The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror by Alex Grass

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Infernal Tramps: Tales of Weird Terror by Alex Grass Infernaltramps.com https://www.amazon.com/Infernal-Tramps-Tales-Weird-Terror/dp/B0H3QQ2J9Q A boy discovers his father’s oracular grotesque in a secret dungeon below their family funeral home. An antique spiked collar transforms Philadelphia into a city that worships a dead dog. A video game dominates the market for years and then disappears, except for one man’s memories of its horrors. A mother with a trunkful of hungry, inhuman babies tracks down the family that abandoned them. The warden of a penal colony offers to pardon a murderer, but only if the inmate can find the antidote to the poison wine the warden gave him. A wealthy young woman receives a surgical implant that delivers more than just a shapely body. Step into a world of fleshly titillation and fresh terror, a dimension of blood and consequence. But buyer beware! Crack the spine and these dark tales are not so easily forgotten. And you may find yourself changing into a beast of insatiable hunger, a tormented sinner, a lunatic on the fringe. Heed this warning, that what once is read cannot be unread. Turn back now, if you can, or else become one of the… Infernal Tramps! About the author Alex Grass was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three kids.

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hosts and Voss here from thecrispaw Show.com. Ladies gentlemen, the early instincts that makes official. Welcome to Monday morning on the Chris Voss Show. Of course, if you're watching this 5 to 10 years from now, I might not be Monday, but it'll be a day, assuming the world's still spinning. Look at the show, my good friends. For 16 years, 3,000 episodes, we were bringing the longest running podcast in existence that still does podcast every day. So,

stick with us in August. I think we're going to hit the big 17. Anyway, guys, go to goodreads.com, Fortezschristch, Christvost, LinkedIn.com, Forteschischristvost, YouTube. YouTube.com, Forteschisclis, and wherever the hell else we are on the internet. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be an endorsement or review of any kind. Today, we're an amazing lady on the show. We're going to be talking about her book from Wiley, Books, if you're familiar with their business books, Air Book is entitled, Effective, How to Do Great Work, How to Do Great Work,

in a fast-changing world by Melissa Swift. We're going to be talking to her on the show about her insights and all that good stuff. Melissa is a leading voice in how organizations, teams, and individuals can succeed in an ever more challenging world of work as founder and CEO of Anthromy Insight. Did I pronounce that right, Melissa? Anthrom. Anthrom. Enite.

I learn new stuff every day. She is a consultant and keynote speaker helping organizations make their people are successful in a chaotic times. Are these chaotic times? Yeah, I can't. I can't feel my legs. She's held leadership roles at several organizations. She's author of the aforementioned book and a previous book called Work Here Now.

Think like a human and build a powerhouse workplace out in 2023. Boy, I could give that book to some people because I find people who clearly aren't outbraining like a human or using their frontal lobe or their brain. A joke. Anyway, you guys, Melissa, welcome the show. How are you? I'm good.

I'm excited to be here. We're excited to have you. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Yeah, so at www. www.anthroem. That's A-N-T-H-R-O-M-E and then the word insight. Dot com.

And, of course, you can find me, Melissa Swift on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. I'm getting a bit active on Instagram and M-E-Swift 1 and Effective. And also a tiny bit on TikTok as well. Oh. Growing in reach. Yeah, that TikTok is getting popular with the kids there, eh? Yeah.

So effective, you want me to start working? I'm just slumming it over at work doing that. What do they call that thing where you just show up at work? You don't only do anything. Oh, the quiet quitting. The quiet quitting. I'm just showing up phoning it in. Tell us about all this work I need to start doing.

Yeah, no, it's interesting. Effective came out of actually the question that people, started asking me after my first book, after work here now. People were kind of like, okay, Melissa, you've got some great solutions here for organizations and teams, and you've really characterized this problem. This issue of work right now is just really gruesome and hard to do, and we're stuck in meetings all the time. There's too many emails and everyone misunderstands each other. All this garbage, right? We're like waiting through garbage, right? You got it. You characterized it. Okay, but what can I personally do? People kept asking it. I'm like,

Okay, that's a good question. I am asking myself this question, right? That's the fun thing about being a consultant on work is we all do it, right? There's not, I'm not like I'm standing over here on the sidelines. I'm thinking of the game myself. So effective was my answer to that question. What makes us affect, what actually makes us good at our jobs? I thought that was a really fundamental question that I didn't see a lot of great answers to. And then what are the forces we're fighting against? What are the things? that we actually have to combat and what are the strategies we used to combat that stuff. And so what are some strategies that you found to become more effective there in the workplace?

First of all, I think you have to actually know what you're good at. What? And that, I know, and it sounds, it's one of those simple but not easy things. Famously, people are actually bad at this. People are actually bad at evaluating what they're good. So what I recommend in the book is there are four simple things you might be good at, and you need to look at how people are reacting to you and working with you, right? Other people are going to get a view of the answer. So, for instance, if you're good at one of the categories is knowledge, you're good at knowledge. If people have been treating you like start off treating you like the library, then treated you like Google, now they treat you like flawed, right? If people are asking you for

answers to knowledge questions all the time, knowledge might be what you're good at. If you're the person who's called in to solve weird operational problems, like every time something's on fire, you're the person that gets called in. you're probably good at methods, right? You're like a strong operator. Yeah. With people crying in your office, you're probably good with people, right? You've created a safe space.

If people treat you like the IT department, even though you're not the IT department, then you're probably good with technology. Four kind of simple things. But once you start to understand where your center of gravity is, that's really step one. I'm very much a fan of strength-based management. I don't think it's like, okay, Melissa, here are all your people. problems, go fix them. It's more like, what are you good at and just go double down on that? Like, it's not mess around with flagellating ourselves for all the things we might not be amazing at.

Yeah. And so focus on what you're good at. There's, there are a lot of people that sometimes are misplaced in the job positions. We used to try and move top salespeople into management, sales management positions. And boy, that would always fail epically because they're two different sort of mindsets. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I actually have a whole chapter on, are you in a situation where you might not be able to be effective? Because if you're that salesperson sitting in that wrong job, right, where you were like this amazing producer and now you're the boss of all the salespeople and you hate it and it's not going well. Again, there's a stop the madness point of, okay, it's not you.

It's the, and a lot of these roles are just broken too. I think that's a kind of a classic thing. We've all been in a job, right? I'm sure you had one point in your career, but you're like, this job is broken, right? There's something wrong with this job. And you have to have the acuity to say,

okay, I'm going to a broken job. I can continue improving myself until the cows come home, but it's not going to fix the job. Yeah, yeah. If it's just a broken function and not working. Now, who's the book targeted towards? It's targeted CEOs, managers,

people oversee other people. Who is it targeted to? A lot of CEOs, design the workforce and workplace, maybe HR does a little bit. But who's the core readers of this book that you want to have look at it? Well, I wanted to create something that would have actionable insights for people at a lot of different levels. At the end of each chapter, I've actually got things that everyone can do, your strategies everyone can do. Here's strategies you can do if you lead a team.

And then here's strategies you can do if you're actually a leader within the organization, right? If you're the big boss. The big guy. Yeah. Because I think that's important. One of the interesting things, I did a piece of research last year on something called work intensification, which is basically like where work has become too much. We've all experienced it. Again, it's a very real phenomenon.

And one of the interesting things that came out of that was that the C-suite, the most senior people and companies, just like the rest of us are overloaded with just tasks. They literally just have too many pieces of work to do. It's not like a strategic thing. It's not a complexity thing. they just have too much work. And that really clicked on a light switch for me. And I said, okay, we need ground level insights that everybody in it, because you can be a CFO, you can be a CEO,

and you still have some of these just basic problems with work that a frontline worker would have. And that's fascinating to me. Yeah. And so trying to be more effective, we were talking about this somebody recently. I think I was just talking about with a group people. I'm always getting up reopening somewhere. And it was about how much work we really do. I think it was a podcast of, I guess we had recently.

And I was talking about how I quit working on Fridays. And I switched my schedule to where I work really hard, eight, ten hours a day. Entrepreneur, it's 24-7 really when it comes down to it. You dream business. It's really annoying. And so basically, I'm technically always on. I'm always answering emails or dealing with issues. But I basically made it to where we do.

three shows a day with the show on Monday through Thursday, and then I get a three-day weekend. And I just, and I took Fridays off. And I am more productive with that schedule than I was at five days. And I was burning out hard. It would be, it would be like Sunday before the time I was trying, I was feeling the weekend. And I had unwound enough, right? And then you're like, we've got to ramp up and do it again. I can't even marinate the weekend.

And you just crash into Saturday. And so I found I was more effective at working less hours. A lot of companies or some countries are saying, hey, you can't contact people after hours. One of the big complaints I've had from all my friends since COVID started is, especially during COVID, we're doing like 12 to 20 Zoom calls a day. We can't even get work done. It's just endless Zoom meetings.

And we're just burning out like it's no way's going out of style. You addressing some of these issues that where people are way overloaded and management needs to look at it and go, yeah, we need to quit pushing it maybe. I don't know. I think what you're saying is very powerful. Similarly, I can figure actually my Fridays such that I do work on Fridays, but in general, I'm very minimal on Friday meetings for exactly that reason. I want the brain kind of outro. And I find that I sometimes have really good work in. insights during that quiet time because you use the word marinate. That really resonates for me

because your brain needs to kind of soak stuff in and you can't be on these back-to-back-to-back calls. You can't just be constantly taking back and forth on email and actually do some of the brainwork that makes us, again, that makes us actually good at our jobs. And we've prioritized remarkably so much since COVID. But I think the trend was kind of creeping up on us for a while, activity over the actual outputs of work. The great opportunity that you and I have as entrepreneurs is to say, okay, I'm going to actually prioritize outputs and I'm going to configure a working schedule that enables me to get done what I need to get done and is less focused on kind of

day-to-day march through a bunch of not very helpful meetings and responding to emails that are very procedural, et cetera, et cetera. And that's, it shows it can be done in kind of these limited moments. And then what I'm trying to do in the book is to show, okay, within a bigger corporate environment, what can you do? So as a, for example, one of the things that really burns people out is when work creeps into kind of what you need is family time, like dinner time on the weekday. You need to like, family needs to sit down for dinner or friend.

If you've got a standing meeting that always goes to bluey, again, we've all had that meeting, right? Every week, this meeting is like a complete zoo. So don't schedule it at the end of the day on Thursday or something. Don't have that meeting at 5 o'clock on Thursday. Don't have that meeting at 4.30 on Thursday. Put that meeting at 10 a.m. on Monday. So even if the meeting goes cabooey, you got all this time and space through the week, through the day, whatever it is to just absorb the fallout of the meeting. And it's sad that we have to do things like this. Many people would say, So why don't you say run a better meeting? Absolutely saying run a better meeting.

But you don't, again, you don't really have perfect control. And what you might have control over is saying, why do you align better with everyone's calendar to do this meeting at 10 a.m. on Monday? That might be what you have control over. And again, just try to minimize some of that fallout into time that you need to just refresh and be a human being and be with your family and stuff. Yeah. And that's really important today. Millennials were the people who kind of started this.

whole, I want something more than just the job. I want something that means something. I want something that makes a difference and stuff like that. And it's a thing where they want something more. And I think Gen Z is taking it to the next level. They want to, they want jobs that mean something in life, that goes someplace, all that, all that stuff. So yeah, it's something that's really important to people. But we're seeing a lot of burnout now. We're seeing a lot of layoffs that are going on. And I saw one thing that was interesting to me where what some of the tech companies are trying to do is they're trying to make AI operators, because that's how they kind of think about their new sort of employees, AI operators or AI agents or whatever that can do everything.

And I was like looking at it going, that seems like a hell of a lot of work for one person and a knowledge base they would have to have. Yeah, if you know how to do AI, but like I might know how to do marketing, but I don't know how to do HR. I don't know how to do, I don't know how to do other functions at the, I don't know how to be a secretary. Never been a secretary. I don't think. I don't know. When you're the CEO, you're the janitor and the secretary and everything else. But so, I don't know, it seems like, it seems like almost they're just making workloads harder for people and doubling it up and seeing how much they can push. It almost seems like they're just seeing how much they can push to overload employees and not have as many employees as

much as they can. I don't know. I heartily agree with you. And the interesting thing is there's a historical precedent. People are always like AI. It's unprecedented. It's totally precedent. We've been through multiple industrial revolutions, da-da-da-da. And I always compare this period in history to the early industrial revolution when it was just really a crummy time to be a worker. But factories would spontaneously catch on fire because there was like sodust all over the floor. Machines were just like being people's limbs off left. It was just gory and terrible. Really, if you want to not get a good night's sleep,

read about the early industrial revolution. And I think we're in an era like that again, to be honest. And just because it's not physical harm, we're not talking about it the same way, but to exactly your point, all of this messaging about, let's call down to a tiny number of human workers and give them technology that is honestly in some regards.

I'm so sorry to say this, not ready for prime time. until things like there, I've seen some very interesting technical argument saying that for instance, Gen AI might always hallucinate. We might not be able to fix the problem of it lying to us. And I always say if this was an intern, at a certain point you would fire them. You would literally fire your intern. They lied to you five times in one day. And you'd be like, Jimmy, it's not working out.

And so this confluence of factors of technology that's not quite right and an increasingly amount of pressure on humans. Again, it's like 1810 or something all over again. And those also coinciding with, by the way, there's some interesting research out of MIT. Human working hours have come on like this over human history. It's so interesting. They don't stay high and they don't stay low. They just researchers have found they just fluctuate. And the early industrial revolution was also a period of like, a pothically high working hours too. Oh, what does this sound like? It's very analogous to current conditions.

And what happened during that time was finally, finally, and this took a very long time, we had public-private consensus that it all needed to get reined in. We need safety standards in factories and people owning the companies. We're like, yeah, it's actually good if half my workers don't get killed all the time. That would be a good thing to have happened. And then we get this massive in the middle of the 20th century. The first of productivity because we just, we got humans and technology,

into alignment. And we got it all working together in the right way. And that's, that's what I'm hopeful for. I think it can be done. But I think we have a good case study on it happening, but it took some doing. Yeah. The, the, the interesting thing with the AI is it's developing so fast, laying off these people. And they want to, like I said, they want to stack up a bunch of work and try and make employees like an all in one. Because with AI, you can have different agents. So technically you're like a manager over a team, I suppose, and they're thinking. I guess, I don't know. But the challenge is that they don't have enough.

Now the problem is they don't have enough tokens for everybody, or it's so costly to give everyone tokens for AI usage that they're having to, they're having to, what's the right word? They're having to scavenger or parse those things out in very small amounts because it's so costly to use the tokens. And so they're having to give allotments and scarcity. And so I'm sitting there going, wait. Okay, so you guys are trying to make all in one,

employees that sounds like they can make a bunch of agents to do the job. So they're basically like, you're basically paying one person to be a team in your corporate. But then there's not enough tokens for them to do their job. Yeah, it's banana. You know what it is? We have these myths about human workers. We're like, humans are like this. Technology is like this. So humans are expensive and technology is cheap. Absolutely not. You're seeing the economics go totally upside down. There's also Humans are hard to manage and technology is easy to manage. So totally false, especially when you get into agentic AI, which has huge promise. I'm not against many of these.

I think these technologies are wonderful, but we've implemented them in a cuckoo for cocoa puffs way. Cuckoo for cocoa puffs. Remember those ads? Sorry, there's a very, very Gen X reference there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's bananas to say, you have these instances. instances, oops, the agent deleted the whole organization's data.

It was one of those recently. I think so, yeah, I think I saw that news. Yeah. They're like the new guy showed up and went, how come the, where's this database? Did I actually do that? Yeah. Yeah, I think I saw the jokes on LinkedIn for that. Oh, it's, it's hilarious because honestly, technology is built by humans.

So it's got all the same pluses and minus as humans, right? That it can be great. It can, it can screw up. It can be super cost effective used properly. It can be completely cost ineffective. And I think it's where we got to just do some myth busting and say, okay, if this is the actual work, just what combination of folks gets it done better?

And I also call in, I think people, some of people's dillier tendencies are starting to come out. So for instance, I heard a story recently about somebody putting their AI agents literally on the company's org chart, putting them into, Like when you go into teams, you can see who reports that person, they're like, these are all my agents. And come on, guys. This is the silly empire building stuff that anyone who's ever done org structure work is like, oh, not this again. And that's, it's not futuristic to put all the agents on the org chart.

It's just the same silliness as always. Look at my empire. But we've got to bring it back in. Yeah. What do you, what more do you propose that people do with this data? Do they need to, orcharts or demands of jobs? And are we really overloading these people? Are they, how do you measure overload maybe is a good question?

Yeah, I think it's a fantastic question. And I've worked with a lot of organizations who are deep in the thick of exactly that question. Because there are different ways to look at it. You can look at things like, is a person, they're, they're telt, like in poker, oh, they always scratch their ear when they're bluffing, whatever. You get talents. This person hasn't taken any vacation, and it's October. Oh, hmm, that's weird.

They've missed all their required trainings. A lot of times that's a tell because they're just so overlooked. You can look at mechanics. How full, what percentage of their calendar is ever open? I do a scary exercise with groups of leaders. I say, how many of you have one hour open in your calendar for the next week? And maybe a few hands will go up out of rooms of hundreds of people because nobody has a single minute free in the outcome.

coming week. And again, that's a recipe for disaster because the second something happens, it's unexpected, if you're scrambling. And you're not, and you're doing all your work in the evenings, which again, not great either. You can look at behavioral tells when people start to behave in ways where they seem super emotional all the time, or they're very shut down. They can either, it can go one of two ways. They can get super emotional or they can get super impassive. You see either one, it just depends on the individual person's wiring. You can look, there's a lot conflict in the workplace. Very often, that is just a bunch of overloaded people. So it's not one thing, but I think there's a list of probably 20 things, that if you're just scanning for

those things all the time, then you start to see some overload. And the goal is to get out it before you see the realtor, which is just a degradation of your business rules. Eventually, your business just falls apart. But you want to catch it here and not catch it at the point. of, oh my gosh, why is this quarter, you know, down so much? That's almost too late. Yeah. Yeah, you've got to, there's so many people that are overloaded and burnout. I think that's why they came with that quiet quitting. Because people are just like, this is too much, man. And one of the things that I have to have is I'm a visionary CEO. I have always been that way. I don't do rudimentary work very well. You don't want me doing accounting or anything that's

rudimentary or simple. There are people, like you used to have a vice president. He was good at that stuff. And so he would do that stuff and I do the visionary work and build models and successful marketing and all that stuff. I was the marketer too. And I have to have downtime as a CEO to be a visionary. I have to have downtime to think, okay, what do we need to do with the business? I need to be able to analyze the business. And I need to have that space. And if I don't have that space, we just become a machine that just goes round around until the market changes or something changes.

You're like, why aren't we making money anymore? Oh, there's a section bleeding out now that doesn't work anymore with the model that it's given. And you're like, okay, we got to go analyze it and fix it. And so you've got to have time to stop the car and check all the fluids and make sure the tires are fully inflated and all that stuff. And then maybe look at the car and go, do we need to add some things to this thing? Or do we need a whole new car maybe? I don't know. But that's the work of visionary.

And if I don't have that downtime, like basically Friday, I'll answer emails, look for emergencies from our clients. But other than that, I pretty much pittle about the office. I'm not meeting anybody on Fridays and not talking anybody really other than email, response or text. And usually those are just emergencies. And it gives me time just sit in my office and not really think about anything and maybe think about little projects or stuff I need to do, work on little. There's probably 500 things I need to do every day as a CEO.

I think every CEO has that problem. And if we get five of them done today, we're lucky. and just go to bed at night thinking, there are those 400 and 495 things I didn't get done today. I got five done. That's a big challenge. Let's talk about your business there, your company, what you guys do and how you help people with becoming effective.

Yeah. So in Alprom Insight, we are really just laser focused on this question of how do you, number one, find your sources of power. When I say your, it could be anything, an individual, a team, a chunk of an organization, and organization, and then how do you hold up bay those forces that are setting those sources of power? So that might be, let's say, a keynote speech on chaos. That might be a workshop on finding a team's sources of effectiveness. That might be a data-driven project on well-being at work, and how can you re-engineer ways of working to really drive well-being. But that's always the

lenses. How do we find our sources of power and how do we cut back on the things sacking them? And there's different different. You could yeah, we can coach executives. We can do work at a whole organization level and everything in between. And so how long have you guys been doing this? Tell us about the company. How did it start? What was the, what was the thing that made you go, hey, we should do this. I got to do this. Yeah. I'm a veteran of a lot of these leadership roles in corporate consulting. And there's so much that's rewarding and great about those roles. I don't want to say, oh, those rules are terrible. No, there's a lot of good stuff and a lot of great learning. You get to work with wonderful clients and particularly working with these

wonderful big teams. That stuff is fabulous. Love it. But for me, a lot of people go through their whole consulting career and they just, they make good use of the IP that the consulting firm gives. Oh, this is our approach to leadership. Okay, let me go sell and deliver them. For me, I've always been someone who makes things, right? I'm like back in the kitchen, cooking stuff up. developing methodologies. How do we look at this? Research, writing, building intellectual property. And so if you're like me, then entrepreneurial space eventually ends up making a lot of sense because you're never going to get the full execution of your vision within corporate space because there's always 20 other things going on that you need to conform to.

And you're also never going to fully get sort of the value of what you created will fully come back to you. But at the beginning of last year, I said, all right, this is it. I am off to do my own thing and I really want to help clients in the way that I know I can. I think that was the other piece is I always, I never felt like I was fully able to help clients up to the 100% level. And so I said, let me, let me go do this. And I spent to your point about thinking time. I spent a lot of time last year really working on this book, really working on effective

because I understood that building out what's in the book is going to so much inform how I can help clients. And now it's this sort of wonderful glide path of I've spent all this time really researching and hammering these concepts out and bringing them into the world for organizations is unbelievably satisfying and cool. Yeah. And you guys do that to help people. Who is your client look like? Do they need to have a minimum sort of maybe revenue, a minimum size company, large, medium, small net worth, anything like that? How do they qualify for you? say our offerings are designed to be pretty. If you're a smaller company and you just want a focused piece of work,

because, again, so much time is spent structuring how this is all done, it's very easy to say, okay, we're just going to grab this chunk on work intensification, and that's a one-day workshop, and you're great. I've done a lot of work at very large, very complex organizations, and I'm comfortable in that space as well, but I think the offering kind of nicely accordions up or down for a variety of company sizes and shaped. I've always worked cross industry. And I think that's part of what I really enjoyed, to be honest, is that industry silos are still so pronounced that there's a lot of virtue and saying,

this is how tech companies look at this question. This is how manufacturing companies look at this question. Oh, okay, that's interesting. They really look at this differently and that brings new insight. So very flexible across the spectrum of industry work. And I see a talk to us button on your website. How can people reach out to you, find out more, see if you both want to work with each other and care compatible, etc., etc. Yeah.

So the talk to us button is great. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn, and I always appreciate a ping there. You can find me, as I said, on Instagram and TikTok. All of these things, drop me an email on super communicative. and always, always happy to engage. Unless it's been wonderful to have you on the show and very insightful. I think you have a prior book.

Do we want to do any plugging on that? Yeah, so that's called to work here now. Think like a human and build a powerhouse workplace. And there's a lot of really interesting strategies there at organizational level for how to fix some of these glitches. Encourage folks to check out both books. Can I use that on my significant others of how to fix the glitches? If only it was that easy. That's why we.

just bury him in the backyard. No, no, do that, folks. That's illegal. That's bad. This is a joke. No, rimey. And don't check my backyard. I got to write that joke down. That was a nice setup. I didn't even think about it. So, Melissa, it's been wonderful to have you on and great stuff there. And yeah, we do need to have more of a discussion of work and effect. In fact, this thing we talked about on the previous show was one of the things we learned, we've been on LinkedIn since almost the beginning marketing over there. And one thing we've learned over all the years we've been on there, like 16 years or something, I don't know how long we've been around. But I think 2009 or six or three or somewhere around there, LinkedIn started. And we were on, we were on it pretty early on.

One thing we noticed was we have these marketing mails that you can do like once a week to your big groups. We have 135,000 group over there on LinkedIn. And you can do like one email push that goes out to everybody in the group if they allow it. And so we started testing what the best days were to get the best open rate. And these are usually people at their offices that are checking their emails. Because we notice no one opens emails on weekends, right, for the most part. And then we would send them on Monday, but we noticed we wouldn't get a lot of response on Monday. And it's because people were so busy.

They come back into work. They got all the fires on the email from the weekend. They're putting all the fires. They're doing the work. on Tuesday, that was the day that we got the best hit where they would open our emails from LinkedIn and about business and they would be responsive. So they came in on Monday. They did all this work.

They did all stuff. They weren't goofing off. And then on Tuesday, they're a little bit more, okay, what do we need to do now? And they're very open to input. And then we noticed as the week went on, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, it got weaker on our response in open times. And then on Friday, we couldn't get anybody open anything.

So whether or not people are working on Friday or not, they got the mindset that they're just, they're just, I used to joke about how at 5 o'clock, 4.50, my employees would be in that runner sprint position ready to leap off and get out the door at 5 o'clock. Just found they're just, they're just, I don't know what they're doing.

Oh, we did notice that they watch a lot of our YouTube's on Friday or YouTube videos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were like, okay, so we know what they're doing. They're either watching, I don't know, only fans or YouTube on Friday. One of the two. We've heard of that, too, people doing that on the job and it doesn't work out well when you get caught, HR. But yeah, so we noticed this pattern and like Tuesday was the key day. And so people are still working on Tuesdays, but after, they're just kind of fading through the week, if you know what they presented. And like I say again, There's so many countries that have invoked the four-day work week.

You can't email your employees after business hours, right? I think France or some European people. I think people should do that. There are times where with my staff and people I associate with, sometimes I want to send them something. It's just a sharing item or something, but I'm like, don't be an asshole, Chris. It's 10 o'clock at 9 or 9 o'clock or 6 o'clock. Let them have dinner with their family.

Let them do whatever the hell they're doing there at home. Leave them alone. And you can schedule your email to go out at 6 a.m. the next morning or 7 a.m. if you want, let people have some breathing space, some reset time. Maybe that's the next book you should do. How to give employees the ability to reset. Oh, my goodness. There's certainly at least one book to be written on that.

Yeah, yeah. How do we know when we're overloading employees and we need to reset them? Because people got to care more. We're kind of reaching this point where we're just really stringing employees out, I think, especially with AI, we're expecting to do everything. Can you imagine being an employee at Microsoft or whatever? And they're like, you can only use X amount of tokens. And you're like, I need three times that amount to do my job.

What the hell? You're stringing me out on where I got to do all these work for all these people you laid off. And then I don't have enough resources to do my job. And I just saw that. I just went, this isn't going to end well at all. It is a weird moment. Yeah. I forget the gentleman's name.

He's the one billionaire that seems to be saying Mark Cuban. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was talking about how he thinks that there's so much of a gold rush. We saw this for the dot com in the 90s, really 2000s, the dot com bust. There's so many data centers, they're trying to build now. You're just like, I don't know, man. This seems like a lot. I don't know anything about all this stuff, but this sure seems like a lot.

And he was joking, I think, over the weekend that what we're basically going to have is these empty, freaking, when it goes bust, we're going to have these empty centers that are just going to, maybe I don't turn into malls or I don't know. Who's that one Halloween group that always haunts any of me? Halloween adventure or whatever. Yeah. What are that? Howard Spirit, Spirit.

Spirit. Maybe I'm thinking of Spirit. Halloween. Yeah. I can picture it very vividly. Yeah, yeah. They're always in that dead mall that no one wants to rent in. And that's probably what they're going to do.

They're just going to take over all the data centers that go bust. I mean, I have to say, for those of us who live through the, the dot-com boom and bust is very vivid to me. Because I graduated from college in 1998, right? So I was like, I was laid off. This is a great fun fact. I was laid off September 5th, 2001. Oh, wow. In New York.

Oh, my goodness. It was good. There are things in life way more important than my little job, right? Good reminder. What a wild time in human history. But you live through something like that, or even though the 2008, you watch the economy get overheated in a certain way, and you're going, oh, so my best advice to people, honestly,

is just be ready for a range of possible outcomes. So the worst thing you can be is blindsided. And particularly if you work for one of these tech companies, one of the things the tech companies have not been read on is just framing normal jobs. They're just not, they don't have good muscle or, okay, this is a reasonable job for a human to do. And that's why you get these big cycles of hiring and then big cycles of laying people off. So I think we each have to take responsibility for ourselves, unfortunately, and say, okay, you know what, my job might be a little goofy and I'm going to have my resume and my LinkedIn ready. Yeah. I think if I had massive employees, like I used to have a thousand employees,

we would have a four-day work week for my employees. And I just, and I would emphasize that, look, Fridays, downtime, maybe we'll sign somebody, I don't know, watch for fires on the email or something. If you tell your clients, like one of the companies I buy from is B&H photography. Yeah, yeah. And what's interesting about them is they have a Jewish holiday because I believe they're Jewish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they, you can't place your order for, I think it's one or two days. Like, I think it's Friday or Saturday. You can't place an order. Yeah, on the Sabbath. Yeah. Isn't it? It doesn't have to do with, I know there's a rule in Judaism where you can't do mechanical things or you can't do certain things on the, on their Sabbath, I think, or on a certain

day. And I've seen it because like in, in Israel, they have special ways to get around it. Well, the word or the elevator stops. every floor so you don't put the elevator button. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some hotels in Miami have that.

Do they really? Wow. Yeah. The fountain blue has that. Like a Sabbath elevator. Yeah. Yeah. So they have this thing where there's sometimes where I need to order something and I

need camera equipment. Why need camera equipment? I need camera equipment like now. And but I've just learned to work with it and I appreciate what they do and they're a good company and if that's the religious thing. I really wish they wouldn't put me through it. But it's fine. I still do business with them.

And I, and I, and I, still work with them, but I respect that. And I think if you tell your clients that, hey, there's a four-day work week, that's kind of what they're doing over there, there's a four-day work week, sorry, you're not going to be able to reach our people between Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, or maybe you can assign an emergency person, but usually there's no emergency that really needs to have. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. So much of what, it's funny, I have a chapter in the book where I talked to a firefighter, an air traffic controller, and an emergency room physician. And it's interesting because in their jobs, they have real emergencies.

And speaking to them, it really brought home to me in consulting. So much of what we call an emergency is just not an emergency. To your point, that most of us work in situations where genuinely nothing is urgent. And then it's actually unfair to people to whom things actually are urgent, right? You talk to people who work at the supply chain function, right? Okay, I've got tomatoes rotting out on the highway. Okay, that's an emergency. that's urgent.

But their emergencies get swallowed up by all these dumb emergencies, all this false urgency and the rest of the company. No, you don't have a marketing emergency, right? The supply chain guys have a real emergency. Calm down. And there's a lot to be said to your point being like, okay, this is what's genuinely urgent, this is what's not. And we're going to just run in a sensible way that talks about the right things in the right

bucket and just stop stressing everyone out. Yeah. And you've got to manage this stuff. Even ER has, even ER doctors have non-emergencies. That's what triage is for. Triage is about separating out the person who is genuinely, and it's interesting because the person who's about to die, that's actually not the top of triage. That person, they actually say, okay, we're going to, if there's nothing to be done for them,

they're not the most urgent case, which is a very interesting mindset. The most urgent case is someone who is very thick or hurt, but can be saved. That's why they always leave me to. die in ER, they just put me in a, you're not, you're not going to succumb to that paper. Yeah, it's just, just check on them, see if you're still breathing. My ex does the same thing. The, no, yeah, I had, I used to have a buddy who had twins and his girlfriend would take the kids. If they got a sniffle, they would be in the emergency room.

And I'm like, dude, do you understand what you're doing to your insurance? You're racking up a hell of a rap sheet that they're just going to be like, we're charge you five times next time we renegotiate your thing. But yeah, it's, I think it's really important. I think we need to, the show we were talking about last week that I'm referencing is we're talking about how you need to make sure that employees have downtime, they have reset time. And I, and frankly, since me giving up Fridays as an official workday, I am probably twice as much effective, or making twice an amount of money. I'm more, I've got more time and more vision,

and yet I'm working less, technically, you'd think. But I'm more effective because I'm on, my brain's engaged, and I'm not fried and not burn out, and I'm not, I don't know, I got enough ADHD problems as it is. Well, but we have to, we have to take our, we have to take brain fatigue seriously. And if you think about, think about union regulation, if you have a Teamsters job,

they would say, you can only lift X number of parcels in a day. or whatever the metric is. You can only drive so many hours in a truck in a row, right? Because we acknowledge the human body kind of conks out after a while. It gets tired. But we don't do that with our brains. We don't say, okay, you can only answer 180 emails in a day. But maybe we should.

It honestly, it might help. I think to your point, operating under serious brain fatigue, we're just not getting enough sleep. This is one that I'm absolutely fascinated with. But the scientists have actually proven that if you come into work on not enough sleep, it is the same as coming and drunk. Oh, wow. I'll just start showing up drunk then.

At that point, you just have some fun, right? I'll just tell them I didn't get enough sleep, so I figured I might as well drink since it's the same. But that to me is fascinating because it shows that people like, I'm a serious person, I'm grinding it out, on hustle culture, and you're showing up to work in the same condition as somebody who had five vodka sodas. That's, we should all take a pause and really be thinking about these things. And to your point, think about what are the conditions under which our brains, brains actually perform properly.

Yeah. If I don't get my eight hour of sleep or at least six, there's murdering that's going to take place. And the judge says I can't do it anymore. So there's that. So I'm trying. I'm trying, Judge. I'm trying.

It's got some guard rails for you. I'm trying, Judge. Trying everything again, man. Anyway, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, I'm, more effective than I've ever been probably in my life. I think I I'm just kicking ass taking names and all of it was just having that reset space. And so Thursday night, my brain goes, hey, it's Friday night, man. You can, you can let it go, man. You can, you can wind a little bit. You can, it's okay, man. We got it done. It weeks in the can. And then on Friday, I start to

decompress. And usually I'll decompress all Fridays because I'm still in business mode. So I'm still doing a little bit, emails and checking things. But then I'm also doing the visionary work for my company. What are we doing? Why are we doing it and all that sort of stuff you have to do as an innovator? And then by Saturday when I wake up, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to have a weekend. Yeah. Where before it was, I would really decompress on Saturday. And by the time I really felt like I was having a weekend, it would be like mid-sunday. Yeah. And to find out of vacations when I was in corporate roles that we would be four or five days into the vacation before I was properly relaxed. And the vacation was only like eight days long or something like that. So I'm like,

okay, I get three good vacation days where my brain is actually able to chill out and just be on a boat on the lake. It's really, to your point, if your guard is always up and you're never relaxing, then you're not getting your right human stuff, but you're also not getting your right business stuff either. You're not having those deeper strategic insights because you're always I got to have it the whole time. Yeah. Maybe I should just quit all the days and just do Monday. And then.

The one day work week. You could be a pioneer. It's my new. My next book will be the one day work week, folks. Check it out. One day work. How to be disaffective at work. Anyway,

this is wonderful and people should reach out to you. Give you a final pitch out to pick your book. Reach out to you on your website for your company and all that good stuff. Yeah. So I believe effective is a book for our time. I think we are all so overloaded. I think it's a hard time to get work done, a hard time to feel good at your job, which is a feeling we all want.

We all want to feel like we're good at our work. So I recommend checking out effective. And I think for some of that deeper problem solving, Anthrom Insight, is here to help. Reach out and ask questions. It's free, and you can get to know more. Thank you very much, Melissa, for coming the show. We really appreciate it. This is a fun conversation.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for us for tuning in. Order Per Book, where Refined Books are sold. Effective. How to do great work in a fast-changing world. You can give it your boss for Christmas and see, maybe they'll give you some more time off or something. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in.

Go to goodrease.com, Fortresschus Christchrist, Christfoss, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschus Christfoss, YouTube.com, Fortress Christchristch, Christfoss. If I didn't say that, and all that's a crazy place on the Internet, we have too much stuff going on in the internet. Thanks for tuning in, be good to each other. Stay safe.

We'll see you guys next time. You've been listening to the the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning, consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed.