Transcript
Live live. Live live. Oh, just a puberty from the ESG. Ivory Tower twice. So, warm in here today, it's a muskie Monday edition of business pants. Joined as always by our lord of the BS. Matt mascardi. Is it really musky today? Do we have to do bestie? I'm still here and today's ESG dipped. Ooze called February 6th 2023. Sexy story updates and sleazy advertising in the form of pedestrian data analysis. And how dare you? Well, we'll see. Hi, class data analysis. I've been told that Matt is essentially booting the nerd alert, the academic the academic paper stories, you're getting rid of it. No, I'm just not doing it today. Oh, okay. You just gonna, you're gonna use today segment to shill our product. Somebody's got a shield, our products. Hey, I'm with it. I'm letting it. Let's do it, let's make it happen. All right. Are you ready? I don't know. Here's your transition. Oh, this is my favorite transition. Yeah, this is, there we go. All the story updates. All the all the stories we've been covering. I'm gonna update you now. It's mostly to irritate Matt. Here we go. Let's start with Elon Musk. Oh already irritated. We're winning. Look, we tried to avoid this topic but he is still the CEO of 17 publicly traded companies. So we we do as a company that covers the people. In the world of business. We kind of we have to once in a while, Matt. Says you first of all, Tesla CEO? This is the Tesla. CEO Tesla, CEO, Elon Musk. Actually it's true, right? This is the only time where that adjectives, that model fire actually matters, right? Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah, Point Tesla, CEO. Elon Musk was found not liable. In a shareholder class action suit. Stemming from The 420 to eat back in 2018. No, he's not liable. I saw this, but, is that simply because afterwards, it took so long to go to trial that the price of Tesla went up and up and up. And it was really hard to argue that you weren't making money as a tester. You're probably accurate about that. I mean, right? Does it feel like you would have repeated the you would have needed the share price to fall for this case to really have impact. I mean I did like right after so he sends out the right funding secured, the price spikes and then it comes out that that was all like false or whatever and then the price drops. So if you were an investor who saw funding secured, then you went out and bought right then the price dropped Then you'd be like pissed. Except if you held it for like 20, more minutes, you would have made a lot of money. And remember, it's a trial by jury, so really just convinced convincing nine, shmoes. Yeah. I know every every time he put schmoes together and ask them to judge Elon Musk, the answer is Also, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is being investigated by the SEC for the Tesla. Self-driving claims we talked about this briefly Nice to remind the audience, a senior engineer on the Tesla team working on its auto pilot software revealed a video. The company released in 2016. Purporting to show a Tesla vehicle driving itself wasn't in fact stage And then Bloomberg later revealed that the video was overseen and directed by Elon Musk. Oh yeah. Now this Brainer case of fraud. But remember, Trevor Milton of, I'm already forgetting. Yeah. Nikola he was convicted of fraud, convicted for similarly misleading investors. I think we both know that Elon somehow will get out of this one, but this this smells really like a very tasty fraud dip. I mean, this isn't fraud on the theranos level fraud. I didn't say that. Well, I'm just sit on the level of Trevor, Milton from Nicolas. Yeah. But this, this does feel like a little slam dunky all these way out. These things, the senior engineer working on the autopilot, software revealed that the test was staged stage. That's, that's seems slammed. Duncan that's pretty good. All right, moving on. Finally, this is the Twitter CEO. The Tesla CEO and the SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Oh wow! All Three at once. I don't know how to deal with this. He can fight into the world that he's working too much. Oh, okay. The estimate is that he's probably working 120 hours per week My wife did that stop signing and he said that, he wouldn't wish that pain on anyone. He said this on Twitter, of course, and he said that he's worried about himself and he sent out a frowning face emoji, you know, here's the takeaway one of these companies shareholders, and or board should relieve him of his duties. That's yeah, it would be easy. No, here's the other breach because and Vivica, I know you're listening Excellence all that this is gotta be a breach of some level of Duty and Care. Know, look, I'm gonna go away here, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna go way out and say, Did you have to buy another company to be the CEO of? Could you have just not bought that company? Actually, here's the worst news that I'm not reporting on, he claims, Mr. Musk claims that he has now saved Twitter from bankruptcy, and think, I mean, how much, but how much does that suck? If he Really saved that. Horrible company. Like I I hate that that's not the problem. The problem to me, he says, almost made it bankrupt of negativity and then saved it from the bankruptcy that he almost made. That might be true. He's tired, Matt give me a break. He's sleeping, like saying I shot a hole in the bottom of this boat, but I saved us all by plugging the hole, like, what kind of so I think? Is that do you think because he's overworked, he needed to Stage that self-driving over there at Tesla, cause he couldn't, he couldn't figure out how to make it work, so maybe they should. Maybe he staged the vegetable dryer that he sold on at auction. All right, nobody knows. We're talking about moving on. Maybe he can help me out with this one. This is what we rely on you. For, you are the Ivory Tower of free flow that wow that's it's a really low Tower. Here's the headline, the unemployment rate is at its lowest since 1969. There was a big job support on Friday. Here's the headline that I'm struggling with and I know you gonna put it in a nutshell for me. US Stocks fall. After Blockbuster January, jobs report suggests more hawkish fed moves ahead. Can you interpret that? Audience care about that? No, they don't that. But all that is, is that they're The investors are worried that interest rates will go up because the job market is still too hot. What does that mean too? Hot? Meaning that there's still so many open positions and companies are still hiring at a really pretty strong pace. That is bad. That this is, this could push inflation up because you're paying these employees more, you want to fill the positions. Yeah, it's like it's just keeps cycle going. So then the FED raises interest rates, which slows everybody's hiring because everyone says like, oh, maybe we shouldn't hire everything, the cost of everything is expensive. Did you know that most companies Lara large cap companies? They don't actually like unlike us, who when we pay payroll, we have to have, like the money to pay for the payroll. Large companies go overnight and borrow the money. Oh, I like this, they often go out into the overnight market and they take like a portion like some like one, two, three day loans. It's like payday loans for Corporation. Can we get involved with this? We cannot because no one cares about us. All right, speaking of which Let's move on that. Don't laugh at us. Let's go to our CEOs, rule category. I have some fun CEO headlines. Yeah, I like CEOs all follow-ups to previous stories we've covered before. The first one's got to be the best, South Africa's energy. Giant eskim has published a job advert for a new CEO. Okay. Eskom's current CEO was poisoned with cyanide real hard to fill that in December. After submitting his resignation, the role was, he described the role as impossible in the worst job in global energy. Wow. That's really, that's quite a story that is I love. Can you imagine me the team that had to craft the description for that? No, that's right. Yeah, that's succession planing at his best. Think about Disney? This is the real succession when you have to go and monster.com to find your CEO. What Bob chapek. He's a bill. He is a available. Do you think he'd move to South Africa? And I don't think cyanide doesn't doesn't affect the follicle challenge. Does it say I know that, I'm pretty sure that that's racist and or sexist. No, it's according to the British, it's sexist, sexual harassment called. Yeah. Okay next story. Nearly 2,000 CEOs recently polled by accounting Consulting form pricewaterhouse Coopers okay? This is 2000 CEOs. Matt Say their company won't be economically viable within the next decade. Without changing its current path 2000. See, that's 40% of the CEOs server survey by PWC are saying that they're company won't be economically viable. How are they still? How do they still have a job where they? But wait, was this like Joe's Garage CEO? Like it? Who is this? Like is this the large cap companies? Is it? What is this? Was that cohort? Next one question. Do you want me to put that next week's? Update that information? Yeah, what did you read it for this week's update, does pricewaterhousecoopers really surveyed Joe's Garage? Aren't they a little bit more than that? Well, look if the headline is 2000, CEOs, say that their companies won't be viable. They gotta find 2000 CEOs somewhere. There's only 8,000 publicly traded companies that are worth even talking about. So this is from their Global CEO survey. Won't be valuable won't be viable. Wow quickly checking I can't they get zero pay if they can't make their companies viable and this is they didn't say They didn't say by 2050. This isn't even a Net Zero. The next question, they said in the next decade, I think. Once you admit that you're automatically, you should see eject. Yeah, this is the eject you're done. At least at least spend something. At least, say that we're working on the viability over the next day. Anything. I mean, like that's yeah. Moving on. Oh, Donnie. The Indian company, the targeted by Hindenburg research. That's, you know, exploding employees. Yeah, they're having a hard time of it because apparently someone investigators again, this is a Empire. A family Empire of companies in India. Run by a single man. Essentially that one guy. Yeah, it's Mark Zuckerberg ask, right? It's he controls. He controls the voting power and the board and everything, he controls everything. He's like, if Elon Musk was Mark Zuckerberg, that's what it was like. He's got like 19 companies that he's the CEO or Co CEO. I told you these stories were sexy. Yeah. No they're not. So it turns out there's a there's a headline out today. A Donny had a handful of Auditors as young as 23 years old signing off on companies worth 100 billion dollars. Matt, the industrial giant used a company called Shah Don Daria which had 11 employees to audit companies worth 100 billion dollars. This is right, this is what happens when you let these fake public companies exist. Look, About all of the adani stuff that's happening, is the research done? See, this is why you should buy portable metrics, the research, done to bring down a massive, that one of the richest people in the entire world. A massive conglomerate of of companies was done by like a guy. Yeah, who. All he did was do things like look up who works at the auditing firm, that was all it took. And now everyone's like, wait a minute, That that's who works there. I'm gonna translate that's coated message to the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ d-list all these fake public companies. Yeah, one man, where one man controls, everything just dealing with them get it over with it's it's a clean sweep it. All right. Next. Another CEO story, Stephanie McMahon remember who Stephanie McMahon is. Yeah she's a daughter of Vince McMahon over at WWE. She resigned as WWE Cosi CEO because she doesn't need the money and was due to be demoted by the return of her Daddy. What was Is that the official press release and it says, but she so she was demoted by the return of her. Daddy. Vince who appointed himself back to the board? Following alleged misconduct investigation. Again this is another example of a company just to list it this is just nonsense but listen to what I just said. It's just absolute nonsense. Yeah. Can you imagine being an investor in this company like somewhere BlackRock probably don't 7% of this company because they own 7% of everything and here is what just happened. The co-ceo dad appointed himself back to the board and the co-ceo decided to step down because she doesn't need the money anymore. What is going on as a company? You're allowing to list its shares on an open exchange this list? That's ridiculous. Is this is not that no. Let's go to our dystopia category. A few more stories from her updates here. Chat GPT we can't really avoid it chat, the headline is chat. GPT could be used by quote Bad actors. Oh, really? Oh yeah, I know. I don't think they're talking about some of that crap on Hulu and Amazon Prime, wow. So it could be used by Bad actors and should be something like, not Andy Dick but, you know, and should be regulated. And this is according to open ai's Chief technology officer. So open AI is the company that puts out Chachi PT. And let me tell you, Matt open ai's, Chief technology officers a woman. Wow, I mean that's pretty rare in the tech world. That's that's the audience. Does it rude? So but this is what their own CTO is saying that it could be used for by Bad actors. But here's the thing. Yeah, all of that. Feels like the same cloud cover we, we get when from like, right? When Facebook says, everything should be regularly regulate us because, you know, like, you know, anything, good happen and we can't be held responsible for the things that we destroyed the world. You didn't regulate us it. That's the same cloud cover, isn't it? They know they're not gonna get regulated in the next decade. Let's not forget last week reported that open, AI founder and CEO, Sam Altman said that the worst case scenario for all this was light out for mankind for for Humanity. Is Right, lights out? Yeah, good speaking of Sam Altman. He also said that, he's, he's, he can imagine ways that chat, GPT breaks capitalism. I'm not sure what that means. Well, here's what he said, he says. And then he went on to say, I think capitalism is awesome. I love capitalism but he still hopes. We find out a better way. Better one is it is that like you're talking about like your husband or your wife and you like, I really love them. I love my awesome, but I think, but I think she could be better. But if I could upgrade it, yeah, that's right. What's happening? I don't love it. The thing I created will break Humanity should be regulated. I love the thing. That would regulate it but I could upgrade that too. Like what he went on to say that no single company should own artificial intelligence, right, and horde, its benefits and added that he is doing everything he can for open AI to avoid becoming. That doesn't that sound creepy to you? Yeah. What is that mean? Turn it off like that. It's it's he's being like he's gonna be compelled to take over the world with it. He's gonna try to resist the power. The power beam. It's sucking him in. I don't know. It feels More like, he like built this thing and then he's gonna like go Corral it somehow like, I can't you just unplug it. Like it's not a sentient being, right? Like shoot it with one on Dick, Cheney's guns. Wow, throwback throwback, you know, I don't know. Also, I was trying to think when I was saying that sentence, the middle. I was like, I don't really know who else who owned guns, other than everyone in America, but America, yeah, I think America has them. And then he said, we've tried to design a structure that is as far as I know, unlike any other corporate structure out there. But here's the problem. I I don't, I couldn't find out their corporate structure. Their website is, is kind of strangely opaque. Well, I I'm pretty sure the corporate structure is changing GPT tells them what to do and say, isn't it. So it's a little surprised by this. He's like, he's trying to, he's he's making it sound like he's all right, things are happening. You see a real person or he's all in AI? What we know we dropped out of Stanford. That doesn't make him any real. Just the chatbot would actually figure that out speaking of Stanford and dropouts and all that stuff. The next story in this line, it turns out that Google that's alphabet for for your professionals, okay, Google will unveil Veil, it's chat GPT clone on February 8th. That's two days away. Yeah, we only have two days to prepare for the end of mankind. And he the Google said, the the event will revolve around using the power of AI to reimagine how people search for explore and interact with information. Making it more natural and intuitive than ever before, to find what you need. So, it's happening. Matt, all the good stuff is happening. I all the fun stuff. All right, I got I got a few more. Let's go to our Wars. This is the longest update I've ever had a worse cutter. Hey, this is, you know, it's just news. People need to know their news, go to the work category. I don't have much to say about this one. You us takes down. Chinese spy balloon. Over Atlantic Ocean. I don't have to say about that. Oh that's the big story that we can. Yeah. It was the big story of the weekend and like conservative media in this company are in this country. Really, really likes the story like it feels like really compelling to them. Well, China was the old woke, right? China was like the original woke War. I don't know what they are but I don't know what they are. I mean, like we're unless they're they were really concerned about human rights in China recently. And I like, this could only be better for like Tucker Carlson if there were uyghurs in the balloon, like their brains would explode. But now Tucker's more worried about black studies. Minors are Oberlin College. Yeah. I mean you are literally his enemy. And then finally. Oh, Activision Blizzard. Oh agreed to pay a settlement worth 30 million dollars after the SEC accused the the video game developer of failing to properly address complaints of workplace misconduct and also violating whistleblower laws 30 million dollars in 2019. The then they had to pay 35 million with to the SEC. For violating whistleblower laws and properly addressing complaints of workplace. Misconduct the workplace misconduct that they did not properly address, includes a Cosby Suite where they hoped to drug female employees and get laid. I'm not sure that 35 million dollars is much of a penalty. Is this good news? Matt Activision is not admitting nor denying sec's findings, so. Thank God. Schrodinger's cat, right? It's like, is it alive? Is it dead? It did it bounce, it did it sing? All right, that's that's done. I'm gonna hand it off to you. I'm all right. That's good because I'm about with that. I feel terrible now. I mean, what do you have? What do I have? Here's what I have. Okay, it's time for an installment of something. I'm calling BS questions from our rabbit. What's BS? What is board saber metrics? That was interesting. They all might be bulshit but it's board. Saber metrics know this. It's not bulshit, stop it. Today's question, is from Lynn in North Carolina? Okay, she wrote this quote, I saw a headline this morning about neo-nazis attacking power substations, in my state. Who should I blame for not putting up a sign? That says neo-nazis, keep out on the fences, surrounding our power grid. Okay, pretty good question. I guess so I found the story she was talking about because she did not add the link and Lynn, it's an excellent question. It's out of Business Insider. The headline was a tax on power grids plunged, thousands of Americans Into Darkness as authorities. Worried Neo Nazis are targeting critical infrastructure. Well, Matt to be clear this, this was the main headline. This was not just the number one click-baity thing that businesses rolling with today. Yeah it didn't take me long to find it but here's your BS. Answer, Lynn from North Carolina, Duke Energy is the company that you can blame for not putting up the know. Nazi. Now I'm listening. All right, here's what BS says. This is what the data says Sports hippie. Metrics number one. Yeah, the board is young enough to know what electricity is. I don't know. They should know what's going on. The Duke's board influence. Weighted age is in line with the US average age, the 63 years old at Duke 62 years old, for the US average. I mean, it's average on boards on boards. Right there. They're old, they're old, but they're not like, decrepit zombies. It's not the South Westport friends. Okay, so 63 is now the new Young the new 63, the new 4720. Yeah. Number two, they are not male and stale oh well we I mean, I know that the CEO is a woman. CEO is a woman. And in fact, the five women on the 14-person board actually owned over 50% of the influence. Okay, this is rare. This is a rare occurrence. When the women on the board. On the majority of the influence. This is largely driven by Lynn good the CEO and chair, okay? But, and Cherry CEO and chair. But it's still rare that it happens at all. And it turns out the longest tenured directors are Lin, good herself and Mary McKey who have both been there around 10 years. But most of the directors have been there. Three, four, five years, singer, songwriter. Maria McKee. Yes no no not at. All right. Number three and this is where the problems crop up. Oh, They are very distracted. They're too distracted to do their day job. So if you're hoping for someone on the board to like, look up and say, why don't we have a sign that says no neo-nazis or I'm all for that time by the. Can we just have no neo Nazis in general as a sign? I feel like that sign. There's a lot of signs used to be implied in this country but after Trump it's not so much. I feel like Now's the Time to put it out, but 10 of the 14, directors are sitting on more than one board including the CEO who's on three boards and that's unusual too, right? Yeah. You don't see a lot of CEOs on that many boards. Yeah, she's been on a bunch of boards. And is this part of, is this part are the other women, the five women on the board. Are they? The ones? They are a lot of the overboarding. So this aligned with the theory that women are the same. Women are being used to film multiple board roles. Yeah. Recycled women recycled women. Yeah. Um number four there's no one there to rock the boat. So not only are they not Really paying attention to their day jobs because they're too busy. But even if they were no one in that room is likely to turn up, turn around and say, hey guys, should we put up the Neo-Nazi sign? Because it turns out that nine of the 14 members of this board are connected to one another, the worst of which is Lynn good herself, who's connected to eight, other board members through friends and friends and friends. Yeah, well, they're there to the board is there to act as a counterbalance to Lynn. So that influence let me think of the Matthew, what does that mean exactly 80% of the board influence are people who are connected with one another? That's that's probably my head. Yeah no there's no math. You can't do math for this and finally and maybe most egregiously the board committee that oversees the no notsi signage. Is weak and lame, and that important committee, okay? Yeah, they have a committee for this. It's the operations and nuclear oversight committee. Ooh. That sounds pretty professional. It doesn't it? It seems like they'd be able to come up with a sharpie sign that says no Nazis here, five members on that committee. They have a combined 19% influence of the nobody cares about no one cares about what they have to say. They show up to work and they're like, shut up. No that's like first day of school at College signing up for classes and you're the idiot who overslept you slept through your alarm and you ended up getting like Jim and right yeah like all the leftovers. Yeah yeah they're all nuclear experts which is great but it's really bad for you know deterring Nazis. And in fact Webster Dunbar who's on this committee is on five boards concurrently so bored five is it rude for me to say that Webster? Dunbar sounds like a nuclear expert. Is that root of it is. Yeah that's racist and rude. So here's what BS recommends. Vote out, John Herron, who's the chair of the operations in nuclear oversight committee? Yeah, and replace him with a black woman who has security and Tech, or hacker background, you know, experience. Now you're speaking my language. In fact, we found her her name is Shelly archambeau. She's a board member at the security from okta, she's a tech exec. She's usually the smartest person in the room and she didn't go to Stanford. That's right. Actually, I gotta tell you a silly as this all sounds, Matt. This is actually very important in Sage advice. Yeah, I know. It's the sages thing I've ever said in my Duke Energy. I know you're listening. Really slow down a little bit and think about what we're talking about here. I mean, look over and if you sold with this, Board, refreshment, we are a available. We're around, we're just not, we're not coming in North Carolina, that's all, but we're not the signs up. At least. That's all we got. That's Damien. Raul mascardi. That was BS, a minute and Bs and Damien's long, 25 minutes of BS. We're gonna be back tomorrow with corporate theater players and on Wednesday with woke Wednesday and Thursday with the game and there's all sorts of stuff, get out of us until then goodbye.