Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
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smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for
your support. I did get a message regarding the previous topic. Well,
the last two to so first hour we covered TikTok
and why you should not have it and deep Seek
the new AI also owned by the chi cooms why
you should not use it or download their app. But
also how like, we are a very stupid society for
not recognizing the threat that is China, and we just
continue to willingly voluntarily give it all of this information,
knowing that they intend to use it for our demise.
But we are stupid. And I told I advise people
don't be dumb asses, But I know that may be
a bit too much to ask. Michael wrote me and said,
the American people are dumb as a box of rocks
when it comes to these Chinese owned apps, they are
willing to sacrifice personal and national security in order to
be able to watch stupid videos made by stupid people.
I agree with your comment, stop being dumbasses. Well, look,
I will say this, just like every platform, there are good, entertaining,
informative quality content creators on TikTok, No doubt about it, right,
no doubt about There are people that are producing very
good content, stuff that is of value. They could also
do that on a different platform, and I would recommend
that they do so, but I can't make them. Trum
might but I can't. I'm just trying to advise people.
Don't use these things. Don't give the communists who are
interested in our demise, don't give them what they seek.
They are not our friends. They are not our friends.
Do you understand like we may we may see them
invade Taiwan soon? What do you think happens when when
they do? North Korea is right now fighting on behalf
of the Russians against the Ukrainians, right North Korean forces.
North Korea is the knife that China wields. I did
not come up with that saying China has used North
Korea to destabilize its region for decades. Okay, they keep
North Korea afloat. So again like this is these are
the actions and when you start then farming out the
AI tech to to other dictators and authoritarians around the globe.
What do you think China is doing with all of
their quote loans that they give to these impoverished countries
to set up airports and docks and stuff ports and
all that, and then oh they can't they can't make
the payments and then China seizes it Panama Canal, what
do you think is going on with that? Like, what
do you think China is doing? Hello? So if you
got to see the cat videos, you can see them
on other platforms that are not trying to kill the
American society. And I would just ask that you that
you just you know, don't That's all all right? So
Google's former CEO says, I know this is like a
tech heavy deal, but trust me on this one. Okay.
Google's former CEO says that the tech giant is losing
out to open ai. This was from the summer, Okay,
that the Google AI product is falling behind, it's losing
the race against Open ai and anthropic these are other
AI models. Why why is Google falling behind remote working?
This is what? This is what the former CEO and chairman,
Eric Schmidt said. He was speaking to students at Stanford
University during a lecture in April when he was asked
about the lead that started like open ai and Anthropic
currently have over Google when it comes to AI. He said,
Google decided that work life balance and going home early
and working from home was more important than winning. And
the reason the startups work is because the people in
startups work like hell. He says. I'm sorry to be
so blunt, but the fact of the matter is if
you all leave the university and you go start up
a company, you're not going to let people work from
home and then only come in one day a week.
If you want to compete against the other startups, you
can't do that. When I started up my company, me personally,
when I started the podcast, I was waking up at
five in the morning and going to bed at eleven
at night, and all day long, except for when I
would eat lunch with Christy. She would come home. We
were up in Asheville at the time, and she would
come home. Her office was fairly close and she would
come home and we would eat lunch together, and then
I was back to work. Every single thing I did,
I worked six days a week minimum, right, Every single
thing I did was for the startup. Was to make
that a successful operation. That's what startups do. And if
you're starting up, you're not having people that are only
working three or four hours from home every day. I'm sorry,
but this guy is correct. He is correct. Schmid was
Google CEO and chairman for ten years from twenty and
one through twenty eleven, before handing the reins back to
the Search Giants co founder Larry Page. He went on
then to serve as Google's executive chairman and technical advisor
before finally departing the company in early twenty twenty. To
be sure, according to Business Insider, Google has been easing
away from a one hundred percent remote work arrangement for
employees since twenty twenty two. One hundred percent remote work,
one hundred percent. Nobody, nobody has to like, that's nuts.
Have you seen that movie with uh, what's his name
one of the Owen brothers and uh not Luke Owen,
No Wilson, yeah Owen Wilson, Yeah, yeah, not the Owen brothers,
Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan where they go to work
for Google. Right, have you seen what Google does for
their employees at their They've got like little cry closets
and stuff. They've got ping pong tables, arcades, cafeteria, they
have all this stuff and then they send everybody home.
And you've been like that for two years. Google employees
are currently working on a hybrid model where they spend
approximately now three days in the office, two days wherever
they work best, whether that's at the office or at home,
per the company's twenty twenty two Diversity Annual Report. Google
also began tracking office badge attendance and using it as
a metric in performance reviews. This is according to internal
memos that CNBC got ahold of. So they were one
hundred percent remote and then they started going back to
a hybrid model. Three days. Yeah, three days in the
office and two days wherever you work best. So oh
I got a coffee shop. Uh huh. Of course, not
everybody believes in magical hallway conversations, as these things are
dubbed by critics of this return to the office movement
among CEOs, But there's no question that working together in
the same room makes a positive difference, said Google's Chief
People office that they have an office chief people Office,
it's like hr, I guess yeah. But this was in
an email by the chief People officer. Fiona Chichioni or
Chizoni wrote in an employee email obtained by CNBC. Not
everybody believes in magical hallway conversation. Okay, So here's the thing.
I don't have to pick sides in this, Okay, I
don't have to, like just because like the managers are saying,
everybody has to be back. I don't automatically defer to
them because they're managers, right. Just because their managers doesn't
mean that they actually know what works best in this scenario.
They have ideas or maybe they've got orders, they have
theories and such, right, But I think it really depends
on the office culture. If you work in a crapulent office,
you're probably going to be more productive if you don't
have to be in said crapulence. Right. If people don't
want to come back to the office to work like,
you might have an office culture problem. And that is
a lot of times personnel related. Have you ever seen
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memories that'll last a lifetime. RTO people rt OH Return
to Office Return to Office is making get another return
to the headlines. As the new year starts, more firms
have announced that they are trimming back on even the
three day a week plans that many had settled into
when unemployees balked at RTO after COVID. Do you know
that there are people who have entered the job market
today that have never had to go into work net nuts.
I mean, I'm not saying there's a lot of them,
but it's a not small amount. JP Morgan made their
announcement being at the office will now apply to all
their employees, which is in keeping with what CEO Jamie
Diamond has as a philosophy, which is be at the office.
And this has got people upset once again. People don't
like to be at offices when the office culture is
not great. But part of the other reason people don't
enjoy being at the office is not really being at
the office. It is driving to the office. Yeah, that's
part of the problem. It' see, because when you say
you got to come back to the office, it's not
just for that eight eight and a half nine, or
in my case, you know, twelve hours a day that
I'm that I'm at the office. Yeah, it's the commute, right,
So now I am required rather than a commute of
you know, twenty feet down my hall into my office,
my home office. Now I have to shower. I mean,
you know, because I care about what my coworkers think
of me, I do take showers. And so now I
have to like walk down the hall, go past my office,
get into my car, pay for the gas, drive on
the streets with a whole bunch of people that don't
know how to drive, and do not realize that we're
not in some sort of a simulation where they're the
main character. And then you know, park, get to the office,
maybe have to fight off a couple of muggers on
my way into the uptown office, and then start the
clock right, and then after that do the whole thing
in reverse. And look, I leave the office here, I
leave the studio at like three three oh five, And
sometimes it'll take me almost forty five minutes to drive
like eight miles. It's nuts. So if you know, you're
chained to the desk or the microphone as it were.
And that's another reason why people don't enjoy the into
the office the rto experience. And there's another thought here.
Maybe this will let companies fire a bunch of people
or they'll just quit on their own. All right, I
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create avideo dot com. Yeah, so return to the office.
JP Morgan Chasing Company telling all of its employees to
return to the office five days a week, returning to
the attendant's policy that was in place before the pandemic.
The largest US bank, which employs more than three hundred
thousand people globally, is expected to announce the change. I
think at this point they already have. This was from
a couple of weeks ago. It was the beginning of
the year they put this notice out that replaces the
three day mandate for many of its workers. The CEO
has previously criticized the federal government for not requiring workers
to be at their offices more regularly. Okay, so funny
that the CEO should mention that Donald Trump has now
told all of the Fed workers to go back to work,
Go back to the office. Everybody begon the pool. Okay,
back to work, everybody except for the ones that have
been put on paid leave the DEIVI. So here is
a former federal employee going onto the tricom app TikTok
to tell the secrets about the incompetence and waste in
the federal government.
Speaker 2: I used to be a federal employee, and I'm going
to tell you why I don't feel bad for federal
employees being forced to come back into the workplace. I
worked for the Army Corps of Engineers for almost a year,
and the abuses that I saw by government employees was
astounding and shocking. I worked as a realty specialist, and
that is someone who manages government own lands, so when
farmers and Ranchersley's land to Gray's cattle, we would manage that.
When I was hired, my boss brad that it was
basically impossible to get fired from the federal government and
that in her entire time working for the government, she'd
only seen one person fired, and that person assaulted a
fellow employee. She wasn't even fired for assaulting the employee
at work. She was fired for lying about it because
they caught it on camera.
Speaker 1: So I can't assault.
Speaker 2: When I worked for the government, we were allowed to
work fifty percent in the office and fifty percent from
home for the most part. In some cases, if you'd
work there, like I think over ten years or something,
you could actually work from home three days a week
and work from the office two days a week. I
use the word work very loosely. One employee spent his
time remote working running his own farm. Another employee bragged
about drunk driving and going out to lunch with her
friends for Margarita's when she was supposed to be remote working.
No one would log into their computers and you can
see it because they're not on teams, and no one
ever checked. Ever, there's some called the eighty twenty rull
where eighty percent of the work in government is done
by twenty percent of the people. And this is very
very true. People who get a job in the government
a lot of times find out that it's very difficult
to fire them, and they take advantage of this. One
employee would come into the office. His start time would
be six thirty, and he knew nobody would be there.
And when I came in at seven thirty and I
was the next person to come in. He was snoring
at his desk. Every single morning. Another employee would take
the government truck on an almost daily basis so that
he could go out to lunch and then go and
take a nap in his favorite park under a shady
tree in the government truck. One of the very first
things I did when I started working for the CORE,
I spent three months cleaning up their real estate files room,
which was a disaster. The government is used using an
antiquated system that was developed sometime in the nineties and
using regulations that haven't been updated since the nineties to
manage our dams and our government lands.
Speaker 1: That sounds about right.
Speaker 2: Our government is filled with the most incompetent and most
lazy people and an occasional hard worker, and those hard
workers are severely punished every time they outwork their colleagues,
because then the colleagues realize people will see that they're
lazy and they don't want to have to work more.
They're just buying time until they retire. Same in almost
every case. My point is some of our government organizations
haven't been maintained or updated in so long that you
basically need to create a new organization and start from
scratch because there's almost no way to transfer it over
and there's so much red tape in between, it'll never
get done.
Speaker 1: Hmmm. Now that's an interesting idea. How about like we
have the Department of Education, so we set up another
agency called Department of Schools or something, and then you
build that one better theoretically, and then you get rid
of the Department of Education. Then it's like, well we
cut the whole department. Sorry, so it's not like we're
firing you, we're eliminating the whole department. And then when
the Department of Ed is gone and the only one
that remains is the Department of Schools, well then I
would shut that one down to actually, but no, if
you were trying to replace it. This is just an example.
People like you replace it and then then after you
shut down the DOE, now you have the DOS and
then you just rename the Department of Schools back to
the Department of Education. I'm just spitballing here. I haven't
really thought this through.
Speaker 2: But I know that our government is inefficient because the
people working for it are not doing what they need
to do to take care of the rest of us.
So no, I don't think government employees should get the
benefit of working from home. If our government is not
working for us, we shouldn't have to take years to
do anything in a technological age.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 2: They choose to take that long. That's a choice. So
they can choose to do things faster and more efficiently,
and then they can choose to get remote work back.
I don't feel bad for them at all, all.
Speaker 1: Right, So she goes by uh Sasha the Great on TikTok,
But don't go watch it because it's TikTok people. If
you learn nothing from the first hour of the program. Okay,
I do have I have an email. Here are a
couple of emails. This is from A Jeff. It's simple chemistry,
the two most common elements in the universe hydrogen and
dumb ass Y's that tracks too, Jan says, okay, So,
regarding the commute, going into the office takes me fifteen
minutes each way, which lets me switch my focus from
the house to the office or walk the thirty feet
to the home office. Dealing with a pair of incredibly
stupid cats never getting away from the house and various
issues associated with it, including what needs to be fixed,
the eight to ten daily Amazon deliveries for crap, my
wife orders, screaming neighbors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Oh,
and the walk to and from the home office goes
right by the incredibly well stocked liquor cabinet. I wish
I could go into the office. Unfortunately, they do not
have a dedicated space I can use. Yeah, so, look,
everybody is different here. I want to acknowledge that everybody's different.
Some people can actually work remotely and be more productive
or as productive or almost as productive as they are
in the office, no doubt about it. I am one
of those people. I am self directed. You do not
need to tell me to work. I will work. I
wake up, I walk in, I start working. I eat
my breakfast while working, I take a shower, I get
in my car, I come to the office, I work,
I leave the office, I go home, and I keep working.
That's my I work all the time. You don't have
to tell me to work. Now that being said, there
are benefits of being in the office. Like just a
couple months ago, before the Christmas break, I was in
the hallway and I ran into a sales guy, and
we started talking and we started coming up with some
ideas and like some opportunities. He can go make a
sales call, talk about a potential client and all of this,
and so like that's one of the benefits that you get.
I mean he did, like he did leave the company
shortly thereafter, so it never worked out, but like you
know that it could have turned into something fruitful. That's
a true story. All right. If you're listening to this show,
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of current events, and I know you do too, And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app and it's a website and it combines news
from around the world in one place, so you can
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me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom
The blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. So I do have the ability to do
the show remote. Okay, I can do this show remote,
but I do come into the office every day because
I believe in office culture. Sorry, I just I think
the boss is listening, so I want to make sure
I get that on the record. Ahead of the performance
review in September, Amazon CEO Andy Jesse sent employees a
letter warning them to prepare as the company was going
back to being in the office the way we were
before COVID. Naturally, Amazon employees blew a gasket, demanding data
driven rationales for the scheduled January two change in work policy. Unsurprisingly,
they haven't received the demanded justification from their employer, according
to bees Wellborn writing at hotair dot com. So they
try so yeah, Amazon is like, we're going to go
back to the opposite. It's more effective and efficient. And
so then the employees, knowing that they work for a
logistics company, they're like, really, what's the data to support that?
Shut up and get back to work. Amazon's CEO Andy
Jase said that what we have been told is that
it leads to increased collaboration between teams and innovation. But
whenever the union apparently asked for data, which is famously
Amazon's bread and butter, they never are willing to provide it,
cannot provide the data to support it. So and this
is one of the other things in this debate is
that a lot of times it's just the fields. It's
there are managers and upper management or whatever that they
just want everybody back in the office. Now, there are
actual economic side effects here. You know, if you're paying employees,
that's one cost, but then you also have the cost
of the building and the HVAC and the maintenance and
the janitorial services and lighting and all of it. And
if you've got people that are in the office three
days a week, but it kind of rotates all around,
you can't ever shrink your footprint, right because it's not
like you can go dark for two of the days,
so you have to keep all that stuff running every
single day, even though the employees are not there every
single day. The businesses and vendors who surround the Amazon
headquarters in Seattle are delighted by this news, by the way.
They're so happy. And this is another part of this conversation,
which is the areas around the businesses that will now
be returning to work. They are going to benefit, the restaurants,
the hot dog vendors, the guy selling the fake rolexes,
all of it. Like they're all going to now enjoy
the economic activity. Right, There's a larger problem going on
across America where the downtown districts emptied out. It was
happening before COVID, no doubt about it, but COVID made
it way worse. I remember we did this last year.
Some we got like some report on the on the
occupancy levels in uptown and it's something like, I mean,
it was a really high number. I mean, I want
to say, a third, like one out of every three
offices or vacant in Uptown something like that. And that's
not unusual. There are some markets where it's worse. In fact,
like I think in San Francisco. I think they're into
like single digit percentages of people who actually are in
the downtown. I mean, besides all of the vagrants and stuff.
I don't know that actually I just made that stat up.
I don't know, but it seems true. It could be.
It seems like it could very well be true, right,
And that's one of the other problems here, is that
people don't want to go back to work in a
downtown district that's been overrun thanks to terrible policies by
state and local leaders. A lot of moving parts here,
A lot of moving parts.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: One of the other ones was the I saw what
Charlotte Area Transit they're now going to start basically running Uber,
which why not just give vouchers for Uber? Like, wouldn't
that make more sense? Just give people vouchers for Uber
and let them make their own calls and stuff. Why
do you have to create a whole freaking fleet of
vehicles and do it yourself? Like I whatever, But I
think it's better than a lot of the bus routes.
All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
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