Transcript
Live. From 364 days before you can ignore the next International women's day. It's an extra sticky edition of business pants. Joined as always, by Eerie Emma lurking and mysterious Matt McCarty. I'm a guy who can't quit his long list of adjectives to start with the Nina. M. Keep going back to the same trick. And today is woke data. Wednesday edition of aged cheddar flavored business nuggets called March 9th 2022. Some delightful corporate governance. Shenanigans Matt makes a rant salad and Emma teaches us about gender pay Bots, that Emma gender pay Bots sort of you almost have it. I do love aged cheddar though. I just want to go on record that part right. How much how many months do you need before it really works for your mat age checks 12 18. How many months we talked about three years? I like in 18 months. 18 plus right. That's where you'd say that here we go. Ready? Yep. Everyone's day, I mean, not really, but I pretend like it's every Wednesday. We go into our ESG bag. We pull out some of our favorite ESG stories, kind of our You know our old-fashioned. I don't know what Matt you look like. You're gonna kill me. All right, I'm gonna focus on proper governance. Words you're saying this week. I got a couple of here. First, we have an energy transfer co-founder and executive chair. Kelcy Warren, and Paul Edition, Beto O'Rourke are fighting. This is exciting. We have a chair fighting like politician but fight. What are they fighting about? Just normal business pants stuff actually beta was being sued for defamation slander and libel because he connected Warren's love for Texas governor. Greg Abbott to the Staggering profits, the oil tycoons company pocketed during the 2020, winter storm that left more than 200 people died in Texas. Beto said I was told to back off the story, I had to stop connecting the dots or else there would be consequences. That's what we do here. We connect dots. That's all we did so exciting. And energy transfer co-founder and executive chair. Kelcy Warren, donated. 1 million dollars to Abbott, overall Abbott's campaign is received about 8 million dollars from the energy industry, while Beto has received 40,000 dollars. Oh, Beto, give it back. We're disappointed in you. Excited that a chair is suing someone for basically the stuff that we do. I just I'm just excited. I hope you can't wait to get sued. Yeah, let's let's make that happen. All right, here's the other big corporate governance banana. I don't even know what I'm talking about. Okay. Here's the headline. Dollar Tree, inks deal with activist investor. Mantle Ridge to revamp board. Ooh siding here we go. Ready for it. A lot of stuff. This is a bizarre one. I every time I look into these stories, I just can't really believe what's going on in the world corporate government. Okay? A Dollar Tree is naming, former Dollar, General, CEO. Rick dreiling as executive chair, okay? Okay. He gets. It gets a lot of dollars in that the activist investor is mantle Ridge. It's founded by Paul hilal who owned, he only owns 5.7% of the company. He's doing all this completely revamping the board seven, new directors, six directors retiring, here's my main takeaway. This is all about the ego of Paul hilal and mantle Ridge, because he's essentially bringing on a big group of incestuous and busy director's who I probably are not even adequately qualified to help reform Dollar Tree. So, let's get into it. Let's start our seven new there are seven new directors and they are all all of the mat. You're going to like this for your, like, your influence for score and your connection scores, and all that there are all miraculously connected Oh, three served together at Aramark two served together at Kellogg 3, served together at Lowe's two served together. It pulled a group and two served together at MetLife and who's the new Dollar Tree Godfather? Well, it's and I like this because it's kind of like a Dollar Tree family, tree whatever its new exec chair and former Dollar. General CEO, Rick dreiling, he's connected personally to five of the new directors through his directorships at Aramark Kellogg poultry group in Lowe's. In fact he's doubly connected with one of them through two different companies and make no mistake this new pile of ancestry was directors. Basically is the new Dollar Tree as they represent, the vice chair, the exact chair, the lead director, and chairs of three committees. And there are all overboard at his hell, the seven new directors, sit on an average of four plus fours. And I did that, I did the picture math. I just looked well, Matt's internet was going. Down. They are all mostly old and white and by that I mean white hair and bald several haven't had real jobs for over a decade. Oh thank God. But I will say two of seven are women and they did replace the only black guy who retired with another black guy. So I feel like they're playing the token game. That's good. I wish to use the listeners at home. Could see my color coded list here. It's me. I haven't. I haven't seen an interconnected Board of of nut jobs like this in a while. I mean, this is just like, this is like the night going 89 corporate governance. Is this the new Boeing Boeing that? I'm very excited. Let's do a deep dive on this with Ari when she comes back from CII, if you're at CII conference, go talk to Ari, give her your business card, Congratulations Dollar Tree for essentially, achieving nothing. Other than Staying in the Cesspool of dollars stuff. I don't even know, I don't know a lot of dollars, a lot of trees and whatever. All right, well, since we're doing the ESG confusion show, can I just keep up the ESG confusion, show, keep it going. Yep. Headline, number one, ESG finds itself at a Crossroads after investing in Putin's Russia. Here's a subtitle of that article. This is at a Bloomberg sustainable funds are holding Russian bonds, as well as shares of companies like state run gazprom. So, outreachy article about ESG is investing and Putin's Russia headline. Number two, our defense stocks. Now, ESG, surely supplying weapons to the invaded Underdog, in an unprovoked fight is a social good. That's right. ESG is now investing in jet fighters, just not Russian jet fighters, everybody with me, okay, with me, can you feel my nuanced? Parse their We should be outraged. That ESG investors owned Russian oil companies, but Swedish jet fighters now, good? Here's the Swedish part of this. SCB, which is a Swedish Bank switches. Its ESG defense policy to allow for investment and weapons and some funds. Yes. Oh wait, wait, it just did it. Just did it literally just did some weapons. Okay, this is not a ESG slippery slope at all, not at all. If you're wondering why all is she is feeling a little flaky right now, it's because I ain't Swan it, it's pretty convenient, right? Clients are asking for it at CB can just switch its policy because now making jet fighters is super ethical Here's an opportunistic quote from City groups, 20 year, 10 year, defense analyst who's totally objective. I think he said he was job. He said, quote defense is likely to be increasingly seen as a necessity, that facilitates ESG as an Enterprise as well, as well as maintaining, peace, stability, and other social goods. Wait, wait. So he's a saying that we need like fighter jets to protect ESG. That's your facility. Searching around the msci building and fighting off. He is an Enterprise needs defense. Oh my God. Damien Yeah, I can feel a rant coming and I'm not sure I can stop it. Sure please. All right yeah why not? You can't fucking facilitate ESG. Yes, she's not a stock type. It's not a Crossroads. You don't go to him. It's not in Rand McNally. Oh, there's ESG. It's not a type of investing. ESG is data, it isn't your mom's homemade cookies made from low water, almond, flour, harvested by living wage immigrants with full health benefits, whose boss only makes five times as much as them, know. Yes, she is a list of ingredients. You can make whatever the fuck you want with the ingredients. It's a bunch of data points. It's not an outcome. Yes, Grant the cookies. Yes she are all the ingredients. Make whatever you want with it. In fact. It's not really different from its financing cousin Factor investing here is a title headline from Barrens in 2019, quote. Fake stock factors can cost investors lots of money. Now, if you don't know what factors are, it's basically a list of bullshit reasons why your stock market moved in at One Direction. Okay, it's a shiny Fancy Pants solution. Also, fake news. Here's a quote from the partner and investment research firm research Affiliates and a Dartmouth Professor. He said, quote, people are desperate to find things that work. That's what he said. Anything that looks like it works in finance. Someone wake up as he's. She chair Gary Gensler. Who tweeted this week that if we can, quote label something. Non-fat milk. We should also be able to label something sustainable. oh, Is it actually ingredient? You can take milk which you pull out of a cow or some or an oat or whatever. You're pulling the milk out of and you can remove fat and ingredient from the milk. Where do I take my sustainable from you? Can't pull on the teats of sustainability for sustainable. Milk script is right. He successfully both fat, shamed, milk and misrepresented ESG in a single tweet, Why is Gary Gensler. So obsessed with ESG factors? When Regulators have shown 0 interest in regulating actual Factor, investing the theory of investing, the purports to identify drivers of stock return and that those are things like value and profit. We don't regulate those but, but let's go regulate. ESG academics have actually pointed out that most Factor investing doesn't work, funds labeled as Factor funds just get market returns in fact Barons ends its article from 2019 with this Sage advice. Quote, avoiding friction and Keeping the Faith. In other words, maybe the key to successful Factor investing, even if it looks like a Hall of Mirrors. Keep the faith capitalism. Just keep the face. Was that mean you have to sell? That means just slide the market. Some some. Yeah, right. The market probably works. Just have faith. Yeah, probably you just had faith that would work. But no, it was right? No inside ESG. Everyone expects ESG to be one thing even inside the ESG community. No one has any idea what's going on? Because when marketing firm till responded to the Bloomberg article, I reference about Russia and ESG they said, quote, ESG is about the investor, really? They said it's about investor choice to which Paul Clements hunt who is a super nice guy. Who coined the term ESG responded wrong. Real ESG is about materiality good. We're arguing. We're arguing about what the acronym stands for like arguing, how about? You're all fucking wrong, it's data and it doesn't solve your problem. What you do with it solves your problem? Make your mom's cookies. If you want cookies, make a turkey sandwich if you want a sandwich. If you're looking for ESG, the acronym to save the world go, try Factor investing their, my rant is over. I'm tired, I don't think the same at first of all, if I had, if I had rented that long, you would punch me. And second of all, I don't like how at the beginning of your ESU rant, my mom is making the cookies for me at the end. I have to make the coach, yeah, make your own game cookies. I like this. All right. but before we get, Oh, I'm actually most excited for Emma today because she's gonna teach me something about gender. What is it? Gender gap paper you do with this morning in pre-production right? Update a few stories. Some stuff that we've been talking about the last few months first. McDonald's, Starbucks, Pepsi Coke. They're done with Russia. Hi. Oh, okay. What does it win for though? Is anyone win the raineys? Yeah, win for Ukraine or the Russian people. I'm a you want to buzz me because I feel like that's wrong somehow, right? Don't you think don't you believe all people deserve Coke or something? You're weird like that? No, the opposite. Big companies are launching campaign to head off Unions. That's right, all the Uber Lyft, doordash GrubHub. They're putting a big ad campaign in it. Making sure that that their workers are not workers. Okay, so we're still back in here. Oh good, they still want. Yeah, they want to be independent contractors forever right there. Thank God, made me. Think this feels, this feels very premature to me. Stay with me here in the libertarian cyber. Now they're world that is our looming future. It will be just a giant. Jobless Mercantile mob of VR wearing meta, diaper mercenaries roaming around selling, knockoff nfts and discontinued crypto coins called Air Jordan's and bitchcoin, right? Like this network. We're heading just gonna be no workers gonna be nothing. He's gonna be a bunch of roaming people just like drooling, okay, can I break the fourth? Why anybody? That was the greatest piece of writing you've ever done. That was that was really special. That really that. From a bot that maybe happy. The next story back to mortgage startup. Better remember, better.com. Emma. Your favorite company member. He laid off. A bunch of people. Yeah. Okay. First of all, I love that they're called better. I mean better than it does. I like that it leaves the van out like you're not sure what it's better than. So they laid off 900 workers right before Christmas. Now Tech crunch is reporting that they're laying up another 3,000 workers, which is basically a third of its Workforce, but here's the real update we missed and I'm looking at you LinkedIn. Better was named the best startup in America by LinkedIn for the second consecutive year. In 2021, forget ESG, we need better regulation on linkedin's, best startup in America Oscar awards. Don't we have a wrong here. Okay. I mean, where's the apology from LinkedIn? In 2021, I have two things. One is a confession and one is a qualm. Yeah. My confession is that like both of these? Um, I have to admit, especially since we've covered this. This is particularly embarrassing. I'm about to embarrass myself right now. So as you pointed out, the name of this company is better, I have to admit, for whatever reason. I had it in my head that this was a Healthcare company, I could not possibly, that's a mortgage company, but don't listen. But I really, I don't know. I thought that they provided like probably predatory like teletherapy or something. I don't know. But my qualm is yeah. What first of all I feel like if you have 3,000 employees to lay off, are you considered a startup after laying off 4000 before at, what point do you stop? Becoming a startup all year to year? Like maybe in your second year of being the best startup, maybe you're not a startup anymore. I don't know. All of it is confusing to me? Yeah, yeah. This is all good with this is problem with this like this desire, this like this addiction to growth, like to go to scale and all this but still have LinkedIn pretending that you're great and blah, blah calling Microsoft to start something. Yeah, it is moving on. I want to I want to please Matt here, Activision Blizzard still in the news for horrible reasons. Now of it. You US Federal prosecutors and securities. Regulators are investigating IAC, chair. Barry Diller, his stepson. Alexander Von Furstenberg. Sorry to laugh at his name, but, you know, that's just me and music mogul. David Geffen. Why? Because they bought shitload of Activision, Blizzard stock, three days before, Microsoft announced that they're acquiring Activision Blizzard. Whoops, if you're wondering Barry Diller. All so set on the board with Bobby cotech up until kotik resigned like 22nds ago, coincidence, just the coincidence and Gary Gensler SEC. Call us. We have we have data like that if you want to help get these guys, we ignore my rank. We can make we can connect the dots and we're willing to get sued. And lastly, Elon Musk is tired of being held, responsible Tesla, CEO asked a federal judge to terminate a 2018 settlement. With the SEC saying, he's tired of the SEC micro managing his Twitter activity and that he was forced into signing the deal. And then it stifles his free speech. That's a triple snowflake trigger, Elon micromanaging, stifled and forced. I feel bad for Elon. Musk also wants the court to end an SEC subpoena that seeks documents related to whether he got pre-approval proved approval. Before posting a recent tweet about Tesla stocks deals. And finally, I should probably tell you that since Elon is involved. This is largely bulshit. He agreed to have any Communications that could affect Tesla stock price, including tweets approved by company lawyers not the SEC. The SEC treats all CEOs equally in that, you ain't allowed to directly manipulate your company's market price by tweeting fake shit on Twitter, that's it. Okay, come on, stop parsing. I see how I got ranty because of you man. I got I'm like updating stories. I'm all excited. I don't even know why he's hungry though. I'm hungry Cal me down. Luckily, my bit is not conducive to Iran, so you're welcome. Here's the headline. This Twitter bot is calling out companies over their gender pay, gaps. So okay, Francesca Lawson and Ally or Ali fend, some are respectively, a freelance social media manager, and a software developer who did this project together, they use data from 13,000 companies who are required by UK laws report. Their pay discrepancy between men and women every year so they have this data set to go from And this is an iteration of bots that are on Twitter already. So there are other Bots who do this. Like something we covered earlier this month or last month the 19 year old who created a bot who tracks Billionaire's private jets and he now has Bots at track their super Yachts as well. So this is just a version of that with different data. And for those of us who don't know, code, even though some of us were told by every adult in our lives that we should learn coding. Here's how it works. Yeah, they took a fireworks, all they do is they take the file from the data that they had and they wrote code that identifies a match between the company's name on Twitter and in the database triggered I Believe by any mention of international women's day. I'm sure that that's written into the code and it automatically generates a tweet about its pay different in the same for every time. Yes. So if another company tweeted about International women's day, yep. Then this bot takes over and tweets back out. Their gender pay Gap. Correct. It'll take. See now I get it now. I, yes. So like it takes a form of in this organization. Women's median hourly pay is blank percent lower than men's or vice versa in this organization. Men's, I really play pay is I know what the gender pay Gap is, how dare you I want that too. Why does that only? Why is it only for international women's day? I think whenever any company is anything They should just say that all day long. So yes, it just Annie, but like the same gender pay anything? I don't, I should say, like, you know, we have a sale on Rubber Chickens and it should be like your gender pay Gap is X every time. Yeah, I don't disagree, but this account gained tens of thousands of followers. In basically a single day, the bot has been tweeted so many Emma that this was the only, this is the only Carberry that the Press Did about International women's day. This is the only story they covered. Was this. Oh 100%. This really is the only because as we covered yesterday, they didn't care about anything but they like this boss. They like bought people. They like this bot. And the bot has retweeted over a thousand companies and they actually had to put it on a 10-minute delay because they were retweeting the companies too quickly and they got reported as spam. So if they have the 10-minute delay between the Tweet being put out by the company in their retweet, they're safe and the account will be running until the end of the week and they want to do more things like this. Come on, keep it going. Well, they wanted to do more things like this, but finding the data is as we all know very well, very impossible Lawson with that. We reached out to them. We did, we can help Lawson said the reason that we're going all in on International women's day is mainly just because that's where we have the data, which makes all the sense in the world and then I went through, I did a lot of scrolling on Twitter and came out with a couple of interesting. Here we go. Sudo stats. So here are Some Industries where women tended, at least according to the Twitter account to be paid more than men. We have first. All first of all, hospices hospices. See, yes, there were multiple hospices that had their female employees being paid on average more than their male counter. Well, I hope it's only female employees. I wouldn't want to, of course. That's my thought is the caretaking professions are mostly dominated by women so I'm sure at like course I don't know. I'm a man can't deal with someone dying men. Freak out about death. It's weird and then he killed allergic to it. Yeah, so we have ironically they like to kill people. They do but they just don't but they don't want to be there. Okay? To kill them because ESG says so now. Oh yes, really. Oh, Swedish Jets. Simple circle on it. Also where women tend to get paid more than men City councils in the UK Leisure. Centres, that doesn't sound and Healthcare organizations and advocacy advocacy groups. Actually, that's not true. I don't believe Healthcare organizations are kind of split, but when I was scrolling, I saw a bunch that hat, their women being paid more, but it ended up being more 50/50. And then finally, to wrap it up, here are some Industries with particularly bad stats. One was colleges and in the UK College means high school. So it's all of these high schools where you snob sole witch College. They're men are paid. 32% more than women are sure College. 30%, more national college group 42.9, per cent more so UK high schools have one woman that doesn't count. So you can't high schools are having some issues. And in addition the other industry that would did very, very badly were media Outlets. So Access Hollywood, men got paid 23. I just kissed your one. You gay listener. Tom. All right. Thank you for that and for the people who created that, I know you're listening. Emma did just email you. So, come on, come on. Our show, talk to us. and finally, two bits of wisdom from meta, CEO Sheryl Sandberg. Is a big day. We got two bits of wisdom for Sheryl Sandberg. You guys don't look excited at all. I'm a very good one. I actually agree with thanks. I actually agree with the first one sambrook said no, two countries run by women would ever go to war. And if half the world were run by women, the world will be safer and much more prosperous. She clearly listens a business pants because this is essentially one of our founding principles. I'm with you for once Cheryl call me when Finland in New Zealand start bombing each other and we can do lunch at your favorite Menlo Park Duncan and secondly, her second quarter of the day. This is now this is the bad funny misinformed unintentionally stepped in it. Quote, here we go. She said, social media is bad for dictators and that's why Putin blocked Facebook and Russia. Oh, I have a fact alert on that one. Yeah, please. I don't want to ruin her narrative with facts but I'm going to The Economist intelligence unit publishes the Democracy index every single year. And Cheryl, of course, you will be proud to know that since Facebook ipo'd in 2012, Global authoritarianism has actually gone. Steadily up everywhere. Thank you. Facebook for embracing democracy with your corporate dictator fist. Yeah, that's that's why I love this second quote from show because it goes both ways, right? I mean, she has her own dictator. She's literally. And we've literally, we've literally watched our, at least for the three of us. Americans people watch our own democracy crumble, 10 years, been great. Thank you for that. And thank you listener for listening this long. Let's let Damian get some lunch. That's Damian Ross and Emma Larkin. I'm at Miss. Carter, we are free float media. This is business pants. We'll be back tomorrow with less Rants and more facts. See you, then.