We Asked the Data Journalist Who Rebuilt the Jobs Report What the Headline Number Hides

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Matt Zeigler (0:52)

You're watching Excess Returns, a channel that makes complex investing ideas simple enough to actually use them for better questions, lead to better decisions. He's back on Excess Returns, Data 4 The People's own Eric Pachman. How are we doing, Eric?

Eric Pachman (1:05)

I'm great, Matt. Thank you for having me back.

Matt Zeigler (1:08)

I'm insisting on this. If you're watching, if you're checking out Eric's work at Data 4 The People, Data with the number 4, exciting development from last time.

You were talking about 501c3 conversion. You are now an officially sponsored 501c3 sponsored entity, something like that. Can I say the words right?

Eric Pachman (1:26)

Not exactly, but close enough.

Matt Zeigler (1:29)

Thanks, Compliance.

Eric Pachman (1:30)

We are.

Matt Zeigler (1:31)

Matt gets in trouble, episode 2000 Go ahead and say what it really is.

Eric Pachman (1:36)

No, I went through the entire process. You have to fill out what's called the Form 1023, and so I was doing that. And it's funny because I sent it to the lawyers and I used AI to do it. I wrote a lot of it, or at least the narrative, but Claude put it together. And so I sent everything to the lawyers and she was like, in 30 years of doing this job, I have never seen a more comprehensive and detailed, you know, Form 1023 submission, especially not before I did it. And I was like, ooh, the legal profession is wrong.

I'm coming for them.

Matt Zeigler (2:13)

When you're getting the compliments. Well, but what this means is, and why I wanted to flag it at the top, you can now make, so if you are going to his site, which we're going to walk through to the really cool tools, if you believe in journalism, and if you're looking for a charitable contribution to make, you can now support Data 4 The People in a charitable manner. Yeah.

Eric Pachman (2:33)

And the point of that story was that once I got to almost submitting it, I realized that the queue or the wait for the IRS is one year and counting.

And I was like, this isn't going to work. We don't bring in any revenue to data for the people. We survive on donations or philanthropy. And so I'm like, I got to figure out in a different way. And there's this entire industry called the Fiscal Sponsored Industry, where you have 501c3s that will use, they have legal counsel and everything, and they will vet your projects, Data 4 The People, to make sure it is charitable and educational. And then if they approve you and they bring you on board, they'll roll you underneath kind of their umbrella. And so our fiscal sponsor is called Fiscal Sponsorship Allies. Their EIN is on our website. And they're just amazing. They have an amazing back end and it makes all the accounting very easy.

And so yeah, when you go to the website, you are actually donating to Fiscal Sponsorship Allies for the Data 4 The People project. And the money just goes straight into our bank account with them. And then we can actually pay for stuff coming out of that, which is really all the tech stack at this point in time, given that we've evolved into a technology company. So.

Matt Zeigler (3:51)

Well, support journalism, support teaching, and what we're about to show you with some of these tools. I'm throwing us right into the deep end. You've been writing about jobs as long as we've been talking. And the data wants to tell me that we've got a good labor market here, and we had a good jobs report. I know you're going to tell me something slightly different.

Eric Pachman (4:10)

Well, yeah, you know what I think about this.

But let's just stay focused on the data, right? Because I've been writing lately, and I'm wrong on stuff. I go in with specific news, and I was like, whoops, data said something different. So unfortunately, it's not the case of the labor market, but I'll tell you right now. So first off, I think we have to understand where we came from. So all of this is based on surveys. So the CES, which is where the non-farm payroll data comes from, which was, yes, arguably quite strong last month.