Business Pants – 2023-01-23

Live. Yeah, that's true. Well what again what does it matter? We're not in video. Why do I say live anyway? From the ESG snowblower convention. There's no ESG snowblowers. It's a musk free Monday edition of business pants. Join as always by our lord of the BS, Matt mascardi, I'm Kimball and today's Propane, leak called January 23rd, 2023, sexy story updates and sleazy, academic paper's. Wow, you just hit puberty. Right then, let's do it. All right, we're already doing it. Okay, I like doing it. Um, let's go with this. No, hold on. There we go. Don't feel like that though. Yeah, but You will want to keep playing. I used to hate this Monday format, but It's been a while. So, I'm kind of excited about today. I'm just, I'm just ripping some stuff that we've talked about some updates and I get to hear what you think. I like this. Yeah, I'm gonna do a nerd alert later too. It's a weird one today. Matt. The justice department is investigating conduct at the Abbott. Laboratories infant formula plant in Sturgis, Michigan. That led to it, shut down last year, and worsened the Nationwide formula shortage. So, there he goes a little update there. but Labs is one of our favorite companies. it was like, Pago Brethren the Chicago Ramen. We did a long presentation for a portfolio manager team. I'm really big one, several billion in assets. Yeah. And we compared Abbott Labs board to Chicago, Mafia bosses. It was very good because presentation can conveniently, I forgot about that. But it was actually a good presentation. I mean, do you? I was probably, have you ever had anyone come in and do analytics in which they named who the Don of the board is in the capos and the we did that, we had that all labeled up. They thought it was great. They were like, this is the, this is the weirdest best presentation we've ever seen. And if you want a presentation, let us know. I don't think any abort Laboratories Executives have fallen on the sword for this one. That's, that's a Titanic group, you know, when I don't think any, there's not no one's really good anyways, go although miles have it did manage to leave. It just stop being CEO prior to all this nonsense. So Kyle's wife, Bob Iger leaving, right? When the pandemic started side stepped it like these investigations don't come from nowhere. It takes like a year, some of them to like unfold, sidestep the whole thing step down what or early last year, I think. Yeah, a couple years ago I was a 2021. Now I'm pretending to to know this while I Google it. Yeah, 2021. Yeah, you're right. So clearly old miles, probably was walking through a Sturgis Michigan Factory in puddles on the floor. And he was like, oh, might be a good time to time. All right, so we'll hopefully be more coming out of this story, but I just wanted to update that that people were actually looking into it now. Professional people. Not us. All right, AI ai's chapped butt chat GT. We haven't really talked about Chuck gbt. We have a little bit, not enough, nor the Confluence of, of all the layoffs and Tech. Here's the chat GPT is responsible for those. Well, let's get into it. Here's the here's the headline I pull to get us going. A Wharton professor and, oh, this could be your nerd alert. Maybe next week is public just published a white paper in which he asked would chat, gpt3 get a Wharton MBA. Oh, wow. And the answer seems to be yes. He said the conclusion was that chat GPT would have received a b to B minus grade on the exam? That's not bad. What is the point of like The. Terry or the terrifying, terrible news of getting an MBA at Wharton when he and I think he agrees and his and he said that it says it's very important implications for business school education. So he's with you. It means that no one needs to have any critical thinking, because chat GPT just regurgitates stuff at read on the internet, doesn't think. And let's not forget the Microsoft is coming back. Big baby 10 billion dollar investment already in this and sought in the Della announced that Davos last week that they're, you know, that they're going to be integrating this technology into workplace emails. Slide shows, spreadsheets all of it. What a terrible world? We live in. I cannot. So first, that is the, is there an overlap with the layout? I mean, there's, there's probably not but can we can we conjure up some story where we blame chat, you see? For the layoffs? Although I sure you're giggling. But I guarantee you. There are a lot of people in Tech now who are probably, or maybe just even White Collar, efficiency jobs that are probably getting a little bit worried about something. I love that. We were terrified for a decade about how the robots were coming for like manufacturing jobs, right? They kind of came for those jobs but you still mostly like fast food and pizza delivery. Yeah it's like I don't It was, it was like delivery chicken wings, just okay? Because nobody wants their jobs anyway, because they pay shit. Yeah. But the real terrifying thing is do we need people in finance or Tech because you can just replace all of that or most of that with AI? I don't think you're actually joking. I think it's probably I'm not important question. Not only is that important question, but the next important question is, we need to go through our database for board, saber metrics and see how many board members got their degrees at Wharton because if it's that fucking easy and that's a lot of problems, I don't know if anyone listened to our edition of corporate theater last week, but if you didn't download Tuesday's episode, we actually have a sketch called ESG Pizza, where I asked the chat GPT to write a comedy sketch. And I just said, write a piece called ESG pizza, and the results are quite fascinating, because one of the things that passed me, fascinated me, the most was that Chet GPT wrote. A It writes it immediately. I mean, you know, it does it right in front of you and in the script itself, the character when asked about, you know, said, do you say, do you sell ESG pizza or something like that? The other character said, ESG do you mean ESP and the other characters know, ESG environmental so even why TP knows that the world still doesn't really understand what is she? Wow yeah that's great. Yeah. All right Chad GPT you just earned yourself a another Wharton degree. Next story, I picked this one mostly because I want to I want one of my predictions to come true. I predicted during our prediction show that this there's going to be a Cyber attack on a major Fortune 500 company. That was gonna have long reaching implications for not only for, for board refreshment but just for everything. Yeah. And and and our prediction paper that's coming out early this week, the where I make it look like a sell-side paper so that real professional people can open it at work and not feel like they're reading. Something that too garbage. Men came up with. Yeah, the the I extended that theory into, once you do the refreshment, you're going to refresh with more diverse members and then dot dot dot. You have the anti-walk saying, where's the meritocracy. It's very exciting stuff. But continue, I want to know what, here's you deciding to self. Fulfill your prediction. Well, here's a story that made me think about it. A board hacktivist, browsing and unsecured Airlines server. Stumbled upon National Security Secrets, including the FBI's, no fly list, she said it took her just minutes. To access the server and find credentials that allowed her to see the database. Good. Yeah, and even further, this one's for you, I'm a lurking. She said, the most obvious pattern in the data is the overwhelming preponderance of our Arabic or Muslim seeming names. No, that's great. That's classy. This no-fly list. Match started up for 9/11 started with 60 names. It's now up to 1.8 million entries, but it made me think, Yeah, if it's mostly Arabic or Muslim seeming names, maybe this is also a list of future Southeast Asian CEOs, right? Maybe. Oh wow. Maybe there's a Confluence there, right? That's a, there's a lot going on now. Yeah, that's this is great. Can we get that list? Can we get the list and add it to our connectivity data for board, saber metrics, reach out to Maya, arson, creamy. That's the name of the active, I'm guessing. She is currently serving time somewhere. Instead, I don't know, I will say I do have first-hand knowledge that as a hairy bearded fella who has been pulled out of Airline several times, you know, out of the waiting for the airplane lines because they tell me it was random like a random search. There's definitely. I'm gonna say, there is an overall overwhelming preponderance of Arabic or Muslim. I'm gonna go out here, pulled out. Yeah. I'm gonna go out of him and I'm gonna say that. The that that correlation goes up when you're tan, It helps, you know, all of Hugh, Tiana, it all helps. Yeah, then you're then you're definitely getting pulled out randomly. Here we go. This one's for us. Matt activist investor, Elliot management, has reportedly snapped up. A multi-billion dollar stake in Salesforce. It seems like a weird response from the audience. I don't know why they think this is so funny. I think, they think anything it sells forces, funny. Any structure with the coast, a co-ceo structure is kind of hilarious. I is Elliot that the, the anti-woke activist without being actively. And, I mean, they went Dorsey. Okay. So they go after Jack, Dorsey, only when he was aligned with Africa, right? When, as soon as he got on the Africa, train, then they were like, you need to stop being CEO at two places. They, they start attacking him, they align themselves with Musk. Who's now the anti-wolf Crusader and must buy his Twitter. Now, they're going after sales force were Benny, off is famously, one of famously wore World, Founders and directors, and CEOs, coach CEOs, right? So what's the ask here is they asking for Less African beneath? What do they asking for? That sounds like a distinct possibility. Yes, the reduced your African Betty off. By one third to ask his not his not yet been me public, I believe. But, let me, let's get the discussion going. I start, I looked at some of our own data board saber's data, and I just, yeah, I'm just starting this discussion here. The the obvious move for Elliot initially would be to counteract the overwhelming board influence of founder, co-ceo and chair. Mark benioff, right? That's the is not the move here. Yes. A coordinate, our data. He controls 70% of the influence on the board. Wow. And that is sounds, that sounds like an understatement. So the, the obvious start here is board refreshment. I took a look at their board, four long tenured old white dudes on the board. So that's kind of counteract your Your woke Benny off, unless you just replacing with other white dudes. Well, here we go. There are four Dudes. At least 66 years old, including a Sanford. Robertson Matt, he's 90 years old, he's been the lead independent director since 2007. Wow. And he shares the nomination committee. So this is an obvious chairs, the nomination committee. So this one, this is obvious one and this again, this is a undercuts. Your theory that Benny off is woke. At least he's not ESG woke. Maybe he's, he's not bringing while she was. I think he probably knows that all of them are basically, like placeholders. Anyway, like none of them really matters, just him, right? That's true. But here's what I found at least and again, a cursory look at our own data here at board statements is that I can tell this to Elliott management, we identify two of these long Tinder directors as as when it comes to worker productivity, right? Okay. That's we identify them as being strong and that would be, Alan hasenfeld and Maynard Webb. So what I'm telling you Elliot is that we have a data to Target. The other two chuckleheads, get the other ones out. Get them out, get them out. That's all. I like that. I like you use our data. That's just me starting the discussion and if you want Elliot if you're listening or other actors investors if you're listening I know you are reach out and we can we can make this conversation even longer and more. You just now they're turned off because by our data come on. We don't. All right. Anything else you want to say about Salesforce or our worker? Oh, the reason why before you answer that, the reason why I bring up the worker productivity data is that there have been some grumblings and mumblings in the business news that one of the problems that Elliot management has and other investors has with Salesforce, is the perceived lack of productivity from remote workers. I don't know where they get actual data for. That. No, they, yeah, that's the perception. So that's why I was targeting. Our worker productivity data, mais, you understand, are they only are they only talking about the workers in Africa? Again, that's specified, that's not that's fine that out later in the week. Yeah. Whereas Scott Galloway when you need him, the next story South, we talked about Southwest Airlines. We previously reported last week. I think, during our Vivic show that Southwest is giving workers bonus points. Worth about 400 dollars to say, sorry. For the physical emotional, toll to hold him on right now, there's, there's new information coming out that they're giving Pilots. An estimated 45 million dollars for 9,000 Pilots. It's about 5,000 dollars each for a bonus that's to say, sorry. That sounds better that's a little bit better. Sorry, this is Teams new to me that we're now paying workers directly as apologies. Like this sounds amazing know. Is this new I mean apology bonuses? Well. Was a unique case. Yeah, in fact, Ari was telling me when it happened that Sal's West because they have to flood their rules in the United States where you have to fly the route. Even if like there's no one on the plane and like and it's like a cactus and a drunk guy. You gotta fly it. You have to fly it. So there are these planes that were flying. They couldn't get the people on board but they people have like they had to fly them. Anyway it was such a mess that that you know like this seems like a unique circumstance in which you would pay somebody like I can't it's not like you know like Doug blew up his leftover Chinese food in the microwave and as an apology the office manager gives everyone else some free wet naps. Right? Like it's not like that. Well it's like a bigger deal. I wonder if he's if he's if he's investing. In is a 45 million dollar investment? I wonder if he's investing in. Just keeping his job or the quiet quitting of a pilot because that's the one you want to overachieve. Maybe they're calling this a gratitude bonus. Oh, that makes it weirder instead of a deep apology bonus. I've just never heard of this. And why, why would the pilots care? Why is this such a What do they care? How did this, who wants to do? But how does this emotionally Pilots want to fly? Nobody wants to fly. But what's the big deal? Why do they care if this is happening? Why is it ruining their day? Well, I mean the it is interesting that like you the like the dude who like takes your tickets at the gates, the one who everyone yells at, because they can't believe that they needed the money, not the 300 dollars like that three dollars. Where does that get you? Where do they get to go with that? And they get points on their owners? Like, what is Syracuse isn't the last thing you want to do is fly your airline after your airline just screwed you for you know, a two week period. It feels like get the hardship that they went through. I want to know what the Gratitude bonus was to the board who has had to end his hardship. Yeah. All the late night. Apologies. Yeah. And that they haven't issued yet up next a self-owned. My first wrong prediction of 2023, although there is a caveat here, there's a cabinet Last week I predicted that the New Zealand prime minister new New Zealand prime minister. I don't like a new twice in a row. I didn't like that. Would be another woman. He did predict that. Yeah. I'm wrong. Haha. No, just send us being replaced by a man named Chris Hipkins, but Chris certainly reads female and all the greatest ways because this is pretty busy territory, but Chris was the is the education minister, right? Okay, and he played a significant significant role in New Zealand's response to the covid-19 pandemic. So he's a giver, he said he was the HR. I would have taken it. Okay. But education and Healthcare. He's a good dude, somewhere. And somewhere Emma, is that women are better than men. That's all I'm really trying to get out. But maybe you can. All right, moving on. a CEO say HR is Central to business success, you don't believe that do you All right. Moving on. Oh, finally, let me wrap up my updates. I just want to this is a section. I'm just gonna call stupid. All right, first in apology this has gotta be the worst apology in our tenure. Really, that's saying something. The Church of England. Issued an apology for its treatment of lgbtq people last week. Days after Bishop said it would not allow same-sex marriages inside his Church's following a six-year period of considering issue. Seriously thought about it and here's what the Bishops wrote, Matt. For the times we have rejected or excluded you and those you love we are deeply sorry and yet they still can't get married in the church. What I don't know. Help me out here. Matt, their, their apologies for excluding you. And after six years of thinking about, they're still gonna exclude. You they need to think some more. What is this? Are you allowed to apologize for something. You keep doing? How's that? Is that a real? Is that real awesome? Well, apparently, apparently you can apply. Yeah, apologize while doing it? Yeah. You, you're apologizing for what you're about to do. Just to continue to be shity to somebody. And finally, I'll give a not to give it. I'll give it to Vivid for this one. This is from our woke data warfiles. This is just fabulous stupidity. I love this one. Pink Floyd, you know, Pink Floyd. Yeah, obviously Pink Floyd, Floyd fans, slam bands. Cover art as woke despite 50 year history. One of the most famous which and best-selling albums of all time. Dark side of the moon has its 50 year history. They put out a, they put out something that commemorate it, you know, of course with a rainbow in it, but with these fans don't realize is that the original album cover, Matt had a fucking Rainbow on it. Yeah, it was a prism. Yeah, it was a prison where the late goes through. So the new one, the rainbow. The new one has those same rainbow colors. It's not actually in the shape of a rainbow but anyway, they're mad because they think that Pink. Floyd is gone. What? I just like this one. They wow, he's gone. Whoa. Because of some rainbow colors. Yeah, there you go. What it used to be. The excellent, like, progressives in, in liberals in America were the ones to get triggered when you said, or did anything. Anything at all would be like, that's a systemic bias or that's now, you can't even put out an album. That was out 50 years ago, without your triggering, a conservative, that's great. I love that. Not to mention that talk about Excellence. I think it's like the might be the best selling album of all time. No, that's the Eagles. But whatever, you know, it's in the top five. It's like really one of the best and it's still fantastic album. It's like there's nothing in it. That's whoa. And again there's not actually a rainbow depicted in the new 50 year anniversary logo. It's just the colors of the rainbow. Matt how dare they really what he got? All right let's do some nerd alerts and by Some, I mean one and buy one, I mean this nerd alert time. This one's a bit of a shit show Here's the upshot though. I won't bury the lead. It turns out when you pay your workers shit. Yeah. And tell them that you're going to give the difference to charity. They do shity work. Yeah, that does does sound disheartening all right. I'll explain and consider this like something of a green washing Parable. Okay. So this is for every company that like goes on their website talks about their employees or their greatest asset and which is I love diversity. And it's this big family and all that kind of stuff. And they also talk about like how they donate, like, some proceeds to charity, but they pay minimum wage, and they give no benefits, if you're that company. Yes, for you. This is a paper for you. Is that us? Are we that company? Yes. I I've told Ari all those things and Jesse is HR. So, I think minimum wage, right. I do they barely, um, here the papers from 2017. It's an older paper. And here's the, here's the title of the paper when Corporate social responsibility, backfires Theory and evidence from a natural field, experiment by John Lewis and Fatima momentum and it was published by The National Bureau of economic research, basically government agency. But these are two economic people, professors doing it. So here's what they did. They use mechanical Turks. Amazon's mechanical Turks. Do you know what those are? No, I have no idea. So you basically hire people to do really quick jobs like, you know, transcribe something do some quick math. I don't do little little tasks. Do a show about episode of business pants and they're called mechanical Turks. Know, we got chat GPT to do that. Yeah. They hired them, and they hired some with CSR, framing CSR, Corporate, social responsibility, and some without, and the results that they found was that using CSR. Yeah, increase of the workforce. Gotta keep explaining this to me. Yeah. All right, the job was, they hired 3,000 of these mechanical Turks to effectively. Look at pictures of German text and transcribe it, that was it. So little pictures it was the on average. It took the Mechanical Turk somewhere between, you know, 10 and 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes to do the job. You get 10 pictures, you write down. What you saw, they paid 10% of the money up front, and they took everybody to do it and they asked them to promise to finish the work because they were giving money up front. And 90% of the pay would come afterwards, they had a two-hour time limit to do this, like, five to 10 minute job. Um, and then they paid different salaries and they had different descriptions. They gave some people just a salary. And some people a low salary, a middle salary, a high salary, and then they give some people, this this CSR framing, okay? It's, they would give a cash donation to a specified non-profit. As part of it. So they'd say like thank you for doing this because you're doing this, we're going to give a cash donation as a percentage of your wages. Yeah. Um and they said our firm is committed to give back and meaningful ways. We are passionate about encouraging education for the Next Generation. We do our part by donating money to, influential non-profit organizations that support education for children in low socio and economic backgrounds. Stop me when this sounds incredibly familiar on every website of a corporation Human Fund. Yeah. And they give X percent of the wage and they change the percentage. Okay? What they allowed the workers to say, as they were doing their tasks. They're looking at this picture of German text. They could say it's unreadable. And they and it would pass and they could still complete the task or they could transcribe it. So what they measured is cheating is number one, did the worker, take the 10% and run away, right? Like not to the job. Yeah, and the second thing was, did they report images as unreadable that were clearly readable? They just said, oh, unreadable, unreadable unreadable, give me all the money, right? What they found was that because of something there, they're calling moral licensing. when the activity, had the CSR component, had this donation to charity and like tried to appeal to you, The cheating increased by as much as 20%. What meaning? Yeah, yeah, they would just say because they were, they, they felt like their Theory, the working Theory here. Is when you have someone who feels like the job is like, doing good, right? Like, yeah, you're a, you can cut Corners. You can cheat. Why? That's why I don't understand that because they think that they're full of shit. The company, like they're green now because because well, you know, like I don't really care about the company they're giving money to charity anyway, no matter what. So why not, who cares about this job? They're going to give the money to charity. And that's, that's kind of good. So I feel fine basically, stealing from the company as a result that was their findings. What's your takeaway here? Matt, I don't help me out with this. What, well, my take the, they also found that the cheating increased as the wage decrease. So if you've got less money, makes that I believe that I would believe, right? That makes sense, because my takeaway here is the greenwashing one which is to say, If you say a whole bunch of shit and you don't hire people to a do that, or be like, who believe in that, right? Because mechanical Turks don't take these jobs because they believe in Saving children, right? Then you will have a Workforce that doesn't care, either about the thing that you say is your mission or about stealing from you because you're so focused on your mission and it's not theirs, right? I think it's a green washing thing. I think you have to be careful like imagine if we were living back at the mothership and the they announced that we weren't capitalist after all we were, we were going to feed Africans. Okay. Like, what would you do your job harder? I would think, or would you think to yourself? They're paying me shit already, why do I care about? They are definitely not feeling the size of this. My second, the same salary, Well, they didn't experiment and which they reduce your salary. All, that's that as part of this and then the cheating was just off the charts. But yeah, if even if you got your same salary, if you thought your company was full of shit and you didn't care I mean, I think my read on this is there's a ship meter, right? That's what you're saying, right? It's in the, in the face of greenwashing, this does it just sort of make you feel deflated as you make. You feel like part of this part of some system where we're protecting the children. And I'm not, I'm not, I think joined for that. I just want my paycheck and then you sort of quiet, quit your way through work by cheating. That's now, the takeaway is now the wrong time for me to announce that if you buy our data board saber metrics, you'll probably will probably will definitely save lives. I think that's the perfect way to end is what I think. Bye, definitely save lives and don't greenwash. That any kind of life you want to say? We'll save it dolphin baby baby. No no, not babies. Dolphins, maybe sparrows. That's Damien Raul's. I'm at Scotty, we are free float. If you like this tomorrow, we have corporate theater. Yeah, Wednesday is woke Wednesday. We do not have a vivid coming back yet. I have to respect out to him. He's good. I want him back. Come on back, baby. But we might actually, I'm gonna reach out to somebody else and see if they can give us their hot. Take on vivix hot. Take, I like that too. Maybe maybe another appearance talk here. A hot. Take a thong. We'll do a lot, take back and forth. That's it. Come back then. Goodbye.