Careerbuilder Jedi Mind Trick
- Chad and Cheese
- Apr 17, 2020
- 30 min read
Updated: Jun 4, 2020
Last week Careerbuilder launches a new slogan and ad campaign while this week hundreds CB employees are laid off or furloughed. What kind of Jedi mind f#%k is that? The boys get deep into that and also talk:
- Amazon does it AGAIN... and AGAIN!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT sponsored by:
Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls, it's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel: Oh, yeah. 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the last four weeks, so how's your day going? Welcome to The Chad and Cheese Podcast everybody, I'm your co-host Joel, still in a dark place, Cheesman.
Chad: And I'm Chad, work from home, Sowash.
Joel: On this week's show, our favorite dumpster fire of a job site drop kicked a whole bunch of employees this week. Amazon is still fucking up. And grandma, like all of us, needs a beer dammit.
Chad: Now.
Joel: Grab a cold one while you still can get them. We'll be right back after a word from Sovren.
Sovren: Sovren parser is the most accurate resume and job order intake technology in the industry. The more accurate your data, the better decisions you can make. Find out more about our suite of products today by visiting sovren.com. That's S-O-V-R-E-N.com. We provide technology that thinks, communicates and collaborates like a human. Sovren, software so human, you'll want to take it to dinner.
Joel: I'm loving my weekly time on the couch with my therapist, the Chad. It's nice. How are you doing man?
Chad: Good. It's been a busy week. This whole ... We work from home as it is, but this is just an entirely different fucking animal.
Joel: I am cabin fever to the max dude. Whew! Man. Well, I got a three year old with a fever that won't quit and he's on antibiotics that aren't working and now he has the shits. Again, the offer to trade your three teenagers for my three year old is still on the table, if you ever want to take advantage of that.
Chad: Yeah, I'm good right now. Yeah. Now is good.
Joel: Okay. All right.
Chad: Yeah. I have enough passive aggressive shit. I deal with higher level stuff, but yeah, I don't need the shits right now.
Joel: Shits are bad, shits are bad. Yeah. Should we get to shout outs? Get this thing going?
Chad: Yeah. Let's start out with holy Recruiting Brainfood moly, Cheesman.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: Hung Lee, I don't know if you saw the
Joel: My favorite pornstar by the way.
Chad: Oh my God. Yeah. The favorite pornstar of the recruitment industry. Hung Lee had this crazy idea, which is very standard for Hung of course, to have a 24 hour Brainfood marathon event, which was a virtual event on steroids. Seriously, he literally broke the damn internet. The event had over 2200 people on at one time. The Crowdcast platform was probably busting at the seams. There were just amazing people, amazing content and I'm not sure anyone else would have thought of anything this big and could have pulled it off. Congratulations to Hung Lee and kudos to everybody who participated. If you want to watch the recordings, just go to recruitingbrainfood.com, they'll be there. You can watch Julie and my discussion slash argument with Hung Lee. We argued whether technology and process efficiency makes good organizations less or more human, that was a fun conversation. It was a back and forth little spat. It's like a normal day with Julie and I. It was fun.
Joel: Yeah. Are we sure that the title Hung Lee Video Party didn't get out on social media somewhere and get mistaken
Chad: Should have.
Joel: ... for like pornstar aroma and have a bunch of people show up? I don't know, I'm not convinced.
Chad: It's good marketing.
Joel: Sounds like a lot of fun. Sounds like a lot of fun. I'm going to start off my shout-outs with a little counter punch to our favorite millennial Holland McCue. If you listened to last week's show, and I believe you took her side if I remember correctly.
Chad: Of course.
Joel: I didn't quite understand the millennial breakdown and how much hardship that they have seen in their life having gone through 2008. Well, a New York Times article came out this week talking about millennials and how they haven't really had much hardship economically up until now and that this is a real punch in the gut. The first sentence of the story was basically, so-and-so was in high school when 2008 happened and it seemed like something far, far away. You guys can be in one corner and the New York Times and Joel Cheesman will be in the other corner, and I'll take that bet.
Chad: Well, it's funny because I was speaking to Kyle, our show millennial this week.
Joel: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Chad: And a couple of others, and I think what we've all come to understand is that, Joel, you're really a closeted millennial. Whiner, always pointing the fingers at other people, I mean all of the basic things that you point at millennials, I mean it's one of those, oh, wait a minute, Trump kind of things, I'm pointing over there, but really it's me. Yeah. Thanks to all of our millennials for listening and connecting with me to really break this out that Joel is just a closeted millennial. Good job, guys.
Joel: I'm going to argue that I'm bleeding over into like Clint Eastwood, grand El Camino or whatever that movie was, where like, get off my yard. I feel like I'm less about being younger than I am getting into like, get off my yard stratosphere.
Chad: As I'd said before, I think you focus too much cohort groups. A super marathon shout out to Liz Van Zyl, or Zyl, Van Zyl, Van Zyl, she's in Australia and they probably say it a hell of a lot more sexy than I do, from PASS Technology. I was sitting just sitting back and watching the Recruiting Brainfood marathon happening, I was waiting for a vendor pitch to start.The vendor was late and Liz saw me over on the side. She brought me on screen to fill time, like comedy relief or something and then she kept me on asking vendors questions for the next half hour or so. Nothing is better than being an impromptu guest host, so thanks so much Liz, I appreciate that.
Joel: Nice. Nice. Did she have any Foster's? It's Australian for beer.
Chad: Yeah. No Foster's on her.
Joel: Shout-out for me from TikTok. TikTok this week released that they'll be hiring 10,000 people. And there was also a study by Piper Sandler, no shit, Sherlock News this week, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok are the favorite apps of teenagers and young adults. Shout-out to them.
Chad: I have to say I love me some TikTok. Some rapid fire shout-outs, new listeners, longtime listeners all the way around, Matt Stone, director of Talent Acquisition at Rock Central, Anthony Peter over at ZipRecruiter.
Joel: Nice.
Chad: Chris Richards and Jonathan Abreau over at iCMS.
Joel: Abreua.
Chad: Abreau, he's a bro dude. And last in my quick shout-outs is the shout out to the dude in Indiana who received $8.2 million in stimulus money.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: He walks into an ATM to pull out $200, right? And he looked at his balance and it was over 8.2 million in his account from the stimulus money that apparently our government is just throwing out in chunks and hoping that he will distribute it for them, I guess.
Joel: Okay. When I first heard this I thought, okay, this is going to be like a funny story, $8 million, he goes to the bank and like haha, fix it, then they fix it, right? Or I was going to say, he cashed it, whatever and went to Bora Bora and it's the end of the story. But East Chicago, is it East Chicago he was from? Not the best area, if you know Indiana or Chicago.
Chad: Yeah. North-West Indiana.
Joel: The dude is older, he's got meth mouth, he's a volunteer firefighter.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: You feel really bad for him and it feels like there's somebody sticking it to him.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: He's getting the carrot and then he gets the rug pulled out from him as he sort of thinks that life is good again. I feel bad for the guy. It's a funny story. But
Chad: It's what I like to call a Jedi mind fuck, is what it is.
Joel: Is that real? Yeah. He did something in the past life that was not good, looking at that guy. I'll switch it around and a shout-out to beer grandma.
SFX: Yes.
Joel: I'll paraphrase this story as I know it.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: A grandma was quarantined, lived alone, she ran out of Coors Light and put a picture out of her window saying, "I need beer", is this correct?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And Coors Light apparently sent her a lot of beer.
Chad: Yes. So 93 year old, Olive Veronesi of Seminole, Pennsylvania, she just held up a sign, as you'd said, asking for beer from Coors Light and the brand, actually the Coors Light people said that they sent 150 cans of Coors Light.
Joel: There is still good in the world, Chad. There is still good in the world.
Chad: There's still good.
Joel: And I actually talked to someone from Pennsylvania yesterday, who told me that liquor stores are no longer essential businesses. You can't even get Curbside delivery or drive through, you can only get beer and wine from the grocery store. I can sense Pennsylvania is probably a little bit stressed out, you can still get Coors Light, but if you're looking for a good bottle of bourbon, you're out of luck if you're in Pennsylvania. And apparently you can't even get it mailed to you, which I asked, they said, no, they don't deliver it to Pennsylvania, so fuck.
Chad: Ridiculous.
Joel: Ridonculous.
Chad: Ridiculous. Something else that we thought was ridiculous is when Indeed kicked their partner publishers to the curb. And we mentioned on the show, we're like, "A smart competitor should just swoop in and take all of this." Well, go figure, talent.com aka Neuvoo
Joel: Neuvoo.
Chad: That's right. Talent.com, they did just that. If you're a publisher and you just got the ritual Trojan Horse fucking from Indeed
Joel: Kick in the nuts.
Chad: That's right. You can go to employers.talent.com/publishers and you can sign up. You can go ahead and try to replace that Indeed revenue stream with talent.com. Again, it's employers.talent.com/publishers.
Joel: Shout out to the Cleveland Browns unis.
Chad: Oh yeah.
Joel: Which were launched or released this week. They're going old school again. Love it.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: It's the traditional look, nothing fancy. Most importantly, they took Cleveland off the front, which is ridiculous because no pro team in the world in football has the name of the city on the front of the jersey. So good for them. The Colts as well, new Jerseys. Falcons are going old school again. The Rams are the worst, the new logo is awful. Any thoughts from you on the new jerseys, new logos, everything, new fonts that are out there in the NFL?
Chad: Yeah. Then the new Colts alternate, not symmetrical, I know we love as human beings things to be perfect and symmetrical, it's actually pretty cool. The negative spaces is the state of Indiana. The new Colts font, again, little changes, but the news Colts font is pretty stellar. I like Tampa Bay's change. I don't think that the Falcons are that bad. Everybody's bitching about the Falcons. I haven't seen the Patriots yet, I know that's coming out. And the rest of them it's just like, man, you're making subtle changes, okay, cool. But I just want to see fucking football.
Joel: Yeah. And actually like I mentioned the city on the front, the Falcons actually have ATL on the front on some of the jerseys, which I think is cool, like the ATL.
Chad: It is the ATL, yeah.
Joel: That's okay. But if it was Atlanta, that would be kind of cheesy. And the jury's out of whether or not we'll actually see Tom Brady play in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers uniform because the mayor of LA is saying nothing sports-wise until 2022. Yikes.
Chad: Yeah. That seems a little ridiculous. It seems a lot ridiculous.
Joel: A little bit of California drama for you. Little LA drama.
Chad: Yeah. Just what we need. My last shout-out is going to go to our listeners. Last but never least, thanks to all of our listeners who helped us break into the top 100 in the Chartable business podcast rankings, number 54 in the US, number 75 globally. And they're like 800,000 podcasts out there. I have no clue how we did it, but we couldn't have done it without you. Thank you.
Joel: Yeah, this is clearly like the guy who got 8 million in his bank account. Like, obviously Chartable fucked up
Chad: Why are you jinxing us? This is killing me.
Joel: ... And put it on the top 100, and they're going to realize the mistake at some point and put us back in the top million. All right. I'll go through my final shout-outs quickly.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: A restaurant called Dig out on the East Coast, lays a bunch of people off via SMS.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: And then I think they got a voicemail, if I remember the story correctly. Anyway, employers out there, don't lay people off via text message. It's just a bad look.
Chad: How do you have to tell people that? I mean seriously.
Joel: I don't know why. I don't know. Especially, this is a people business, right? Service and dah, dah, dah. Anyway, that's fucked up Dig, bad on you. You suck. Shout out to Sean Horton, an Indianapolis resident who's a big fan of the show and works at Jobs in Logistics, which I'm assuming is one of the few job sites or networks that's actually having a good time right now, with trucking and logistics and warehouse workers and everything else.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Shout out to him. And then lastly, the gang at HiQ. I know we haven't talked about them in a while, but the HiQ versus LinkedIn case is still on. And I've been told that by August of this year, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not to hear the case. That could be an interesting development as we get out of summer, they'll keep us abreast. But shout-out to HiQ for continuing to fight the fight.
Chad: Yeah. We have events, and one of the events are Chad and Cheese Virtual Travel brought to you by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right, our friends at Shaker Recruitment Marketing want to keep us safe and said, "Keep your asses at home."
SFX: Hell Yeah.
Chad: "Do whatever you can virtually." The very first one is actually one that's going to be happening next week, it's the HR Hackathon. So Eva Zils puts on an HR Hackathon every year. And this year
Joel: Is she German?
Chad: She is. Yeah.
Joel: Is it German?
Chad: You listened to some of her videos, they're in German or they're in French.
Joel: Yeah. They're good.
Chad: And the only thing that you can understand are the American curse words that she uses, so I love her. But she had to go virtual this year, go figure, which I don't think it's going to hurt at all, to be quite frank. Because think about it, you don't need to be in the same room to do a hackathon. Plus you can pull hackers in from all over the world, who couldn't afford to travel before. I believe this is going to be pretty awesome. I'm going to be one of the judges, Bill Boorman, a couple of other smarter people who are going to help Bill and me out. But it's around building apps, prototypes, and technology, which can help in this new COVID world we live in. There's already been 40 plus project pitches thus far and are pretty stoked. If you want to get involved, you want to just linger and lurk and watch and see what's going on with the hackathon, you can go to hrhackathon.net. That's hrhackathon.net. Eva, you are a one woman band. You're just killing it man, just killing it.
Joel: Let me understand, is this for start-ups or new sort of sandbox beta projects that people will pitch?
Chad: Anybody who wants to come in, pitch a concept and develop. That's what it is.
Joel: Okay.
Chad: Yeah. And if you're bringing some stuff in that you already have to repurpose and you have the code, great on you as well. But it's all about re-purposing around this new purpose which focuses on obviously the COVID community.
Joel: Got you.
Chad: And again, not just developing the product, but also pitching the product to the judges as well. If you're just bringing in your shit and saying, "Hey, this would be great for the new COVID world too." It's like, "Hahaha. Get the fuck out of here."
Joel: TAtech Death Match coming up as well.
Chad: Yeah. TAtech Europe Virtual Death Match.
Joel: TAtech Europe from your computer. April 28th?
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: April 28th. Yeah. We'll be doing those in the next couple of weeks obviously. Three companies Get Optimal, JobSync, Supersonic...
Chad: Sonic Jobs.
Joel: And SBOJ who's getting a new name apparently.
Chad: That's right. That's right. I have a new update on that one. First off, none of this people could happen without the support of Pontoon Solutions . That's right kids.
Joel: PoonTang Solutions.
Chad: Call and meet RPO professionals at pontoonsolutions.com. We're going to have, Craig Rhodes is going to be judging with us. We had a conversation with them earlier this week and I think we're all going to be drunk on every single one of these.
Joel: Oh, that's a guarantee.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: Yeah. The Death Match contestants are Daniel Fellows who is the CEO of Get Optimal.
Joel: Former Indeed guy.
Chad: Yeah. Alex Murphy, not Robocop, CEO of JobSync. Nick Gray, who's the CEO of SBOJ, oh wait a minute, not SBOJ anymore, they're changing to CloudRPO. Let it sink in. Let it sink in. It's a dot com, so you got to love it. CloudRPO.
Joel: It's a dot com.
Chad: It's a dot com. And last but never least, but of course Mikhil Raja, CEO of Sonic Jobs. Just go to chadcheese.com, click on the reaper, find out a little bit more about what's going on. You can even listen to some past Death Matches, which are pretty cool. Listen to Aman Brar, who was the CEO of Canvas at the time. He won the very first Death Match. He's now the CEO of Jobvite. You can listen to Anoop Gupta. You can listen to Andreea Wade from opening.io and many, many others. Check it out, chadcheese.com, click on the reaper.
Joel: Cavalcade of champions is what you'll be listening to. And is it true that Craig Rhodes is related to Randy Rhoads, former guitarist of Ozzy Osborne?
Chad: Yeah. We're going to have him riff while he's on. I think that'd be awesome. I think that'd be awesome.
Joel: Nice.
Chad: And then May 19th, we have North America coming up too, so we have, again, slots open for four, that's right, only four start-ups. I think we have two of those possibly already filled.
Joel: Yeah. I think we verbally promised one. Talk about that yet or not.
Chad: Yeah. If you want to get on the virtual stage with Chad and Cheese and do a Death Match, this is a time for contestants. It's free of charge because our friends at Joveo are sponsoring this bad boy. Again, making sure that the virtual vibes keep happening for TAtech.
Joel: The fact that we have start-ups is a good thing, we should celebrate that no fee. Is it news time yet?
Chad: Topics.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Joel: Let's get to the news. All right. Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs. No surprise
Chad: Layoffs.
Joel: We've covered ZipRecruiter ... Yeah, layoffs.
Chad: Lay offs.
Joel: We've covered Zip. I think we've talked about ALIO.
Chad: Lever.
Joel: ... and quite a few others. Indeed shutting down businesses. Lever. If you haven't caught up, check out our latest shreds where we cover most of this stuff. But anyway, Careerbuilder, our favorite dumpster fire, job board world, has laid off, rumors have it, just under 200 people. We've heard 60%. We've heard a lot of furloughs that probably won't be coming back speculatively. I do have to their credit an official statement
Chad: What?
Joel: Which I'll kind of paraphrase now because it's pretty standard, but it's, "The spread of COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to the economy, which has adversely impacted the talent acquisition and human capital management space." No shit. "As a result of these rapid changes, we made the difficult decision to lay off or furlough a limited number of our employees. Careerbuilder is committed to supporting the individuals impacted while continuing to serve clients and job seekers through this extraordinary time."
Chad: Huh. I wonder if it was a difficult decision because last week we just talked about CareerBuilder's new slogan that they rolled out, and commercials on last week's show.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: It feels like a real, again, Jedi mind fuck that's happening here. They come out swinging with commercials focused on helping everyone in this time of need, during COVID and the very next week they lay down the chop. Again, I feel no balance here whatsoever, and I wonder again, they're CareerBuilder, the monkeys are definitely running this bitch.
Joel: By the way, Irina, our favorite CEO, is at a whopping 36% approval rating on Glassdoor. You know shit's good at CareerBuilder right now.
Chad: Yeah. We actually talked about this last week too is, what is the Zip and the Lever and what do we think is going to happen with Monster and CareerBuilder? And we just thought, CareerBuilder would fade away, we wouldn't even hear much about them. We were wrong about that. It might be the other way around. Monster might fade away and CareerBuilder goes out with a big chop.
Joel: I'm still convinced Monster energy drink is going to drop 25 million and just take the domain and it'll be over. That'll be the announcement.
Chad: Yeah, that'd be good enough for them.
Joel: And Baird will just take all the resumes and whatever and it'll be over. That'll be it.
Chad: Randstad.
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: That being said, we're talking about layoffs and trying to get the good vibe in here. Our friends over at Candidate ID this week or last week created a platform called Talent Pipeline. It's a not for profit talent acquisition industry initiative to connect furloughed or redundant TA and employer brand professionals with employers looking for their skills. It's free to use and it takes no time whatsoever to get registered. If you are from one of these organizations that we've been talking about or if, even more important, if you are the employer who's doing the laying off and the furloughing go to talentpipe.org. You can sign up, it's free, and you can start to hopefully make these connections for your employees that you're either laying off or furloughing. This is a really important thing. Knowing that ... And I think we're talking about Lever where they said, "Yeah, anybody who gets these people, that's awesome, they're great people." That's great. What are you doing to try to help make those connections? What kind of partnerships are you making as an employer to make those connections? This is just one example. Talentpipe.org, where you can go in and you can start pushing your furloughed candidates that way. Contact Candidate ID, I'm sure they would love to try to help you out. Not to mention if you're an individual you can just go in as an individual, so check it out. If you're an employer and you're looking for good talent, this is the time to find it because they are out there.
Joel: Yeah. And even in our industry, I mean stories still about chatbots still hiring, programmatic, a lot of the newer players, they are potentially looking at people to add to the roster. It's not super dire, but yeah, it kind of sucks out there for sure. Over the last time the world ended, some of our greatest start-ups were born out of that time. Keep your eyes open for maybe the next great thing. But yeah, Amazon continues to fuck shit up.
Chad: How?
Joel: Hates workers with an opinion and the need to unionize and try to make things better at the company.
Chad: They fired two Seattle based employees who publicly criticized safety and working conditions at its warehouses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Washington Post reports, "User experience designer, Emily Cunningham and Marin Costa were both fired on Friday after they tweeted criticism of the company and offered to match donations to warehouse workers. Both had previously criticized Amazon's climate policies, as well as circulated a petition internally calling for improved sick leave policies, hazard pay and childcare for warehouse workers." According to the New York Times. They're trying to advocate for themselves and obviously for all of their peers, their employees, the people that they share a lot of their time with, right? And these are essential workers. But yet Amazon doesn't want them to have a voice.
Joel: Yeah. And don't forget, last month they fired the warehouse worker who helped organize a walkout in the New York office, I think it was Staten Island. This is a long time trend of just basically being combative with the workforce. I think that it's going to be one of two things, either the government is going to step in and unionizing is going to become a thing and government's going to realize Amazon is this huge juggernaut of a retailer and has to be put in check, whether that's via paying taxes in a way that's fair and treating workers in a way that's fair or robots are just going to replace all these people and it doesn't matter.
Chad: That's what Jeff wants.
Joel: That's what he wants. He'd love to have people out of the process all together. And it's additionally hard because you have all these people out of work and Amazon is still hiring tons of people. It's a catch 22 for everybody, Amazon's great because they're hiring, but then they're also a minister society because they're fucking shit up with taxes and they're making shit really bad for their workers. I don't know what to do, it's a tough problem.
Chad: They are a big piece of our infrastructure. The supply chain, if you think about it, you can't treat people like this. I don't care how big a part of any system you are, I don't give a flying fuck. You can't do this from your ivory tower. We have to treat these essential roles like they're essential. Like for starters, paying them essential wages. It's ridiculous that everybody's talking about 15,16 dollar wages. People, that is $30,000 a year for an essential worker, that is ridiculous but yet acceptable. No, it's not acceptable. And that's what we have to get away from. Suppression of voice is not acceptable and saying it's against policy is total bullshit. And then they try to smear, as you'd said, Christian Smalls, they tried to smear him because he was trying to do the right thing.
Joel: Yeah. I think we focus a lot on Amazon and fairly so, but things like Uber and Lyft are doing. They're not employees, they're not beholden to benefits and paying certain taxes, they're contractors.
Chad: Yeah. They're gaming the system.
Joel: So when they're not working, Uber has the gall to go to the government and tell the government that they should be paying and bailing out the drivers of Uber, instead of Uber actually treating them like they're workers. You know what I mean? There's this weird dynamic like, Uber wants it both ways, right? They don't want the government to be involved as long as they're contract workers and they don't have to give benefits, but then when shit hits the fan, they're going to the government saying, "Hey, bail out our drivers." You can't have it both ways.
Chad: Sounds familiar, everybody, yay, capitalism. "Oh shit. Government, can you give me a handout? This would be fucking great. Thanks." "Yeah. No, I didn't save any of that money." "No, I know we had record profits. No, it's my bad."
Joel: Yeah.
Chad: Ending this segment on more of a positive, I'm trying to be positive here because I don't want Joel to go into his negative millennial place.
Joel: That's good.
Chad: Staffing firms announced partnerships amid COVID-19 pandemics. One of those, because there are many of them and we'll actually put the link on our website, but a friend of ours over at Cross Country Healthcare, they are currently collaborating with JetBlue Airlines to provide free flights to healthcare providers traveling to
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: ... New York to fight COVID-19. Healthcare professionals working through Cross country will get information on flights and once they've received their active assignment, boom, they're gone. Now we've heard these types of initiatives happening with Delta Airlines, staying in Hilton hotels and we hope to hear much, much more. And if there are other initiatives that are going on that we're not talking about, listeners, feel free to fire those off to us on Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever you can find us.
Joel: Yeah. New York's a mess. My heart goes out to the New Yorkers, particularly New York city where, let's be honest, a lot of people live in close quarters. A lot of families live really in close proximity to each other. I'm going crazy and I have a large Midwestern house.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: I can't imagine being in a small enclosed space.
Chad: That's a new level of stir crazy.
Joel: It is a new level of stir crazy. But thanks for that positive note, and then I just brought it down like a fucking Debbie Downer, didn't I? Jesus. All right. Let's hear from Canvas and talk about LinkedIn and lawsuits and all kinds of other shit.
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Joel: Speaking of bad news, I hate to say, this just came across the news wire. This is Thursday as we record this. Brian Dennehy has passed.
Chad: Another great actor. This wasn't COVID related, was it?
Joel: Natural causes it says.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: Not COVID related. I loved him in First Blood as the sheriff.
Chad: Oh, as the sheriff. Yeah.
Joel: And Tommy Boy.
Chad: That's range right there.
Joel: Yeah, that is range. That's what you deal with, with me.
Chad: Should have a Brian Dennehy movie, kind of like Film Fest this weekend. Go ahead and treat yourself to that on Netflix, Amazon, and wherever you get your movies.
Joel: Cocoon, I haven't seen in a while. I think he was in that too.
Chad: Yeah. That's a while. Facebook, LinkedIn sued for allegedly eavesdropping on Zoom users. Now this is straight from, from Dennis Tupper, I want to definitely call this out because I love when listeners find good shit like this.
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: A California resident has sued Facebook and LinkedIn for allegedly violating Zoom users privacy by eavesdropping on their video conferencing. The federal lawsuit filed Monday by Todd Hurvitz, also alleges that Zoom violated user privacy by sharing data with outside companies. Who doe
o quote unquote accurately target users for additional services and to convert them to paying customers. While we are in a global pandemic, people need to connect and yet they're being taken advantage of because Zoom sees an opportunity that is put in front of them by Facebook who's a bad actor as it is, and they automatically jump in the bad actor pool. If we want to say it's frivolous, eh, I'm going to say this is again, a bad actor sucking in a new actor that now is going to be playing in the bad actor pin.
Joel: Okay. So if I hear this correctly, Zoom is working in tandem with LinkedIn and Facebook to basically pass over data from Zoom and whether that's what? Transcription and all kinds of other shit, I guess?
Chad: Actual voice, listening in. Yeah, listening in.
Joel: Okay. Actual audio recordings of what's going on.
Chad: Or recording or live stream. Zoom allowed users of Apple's iOS operating system to log into video conferencing services through their Facebook plugin. That's where a lot of this gets really fucked up because of all these single sign on kind of scenarios. And Zoom knows about this, the information that was actually collected, personal data, IP addresses, time zone details, device information, we're talking about your mobile phone.
Joel: Well, yeah. Every voice assistant on the planet is listening to what you're saying every time of the day, what you're watching on television, your conversations, anyway.
Chad: Yeah. Well, if we start to standardize and think that this is okay, then
Joel: Well no. I mean, at least with voice, you can turn shit off apparently, there are things you can do. But yes, if you're logging into Zoom with one click registration with LinkedIn or Facebook, and then there's some relationship with Zoom and Facebook in this example that they're passing over audio from your conversations, then yeah, that's kind of fucked up.
Chad: Audio information from your mobile phone, who knows what the fuck next, right? Or you're using the single sign on from your laptop, either way. But if you're Zoom, to me this just looks like a short term money grab, unless you're working with Facebook on an acquisition play. I mean, why feed Facebook when they could possibly create a similar product? Facebook with messaging and things like that, they could obviously pivot and become quote unquote a Zoom, unless they could be looking at acquisition.
Joel: And look, one of the strengths of Zoom is not only simplicity but also free, right? And the old adage of, if you're wondering why our product's free, it's because you're the product. If Zoom has the same mentality of Facebook where, yeah, we'll be free for a lot of people, we're going to make money on the data, this is a way to make money on the data.
Chad: Yeah. I didn't see that it was only free accounts.
Joel: No, they have a paid version, right?
Chad: Yes.
Joel: But the strength of Zoom is, it's super easy to get on, to join, the basic level's free.
Chad: Still not good.
Joel: Anyway, Facebook now, in the feed now, it'll have your company page and it'll say, "Hey, posting jobs or need to hire people? Click here to post jobs now." They're starting to throw in your company page on your feed and trying to entice you to post jobs. That's a little bit of a newsworthy event that we didn't have on the list at first.
Chad: Yeah. And also another newsworthy event, as we always, we don't talk about enough. If you're out there in the market, you need to buy local, right?
SFX: Hell yeah.
Chad: And we were just talking about Amazon and buying shit, fuck that, buy things that you can local. And one of the reasons why in my Facebook feed, 450 North Brewing Company, which you know, amazing pizza, amazing beer, they're doing a lot of curbside stuff, and we go there at least once a week. They just did a beer drop and it was with nine different beers, and they went on sale at 11 and they did a virtual beer drop. You could go online and buy the beer, they're sold out. So get out there and support local. And staying somewhat local, the next topic is Salesforce, and we'll talk about job or
Joel: Labor hoarding.
Chad: ... labor hoarding. And now the reason people, I know in San Francisco there's a bunch of Salesforce employees and whatnot, but here in Indianapolis we also have the Salesforce building as well.
Joel: The tallest building in the state is Salesforce.
Chad: That's right. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who I'm sure you all know, made a pledge at the end of March, not to drive any significant layoffs over the next few months while the pandemic is expected to be in full swing. Benioff also extended his commitment further by challenging other CEOs and encouraging them to commit to a no-layoff pledge. Every CEO take a 90 day no-layoff pledge. I love to hear that, and then we hear this new term of labor hoarding. What is labor hoarding?
Joel: It's pretty much what you just said. It's basically hoarding your labor when times are really slow or stopping and paying them while they do nothing till times get better. And granted Salesforce is a strong company, a lot of money, most of their workforce are really high level engineer folks or educated folks. As far as how real it is that a lot of companies can follow this pledge, apparently CareerBuilder didn't get the memo, it's going to be tough. And I think as a Silicon Valley celebrity if you will, I think you'll see some of this stuff from the Twitters of the world, the Facebooks, the Apples, you'll probably see very similar. By the way, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, and speaking of Amazon and other folks. Jack Dorsey gave $1 billion to COVID-19 relief efforts. And I'm not sure specifically what it was. But $1 billion represents 28% I think they were saying of his net worth. I mean
Chad: WOW.
Joel: And in contrast, our buddy Jeff Bezos at our favorite company that's not a job site, Amazon, donated a bunch of money, but it represented I think like 0.7%. It would be like you or me giving $7 to a charity.
Chad: Well, I have to say that this type of leadership we really need in government to be able to pull everything together. One company, Benioff or Dorsey, they just can't do it. They can challenge others, but when you have a leader who's in charge of a whole fucking country that's entirely different. In Denmark, the country quickly instituted a policy to help companies keep their employees for the duration of the next three months, preventing the company from experiencing the mass pay off spike that happened in the US. It's important for us to understand that when we have people that aren't getting paid now or after COVID, those people cannot contribute to the economy, they can't pay their bills. They can't do the things that they need to be able to do. And we're already putting trillions of dollars into the system. It's just the way that we're doing it is just so wrong-headed.
Joel: Can we talk about sex robots and really end this thing on a nice note.
Chad: That would be awesome.
Joel: All right. Let's hear from JobAdX and sex robots.
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SFX: Hell yeah.
Joel: Sex robots.
Chad: There it is. Yeah. You shared this podcast with me and I thought, ah, this is really going to be interesting. I mean, because we've talked about sex robots so many times. And yeah, dude, it was interesting as fuck, I couldn't believe some of the things that's going on out there. Why did you share this in the first place other than it said sex robots?
Joel: Yeah, I actually read about it from an AI newsletter and it's from a podcast called Hidden Brain.
Chad: NPR.
Joel: I recommend if you listen to podcasts, which you obviously do because you're listening to us. But it was ... You either expect sex robot conversations to be comedic or sort of sci-fi speculative, whatever. Like they're going to fuck us out of existence. I didn't know what to expect going in, but Hidden Brain tends to be pretty smart and had a lady on who's basically her life is basically studying this whole phenomenon. And it was a historical perspective from the days of Greeks and Romans where they would make statues and Pygmalion, sort of the folklore around that, to the 70s blow up doll phenomenon, to obviously sex toys which were sort of early intro to robots as companionship.
Joel: And now going into companies that are taking 16 weeks to create very lifelike robots that are like people. And she went into it thinking, hey, it's going to be very sexual. These are going to be Barbie dolls. They talk about how the perception or the stereotype of someone that would want one of these is living in mom's basement, no human contact whatsoever. And she sort of goes into refuting those myths and talking about sort of the typical buyer. If you're interested in sort of technology and culture and human sexuality and the future of relationships, it's a pretty interesting lesson.
Chad: Yeah. For me, we just finished, we put out this week the Alexa job search podcast. And the thing that I thought was interesting was the voice assistance like Alexa that are being asked to talk dirty to them. There's a market for that apparently. And an app called Harmony is a sex chatbot and an app for your phone. I guess, is that a sex chatbot in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? That in itself I thought was interesting because it is, the things that we talk about from a chatbot standpoint process efficiencies, engagements on and so forth. This is so much more simplistic, but there is quote unquote AI to it. That was one point that stuck out to me and I was like, "Wow, okay." I didn't think about that, didn't think about asking my Google home to talk dirty me. And then the second part, which was really unnerving was sex dolls that could prospectively be custom made to look like someone else. Let's say for instance that chick that would never go out on a date with you or that dude that would never go out on a date with you. You could actually possibly get a doll made in their likeness. And at that point, I just had no words.
Joel: Some privacy concerns there, right?
Chad: Yeah, I was like, I just had no words at that point. And coming with the regulation that would have to come behind that to be able to not allow something to be made in somebody else's likeness without their permission. And I was like, "Oh my God, this is going down a fucking rabbit hole that I never thought about."
Joel: In light of the sex robot podcast, if you haven't seen Her starring Joaquin Phoenix, it's a really interesting movie sort of having digital relationships and what that looks like.
Chad; With an operating system.
Joel: An operating system, right. And then the other one would be, Whitney Cummings is a comedian and she has a Netflix special. But she actually partnered with a sex robot manufacturer to make a sex robot look like her. And in her stand-up she actually brings the robot out to talk to her about the whole thing. If you're into this thing or interested, check out Whitney Cummings stand-up on Netflix. And if you can find Her starring Joaquin Phoenix somewhere, check that out if you haven't seen it yet.
Chad: No words. We out.
Joel; We out.
Walken; Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast. With Chad, and Cheese. Brilliant.. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shoutouts of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening, it's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one. Cheddar, blue, nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss. There's so many cheeses and not one word. It's so weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode and while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. It's so weird. We out.
s this surprise? Joel: It shouldn't surprise anybody. Zoom, the hottest tech company in the world right now probably, that burst from 10 million users to 200 million, probably up to 250 million by now, had no context for what growth like that would mean from a security perspective, from a PR perspective, from just a light being shone on your business perspective. It's no surprise that some lawyer saw a story about security risks and figured out, okay, who can I sue with a lot of money that's integrated with Zoom to put some bank into my bank account? You know what I'm saying? To me, from what I read on this was super frivolous, try to find a chink in the armor of a start-up and then sue big companies a lot of money. I think it's totally baseless. I think it will be thrown out. But who knows, maybe they'll just write him a check to make them go away, and if anything else he gets some good PR and maybe some new clients at his law firm.
Chad: I saw that, I thought that kind of at first, and then I started researching it and I found other articles, one on law360.com where
Joel: Look at you on law six ... what is it? law360.com?
Chad: Yeah, law360.com. Facebook, it seems as if ... And the thing is we have to think here, right? Who are the players in this? Facebook, we know has been harvesting data from users for ever, right?
Joel: Run by a site.
Chad: Unapologetically, right? LinkedIn, we know does it, they just do it in a much more silent stealthy way. And Zoom is this new player, It's just like, okay, I can start to believe how this could perspectively happen. They're harvesting personal information, Facebook seized on these profiles to boost its targeting advertising business while Zoom also profited from its newly enhanced ability t
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