Grubstakers - [Unlocked] Episode 78: The Employment Episode feat. Finn O'Shawnessy

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

In this week's premium episode we're joined by the pseudonymous employment expert Finn O'Shawnessy to talk job getting tips (tip #1 Lie!). It's a wide-ranging discussion but full of useful tips - so we opened it for all y'all.

First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world. Berlusconi flatly denies that any mafia money helped him begin a start in the dynasty. I have always had a thing for black people. I like black people. I'm telling you, these stories are funnier than the jokes you can tell. I said, what the fuck is a brain scientist? I was like, that's not a real job. Tell me the truth. All right.

But anyway. Five, four, three, two. And we're back on Grubstakers on the premium side. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. I'm here with my friends. Andy Palmer.

Steve Jeffries. And, you know, this week we're joined by a very special guest because we want to talk about jobs in general. You know, Grubstakers, we've been talking about billionaires in particular, but just the actual day-to-day grind of being a wage laborer we wanted to focus on that and we're joined by a career counselor and recruiter that Steve knows named Finn O'Shaughnessy thank you for being with us thank you for letting me be here yes and Steve knows this person with his definitely real name that we just gave you and I guess we just wanted I was imagining when you introduced him like half listeners were like oh no no, they're going to do a bit. And he's going to jump in with,

oh hello, I'm Finn O'Shaughnessy. That's how little I respect myself and my Irish heritage. I just allow a name like Finn O'Shaughnessy to be paraded like my ancestors didn't suffer through two genocides so that I could come here and podcast for $100 a month in Brooklyn.

But actually, you know, I did want to do this episode for a variety of reasons, which is, you know, if you're listening to the premium side, maybe we'll unlock this, but you may or may not be having, you know, job troubles or you hate your job, you want to get another job. So I want to talk about that and I want to talk about specifically the recruiting, temp, and permanent hiring industries more in general. And really, more than anything else, this is an intervention for Andy, who hates his day job, and we're trying to figure out how to get him out of it into a better one.

Is that right? Well, if we unlock this, it's only the uh management side maybe i shouldn't have put it that way but yeah yeah if you're listening the best thing you can do for andy is dox him and try to get him fired because then i can collect unemployment and but i guess like um so finn if if where we're going to start, or I guess where I would start, is essentially for people who, because, like, I guess we've all gone through the temp or permanent hiring recruiting process. But for those who haven't gone through that, could you just briefly explain how temp and permanent hiring works in this country well um the the sort of nature of hiring is that from from your perspective as the person trying to get hired you send out your resume a bajillion times and then about maybe five percent of those lead to interviews and then about five to ten percent of those

interviews eventually lead to hires i call those the the ones where I don't throw up on them. Oh, yeah, yeah. And you don't get a lot of feedback. The only thing that's... The thing I think that people need to know from the get-go when they're going into recruiting is, when they're going to try to get a job, is the average person looking for a job will

apply to about 200 positions for each offer they get and that's the that's the average it varies by industry um there's a kind of funny thing where the savvier industries are actually worse off uh i would count as being in the hr industry and we're like 240 applications per offer, probably because it's all giant race to the bottom. We see the numbers and we say, okay, the only way to really deal with this is to increase volume. That's what you need to do is increase the volume, put out your resume more often, more aggressively, more sloppily, frankly. Being sloppy is, frankly, an advantage.

The keys to the job search are the keys control A and control C and then control V. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So for cover letters. Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's go straight to the pain point. Yeah, let's get to the nitty gritty. Yeah, yeah's get to the nitty gritty. Yeah, sure.

Do you even need to have a field for the name of the company in a cover letter? Can you make a cover letter that's generic enough for most jobs? I would not recommend that, but that's just because it's extremely easy to adjust. It's like, make a cover letter. When I did my last job search a couple years ago i thought this was probably the easiest way to do it was i had maybe eight different paragraphs and then i would choose two to three of those for each job right uh generically and then just do like a word substitution where i flipped like the last line would be like uh i really look forward i think these would really

add to the position of x and company Y in the Z unit. I like how you learn marketable skills just from the job search. Yeah, I want to write like a Python script. Yeah, yeah. Dear name. I'm really interested in X. I can do Y, Z, and A. Yeah, that would be great. And the first part,

just company name and their address and the name of the position, and like reposition name, and that makes it think that you pay attention to care. Just let them know you know where they live. It's important to start out your cover letter by intimidating them. You have to establish dominance so that they're afraid

of you and hire you. That's what I've found. I always started off with a list of fears, and I realized that wasn't maybe the best approach. Well, that's disarming because they're like, oh, no, we can control this one. Yeah, yeah. I'm offering it like, here are my weaknesses, basically. Yeah, this is how you can exploit me more efficiently.

Just start off with offering your neck straight to the slaughterer. In my time in college, I learned how terrible and ineffective unions were. And I learned the first thing I should do is report any unionization activities to management. That's the most effective cover letter. Oh, yeah. But I think that's actually what I was doing is I would have a That's the most effective cover letter. Oh, yeah. But I think that's actually like what I was doing

is I would have like a five paragraph cover letter and three of them were always in there. And then you read the job description once and you're like, okay, two paragraphs. Here's how we adjust this and this part of my work experience to this job. There's something that I think is kind of funny is that there's this part of doing the job search is trying to tailor your resume and your cover letter to the particular job.

And it's actually less complicated than it sounds. It's mostly try to identify what that particular recruiter is kind of obsessed with. Right. Like they'll probably use like one or two like very technical terms like three or four times and then just figure out some way to cram that into your resume and cover letter even if it like barely makes grammatical sense uh and then and this is like from a if you're like a literary person this is really hacky you know this is hacky cheap writing but uh recruiters actually kind of lose their minds over it because it means you actually read it and that just like puts you like way ahead of like people who are like using python scripts basically

no i'm gonna have the python script look for repeated phrases um and there's actually this really insane strategy i don't know if it works anymore because i i don't ever actually see the bowels of the software they use uh you know it's pretty well known that a lot of these companies, they will have a script that parses your resume, and that's before any human looks at it, and they just reject any resumes that don't hit a certain amount of keywords. Yeah, I figured that, like, if you hit the keywords, then you're going to pass the Control-F screening.

Yeah, the Control-F. They don't even trust their own software a lot of times and make you reenter your resume, right? Yeah, the control F. They don't even trust their own software a lot of times and make you reenter your resume, right? Yeah, that's fairly common. I think it might have been to deal with the specific strategy

which was so you have like a white background and black lettering on top of it and then you write like a bajillion keywords like thousands of keywords

in white text and then layer it behind the black text so humans can't see it but the parser will. Oh, my God. My mind was blown. Yeah, no, that's...

I don't know if they figured out how to defeat that one yet. Well, it depends on who the they is. I'm actually sure even if the people who are doing that kind of scale of recruiting actually want to defeat it. You can use, like, two-point font. Yeah. It's not even two-point font it's like in white text it's what would be layered behind it so it's just totally oh so you can fit more is that is that something you can do in word or do you have to do some

special oh no it's a pdf thing yeah it'd be a pdf thing okay yeah yeah it's um i always thought that was incredibly funny uh because uh the in general you want a resume to be like 600 or so words, not much longer. When I read a resume, probably 10 seconds for me to figure out almost everything I need to know. Okay. I usually have a pretty good impression of what a resume that's like over a thousand words where it's just like in a smaller font and like up to the edges and everything, like I immediately, before I even read a single word, I'm already judging the person as like not good at editing,

not in control. The kind of person who's going to like take an hour to answer like two questions and like really waste my time. I'm just imagining like if a recruiter sees one of those like hidden word essays, maybe they get programmed and don't even realize it, and then they're just at breakfast team building. Oh, so you're proposing a way of creating Manchurian candidates

by applying to jobs with brainwashing in the hidden text. We talked about this in our coke brothers episode but so the coke brothers in their various programs like at george mason university the mercatus institute and there are other scholarships they have like journalism funds as terrifying as that is but so they they would run a program that would search like applicants essays for words like freedom and liberty and markets and this kind of shit. So like if you want to just get. A million dollar scholarship.

Just put those in two point fonts. And then send. To every single Coke affiliated. Hiring thing you can find. Oh that kind of stuff was how I paid for college. Yeah. It's like the Instagram thing. Where you know people who really want to like get their

instagram seen by a certain demographic will just be like out enjoying the sunshine and then they'll have like 30 hashtags following it oh yeah like youtube was infamous for that as well like uh just like every like you just see like absolute nonsense hashtags attached to videos just oh yeah yeah like uh just um but anyway this actually tower hashtag tower seven it's just like a miley cyrus video hashtag q anon yeah i have to yeah i have to apply to 400 jobs because i keep putting that in my resume um but yeah the instagram thing actually reminded me of uh one of my favorite thing that instagrammers will do to further their careers, which is lying about sponsored content. I've always thought this was an amazing piece of dystopia is the Instagram stars who will pretend that they are sponsored by a company that hasn't sponsored them at all. So they look like they've got their foot in the sponsor door.

Yeah, yeah. So they look like they would be more attractive to other companies that might sponsor them which gets to one of the most important parts of all this which is lying yes the strategy around lying about job search uh you know before you do that let's do our new ad reads for grub stakers uh we we just got a big sponsorship deal with BetDSI.com. And they said, put it in the premium app. And, you know, if you're thinking about advertising with us, the rates are going up. But anyway, sorry, go ahead.

So we all know this cliche. You know, you see it in every sitcom. How do you lie on, you know, lying on your resume about this, that, or the other thing. And it's really kind of an art form because fundamentally you just don't tell the truth unless you have to, is kind of the overarching theme. And there are basically two reasons why you wouldn't, why you want to tell the truth. There are two things that really hold you back from just saying whatever it takes to get the job. Number one, it's easily verifiable. You know, don't claim that you went to a college you didn't go to.

That's very, very easy to check. Don't claim that you worked for companies that you obviously didn't work for. Very easy to check. Don't claim you worked for companies that never existed. Very easy to check don't claim you worked for companies that never existed very easy to check um and you know the thing is what if what if i found those llcs and uh some sort of cayman island shell company i mean if if it exists it exists man uh and you know a lot of a lot of people don't know that founding an llc is extremely easy so i guess you could probably boost yourself up. Delaware. We know that now. I mean, I'm already, like, self-declared girl boss

at Grubstakers LLC. Oh, my God. Yeah, I worked for my company, Microsoft LLC, with a zero instead of an O, founded in Delaware two months ago. Yeah, and the other reason would be if it's something where it would come back to bite you once you actually have the job. Does that ever happen?

Yeah, people get fired for that. To be honest, most of the time that the people who I help get hired get fired, it's because they just stop showing up to work, which I can't really defend them. Someone in this podcast did that. Oh, no. Oh, no. But, you know, if it's a question, if it's a skill that you don't quite have, but you think you can muddle through for a few months,

yeah, you can do it. Let me ask you guys, how many jobs have you guys each had? I think I counted before the episode it was like eight yeah more than a month seven or seven or eight that you've held more than one month probably around that i know it's less than 10 probably around seven or eight all right it's seven for me uh i'd go with 15 um of which i'd say four of those were more than a year now uh let's find the absolute value of the difference between jobs and sex partners and make everyone guess which whether it's negative or positive

um well yeah this we'll we'll put out a chart on the grubstakers twitter later yeah yeah um so uh this gets to why i think you people need to not listen to the standard job advice that you'll see. Because one of the most common ones is you'll research the company before you even make first contact. This is possibly the worst advice. Because that could be, they're talking about doing like hours of research. You know, they want you to know who like office managers are. And first of all, for those of us on the recruiting side we consider that terrifying like we think that you're planning like a terrorist attack second of all that's what an active shooter would do yeah

so that you're doing active shooter stuff not like looking for a job so the other thing is that this advice is really designed for you know pete campbell from madmen you know pete campbell was never going to go without a job like they try they try to fire him, and they can't because his grandmother has too much power at the fish market. Like, that's who that advice is for, is for people who are by birth or absurd luck

so insanely over-connected that they're not actually looking for a job because they need it. They're on safari for a job. You know, they're they're on safari for a job you know they're the big game hunters and and we're the ones out there trapping rabbits you know like that the advice is ludicrous um and so you know this stuff like you research the company uh always like make first contact in a casual setting like what in the fuck are these people on uh again lots of witnesses

establish that you are not a threat yeah yeah and uh it's it's absolutely preposterous absurd advice like you spell check what yeah yeah like i mean admittedly i do see people misspell things on their resumes a lot but it's you know it doesn't get to any of the hard parts and again like i said before you're going to apply to like 200 jobs you can't afford to spend three to five hours on every single one of those applications that that is ludicrous but if you want to get your malcolm gladwell hours on out applying yeah became a master at applying for jobs all right so quantity over quality you know that free labor that doesn't pay for anything yeah yeah yeah just uh that that free exploitation you

get to do before the wage exploitation you do i've had co-workers be like so why why haven't you quit and i'm like well i don't have a lot of time to look for jobs and i'm not going to do that for free yeah like i'm going to do it for unemployment money exactly yeah that's that's i mean just do that work uh yeah that's um i'm all i've been like learning node.js and python to like automate as much of my work as i can so i can oh no you start using a use like fiverr or taskrabbit to like get somebody else to do your job for you and then you can use that time to the freedom time that's some real like tim ferris race to the bottom shit yeah where he wrote that book was like the five-hour workday and apparently in that book it's just some of the advice is like you know a lot of the work that you need to get

done you can just source out to people in india it's like what the fuck yeah like that doesn't actually reduce the amount of hours worked. It just kind of like shuffles it around. You're just like exploiting someone who's in a worse off place. The five hour work week, you just own some apartment buildings and collect rent from the tenants.

There's an underclass of software engineers who would take you up on that. Yeah. You could hire on TaskRabbit. Well, the problem is I'm also part of the underclass of software engineers who would take you up on that? Yeah. You could hire on TaskRabbit. The problem is I'm also part of the underclass of software people. There's an under-underclass who doesn't have a job yet that wants your job.

They get your job and then you get the other job. I'm just trying to carve out time for you to be doing the job applications. It's a short term. I'm thinking about writing a sequel to the five-hour work week based around

mining cobalt in the Congo. And occasionally you do have to work to check up on possible worker organization activities and these sorts of things. But mostly you're just collecting the money. I mean, yeah gonna be a booming industry soon um but i guess um

we can continue on with i guess advice for people who might be listening on on you know getting a job and what our good co-host andy should do because we see that this job is weighing on him it's stressing him you know his productivity at the podcast is going down we're taking him aside we're writing him up all these other things because I think you guys are just retaliating because I

reported you to the NLRB that is not something that's going on in my actual job right now Andy andy andy filed a sexual harassment claim against yogi and so yogi has to appear on different episodes now and now we're trying to get andy fired and make it look like it's unrelated you have to write it into andy's contract that he won't appear in the same episodes as yogi yeah yeah and um but but you know it is it is just something where it's like what you're saying there andy i mean it makes sense where it's like you have a job you hate so it's like okay you

figure out how you get them to lay you off so you collect unemployment or you either get hired in another job because it's like for vast majority of people like what 75 of this country lives paycheck to paycheck it doesn't make sense to, like, quit a job and then... That's also the numbers for this podcast. Yes. Quit a job and then fucking... Oh, I just got that. Quit a job and then go looking for something else.

And, I mean, it's like, look, it's a socialist podcast. I'm sure most of our listeners are familiar with this, but it is the core lie of, you know, there's a choice under capitalism, where it's like like you don't like your job just quit well that makes no sense if you don't already have another job lined up because you're just starving that bears out in the economic data because the the um the federal reserve economic data site tracks quit rate for employees and it varies inversely with the unemployment rate so when times are good more people feel who were thinking about quitting do that's funny because like three of my uh

three of my co-workers in this last week just quit with no job lined up like they were just so i was just i mean i've i've done that once yeah yeah i know how it feels i did that before i moved to new york and boy i mean i had I had savings, but boy, was that a... Oh, yeah, it's really stressful to do that. I was just laughing because Steve was talking about how, you know, people can't quit when the economy goes bad, and we were just talking before this podcast started about how the economy is just going bad. Yeah. And he's trapped.

Yeah. Well, even in, quote, good times like now, unemployment, which is at a low reported rate, even in New York City, there's still 171,000 people unemployed. Right. And the definition, I mean, as we brought up a few times before, even if you work one hour within the survey period when they do the unemployment survey, you're still fully employed. So everybody on fucking TaskRabbit and shit. Yeah, if you did one hour of work, you're employed just as much as someone

who did 40 hours of work. Postmates. As far as the statistics are concerned. And there's also, I mean, the very important thing to remember at U3 is that it's only people who are actually looking for work. So it actually winds up being a very confusing statistic to be using as a core tracking because somebody who

hasn't applied for a job over the course of the survey period is a discouraged worker and, you know, they'd be included in looser definitions of unemployment, but they would not be included in the reported unemployment, which has a kind of interesting implication in that since we do a lot of economic targeting around the unemployment rate, and the unemployment rate is basically defined as people who are actively suffering for their lack of work. It's not like a labor use utilization thing. It's how many people are just suffering. And after a certain amount of time, don't the long-term unemployed just kind of drop off?

Oh, yeah. There's even some kind of interesting statistics about how long does it take somebody to drop out, to move out of the labor force, is the term that BLS uses. On your resume, if there's a gap, that's going to be a problem.

The longer the gap on your resume uh the more likely you're just gonna fall out of the labor force eventually yeah yeah the it's a surprisingly flat distribution if once they break it down by like you know people who have been out of work for like three weeks versus six weeks they go up to like 50 weeks uh and it the people who go back into the labor force it tends to bias towards the shorter term but it's not like 80 versus 5 it's like 30 versus 15 uh but it's still like those really long-term unemployment's really hurt you and even if you do get a job it tends to be a worse one right than the people who are getting back in rapidly so you know it's good it's good that

we punish them because as we all know systematic unemployment is their fault yeah yeah so speaking oh uh speaking of lying on your resume strategies um or you know uh being flexible with the truth say you're long-term unemployed if you towards the beginning you realize things may not be that great. If you did just start a company, and then in your interviews later say, well, yeah, I was unemployed, so I thought I'd start a company, but then it didn't quite work out, would that be better than just having a long blank? Well, so the question about gaps is really a tricky one to deal with. It's honestly a lot of the the art form of it and uh it's usually the bigger issue comes in

when people have a lot of jobs that don't cohere together that they don't you want your resume to kind of tell a unified story of your skills and a narrative that kind of has a teleology that leads to this next job that you're applying for and so sometimes it's worthwhile to just cut out previous job experience that's just not relevant and i mean right i was just getting ready for this job yeah yeah i needed a break before i knew i would get this job that's what you can say but if you're talking about just like creating an llc as effectively like a cover story um that's kind of an interesting one uh part of one of the things that a lot of

that sucks in interviews is you know well if you know if you're the president of a company like why are you bothering to come here and you know people who are trying to leave say academia get this a lot you know it's like well why aren't you why would we hire you when we think you're just going to go back and be a professor

six months down the line? That sort of thing. Some people were worried that, because I might sometimes mention I did comedy. They're like, well, what if you get a big job at SNL? And I always tend to be like, you don't have to worry. Yeah. So I've never really thought too much about people basically creating their own companies as a means of papering over. And I'm kind of wondering if it would make more sense to create the company but give yourself a title that isn't president. Right.

I was thinking like the narrative you could spin is like be like, you know, I tried to like strike out on my own, see how it worked out. And, you know, it didn't. So now I'm back in the. Well, I mean, you don't really necessarily want to say it didn't work out. This is always... The why did you leave your last job is always a tricky one, and you usually want to spin it as the job... Secretary wouldn't let me. Like you weren't good enough.

That's the thing. It's like when you say it didn't work out, that makes it seem like you weren't good enough at it. Oh, yeah. weren't good enough that's the thing it's like when you say it didn't work out that makes it seem like you weren't good enough at it oh yeah you want to try to portray it in terms of it didn't offer you something that you wanted right uh and so a classic one is there wasn't room to grow that's a very classic one it doesn't even matter if it's true remember it doesn't matter if this is true because there's no way to verify that right there's absolutely no way to verify that or um it wasn't uh directly involved enough with the particular field I was interested in in the case of like your own independent company I think it would make sense

to say something like you know something that was more stable or I really want to work more collaboratively with more people and that's kind of hard to do when it's a very very small organization um all of these things are kind of uh sensible ones you generally do not want to mention uh money at early stages you know what's funny is that uh my current job i got it through a temp agency and i actually in the temp interview you know the kind of the screener interview um they were like so why are you looking for a new job if you have a job right now it's like well i mean it pays like ten dollars an hour and they're like oh okay yeah yeah the people who are on the like recruiting side that aren't actually attached to the hiring company right those people can usually be somewhat more

honest with um not always but uh you know it's it's really really the person who's doing at the company side who you really just need to be like, I will do anything. I will do absolutely anything for this job. I will lick your boots every day. That's when you really need to be the very obsequious version of yourself. But yeah, I hadn't really thought too much about that, using your own like a personal shell company to paper over what title should you create your show company what

title should you give yourself like well i mean i'm not the office assistant i would have the president analyst who's the president oh yeah executive executive vp of totally legal business. I mean, I would consider just like every single time you apply to a job, just copying and pasting exactly the title of the position you're applying for. I mean, I'm an analyst and I look at like analyst job descriptions and I'm like, none of this is what I do. They just pick a word. Like analyst is one of those words like consultant where they just pick it yeah oh yeah analyst analyst uh just means whatever i mean it covers an enormous amount

of ground it's basically just if you can program a algebra equation in excel like you're an analyst like that's it like yeah uh a1 plus b1 equal and then then now you're an analyst yeah we should just explore the concepts of wherever it's just meaningless oh yeah like uh you just start calling um i mean i don't even know i mean you work at a zoo you're an analyst yeah yeah um yeah analyze the uh the copper lights i'm a product analyst i feed the elephants um yeah most of the job titles tend to be very meaningless uh unless it's like a regulated title like medical doctor or social worker or lawyer where like the government will come after you for claiming the title without the right certifications.

Outside of that, all the job titles are absolute gibberish. I remember having an operations assistant opening in my database. There were two of them at the same time. And one of them was filing and faxing and answering phones. And another one was drawing blood and suturing and because it was surgical operations assistant it was just listed as operations assistant i was like what am i supposed to do with this like how does this help anybody to do this i'd like to see one person's like i don't know how to suture this fax machine but um I did want to ask so and and maybe before we end we'll circle back to I guess more advice

for just kind of people who are listening um as to how to get a job but but I did uh this thing you wrote for us I thought was pretty interesting where you talked more generally about I guess we've kind of since probably the 90s and major offshoring started we've had this fetishization of recruitment and job recruiting and skills training and all this crap and you made this pretty good point in this this little thing you wrote up to prepare was essentially when we think of job recruiting it's always treated as a monolith but there is upper class middle class and think of job recruiting, it's always treated as a monolith. But there is upper class, middle class, and lower class job recruiting. And there are three completely different things that are always just kind of papered together. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's, you know, the sort of upper class stuff is, you know, the headhunting agencies you might hear about and on that end you know that's the person who goes to a headhunting agency and says i need a job they're going to pay like thousands of dollars for that service right like that's not something that's accessible to the majority of us uh and then there's a whole sort of realm of middle class style recruiting for professionals in highly skilled fields and that whole field is the one that most people tend to think about the most because you know how often you hear politicians say oh you know the the

american middle class the american middle class no nobody says the american lower class nobody says that uh so there's a real fetishization of this middle class style of doing things and it extends into recruiting and uh in the middle class field it's often kind of a question of finding people and finding openings and trying to figure out a way to close the distance between those which is often a geographic distance um you know you might have a um i don't know a biomedical researcher who's languishing in west virginia and most biomedical research happens in new jersey so come on down to new jersey uh but that all kind of presumes you've got somebody who can afford to move um and that's a lot of it and those or those companies

they tend to be working with like kind of almost like a one-to-one uh you know like almost every time they have an opening they find somebody and it's really kind of a matter of frankly that person was probably going to get hired sooner or later you know this biomedical technician or this petroleum engineer they're probably going to get hired sooner or later it's about reducing the amount of time they spend out there looking uh but lower class recruiting is where things get really wonky and weird and uh it's oftentimes expressed as like if we were good at meeting the private sector demand for working people we could just get down to zero percent unemployment um and as we know this is just never going to happen

because then the Federal Reserve will have a freakout over the Phillips curve and raise rates and tank the entire freaking economy. The Phillips curve, real or made up? Economics is... Yeah, for our listeners, I think all of us know what the Phillips curve is, actually. Yeah, that's the unemployment there's an inverse relationship allegedly between inflation and unemployment so if you have less you have less unemployment then you'll have more on inflation

either now or soon yeah that's so basically the belief is that uh if we did get down to full private sector employment we would go into hyperinflation right basically the belief is that if we did get down to full private sector employment, we would go into hyperinflation. Basically the gist of it. And, you know, the last several administrations of the Federal Reserve have decided that that is too high of a cost to bear. We need to push the cost for inflation onto the poorest people and keep a certain amount of them unemployed. So they have like... So you don't let them just kind of run free And buy things with money And their jobs

The Federal Reserve actually has their own measure Of where they think the optimal point on this Curve is called the Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment Or NARU And so they've continually revised NARU Down each time unemployment Goes down but

Infl inflation doesn't go up yeah that's always in like the first chapter of like economics textbooks it seems like where they're trying to blow your mind with like did you know that there's actually a uh minimum level of inflation below which it's actually bad for the economy they're not inflation uh you're like i didn't think that because it's funny we don't fucking see that in the data. We're going to blow your mind with that. And then it turns out it's just not true. I forget which of those economics books for dummies I read, but they had it at 5% is the Nehru,

which is what they all thought Nehru was. And now we're below 5%. And everybody's like, yeah, we're still experts and you should still listen to us. We definitely know what we're talking about. Yeah, that's what you're taught in like high school next to calculus. Yeah. And Nehru, which I think is something from World of Warcraft. I think that sounds like a World of Warcraft.

It sounds a little like Nauru, the country. Oh, yeah, yeah. So the thing about whether or not it's true, this is where economics becomes a very funny discipline because uh even if it doesn't happen the people who have control over these things believe in it and so it kind of gets into like its own speaking of employment yeah it's kind of this own uh like self-fulfilling prophecy like right it doesn't actually matter if having very low uh unemployment would lead to hyperinflation because the people who care about, the people who have the levers on, you know, interest rates and such like that, they believe it's true and they will act as if it is true. And so they will follow through on the policy prescriptions from it, regardless of the descriptive reality. They do not care.

It is like bloodletting. So the current Nehru, as of 2019 right now, is about 4.6%. That's what they say Nehru is? Yeah. And I'm not sure what the federal unemployment numbers are. I know that the state... They forecast it to go down, obviously. They have a curve of the natural rate of unemployment,

just like what we think it is. Yeah, what they thought it was at any point. They even have a forecast. That's such an embarrassing data set to release to the public. Yeah, I'm reading the Federal Reserve Economic Data site right now, and they have a projection of neighbor, and it's like, well, going to go down. Yep, just going to go down.

We're just going to keep on estimating it downwards until we get down to the reality of 0%, and then we'll just claim we were right all along. Our advice on this jobs episode is join the Federal Reserve. Yeah. Very little accountability there. The Federal Reserve is essentially a federal job guarantee program for economists. Yeah, for people who know micro-econ.

Yeah, it's for economists who say the right thing. Because even if it doesn't have an effect on inflation, it does have an effect on how much firm owners have to pay their employees. That's true. because and so there's kind of a bit of an incentive for economists who want maybe more lucrative jobs to say like oh yeah there's you know you can't hire too many people or else well i mean there's the the classic joke you know you mentioned offshoring and i mean when was and the economists will say oh you know offshoring makes us generally better off because it reduces prices economy-wide but when was the last time you heard an economist say we should start offshoring economists offshoring is good until it happens to you yeah yeah just like inflation is good until it happens to you yeah but it is interesting like uh i'll confess to not having

studied pete budaj's plans on this um but i i think you know maybe we're moving away from this with with warren and sanders but certainly up until now this has kind of been the democratic plan is like i mean one job training but to like maybe give credits or whatever to job recruitment companies and this kind of stuff and this is supposed to like solve our problems with um buddha judge's plan is uh avoid eye contact with your actual constituents especially if they're not white. His plan is, you know, Nehru is so much more poetic than the original Norwegian. Yeah.

But yeah, we are moving, hopefully, you know, with Sanders especially and maybe Warren also, we're moving away from the idea that private sector employers will help us achieve full employment. Now, Nehru, is that... Because they haven't... I mean, you know, so we've relied on the private sector to employ people for the most part for most of our history as a country. And we've always had unemployment, so they've always failed in that regard. Now, is Nehru... Is that Urdu for Blue Lives Matter?

Oh, God. Yeah, this is actually part of why I find the Green New Deal so exciting as a possibility. Is that, I mean, we all know that there are bullshit jobs. Many of us probably feel like we are currently working in a bullshit job. Some of us read David Graver's bullshit jobs. Yeah, some of us are looking forward to reading david graver's bullshit jobs books titled that now yeah uh but uh there's a kind of interesting converse to that which is that there are actually a lot of jobs that are still going undone um you know we'll often hear this kind of discourse that uh there's not enough work for people to do that uh we've automated away all of the

meaningful work but the truth of the matter is is that we actually have an enormous amount of labor left to do uh it's just in things that are not being paid uh we have you know we have so much environmental remediation work to do so much of it and there's plenty of work to do there's just no jobs yeah yeah it's so there's a there's a genuine a numinal even demand for like home health care workers and and therapists and all of this stuff uh street cleaners i mean we even have like more or less guaranteed jobs for street cleaners in this city and our streets are still dirty yeah like we can do better the the need is there but we want to pay people to like scam youtube algorithms for yeah like it's like you know your your your train is late because uh you know there's a signal malfunction you're huh, there just aren't enough jobs out there.

Now time to write fake content to trick an advertiser into putting their stuff on my website. Yeah, exactly, exactly. A lot of us are doing just absolutely nonsense jobs, and there's still very meaningful work out there to do, but it just isn't getting paid for and uh the classic example one of uh one of the easiest jobs to get um around here is home health aid it's extremely easy if somebody comes into my office and says they want to be a home health aid

i can almost always get them hired in a matter of weeks it's very easy even though it's a certified job that requires quite a bit of training it is The demand is so much higher than the supply for it that the private companies are willing to do a month of free training to get people certified for it. The trouble is that because the way that home health aides are paid is fundamentally out of Medicare and Medicaid. They're fundamentally paid by that. It is almost entirely for poor people who are disabled, either due to age or another physical infirmity, that are not quite at the point where they need to be living in a group home. And so they live at home, but they need somebody to come around and do their laundry, administer their medication,

maybe help them take a shower. So the wages are effectively set by Congress. The people who have the demand, they don't have any money anyway. So the whole free market forces thing just completely collapses. You can't negotiate for higher wages with somebody who can't pay you. That's nonsense. You're getting paid by Congress. There's no market going on here. And so this means that the job is simultaneously difficult and pays poorly. So nobody really wants to do it.

So if you are one of the few people who wants to do it, you're not going to go without work. You're going to be working steadily up until you can. It's like charter school teacher. Yeah, it's a lot like that you know it's uh and so the thing is is that and we're still not meeting the demand for it as a job there are still a lot of people in the city who could use some additional assistance and they're not going to get it anytime soon because we can't increase the wage and because we keep on trying to rely on a private sector solution to what is obviously a public good it's not gonna freaking happen yeah so jobs just fundamentally aren't a right that people have yeah we and this is actually one of those jobs that is covered in

the green new deal yeah so there's a federal job guarantee within the Green New Deal, and I think that's one of its strongest points, really. Yeah. It makes, you know, if you want a job, you've got one. Well, and that's the thing is, like... If you don't get that job under a federal jobs guarantee, you can sue until you do. Every other plan, essentially up until now, you know, from the 90s to now, it always involves essentially

like government tax credits or even just government direct money to someone in the private sector, whether it's recruiters or trainers or whoever, or actual employers get tax credits to hire. It's all just spending public money to try to get the private sector to do stuff because we're all so petrified of this idea of the government actually just spending its own money to actually do something and the one real case we have is uh is the worst progress administration yes and it was just massively successful yeah and it was set up incredibly fast um you know the civilian conservation corps was hiring people in sight of months of uh of uh of FDR getting elected. And the WPA did have weaknesses,

not least of which is that by decentralizing its administration in an era of extremely brutal segregation, that meant that segregation just wasn't... Oh, how could that go wrong? Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And the other problem was, of course, that it wasn't permanent. You know, just once... It was an emergency situation? Oh, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the other problem was, of course, it wasn't permanent.

You know, just once. It was an emergency situation. Right. It was bound to be ended at some point. Yeah, and then they just killed it during World War II because whatever. I guess if you're in the middle of you know, you can either go get blown up in the bulge or, you know, make the things that blow people up. Yeah, yeah.

In both cases, though, like, what led to almost true full employment of, like, you know, well, not quite there, but in, like, the low twos to high 1% range for a while was um large-scale industrial policy by the federal government it wasn't waiting to give tax credits to private employers well and i mean the tax credit thing is just getting i really hope that we just never mention it again going forward except to like for mockery because like that's what trump's been doing and oh you know we'll give these big tax breaks to these companies and then they'll encourage hiring and then they

just did stock buybacks uh and now you know you know we're we're looking at a recession we're staring that one down right now and not quite fired yet but it's it's common and you can just watch these large firms just stockpile liquid assets like they just know what's coming and they know that when there's a crash like middle-class homeowners are all going to go underwater and then they can just snap up those properties for a song if they've got the liquid assets on hand oh yeah oh yeah yeah well oh and just two things uh one is like one of my favorite things is conservative economists will make the argument that Works Progress Administration made the Depression worse, which is why FDR was reelected in a landslide three times. Reelected so often that we had to put in like a mercy rule, a presidential mercy rule uh yeah the the wpa let me see i think i've got the numbers on hand um

yeah the wpa initial proposal was 3.55 million jobs uh and it peaked at 3.33 million in 1938 uh so it was within three years of implementation so that's incredible speed like we can do this uh you know we we absolutely can do this and uh there's really kind of no reason to believe that it's it's not really bad for the economy for even the private sector economy for this to happen uh because those people then have to you know if you employ all these people digging ditches they they're going to go to bars and so on and so forth. And movies and such. And, you know, this is all largely a good thing for the private sector. The issue is, as Michael Kolecki points out in Political Implications of Full Employment.

Kolecki. Kolecki. I'm sorry. A little bit. Polish is a little bit hard for me. Okay. I've got to pause and start over. Well, this episode has probably the least interruptions by mispronunciations.

That's true. Yeah, Sean hasn't been doing a lot of talking. The real issue is that if you have truly full employment, then firing people doesn't actually hurt them that much. Okay, but hear me out what if instead we address the recession by giving discount networking classes to those home care professionals yeah yeah that's something a good one you know just uh just like some like uh really like scaled down cocktail parties like that too and also here's how to hook up your router. Let's hope that gets you a job. The part about the...

Learn to code. Exactly. The learn to code thing gets really kind of... That's a white supremacist phrase. The coding idea is really kind of darkly amusing since the real purpose of a programming job is to automate away its own job yeah like it's it's designed to be like its own like suicide switch is built into it as a career

your job is to not have a job yeah the saving grace of it i think is godel's incompleteness theorem oh yeah it's always gonna be a um another level that you have you can't just automate away so you're just counting on like the whole thing just doesn't work anyway like yeah there's there's always going to be uh you know something you you need a human to do i guess well i mean that's um i mean that's part of the thing about automation that i often see people get kind of wrong is that we don't usually automate away the entire job yeah we automate away tasks yeah within that job and you know fairly simple example is you know my job involves a lot of looking at big numbers and i can just use an excel sheet and do you know some if and then put in a phrase and i don't have to manually go

through the table and count up one two three 550 three, 550, 560. The fact that I can just automate that very quickly, that saves a lot of time. That automates a task, but it doesn't automate the whole job. And we're very, very far away from completely replacing even cooks. Oh, yeah. We're very far.

Either you or your boss is going to figure out some other shit for you to do after you automate that. Yeah. And also, like, the automated cook. Like, it's still going to be a level, and it's usually going to be, like, in a faraway country. Where it's, like, there's still someone who's, like, putting together the automatic meal box that goes into the cooking machine. Programming new dishes.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's a, I mean there's, you know, the whole thing about the Luddites that a lot of people get somewhat wrong in their British history is the Luddites weren't anti-technology. They were anti- capitalist using

that technology to exploit them more efficiently. They wanted a, it was a negotiating tactic to get a better cut. And so it's not that automation is intrinsically going to destroy our lives and in fact if we had a decent economy it would do the exact opposite we'd go oh crap we can do in 20 hours what used to take us 40 hours oh yeah everybody gets an extra week of vacation yeah uh or or they take on another job they want more yeah yeah like caring

for like being a home health aide or something. Or gaming. Or gaming. Or being a professional gamer. We can go to the entire Twitch streamer economy. Yeah. Yeah, let's see you automate that, Bill Gates. Once they automate Fortnite, it's basically done, though. I mean, we're already facing a danger of comedians being automated away with these weird Markov bots. Let's see them write a program that can find the obscure racial slurs from the 19th century.

I know. We don't automate quite the way that people think we do. And even for something as simple as using a water mill to beat paper pulp, that does save an enormous amount of labor, but it's not quite the same as just eliminating the jobs outright. There were still people working in paper mills.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, by 1600, even though they had figured out how to use a water wheel to beat the, the pulp. Yeah.

It's still going to break every now and then. And you still need to move it around. Yeah. And it's true. My water mill employees, almost no one knew. Yeah. But there's still someone that needs to go in there.

Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah in there. There is that whole joke about the auto plant in Ohio that closed down in 92 with 3,000 employees and reopened last year with 150 employees or something like that. Same number of cars. But it's definitely

kind of interesting. It's almost like it asymptotically gets to what people think is going to happen, but doesn't ever quite cross that barrier into just like the elimination of work. And in any case, it's definitely compatible with full employment. Oh, yeah. Everyone who wants a job can still have one,

and we can still specifically focus on automation. Yeah, yeah. Just definitionally. Are you familiar, I haven't read this book but i know they just dropped that book what fully automated luxury communism everybody's arguing about it on twitter i don't know do you have any opinions on that uh i mean i guess that's kind of what i was getting to was that uh we're very far away from that level and story that type of technology and uh a lot of the automation that we do doesn't really

reduce the amount of uh calories going into the economy it's really just kind of more efficient ways of using fossil fuels um which is a little bit grim uh or rather taking a task that humans used to do and figuring out a way for a fossil fuel to do it uh which is basically you know how like bitcoin works somebody figured out how to solve very simple math problems that you can do by hand and just have it be done by burning like an enormous percentage of the world's coal so uh that's i i think we're very far away from like an em banks the culture style level of automation where like i think we're just very very far away from that an E&M banks the culture style level of automation where like I think we're just very very far away from that

and also who controls the computer yeah that's actually a very important thing is that the ownership if the ownership just keeps on going to the richest couple of people over and over again it doesn't actually help the rest of us seize the means yeah you gotta seize them so that's part of the issue is that we're pretty far from

the technology it also you know can do, it could just keep on going to the richest people and they can just figure out new forms of labor to exploit us for. Eventually we're going to get to the point where it's, you know, the old joke about getting kicked by a horse factory. You know, the idiocracy jobs of, you know, getting hurt on, like everybody's working as like a jackass stuntman sort of thing uh but one thing that i do think is really kind of fascinating is people will talk about oh we can't reduce the average work week because that'll cause like this huge economic devastation we've been on the 40-hour work week for a while the last step we had downwards was to a 40-hour work week and that was a long time ago and it didn't cause a total economic collapse when we went from an 80-hour work week to a 40-hour work week.

Why would... Why can we not do that again? Are we saying that we have not gotten more efficient at producing things in, what, 80 years now? Right. I mean, that's the whole argument, is just to go back to the New Deal. At the time, Congress was seriously debating a 30 hour work week.

Yeah. And I mean, again, this is not socialism. These are capitalists, liberal capitalists. These are 30 hour work weeks 80 years ago when we've had, you know, measurable growth, measurable, but extreme amounts of economic growth since then we are vastly richer than we were at the time and you know at the time they were discussing 30-hour work weeks and developing world yeah yeah you have to kind of wonder if like we got worse at things if like if like we're expecting the working class person to be working harder than ever before like like the narrative doesn't hold together It's good to keep them distracted. Give them an extra day. Maybe they'll start thinking about things.

That was one of those things that becomes really odd when you're looking at economic history. Really fun to me, at least. We can't say 16th century China. A period that I'm a big fan of. Early Ming. Middle Ming, I guess. That's when most of the Great Wall was built. And a lot of the factor that went into why they ever built it...

I'm more into the Ming's obscure earlier works. Yeah. One of the things that really motivated it was that people were basically economically sufficient off of significantly less than working all year round and it was actually very hard to find jobs for people to do during the summer because uh you can't spin silk in the summer because it's too dry and the silk breaks and you're not planting or harvesting that's when the crops are growing so they were like oh shit these peasants are going to start revolting they're going to get bored and they're going

to try to revolt just because they're bored uh so let's build a giant wall i'm pretty sure that's also how the pyramids were built like there's not a lot of um written record but you know there's the thing where it's like jews built the pyramids and it's like well no that was the the ram ramaz times was like, that was about over a thousand years later. But shut up, Sean. Don't call the Jews aliens. But it was also like, basically in ancient Egypt,

less so now because they have dams, but the Nile would flood. And so you've got all these farmers who their farm is flooded now, but they've got a central government because all the grain goes. But now they've got all this free time so they're just like all right let's let's build me a giant uh piece of stone for me to live forever and you know that's yeah yeah it's basically a make work project oh yeah yeah and it's uh it's kind of a fascinating thing because we're used to thinking about a make work project as something that tries to artificially create jobs to reduce the unemployment to figure

out a way to give people have an excuse for giving people money to live but it can also help you live forever yeah it can also help you live forever uh but you know historically many of them were just we need to find some way to keep these people occupied. And I mean, today, we could just have everybody be Twitch streamers. It's just not that hard. There's got to be enough going on in the Overwatch League to occupy. We could intentionally accelerate the climate degradation. yeah, it's it's definitely an oddity looking at like in the past where there was like a surfeit of

there's almost too much prosperity for these governments to feel comfortable for these relatively totalitarian governments to feel comfortable and now we're saying like oh no, there's just not enough to go around there's not enough to go around after the industrial revolution but before there was right that's a blatant lie there's not enough to go around after the industrial revolution but before there was right

that's a blatant lie but I guess before we run out of time were there things we didn't get to as far as like anyone who's listening to this who like is trying to find a job essentially or maybe they hate their job they're getting out of this you know just like general advice that you give to people

I'll do a recap of my points so that we kind of have it all together in one right so that position uh when andy's editing this he can really hone it into his skull really take some notes the the number one oh wait i did want to say uh one piece of uh job advice is if you are listening to this podcast at work uh very important you use headphones because apparently somebody tweeted at us i don't know if he was fucking with us, but he said he took a temp job and he was listening to our podcast,

our fucking Notch episode, where Andy plays this clip of PewDiePie saying the N-word. I cut the N-word out. Yeah, but it's very clear what PewDiePie is saying. And Andy keeps playing this clip and this guy tweets at us like, yeah, so I went on this temp

jump and I was listening to your podcast and you kept saying the n-word and uh they didn't ask me to come back on the truck I'm guessing that's a gag like that that's kind of a running gag on your kickstarter sucks or someone's like yeah I got in a cab and the cab guy was like yeah I like comedy so I put it on and it was the one where you guys said that um hugh hefner right behind his balls had a pussy and he threw me out of the car um yeah job advice okay yeah headphones for podcasts headphones for podcasts that's that's very good uh so the first thing to know when you're looking for a job is it's going to be like 200 applications yeah like i'm not going to lie to you here uh it's miserable um most of us are not prepared for 200 rejections i do not think humans were designed for that humans lived in what groups like 50 to 100 for most of our life i was yeah

yeah yeah but you know most people yeah and uh you know if you got shot down for Stone Age marriage 200 times, that was, like, really bad. Like, it's, like, incomprehensibly bad at that point. So, like, I think we're designed to start psychologically shutting down at that level of rejection. Especially when, like, the Stone Age marriage is an orgy. And if you're rejected at the orgy, that's... Getting rejected by all 200 of the other people living in your village.

Yeah, in your gathering van. But, you know, I'm a big believer that if you're going to send somebody out on an ocean voyage, you don't tell them that it's going to be 10 days when it's going to be 200 days. Like, it's just irresponsible. Unless you're trying to sex traffic them. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I'm not trying to scam you right now. If I was trying to scam you, I might say something different. But, you know, be prepared for doing this a lot. And that can take a lot of time because this isn't a New York number. This is a general US-wide number. There's probably only like 20 openings in your field each week. So it's going to take time just to even fill out all those applications just in terms of the number of openings. So I just want people to be psychologically girded for how tedious this is

gonna be uh number two um most of the qualifications are bs uh you the closer you are to the job match the more likely you are to get called in for an interview uh up to 50 percent if you are the person who is 75 qualified is has not gained an advantage over the person who is 50% qualified. And this basically comes down to the people who are writing these job postings. They just kind of want to not get fired and go home. They are workers just like the rest of us. And so they will use these shortcut lazy templates that just make it look like the genre of a job posting. And that means it has to be a certain length

and a certain format. And they're not just going to say what they actually care about, which is we just need somebody who's TIP certified or something like that. That's the only thing they actually care about. They're going to put in TIP certified, three years experience, yada, yada, yada um and they actually only care about one or two

things out of like five and you can't actually tell which ones are the good ones from looking at it so once you get up to like 50 qualified just just dive in um it's actually one of the it's actually really odd because it's one of the things that wound up being pretty heavily gendered in my research um in a way that is actually advantageous for women very oddly uh for women the diminishing return point is at about 30 percent uh you know they they hit about the same interview rate as men hit at about 50 percent which is still terrible uh and you know they i'm not trying to say that women are having an easier time. It's just this one odd phenomenon. No, that's my job on the podcast.

It's just this one particularly odd phenomenon. But what this really tells you is be sloppy. Be sloppy with your applications. I told you you're going to have this really high target, so just cast that wide net. Scattershot? Yeah, absolute scattershot. Frankly, scrutinizing your job applications

to make sure that it's something that really fits your skill set, not a good use of your time. You are better off just getting on to the next application. Like, better off just keep on moving. Tinder it. Yeah, Tinder it. Tinder it, exactly. I think I call my job application strategy RAF over Germany Yeah

Drop on everything you see And take more, yeah, take the night bombing strategy Rather than the day bombing strategy I mean, not literally You actually want to apply, like, as soon as the job is posted Right Like, you want to apply within the first couple days Oh, yeah, that

It's actually, we've actually gotten precise enough As soon as the job is posted. Right. Like, you want to apply within the first couple days. Oh, yeah. We've actually gotten precise enough that we know that a 10 a.m. applicant is more likely to get the job than an 11 a.m. applicant. Wow. So, I should just program it to automatically send then or something? Pretty much, yeah. Okay. And number three is, as mentioned, lie. Like, say whatever it takes. You know, don't say anything that's going to, you know, only really measure yourself

on something that can really come back and bite you. If it's not something that's going to come back and bite you, you know, any of those fluff questions. What is your biggest weakness is a really tricky one and don't say something like uh yeah i tend to sleep in a lot um if i say on my resume that i'm trans i have to be uh but yeah don't don't tell the truth about that one the that question in particular you want to the old advice was say something that's actually a strength but make it sound slightly bad like my

problem is sometimes I care too much yeah don't don't don't don't do that you want to do something where you have a opportunity for growth like you know I can kind of get caught up too much in the details, but this is what I've done to work on that. That's kind of what they're looking for. Say I jack off every day and do shrooms twice a week. Yeah, yeah. My greatest weakness... All true honesty gambit.

Honestly, you can keep it outside of work. My greatest weakness is that I've killed my last three bosses. Don't say that sort of stuff. Oh, so it's a strength. Bullets. Hit me every time. That used to be a bit Sean did. I had a stand-up joke, which is I get tired of interview questions like,

why did you leave your last job? And I just say, ran out of ammo, police were coming. That was the first thing I saw of his, and I was say, ran out of ammo, police, we're coming. But yeah, I mean... That was the first thing I saw of his, and I was like, eh. Now I have to be his friend or something. That's a good joke. You kind of want to be portraying yourself

as like a Superman, almost. You want to make it clear that you offer them a lot, and you aren't really questioning what they're offering back in the exchange. It's reasonable to start doing that once you're offering back in the exchange uh it's reasonable to start doing that once you're further along in the interview stage like second and third interviews it starts to make sense to ask about pay scale and benefits that sort of stuff but early on you really kind of want to just like offering yourself up as a piece of meat so when

you say portray yourself as a superman you mean i should say things like my parents were part of some secret breeding program in the third reich I was thinking more like my greatest weakness is kryptonite. My parents were scientists who tried to warn this council about the impending climate crisis, but actually they just wouldn't listen. So I left my last job because I was a gigolo. And if you've ever read Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, that should really tell you how that one went. Yeah, don't.

You want to be portraying yourself as very excited, very interested, very bubbly, and just absolutely ready to dive in and do whatever they tell you. And the fact of the matter is is that outside of verifiable job skills, like your certifications, or they might ask you to do something, they might actually test you. Particularly if you're doing software, they will just literally test you.

Honestly, those are the only interviews where I just nailed it, where they're like, so we need to do this thing in Excel. And I'm like, oh, okay. So you do this, this, and this, and they're like, yeah. Yep. Where do you want to start like that's that's that's wonderful uh but it's unless they're doing that just pretty much tell them what they want to hear oh and it's mostly a matter of reading that like there's a certain level of insincerity that we can see through like again like if you do the whole like my greatest weakness is I care too much, we kind of see through that and we think you're lazy. If I may describe myself using Nietzsche's so-spoke Zarathustra,

the Übermensch is... Is a becoming and an overcoming. I would describe my greatest weakness as I am stretched over a vast abyss. I'm like Nietzsche's Superman. I'm dying of syphilis. I'm like Nietzsche's Superman. I killed God and I am now adrift in an inability to describe morality. But I guess before we run out of time here,

is there anything that you wanted to mention that we didn't get to? I think we got through most of the things that I really wanted to get through. Don't listen to hucksters who try to tell you that the jobs problem in America can be solved with software for coal miners. Hucksters like several presidential candidates. Yeah, including the one who won

the popular vote last time yeah um don't listen to these grifters uh one of the listen to the people who are actually affected i think if we've you know uh it's very easy to listen to the people who run these multi-million dollar companies and their whole weird take of like oh you know the people at the bottom just need more hope right but the fact of the matter is is that the people who are in deep profound despair about their job prospects are actually being pretty intelligent um under neoliberalism they're probably pretty screwed the solution is to change the system it is a systematic demand is a systematic structural problem and individual acts of smiling are not going to cause it might save a couple of

people but it's not going to save everybody you can you can get on the life raft but other people will be drowning on the boat yeah somebody else is coming off of that life draft if you're getting on there and that's like the entire fucking message that they give is like you know even the capitalist propaganda it's always like you will survive while everybody else is fucked and yet at the same time they'll have these political campaigns where they're essentially saying that but it has kind of a hopey message to it it's the bullshit of social mobility it's like well if you're mobile, that means everyone's still stuck. That has to exist.

Capitalism is fair because sometimes rich people came from slightly lower classes. Your overlords who control your life, some of them were selected by lottery. Not just by birth. That makes it fair. And that's why the Ivy Leagues are legitimate institutions.

But I think we... Were there any other questions that somebody wanted me to go over? But I think I covered all the things I wanted. Yeah, I know you're using a pseudonym, but do you have any plugs? Check out the Great Wall of China. I'm really into that. I will always... Hit up some late Ming.

I will pretty much only some late Ming I will pretty much only ever plug Do Not Eat if somebody doesn't listen to the Do Not Eat podcast or YouTube channel please do he is the only good LPR he is doing a let's play of City Skylines but he is actually

a curmudgeonly Marxist urban planning professor that actually sounds very interesting so you know uh he's got an amazing video on uh why uh elon musk's hyperloop is an absolute fucking joke and would probably just get hundreds if not thousands of people killed but even if it managed to overcome the insurmountable legal difficulties. No, he was going to build it through the middle of freeway. That was his original plan. He was going to build a private bus.

Excellent ones on prison labor and water distribution and even a very, very fun video on the Killdozer. Oh, yeah. Oh, is that the guy who got real pissed off and built his own tank and destroyed the mayor's house? That's the Killdozer. That's the Killdozer. This insane libertarian small business owner

got into a zoning dispute over years and eventually he just welded metal plates to a bulldozer and went around and tried to destroy his town before killing himself. Yeah, they just heard a muffled pop in there and it didn't move anymore and they had to weld it open to find his body. Yeah, yeah.

Killdozer is one of the few things on the internet that makes me think bipartisanship is still possible. Because every day on the anniversary of Killdozer bipartisanship is still possible because every day on the anniversary of killdozer you'll see every fringe obscure libertarian but also socialist community celebrating this where he like fucking built a tank and destroyed all of his enemies in the town government well he's a it's a very fun episode but the the gist of it is that he was actually significantly crazier like a lot of his problem was that he was uh he was much of his anger came out of the town would come up to him and say you need to have a genuine plumbing system that goes into the municipal waste

and he would say no fuck you i'm going to just shit in this submerged cement mixer and you just and i'm gonna diy septic tank yeah use the diy septic tank that occasionally just gets dumped into the water supply and he's like this is this is the hill i will literally die on is i have the right to pollute the municipal water source and not use the municipal waste system. I have a right to not having a real toilet. I'm just imagining he's showing them the exact text of Murray Rothbard where he says you can do that. Yeah.

I don't want to live in a world where I can't shit into. So it's actually way more fun and hilarious when you realize that he was actually just like he was he was just a huge libertarian maniac like just like absolutely the kind of guy who like quotes john galt regularly uh which makes me feel much less bad about the fact that it didn't work out for him um that he was totally unsuccessful uh but yeah, that's my only plug. Do not eat's really good. All right. Everyone listen to Do Not Eat, but still listen to us.

Yeah, thank you, Finn. And I guess if you guys have, if you, the listener, have employment questions, you could hit us up, grubstakerspodcast at gmail.com, and maybe we'll do some sort of follow-up in the future with Finn. Because, you know, it's hard out there. We know we're all just trying to survive.

So hit us up. Let us know if you have questions or just comments. And maybe we'll revisit this topic in the not-so-distant future. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. It was great being here. Thanks for listening. Bye.

Bye-bye. Thank you. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you