Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Inside the strange world of corporate influencers

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Taylor explores the inner workings of modern office life through the world of corporate influencers. She’s joined by Ross Pomerantz aka ‘Corporate Bro’, a successful corporate influencer who simultaneously parodies the entire genre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We've all been on LinkedIn and seen some bro that we used to work with, waxing poetic about leveling up in B2B sales. Or watch one of those Day in the Life TikToks about what it's like to work for a fang company. Corporate influencers are having a moment. Some of it's cringe, but some of it's actually helpful in terms of understanding the inner workings of modern office life or making fun of it. We're salespeople. We partied too hard in college and graduated with no hard skills. We're salespeople. We're just a number.

We're salespeople. Quot is too high. the product sucks and marketing doesn't do shit. We're salespeople. We probably make more money than you. We're salespeople. We know you don't like us. We don't even like us. Here to help us understand a little bit more about it all is a man who does both. Ross Pomerance goes by the alter ego corporate bro. He's a successful corporate influencer in his own right while simultaneously parodying the entire genre. Ross, welcome to power user. Thanks for having me. Okay, so first I want to explain to people what is a corporate influencer. I feel like you're part of this burgeoning class of content creators making

content about the workplace. Tell me a little bit about sort of what it means to be a corporate influencer and how you got into all of this. Candidly, I think I started before most corporate influencers. I started in 2013 on Vine. So I was corporate bro back on Vine. And I was doing it alongside my role, which was sales rep at Oracle, which is the mega huge software company based in the Bay Area, but they've got offices all around the world. And essentially, It was catharsis for my job. My job was really hard. It was really shitty at times.

And I was that kid who grew up making home movies for my friends. So regardless of what I was doing, you know, from playing pool basketball in college and me making highlight reels for my, you know, the house I lived in, all the dudes I lived to make movies as a kid with my cousins whenever they'd come into town. It was similar. I just decided to make vines about my life working a corporate job. So the key of looking busy is just walk around looking really pissed. Ooh, check out that LinkedIn request.

Daddy like. She wants to boom. She's like 50. Oh, she's still got it. That is crazy. You were in the content game early. How autobiographical is this character? Because I feel like you really express these intricacies of office dynamics so well.

Yeah, I would say corporate bro represented all the things I wish I could have said to people's faces. I remember my, it was one in the first week there. I remember walking around, I was at this place called Twin Dolphin, which is essentially a frat house with a dress code that was across the street from the main orc. campus and I was walking with one of my buddies. I was like, dude, everybody here is just a corporate bro. Everybody was 20 to 40 years old selling million dollar deals to companies that they had no business talking to, selling technologies they had no understanding of, and somehow was making the world go around. And I got a role in business development, which I was like, yeah, I'm down to develop some business. What does that mean? And day one, it turned out it was cold

calling in sales. So I was a washed up athlete. I was playing baseball, minor league baseball before that and you know ended up finding myself around a lot more washed up athletes as well and so i would say it was documenting a lot of the things i went through from back in the day we had wired headsets so you'd have it around your neck and someone would be like hey let's go to lunch and you'd be like all right cool you get up and it would choke you out for a second or the chairs that lean back too far there's a lot of bullshit in the corporate world and i was like am i the only one seeing this like what's going on here and so uh the character corporate pro was my way of calling it out without it being Ross. In fact, nobody knew my real name until about 2020. I kept it secret.

So tell me about your evolution. I mean, are you still working that corporate job? Are you doing content creation full time? When did you make that transition? And when did you really start to take off? I feel like I didn't find you until you were on TikTok. So I worked my way up the ladder up until managing a few people. And then I decided to go to business school. And obviously, after business school is when I decided to make the leap in 2020. I, that's when I graduated. I probably could have left earlier, but I think part of me was scared. Part of me was like, I should go to film school. In fact, I applied to film school. I was about to go to Second City Film School in Chicago when I was fortunate enough to get into Stanford. And I called the admissions director

at Second City. They were like, dude, what are you doing? Go to Stanford, obviously. Because that was a huge conundrum in my life. Do I chase the passion of content creation and creativity? Or do I continue down this business path? And fortunately, I've sort of combined the two. So I still do a lot of consulting work with early stage to large companies as big as Salesforce, Microsoft, around Go to Market Strategy, Brand Strategy, Social Strategy, and sales for a lot of early stage startups. So I keep my ear to the streets. I'm still very much close to the game, but I do not carry a quota anymore. I left that world in 2020. Amazing. So what role did Instagram play in all of this and LinkedIn?

So as Vine disappeared, I can't remember if it was around 2014, 2015. It started to sunset. You kind of see the writing on the wall. I was like, I don't want to lose it. my videos and right at that moment, Instagram released video, it was up to 15 seconds. And so Vine, I was like, six seconds. Okay, I can make one joke of video. 15 seconds. Whoa, I can, now I can make two, maybe even three if I make this quick enough. And so I started transferring my videos over there. I started shooting new ones, longer ones, sort of developing the characters a little bit. I started bringing in a manager character, a few other like recurring sales rep, which were just my friends, people I worked with and family. Like my manager was actually my little brother for the longest

time and Instagram jumped to one minute. Like that was kind of the big the big one for me. But then I realized, wait a second, all my target audience is on LinkedIn. So I kind of have a long saga with LinkedIn. I started on LinkedIn posting videos like 2014, 15. I'm not going to say it was off color content, but it was comedy. So it was not buttoned up professional content. Yes, it was about the professional world, but it was certainly not professional in a lot of ways. I actually got kicked off that platform in 2019. You're I kicked off LinkedIn? I got banned off LinkedIn.

I had a big following on LinkedIn and they kicked me off for not being a real person. But Instagram was the big one for me. It's still the biggest one for me. I will say the dollars have switched. I charge the most for LinkedIn because there's two pieces of LinkedIn. There's the Ross Pomerant's LinkedIn. There's the guy who plays corporate bro, the Stanford MBA, the consultant, the advisor for companies. And then there's a corporate bro page.

So I've sort of delineated between the two. and that's been a big piece of trying to grow my brand around. A lot of people call me corp. I'm corporate bro, but I think a lot of people also struggle to get past the name corporate bro. They think I'm a huge corporate douchebag, which, like, I make fun of that. I think a lot of people are quick to say,

we don't like whatever he's doing, but they don't watch because it's entirely satire. I'm entirely making fun of this world. I've been making fun of tech basically since day one. So that's why I've been trying to kind of build the Ross brand as well, and LinkedIn's been a huge part of that. I want to kind of dive deep on LinkedIn with you today, because it is such a weird platform to me.

I'm fascinated by it. I feel like, I mean, kind of like you witness, it had this evolution of kind of being buttoned up, serious place. And then they really started to lean into sort of the engagement metrics that I feel like all the rest of social media was defined by, where you started to see people doing this sort of engagement bait, you started to see the rise of more personality-driven content. And now, like you mentioned, they have this creators program.

Yeah. So I wrote, I think back it was 2017, or 2018 about the rise of LinkedIn broitry. Are you familiar with what broitry is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The self-serving, like, you know, like humbled and honored type stuff, the, like, cringy, motivational, like, but very contrived, like, posting on LinkedIn. Yes. I'll just read this one to you for now. It's from this guy. He's a co-founder, three-time's author, top core writer of 2017. job Cora.

He said, I don't want him working remote. Today, I sent an offer letter to him. We want to hire the best. We like hiring people we work next to. When we hire friends, we see more creative energy in the workplace. It's not perfect. It's harder to let friends go, but it's all worth it. Hiring has been the hardest part of growing a business.

You invest so much time, then don't see ROI. Then with some hires, you see it right away. We're not experts. This is honestly nonsensical. It sounds to me like it was written by chat GPT. I don't even know what this means. That's a whole other thing we could talk about too now with Chad GPT. Well, what is the point of broatry?

Like, why do these people sort of frame these business success stories? Because it does seem like a lot of corporate bro type people posting this content. You know, in your best, I guess, as a sort of connoisseur of corporate content, what does broatry achieve? I think something like this is honestly partially born out of the barstool model. I think it's a slight adaptation of, let's say something controversial, let's say something like kind of annoying. and counterculture and then not apologize for it, you know, to try and stoke a reaction, stoke engagement. It's engagement farming at the end of the day, you know, and there may be some people out there who do agree with it. And then you get arguments in the comments and, you know,

some people latch on to it. It's an interesting strategy because people talk about this word community and they talk about it, trying to build communities and so forth. But community, while intended to be inclusive, is fundamentally exclusive. It's right. We're trying to build a certain group of people that we want there and also dissuade those that we don't. And I think, posts like this are trying to do exactly that. They're trying to find some people who are like, yeah, that's why I hire my boys, like, because all of us like crushed together. Like, that's what we're about out here. And there are some people who genuinely subscribe to that, unfortunately, you know, like you could just talk about this post reeks in bias, right? Like hiring

people just exactly like you, you're going to get the same thing over and over again and you're going to get no diverse ideas and so on and so forth. But I just think that's the whole point is to try and stoke a reaction. And you see it across a lot of social now. I mean, you see it in journalism. You see so and so slammed blank. And then you go read the article. They didn't slam them. They said a very thoughtful, like, you know, quote about why they disagree. Yeah. Understand. It's like we slam, we destroy. It's all these words. So that's what I think. There's some sort of like, I feel like it got so often on LinkedIn, though, there's this positive sort of like hustle, culture, inspirational, like sheen on all of that kind of drama. Tell me a little bit about the CEO crying,

because this was a really famous LinkedIn post, I think, from a year or so ago. Yeah. Do you remember what happened? This guy basically laid some people off and then made a post about it and posted a selfie of himself crying. That's effectively what it was. So naturally, I went and made a video, made a video like talking about it. There's a lot of the videos I do come out of some sort of news story and then I will spoof it in some sort of way. How to go viral on LinkedIn.

And he went crazy viral for it. It was like, one of the hardest days of my life. Like I had to let these people go who I just. I fundamentally loved and posted a picture of himself crying. And it was so inwardly focused. It was so selfish. It was so like pity me. Like it's so hard to be CEO when I like fired these people rather than focusing on how

great these people were or are. They need jobs like that type of thing. So it went wildly viral. It got picked up in mainstream media and fostered a huge discussion on like what is being made on LinkedIn. It's so funny because immediately I think I saw people defending it. I saw other kind of entrepreneurs, especially on Twitter being like, Like, we do need to talk about this.

It is hard to lay people off. And it's like, sure, it is. But like you said, I think the framing of the post was so sort of inward looking. He said, I know this isn't professional to tell my employees that I love them. But from the bottom of my heart, I hope that they know how much I do. Every single one, their families, their friends, their hobbies. And it's like, you just fired these people. And it was almost like he seemed to be trying to elicit sympathy for himself.

Yeah, for himself. I have a hard time with this. A lot of people come to me to be like the truth sayer, the, the arbiter of justice on LinkedIn, like this person's going after this person, this thing is happening there. Like, Corp, bro, come in here and lay down the hammer and, like, say who's right, who's wrong here. And I will say, like, it is hard to fire people. I don't think CEOs want to fire people. I don't think, like, I do think a lot of them care about their people and want to see their

organizations grow. But, like, don't do it from your yacht, you know? Like, don't do it from your mansion in Jackson Hole. don't show up late to an all-hands meeting where everybody's basically sitting there to say who's on the chopping block today. And that's a major company that may or may not work with Matthew McConaughey. I think there was just a lot of misses and a lot of out-of-touch deliveries on those things as the layoffs were happening. Because I still at the end of the day, I do think it's hard. I don't think there's a right way to do it or a perfect way to do it.

Some people got laid off over Zoom. Some people's slacks just got shut off. Their badge stopped working. But like there's never a good way or a right way. It was an HR person, not even their manager. There's a lot of things that were done horribly, horribly wrong. But I do still think it's hard. I don't think they want to do it.

They're not all bad people. There's just so much out of touch bullshit. I mean, I feel like one thing that LinkedIn has really done, especially as it's evolved to be more creator-focused, is just try to sort of train people to focus on their personal brands. It seems like every CEO now has to be their own brand. What sort of changes are you noticing in terms of power dynamics in these corporate environments with everyone trying to be an influencer?

It just means there's a lot more fluff. There's a lot more BS. It's becoming more and more saturated. I still think LinkedIn has so much opportunity for people. I think a good personal brand on LinkedIn is extremely lucrative, extremely valuable. You know, it's no different than building your brand anywhere else. It opens up opportunities and people want to work with you. They feel like they know you. You can build trust. There's a lot of great things that can come out of it. I do think still today, a lot of the best people who are the best at what they do spend their day doing that and not posting about it. I feel like everyone has. to be an influencer now and especially with like corporate influencers. I mean, it just seems like everyone has to document everything. Do you remember when there was the rise of sort of a day in my life of Fang employee and then people were vlogging there, you know, lunches or whatever at Google? It just seems like we've now entered in this stage of the content creation economy, I guess, where you do have to have a sort of audience or reputation or like that girl that got laid off. How do you think young people especially should navigate that balance and like where do you see this going? And what does this mean for corporate environments?

First of all, I agree 100% that building a personal brand is almost table stakes nowadays, especially if you're an early stage startup. It's a way to get in front of potential customers. It's a way to explain what you do in a like not necessarily selling direct sales, direct marketing kind of way. A lot of times these companies, people will build their brands while at the bottom of the totem pole, they'll be like, hey, I'm talking about my life at work. I'm helping bring value to this company. I should be paid for it, or they're going to go off and do their own thing eventually. Case and point right here in front of me. I mean, both of us in a lot of way.

In a sense, too, you're also using your company for cloud. I mean, if you're vlogging yourself as a day in the life of a Googler, for instance, like you're kind of using the company itself to grow your personal brand, which, of course, we all do to an extent, right? We use our work experience to build this narrative about ourselves. But I guess, like, I wonder if you've noticed companies sort of changing policies on any of that stuff. I've definitely noticed news organizations have cracked down, but do you see any other sort of corporate places like Salesforce or these other big companies

trying to get a handle on their employees' content creation? I haven't seen it from a policy. Granted, I'm not in the day to day there. I haven't seen it from like, no one's coming from a policy standpoint and been like, I was told it is against company rules for me to do this. I do think people are still wary because it's not that difficult to go viral for a bad reason. and say something that you didn't mean. I've had it happen to me, have someone pull a quote, take it completely out of context, and the internet runs away with it because they don't bother to read the rest of it or do any research.

I think people are nervous about that to put themselves out there. It is a humbling and raw and vulnerable experience to put yourself out online. It is because someone's always got something to say. I do think companies are going to find themselves treating those employees a lot like athletes, where they either need to pay them. to stick around or, no, let's just let them go. Let them kind of run away. It's going to be sort of a not influencer for hire, but yeah, I guess I'll treat it

kind of like athletes. Yeah. Do you see companies having their own, like, in-house corporate influencers? I've seen a lot of companies trying to do that. But inevitably what happens is they allow them or they want them to be those influencers, but they're paying them for a different role, right? They're like, it might be ahead of sales, but they're building a huge personal brand. They're like, we love this.

Like, we're going to get you in front of this. this and this, but they're still just getting paid to be ahead of sales. And then they get really big and the head of sales is like, hey, I'm like kind of doing multiple jobs here. Can you pay me a lot more considering how many eyeballs I'm getting on the company? And they're like, oh, wait, no. And they leave. So it's hard. You can incubate someone, but they're going to get big enough and leave unless you do something to keep them. I think that's been the biggest issue. And a lot of companies come to me and they're like, yeah, we're building up these, these folks internally. Some are better than others, in my opinion, and they have all left. They've all gotten big enough and been like, I'm going to

take a job. I got another company noticed me and was going to pay me a lot more to do the same job. Which content from big time corporate influencers do they create on their own? Because I think there was a job posting that somebody tweeted a while ago about some Silicon Valley VC looking to have somebody run his Twitter account. I used to do ghost writing actually for a CEO on LinkedIn. I know that this is like a lot of these big time people. There's no way they're creating. all of the content that they're creating, I would imagine. How much of this is also just like smoke and mirrors and building personal brands for people that maybe even aren't posting themselves?

I think there's more of it than people realize. But I will say now with AI, there's a lot more of that now. Like I know a huge VC who has a Hollywood writer who writes all of his speeches, all of his, like, tweets, all of his, like... What? He's like Hollywood screenwriter. And he's like a hilarious. He writes a lot, you know, he wrote for like Kimmel and like a few of the other

late night folks, but he, you know, he contracts him out and says, hey, like, I need you, I've got a speech I'm given. Hey, I've got some like content I want to post about. The guy whips it up. He gives him the interviews him, gives him the details. The guy whips it up. You know, goes back to him. He might make a few tweaks. Like, that's where we're at now. And it's interesting. Like, I think writing and good writing is still extremely undervalued and underappreciated. You can find writers for fairly cheap, especially including accomplished writers, which is disappointing, in my opinion as the... Catch me writing, you know, CEO's LinkedIn spam, I guess, in six months if my journalism career doesn't... I mean, who knows what kind of... There may be huge money in that at some point.

I still don't think AI's gotten good enough to take over good writers. Like, it's enough to put something out. When we come back, we're going to talk about how AI is taking over LinkedIn and the future of corporate influencers. Let's get into AI because my entire link... LinkedIn feed is just AI at this point. Like, it is indistinguishable. And it seems like so many people are leveraging chat GPT. What do you think AI is doing to the platform and this whole sort of corporate influence world? I mean, it's flooding it with bullshit, frankly.

You can just tell when something is written by chat GPT. It's like corny. It feels like it's written by a stone fifth grader. People who have a unique writing style, it makes them stand out a lot more. Like, you can just tell. And now there's all these rise of influencers who are AI experts, how to leverage. AI and of course like everybody's trying to figure out how to leverage AI. I do believe we're underestimating how big AI and how important it's going to be in the next 10 years, but we're

overestimating it in the short term. It may speed up some things, but it doesn't create genius content. Like it doesn't have the human soul in it. It doesn't create. Yeah, which is ironically what made that broatry so compelling was that it was weirdly emotional or like almost psychopathic. Like there was just like. NAR-specific as hell. Yeah. Like this human intensity to it. that has been so watered down by the rise of the chat GPT stuff, which I think is going to prove a problem for LinkedIn. Like, I don't think that this AI content is as engaging as sort of the OG broitry. LinkedIn stated in a recent earnings call that people engage with over 1.5 million pieces of content per minute on the platform with uploads growing 34% year over year. How do you see

this flood of content affecting the creator landscape and just the user experience of LinkedIn? It gives me YouTube 2010 vibes. It gives me like Instagram like pre-interest-based algorithm vibes. It feels like what they're trying to do is promote so much content generation so that they can train their algorithms. And they're like suggestion algorithms. It's a problem right now. But what I do think LinkedIn's really good at is showing you the things you've opted into, unlike Instagram and unlike where it decides if your own followers who have opted into you will get to see your content, which I think is still madness. LinkedIn's also been leaning very hard into video.

They've been encouraging creators to post videos. They have this sort of short form video carousals now in LinkedIn. Do you think that this platform will successfully pivot to video? I mean, are we looking at the next sort of Instagram or YouTube? You know, you compare it to YouTube in 2010. Do you think that eventually LinkedIn will just be primarily video? I do. I think there will still be a place for it because I don't know what the future of Twitter, because

I'm not going to call it that. I'm not going to call it X. I don't know what the future of that looks like. I do think they will be a hybrid of both, but I still think video is more engaging for people. It's more eye-catching. It's more likely that someone's going to stop as they scroll. Like just the fact that a video is whatever this big on a screen

as they more and more people use mobile, it's a better chance that someone's going to stop. So like it just is better. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it's much more engaging. I think a lot of video takes more resources to produce. And a lot of these big people on LinkedIn are not used to producing video. So I think it'll reshift the power dynamics on that.

platform. It's interesting you mentioned Twitter slash X because when Twitter died, I remember people saying that LinkedIn is actually going to be the biggest beneficiary or rather when it rebranded, Elon took it over. Do you think that that's panned out? I mean, do you think that all of those people, because massive amounts of Twitter users have left the platform since Elon took over? Yeah. Have those people gone to LinkedIn? I mean, is LinkedIn the biggest sort of winner of the whole Twitter debacle? It's hard to know. You know, like every time I log in, to Twitter, I see a lot of things I don't really want to see and didn't really opt in to seeing. What Twitter slash X allows on its platform is not really something LinkedIn would allow in their

guidelines and so forth. I think a lot of those posts would get taken down. I think they would get labeled as misinformation and removed. It's hard for me to know because LinkedIn has put such an emphasis on growth and content. I don't know if it's because they put more effort and resources into that or if it's because some folks have come over from X slash Twitter. I will just go ahead and say, I think that they were the winner. I think that there was huge parts of- I think they're the winner too. I just don't know.

Corporate people used to be on Twitter in a way that I don't think they are anymore. And I do think LinkedIn is sort of cleaved off a lot of that. LinkedIn also has its own version of substack. And you recently started a newsletter. I think it's called Silly Valley News, which love the name. What made you start a newsletter on LinkedIn specifically? Yeah. I mean, I started it on Beehive originally, originally.

It's the Beehive experience, not an ad. just a better customization, better platform. However, it's one more thing for my followers, fans, whatever you want to call them, to opt into. On LinkedIn, it's already built into the ethos of where a lot of people follow me, where they get my information. When someone adds you on LinkedIn or follows you on LinkedIn, they are immediately suggested your newsletter.

And given that I put all the video out there, like it and people are following me every day, it's way easier for me to convert those folks. So, you know, I have like 25,000 readers on, LinkedIn. That happened in a month and a half, two months, whereas I think I did two months on Beehive and I was around 5,000 total. I had to keep begging. So for corporate influencer landscape as a whole in, you know, 24, I feel like it's gotten more competitive. More people are aware that you can be a corporate influencer. Everyone wants to get into the game.

Where should people start? Is the path to Sardom still through LinkedIn? Can you blow up on Instagram in 2024. Is there some other platform that we don't know about, you know, that business people are connecting on? The short answer is there's still room on Instagram. LinkedIn came out and said very specifically they're trying to avoid virality. Maximum morality. They basically-

I don't believe that for a second. Yeah, which I think is silly because I'm seeing these videos that are blowing up. Maybe it's by some order of magnitude against Instagram, which there's just less users on LinkedIn. So maybe that's what they're saying. But I think there's room on both. And I would say video content is where the money is. It's where people see your personality.

Yes, it takes more to do. But you don't have to go to an office on a weekend and get your friends and family and script something and have two cameras and then do all the editing. You can, talking head totally works. A light and a phone will totally work for you. And I always tell people, it's just the act of getting going. It's an analysis paralysis. Everybody's like, is this perfect? Is that perfect?

Like honestly, a little screw up in there ads engagement. Wait, I saw that your hat. Wait, you, and people love to comment on the messups in my videos. And I'm like, good. Sometimes I put them in there intentionally. So they engage with it. Yeah. What do you think is like the biggest bullshit facing the business world today?

I still think the glass ceiling is a problem. I still think like diversity is a huge, huge problem, especially in tech. You know, I think there's a lot of virtue signaling is a huge problem. There's a lot of people who want to fake the things that matter and say that they're leaning the things that matter and don't, a lot of companies that are doing that. What about hustle culture? Because I feel like so much of corporate influence or promoting yourself as a worker is intertwined with hustle culture. So I'm probably guilty of hustle culture, like just doing that myself. I just, I am addicted to work and it's a problem. I'm working

through in therapy right now. It's not something I really want to brag about. I actually do think it's flipping the other way now. I think people are talking more about how cool it is to not work. I'm seeing a lot more of that than the hustle culture. I think people are laughing. Like, hustle culture is corny now. You're right. Like, it's kind of lame now to be that way. Or those are the people that are most mocked online.

Like, no one, we all agree that, like, we don't want to work. And none of us should have to work. Right. Like, is that a crime? Like, not all of us want to work. Some people need money to live the life they want to live. And that's okay. Yeah.

That's okay. So I think it's switching. I actually do think it's kind of going the opposite direction. I, you know, it's case by case. but hustle culture in a nutshell, like it has a negative connotation now. I think it's a joke. There's been so much sort of humorous portrayal

of workplaces in media. We had Dilbert, the comic, obviously the show The Office. Now we have this generation of corporate influencers. Where do you see things going next? I think there's just going to be more corporate influences. I think we'll just continue to show. What a dystopian world, Ross.

I, look, there's, social media has created a very, very strange ecosystem of life. And like, I don't even, I can't even imagine where we're going to be in 20 years. I'm curious your thought on where we'll be in 20 years. Will some of these platforms be gone? Will the new ones rise? I mean, I feel like that's kind of always an ebb and flow in life. But what, like, what do you think it's going to be in 20 years? I don't know, but I do think people have less of a sort of tied to their jobs. This has been a shifting thing among generations. But it's interesting to see the rise of corporate influencers at the same time that young people have less and less sort of emotional attachment to their jobs and that they're

more likely to switch jobs. Yeah, the loyalty piece is huge. People today are way less loyal to their jobs than even 20 years ago. And yet we're seeing these corporate influencers where their whole job is their, it's so tied to their online persona and their personal brand. No, it is. It is. But you're also, like, the sad truth now is the best way to get a raise is to leave your company.

Of course. Or like a valuable raise, a useful raise because all the raises people get by staying are negligible. Of course. You know, so why stay? What's the loyalty for? No, you should never have loyalty to any company ever. Yeah. That's delusional. That's something that died with our, you know, parents' generation, I feel like. And I don't even know if it was ever really fair back then either. But, you know, there's a lot of also, I mean, salary transparency is a big discussion. I feel like in the corporate influence world. And I've seen a lot more efforts to kind of share and trade information. seen these scripts that people use and share now online to get yourself a raise or to negotiate

certain benefits. And I think that that's pretty good. I mean, I think people are doing a lot more information sharing. And we all kind of work together in this workplace of the internet. Right. I definitely think it's net positive. You know, it's the power has always really been in, on the side of corporations. And so any corporate influencers are actually sort of shifting the power dynamic almost away from corporations and sort of definitely definitely i mean i think it's like you said now that the loyalty has kind of dissipated nearly entirely people have no issue like you know hammering their company for the bullshit as they rightly should and everybody agrees and if nothing else it's created a good discussion yes a necessary one forced evolution we're in a

new age now it's just this is how it is and i think a lot of old school folks it's always how it goes right the boomers in this case, like they're out of touch in another 20, 30 years, I'll be completely out of touch. I won't know what the hell's going on. This is just how it goes. This is the process. But I, again, given the rate of which technology has been growing and developing, I have no idea what it's going to look like. Yeah. Well, by then, I'll be working on AI farms or something. Our AI holograms will be making the content for us. All right, Roswell, thanks for chatting with me today and we'll see you out there on LinkedIn. Appreciate you. Talk to you soon. All right, that's the show.

You can watch full episodes on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larchick and Jelani Carter. Our video editor is Brandon Kiefer and this is Brandon's last episode. So Brandon, thank you so much for all of your hard work. Our executive producer is Zach Mack. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like this show, give us a rating or review on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen. In the meantime, check out my new newsletter, usermag.com.

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