HiBob Beast Mode & DOL Dismantles Worker Protections

0:00Joel Cheesman: It's not even under the DOL, the Department of Labor anymore. No, they're shuffling it over to the Health and Human Services. The department currently run by Robert Corkscrew Raccoon Penis. What? Kennedy Jr. The guy's making measles great again. Come on, just slam an iron brew and let's do this, boys. Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Soash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, rash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.

0:46Oh, yeah. Wake me up when September ends. Hey, boys and girls. It's the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel. Let data rain. Cheeseman. Oh, this is Chad. Nap culture. So watch. And on this episode of HR's most dangerous podcast, Bill wants to protect humans. Bob wants to feel the full power of the force. And Vinioff is getting his mojo back. Let's do this. Nap culture. What's that about?

1:16Joel Cheesman: Yes, yes, and yes. Well, Matt Adam once told me that he took like an 18 minute nap every day, every day, no matter what. It was standard nap rejuvenated him. And I always thought, dude, that's 18 minutes. I could fucking be doing something. Right. I mean, just like, I can't do it. How long does it take me to get to sleep and buzz? So now, now being Euro Chad, much more relaxed, get up in the morning, play some paddle, have a little brunch. And then like around one 30 or something like that, I'll take maybe, you know, 20, 20 minute, 30 minute nap. Hey, I got to say, Matt, Adam, you put that you put that seed in my brain, not to mention, Joel, I'm always talking about you and your naps.

2:02Joel Cheesman: Yeah, no, it's it's lovely. Escalated quickly. It is lovely. Yeah, I'm a I'm a 22 minute man. That 18, 20 minute ish thing tends to be the best. Now, Matt, Adam, they don't anyone that doesn't know a longtime friend of the show. It works at NAS. Love that guy. Same age age group. I dare say. So the challenge is doing the 20 minute commitment. Like my wife can't do 20 minutes. She's too much in her head. She's too like, if she naps, it's like a three hour event. So if you can do the 20 to me, it's, to me, it's like the old control off delete, like just like quick restart, clear the system out, uh, get yourself back.

2:45I feel much better after the 22 minute nap, but that's good. And the evolution of Chad, when we started this thing, naps were no, no bueno. I was not a thing that you were open to. So clearly this is the older, kinder Euro Chad that's coming out just in time to come back to America.

3:04Joel Cheesman: Yeah. Yeah. No shit. Right. That, that in over a decade with Julie, who's been able to really kind of like smooth out the, she's always been pretty chill. She's chilled you out. Hasn't she? Oh yes. A lot, a lot. And she's just like Christine with regard to if we'll nap, we nap together. I have to get her up. Like she'll get another more 10 minutes than I will. But if I don't get her up, she's going to be three to five hours. I mean, she just she can fade into that. Hard nap. Yeah. Once once the brain hits rim and once the brain like goes deep, like it's you're done. You got to keep it just just the tip.

3:40A little update on me. I was at a red carpet event this weekend. Say what? Yeah. Not quite Hollywood. not quite the Chinese man theater, but Louisville, Kentucky, Louisville, Kentucky. Yeah. They have red carpets there.

3:54Joel Cheesman: Okay. I get it. I thought it was just red knacks. Sorry, Kentucky. I love you. I love you. Don't listen to chat. Don't listen to chat. He loves your bourbon too. No, my, my niece in her twenties has always was always a theater kid was always good. There are certain things that people do when you watch when they're young and you go, that's what you need to do with your life like that's that's your thing and she never really pursued it and most recently she was she still has a day job and one of her friends that she used to work with is a director and started a pilot or filmed a pilot of a show it's called second shift it hasn't been picked up it's still a pilot and i was thinking the pulp fiction scene uh where john travolta's like i don't have a tv and samuel jack's like well you know there's an invention called the tv and on this invention they show shows and there's a pilot and they sell the pilot and if the pilot gets picked up then the more shows are made so they're in the pilot stage but my niece is in this pilot and they're pitching it to like hbo netflix if it gets picked up i'll update everyone on where to watch it and yes do that so that would be very cool but they had sort of an official event uh with red carpet a photographer and all that good stuff so from the just from the camera scenes it looks like i might be in hollywood or i might be in somewhere, you know, not Louisville, Kentucky.

5:16Um, and it was a ton of fun. A lot of young people, everyone that's in the show did it voluntarily. Nobody got paid for it. It's a real bootstrap kind of thing. Um, it's very, if you like Kevin Smith humor, if you like clerks and kind of that really conversational humor, kind of like meets the office. So it's a lot of like looking at the camera sort of offbeat humor conversation. It's very raunchy. It was fun. So I I did that this week. And then shout out to my son, my oldest. He turned 20 yesterday on the first. So he's back in Indiana, back at IU, sophomore year. Love and life. Love and life.

5:58So things are good for me. Things are good for you. How could it not?

6:01Joel Cheesman: Did you wear your derby tux to the red carpet event? Come on. Come on. You know I did. You know I did. You know, I didn't I didn't wear the bow tie, though. I kept I kept the white T-shirt with the the crystal, the sparkling white Air Force ones. So I kept it hip, but not like too hip. So I don't want to be that old guy that overdoes it. So I thought you're saying you're saying you're bringing dumb and dumber to 2026. OK, no, I got it. I'm going full dumb in 2026 for sure. Yeah. Full, full dumb. I love it Speaking of full dumb, let's go to shout outs Is it time for shout outs? Guys, our shout outs are sponsored by, yeah, you guessed it, bourbon Oh, I love chicken cock I do, I love it That's right, and if you love bourbon give thanks and praise Proven Base, our sponsor that helps make free bourbon doable I just sent out two bottles, Chad bottle from you, bottle from me Some lucky winner gets that every month but you can't win it unless you play You got to go to chadcheese.com slash free to get that lovely, lovely, lovely liquor that comes from Kentucky and our friends from Poovin base.

7:19Big thank you to them for making miracles happen. Chad, what you got? Well, I've got a history lesson for my shout out.

7:26Joel Cheesman: So let's go. Oh, stop. It's too early for a history lesson. It's not a history lesson. So before, before the smartphone, were you a big map guy? I mean, did you enjoy using maps to navigate around big cities? Oh, maps, the fold-out maps? Yeah. Yeah, it sucked. Awful. It's a great skill to have when someone pulls the plug on the grid. Oh, dude. Gen X is going to be the only generation to survive. Dude, I'm telling you. So after being dropped into the jungles of Panama and the swamps of Fort Polk, Louisiana, and the military. Yeah. Hello. So I began to love using maps, right? Not just to find my way through, you know, said jungles and swamp, but, you know, definitely everyday travel.

8:14Joel Cheesman: But back in the day, you had so many maps. You had the U.S. map. You had different state maps. And then when you got into larger cities, you had to get the city map. So if you did any travel whatsoever, you had a collection of big ass maps that you had to unfold, probably stored in your glove box. That's what you used to use the glove box for kids. You had to find your place. Where were you at on the map? You had to find out where you were on the map. You had to find the destination. You had to pick the route you wanted to take. You had to know where north was. You had to orientate the map. And then you had to read the map while driving.

8:52Joel Cheesman: Right. So did you remember the first time the magic of MapQuest met your life? Do you remember that? Sure. It was one of the many miracles of the Internet. That was the next thing, like maps. OK, I put in where I'm going and it tells me when to turn and like how basically roughly how much time. No, it was it was amazing. Yeah, it was great. So late 1990s, my first time I printed out. I remember printing out and stapling about 10 pages of directions together instead of unfolding that huge map of, let's say, for instance, like Indianapolis. Yeah, it was amazing because, like you said, all the directions were laid out.

9:31Joel Cheesman: And then it came the smartphone. And unfortunately, MapQuest didn't assimilate quick enough. And Google Maps literally just became the default. So remember the Garmin, the Garmin? Yes. People have Garmin's in their car. Yeah, that was before the Garmin. So MapQuest died. Wait a minute. Wait, excuse me. This just in MapQuest is now the top download. What? What? What? What the hell happened? MapQuest. These people have Minecraft. MapQuest refused to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America, which sent MapQuest's iOS app to the number four position in the U.S. Yes, it reached number eight overall in the U.S.

10:18Joel Cheesman: But over the app store with games, everything. And obviously in navigation, it was number one. And in Canada, go figure. Yeah, it was overall number two. So I want to shout out to MapQuest, allowing us to have a nostalgic moment, a history lesson due to rebellion over sheer, sheer stupidity. Thanks, MapQuest. All right. All right. Thank you. All right. So AAA, which you probably had growing up. I can remember when we take a vacation in the summer, my parents would like let AAA know where we're going, what like where we're all the all the stops. And we would get a packet from AAA of directions of where to go.

11:03We'd have coupons for the Motel 6 or whatever it was like we would get this travel pack, which also a little bit of history lesson in there. But yeah, maps and travel has been a longtime challenge for human beings. And I don't think young people know the pain of maps and going places that you didn't know where you were going. Well, and then reading that map, you had to be careful. You had to be careful. Oh, the worst was like, oh, shit, there's a there's an accident. Yes. Now you have to get the map out. We got to find an alternate route. And good luck with that. I mean, how many, and then the gas station pull over, right.

11:44And your dad never wanted to do it. And your mom is like, pull over and ask the gas station where such and such is. I'm pretty sure people mess with you. People on the side of the, like, oh, we're going to mess with these people. Like, oh yeah, you go down 10 miles up and then over. And then yeah. Yeah. Good time. That's a good time. That's a good shout out. I like a good, I like a good history lesson. I might have one too. All right, Chad, my, my shout out. I don't think Snoop has ever been on the show. Has he? I was trying to think. Have we ever had a Snoop shout out?

12:15Joel Cheesman: We've had over 1 ,600 episodes. I'm sure he was somewhere. For Snoop not to be on it. Surprise. So Snoop is in the news for doing something in our space, which is worth a shout out. I like it. Weed jobs. Deal and Rippling, as we've been talking about for a while, and we'll get to High Bob in a second. they're in the news too, is from my perspective, full court press on the promotion. They've signed a deal with Arsenal, the football, the English Premier football team. They're on their jerseys now. Actually stopped at the Edinburgh Mall. Outlet Mall. It's going down to Louisville. And they have the new Arsenal with the deal logo on the sleeve.

12:57So bad. Which tells me the IPO must be coming. If they're doing the full court on the promotion, it must be coming. And they've employed Snoop to partner up and have a new promotion. So without further ado, I'm just going to play you the ad that Snoop does. It's for his ice cream company called Dr. Bombay. So he'll mention that. Never had Dr. Bombay ice cream. I don't know if it's laced with reefer or what because it's Snoop. But yeah, here we go. Snoop, pimp and deal. Hold up.

13:28Joel Cheesman: I'm hiring an international ice cream taster here at Dr. Bombay. 10 grand a month, you can apply anywhere in the world. What? Must have passport, detail, or detail. But first, you don't need this. Tell them, pops. Howdy, folks. See, 50 years ago, we had a dairy farm in Mississippi. Today, we are going global, baby. And we didn't use to help us find new flavors. See, we tried to hire ourselves. I love ice more than that. I ain't gonna lie to your own boy. you don't need to slow down a little bit. Time's out going global's not that easy. See, I love the paper, not the paperwork. But all let's handle now we did.

14:10Joel Cheesman: And who knows, if you keep it playing, you might end up here with me. So you ready to be Dr. Bombay's official ice cream taster? Then go to bill.com slash snoop and apply. And yes, I've applied, Chad. I've applied to be the ice cream tester for Snoop. Do you think that's his real dad? I don't know. Because he looks great if it is. Snoop is our age. So his dad, I mean, 70 something, the minimal, like he looks great if that is his dad. Yeah, I doubt it. It was a commercial. But hey, if it was awesome, if it wasn't awesome. The question will be, will Snoop be at the NYSE when they ring the bell or the NASDAQ?

14:50Because I want to see Snoop. I want to see Snoop on Wall Street. You know we will.

14:55Joel Cheesman: Yeah. And I mean, weed is legal in New York. So it'll probably be spoken while he's while he's doing it. He should be at least. Sounds sounds like an event that maybe we should go to. Where are we going, boys? Well, just for so you kids know, travel is sponsored by Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right. If you are looking to try to fuse AI into your stack and you have no clue what what you're looking for, what you need, any of that stuff. Just go to your friends at Shaker dot com. They've been in business for 75 years. That's right. This year, their 75th year in existence celebrating. So go check them out.

15:31Joel Cheesman: Joel, we are going to Wreckfest in Nashville, happening September 23rd and 24th on the Disrupt stage. We're going to be doing that. The girls, Mo and JT, are going to be on the Innovate stage. So we're going to have Chad and Cheese all over the place. Chad and Cheese all over the place. Now, the first night of Wreckfest, You can join us on the rooftop at the bar of Old Reds. Have a drink with the Chad and Cheese. It's a different venue than the last couple of years. We actually had to upgrade, get a bigger venue, get a better venue. So it's Old Reds. And if you haven't seen information, go to LinkedIn.

16:13Joel Cheesman: You got to know a guy for the most part. Then I'm going to be heading off to Cabo for Chris and Marin's wedding. Have a good time there. A little fun in the sun. Then I've got to go to, oh, I almost forgot. Dallas. The very first time we've gone to an SIA event collaboration X at the Omni. And there is a shark tank that's happening. You know, you and I both love a good shark tank. Show them what's up. All right, let's go. Show them what's up. It's a shame if you're not watching this, because if you're just listening, It's a bunch of slides promoting the conference. It's hype, baby. Just take our word for it.

16:50Nothing but hype. I love it. Ooh. Adagoga. First word. First word. These are the companies in the competition. Insigna. Insigna. Tenzo. Tenzo. Tenzo. Ooh, look, it's Brian.

17:03Joel Cheesman: Aw.

17:07Joel Cheesman: Happening on September 30th, kids. That's right. go to collaboration x.com you like that i came up with that i came up with that a little fun fact uh the tenzo founder yeah lives lives up the street from me he went uh he went to hsc is which is the high school uh i think he was valedictorian uh he graduated like 18 or 17 went to stanford and obviously made good not that i'm pimping them or that i'm promoting them but like little fun fact if you meet the founder let him know like oh fishers i'm sure he'll be pitching yeah i'm sure you know cheeseman you live right up the street right i'm sure he'll be pitching yeah you know cheeseman up loser you're done his dad and i are having shake shack later today for lunch it's all it's all good it's all good i don't i don't know though yeah if he signed up for fantasy football oh well come on now that's right we're uh we're picking the teams uh as we speak this week we're going to formalize the final uh folks that are in the competition so next week we'll have who's in we'll do the draft uh i think sunday i forget what day the draft is but we should have draft grades very soon and the games are starting chad i'm pretty excited uh college starts this weekend, the mighty Ball State Cardinals take on the Ohio State Buckeyes.

18:35The number one ranked Ohio State Buckeyes. I think I told you the Ball State quarterback is 5 '11", 250. I mean, the dude's going to look like Earl Campbell playing quarterback. That's fucking awesome. Yeah, I don't know. It's a game that you normally not watch, but if you're out there, check it out. 5 '11", 250 quarterback. That's fucking crazy. worth watching. Could be worth watching. 5-11-250. It is a little bit crazy. Wow. Almost as crazy as the topics we're about to cover. Here we go. Topics. All right. Let's talk about money. Salesforce has led a$166 million investment in HR platform. Hi, Bob.

19:21Increasing its valuation to$3.2 billion. Hello. The strategic partnership aims to utilize workforce data for enterprise AI agents, prompting, hi, Bob, to defer its initial public offering until at least 2027. Chad, the money is flowing again. Your take. What are you doing, Stepbro?

19:46Joel Cheesman: This is about, this is sexy money right here, right? And not to mention they have 700 million in total funding. Okay. I think the market loves that high, high Bob because they're catering to businesses of all sizes, but that's kind of like where I see the problem trying to attack a total addressable market that wide globally is a pretty big effort. So they're going to need some cash. Plus like smart recruiters who went with the all or none movement to a Gentic for an ATS high Bob is bigger. They're an HCM. They're not just a bigger platform. They're looking at a bigger TAM. So they're going to need a lot more money.

20:26Joel Cheesman: It's a bigger platform. The vision, the cash, they need it all. It's interesting that Salesforce, go figure, was one of the companies that doubled down on these guys. I think that's smart. I think we'll talk about it later in the show. I think the SaaSpocalypse is bullshit. And I think this is just Salesforce saying, look, this is how the market is going to evolve. And we're going to put the money behind high Bob. So, yeah, I think I think it's a good way to head your bets. I'm the best there is plain and simple. I mean, I wake up in the morning. I piss excellent. Yeah, I'm in agreement. We talked a couple of weeks ago about private equity coming for workday.

21:04And I think this sort of reflects the timing is right. Private equity coming into workday. We'll talk about their earnings a little bit. but Salesforce coming in and partnering and investing in high Bob makes a lot more sense to me than private equity just coming in and ripping out the guts. So timing is right, because I do think valuations on these SaaS companies are still low, where they will come back or bounce back. We don't know. But Salesforce smartly came and said, look, the price is right for these companies. They may have approached deal. They may have approached rippling and some others.

21:39My guess is the price was probably a little bit less amenable than a high Bob. It's kind of like back in the day where you could, you know, you could invest in Lyft or Uber. Uber was way too expensive. So I'll invest in the Pepsi. High Bob might end up being the Dr. Pepper of this whole thing, but it's probably a really good sound bet. And I think that it makes much more sense. Second piece of this is that it fits in so well with Salesforce and their AI aspirations. We've all seen the Matthew McConaughey commercials, the chat and the, you know, the AI that's coming and the agent force and all that.

22:14So, you know, HR used to be used to basically be of an org chart. It used to be sort of a maintenance thing. And because of AI, it becomes an intricate part of the entire thing, because if you know who reports to who, what someone's paid, what their job duties actually are, then the agents in a company become way more influential because you're, you have much more data in terms of what that agent is doing within a company. So for me, like Salesforce and their agent force and what's going on there, this is a perfect fit for that. I suspect the high Bob brand will eventually be Salesforce and there'll be Salesforce HCM workforce, something, and it'll all fit into agent force.

22:58So I, I think this is part of a bigger picture for Salesforce. and I think it's a great opportunity for High Bob to get some extra funding. The IPO thing is interesting. They obviously basically said like, hey, we're going to put this off until 2027, whereas Workday, you have an already public company looking to go private. So we have a little crossing of the streams there. But High Bob just became a must watch in our space going forward, and you and I will continue to watch what they're doing and what Salesforce is doing with it.

23:28Joel Cheesman: Yeah, I think P.E. is you're talking about the money is going to burst the fucking damn. The economy has been shit, which has kept companies from spending money. Right. Yeah. This is kind of like a leakage of the damn, not even from P.E. yet. So there's going to be as soon as we can turn the corner and we can stop all this bullshit. That's that's literally just suffocating the economy. Yeah. There's going to be money that's flowing. There's going to be tons of money that's flowing. Now, on the other side of the house, talking about building agents versus buying agents, we were talking to a professor a couple of weeks ago where he really is focused on the building of the agents.

24:08Joel Cheesman: And I don't think that motherfucker understands our industry. Yeah. We're not going to build that stuff. Right. We've done it before. We've built applicant tracking systems before. We tried to maintain that. We're like, no, shut that down. Let's buy something. Right. Yeah. We want experts in our space to be able to do that shit. Right. Not just the building, but also the maintenance, not to mention building new features. So I think from our standpoint, that is the smartest thing. And as I talked about with smart recruiters, you take a look at one of the biggest companies. I mean, just from a business standpoint, SAP, buying smart recruiters, they see that as a very integral part.

24:47Joel Cheesman: Agents, not just smart recruiters, but agents, building agents all the way through your business model, I think is amazing. amazing. And if they can take a look at bigger companies like the workdays of the world, looking at Paradox, Salesforce, prospectively looking at High Bob, if you can get that agent company to come in and start building agents throughout that actual business stack, oh, that's fucking money, baby. And that, that I think is the business of the future. Yeah. I think it's a really pivotal day for our space because thanks to AI and agents, the data that we have in our systems becomes essential infrastructure as opposed to like just an administrative software.

25:28This becomes a real strategic step for companies to start understanding and utilizing their talent in a way that they never have before. So I think this move is really exciting. I'm working with a startup sort of in the opening phases and the conversations of integrating with Greenhouse and iSIMS, whoever, those conversations are evolving into, okay, how do we integrate with Zoom and Salesforce and like these bigger platforms? And that's a very exciting evolution, in my opinion, in our space. So this is something to keep an eye on for sure. Agreed.

26:04Joel Cheesman: I'm going to come. All right. Speaking of high tech, Microsoft founder, Bill Gates warns that artificial intelligence will severely disrupt the workforce within a decade. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Placing young and blue collar workers at the highest risk of displacement. Bill Gates urges governments to implement protective measures, protecting what he calls, quote, human reserved, end quote, occupations, saying we should tax AI computing and robots to fund retraining programs and prepare for the human race, prepare the human race for universal basic income. Chad, put down your flippy and let us know what you think about Bill's words of warning.

26:46Joel Cheesman: Well, personally, I don't think the timing of this is good. Go ahead and play that video that I that I sent you. You got it. Record highs while workers slice of the pie has sunk to historic lows, according to an analysis today in the Financial Times, all of it based on federal data going back to the 1940s, showing a corporate earnings bonanza, as the newspaper put it, nearly doubling the corporate share of national income over that time, while the workers share has slipped, especially over the past 12 months. Experts say it's too early to gauge whether that shift is temporary or tied to something deeper like the introduction of AI.

27:24Joel Cheesman: So, again, personally, I don't think the time can I jump in real quick? I know some of our if you're if you're listening to the show, the spike that happened in covid in terms of employee pay, it went straight back down. Isn't that a shame? Like we had talked so much about like, hey, we're back, baby. And then, nope, went straight back down. Anyway, I just wanted to wanted to highlight that because I thought it was interesting. And if you didn't see it on the audio version. Yeah, I so we're feeling the impacts of wage or inequality more than ever, which is compounded by inflation tariffs, an economy that's paying its CEO 400 times more than the person that's actually doing the hard work.

28:05Joel Cheesman: What do we need? Well, I don't believe the answer is the wild, wild west for AI. Right. The approach of the Wild Wild West. I don't think that's it. Unfortunately, we don't have the right leaders in place to navigate this situation. I think that's what Bill's saying. And over the past two to three years, we've heard about AI taking jobs, but we've seen little real examples of that actually happen. We've seen tasks, small subsets of jobs automated, and we've heard CEOs boast that they're replacing humans with AI just to hear that they're actually offshored the jobs or they're bringing employees back.

28:47Joel Cheesman: We're inundated with stories and surveys that scare us or make us happy. Right. So I think it's important at this point to start by separating the wheat from the chaff. and because today there are so many voices that are out there, instead of listening to them all, I think we really have to provide weight and priority to some of them. And Bill Gates, unlike most of the other billionaires and AI figureheads that are out there, I believe Bill Gates has been around, he understands, and his experience is in more than just tech and that he better understands the problems of humanity as a whole. So more importantly, as evidence of this open letter that he wrote, he understands that humanity equipped with AI is a big problem for humanity without proper leadership.

29:39Joel Cheesman: So I believe we give way too much credit to most of the AI voices that are out there, as I said before, because they don't even understand some of the answers that they're putting out there. And they're just making shit up or they have a vested interest in how they are creating a certain narrative. And for example, I remember Musk asking for a six month AI pause. Was that because he was afraid of AI progressing so fast? Or maybe he just wanted the other models to slow down while his piece of shit Nazi porn bar bot. Sorry. Talk about Grok. Are you disparaging Grok? It's a piece of shit, dude. Anyway, those all come down to leadership.

30:21Joel Cheesman: And at this point, I believe, unfortunately, we're all looking to Europe for leadership because in the U.S., we've pretty much stated this is going to be the wild, wild west. There might be a wee problem, boys. Just a little. Yeah. So the Bill Gates manifesto and how crazy he would come out with this when the Gates and Epstein Island conversation just became something that people are doing. Nice little pivot shift of attention. But anyway, he writes this manifest manifesto, I guess I would call it. And it comes off to me as very just very anti-human and also more and more familiar to your point.

31:01In 2014, 2014, Elon Musk said, and I quote, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon, end quote. So this sort of apocalyptic AI is going to kill us all, take all the jobs is over a decade old. To me, it's starting to lose its emphasis. It's threatening tone. Look, radiologists were going to be out of a job five years. All these positions that are gone. Customer service, we recently talked about that. People are offshoring all of their... Yeah, Klarna not replacing everybody. Like these stories of, oh, maybe not so much are becoming much more prevalent. And now we're talking about data centers and people don't want data centers in their communities.

31:51And Trump is coming out with true socials about like, let data reign. And if you don't have data centers, you're going to be poor and hungry and way behind, you know, humanity. And we got to keep up with China and China is going to kick our ass if we don't. So like this narrative to me is becoming numbing. and the message of humans are going to be okay, I think is one that we can all start to embrace. And I certainly am. I think that the human's ability to adapt, human's ability to take things, every time in history where technology has improved and industrial revolutions have happened, And more jobs have been created.

32:34More prosperity has been created as a part of that. I have no reason right now to think that AI is going to be any different. There will be more jobs, more opportunities. We talk about more businesses being created than ever before. I understand part of that is there's not as many jobs, but there are going to be companies that are born out of the tech layoffs and other things that happen that are going to create more jobs. So I'm more optimistic about sort of humankind than I have been a long time. I don't think AI is going to kill us all. It could. I don't know. But, I mean, you might as well side on optimism in this world than pessimism and adapt accordingly.

33:14That's how humans have survived the past. And it's how I think we'll survive in the future.

33:18Joel Cheesman: I think we've also rebelled. And I think that's where we're about to go. Because, again, we talk wage inequity more than ever. I mean, look at the video compounded by inflation. I mean, again, the economy itself. So, yes, if we change the direction in which we are moving and the direction we've been moving is to push more people lower, lower, lower into poverty and give a bunch of people. I mean, not a bunch of people, a few people, most of the cash. I think if we start to give the individuals the wages they deserve for doing the hard fucking work. yes, you had great vision. I appreciate that.

33:58Joel Cheesman: You're at the top of that. You're at the top of the pyramid and you had great vision, but you didn't build that fucking shit. Somebody else did it and they're doing it day by day by day. They're doing the hard work to actually push the profits to you. Profits are at record highs. Wages are at record lows. This to me, I appreciate the optimism, but unless we actually start paying our people, there's going to be a problem. There's going to be a huge problem, pitchfork types of problems. And we're seeing it at least, I know you've been out of, outside of America for a while, but I know you keep track of, you know, the democratic socialists and like the kids are mad.

34:34The kids are pissed off. And part of that is we're not getting paid. The jobs aren't there. I mean, there's, there's going to be a political sort of reckoning in all of this. And when you, when you hear talk about UBI, I think that's just bread and circuses. I think it's like if we pay people, if we write a check, we can keep the party going. We can keep the data center going and pacify the masses. That seems to be the strategy that they're embracing. May you live in interesting times, Chad. May you live in interesting times.

35:08Joel Cheesman: I want boring. Give me boring. I keep saying that. I want boring. All right, Chad, let's take a quick break. Guys, if you haven't subscribed to us, if you haven't shared us with your industry friends, If you haven't left us a review, please do all of that and listen to the ads because there's no show if we don't have sponsors. All right, Chad, this next segment is brought to you by free T-shirts. I'm wearing one right now. The most recent iteration of the Chad and Cheese T-shirt. And if you could see the back, you would see that it's sponsored by our friends at Erin App. That's E-R-I-N. Better referrals through Erin App.

35:42app. But you can't get a chat unless you go to chad cheese dot com slash free. I've got a I've got a child labor camp going on in my basement. We're packing up T-shirts. We're sending out to the good listeners of the chat and cheese show. But you can't get it unless you go to chad cheese dot com slash free today. All right. The SAS apocalypse may be on hold. Two software giants delivered strong earnings beats last week. Salesforce posted Q2 revenue of$11.35 billion. That's up 11 % and raised full year guidance, heavily boosted by investment gains from Anthropic. Meanwhile, Workday beat expectations with$2.65 billion in revenue driven by a 14 % surge in subscription growth and rapid AI agent adoption.

36:31Hello, Paradox. Chad, Is SAS so back or is this a temporary head fake?

36:37Joel Cheesman: Yeah, I'm going to focus on Workday because it's more our space for the full fiscal year. Workday expects subscription revenues of between nine point nine four billion and nine point nine five billion. So that's a lot of money. Broadly matching analysts estimates and AI accounted for more than 25 percent of new annual contract value during the quarter. Okay, so Workday has over 11 ,000 companies using their platform. That's a portfolio of companies that are hungry to use AI. They are hungry to find ways to extract ROI out of AI. They are hungry to take these AI usage and ROI stories to their board.

37:22Joel Cheesman: And they can do just that with a company like Workday exposing themselves to little risk, right? Workday is a steady business. It's a big business. It's a profitable business. And to all you Sasspocalypse chicken littles out there, I told you motherfuckers that the Sasspocalypse was bullshit. I told you that companies like Salesforce and Workday would integrate AI into their system and change their models if and when it's necessary. The most important thing to remember is that companies, as you said earlier, Joel, have the gold. So Workday and Salesforce have the gold of data inside their systems.

38:09Joel Cheesman: Yes, please. I have another Guinness. Data, mountains of motherfucking data. That's the gold, right? And that's what is needed to make these models home. So to me, the market has become a whiny little baby that you can excite with a wonderful fairy tale instead of solid numbers. Workday and Salesforce are solid companies who will make big model changes slowly and only when the customers are ready. The market is just it's fucking bullshit, dude. It's driving me crazy. It's driving me fucking. It used to be something we could look at and it made sense. You looked at the expectations, meeting expectations.

38:51Joel Cheesman: Workday met expectations, and one of the analysts even dropped. It was like, what the fuck is this? This makes no sense. Anyway, sorry, I'm ranting. You're not going to fall for the banana in the tailpipe? There were two primary narratives in the threats to software. The first one was, you know what? Let's get our webmaster to vibe code us a CRM. let's get Johnny, uh, you know, interned, uh, vibe coders and ATS. Like that was sort of the narrative that was always silly. These, these enterprise huge ass companies are not going to get, uh, you know, Sally webmaster to like vibe code some, some tech, right?

39:33Like that just was not very realistic. And I think we're seeing that play out now. Um, the second, the second narrative was, well, if your pricing is on a per seat basis and companies are laying off and agents are doing work, how does the model work in this new reality? And well, shocker, they're all changing their pricing models from a per seat to a consumption or how many tokens are you using? Aspects of it, yeah. So it wasn't a real tough narrative to say like, well, we'll just change how we charge for the product. We're not like bound to the seat pricing model. So I think we've both thought like it was ridiculous to think that these software companies were going to go by the wayside.

40:24And I think, in fact, with the Salesforce high, Bob, you can argue that these companies will be more important than ever before because, hello, they have data. and they can start aggregating data across multiple companies. And that's only a scale that a Salesforce or Workday can provide. So I think all those narratives were ridiculous. I think that probably there was some algorithmic trading that said, okay, these companies have lost 15%. So let's keep the selling going with the bots. And it just cascaded. And I think that we're learning that it's a false narrative. And we don't give financial advice on this show, but take a look at the software companies.

41:02Like they're kind of bouncing back and they'll probably keep doing so in the near future.

41:07Joel Cheesman: Solid. They're fucking solid. There's no reason to think that they are that they are done. So any standards. Solid as a rock. Yeah. Do not do not fall for it, people.

41:21All right, Chad, this one's this one's for you. The U.S. Department of Labor has finalized three rules dismantling longstanding affirmative action requirements for federal contractors. These updates officially rescind race and sex based mandates, eliminate the 7 % workforce hiring goal for individuals with disabilities and update veteran contract thresholds. Though general anti-discrimination laws remain intact. This one's yours, Chad.

41:51Joel Cheesman: Get it. Yeah, this one's near and dear to my heart. And also Julie's. I mean, because we've worked on veteran hiring programs, individuals with disabilities programs, and we've seen the outcomes. We've seen the the impact on these on these individuals, on these communities. Right. The Trump administration is quietly tearing down the OFCCP, otherwise known as the Office of Federal Compliance Contract Programs. Now, to quote the suit and tie lawyers over at Ogletree Deacons, quote, President Trump's proposed fiscal year 2027 budget would defund OFCCP as he proposed for the fiscal year 2026 budget and move the agency's more limited statutory functions as to individuals with disabilities and protected veterans to an expanded office of civil rights, end quote.

42:46Joel Cheesman: Okay, so what that means is the OFCCP is used to force corporations to actually play fair instead of just taking your hard-earned tax dollars. For example, if a defense contractor wants a fat government check funded by you, the working people, the taxpayer, they aren't supposed to just hire Uncle Bob's golf buddies and call it a fucking day. They're required to hold higher standards for hiring. Public money should serve the public. So moving on. Why should defund the OFCCP make your blood fucking boil? Because the OFCCP is the watchdog stopping these corporate parasites from feeding off our tax dollars while discriminating whenever they want.

43:36Joel Cheesman: Now, let's look at the absolute comedy of where they plan to dump the scraps of the OFCCP. They want to move the limited functions regarding disabled folk and veterans to an expanded Office of Civil Rights. Sounds cozy. Sounds like, oh, yeah, civil rights. That's nice. Until you look at the map of where they're going to put them. It's not even under the DOL, the Department of Labor anymore. No, they're shuffling it over to the health and human services. You know, HHS, the department currently run by Robert Corkscrew, raccoon penis, Kennedy Jr. The guy's making measles great again. That is where they want to bury workforce protections for individuals with disabilities and former military service members like myself.

44:29Joel Cheesman: in the darkest, most unhinged corners of federal government. This isn't agency reorganization. It's a fucking burial. And the Trump administration is giving a massive fuck you to veterans and people with disabilities who just want a fair shot at working, living their lives and being a part of something, a part of society, which is what we all want to crack at and what these agencies allowed, especially since these corporations are taking our hard-earned tax dollars. We should be treated fairly overall. And now that's all going away. Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

45:12I cannot put it any better than that. But I do want to add a history lesson. There's no way that you're the only one getting a history lesson in on this one. So back in 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race conscious admissions in colleges. You might remember the case interesting brought about by Asians because they felt they were being discriminated against and not getting into colleges. And at the at the time, I opined that it would lead to fewer, fewer diversity in the applications process, not just the acceptance process. So the argument wasn't, oh, colleges are going to discriminate. I don't think they necessarily do, but the incentive to take more diverse applicants is gone.

46:02What I thought the result would be is if fewer black kids, Mexican kids or Hispanic kids, kids of diversity thought, you know what? But I have no shot at getting into an Ivy League school because those sort of protections for me are gone. Three years later, that's exactly what's happening. In the 85 most selective colleges in the country, black applications are down. Hispanic applications are down because these kids don't think they can get in without some little bit of a leg up. So my fear in this is, do people with disabilities just not apply? Because they think, well, this is gone. So why would a company hire me?

46:50I'm a black woman. I'm not even going to apply because I have no shot. That's ultimately the damage that these laws impact onto our society. So that's sort of my take on this. I think that the counter argument of like, well, it's not 1967 anymore. Like women are way more advanced than they were back then. Black Americans are way are way further ahead than they used to be. I think disabilities is the real sad part of this. I think that they are real still really challenged in the workplace. But I think all of that goes away when you think, well, if the if the perception is I'm not even going to get a chance to get this job, I'm not even going to apply.

47:37Then we've really done society a disservice in my mind.

47:40Joel Cheesman: Well, all those categories you just talked about, they all get paid less than a white man. So it's not equal. Right. And that was under protections. That was when that is when we had protections. Right. So we don't have protections. And this is the thing. OK, so first and foremost, those individuals, they got a job, which is awesome because that's what we need. We need our communities to actually to get those jobs so that you can spend money in the communities and drive economic growth. OK, that's what we need. Now, what happens when they can't get those jobs? That's the thing. We had wage inequity even when we had legislation on the books.

48:21Joel Cheesman: Yes. Now we have no protections. So now we've we've come so far since the 60s. Well, we really have, but we still weren't equal and we were trying to work toward parity. Right. So that the same person doing this or different people doing the same job got paid the same money. We weren't there yet. We weren't even close. And now the protections are taken away. What happens? And I think you're right. There are a lot of individuals that literally are just going to throw their hands up. Like you said before, you want that optimist kind of you. And you had those at least at least the government's looking out for me.

48:54Joel Cheesman: At least the government's looking out for me. Now, guess what? that ain't happening because they don't give a fuck and a department of labor you can go fuck yourself elections have consequences chad let's hope interestingly uh hbcu applications have gone up the difference is college applicants feel like there's somewhere that they can go if they can't go to ivy league schools or elite schools it feels like segregation again though right the difference is like disabled people don't have an outlet. They don't have like an HBCU. Like, where do they go? So I think that's, it's just a real shame. Oh yeah.

49:31Joel Cheesman: All the way around. Elections have consequences. That's hope. Please. And so do breaks in the show, Chad. Let's take a breath. We'll be right back. Let's lighten things up a little bit. Let's last month, AI startup Lemon And lime sparked online backlash after offering fast-tracked job interviews to attendees who got tattoos at an unofficial Y Combinator after party. Critiques called the stunt exploitative. No shit. Co-founder and 20-something Jordan Zietz apologized for the poor judgment and offered to cover full removal costs of the tattoos for those that wanted it. Chad, crazy pills. What you got?

50:16Joel Cheesman: Bruh. I don't get it. I mean, I really don't get it. And to have a founder say, well, you know, I, we really didn't think this through. That's, that's an understatement. It's a true understatement because you have individuals, a lot of individuals are looking for jobs. The job market's not that great. And to be able to do this just so that you can, you know, I don't know, feed your family. That's just total bullshit, man. And again, it seems very tech bro-ish, not thinking about anybody but themselves. It's a very musk kind of thing to do. Animal spirits. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. Lizard brain.

50:54Joel Cheesman: As a guy who now has two tattoos. Yeah, you're tatted up now. Just tatted up. The sleeve is coming. Don't worry. Yeah. No, I'm going to work on that. I'm going to work on that. to be able to, to go through kind of like that whole interview, uh, bait and switch kind of thing. Cause I, I, I wonder how many people actually got hired and how many people in the company, because she, I mean, you do get into those almost like we work kind of cult, you know, I wonder how many people at the company actually got it anyway. It's, it's, it's weird. You dumb ass. So seven people got a tattoo, uh, from this, uh, six of the seven got the logo I think the company logo, another person just got kind of an artsy thing.

51:39Not exactly sure. Look, this is a, this founder is young to say the least. I'm sure everyone there was 20 something. I'm sure drinks were flowing. We've all done stupid shit. So I'm willing, I'm willing to give him a little bit of a pass on the stupidity and realizing like, okay, that was really dumb. Cause I've been at some conferences where people have done some really dumb shit for money or for companies. So, so I, I get it. Hopefully he learns from this and moves forward. It is not, it is not, it is not, nope. It is not uncommon. Do you remember golden palace in the mid to like early two thousands, they paid people 10 grand to tattoo their logo on your forehead.

52:22Oh, I mean, come on. People did it. Like I know that this is, this is, this is our space. This is interviewing for a job. And so, but I don't think this was a really good. This is not a company sanctioned, like get a, get a tattoo and get an interview. I think this was a party with drunk young people doing stupid shit. And someone, unfortunately, the CEO says, Hey, let's get tattoos for an automatic interview.

52:48Joel Cheesman: If the CEO co-founder says it, it is company sanctioned. He has since backed it up. I do. I do think, however, there's a trend worth watching of using jobs to market. In other words, marketing is hard. Getting people to your site, getting people to your brand, embracing it is hard. And I think more and more people are finding out that if we post jobs everywhere for free, people will find out about us. People will come to the site. People will engage with us and learn who our brand is. Mr. Beast, interestingly, if you're watching, if you're following Joel Alge on social media, he's calling out Mr.

53:24Beast for ghost jobs. Apparently, there's a job they have for a recruiter. and Joel knows someone at Mr. Beast, apparently like over 30 ,000 people have applied to this job. Not that Mr. Beast needs it, but that's 30 ,000 people that now are in the system to be marketed to or to be, you know, be in the system of the Mr. Beast world. I think more and more companies are catching on to this and saying, let's just post jobs everywhere and get people in the system. We can market to them. It's like free advertising. So I do think that this is a little bit of a, it just smells of this new, hey, let's use jobs to market.

53:59Let's use interviewing or getting into the system from an employment perspective.

54:02Joel Cheesman: Are you teaming up a job for the Chad and Cheese podcast? No, we're not hiring anybody. Unless they're family or child labor, we have no interest in hiring you right now. At some point, however, Chad, we may need someone to help write these dad jokes because... That's why you have Grok. Every week. Every week. All right. This one's good. This one's awesome. Why couldn't the chili pepper participate in an archery competition? Why couldn't the chili pepper participate in the archery competition? Oh, I don't know. This sounds like a good one, though. He didn't have habanero. He didn't habanero. Oh, that is bad.

54:51You done messed up, A.A. Ron! Another Guinness barkeep. We out. We out.

54:59Joel Cheesman: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast. The Chad. The Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology. But most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs 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. So many cheeses and not one word. 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.

55:49Joel Cheesman: Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. So weird. We out.