But it has brought me so much joy in every day of what I do, even when it's difficult, not just filming on camera and the challenges are hard or whatever, but

But I'm so grateful for the values that our company, our production company has and the people that we have found to bring it to life. And so I think if you're sitting at your desk at whatever job you're at and you're not feeling it and you do want a job that brings you that joy, it's a difficult thing to look inward and ask yourself, can I do it myself? And what would it take?

How do you think that being able to kind of like build your own production team and pick the people that you work with, what's been like the best and worst parts of that experience? Being a full-time YouTube creator is such a privilege. It really is. And I think me from a few years ago would not have believed the team we have built at this point. I think that the pros are obvious when you have success.

Obviously, it's amazing to have a show with recognition. It's amazing to work with people I love every day. And it's amazing to be the person who says, yes, we're going to do this or no, we're not. And get to have that creative agency over things. I think the cons are a lot of what it took to achieve that. The cons are having a moment where you realize, I think I'm going to quit my stable job to do this crazy thing. The moment of...

I've quit my job. I really freaking hope this works. And then as you're growing and putting your head down, working with others, learning how to be a manager, learning how to be a leader, learning how to have really tough conversations with your peers, your employees, and also remaining firm

in what I didn't like about my prior jobs I held and in making sure we're not going to do that this time in my world. When I left my day job before starting my channel, I actually made a list of these are all the things I didn't like at everywhere else I've worked from big corporations to small startups, whatever it may be. And I

I have really tried, I think our whole team has really tried to uphold those values, sometimes to our detriment, because growing at scale is a temptation at times, but it's also, you lose a lot of the love and the joy and the real humanness to things. So that's the choice we've made, but I'm really happy with it.

Yeah, what's an example of one of those things where you're like, we're not going to do that. We're not going to do like that traditional thing that like now you have the opportunity to do differently. Something I think that my husband Garrett is exceptional at and we work together and run the company together. He's extremely good at speaking with everyone one-on-one and finding out their own needs and

And all the other jobs that I've worked at, if someone asks, oh, can I have this specific piece of equipment or can I have this? It's always a huge bureaucratic process to get what you need. Right. And I feel like because our team, we've chosen to keep it smaller. It allows a lot more opportunity for us to maintain happiness. I feel like that is significant.

such a forefront issue for us. Not an issue. It's a big value for us for everything that we do is are we having fun with everything we're doing? Is there a balance? And Garrett is exceptional at crafting work-life balance and even boundaries with all that. And I think...

that the best leaders are people who have done the job themselves and understand the pain points within. I think we have all had a manager who has only managed and never done the thing. And that is really difficult to work with at times. And fortunately for me and Garrett, we've done everything from editing for other YouTubers when we didn't have any money to holding a boom pole to do sound to, you know,

crafting emails. We've done it all. And I think at this point, it helps us lead in a way with an intimacy understanding of what it takes to do it. What's like a universal challenge that you've seen? The most difficult challenge I find in any position is the transition from the person doing the job to being a manager.

Management in general is its own skill set and not everybody wants to do it. And I find a lot of companies do not offer upward trajectory unless you want to manage other people. When in actuality, they're two completely different skill sets. So I think that that is just like a general concept.

Issue everywhere at every company. And I mean, even at some of the jobs I worked, I was like, I don't I don't know if I want to be a manager yet, but that was the only way to go up. And so you have people who find themselves in management and really want to actually be doing the craft instead, but just at a higher level.

Or you have people in management who are career managers and have never done the craft and they can't relate to the people that they're overseeing. And so it just feels like someone's arbitrarily setting deadlines and they don't actually know what it means to do the job.

I don't know the solution to that, but I think that it is a problem that everyone in corporate America needs to fix together. Collectively, everybody needs to get together and fix it. And I feel like it's an unspoken problem that everyone just kind of is like, oh, this is just a hard thing you have to deal with. Why? Obviously, there's management training, but to me, that's kind of like the linchpin, the big obstacle to upward growth for every company. Yeah. Yeah.

What does like a clown manager do? A clown manager? Well, you know, the clown school. They're actually, I guess they have a different corporate structure from the military. Yeah, that makes sense.

It was like, well, someone must be like, I don't know, soliciting jobs for them and sending them out to like different places. And they don't get to do as much clowning then, I guess. But the organizations where I've seen it most effective, like, you know, let's say, let's take the military, for example. It's a very regimented, structured way of moving up, moving down, moving laterally there.

which has its benefits and its detriments for everybody involved. But I think there's always a lot to be learned from an organization that's effective in what they do, especially like, again, let's take the butler's.

Could I be a butler? No. But do they do that job so effectively with the training they have? Yeah. And if you love it, by all means, become a butler. Is there one that you've tried where you could see yourself doing it long term? You know, the profession, I don't even know if I could say this is a profession for me. But one of the challenges I really fell in love with was boxing.

So I just did a video where I trained like an Olympic boxer for quite a while. And at the end, I participated in a fight in front of 15,000 live people in an audience and a lot of people watching online. And to me, this was a difficult thing to step away from when it was all over because I loved the training so much. It was my ideal work environment. Maybe not the fight. That's not an ideal work environment. But the training. I was surrounded by people who I...

loved learning from. They pushed me in a way that only they could. They believed in me. And those are all things you want in a manager, right? And the balance it gave me between, you know, I'm at my gym training. I'm bettering myself. I felt like I was bettering myself. And then I was also having that balance of going home and working on the computer. Like it was an ideal work day for me. It was a perfect day. But the reality is,

That lifestyle and being a boxer is not sustainable for me who is not a professional at it. It's extremely dangerous. I mean, I broke my nose in the fight, but I won. So it was a difficult thing for me to step away from, but it was a beautiful thing because I felt like, as I mentioned, I found managers who believed in me. I found a workplace.

day that was ideal for the things that I loved. And I felt like I was really operating at my prime during that. And so it was a really beautiful, happy accident to find that. Yeah. Yeah. That's such a unique way to like find something that fits in all of those ways. And yeah, I wish everybody could find like such a supportive environment. Absolutely. I mean, I think it made me realize too that

Finding a community of people who bring you to your best is most important at all times, whether it's with your job or the people you hang out with after work. All right, we're back with Morgan, and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. This is where each one of us shares a story, trend, or company we are following right now. And Morgan, since you are our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? So mostly for the last month, I've been keeping tabs on CEO pay and insurance.

In between that, I have a 18-month-old. So the only other thing I am keeping tabs on is potty training. I'm so glad you didn't make a joke like, my wife is the CEO of our home or something. You know, like, I can't stand humor like that. Well, look, I am the CEO of potty training, and I'm taking a no-nonsense approach. Just kidding.

She peed on the floor yesterday. Not taking any shit. She peed on the floor yesterday. She peed on the floor. Oh, no. Oh, no. I think that happens a lot. I've been reading a lot about different potty training techniques. And, you know, as with all things parenting, I've learned as being a parent, you read five things and they all have five different opinions. And it turns out you should just do it whatever way is easiest for you. So what's been your method of choice and what's been the least effective method?

My method of choice is just she says she wants to sit on the potty and then I take off all her clothes and she sits on the potty and then doesn't do anything and then stands up and pees on the floor. And, you know, we're just going to keep doing that until... Stick it to the man. Yeah, you know, we're just...

We're going to keep doing that until we try something else. See your daughter's revolt against CEO pay since you're the self-proclaimed CEO of body training. And what's been the least effective method? Probably the one you're doing, potentially. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're just doing one right now. There's like one where they basically are like, clear your schedule for three days and...

And they don't wear diapers and you're just like... Fuck no. At the beginning, you're going to have some accidents and by the end of the weekend, you're done. Seems like a thing that sounds crazy to me now and in three months when I get frustrated, we're going to do it and it will work and then I'll tell everyone that they just have to do it. This is the Ozempic of potty training? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? Slightly different than that. I have two very quick keeping tabs. The first one is just kind of a...

It's Aaron Rodgers. I don't know if you followed, but last night on the third play as a New York Jet after the most excruciating multi-year saga that was the Aaron Rodgers Green Bay will they won't they tears his

Achilles tendon and is probably is at least done for the year. But that's a brutal injury. He's 40. This is probably the end of Aaron Rodgers career. As a certified cool girl, I can say that I saw him talking about this on the Manning cast last night with John McEnroe. There we go. Yeah, McEnroe was there. He was there to experience that.

A bar in Wisconsin was doing like a special, like an anti-Aaron Rodgers special where they said drinks would be on the house if the Jets lost. And so immediately after the injury on the third play, people started buying huge amounts of drinks because they thought they would be free. But then the Jets actually won in overtime. So everyone had to pay. Yeah.

Oh my god, yeah. That's awesome. It's wild. And then I have one last very quick one. Have either of you seen the music video to Back on 74 by Jungle? It's gone pretty viral. No, but I do like Jungle. Jungle's great. And I will watch that video. It's a really cool video. It's gone viral, particularly one bit of the choreography, which the choreography is amazing. But what I'm really interested about it is that

They partnered with WeTransfer, which is a file transferring service that audio professionals use and video professionals use a lot, where they host the video on their platform and you can watch it. And now it's like a really like lavish vintage setting in an old theater. There's allusions to ballroom culture. And throughout the music video, there's framed pieces of artwork that you can click on and download that piece of artwork.

Pretty cool interactive music video and I'm pretty into it. It's pretty cool. You should check it out. Oh, I like that. Maybe we can put it in the show notes. Yes, what's your keeping tabs?

I actually have two for you. The first is simply a Daily Mail headline that I'm going to read verbatim. You're obsessed with the Daily Mail, by the way. I read the Daily Mail every single day and I get a fair amount of story I did from it. But horror author Stephen King claims his wife threatened to, all caps here, divorce him because he played Lubega's mumbo number five on repeat. I thought this.

I can't on repeat Stephen King I didn't think I could love you more but I Stephen King that's incredible I mean that's a commitment to horror in your everyday life that I just can't match no notes no notes King and my second is Olivia Rodrigo's new album is good it's so good I love Olivia Rodrigo my favorite lyric is probably I want to meet your mom to tell her her son sucks laughing

That's great. There's a lot of good material there. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Morgan. Tell us where we can find more CEO pay coverage. Sure. So I assume the links will be in the show notes, but you can also go to FastCompany.com. We're going to be rolling out even more CEO pay coverage over the next few weeks. But you can find a list of every company on the Russell 3000, which is almost every publicly traded company in America, which you can search through and see every CEO and their and their

salary. Most of the facts that we were talking about in this podcast are in a great article by Kristen Toussaint, sort of unpacks everything you want to know about CEO pay and whether it's fair or not. And then we have several other articles about how CEO pay affects morale, looking at the fairest and least fairest paid CEOs and a bunch of other stuff. So please check it out. Cool. Thanks.

And that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom, mixed and sound designed by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen.