Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / NCAA, ESG, And More ... Florida's CFO Visits With Preston

Transcript

NCAA, ESG, And More ... Florida's CFO Visits With Preston · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:14
  Where does the time go? We're already into the third hour Thursday, February
• 0:22
  first, on The Morning Show with Preston Scott, otherwise known as my son
• 0:26
  George's Birthday. Good to be with you. I'm Preston. That's Grant Show
• 0:31
  fifty eighty seven, and we are joined by the Chief Financial Officer for the
• 0:37
  Sunshine State, the honorable CFO Jimmy. Patronis Jimmy. How are you,
• 0:44
  my friend? Man? I tell you being called honorable, that's high praise.
• 0:49
  Thank you. I'm great. I can't complain, my friend, you're
• 0:53
  the CFO. If I can't call you honorable, we are in deep trouble
• 0:57
  right my first campaign, my bumper stickers just said Jimmy autumn. I'm glad
• 1:07
  you said something about that. I was just curious, first, how many
• 1:11
  terms have you served? So I did eight in the state legislature, and
• 1:15
  I was working at the restaurant, so, you know, doing what I
• 1:19
  was supposed to work and have a real job at home. Then I was
• 1:23
  term limited out I was going home. Rick Scott asked me going the Public
• 1:29
  Service Commission. So I was there three years and in twenty seventeen he appointed
• 1:34
  me to be CFO after my Katie, my wife gave me permission. So
• 1:40
  then elected in eighteen and re elected in twenty two. So I'm I'm about
• 1:45
  to cross the threshold of you know, working on my I guess my seventh
• 1:49
  year. How many? Is it term limited? Yeah, it's term limited.
• 1:53
  If I finished this term, which I'm tending to, I'll be the
• 1:57
  longest servants CFO in the state's history. And that's it. You're done.
• 2:02
  Yeah, I mean, well, I mean there's there's I mean, unless
• 2:07
  you're going to change the constitution. But yeah, I'm done. I'm I'm
• 2:08
  my best. I do think I got the best job in the state.
• 2:10
  Nobody nobody shows up the work unless I find the paycheck. So when everybody
• 2:15
  takes my phone call because of that, So it's it's it's good stuff.
• 2:19
  How would you describe to somebody like you're sitting down with a person that's not
• 2:24
  involved in politics, they don't really know, probably don't care, and they
• 2:29
  say, what what is the job of the CFO? How do you describe
• 2:34
  your job in like a coffee table discussion? Yep. For the first thing
• 2:38
  I tell him, I said, it's like I'm the state's business manager.
• 2:42
  I pay all the bills, I balance a checkbook. You know, a
• 2:46
  license. You know, over a million insurance licenses in the state. So
• 2:50
  whether it be your you know, guy shows your car, insurance, life
• 2:53
  insurance, health insurance, I do all insurance. Consumer fraud. You know,
• 2:59
  here's another one. And people don't realize, you know, I ask
• 3:00
  them, you know, a licensed funel homes and the funerals. Why do
• 3:06
  you license fels? Because people by pre need. It's like an insurance product.
• 3:09
  So where there's where there is a fiduciary responsibility with an insurance role and
• 3:16
  it's tied to the consumer, I have a responsibility. I'm the state fire
• 3:22
  marshal or regulate blasting anything is like the Governor's office didn't want I ended up
• 3:27
  getting when they rewrote the constitution twenty years ago. When we look at the
• 3:31
  legislative process, we're in session right now and the one mandate is to balance
• 3:37
  the budget. As you well know, how much, if any input do
• 3:42
  you have on it on the front end or the back end. So it's
• 3:46
  interesting, not a tremendous amount. But you know, back during COVID to
• 3:53
  the legislature, the Speaker and the Senate President and the governor have the revenue
• 3:59
  estimating common it's what they're going to have the projections, and they've built the
• 4:01
  budget. But but what I did, which ruffled some feathers buff All was
• 4:05
  important to do, is I started, I saw what was happening with COVID,
• 4:11
  and I started sending it. People don't like him when you send letters,
• 4:14
  But I sent a letter to to those those different parties saying, you
• 4:18
  know, these are some concerns I've got. Oh, they didn't like me
• 4:21
  sending letters, but you know that's that's part of my job is is I
• 4:25
  managed a checkbook even though they they dictate what I can spend and I can
• 4:29
  stop payment on something. But you know, I've been around this process long
• 4:32
  enough. I've seen more than one dip in the economy, and I get
• 4:35
  paranoid. When are states, you know, cash reserves and where again,
• 4:41
  where where were like a seasonal business on a beach destination, we have were
• 4:46
  ups and down to the of the cash flow of the state. When tourism's
• 4:48
  here, We've got lots of money right now, it's just all the way
• 4:51
  around. We've got plenty of money, but time is fleeting, and you
• 4:56
  know, like I said, COVID COVID wiped out the state financially that we
• 5:00
  bounced back very quickly us You can see at w f L A FM dot
• 5:04
  com The Morning Show with Preston Scott, Boy that escalated quickly. I mean
• 5:12
  that really got out of hand fast. On w FLA, Levin passed the
• 5:19
  hour. Jimmy Patronis has always been very kind in offering its time to us
• 5:26
  here on the program. He's the CFO for the state of Florida. And
• 5:30
  my guest here on the Morning Show with Preston Scott Jimmy word association. I
• 5:34
  say, ESG. You say, worst thing you could do to the profitability
• 5:42
  of a company. Explain that that's a word, Salard, I gave that
• 5:47
  word. Oh no, no, no, sir. That you are not
• 5:49
  even close to Kamala Ra's territory, right, You say ESG, which is
• 5:57
  three letters, and I say that. Explain to people why why is Florida's
• 6:02
  so focused on fighting ESG. It started last year with stuff that made national
• 6:09
  headlines, but the fight is continuing. Explain why so ESG is it seems
• 6:16
  to continue to weave itself into corporate boardrooms. Corporate boardrooms don't know what to
• 6:21
  do with it. You've gotten in situations where a chairman or a board of
• 6:27
  directors is saying you've got to adopt these ESG policies. Some of this stuff
• 6:30
  has been dictated by some of the stock exchanges. That stands for Environmental,
• 6:33
  Social and governance. So I mean, if you understand what the term WOKE
• 6:39
  is, if you WOKE kind of goes in in hand with ESG, and
• 6:43
  the more environmental friendly you are, the more social agenda friendly you are,
• 6:48
  the more your governess reflects supportive of those two. You know, they score
• 6:53
  you as like having a high ESG score. And you have companies that praise
• 6:57
  themselves on the media about being that that has zero sensitivity to the bottom line.
• 7:02
  So this is where like in the case of Blackrock, black Rock got
• 7:06
  way out in front on this, but they're also one of the biggest managing
• 7:11
  of assets in the world. You know, it started affecting their bottom line,
• 7:16
  which is firefighters pensions, it's law enforcement pensions. And I just said,
• 7:21
  you know, I don't want it doesn't perform well. But two,
• 7:26
  you know, it's not what's going to create the best thing for the buck
• 7:30
  when it comes to investment of people like that in the long run. So
• 7:34
  yeah, I keep on beating up on this issue. And as we start
• 7:38
  to expose it and educate people, the black Rocks of the world start to
• 7:43
  back away from the public support of ESG, but they're still doing it internally.
• 7:47
  I'm curious, Jimmy, you know, there's a story. We haven't
• 7:51
  even talked about it yet today, and I doubt we will. Today.
• 7:55
  Disney got whipped one more time in court to Florida one against Disney. It
• 8:01
  was a pretty significant ruling yesterday. But Disney is all in on ESG.
• 8:09
  But yet they somehow are escaping their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. It's a
• 8:15
  publicly traded company. At what point does that rooster come home to roost?
• 8:20
  I think at some point it will. As long as you've got stock exchanges
• 8:26
  that have some form of an ESG expectation in their governance, then this is
• 8:31
  going to make the water, you know, kind of murky when it goes
• 8:35
  into a court. It comes down from a lot of influence from Washington out
• 8:39
  of the White House, and so where we feel like we have the high
• 8:43
  ground we take is to call them out as ESG doesn't always have the best
• 8:50
  outcomes on investment. And Daddy always said, you want to get somebody's attention
• 8:52
  to get into their pocketbook. So I mean where you have dollars fleeing the
• 8:58
  ESG funds or the ESG companies. Because some companies proudly, you know,
• 9:03
  put it front and center. Some of them they check the box and they
• 9:05
  do whatever they mintmally have to do because they've got a border of directors that
• 9:09
  still believe and have a maximum profitability every single year. But yeah, it's
• 9:15
  in the case of Disney, they they've doubled down on it. Yesterday was
• 9:22
  a good day for Disney bottom line. In the state of Florida, the
• 9:26
  lawmakers, and I'm guessing with some guidance from your office, they're erecting barriers
• 9:33
  between the public and the businesses of Florida and the banking and lending institutions that
• 9:37
  want to try to score companies and businesses and loan applications with ESG. Yeah,
• 9:43
  basically say, if you're going to only lend money to a business and
• 9:48
  the more woke that they are, the more ESG friendly that they are,
• 9:52
  we're going to give you a lower interest rate. That's horrible. That's horrible,
• 9:58
  you know, So we said, if you're going to to do that,
• 10:00
  we made one hundred and seventeen banks they sign attestation Forum saying we do
• 10:03
  not score loans in this method or manner. So okay, as long as
• 10:09
  you don't do that, and you really care about somebody's business fundamentals, then
• 10:13
  you can do business with the State of Florida. And in the scheme of
• 10:16
  things, that's a pretty big stick we have to use over the banks because
• 10:20
  if if the State of Florida starts pulling out my checking account of loan's got
• 10:24
  sixty billion dollars in it. That's not including the two hundred billion that we've
• 10:28
  got in retirement and funds on the State of Florida's in a great financial place,
• 10:31
  but we've got a lot of financial influence too. Jimmy patronos with us.
• 10:35
  We're going to do another word association. This one will be fun.
• 10:37
  I'm going to say NC DOUBLEA next on the Morning Show with Preston Scott WFLA
• 10:46
  at WFLA fam dot com, on your phone with the iHeartRadio app and on
• 10:50
  hundreds of devices like Alexa, Google Home, Xbox, and Sonos, and
• 10:54
  Iheart's radio station. Twenty two minutes to the hour February first, on the
• 11:01
  Morning Show with Threston Scott, Jimmy patrona State CFO with us, and I'm
• 11:07
  going to remind the CFO that we we stress on this program no profanity.
• 11:15
  And I say that because as I mentioned this next word association. So I
• 11:24
  say NC double A, and you say, say for broadcasting, you were
• 11:35
  stuck because your first instinct is I want to say something with four letters,
• 11:43
  all right, So I say NC double A. You made a lot of
• 11:46
  waves publicly in the wake of Florida State being axed out of, snubbed whatever
• 11:52
  from the college football playoff. We talked in the break Senator Rick Scott's asked
• 11:58
  for document, has he gotten any? So they immediately fired back a letter
• 12:05
  from their compliance officer, which you know was was careful not to expose any
• 12:13
  any liability. But you know, I tell you, the NCAA is in
• 12:20
  Washington a lot and they and they use it for cover because they've got such
• 12:24
  a train wreck of an administration right now. They're getting nothing solved with nil
• 12:30
  the portal, the challenges that's created, the debacle that happened with the playoff
• 12:35
  system. So you know, these guys like Charlie Baker, they go and
• 12:37
  they do a bunch of name dropping. They spend a bunch of time in
• 12:41
  Washington, d C. Because they said, you know what, Washington's going
• 12:43
  to fix this because they're they're too inept, and then do this themselves.
• 12:50
  I truly feel that they're removed from reality. They've got a board of governors.
• 12:54
  Now, I'm sure they're nice people, but again, removed from reality.
• 13:00
  Charlie Baker, who's the president, he's making over three million dollars a
• 13:03
  year and I don't know what the university system is getting for that ridiculous salary
• 13:09
  that he's get. I'd like to know what Dan Wilcox. But again,
• 13:11
  they're kind of a little bit separate. They're not they're not subject to Florida
• 13:15
  law. So you know, we we can demand discovery. And the mattitude
• 13:18
  is where if you've got if you're not subject to Florida law, then what
• 13:22
  do you get to hide? Okay, so we're not going to stop.
• 13:26
  I think I think I have a fiduciary role in the state. Do when
• 13:31
  it comes to our taxpayers dollars? We send millions of dollars to our universities.
• 13:35
  Our university send millions of dollars to the NCAAA. So in and around
• 13:39
  about way state dollars are going to this box of idiots. Well, you
• 13:43
  mentioned Stan Wilcox. That's a name familiar to Florida State fans. He was
• 13:48
  the former athletic director. I would say candidly and objectively, he wasn't very
• 13:54
  good. Uh, but he's in charge of compliance now. Yeah, and
• 14:00
  look, Stamp a nice guy. You know. He always made me feel
• 14:03
  welcome. He always looked great, towering in his burgundy blazer at you know,
• 14:07
  garnet blazer at Florida State Games. But you know, I mean,
• 14:11
  if you look at some of the darkest times we've had in the last twenty
• 14:15
  years, it was when he was athletic director, and I think you know
• 14:18
  he he was excited to get the heck out of you know, Florida State
• 14:22
  and go work with the NCAA. We has no accountability, you know,
• 14:26
  I'm sure he's making some ridiculous seven figure salary, you know, courtesy to
• 14:30
  State of Florida. So the NCAA is saying it has no responsibility to turn
• 14:35
  over any documents whatsoever. Does that change if there's a criminal issue involved.
• 14:39
  For example, I want to know what their profit was from their ESPN books.
• 14:48
  They have their own sports betting book, and there were odds on what
• 14:54
  teams made the playoff, and they were discussing Florida State being knocked out of
• 14:58
  the playoff as an unbeaten tea before Jordan Travis ever got injured. I'd be
• 15:01
  curious. I mean that potentially could be a criminal act when you're involving sports
• 15:07
  bookies. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna get you more upset. So Boo
• 15:11
  Corgan who is the athletic director, and these athletic directors are all related,
• 15:18
  family related by blood. Okay, they all are. They feed each other.
• 15:22
  It's really bad. It's incestuous. But Boo Corgan, who his daddy
• 15:26
  was an athletic director, who he's an athletic director who also chaired the Bowl
• 15:31
  selection committee. You know what his brother is? He works ESPN. Yeah,
• 15:37
  see, you can't tell me. There wasn't a conversation between Boo Corgan
• 15:41
  and his brother, just candidly even saying, well, man, you know
• 15:43
  that a SEC championship game without Jordan Travis. You know, the ratings on
• 15:48
  it were kind of a dud, and it wasn't a points game because people
• 15:52
  like seeing points. You know. Just it was. It was the most
• 15:54
  unprofitable game we had of all the championship games. You can't tell me that
• 15:58
  converse didn't take place, and then you know ESPN goes. You know,
• 16:03
  I just want to make sure I'm letting my brother know that a Florida State
• 16:07
  in the National Championship may not get as much ratings as say an Alabama in
• 16:12
  the National Championship. So I mean it became a business decision, you know,
• 16:18
  for them for ratings. But I guarantee it made a business decision,
• 16:21
  and that's like insider trading on the sportsbook idea though, I think it needs
• 16:25
  to at least be explored. Jimmy, as always, thank you for the
• 16:27
  time. I appreciate it. You're welcome anytime you can make the time.
• 16:33
  You're the best. Hey, and special shout out to Susan Miller, she
• 16:34
  listens every single morning. Thanks so much, Bye bye, Jimmy petronas CFO
• 16:40
  for the Sunshine State bringing it strong on the Morning Show with Preston Scott