You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Am six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. It's the Bill Handle Show. He's still on vacation. Back on Monday. Wayne Resnik sitting in. It's always weird when you play a bump. That's a song that's on my workout playlist. It's like it like it tickles my brain in a weird way.
Bad religion colligions.
Man, yeah, yeah, oh I know, bad religion. All right, I'm sorry, I diverge it is. I just want to say though, it's weird when you hear a song that you hear a lot and that you hear it as a bump on KFI. Not weird, it's it's whatever. Here's some stories we're watching for you. There is a red flag warning in effect today and tomorrow for parts of La and Ventura Counties. The Santa Ana wins are gonna peak uh today later today into tomorrow. Gusts could go
up to forty five miles an hour. Very low humidity, oh my gosh. Up in the elevations above four thousand feet, you're talking about humidity levels less than ten percent and in lower areas. It will vary more, but could be as low as eight percent relative humidity that is dry as dry can be, so fire danger is high.
Please be careful.
And two separate shootings in downtown LA within blocks of each other, left four people entered last night. Everybody was taken to the hospital. One of them is in critical condition. I take that to mean the other three are better than that, and police are still trying to figure out if there's a connection between the two incidents. And I mentioned that story to you because we're going to talk a little bit about a new tough on crime attitude here in LA and across the country. This is happening
everywhere in New York. I'm just giving you some examples. In New YORKA, the governor ordered the National Guard to go be in the subways to try to help with the prime problems on the subways. In Louisiana, very different place than New York, same kinds of ideas, though in Louisiana they passed a law that seventeen year olds will
be tried as adults period, end of discussion. In Oregon, another place that's different from the first two, they recriminalized some drugs that they had previously decriminalized, and they said, Ah, this is not working out, Let's make them criminalized again. In San Francisco, of all places, voters approved a ballot measure that requires welfare recipients to be drug tested and also gives the police more power to surveil people.
They passed that.
The voters in San Francisco, Colorado, they voted to reduce parole eligibility for people convicted of violent crimes. Now we can go through and look at all of these things that happened around the country, and I can see some of them I think are good ideas and some of them maybe not. But what the thing that ties them all together is a sentiment amongst us the people that
we let crime get too far out of control. And I do think the idea that we let it get out of control is accurate historically and explains the backlash. And that is certainly true here in La in La County, and in California, because you may recall in terms of local concerns, this has everything to do with Proposition forty seven that we voted for like ten years ago that made certain felonies misdemeanors, and in La County ninety percent
of the neighborhoods. If you break down the voting maps by neighborhoods, ninety percent in La County voted yes on Prop forty seven.
So that's why I say we did it.
It didn't just happen. We affirmatively made choices that caused some things to happen that are now creating the backlash against it. And that's why we passed Prop thirty six, which rolls back a lot of the leniency that we chose when we voted for Prop forty seven. And the thing is, eighty seven percent of neighborhoods in La County that voted for Prop forty seven also voted to overhaul it and and roll it back.
It's not different people.
It's not like ten years ago some group of people said let's make it more lenient, and now a different group of people are saying, let's make it tough again.
It's the same people. There's a huge.
Correlation between voting for Prop thirty six to toughen up some of these laws again and voting for Nathan Hoffman as the district attorney.
So imagine because because.
Voting for him also is a vote for getting tougher on crime. Now that's not being totally fair to him. He's not one hundred percent tough on crime every time, all the time, and that's all that I'm about. He has spoken at length about other ideas that would not be considered tough on crime. They would be considered smart on crime and bringing sensible compassion into the system.
But if you.
Voted for him, there's there's no chance in hell that anybody voted for Nathan Hackman because of those nuanced things that he talked about. Everybody voted for him because they wanted to get tough on crime.
In La County.
And therefore the two things go together so much so that the group of voters that voted for Prop thirty two thirty six, excuse me, and for Hawkman, it's like forty percent of all the voters. What percent of La County voters stayed entrenched in a soft on crime view? These would be the people who voted no on Prop thirty six. We don't want to roll back the leniency of forty seven. They also voted for former DA George Gascon that group fourteen percent, and then I guess everybody
else voted for one and not the other way. For whatever reason, they voted for Prop thirty six, they didn't vote for Nathan Hakman or the other way around. So that shows some real I'm gonna say it's a population moving in lockstep. The problem is this is cyclical. You know what's gonna start happening this year. I promise you I won't be here to gloat that I told you so because I, as I announced earlier, I am retiring fully from radio.
I guess next week. But you will start to see.
Calls for criminal justice reform again because already jail populations are growing. They will continue to grow as a result of these things that have happened. And as soon as the jail popular start to grow, there will be more cries about the conditions and overcrowding and that we're over
incarcerating people, and the pendulum will swing back. And I think what's happening is the cycles are becoming shorter between a bunch of tough on crime legislation and policies, and it kind of like five years later, ten years later, there's a move to make it not as harsh, and then five and ten years later. But I think we may start to see two or three year cycles now, because it's just so political as opposed to being a thing like how to build a road is not political.
Maybe whether to build one or where to build it is political, but how to build a road it has no politics in it. There's a proper way to build a road, and there is a proper way to run a criminal justice system. But the problem is nobody's interesting in that. I'm going to throughout the show, since I'm retiring completely next week, I'm going to be doing some selfish things, just occasionally. One of those selfish things is going to happen in the middle somewhere of this segment.
But this segment is about a trend in corporate America right now to lower the head count at companies, but not necessarily in the way you may be thinking, because one question when you look at a company, one question that you can ask is how many employees do you have? And then investors or debt holders can say, wow, should you have that many employees? But there's another way to look at a company or a government agency or any entity really, and it's not how many employees do you have,
it's how many levels do you have? And the trend right now has to do with flattening these companies. I did clap my hands in a flattening move if you heard it. Flattening the companies and reducing the number of levels in the company. Every company has to have one or or it could be two people some number of people who are the very top people. Every company has to have an ultimate boss. You cannot possibly operate without that, or else you get like a lord of the flies
situation in your company. And in theory, every company has to have somebody who's and I don't mean it pejoratively, because I've been this a bunch of times. I'm this now here that are on the bottom rung of the ladder. Mainly that they they are not the boss of anybody. They have a job to do, but their job in no way involves having any oversight over anybody else. So you have two levels. You have to have two. Now, how many do you need depends on what kind of
company you are and how big you are. But there has been a trend before now to put in place level after level after level after level of management. When I was with Defens, you had officers and then supervisors and then you had deputy chief. I mean they still
do deputy chiefs, and then you had chiefs. And it's not that there were that many levels, but a lot of times I kind of thought, do we really need I'm not going to say which I'm not going to say which layer I questioned the necessity of, but I did often question whether we really could have gotten rid of one layer and it would not have affected anything. Now, that's still relatively modest compared to some companies. Wait till
you hear about how many levels certain companies have. But the move now is to get rid of entire layers of supervision in a company. What that means is when companies are doing big layoffs now in reduction and forces, very often it's people in middle management or even upper management who are being let go, like UPS, who says since last year they've cut thousands of supervisor jobs. My god, how many supervisors did they have? I mean, UPS is a big company, They're all over the country. I would
agree they need quite a few supervisors. If they were able to cut thousands of them and still operate properly, how many did they have? Amazon has a goal they want to increase the ratio of workers to managers. Every manager for every manager there'll be more workers.
That means less managers.
That's a nice way of saying that less managers were going to get rid of managers. Over at Google, they have gotten rid of managerial roles by ten percent. Now I'm not clear over what period of time did they get rid of ten percent of their managers?
In a year, in a month, in a day.
Public companies in the United States have cut their middle manager head counts by about six percent since the pandemic. Now, you don't have to believe me, because there's a data provider called Live Data Technologies, and they did an analysis over twenty million white collar workers and that's their conclusion. That's middle managers, senior executives. I assume these are like senior vice presidents and things like that. They're down five percent since the end of twenty twenty one. Now it's
not just people losing their jobs. It's also when you flatten a company and you take away layers of management. And this is probably what's more important for people like us. I mean, I don't know how many people listening are upper management in a company. I'm sure some of you are, but I suspect most of us are.
Either in the middle or lower.
When you flatten a company, you take away advancement opportunities. So people who are middle managers who were aspiring to become senior executives there may be no positions that even exist for them. At some companies, people who used to be bosses have had to move into jobs where they are not the boss of anybody, and not necessarily because that's what they wanted to do. The job market is apparently flooded right now with managers. So I want to tell you about City City Bank City.
They are one of these companies.
That have been flattening and getting rid of middle management, and they were proud to announce a restructuring last year.
Late last year.
They were very proud of this that they cut the number of management layers at City. They cut it down down to eight levels of management.
You know how many there were.
Before thirteen levels of management. Now City is a huge corporation, and I get that, but if you're a teller at a bank and there's twelve people between you and the head of City, that's too many. Eight is probably too many, but I guess can't do it all at once. So here at iHeart you. Remember I said every company has to have. There's got to be somebody at the tippy top, and there has to be somebody at the bottom. So I'm the person on the low rung and at the
high rung. Here at iHeart, I think it's two people kind of are sharing the high rung, Bob Pittman, the CEO, Rich Bresler, the COO CFO. If anybody from management listening, don't get nervous. I'm not doing anything crazy. So I would just like to say, though, in light of my impending retirement, I would like to say one thing to
the CEO of iHeart, Bob Pittman. Bob Pittman, I know that you have a very good tequila company called Cosa Dragonis, And I'm just saying putting it out there in the world that boy, wouldn't a nice bottle of Cosa Dragonis tequila make a wonderful retirement gift for oh, I don't know, somebody. Well, remember when every company wanted to get into diversity, equity and inclusion.
DEI that's changing big time.
Corporate America is pulling back on their diversity programs, partly because of pressure from activists.
Who have sued. In many cases some of these companies.
And then with a new administration coming in, you know, I think we can agree the new administration is not as friendly to DEI ideas as.
The current administration is.
So they're gonna have activists on their backs, and they're going to have an administration that's not going to be very sympathetic to any of their DEI efforts, and they're starting to because if you have an administration that is friendly to DEI, then you're not probably going to have any luck getting the government to do anything about federal
programs in this regard. But with the new administration coming in, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, that is a place that has sued many companies over their DEI policies, and now they've identified sixty one federal programs that they think could be should be eliminated and that they could sue over, like the program that gives technical assistance for minority farmers, or program that give preferences in contracting for minority owned law firms that are helping the United States
collect money that's owed to the United States. And it's not just that generally the tone of the new administration is more anti DEI. It's also that one of President Electrump's top advisor, Stephen Miller, actually ran a group that sued companies over their DEI policies, so he has some
experience going after it. Because of this backlash and because of activist behavior and lawsuits, for example, Ford Motor will stop providing workplace data that it was giving to the Human Rights Campaign, which is a gay rights I mean, I'm kind of broad brushing what they do, but if you said, you only have a few words to say
what they do. They're a gay rights lobbying organization and they've been very successful over the last twenty thirty forty years in treating companies to make their policies more gay friendly, bisexual friendly, transgender, all that stuff. And Ford was in an agreement to share workplace data with them, basically to say, look how we're doing.
What do you think? And they said they're not going to give them the data anymore.
UBS said, we're not giving any more of these twenty five thousand dollars grants that we were giving to businesses led by women of color, those grants no more. Walmart used to fund a charity that it made. It created this charity to address racial disparity and of course fund it. And they said, we're not going to renew funding for it anymore. If it can exist without us, that's fine, but we're not going to give it any money. Also, in the courts now, I would say, in the courts,
we're getting mixed messages about these DEI lawsuits. For example, earlier this month, Federal Appeals Court told NASDAK that they're racial and gender targets for the boards of its companies. You know, if you list your company on NASDAK, there's certain rules we have to follow if you want to be traded on NASDAK. And they said, we want to have rules about the racial and gender makeup of your board of director's company. And there was a big lawsuit
and Federal Peace Court said you can't do that. You can have certain rules for these companies, but that's not one of them. One of the first companies to start this trend was Tractor Supply. Tractor Supply made a big announcement in June saying they were going to not support anymore LGBTQ events, not that they were going to fight them or anything, but they weren't going to actively support them.
And they issued a statement saying we've heard from customers that we have disappointed them, so they were hearing a lot from people who do not like DI. Some court cases have upheld various DEI programs at different companies, so the judicial side of it, it remains to be seen where that's going to go. But generally speaking, there is a trend to move away from DEI. One company though
it's too bad, bills not here right now. Because one company that is not moving away, that is not caving to the pressure is cost Co and they've got this group called the National Center for Public Policy Research that wants the shareholders of cost Co to vote to require the company to issue reports on how financially risky it is for Costco to have these programs. They do cost
companies money to operate, they absolutely do. So this group says, you have to tell your shareholders how much money you're spending on DEI stuff, and Costco said, no, we don't want. We opposed that. We don't want that, don't vote for that. And they have a chief Diversity officer. Their supplier program is focused on expanding small and diverse businesses to supply
goods to Costco. It donates to organizations like the Thurgood Marshall College Fund that serves minorities and other underrepresented groups. So a lot of companies are caving. Costco is not caving. And I don't really know how you decide whether or not to patronize a company visa the what their DEI policies. If you're anti DEI, do you actually refrain, like will you not be a cost Co member because they are
pro DEI? I don't think about it that much. Maybe that makes me a bad person, or maybe that just makes me if I'm in consumer mode. I'm in consumer mode and I'm gonna do business with whatever company best meets my consumer needs at the time, and not necessarily try to research everything about them.
But you do you boo.
Oh, alrighty, let's ummm yeah, let's get into it. Gift giving season is winding down, but sometimes gifts are given all year round. It's time to talk about animals in the news. Never in an upsetting way. This is heavy petting. When people give gifts to other people, the percentage of times that they're doing it to have sex is minimal.
Of all the gifts that are given in a year by humans to humans, very few of them are being given for the sole purpose of trying to get the gift e to have sex with you.
But in the animal kingdom, that is the main reason.
It's the main reason gifts are given, and many animals give gifts.
Now, when you give a gift, and this is.
I think exclusively, although there might be an exception out there somewhere. I think it's exclusively the male of the species giving a gift to the female in order to get permission to mate. Snails do it, earthworms do it, Squids do it, birds do it. But where you see this the most insects and arachnids, bugs and spiders. For example, the male six spot burnet moth gives the gift. Now, hold on, I will explain why gives the gift of cyanide to the lady.
Hello, would you like some cyanide?
Oh?
My goodness, I certainly would.
Well, then let's go at it now. For us, cyanide is bad and deadly and we don't want it. But in the case of the six spot moth, it's actually they use it as a defense mechanism, so they like to get cyanide inside of them. Nursery web spiders go a man will go to a lady with some kind of of tasty morsel wrapped up in silk and then sprits some chemicals on it that they have to make
it even more alluring. And if the if the guy shows up, hey, I wrapped this larva in silk for you, and the lady goes nah, the guy will go back and wrap more silk and then come back and go what about now. Now here's the thing, though, sometimes these
guys are cheapskates. Sometimes the male nursery web spider will try to trick the lady by taking some kind of low quality prey or maybe even like they ate half of a larva and then they got full, and now there's this half eaten larva and they're like, I'll just wrap it in silk, and you know, see if I get this lady to take it. Because the here's what happens. Do you know what's in a gift before you unwrap it? No?
You do not. Generally you have to unwrap it first, and I would imagine wrapping something in silk makes it to fairly time consuming to open it up. So the guy shows up here, I forgot you this, and the lady spider is unwrapping it and the guy he just starts mating with her and she's distracted, and he'll finish his business and run off, and.
Then she gets it open.
And goes, gosh, this is just half an eating larva.
What a cad.
There was a study done on this, Yes, somebody funded a study to find out how often the male nursery web spider gave a crappy gift to a female as part of the mating ritual and said that as many as seventy percent of the gift's gift, even by the dude, are fake. So it must really. I mean, you think it's tough dating human guys, ladies, think of what it's like being one of these lady spiders. Then there's the animals that give the gift of themselves. For example, the
sagebrush cricket. They had a deal, the man and the lady. If you let me mate with you, you, the lady, can nibble on my wings, you can eat part of my body.
You can even suck some of my blood.
I mean, it's not blood, it's the insect equivalent of blood. It's called some science name like hemelythh or something hemolymph. I don't know, but yeah, you can be a little vampire on me for the privilege of mating with you, not to point out that it's really in both of their interests to mate at some point, because you gotta, you know, keep the species going.
So letting the lady nibble on you is one thing. But the male redback spider, this is what happens here. This is grim.
Hey, could we make some spider bait? Could I put some spider babies in you?
Yes? Yes, you could? All right, here we go.
And while that's happening, while they are pro creating, this spider will flip, like do a backflip into the lady's mouth so she can chew on his body while they're mating, and eventually she eats all of him. But look, here's the thing, you know, Apparently out in the wild, it's much like it is here in the human world, where, Oh boy, are you lucky if you're a guy and you're looking to procreate? Are you lucky if you get a lady to agree to? And so I guess they
don't mind. Also, it's another distraction in this regard. It's like, okay, I'm now in your mouth and you can eat me, which buys him some time to I don't mean I'm not trying to be gross. This is clinical to put more sperm inside of her, which means more offspring. The way it works, it doesn't work that way for humans, but apparently here it does. So it is ultimately about It's not about generosity.
It's about trying. And it's not even about like.
I'm a randy animal and I just I really need to do it and what do I have to do to get you to let me. It's it's really about we need to not die out. But y'all aren't making it so easy. God, you didn't make it super easy for us to keep from dying out.
So now it's tricks and gifts and fake food and.
Let me keep the species going, and I'll give up my life to do it. All right, that's heavy petting for a Tuesday. We'll probably do another one before the end of the week.
This is KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.