Chapo Trap House - 596 - Take this job…and Love It! (1/24/22)

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Our roundtable of experts debate the possibility of intervention in the Russia/Ukraine tensions and come to the conclusion a global nuclear exchange would probably suck, at least for the Podcast Industry. We then take a look at a trio of pieces examining the national crisis in hiring and firing. Does Nobody Want to Work Anymore or is it just that Work Sucks, I Know? We get to the bottom of how you’ll probably end up a serf (but without the benefits) regardless.

Greetings, friends. It's Monday, January 24th, 2022. And at the top of my head, at the top of this week, at the top of this episode is one top question. Will the United States start World War III with Russia over the Ukraine? Matt Christman, go. Absolutely. And their hands have been forced. We cannot allow a sweatsuit gap. No, wait a minute, not a sweatsuit. That's the wrong thing. A track-suit gap. A track-suit gap. Shit, never mind. Okay, so World War III not happening? No, it's definitely happening. We have to. We have to protect the Ukraine. We have to protect our sphere of influence.

Our sphere, our orb of influence needs to be... Our globe of influence. It cannot be penetrated by the dastardly, the hordes of Putin. Not going to happen. Felix. I mean, look, it's inevitable. This is a clash of ideologies. There have been never two governments, two states that are more different than Ukraine and Russia. There have never, never, ever has more been at stake. You know, one is a sort of shitty, hollowed-out kleptocracy where everyone gets malaria from sprite every few months. The other is the other one of those countries. And if one takes over the other, well, what's the point of

anything, really? There's a new phrase that has entered the American lexicon, and I've never heard it before, but they describe that they are sending a shipment of, quote, lethal aid to Ukraine. I swear to God, I've never heard this phrase before, but I looked up the phrase, lethal aid, and there are 30 news stories that just without any context or whatever has now adopted the phrase, lethal aid. That's a thing that means... That's our new word for arms shipments. Yeah. For sending... I mean, it used to just be called military aid.

Yeah. But I suppose that they need to, I don't know, solve them a little bit. I guess. And that's after Trump sent them fail aides. I heard it with Yemen that we were giving lethal aid to the Saudis. Yeah. Like, not like eight years ago now, eight or nine years ago. And if you look at how that went, it helped a ton. I mean, they're doing great. They've gained negative 20 centimeters.

But you can't argue that it wasn't lethal. It was definitely lethal. A lot of people are dead now because of it. So fingers crossed, we can make that happen in Ukraine. Yeah, this is just the NBC News. It says here, the first shipment of, quote, lethal aid to Ukraine has touched down in Kiev, the country's U.S. embassy said Saturday, less than 24 hours after Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart. The shipment demonstrates U.S. commitment to helping Ukraine bolster its defenses in the face of growing

Russian aggression, the embassy said in a tweet. The shipment included close to 200,000 pounds of lethal aid, including ammunition for the frontline defenders of Ukraine. I mean, like, they just showed up with the shipping containers full of just thousands and thousands of pounds of, I don't know, what was another phrase we could use here? I don't know. Just the, not death, kinetic situation enhancers. Something like that. Gaddafi did a similar thing with the IRA and Belfast in the 70s. He sent also a shipping container of lethal aid and it helped them out.

It did. Everyone's got that oomph that they give lethal aid to. I haven't really been paying too much attention to the World War three starting, but what is the aggression that Russia's doing? Is it like just they keep bringing troops to the border and just kind of like psyching them out, like going boo and then going away? I think it's like Joe Biden, he sort of like, he walked it back, but he said that like a limited incursion by Russia into Ukraine wouldn't necessarily lead to a U.S. military response and then everyone freaked out over that and he sort of walked it back. But, you know, I think it's like, I don't know, they're going to theoretically, I think, see some territory

in Ukraine that they regard as theirs to begin with. I'm not sure, but it seems very hard. It seems hard to imagine that this United States military would really do a full response to Russia entering, or at least they're like, okay, like Ukraine is a sovereign nation and Russia is threatening them and that they like, you know, invade a sovereign nation in defiance of like the global community that then America would have to back that up. But like, who the fuck are we to tell someone not to do that? Yeah, that's really all we do. What the fuck?

Yeah. You're forgetting about the sphere. Yeah. It's part of our sphere. Even though after the fall of Berlin Wall, the U.S. promised that NATO would not move one inch to the east from where it was. And since then, all of the Baltic countries have been added to NATO. They've been threatening to add countries like Ukraine and Georgia to NATO, which is genuinely insane that this thing that was supposed to check the aggression of the Soviet Union even continued to exist after the end

of the Soviet Union, let alone expand, which it's been doing ever since. Yeah. No, like we made sure, like Americans literally made sure that Russia would never, would never, its power would never be greater than that of like California's ever again, the way that Americans hollowed it out and they made NATO bigger. Yeah. Why? Why? Yeah.

A thing that would be theoretically on the table if anyone was actually interested in seeking a diplomatic negotiated end to the tensions that have escalated between Ukraine and Russia. One thing that could be like a concession that is part of any sincere negotiation would be America just stating for the record that Ukraine is never going to be part of the NATO. No NATO membership for Ukraine. It's like a pledge. That would be a good step forward. That would be a good faith effort.

Yeah. I mean, and then if they continue to, I don't know, do what they're doing, then I don't know, whatever. I mean, that was, you know, why I have every election, I'm strong for the Buffalo Bills of France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, because okay, if he got in and he was like, we're leaving NATO, I think it would be like when someone leaves a party and people are like, oh yeah, no, I actually have to go too. Yeah.

And then it's literally just, it's just Latvia. NATO is just Latvia within three months. That would be good for everybody, honestly. Yeah. I mean, we got to wrap this thing up. Come on, folks. What are we doing here? Brandon's president. He's flicking the lights on to tell you to get the fuck out of his living room. Yeah.

Hey man, it's last call. You got to be anywhere, but you got to go home. You can't stay here. You don't have to, you don't have to be where your home is. You can't be here. Joe Brandon's going to Irish goodbye, NATO. Yeah. Well, I mean, not much to say, but I haven't paid too much attention to it because I'm just like, this is not going to happen. We're not going to start World War Three with Russia. At least that's maybe that's a wishful thinking on my part. I fucking hope not. I mean, people talk about some sort of conflict with China and that's very difficult to conceive

of just because of how inextricably linked our economies are. But Russia, we could maybe scrap with them. Possibility is just a way to focus the national project on literally anything else other than the just gaping hole at the center of the American national project that is otherwise all we can really contemplate. What are we all doing politically in America other than just coming to our own realizations of the fundamental incapacity of the state and its inability to promise to deliver on any kind of promise of the country we thought we lived in. And in a time like that, the only real thing to do is to focus on an external enemy and maybe, and the Russians worked for a while. Maybe they can work again,

although it doesn't seem, I don't know, it doesn't seem like anybody's got their heart to it. No, no one really seems to give a shit. And I could even, I sort of see Biden doing some Reagan cosplay. Okay. The airport disaster in Afghanistan, the MI6 totally did not do. We would stand, we will commit to that. They didn't do anything. They would never do anything like that ever. Okay. That's the truck bombing in Beirut. Confrontate like just to, you know, woofin' on the net at Russia. That's Reagan stuff. Nothing's going to happen because they're really, I look, I'm going to be honest with you, I've not read a single article about

this. I don't care. I don't care. I'm going to be so fucking mad if there's a nuclear volley over this because I haven't read a word. I've committed to paying no, paying no mind to that entire part of the world. I don't care if your country uses Cyrillic. I don't know anything about it, nor will I ever know. I'm not into it. It's your guys's business. It's one Catholic and one's like the Eastern Orthodox. Wow. Sounds like you guys have a lot to talk about. I don't know what you're fighting over. For all I know, for all I know, you could be fighting over the only discovery zone in Eastern Europe. I think you should both use it. I don't want anyone to die. But maybe Biden will do the

Reagan, the Reagan Bush classic and be like, oh yeah, no, trust and believe. We know where you work now. We're coming back. And then nothing happens. And then like a year later, it's like, oh, there's actually all the fentanyl is being made in Costa Rica. We're going to invade. Yeah, find some like a smaller project to focus on instead of biting off more than we can chew. I mean, I got to say though, for the record, though, I will be, I'll be so pissed off if there's a nuclear exchange between America and Russia. Yeah. I'll be super pissed. And I mean, like, and you know, you will be too because no more show. No more a shop or

shop house podcast. Yeah. Which is the real tragedy if this sort of go down, obviously. Watch us be one of the 5% of Americans who survive and also somehow all our listeners. Yeah. And it's like, well, what's in the news? We're just like trying to find we're trying to find the shittiest of the 295 million obituaries. Instead of reading series, it's just like fucking like just like names of people scrawled on a wall. I'm just like just reading those. So I some more new articles. I got I got nothing today here. Just the irradiated dog packs have gotten larger. I mean, don't you guys sick of that? Slow mutants are moving into quadrant four. Oh my God. My new landlords and skin walkers. Yeah. Fingers crossed that

doesn't happen though. I mean, but honestly, it would be pissed. Pissed. Certainly we'd all be pissed, but also pretty hilarious. Can't argue with that. It's like, oh, Russia and the United States spend 50 years in a nuclear standoff. It's it's ends because of the defeat of one of the states. And then there's a new world order. And then 30 years later, they blow each other up over some fucking pipelines in a potato field in Ukraine. The shittiest version of both states. Yeah. Like Russia without the Soviet Union. No, no real like ethos like communism or anything like that. No project. The most like diminished in America that's repeatedly like not just like blown the free throws, but like our pants have fallen

down at the free throw lines for like 20 years straight. Yeah. Both the worst versions of both. Exactly. Because like if they if we've gone to if we've gone to nuclear war at the height of the Cold War, that would have been two countries at their apogee is like coherent, like ideologically motivated states with with a population that had some investment in the project that they were part of. And yeah, we could all gone together in nuclear fire. And instead, we just got to spend 30 years having every belief just stripped from life. Every everything that we thought mattered revealed to be just a con artist. And then we get to blow up. We don't even get to just, you know, live and wallow in our fail aides. We get

to get nuked then for nothing, for fucking nothing. I feel like it's going to happen now that we put it this way. I mean, funniest outcome, right? That's usually been that's how we I remember when we were all still convinced that Bernie was going to win. It was the first person to really elucidate the dark reality coming towards us was Felix. We're saying, what's the funniest outcome here? And it's Biden winning from that huge pack of people this like a senile mummy just rolling to the nomination without even knowing where it was. And then boom, that happened. Okay. Well, what if, you know, a lot of people were saying like Biden's going to get the nomination and lose. And I was saying since

like 2018, no, he's like going to win. Yeah. He's like the epic old man America wants. What if, what if we like launch the ICBMs at each other, like these nukes that travel like 9,000 miles and they just don't work? That's like, we've done all this shit and they just don't work because it's like every other shitty piece of like contracted work. They just, they like land and there's like a little explosion and it kills like 20 people. They're filled with Legos. It's just like, you're like, you put the keys in, the two keys, they nod at each other. They turn them at the same time, but then the piece of proprietary software that they bought from a third party, they haven't paid to update it. So it's just

like, sorry, up, updating, updating, downloading, downloading. Yeah. No, that's what it, like in Russia, they're using like Bonsie Buddy to launch it and in America where we sort of somehow are a missile launch system, like NORAD is now on Squarespace and it's like, it's just down for maintenance. Neither work. It's Vimeo and they're extorting the US government. They're like, you have to pay a thousand dollars a month to keep your account active or we're deleting all the strike codes. Yeah. They're trying to wake Biden up to authorize him to use like America's credit card on Vimeo. They're like, God damn it. Like what the fuck? They're like, the missiles are in the air, sir. I need you to collect, click every one

of these things that has a stoplight in it. No, it's a parking meter. And then the nukes land and they just don't do anything. We've just like, we just assume they work and like we did nuclear testing, but first, like those were just in the best possible conditions, but it turns out when you launch them at another country, they just don't, they're broken. It rained on the way over there and it completely fucked up the cast, the chassis. It just, it lands on a guy's house and that's it. That's just, you know, he doesn't even get like, he doesn't even get radiation poisoning. Like someone stole the uranium from it. Well, well, let's just say, fingers crossed, hope it doesn't happen. Yeah. But you mentioned

earlier that if, if like, for instance, if France, if, if Mel and Sean got in France and decided that France was going to leave NATO, it would start a cascade effect of like when someone, when, when, when one cool person leaves the party, everyone looks around and like it, we're among the only cool people left here. I think it's time to go. So that phenomenon, applicable to NATO, perhaps, but here's another thing that I'm the next article I'm going to talk about that describes this great phenomenon. It also applies to jobs. Now there, there's a, there's a bunch of different news articles about this and I'd like to go into it and we've talked about it many times on this show, but once again,

I will simply say, nobody wants to work anymore. Nobody wants to work really sad. Nobody wants to work anymore. And I think the New York Times has, they've finally, you know, behind the curve as usual, they're talking about the no one wants to work anymore phenomenon. However, their headline is you quit, I quit, we all quit and it's not a coincidence. Why the decision to leave a job can become contagious. And so yeah, there is a, there is a, a COVID problem, still, still a problem, still around bigger problem, the virus of people leaving their job. Yeah.

So how are we going to deal with this? So this is by Emma Goldberg in the New York Times. It begins like this, something infectious is spreading through the workforce. Its symptoms present in a spate of two week notices. Its transmission is visible in real time and few bosses seem to know how to inoculate their staff against this, against this quit tajan. There's just, there's no way to stop people from quitting. It's just like no one knows. It catches. What can you do? It catches quickly. There's a shock when you see multiple people leaving. It's like,

oh, is there something I'm not seeing? Said Tiff Chang, 27, who left her job in digital marketing in July, along with five of her close friends and at the 40 person agency. Is it my time to leave as well? Quitting rates were high in August, September and October. And according to Labor Department data, they climbed even further. More than 4.5 million people left their jobs voluntarily in November, a record high in two decades of tracking. Bam. Economists explain that the numbers, explain the numbers by noting that competition for workers led to better pay and benefits, driving some to seek out new opportunities. Psychologists

have an additional explanation. Quitting is contagious. I'm really sick of psychologists talking to the news. They just, they never fucking add to anything. No. Employers are going to have to start contact tracing employees who have come down with the sickness. And then, you know, like, you know, like, like rabies, they say they need to be destroyed. They need to be put down immediately.

They need to be put down immediately. No quarantine, no contagion. So what did the psychologist, is it just like, oh, it's, everyone wants to do it when they see one person. Do they mention that it's like, oh, they're not being paid enough? Yeah. Or they're noticing their job sucks? Is, I'm really done with psychologists. I've joined a new religion while I've been out here. Yeah. They have some very interesting to say about psychology and its effects on people. Yeah. I don't agree with them on all the other stuff. I believe in an entirely different

alien mythos than they do. But the shit they're saying about psychiatrists and shit, they're like, you joined the church of Scientology and you're like, okay, I agree with the auditing. I agree with all the blackmail. I definitely agree with about the psychiatry and industry of death. But I believe in Halo. Yeah, exactly. Not Zeno. Not Zeno out of here. I believe in the forum runners, the covenant.

Exactly. All that shit happened. It all happened. And like no one, the thing about Halo is they accounted for people being like, oh, well, why aren't there artifacts? Because we lost the humanity, we lost to the precursor so bad that they're like, we're going to make you cavemen again. And you're not going to remember when you had spaceships. I think that's actually pretty close to what is in Dianetics or the Zeno prophecy. Well, in the Zeno deal, they brought a bunch of aliens to Earth and killed them. First, they showed them a bunch of scary videos, and then they nuked them all in volcanoes. And then their ghosts inhabited humans.

They made all the aliens watch House of Sand and Fog. Yeah. They're like, this is a really tense movie where two people treat each other terribly. And the aliens were like, no, they've never seen a tense adult drama. Going on to the article, it says, so quitting begets more quitting, a challenge that employers can't always solve with raises or perks. Even a single resignation notice can breed a hotspot, said Will Phelps, who teaches management at the University of New South Wales and was an author of a study on turnover contagion.

If you teach management, you are like, that is less honorable than professionally getting hit by cars for a living. Absolutely. Yeah. If you teach management, your job might as well be like, I go to big box stores and fall down. The office has long been a petri dish for infectious behavior. Lying, cheating, and job satisfaction all tend to spread from desk to desk. Financial advisors, for example, are 37% more likely to commit misconduct if they encounter teammates who have done so. What researchers refer to

as peer effects, noting that one case of misconduct results on average in an additional 0.59 cases. Employees also mimic the nutritional patterns of people they sit with in the cafeteria. These are suggestible to one another in far subtler ways than they realize. The contagion spreads in the office. People talking to each other. People noticing what's going on or just being around other people. Go all remote. Keep everyone separate. Keep them in the pod. Just keep them looking at Zoom and on Slack, and then the contagion will not spread. You'd think so, but it seems like they really don't want that either. It's weird. What do

you want people want? You don't want people in an office so that you can keep the real estate justification, explain why you're paying those fucking leases, but you don't want them hanging together. I guess you have to create bulletproof plexiglass cubes for everybody with no ability to hear outside of them. I've been trying to figure out why this is such an anti-work from home company before COVID or work from home country. Everyone, if you couldn't do your job anywhere but the office, then people's bosses wouldn't fucking bother them as much as they do when they know they're home. I guess it's just like, that's probably management psychology. You just want

to beat people down more. You want them to spend less time with their kids and their family and doing things they like to make it so the only thing that they get any positive brain chemistry from is doing the widgets correctly. Go around here. Here's some of these strategies that they're going to. They're going to deal with this phenomenon. It says, for employers, replacing just one quitter is a straight forward class. I love that they use the word quitter. You're a quitter. Yeah. Why don't you just stick with something for once? You're quitting. You're letting everyone down, but replacing several or even dozens is far more challenging and the interim periods tends to leave existing

staff with a heavier load while recruiters field awkward questions about what's fueling all the departures. With quitting rates soaring, some executives are wondering how to lift morale. There we go. That's okay. There we go. Seth Besmurtnick, chief executive of the marketing software company Conductor, had seen his company's turnover rates hover in the low single digits for years. He even worried that his retention was too strong, making it hard to scout new talent. Over the

last two years, though, turnover rose into the double digits. Mr. Besmurtnick had to get creative in his tactics to keep workers content, including adding new holidays and bringing Broadway actors from Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen to sing burn and waving through a window for staff during all company video meetings. People keep quitting. I don't understand. The Hamilton will continue until morale improves. I mean, in 2020, we had all families zoom Thanksgiving, and I almost quit the family. That was without singing. Career coaches, meanwhile, worry that some people are being too easily influenced by

the behaviors of their roaming colleagues. Catherine Minshew, chief executive of the Muse, a job search site, warns clients that a single employee's desire to leave a company shouldn't have too much bearing on the decisions that friends make. When one person announces their resignation, there are usually some questions from their colleagues and workplace friends. She said, where are you going? Why are you leaving? That Piper Trail won't always lead people to better options. Ms. Minshew advises workers to assist their companies with the hyper-individualized approach that they might take to building relationships. The idea that someone would publish a list of the 50 best people to marry

in New York City is silly, she continued. Similarly, I think the best companies to work for is a bit of a silly idea. That is a silly idea. All companies suck to work for. That's true. They're bad. This is a good idea. For employers, they should do their own version of the shitty media men list or the West End Caleb saga or bad men. Don't do it. They love bomb. They ghost. The worst employee list. These are people who talk to their coworkers about their salary, who complain, who take sick bays. They should have a list of people who leave jobs. A black list.

A black list. That has existed all throughout a number of industries. Usually, it's people who try to start unions, but now it can be just people who express even mild dissatisfaction with their jobs or have too many mini-muffins in the pantry or whatever. You're killing the morale. You're taking all the mini-muffins. Everyone's going to quit now. This is a logical career advice. Can't always prevent the contagion from catching. There's a little bit of a take this job and shove it feeling, Ms. Wells said. If you're in a company where all the people start leaving, you're like, why am I the last one sitting

here? That's the end of the article. I'm just going to, like, word search this article for the word wage. Wages. That's zero out of zero. I'm just going to put, look, salary. That's zero out of zero. I'm just going to Google. I'm just going to word search money. No. But this is a waste of time. None of those words appear even once in this article. Why should it? The whole thesis here is that quitting is essentially like herpes. And once somebody has it, they'll never lose it. And they're going to spread it to their coworkers.

And there's apparently no cure. Okay. The phrase, noting that competition for workers led to better pay and benefits rather than others to seek out new opportunities. That's the only mention of better paying benefits. But in this context, benefits also means you can see a cast member from Dear Evan Hansen sitting, looking through a window to you over a zoom. I got to say, if it was, if it's the guy, cause I never, obviously, I had no idea what the fuck that was before the movie came out. I knew it was a play, but that's all I knew. And then I saw the commercials for the movie and the horrifying demonic man who plays the

high schooler. His face was so unnerving that if I saw it on my zoom, I would have to quit immediately. Oh, is that the one where it's about like a boy who, he commits suicide and some other boy like assumes his identity, but the, yeah, the guy who plays him is like 48. He's a 48 year old whose dad produced the play or produced the film rather. It's pretty funny. Yeah. It's something like that. It's some fucking talented Mr. Ripley stuff with music. And I don't want it. I don't want to see that on my zoom calls. Cause you're like, I would see ads for it on TV all the time. It's like the musical

of the year. And then I was absolutely astonished when I found out it's not about AIDS. It did have that vibe. Yeah. We should bring back musicals about that. I mean, I know it's like, you know, prep has been great for everyone. It's not the 80s anymore, but like, you know, they made like four, five, six great musicals about it. That's true. You got rent, angels in America, all the other ones.

Yeah. That's half of them. That's half of six. Oklahoma. Yeah. There's a disease in Les Miserables. We're there. We're there. That's like five. Okay. So that's from one perspective on this issue. The next article is from Slate. And this is sort of like, this is here. The headline is companies are desperate for workers. Why aren't they doing the one thing that will attract them? Hamilton. Yeah. And it goes, if you believe reports from employers, they're desperate to find good workers but

can't lure them at any price. Talk to job seekers, though, or existing employees at those same companies and you'll hear a different story. So this is the other perspective to the quittagent about what's going on here. From job seekers' perspectives, companies do have plenty of vacancies, but they haven't adjusted to the massive sea change the job market has undergone in the past two years. They're offering laughably low salaries, although candidates can command far more, or requiring years of experience for entry-level jobs, and they're still operating on a model of underpaying and overworking at a time when workers have much better options. These accounts

are pretty typical of what I'm hearing from job seekers as well as from employees at companies that say they're having trouble hiring. So here's a bunch of like, these are first-hand accounts here. So let's just, a few examples of what's going on. I don't know, man. I'm still thinking it's psychology. Yeah. It's the classic psychology doing it. So the first one here says, I've lost count of the job ads I've seen that won five to eight years of experience in a fairly unique field, but are only paying $17 to $18 an hour

in a high cost of living areas and where the job is in-person. I imagine the employers think that this is a good pay rate, but it really is insulting. It's not very good. It's lower than the minimum wage would be if it had risen at the rate it had until the mid-60s. It's that anything lower than like, I think 22 or something like that is lower than what a properly adjusted minimum wage would be. So yes, that is a shitty fucking wage. Imagine adjusted for inflation and cost of living and just productivity over the last 40 years.

If you do productivity, it's like, get out of here. $17 to $18 an hour is you're making minimum wage and are required to demonstrate five to eight years of experience in the field that you were applying for. Next one here is, my employer is absolutely desperate for another key staff member, but doesn't want to give any more than a week vacation. Won't budge at all. It's incredibly short-sighted. A week vacation. A week for a whole year. A week off.

A week vacation, man. This really is the no-fun country. It's insane. It's insane. You were talking earlier about if France leaves NATO, France is like, for all this shit they get from Americans, they're like, oh, she's eating surrender monkeys. We are such pussies compared to the French. Absolutely. They get any job in the French economy if an employer was just like, yeah, you have

to take like, in one weekend in August, could you come into the office? Every car in Paris would be on fire. We will come to your house and drop kick you through your fucking front window if you tell us that we have to come in for an extra half an hour a month. If somebody in France proposed boss's day, they would be flayed alive. Next one. I recently went through a job search and it was interesting. I received an offer from every interview. One actually called while I was on the way home. What some employers were offering is still laughable though. One healthcare agency that involved direct contact

with medically vulnerable patients boasted in the interview that they encouraged taking time off and promoting a healthy work life balance. Their PTO benefits were seven days off a year, which included both vacation and sick time with no COVID related sick time allowance. Awesome. Unbelievable. Last I saw, they still had the job ad up marked as urgently hiring. Not that urgent. Psychology at work once again. The psychology of not wanting to work every fucking day in

a COVID hole. Yeah. I mean, it seems to be pretty obvious. There are things they could do to fill these. It was like offer more than a week of vacation and don't pay minimum wage. Yeah. Okay. Next one. In my industry, biotech specifically cell therapy, I keep hearing and seeing that there is a desperate need for trained employees. I know that in my department, we've been trying to hire some specialized positions forever and at least some interviews have happened. But the interviewees turned down jobs because we're not paying anything like what our closest

job type and physically competitor is paying. Since everyone in our department knows this, no one I've talked to seems to know why we aren't offering market rate. Because there's a guy in Connecticut in a swimming pool full of doubloons and he doesn't want to get rid of them. Next one. We are hemorrhaging talent, both salaried and production, factory workers, and can't find and hire qualified applicants who will work for what previous employees are making. We're going months without filling positions, mostly because our HR VP believes that we're

all overpaid. The market believes otherwise. I wonder who will win. Well, surely the market, right? The market forces, I mean, this is just a rational way of determining the value of some of this labor. It really is like a wrestling match, labor and capital wrestling out in the squared circle of the free market. Then there's the ref who occasionally will just take out a folding share and hit labor in the head. Goes on here. At the same time that companies are failing to offer competitive salaries, many of them are overstuffing the job descriptions well beyond what's realistic. This is the

next one. My organization is, quote, struggling to fill a role, complaining about how they can't find anyone qualified. When they do find someone somewhat qualified, they get turned down. Well, no kidding. The position is a combination of two very different jobs. Good luck to find someone with several years of commercial land transaction experience and a volunteer management experience. You want to pay this experienced person who has to do two very different jobs and report to two different supervisors, peanuts. No wonder they've been trying to hire this position since July.

This is like the job descriptions that these first-hand accounts seem to be more like the white-collar version of those things that are posted on the doors and windows of restaurants now that are literally saying, sorry for the lack of service, but no one wants to work anymore, not even at $15 an hour. It's like, have you tried 20 jackass? Have you tried 25? Have you tried 30? Because the market has spoken. Well, we'll see how long that lasts. My guess is that this all ends with an interest rate whip crack that gets all these hogs back in the line and basically it would enforce recession. Yeah, they're doing this summoning circle for Volcker lately, I can tell.

Next one. In my field, I'm seeing a ton of postings for jobs over the last month or so, and I've had multiple recruiters contact me just this week. But the job descriptions are wildly demanding, even more so than pre-pandemic. So many very specific skills that you'd be very likely to find in one person. I had a client rant to me recently about how they weren't getting good candidates for their positions. I suggested that they consider focusing the job description a bit more on the skills they most want. And he got really defensive and just said again how much they needed all the work done. Then you have to pay for it. There is just an utter disbelief that they no longer hold 100% of the cards.

No, it's just not computing. Their brains, because the algorithm does not factor in any kind of worker autonomy. And so, yeah, they're not going to change it, that's for sure. Not of their own volition. The employer mindset here, whether it's someone who was working like a service job or a more white collar email job, marketing consulting, like you should like that. It just seems to me that whether it's a wage or a salary, employers just think that giving someone a job is a favor to them. Oh, yeah. If you have a job, you should just be great. Hiring someone is a huge favor. And then

turning down that favor is like spitting in their face or whatever. One of my favorite moments from the 2016 campaign is somebody asked Trump when he was in the middle of doing his insane Bobby Heenan-like trolling of dead troop families. And somebody interviewed him and like, you know, the Khan family has pointed out that their family sacrificed for this country. What sacrifices have you had? And he goes, I employ thousands of people. I give them money and I give them a health care. It's like he literally imagines his job of extracting surplus value from people as a genuine sacrifice of his own money that he would have otherwise as if they're doing the job. Isn't the reason he has the money

to give them in the first place. And yes, that is exactly how they all think. Okay. Okay. Sharks. Here's my idea. Labor costs to join up. Employees, they're getting uppity. They're getting saucy. They're getting saucy. They act like, you know, they're taking more and more of my hard-earned money away from me. It's not good. They're getting all kinds of psychology. Sharks, what if I could tell you for a relatively smaller investment in food and housing, you

could have employees that would literally can't leave. Sharks, it's called slavery. Okay. Now we're talking about it. You literally own your employees. They have to work for you. They're your property. It's like you own your factory equipment. You own the office space. What if you own the people in the office as well? I would never have to hire the cast of Hamilton to send for that. I could save that money and have them come just to my house. I bet if there was modern white-collar slavery, employers would still do Zoom calls with Hamilton

and dear oven heads. They absolutely would. Look, I'm the good employee owner. I'm the good slave owner. You know, like bad employee owners. They never have Zoom calls with dear oven heads. Not at all. You should be thankful that you're working at night. I feed them nutrient bowls. Some people just feed them slob. Some feed them bad, unnutritious

food. Here, we get sweet green every fucking Friday. You go across the street. They have a hamster feeder of soylent in the middle of the office, and that's all you get. I think you're right that this will end with just like Volcker time, but if it doesn't, I could see in every state that we are about to go on tour in that they're going to pass a law that says that you can just impress prison, not even like people who are in state prison, like people who are like in jail. You can make them work at your company.

Yeah. The old anti, the South had after the Civil War, anti vagrancy and loitering laws where if you were just walking down the street and you didn't have anywhere to go, it's like, all right, you're building this fence now. That's what you're doing. They actually trick thousands of people to painting fences because one kid told them it was super fun. Maybe that's maybe that's what they should do. Hire a few key influencers start be like work is dope. You start doing tiktoks about how much fun they have like filling out expense reports. You're dead ass. I'm I'm I'm merchant on all the boys. Pain is fanciest fire.

It goes here. The resistance to adapting to new conditions seems to lie at the heart of what's happening in the market. Employees, employers are still operating like they did a decade ago without considering how they might need to change to raise offers, increase benefits and generally make themselves a more attractive place to work. They're also not approaching their hiring process with the seriousness or urgency that this market demands. As this person pointed out, what I'm hearing about the job market doesn't match with what I'm actually seeing. I'm hearing we'd hire anyone with a pulse and a half of your experience. I'm hearing please apply. I could use someone like you. I'm hearing you're a great fit

for this role from the recruiter. What I'm seeing is I apply into a black hole. I'm being told to reach out to people who never get back to me. I'm seeing desperate companies take a lot of time to think about it. I'm seeing people get to the final round of interviews and suddenly be disqualified for something that, according to the company, should have disqualified them when they first spoke to the recruiter. Seriously, a friend went to a final interview after getting extremely good feedback from his internal recruiter on every prior step and what I think was a four part interview. Okay, I'm just going to pause here. Oh my fucking God. If you have to interview for a job more than twice, they should pay

you for the third time. Yeah, absolutely. That's a lot of time. Just like a stipend or whatever. Just like a $50 in cash. Just something. A four part interview. Jesus Christ. Only to be told that the company was looking for entirely different skills for the role. Think interviewing in French and then being told the job requires Japanese. You'd think they'd have figured that out much sooner in the process. It sounds like the human resources departments don't want to work anymore. Yeah, exactly. No, that's the thing. Like all middle management, they're all stupid. They're all fucking stupid. They're all stupid because like they've been, I mean, being an employer post NAFTA really, really post the entire

1980s, but especially post NAFTA is like you're playing T-ball. Yeah. And now you're just playing softball. They're still throwing it underhand. It's like, wait a minute. What? It's moving? Yeah. You told me this would happen. And they're just not, they're not up for it. They're really not up for anything. You get brushed off the plate with an underhand softball pitch and you're like, oh, I've got brain damage. Yeah, no. I mean, like, it's funny, like, especially in like service jobs, like the Heligarff saying earlier, the flyer is that like, sorry, sorry, sorry that the jalapeno poppers aren't on the menu, but no one wants to work anymore. There is nobody on the planet who hates working and wants

money for free more than restaurant owners and people in HR departments, more than anyone who like our employers. Yeah. They hate working. Yeah. They really don't like it. Yeah. And they want, what do they want? They want all the money, all the fucking money possible for doing as little as possible, which is, you know, I mean, like that's, that's what everyone wants. Right. They feel entitled to it. It's almost like there's an adversarial relationship between employers and employees. You know, the, the idea of like, yeah, the president dies after one six year term. Yeah. Executed in public. Yeah. Well, yeah, we should obviously be doing that. No question. We should also do that for restaurant owners.

Like how bad do you want to have a restaurant? If you really love having a restaurant, you're going to do this. Yeah, that's true. You're going to, you're going to only get the most passionate, dedicated to restaurant tours. Yeah. It's like you get, you get 20 years because it's, you know, it's less power than the president. So you get 20 years to run a restaurant. You get to be in charge. Everyone kisses your ass. And then they, your employees shoot you behind the dumps. We get the, I was thinking it's like if you, if you run a restaurant and it doesn't turn a profit in five years, you're killed. Yeah.

John Tapper shows up with the fucking the compressed air slaughterhouse thing from this. Hey, you got a hold still. I'm killing people here. No, I feel like a lot of like really like stupid, tyrannical people. Like we've all seen this. I'm one of the only people who's brave enough to call it out, but there are way too many restaurants in America. There's like 10 restaurants per person. It's so fucked up. There's a lot of restaurants. And the people who run them, like they, they, I guess they don't notice that there's literally their house is in between 50 restaurants. Their entire block is just their house and

then restaurants. And when they don't make money, they're like, Oh, I have to just not pay my employees. Yeah. I have to just keep them locked in a basement. Yeah. And they're always, and they're, yeah, they're always the guys who are bitching about like the no one wants to work stuff. So if it was like, okay, if you're running a restaurant and you just, you can't do it, boom, the way, the way that they used to do executions in a sort of later periods of a union where it just, when it's your time, it's your time. They send you into the showers and just shoot you in the back of the head.

Yeah. Yeah. With a little drain, a little downward sloping drain in the middle of the floor to catch the blood. Just the final thing it says, to be fair, some employers do seem to be doing everything they can, but are still running up against the realities of a jobseekers market. My company is in the software sector and finding experienced developers, programs, programmers and implementation folks in our specific, very competitive ecosystem is really hard. We're fully remote with fully supported IT, pay competitively, really, pay at least 80% of medical insurance premiums

and have other really very nice benefits, have amazing work-life balance, require folks to take their vacations and a very supportive, transparent, employee-centric culture. We've had folks accept our offer, then renege two to four days later. We've had someone start working and after two weeks quit because they accepted another offer. Our specific job market has always been competitive. It is now insanely competitive. Ultimately, though, too many companies have become used to not having to pay competitive wages, offer attractive benefits, or generally treat people well. Now that that's changed, some of them are finding it easier to complain about the labor market than to figure about

how to make themselves a place people would be here to work even when they have other options. It's unclear how long this moment will last, not too much longer, because, yeah, I mean, I'm just getting to the end of this piece here. It's like, yeah, I feel like you're right. Do you think the people who run the economy and own everything in this country are going to allow the free market to produce conditions in which employees have this much fucking bargaining power? No. They are in the basement of the Federal Reserve right now. They're doing salt circles and fucking lighting handles right now. They're going to handle this shit.

The next article I'm going to talk about is, this is one of the solutions that is being implemented right now. I saw this article and I was literally mouth agape reading this. This is from the Appleton Post Crescent. What to know about the battle over Wisconsin healthcare workers now playing out in court? Listen to this. It was unclear whether a group of former ThetaCare employees would be allowed to start their new jobs at Ascension Northeast Wisconsin Monday after lawyers for both health systems made their first appearance in court Friday morning. The uncertainty is the latest development in a battle over healthcare employees that began late Thursday and is now playing out in court. It comes as staff shortages

strain health systems nationwide. Nearly one in five healthcare workers have quit their jobs since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. What happened to stop the employees from starting their new job? ThetaCare requested Thursday that an out of Gammie County judge temporarily block seven of its employees who had applied for and accepted jobs at Ascension from beginning work there on Monday until the health system could find replacements for them. The employees are part of an 11 member in interventional radiology and cardiovascular team which can perform procedures to stop bleeding in targeted areas during a traumatic injury or restore blood flow to the brain in the case of a stroke.

Each of them were employed at will, meaning they were not under obligation to stay at ThetaCare for a certain amount of time. Out of Gammie County circuit court judge Mark McGinnis granted ThetaCare's request and held an initial hearing Friday morning. The case will get a longer hearing at 10 a.m. Monday. McGinnis told lawyers for both health systems they should try to work out a temporary agreement by the end of the day Friday about the employee's status until Monday's hearing. Otherwise he said the order prohibiting them from going to work at Ascension would be final until a further ruling was made. That means that seven healthcare workers would not be working at either hospital on Monday.

So their employees, they were not under contract, they were outlaw employees who chose a different job offer from a different company. The company that they were leaving took them to both companies to court and has basically placed an injunction against them. A judge granted one, although today in court it was overruled. They can go to work at the new place. So it did not. It did not. It didn't work. It didn't work, but it did work for a minute and there was a judge who was willing to credit it, which means that this is definitely on the next frontier of employer management solutions to the, to don't want to work itis spreading. Yeah, is just. Hey, how about surf them? All right. Slavery. Slavery understand bridge too far very

such touchy subject, especially in America, but how about surf them that way? Come on. You got the breeches. There's a loot. You got like corn festivals. How about at like once a year we'll do like a carnival deal and you can throw your like tomatoes at your boss to get like let off some steam. How about that? Cops would love being knights. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh my God. They already think they are. Yeah, they could have a house. If you like, if you're like a cop instead of like a fat cop in a in a bulletproof vest, he's like wedged into a curse or a fucking breastplate and it was like ham hocks are spilling around the metal. Yeah, we should merge new and old traditions

and they should like joust each other, but they're driving their chargers at the highest speed possible at each other and whoever like stops like loses. I give a cop joust. All I'm thinking about is the photo of the world's fattest twins on scooters. They're driving directly at each other. Yes. Yeah. I get. Yeah. That's if the radar doesn't work, people are still like, fuck you. Yeah, it probably it's going to be judges just being like you who you can see it's a religious exemption. You there's like it's religious discrimination to not celebrate Boston. You're violating my religious freedom by quitting when I when I shoot at your feet and make you dance. Yeah, they should just make a religion around

Boston where Boston is like Christmas. Yeah. It's like the day that the Lord was born. Yeah. Yeah. Like you don't understand. I am God's emissary on earth. They are literally violating my religious rights by leaving my employment. Yeah. And I'm not God anymore if I don't have any employees. And the way that they like the way that they're like really into saints like Latin America, Latin American Catholicism, that's like you just have instead of having like 50,000 saints, you have 50,000 bosses. Yes. And Jack Welch, Jack Welch is like the boss of efficiency. Yes. Warren Buffett is the boss of thriftiness. Yeah. Tears of the Holy Virgin, Henry Ford. Yeah. Yeah. Boss of antisemitism. Cake boss is like the boss

of fun. Well, but yeah, like I mean, yeah, like if if if the Volcker summoning circle doesn't work, because I mean, like they've cut off the no more stimulus checks. No, I'm like that has not worked thus far. Yeah. If the you know, if an artificially enforced recession, if that doesn't work, then I think like the next step is through the courts, through the awful judge, every every judge in this country is so bad monster. And it's just that like through the courts, it's going to be like, yeah, if you quit your job, you have to like be justified in front of a judge. And if they don't think you have a good enough reason, like you can be legally prevented from leaving your job or if you take a new job,

your employer can sue you for like the loss of their profits that that you leaving would would would it would it would. It's an exciting new frontier and legal theory that we can all look forward to seeing develop over the coming years. Um, I don't know though, like it's like, you know, we have a small business, we don't have any employees. No, but if we do, but you know, like, let's say we want to hire some employees. Let's say let's say we had employees, but they were thinking of going to another podcast. Not going to happen. Well, like what are some things that you guys would do if you were an employer that they're like, okay, not pay more money or more time off or anything like that, because like, I

mean, like I got to eat too. Yeah, yeah. I got I got a I got a wet my beak. After we pay ourselves, we're barely breaking even. That is the only thing that the money goes to. And we're actually borrowing. We're doing PPP loans to pay ourselves more. Yeah. We've borrowed $20 million last year in PPP loans. But it's like, then you see how expensive it is for us to pay ourselves. Yeah. And that's the cost of doing business. That's when people say the cost of doing business. That's what they mean. Yeah. The cost of paying yourself. So not they're not paying anymore. That's not happening right now. You're you are getting 11 an hour. But here's all start all start. I'm kind of like, I would consider myself

sort of like a liaison to our employee or hypothetical employee. Once a month, they can come to my house and use my Nespresso machine. And that's good. Yeah, they're allowed to use. I mean, like, I know what we pay. I know what you pay your place. They can't afford it. No, they cannot get that. Yeah. Yeah, they got the shitty trip coffee. No, it's pathetic. They have the Mr. Coffee that's in every Airbnb that makes 10 ounces of coffee an hour. But they can come there. And if they've been with us for five years, let's say, they can use, they're allowed to use the black and red Nescafe cups. They're allowed to use the red ones was the decafs. I don't really use those ones. Those are from my mom visits.

My mom hasn't visited. She said the sink was gross. So you can really like use a few of those if you'd like the blue ones. I'm not crazy about have have two of those for all I care. And you get the gold ones, the really frothy ones. If you've been with us for 20 years, okay, fine. But if you're not fired instantly. Yes. I'd say that we could have maybe like once every couple months instead of a pay raise or vacation. You on will come to the office and do the Joe Biden's. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And you can just have a personal audience watching that and who wouldn't love that that worth so much more than a living wage. And we don't know. We don't offer retirement accounts or anything like that. But if you've

been with us like 30 years, Branson will spend an entire day with you as Walt Tremblay. Yeah. I mean, just like, okay, like maybe, maybe like, like, you know, a nuclear option. I do, I do like your E1 idea, like nuclear option. Let's say, let's say the quittagion is spreading, like one employee is leaving and then like, there's dissension in the ranks that like, Hey, we got a better job. Okay. We get Charles Austin to write and perform a new and new NBA stupid ass song for the office. That's a perk. Something just for them. That's not really like, I mean, that's dude, you know how much I would love like new NBA stupid ass fire to drop. I would love that. We don't get that. I'd even consider

paying Charles to do that. Yeah. I mean, not a lot, but no. No, because we have to get paid too. Exactly. Like that's why we're not paying Charles to do it. But like, hypothetically, if these employees created enough value for us, I'm okay. Here's another idea. I mean, this is my idea. What is something everyone loves? Pets. Photos of pets, petting dogs, cats, little, little, just our furry friends. So yeah, similar to how like, you know, if you've been with the company for five years, you can come by once a month and use Felix's Nespresso machine. Yeah. Okay. If you've been a loyal employee, you can use one of your vacation days to clean my cat's litter box. Yes. Ooh. One of your two vacations. I mean,

you can pet them if you see them in my apartment. Yeah. You can, but you can pet them and you can say, hi, I'm already, and you know, but leave like as soon as you, but if they're not in living room or something, you can't go look. Oh no, don't. Yeah. I'm gonna go one round. Or if one of them is asleep, don't wake them up. Oh no. No. They're sleeping. Okay. Or maybe some sort of like, okay, like instead of, instead of, okay, like one week's vacation time, that's very generous, but like instead of having one week's vacation time, what if there was just like company field day? Yeah. We do tug of war in the park. I'll pay for a pizza. There'll be one pizza, no toppings. And it will be, unfortunately, yes,

it will be from one of those Brooklyn places where the crust is really thin and crunchy and the, the, there's just discs of shaving cream like cheese. It's not even a regular pizza. This type of pizza we eat. You get one slice of that. Company field day in lieu of vacation. Yeah. Attendance is mandatory. And you will still have work to do of course while we're there. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like we'll bring our laundry to the park and you can fold it while you watch us play dodgeball. I'm, yeah, I'm going to need someone to de-scale my Nespresso machine because the one employee this year who took me up on that offer, the one who qualified for that offer, they got a little greedy with the red and black ones.

And there's a little bit, they're a little bit of fungus in the tubes. I'll be bringing all the cleaning materials and you know, you'll, you'll, you'll see if it can still make me the half caps that I like around 3pm. Okay. Here's another one for select employees. Once a month you were allowed to eat your office away from your desk. Yeah. You can go, you can go to a park and you can sit outside. You can sit in your car and eat lunch in the parking lot and you will still have to answer emails, but you don't have to be at your desk. Yeah. And okay. Like I would, I would be willing to, I'd be willing to, I mean, I don't, I don't like doing it because again, like I, I need to make money. Of course. Right. I'm

in business to make money. That's the whole point of this. I'm in business. It's about cash. Okay. I'd be willing to expand the amount of time through which you have to reply to an email or be fired from two minutes to five minutes. So you have five minutes from receiving an email from me to respond and take action on all the actionable items. Five minutes though. That's, no one else is doing that. And I'm sorry. If employees are not attracted by that, then, then we need to go to the, the surf them system. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have to just get a, surround up a bunch of people in bull cuts. We need to enclose the digital comics. Yeah. I mean, we don't want to do this. We don't want to all move

to a castle where we have a bunch of, we have a bunch of surfs living there and doing all this stuff for us. I want, the saddest thing about having the services, they're not allowed to use my Nespresso. No. They won't even know what it was. They think it was the devil. It'd be too scary for them. I want to live in the modern world, but we may have to. We may have to import some surfs. I'm sorry. Yeah. We're sorry. You know, I hear they're like, um, you know, two countries that produce a lot of surfs are fighting right now. We think we're, we think we're going to have trouble finding some. The refugee surf army just pouring into America. Like the surf them system had way more vacation days, way

more, way more vacation than the currently free market system. Like a hundred feast days where you would just get shit faced and punch somebody in, in the village. And, and yeah, they had like cartivals where like the, the, the, the Lord would like it run around, like it hit in the head with like tomatoes and yell that stuff. And, uh, and job security. Let's not forget about that. Yeah. We had way more time off in job security. So we're going to get that. Like that's the real innovation of the new surf to miss. It'll be, Hey, employers, what, what, what did the old feudal lords love? They love the surfs, having the surfs on the land, not being able to go anywhere. But because of that intimate relationship,

they had to give them a lot of time off. And, uh, they had, uh, to, you know, make sure that they ensure their survival. Now, though, you can have all of the, uh, the access to labor of a surf, uh, a feudal overlord, but you don't have to give any time off. You don't have to have any that you can fire them at any time. Uh, and because you're instead of having to use, you know, uh, uh, the Catholic church and, and, uh, your role as a, uh, military commander to keep them in line, you can just use, uh, apps, apps and little floating drones and do the job for you. Okay. Here's another thing. Our surfs, you mentioned, like, you know, if, if you were a feudal lord, like you're primarily you would, you know, uh,

you maintain a castle, maintain your keep and you muster fighting forces for your, for, for your king or whatever. And you know, we have our, we have our loyal, we have our loyal banner men, right? You know, like the, the knights of ours, you know, like a pot about list, you know, like, uh, like, you know, our nights, but our surfs, if need be, we will conscript them to be pikemen, to put down the seeking derangements rebellion and I'm redistributing all of, all of Max Palma and Ben's lands to Patrick Caleb and Cameron. Cause like, cause they mustered their serves to, yeah, like to put down the Jacques rebellion. Yeah. Yeah.

I've heard terrible things about Duke Palma. He's a bad noble word. Do you want to work for him? No, you don't. He doesn't let you use his mission as an espresso machine ever. That's not an option. He's a monster. He's an absolute monster. He just walks into the break room and shoots people with a paintball gun. So I mean, like, like, I feel like our listeners, our podcast serfs, and like, by that, I mean,

you're our employees and you pay us for that privilege of being our employees and we can fire you at will and we conscript you into our armed forces. Yeah. You're going to be Kevin fodder in the podcast wars. Yeah. You ready for that? So yeah. But then remember though, if you die in service, that you get to go to podcast Valhalla where

everyone's riffing together at the big table. Yeah. You're a member of the show in Valhalla. There we go. That's the future of employment. Yeah. All right. Until next time, gentlemen, bye, bye. We got a kid that's too. We got another one to do. We get by the best we can do. Factory's got a good medical plan because I'm a union man saying yes, sir, no, sir, yes, sir, no, sir, yes, sir, no, sir, yes, sir, no, sir, yes, sir, no, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, sir,