Ep 46: Fast Food Robots and Raising Capital

Nasir and Matt talk about fast food restaurants replacing employees with robots and answer the question, "I'm trying to raise some capital from investors. When they ask how I am going to use their investment, what should I say?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: Welcome to our business legal podcast where we cover business news and add our legal twist and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, sends in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. We really appreciate those questions. Those of you who have not sent any questions, you guys can stop listening because we don’t care about you guys. MATT: The people that don’t send in questions don’t have problems so maybe that’s a consideration as well. NASIR: I guess that’s true. Well, you can still listen. MATT: We don’t want to alienate people that don’t have questions that need to be answered – or at least I don’t; maybe you do. NASIR: I guess that’s fine. MATT: All right. Well, let’s get to what we have for this Monday episode. NASIR: Actually, this episode is coming on Tuesday, I think, because of the Memorial Day. Just a procedural clarification, for those listening. MATT: For people that have hacked into my computer and listened to the audio a day in advance. But, for those that haven’t, happy Tuesday! We kind of talked about this before, I think, with fast food workers and the protesting but I didn’t even know this was still going on but more fast food workers are protesting, want higher wages, blah blah blah. But this is getting to robots that are supposedly going to replace fast food workers. I thought this was pretty interesting. I don’t think there can ever be a situation where it’s going to be 100 percent replaced. I don’t even know if you can get to 25 percent. But it gets to an interesting point of efficiency in the workplace. If these robots can do things more efficiently than actual people, great for none of the problems. But it also gets to what jobs should people be doing for a fast food restaurant – task allocation. If someone can do these three things, can they do that? Great. If not, maybe we should have some sort of robot in place. NASIR: Yeah, it’s not a new issue because we’ve talked about how, in GM, when they started automating everything – or everything from the assembly line to now robots are building cars that are building self-driving cars which is robots building robots – and so, this is stuff that’s been going on for a while, but I think it’s different now that it’s in the fast food industry. But I’m just wondering if the argument to start replacing these guys with robots, are they going to have faces? Am I going to Panera Bread – by the way, Panera Bread is going to start doing this very soon with some kind of automated service – am I going to walk in and some robot with eyes and a mouth is going to talk to me and ask for my order? That’s going to be kind of weird. MATT: Well, you’re thinking of it from the perspective of actual robot people. NASIR: Yeah, it’s as if it’s Back to the Future made another movie and they would do this. It would look like that – some robot with someone asking for your order like they did in Back to the Future Part II. MATT: Well, keep in mind that a lot of tasks – well, not a lot but there’s a good amount of tasks – that still go on at restaurants today or a lot of different industries that are done by robots but more so like machines and equipment so I don’t think you’re necessarily going to walk in and have a robot person there. “Can I take your order?” NASIR: Taken from the employer’s perspective, it’s kind of hard to do it because you kind of have to take your heart out of the whole concept because these are actually real people that they’re replacing. But I suppose, if a robot can do the exact same thing, it’s cheaper. It’s just like before,

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