Union Carbide

Well, I came from a, a larger company.

It was, uh, First Brands that were a spinoff of Union Carbide.

Union Carbide spun off their, uh, consumer products divisions.

Not to be confused with the First Brands that just went Chapter 11, like, three months ago.

Different company.

Uh, but so that was a Carbide spinoff.

It was very professional Very conservative.

And on, and New Balance was very entrepreneurial.

...

some GE, some Union Carbide.

Yeah, but you buy those blue chips, and through a legitimate broker.

Well, doesn't everybody?

It was the result of negligence and incompetence on the part of a pesticide manufacturing company and government officials.

It was in the early hours of the morning on December 3rd, 1984, that wind carried a gray cloud of poisonous gas from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.

Some 40 tons of the toxic gas methysos cyanide, or MIC, had been accidentally released from the plant, and it spread through the city, poisoning everything it touched.

To this day, there is disagreement about where and how the leak was sprung.

Local activists and government officials contend that routine pipe maintenance created a backflow of water which spilled into a tank of MIC.

But Union Carbide Corporation contends water entered the tank after an act of sabotage.

Whoever was ultimately responsible, the result was a nightmare without end.

Over 10,000 people were estimated to have died outright.

And his legwork was legendary.

He did 200 visits a year, took Union Carbide executives to lunch, and he said there are actually fewer liars on Wall Street than on Main Street.

Which sounds counterintuitive, but corporate executives are terrified of the SEC.

If a CEO invents fake revenue, they go to federal prison.

Oh, this is a great comparison.

In the case of Publicer Industries versus Union Carbide, Union Carbide was bound by a fixed price contract to supply ethanol.

Right.

The Middle East oil embargo hits, and the market price of the petroleum-based raw materials Union Carbide needs completely skyrockets.

Their costs essentially double.

A one hundred percent increase in raw material costs.

Precisely.

That prior action provided the market with fair warning that sudden massive price increases orchestrated by foreign cartels were a distinct historical possibility.

My dad was a pretty heavy smoker as a kid, so I thought it might have been secondhand smoke.

We lived in West Virginia along this polluted river of FMC and Union Carbide, so I thought it might be some kind of playback from running along the Kanawha River in Charleston, West Virginia, for five years.

But yeah, it ended up being melanoma.

And again, the miraculous thing was that, now people are probably watching this and listening to this and saying, "Well, didn't you have some spots on your skin?" Because everyone thinks of melanoma, these big ugly spots that show up on your forehead or your ear or body.

So you are deep in the electronic component side of the world of electronics.

Actually, we started as a, the electronics division of Union Carbide, then we spun off and became Kemet, and then in, uh, 2020 we were acquired by YAGEO.

It's been a good and exciting journey.

Well, and I, I think it's also important to note with respect to you that you were originally by training, I think, a chemist, and then later on you've got-