As you probably guessed, the week before Christmas, recruiting news is a bit light. However, that won't stop the Chad & Cheese commentary train, even if things are a little less recruit-y. Elon's Cybertruck is hitting some snags in Europe, and it's not just the narrow roads in Cork that might keep it out of bounds in the Old Country. Threads has also hit Europe, successfully maneuvering the EU regulation machine. Does that spell more trouble for Elon's X? We discuss. Sticking with Europe (why not?), it's a Who'd Ya' Rather: Ménage à  Trois edition, featuring Urban Sports Club, Harriet and Mistral. What's more? How about the future of self-checkout and giving eternal life to your favorite porn stars, thanks to AI. Indeed, the happiest time of the year starts with this warm and fuzzy episode of Chad & Cheese. Hallelujah! Holy sh!t! Where's the Tylenol?
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeman 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, I don't know what to say, but it's Christmas and we're all in Misery. What's up, kids? You're listening to The Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Shitter's full Cheeseman.
Chad: And this is Chad 14th amendment Sowash.
Joel: And on this episode, Cyber Trucks Threads and Pornstars, sounds a lot like my Christmas wishlist. Let's do this.
Chad: So no cold open. I mean, it was all cold open, you didn't have anything leading you in, you don't have sound effects. This is not a great holiday season for Joel, right now.
Joel: This is awful. It's your nirvana. It's your nirvana. No sounds no baby crying or, our software for podcasting.
Chad: It took a shit.
Joel: We can't play sounds, so Chad's gonna throw these in, I don't know what... I'm out of control. I don't have sounds. This is the Cole In My Stocking. But anyway, it's Christmas time. It's holiday season, our Christmas cards are out, everyone's feeling the love.
Chad: Loving it.
Joel: You're in, who knows where the hell you are, some sunshine coming through the window, you got bottles of booze behind you. If you haven't seen this stuff, go check us out on YouTube, you can see all the glory of Chad's backgrounds, it's not relegated to his Facebook feed. You can go on video and see the elaborate vacation spot. So where are you now and what are you doing?
Chad: I am on the island of Madeira, which is a Portuguese island, but it's literally off the coast of Africa, it is pretty much a mountain in the water, so it's got just this crazy hiking trails, it's golf courses. It's pretty amazing. So we're here through Christmas and New Year's Eve, we have family coming in for New Year's Eve, we're gonna do big Airbnb. Right now I am actually at a friend's house at his bar, as you can see living the life and enjoying shorts and T-shirt weather.
Joel: So I'm gonna give you a little AI scare story. So you and I, we chat on Facebook Messenger, and you put a picture on our feed about you in Madeira, and on Instagram, I'm starting to get ads about visiting Madeira for vacation. That's how scary smart this AI shit is getting.
Chad: It knows.
Joel: It's getting a little out of control, a little out of control. Pouring yourself a beer. That's nice.
Chad: Pouring myself a Coral. Literally, this is a Madeiran beer. Yeah, so while you're here, you gotta drink this stuff, so they've got Madeiran port wine, rum, which we will have later. So yeah, we're just trying to do the most Madeiran things we can, get drunk. Eat food.
Joel: So you remember last week, I said, If anyone in Chicago wants to lose some money on the Browns-Bears game, so two people took me up on that, one was Joe Shaker, which I knew would happen, and then our boy, Mike Shafer at FactoryFix. So Joe being the grizzled veteran of the betting world, took the points they gave the Bears three and a half points, the Browns won by 3. So Joe technically won in Vegas, although my Browns will be in the playoffs and his Bears will be in Bora Bora, Mike on the other hand, at FactoryFix took it straight up like a man. No points. So I came out even, I pushed on it, but I got a nice bottle of scotch from Mike and I sent Joe some nice red wine, which was his request.
Chad: I like how you talk about somebody taking it like a man and going straight up and knowing that whenever you get a chance to take the points.
Joel: Take the points, the best ever with Joe was Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Ohio State blew him out, but Wisconsin had so many points that I lost the bet. So... Yeah, you gotta take the points, sometimes you have to. If it's Ohio State, Wisconsin, you can't go straight up on that bet. Well, my friend, have a good holiday. I will not talk to you hopefully at all next week, take a time out.
Chad: If we're luckily.
Joel: And then we hit the ground running next year and spend a lot of time with each other, so let's get to shout-outs.
Chad: A big shout-out to... You might know her, Penny Queller and the Mom project. This is from SIA "The Mom project a staffing provider with a special focus on mothers returning to the workforce which is what we need kids, named the long time staffing industry executive Penny Queller as its president, to lead the company through its next stage of growth." Penny was already working as an advisor to CEO Allison Robinson, who has been on the pod and will transition, Allison will transition to a new role as founder and chairwoman. So big shout out to Penny and the mom project.
Joel: Love it, love it, love it. Mine is much less professional, I hope that you can bear with me...
Chad: Imagine that.
Joel: My shout-out goes to Aidan Maese-Czeropski. Hopefully, I said that correctly.
Chad: Excuse you.
Joel: Who the hell is that? You're in Europe, you may not know this, but a 25-year-old staffer, a Senate staffer this week decided to... Well, he didn't do it this week, but he shared pics recently of having sex, sexual intercourse in a Senate hearing room, the same Senate hearing room where they vet Supreme Court Justices and really important people, Aidan decided to do the nasty. He recorded it, put it on like a private group chat, didn't think this would come out. Shocker, it did, lesson for the kids, if you put it online, there's a good chance that it's gonna be found. Aidan works for an 80-year-old senator. I can't imagine what that conversation was like, 80-year-old senator who's leaving the senate, from Maryland, he was fired shockingly, and people are digging up some really interesting stuff on this cat, they're looking at his Venmo purchases, his Twitter stuff like kids if it's on the internet, it can come to bite you in the ass. Don't do it. Aidan, cautionary tale, but shout-out to you, my friend, sex in a Senate hearing room deserves a shout-out. Deserves a shout-out. If nothing else does.
Chad: Yeah, well, I can tell you what the Senator said, he said, everybody's done that, but nobody's stupid enough to actually take a video and put it out there, you got caught 'cause you're an idiot.
Joel: Where would be the ultimate on the down low, sex. Would it be the Oval Office?
Chad: Oh God, yeah, I mean, if you could pull that off, I don't know how in the hell you'd pull something like that off, but I mean, if you're in a senate room, for God's safe, you go to a SCIF, that's where you go.
Joel: I hope it was worth it, man. I hope it was worth it.
Chad: Yeah, and what's better than sex in the SCIF is free stuff.
Joel: Free stuff almost as good as sex in a Senate hearing room is free stuff from Chad and Cheese. We're talking t-shirts from JobGet, beer from Aspen Tech Labs, a bottle of Bourbon from Chad and myself, our pick from our friends at Textkernel, and if it's your birthday...
Chad: What...
Joel: And December birthdays are something special, you get a chance to win a bottle of rum from our friends at Plumb. Another trip around the sun is being celebrated by Holland McCue, Monica Abby, Nick Bradford, Mike Politich, Tina Davis, Angela Aguilar, Nick Hutchinson, Kim Grey, Lex Kramer, Ali Raza, Daniel Bailey or Daniel Bailley, Jonathan Martinez, Kelly Havanic, Aaron Matos, and our 25th, December 25th birthdays, our baby Jesus birthdays, go to Jeff Stanton and Craig Rodds who are celebrating on December 25th, which I can't imagine a worst day for a birthday.
SFX: Happy birthday.
Chad: Anywhere inside the holiday region, I think you pretty much get screwed.
Joel: Yes, yeah, my dad, who I said turns 84, his is on the 20th. When we drop this, it'll be his birthday, he bitches all the time about how much his birthday sucked because it was right near Christmas.
Chad: But what doesn't suck is events, baby. That's why I travel by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. We already have eight. That's right, the Ocho conference is planned for 2024, the very first is an event in San Diego. That's right, kids.
Joel: The wells you know what.
Chad: Yeah, we're gonna be hanging out with koalas at the zoo, we're gonna be at the zoo with our friends from Qoalafi, that starts with a Q, ends with an I, Qoalafi. You gotta go to chadcheese.com/events. You gotta check out where we're gonna be, we're really stoked about this event, definitely stoked about working with Evan White this year because that guy is going into overdrive, so really excited about 2024. It's shaping up quick, if you wanna get in and you wanna do some booth stuff with us and VIP parties or what have you, get a hold of us ASAP 'cause they're going fast.
Joel: Going fast. And by the way, it's not a Chad and Cheese event, but I will be in Montreal in January if you're in town, say Hi, I'll be seeing the HiringBranch folks gonna go see some hockey, the Canadians versus the Oilers, little Connor McDavid I'm pretty excited about that. But yeah, we got a full plate next year, I'm getting till for this shit, I don't know about you. Luckily, we have video that we can do new stuff with, and by the way, if you haven't listened to the Chad and Cheese podcast does data with our friend Toby Dayton at LinkUp, great stuff. We look at the monthly employment reports, we dig down, we simplify it for the Chad and Cheese listeners, learn some stuff, if you haven't looked at that, it's exclusively on YouTube, go to YouTube.com/@chadcheese, subscribe like and share, my friends. And while you're at it leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice, we'd like to know what we can do better and what we did well in 2023 and heading into 2024. And speaking of doing well, Chad fantasy football, fantasy football was not one of my strong suits in this season, my friend.
SFX: Boo you suck.
Joel: We're getting down to the end. We have our play-off line-ups set, This is our final full leaderboard for you. Top four spaces go to the playoffs for final glory, the chain, the social media, affection and love, our top four all female, all female playoff at Chad and Cheese Fantasy Football, sponsored by our friends at FactoryFix, includes Michelle Sergeant, Dina Parow, Marcy Mall and Jill Patterson pretty much right up there the whole season, those ladies are gonna battle out for the top spot. Your next four are your consolation prize, that's your boy, Chad there, Joe Bag A Dixon gets to battle it out, Dean Osner, Grent Losi and the bottom four...
SFX: Boo you suck.
Joel: Eliminated, annihilated. Deleted from the whole scene includes me, Jasper Spanger, Dennis I was
Number One Last Year Tupper.
SFX: Boo you suck.
Joel: And the bottom, Kristen Urban. It was a fun season. Our season is over, you're back in the playoff for the consolation prize, I can't wait to see who comes out the winner between Michelle, Dina, Mercy and Jill. It's gonna be fun.
Chad: I beat the number one team last week, I was in fifth place. I'm still in fifth place, this is bullshit. Two years in a row. Fifth place fuck.
Joel: Can I just say that I hate Christian McCaffrey, I hate Christian McCaffrey.
Chad: You've been making fun of Jasper this entire time, but you're just one ahead of him, and I believe he scored more than 100 points more than you did.
Joel: Well, his points were calculated on the metric system, so I don't think it was the same as mine. It was much less, I'm sure, or Celsius one of the two.
Chad: Touche, touche.
Joel: So not Fahrenheit. Let's get to topics.
Chad: Topics.
Joel: All right Chad. Elon's cyber truck has hit some bumps in the road. Criticisms from organizations like the Center for Auto Safety highlight concerns about the truck's safety and potential dangers it might pose on the road, they argue that the cyber truck's design, particularly its stiff stainless steel panels could cost severe damage in accidents involving pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles. Additionally regulatory issues in the European Union and skepticism around the truck's safety features, further field the debate across the pond. Chad You're on the waiting list for the cyber truck, I believe. What are your thoughts on these developments...
Chad: I gotta go with the Center for Auto Safety who posted on Twitter "At over 6000 pounds, no one will ever doubt your manhood again, we get it, you were picked last in gym and now you want revenge, but this isn't the answer. Buying this is why you were picked last. It's desperate and dangerous to everyone else on the road, stop being picked last."
SFX: No God, please no.
Chad: So everybody's making fun of Elon, and we're seeing all of these trolled videos where the cyber truck was trying to take a Christmas tree and they were off road and they had to get pulled out by a Ford 150, they are now calling it the sports futility truck not utility, sports futility truck. The thing weighs three tons, almost a half ton more than the EV Ford 150, and on the Europe side of the house, which you mentioned in a Rolling Stone article, "the truck is currently not available in the European Union due in part to regulatory issues, and a Tesla VP has confirmed it's unlikely to ever be sold in the market." This literally is just an Elon...
Joel: Vanity project.
Chad: Testosterone project. Yeah, and people will buy it. I don't know, it's the ugliest fucking thing I think I've seen. It looks like the Land Rover from Lost in Space from the 1960s.
Joel: You mentioned Europe, by the way, Keith Richards turns 80 this week, or turned 80 this week, how the hell that guy is still alive is a mystery to me, but that's a different show. I think just like the Hummer of 20 years ago, this will be a very popular vehicle with a very specific audience of male, more than likely. Have you seen the black one? The black one is totally cool, this thing will not be like the biggest selling car in the world, but there will an audience for this. And will enjoy it. They'll fix the towing stuff, the European thing is gonna be an issue though, 'cause it's a steel car, that's bullet-proof, that just reeks of European regulation to me, in America, it'll be... I think it'll be a hit with a lot of people. We do our predictions show soon, we don't do like pop culture industries like I would predict this car will be around in a decade, this will be a thing that people do embrace. The weight of it is because they want you to get the tax incentives that you do with the Land Rover or like any other big car, that's why it weighs as much as it does, although batteries don't like heavy cars, so I don't know how they kind of... I guess they kind of balance how far it can go with how much it weighs, but the tax incentive will mean a lot of... Every rapper, every CEO in Silicon Valley, this will be a hit with a certain audience, mark my words.
Chad: Well, it's not gonna get obviously into Europe, not to mention Europe is starting to tighten down on their EV rebates, so there's a lot that's happening here, so we'll see the prediction show... I do you see it as kind of like a Hummer sales machine per se? The only reason it is gonna be around is because it's an Elon project and he loves this thing.
Joel: Yeah, yeah, just like when Schwarzenegger had a Hummer and it took off somebody like... People will drive, they'll give it like heaven forbid, Trump gets re-elected and he drives around in a cyber truck, then it's over. I don't know.
Chad: See the big difference between a Hummer and a cyber truck is the Hummer was actually a military vehicle and that motherfucker could go anywhere. I mean, you could not get that thing stuck, I know 'cause I had one and drove it in the jungle when I was 18 or 19 years old, I couldn't get that fucker stuck.
Joel: Right, but how many people who bought it needed to get out of tight fixes like that, like they just drove it around downtown Manhattan or whatever, by the way, this will never go over in Ireland because the roads are like 3 feet wide. All right, from one megalomaniac to another, Meta's social media platform Threads has now been introduced in the EU after previously being available in various countries worldwide, including the US, and the UK, since July 2023. The delay in its launch was linked to complexities in complying with new regulations notably, the Digital Markets Act, aimed at regulating big tech companies and set to be effective by March of 2024, Threads is in Europe, Chad, and so are you. What are your thoughts?
Chad: So I see this as really a cage match, a pseudo cage match between Zuck and Elon. So this is a Twitter versus Threads kind of scenario. The unfortunate struggle that's happening here is really between idiocracy and civility, Twitter, undergoes EU probes under the new disinformation rules, their failure to combat content disinformation and manipulation. So now we see Threads pushing into Europe and Twitter getting pulled down in Europe. So why? I don't know, because they're amplifying antisemitism. Alex Jones, and even the seditious, Donald Trump was let back on the fucking platform. Twitter's just too toxic for advertisers, billions have been lost. Elon told the advertisers to go fuck off, the blue check mark means nothing anymore, a possible $1 charge and also hiring platform fees, that won't be enough to make up for the billions that they lost in advertising.
Chad: Twitter is top heavy, which means the top 10% of users account for 72% of time spent on the platform. Now, on the other hand, Thread's ability to onboard new users through Insta was great, but only if you have an Insta account. So not so good. Threads is opening up, obviously, in the EU, so they're gonna be able to have an opportunity to expand if they've got great penetration for Instagram in EU but the point of the story is that Threads won't kill Twitter. Hate speech is killing Twitter, Elon's public speaking, his tweets and his behavior is already killing Twitter. So Threads just needs to sit back and focus on creating a better product and allow Elon to continue to pour gasoline on the fire that's happening over there right now.
Joel: Threads at launch grew incredibly fast, they did a great job of you leveraging Instagram and all your Instagram people are now your Threads people, and adding people was really easy. The problem has been stickiness and keeping people on, how much of that content is the same stuff that I get other places? Our friend Levin who does the European show with us, we asked his take on Threads in Europe, and his comment was tried it wasn't mean enough.
Chad: Wasn't toxic enough, yeah.
Joel: Well, yeah, it's too nice, people are too pleasant. So there'll be an audience.
Chad: Sounds like a horrible world.
Joel: And a lot of people are like I'm over Twitter the toxicity, the Elon thing, the politics so they're over it and they're going to Threads. I see us dividing into a world of like, Threads users and Twitter users. And your Twitter user is sort of a brand that's different than Threads. I mean, if you look at every, just about every major company has the gold badge or the gold, that they pay for their account and you see journalists, and.
Chad: Not everybody pays for it, though.
Joel: Not every... We don't know who they just give it to and who's paying. I mean but Elon, it looked like he was sort of strong arming companies. You remember some people were getting company names and buying the blue check and then posting as I was really Coca-Cola, or I was really IBM and that was a whole mess. So I think that if you're as a social media strategy, you're gonna have to be on Twitter, whether you advertise or not is different. I tend to think that if Twitter advertising actually worked, these companies would figure out an excuse for like sticking with the platform. But it's a shit show, it's sad to me because Elon's launching rockets and landing them, he's giving internet to like the whole world, he's going to Mars and he dinks around with this social media shit.
Joel: It just frustrates me. I wish he would focus on this stuff. And even Tesla, right? He has a point when he says, "I've done more for like, the environment than just about anyone on the planet. And you guys are still like up my ass." We're only up his ass because he's a dick on Twitter. So, I don't know, I don't know. This thing is going to a subscription only I think maybe small businesses will advertise, maybe local people, the big guys seem to be not wanting any part of it, but I think it's gonna go more subscription, they're gonna give you more and more reasons to pay them a hundred bucks a year. And that's the business model in my opinion. Threads will monetize like Instagram and Facebook and in all this, TikTok is kicking everyone's ass.
Chad: Exactly, exactly, yeah.
Joel: Yeah. Which, speaking of bets have you gotten your bourbon yet from the Indeed Whisperer, Jim Durbin?
[laughter]
Chad: Not yet. I have not gotten it, but yeah, I will ask my people who are watching over the house to see if I've gotten it so we shall see, because TikTok still running strong in the US of A. As a matter of fact, I might even predict that, flipping this, that next year Twitter in some European countries will be nixed, because of the disinformation and how he's not managing it and EU might put a smack on and say, "we're gonna close you down in the EU." And yet Twitter will still be, or not Twitter, but, TikTok will still be running in the US.
Joel: By the way TikTok genius PR campaign, Twitter could take a little bit of a hint or a tip from what TikTok is doing, marketing and PR-wise, 'cause it's Playbook Masterclass, brilliant.
Chad: Elon would have to shut up, and that's never gonna happen.
Joel: Yeah, it's never gonna happen, it's never gonna happen. Well, let's you and I shut up for a few seconds and pay some bills and listen to some of our sponsors, we'll be right back.
SFX: A crummy commercial son of a bitch.
Joel: All right, Chad, what's better to ring in the holiday season than a game of Who'd You Rather, and in honor of our friend Levin over in Europe, we're doing a ménage à trois edition of Who'd You Rather, by talking about three companies, and at the end of those summaries, talking about Who'd You Rather of those three, are you ready to play Who'd You Rather ménage à trois style?
Chad: Let's do it.
Joel: Let's do it, all right. First up is Berlin Urban Sports Club, they've secured 95 million Euros to strengthen their wellness market presence. Surging employee demand for wellbeing programs drives companies to invest in benefits like those offered by the Urban Sports Club. Next up, we have Harriet, a London-based AI solution for HR data management, they've secured 1.39 million euros in pre-seed funding. They focus on cleaning data, offering tailored support and easing HR tasks through its AI powered, assistant accessible via Slack teams and other platforms. And last but not least is Mistral, Paris based Mistral AI established by Meta and Google Researchers, has secured 385 million euros in funding, valued at $2 billion, pioneering AI chatbots. It focuses on open source technology, challenging major players like OpenAI and AI Advancements. The company says it's open source AI contrasts with tech giant's Guarded approach, emphasizing community driven development for safer, more robust software. Urban Sports Club, Harriet or Mistral, Chad, who'd you rather?
Chad: So the sports club. This sounds like a perfect model for employees in Europe in a very fad-ish culture for the US looking for free kombucha bar, of the day idea, right? I mean, it seems like free breakfast, free kombucha, that kind of thing has been kind of like the thing, the fad in the US but they don't always last too long. I don't see something like this lasting incredibly long in the US because to be quite frank, employers don't give two shits about their employees. They act like they do, for the most part, there are some that generally do but they're looking at these organizations as a way to just try to suck some attention in to be able to prospectively pitch, their organization. Harriet, an integrated Slack system.
Chad: I mean, that's really what it is, is Slack is the core vehicle for widespread and easy adoption. And then using other, much harder to navigate data repository systems like Google Drive, Notion, HiBob, Bamboo, Zapier for the accumulation and the training of that data, this is a really a keep it simple stupid model, I love it, I love it to death. This is awesome, but it feels more like a feature than a bigger LLM 'cause they're just focusing on policies, best practices, those types of things. So I really love it, but it's not as big as Mistral, European, LLM founded in May, this May, by three former Meta and Google AI researchers funded by Andreessen, Nvidia, Salesforce, BNP... Do I need to fucking go on? I mean, this has all the right ingredients to work since Europe needs another major LLM player, I'm gonna pick Who I'd rather Mistral all damn day.
Joel: Mistral, you like those high, high priced, high price, companies, don't you? So, talk about David and Goliath. We got one company at 1.39, pre-seed 95 million, and then like the granddaddy here at 2 billion valuation, Mistral. So the Urban Sports Club thing, I do love businesses that like to make companies feel good about what they're doing, whether it's a diversity program, benefits program. And in this case, we let our folks go to the sports club or whatever network this is, to socialize, work out, get healthy, get balanced, etcetera. So I think they will find a very strong market, they've been around for a long time, so they've grown organically. And who better to sort of manage this than the country that invented kindergarten, out of Germany, Urban Sports Club.
Joel: So I like the business, but do I like it more than the other two? Harriet total agreement that this is a feature, probably not a standalone company and that's probably how they're built, that's probably why they only have a million some in pre-seed, they are a piece to a bigger puzzle, someone like a Personio, a HiBob that someone like that should come along and gobble up someone like Harriet. I do like the name by the way, it's kind of cute. But yeah, to me this is sort of like, I don't know, scenery in a bigger picture, the real show here, the act, the name on the marquee is Mistral this thing has an amazing potential to disrupt everything. Look, open source has a pretty, pretty long and illustrious career in technology.
Joel: WordPress comes to mind, PHP, Linux comes to mind, which is basically the backbone of a lot of websites and technologies that are out there. So the question is, can you take Linux and what they did and even WordPress and take this sort of community-based, development and infrastructure and compete with OpenAI and Gemini, Bard, whatever Google's gonna come out with, and I see Facebook being the backbone for a lot of new things. Our final story about porn, includes Meta and their AI, so they're in there as well. How this will impact our industry though, I think is really, we don't know yet. So this is an open source chatbot, right? How many times have we talked about chatbots? Are they ubiquitous in our industry? Whether it's Paradox, Wade and Wendy, you name it.
Joel: All the ones that are out there, is this gonna make it super easy for someone to create a chatbot that will compete with Paradox? We don't know yet, but it certainly seems like the bones are there for someone to just put the meat on it to have a competitive product. Everything that Gemini's gonna build, or can this will probably be a much cheaper, much easier to use, less guarded, less walled technology that people can use to build products in our space. I'm being long-winded, but it's my short answer of saying that Mistral also, you and I can fight over Mistral as to who gets what there, in this ménage à trois edition of Who'd You Rather. But that is kind of a slam dunk for me, it wasn't really even that difficult of a decision.
SFX: Shall we play a game?
Joel: Which brings us to, self checkout. We've never talked about this. I don't think. This will be fun, so self checkout, promise, convenience, cost saving and efficiency. But faces criticism. Customers complain about glitches. Retailers combat theft, and some stores like Walmart and Target are testing alternatives. Labor shortage drove its expansion, yet rising frustrations and theft concerns persist despite having fans and being a technology advancement. Workers monitoring self-checkout stations face safety risks and customer hostility. Chad is self-checkout on the way out?
Joel: Well, I thought it was interesting that, one of the people in the article actually talked about discounts, if I'm going to check myself out, I should at least get a 5% discount, which would be fairly simple for like a Kroger, because, you know, they're gonna raise their prices by 5%, right? And then everybody's going to pay that 5% tax at the actual human register, right? So a lot of this from a confluence standpoint doesn't make sense. Labor is gonna be hard to find to be able to do those jobs, we're already seeing that labor is hard to find as it is. Theft, they already had that into the equation when they started, they're bitching about it now, they're full of shit, their profits are higher than they've ever been. Grocery I know has, lower profit margins, but they're a lot bigger than what they have been.
Chad: They're pulling in a shit ton of cash, and their CEOs are getting paid more than they ever have. Bernadette Christian, 59, a worker at Giant Food in Clinton, Maryland mans six self-service stations at once. And she's afraid to help or confront shoppers who she said had become angrier since the pandemic. And I would say even before that, we've just had more of an angry kind of a feel in the US. So yeah, you're talking about Bernadette. Bernadette doesn't wanna come up to you and say, "Hey, what's that in your coat pocket? Or wait a minute, what did you just put in your bag? Did you scan that?" Right? I mean, you're putting these people under some very, very horrible conditions, they've gotta watch six of these things. They've gotta come over to me and I've gotta wait for them to scan my driver's license so that I can get my Bourbon when I want it, there's just too many things that are happening here. So they're playing with the not enough labor, and then when you start to do these self checkouts, you have to have labor on the self checkouts, so it's literally, I think, a problem they've created for themselves.
Joel: When I was growing up, my mom would get paid on Friday and she would go to the bank and deposit, like give a check to the teller and say, "I want X amount of cash back," which was the cash she had for the week. And then from there, we would go to the gas station and we would sit in line and wait for the guy who pumped the gas to eventually come over to the car and have my mom say, "fill her up." He'd fill it up, give cash, he'd have the little change thing on his belt and give money back. This was the world before self-service.
Chad: He would wash your vehicle and he would check your oil too.
Joel: Depending on... Well, in our neighborhood, not so much, maybe in the high class district that you lived in. But the point is like, full service sucks for a lot of people, I would much rather ATM it, not talk to anybody, pump my own gas, that's the world I prefer, and I never, ever check out from the grocery store, with the person, the cashier. I like my own stuff. I get it done quicker. I'm more efficient, and I love when I go to Costco or Sam's Club and I have an App where I can scan the product and I can pay on my phone, and I literally walk out and I have a barcode and the guy goes, boop, and he checks my thing and says, "have a nice day." Like, that's the world I wanna live in. It scares me to think that we're talking about going back to the days of old or getting rid of some of this stuff. The problem is just like the dude in Walmart with the baseball bat that wants to beat up the janitorial robot. People are gonna like, find ways around the system. How do I steal stuff? How do I raise a stink with the 22-year-old that's like overseeing 20 self-serve kiosks. What happened to the day when Amazon bought Whole Foods and we were supposed to just like walk in, and they were supposed to scan us somehow and know what we picked up off the shelf and we just walked out and it charged our Amazon account? Like when is that coming? There's gotta be a happy medium, there's gotta be a way to verify, let people go out the 5% discount.
Joel: Sure, that's great., but that'll be more people in the self-serve, which will create more self-serve issues if we add discounts to that. I for one hope they don't get rid of this, or how do you secure it? 'Cause we can't go back to standing in line having the cashier scan everything and like "Al butter on aisle four need a price check," and like they go, that world sucks. I love the self-serve world, figure it out, the theft thing I think is crazy, but our tech should be such now that these aren't issues. Dammit.
Chad: So here's the thing. I'm here in Europe, I go to Aldi, I go to Lidl I go to the Continent and they don't have any of these self-check aisles. You go through a person and nobody has a problem with that because they're patient and they understand that nobody's gonna die in this process. As Americans, we want it now, we want it yesterday, and that's one of the reasons why Bernadette Christian is really scared to confront people because we Americans have turned into fucking assholes. These toxic Twitter tweets have really just embodied who we've become. We care about ourselves, we don't care about the people around us, this is about our experience. And there's no reason why this can't work like it used to, I do love this self scan. I do love it, don't get me wrong. I haven't used it in three months since I've been here, you know why? 'cause I don't need to.
Joel: You're right, it's a state of mind. There's a comedian that talks about Waze, the program where it helps you drive and miss traffic and he hates it because aside from the fact that it makes you go through a neighborhood you don't know and like cut through places and sort of be like... Is your life that like urgent that you can't sit in your car for 10 more minutes and listen to music or think about life or appreciate what you have? Yes, we're way too fucked up in America, but we ain't going back in America, that's for damn sure. If anything, it'll be more like delivery and I don't even wanna leave my house, I just wanna sit in my lazy boy and Netflix, Madman episodes.
Chad: And what about that says community.
Joel: Nothing.
[laughter]
Chad: Nothing, we've turned into a non-community, community. Anyway, get me the fuck out of this.
Joel: I know, I know. Thank God we have Chipotle to interact with each other.
[laughter]
SFX: A crummy commercial. Son of bitch.
Joel: All right, Chad, you took the porn stories away from me last week with the ICIMS CEO news news break. So I gotta get it in.
Chad: I didn't think that ICIMS did that.
Joel: Yeah, I know ICIMS did that, we gotta get that dude on the show. All right. So, Sophie Dee, a veteran porn star, she's about 38 years old, I think is collaborating with an AI company to create a digital alter ego, Sophie AI resembling her appearance and voice utilizing Meta's AI model. STXT trains the AI with explicit conversations, personal details, and AI generated images to simulate Sophie Dee. Sophie AI aims to sustain her income post performing years, offering subscribers a personalized experience at a monthly fee, drawing in around 700 users to date. While Dee anticipates ongoing success, some of the industry like Allie Rae, Allie Rae find the technology premature, premature and not lucrative enough for sex work cautioning against its hasty adoption. Chad, your take on the escalating drama of porn and AI.
Chad: So scale, baby scale, and I mean, Allie Rae was, I believe the nurse who was making $30,000 a month or currently is on OnlyFans. Well, of course she doesn't wanna see this happen because this is the next move. We're gonna be able to scale from OnlyFans, which is beautiful because if you think about it, okay, so if you're a stripper and you're on on the stage, you have that time. That's it, that's all you get, but if you go to OnlyFans, you have all of the obviously content library that you've created over the years, and that's scalable. People can dig into it, they can go through it over and over and over if they want to, but you're continuing to add to that, and that scales, well. What scales better than that? Being able to create not just conversations in chats, but to be able to scale those chats to thousands of people at once with one chatbot, and then be able to use possibly looking down the road multimodal where you're actually creating videos and voice. This is the next step, and I really think that if any company is smart enough, and again, this is a Blockbuster Netflix scenario, Blockbuster should have bought Netflix. OnlyFans needs to buy one of these companies, and they need to make it a pretty much a fee for anybody who wants to use it, and they're just making transactional money, they could really explode with that kind of model.
SFX: Prince Ehhhh!.
Joel: Explode, explode you say? Our friend Adam Gordon and I had a small back and forth on the history of this or the future of this. And he's pretty convinced as I am as well, that they'll still be humans doing this, they'll still be humans, like real people showing skin and doing whatever, pornographic that they want to do.
Chad: It'll be more.
Joel: The challenge is, and it's, to me, it's... Yeah, to me it's this conflict between the new face of porn OnlyFans and spare time and showing skin and everything, and maybe a few chats here and there, versus a old aging porn star being able to leverage her brand and her portfolio of work, if you will, and being able to provide that in a virtual format for the rest of her life. Frankly, she can still be 25 and whatever when she's 75. But the key there is she's a porn star that has built a brand and an audience, whereas if I just go on OnlyFans and have not done porn or not have any kind of wide audience, the chances that I become rich are much less. And I hate the idea of competing with porn stars from the past now are producing porn, well into their golden years. Throw in the fact that you're gonna get VR at some level, you're gonna get sex robots, and this thing is gonna get strange.
Chad: I know.
Joel: You're gonna be able to customize, you know, the girl you dated, you know, the one night stand you had back in '98, I want to produce her and like, go back in time.
Chad: That's just so fucking creepy.
Joel: That's where it's going, dude or I want to like, I love Jennifer Aniston, or I love whoever Selena Gomez, I want to have her as my slave, digital slave, sex, whatever.
Chad: People are going to own their own likenesses at that point, let's hope so that we don't have to play that game, oh my God.
Joel: But it'll be personalized, it'll be just for me. I'm not gonna publish it anywhere, it's just for me, it's just for my... I don't know how you police that this thing is going weird, but it's too easy to scale and the costs are too low to not disrupt what OnlyFans is doing and the money that girls are making on OnlyFans that is not sustainable when you look at what technology is doing. I hope they never digitize Santa because I'm on the nice list this year Chad, and I can't wait to see what's under my tree. How about you? .
Chad: Hopefully it's not an AI, girlfriend, 'cause I don't need any of that shit.
Joel: Those are skeletons Chad does not need. Based on your background of booze Santa has already seen
you, my friend, happy holidays we out.
Chad: We out.
Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese Podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forward it to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back, valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey or just watch big booty Latinas send bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckle heads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt, but save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.