Andrew Crapuchettes: Working In A Pagan Labor Market DMW#225

Work, Vocation, and the Christian in a Secular Labor Market

Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between, broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Dead Men Walking starts now. Well hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking podcast.

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Sometimes you just got to quote scripture and people seem to like it. But up top at the show, as you know, we have sponsors that we partner with that help this show, help us go to conventions and conferences and bring you guys content, so we want to make sure we honor them.

Jacob's Supply, it's that time of the year, projects are in full swing and you know where to go, whether you're an influencer, a decision maker at your work, whether you own your own business, you're in the construction trades.

These guys do 30, 40, 50 off building materials. They're located in Temperance, Michigan, but we've got guys, I was just there a couple of weeks ago and we got guys coming 12, 14 hours away because I mean 40, 50 off PVC decking, name-brand appliances, lumber, metal sheds, barn kits.

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Brother in the Lord, we got to support our guys that are building things and let me tell you, the Lord has blessed his business because he is absolutely so generous and customer service top-notch. So jacobsupply .com, check them out.

Two conferences I wanted to tell you about really quick too. First one is works-based, this one's gonna be fun because we have a gentleman who's speaking at works-based on the podcast today and they're gonna, it's in downtown Fort Worth, Texas, June 28th, 29th and it's going to be everything about what I just said, building things, Christian networking, understanding how to run a business, own a business, staff a business.

It's gonna be a time of also connection and making connections and you're gonna hear some great speakers like Andrew Kraposchetz who's on the podcast today, David Bonson, you might know a few things about managing money.

I think he's got a couple billion underneath his belt. C .R. Wiley, which that's a fun one. Theology Podcast is a great podcast. He's a historian and scholar but I think the guy's got like 80 doors or something.

I mean, I'm a real estate broker and he's over there just renting and investing away. So guys like that, Steve Jeffrey, Dave Reese, come on Armor 500, we love that guy. They're all gonna be there, they're gonna be speaking, you got to check out this conference.

You can just, everything I'm talking about, link below guys, just click on the link, click through, get your tickets. Those are selling fast. It's coming up at the end of the month so jump on that one.

Moving into July, we have Thank God for Bitcoin with Jordan Bush. This is his second annual conference, phenomenal conference as well. They're gonna be talking about the glory of economy, digital currency, fiat currency, how do we invest as Christians.

I think it's very important that people get to this conference and you're gonna have speakers there like Michael Foster, again C .R. Wiley, Dr. Ben Merkel, Dr. Glenn Sunshine, Nate Fisher, Jordan Bush, list goes on and on.

Another great conference there, or conference, it's in Rockettown, Nashville, July 24th and 25th. As always, click through in the link description below and you can check that out, get your tickets for those two conferences.

We support all three of those guys so make sure you go check them out. All right, now that we got the business out of the way, we want to get right to it. I'm not gonna talk about how I lost my voice, got my voice back, lost my voice and now got it back again.

Don't know what's going on with that. I'm not going to ramble on about the camping trip that I'll leave them for tomorrow with our church for a week, even though that's fun. We're gonna get right to it.

I want to introduce our guest, Red Balloon CEO Andrew Krapiszewicz is a longtime business leader, entrepreneur, an innovator in the technology industry. He has founded several successful tech focused companies and is widely considered a global pioneer in the development and use of labor market data analytics, an industry he helped found over 20 years ago.

In 2021, Andrew founded Red Balloon, which has quickly become America's largest connectors of employers and employees who prioritize a positive workplace. Geez, that's a lot of Ps. That's, yeah, culture free from the decisiveness of canceled culture mandates.

Trying to make me do a tongue twister in that bio and for those of you watching, you know I read that, did not memorize it. It's Andrew Krapiszewicz. How are you, Andrew? I'm doing really well and honestly, we gave you a tongue twister and then you pronounced my last name flawlessly.

So if you want to go on a camping trip or whatever you want to do, I feel like you've earned it at this point. Yeah, no, it's so great to have you on in person. I know we've met in passing at some of the Fight Left Feet stuff and I know you got the Workspace Conference coming up, but I've always wanted to sit down and talk to you because as a business owner and as a lot of listeners who are business owners, entrepreneurs, influencers at their place of business, there's a lot that's been going on in the labor force that I think we just need to talk about shifting, if you will.

But before we do that, did I miss anything on the intro? Do you have anything on family, wife, church, anything like that you want to throw in there? Yeah, I mean I'll throw in a bunch of other stuff.

I'm an elder at Christ Church here in Moscow, Idaho. I've been elder for a long time now, 10 plus years, on the board of Logos School here in Moscow, Idaho. I'm on the board of ACCS, the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

I've got five kids, I've got three large dogs, and I've got one large gun room, and I live on 60 acres, 10 minutes from the office. So all the dreams of homesteading and all those things, I don't do any of those things.

I just have a bunch of land and then I sit in front of a computer and work all the time. But it's the good life and I'm happy. And occasionally go out back and relieve some pressure by shooting some guns, maybe.

A hundred percent. And then I do the real estate thing. I'm doing a housing development. I have commercial property, various other things. But Red Balloon is my main jam right now. Well, let's talk about that.

First of all, I want to know where the name came from. Second of all, I want to know what's it all about. Because it is really just becoming so popular, even within the circles and some of the circles I don't run in.

I heard someone who is outside of my kind of Reformed Presbyterian circle, and they're a mainline evangelical charismatic that was like, have you heard of this Red Balloon company? And I was like, have I?

And so it's just, it's growing. And what is it? Well, name, where'd you get the name? And what's it all about? Yeah. What in the world are you doing crappie jets? So I have to give you a little bit of backstory for this basically.

So started a bunch of business. I moved to Moscow 25 years ago, saw that there weren't a lot of good jobs, but there's this great kind of church community, but without good jobs to fuel that we're going to have trouble being able to build, build houses, build churches, build buildings, build businesses.

We need high paying, prosperous jobs to be able to accomplish those things. And I grew up in San Francisco Bay area. I did the dot com thing down there. Okay. God gave me skills. I should use those to bless other people.

So I've been blessed to start a bunch of businesses, had a bunch of exits and exits are super fun, but you, cause you get a big check, but you lose control in the process. So one of the businesses I was running built up to about a $50 million tech business, SAS business.

We built a new 70 ,000 square foot headquarters here in Moscow, Idaho. All was going well until the world lost their mind in about 2020. Um, and my board lost their mind right along with the rest of the world.

So, um, they started having real problems with me being an unapologetic, conservative Christian CEO. Uh, they wanted me to start putting things on social media like black squares or BLM or things that just didn't make any sense at all for a, what I believed and B for good business.

Because it used to be, if you were in business, you would care about the business you were in. And all of a sudden you started getting into this 2020 and honestly it happened before then where this wokeness in the workplace was just taking, it was a massive distraction.

It was taking all the joy out of work. And so my board's like, Hey, you need to do this stuff. And I'm like, Hey, you've got the wrong guy. They said, well, you are welcome to be a CEO who happens to be a Christian on the weekend, but you're not allowed to be a Christian CEO.

I'm like, wow, it sounds a lot like you want me to not bring my whole self to work. They're like, no, no, no, it's not at all like that. Like actually it's exactly like that. So, um, after several months of head bonking, um, I ended up leaving the business that I'd helped start and, um, was kind of going to spend a year doing real estate, maybe a little bit of golf, hang out with my kids, that kind of thing.

Um, but a friend's like, Hey, so you just had to make a choice between your job and your values. And by the grace of God, I chose the right thing. I chose my values and lost my job. And in fact, my sweet wife gave me a very nice bottle of Scotch as a way to go.

You lost your job. Um, and, but not everybody is in that position to be able to shrug off losing their job and be like, well, I'm gonna take a year off. Not everybody can afford to do that kind of thing.

Um, and so, um, how do we have the back of those people who are in maybe a different financial position and are being given some of those same decisions? Because I think in America right now, unfortunately, if you don't tow the line, whether it's the liberal agenda or the politically correct agenda or the DEI gender or whatever it is, you're going to caught, you're going to find yourself on the wrong end of a, of a pink slip.

And so, um, that was kind of this like, Oh man, I need to do something about that because Christians and conservatives, if we get canceled from Facebook, we're going to kind of shrug it off. But if we get canceled from our ability to feed our kids and pay our mortgage, we're going to be at least tempted to compromise on something we hold very dearly.

Um, so that's where red balloon dot work came from. The name is, um, if you've ever been on a hot air balloon, have you been on a hot air balloon? I haven't. Okay. So it's this, it's a very weird sensation.

So I did one in, uh, Dartmoor in England with three of my five kids and you know, you go up there and it's perfectly still, like there's no, there's no wind noise cause you're going with the wind. You just kind of are along for the ride and the way you steer the thing is to try and go up and down and find wind that's going the right direction.

I didn't know this before. It's fascinating to me. Um, and I had a British airways pilot cause you have to be a pilot to run these hot air balloons. Also fascinating. Um, and it felt a lot like looking for a job, this kind of, I don't have a lot of control.

It's very quiet. I'm getting ghosted constantly. It is, uh, I, and, and I was like, Oh, well then that's a perfect analogy for, uh, helping people. Also balloons help you travel like you go places. In fact, there's this cool story of this family that escaped from East Germany because they were, and they did it by building themselves a hot air balloon and they floated over the wall.

Um, and we're able to escape. And so, so all these kind of analogies and then people are traveling to red States or red businesses or red versions, uh, parts of blue States so that they can be free. And so it's like, okay, so red balloon, people are moving, they're traveling for freedom, they're finding a new job and then .work not .com cause .com sounded too much like communist for me.

And, uh, and we don't want communism, we want work. So, uh, red balloon .work that's where it came from. So yeah, now we're the lady, the nation's leading pro freedom job board, uh, with over 4 ,000 businesses and over 2 million job seekers have been on the platform in the two and a half years that we've been, um, doing this rodeo.

So, so it's a place, so it's labor placement. So it's people seeking jobs are seeking employees or employers, correct? That's right. So if you're a job seeker, if you're, or if you're at a job happily or not happily, and you're thinking, man, this, uh, wokeness in the workplace or, um, I'm underemployed or whatever it is.

Um, and you want to find a job with someone who will respect your freedom, then you can go to red balloon .work. Everything is free for job seekers. You can fill out a profile, you can put up your resume.

We have a resources on there, the employee bill of rights and responsibilities. We've partnered with the leadership Institute. And so we have a bunch of free video training classes on resume writing or interviewing or last mile project management.

Um, a bunch of things that we want to really be a blessing to job seekers, um, with. Um, and then if you're an employer, if you're someone who's looking to hire right now, now you need to understand that we live in a very right now, 75 of all employers in America have had a labor-based lawsuit in the last five years.

75 have had a labor-based lawsuit in the last five years. And a lot of those are connected to you mispronounced me. Um, I believe that you discriminated because of age or gender or sexuality or any of these things, um, that are just demoralizing to an employer, because if you're paying a person or you're interviewing a person and you know that at any moment, they would, um, if they decided they wanted to sue you, they're probably going to win because we live in a stupid society.

Um, it makes it terrifying to hire right now. And so if you go to red balloon .work and post a job, you know that you are going to get the type of people that are going to show up, work hard and not be a whiner.

In fact, we asked the job seekers to sign a pledge that they're going to show up, work hard and not be a whiner. So, um, while some people might sign that and still be a whiner, it does filter out a lot of the people that you simply don't want to hire, um, in your business.

So you can post jobs in red balloon .work. You can look at that resume database, which a lot of employers do. And then over the last year, um, and this actually started with louder with Crowder, a really good friend, uh, where we've helped them do a lot of their hiring.

They came to us and said, look, can you guys just kind of take over the hiring process? Because, um, we know that every time we hire poorly, it costs us tens of thousands of dollars because you got to get a bad culture fit within your four walls.

It will, um, not only disrupt all your good employees and your customers and your vendors, but it also will just make everyone miserable because they're walking on eggshells around this person, knowing that at any moment, if you don't treat them in just the way that they believe they should be treated, that they are going to blow up and sue you or sue the employer that you all work for.

So, um, so we're like, sure, we'll take that over. So we started this recruitment process. Um, and in the last, I want to say 10 months, we've done over 250 positions for employers where we've actually gone in, um, help them write a job description, done it, done a compensation review.

So they know what the market is look is looking to pay. Um, and then actually do direct sourcing of talent, uh, put that talent through the interview, uh, gauntlet at red balloon to make sure that they're a culture fit and a skill fit, and then only presenting the employer with great people who we think are going to be able to do the job.

And then they just need to decide which one they like the best. Um, and so that's red balloon recruiter. Um, and so whichever way you want to do it, if you want to do it yourself and post jobs and find great people, fantastic.

If you want us to just run the process for you, um, and bring valuable people that are going to build your culture and not wreck it, we can do that too. Wow. That's so good. Yeah. You know, I worked for a fortune 500 company as an account manager and we had it really hammered into a $62 ,000.

That's what it costs to hire this employer that you're interviewing. Um, so make it count because if we have to work them out of the system in three or four months, that's going in the debit side of the sheet.

So yeah, very costly. I would see great value for companies in having you come in and go, yeah, we're going to place the right person or, you know, narrow it down to five or six or how many ever possible candidates, because it is extremely expensive, time consuming.

It's a risk. If you don't know, you could be the greatest company in the world and just really bad at hiring and that can sink your ship. Um, so yeah, the fact that you guys expanded into that too is very interesting because I bet you there's a real market for that, for a small, medium and large businesses that, that go, yeah, we need experts that know how to do that.

Um, two questions though. What happens if someone comes to you, who's an employer, uh, that, that wants to post and says, yeah, I don't know. I don't really agree with any of your, uh, uh, you know, any of your political views or your statements, but, uh, you got some good workers and labor's tight right now.

We want to be, you know, we want to be on the site. Is, is there something that you do to kind of, uh, you know, filter through possible employers searching for employees or is it just go ahead and post and.

Yeah, no, no. We're, uh, we're because we don't want our job seekers to come on, take a job with a business at red balloon and then find out they're working for the enemy, um, as it were. So no, we spend a lot of time filtering our employers.

We make them sign a pledge. Um, and it's not a complicated pledge. It's you believe the constitution still matters and you promise to respect and protect the freedom of your current and future employers.

And in fact, kind of a cool story. So this red balloon recruiter process we're talking about, um, and I'm not trying to, you know, do an advertisement or anything, but we only charge $4 ,500 to do a recruitment process.

A typical recruiter is going to charge you $40 ,000 to do the same process because we're at the scale of a job board and we're working on called 50 positions right now. Um, we're in a position where we can do that at a much more attractive price.

And so I had a large marketing company call me from New York and they're like, look, we believe in free speech and we believe in meritocracy and we probably disagree on a bunch of other issues, but I desperately want the type of people that you have on red balloon and your recruitment process might save me $30 ,000 per hire.

Um, is there any way that I can use your service? And I'm like, well, you need to promise to protect the freedoms of your current and future employees. And that means no DEI training and no rainbow flags in June.

And if you're willing to sign up for those things and actually let people live their values out loud, everyone doesn't have to agree, but you do need to not jam your leftist worldview down the throats of everyone you hire.

If you'll agree to those things and I'll, I'll allow you to use red balloon and, you know, pay us to do this work. Um, and they're like, fine, I will happily sign up for that because it is worth it for me.

And that's, that's where we want to get. Cause I feel like a lot of this parallel or freedom economy, um, so much of it is, well, I'm a Christian, you're a Christian, so you should pay me more money for my crappy product.

Uh, whereas the left is controlling so much, you know, LinkedIn or Facebook or YouTube, if they censor you, it really can hurt. Um, and so I want to be in a position where, uh, businesses on the right, like red balloon, like public square, et cetera, where we actually have the quality products that the left is like, look, I am willing to bend on my ideology because I am so desperate to be able to access this freedom economy.

Um, we're a lot smaller, obviously indeed, ZipRecruiter, all the big job boards out there have way more traffic, way more people and all those things. But we have the kind of people that any employer in their right mind actually wants to hire.

So, um, so we do filter businesses and our goal is, look, you can't work with us, um, unless you're going to protect those freedoms. Wow. Yeah, that's so good. Um, and that kind of leads me into something that I wanted to ask you, but since you kind of brought it up, you know, you, you have the, the left kind of movement in the progressive movement, shoving things down people's throat.

We see some discrimination against people with a certain set of values, Christians, things like that. Um, what is now with, you know, when you take national polls, you've got anywhere from 47 to almost 60 of people who just go, yeah, I don't want to see it at the workplace.

I don't want to see it in sports. Right. And that's being conservative. So why are big companies, um, uh, doing that? Why I've never heard a good reason for that because I think deep down, most companies are still free market capitalists, uh, and they want to do the best job that they can do to get the money out of your pocket into their pocket, whether that's, you know, providing a better service product, whatever it is, you know, some of them cheat a little bit, use the government regulations.

That's a different episode. But my point being is what, why do you think the push for this? Where's the profit in jumping on something that's now it's growing, but, but, but it's a minority view, uh, for most consumers.

What do you think of that? Yeah. So, um, if you look at the history of, I'll call it wokeness in the workplace. And I know some people are like wokeness in the workplace. Is that just a straw man that you're just using to try and prop your business up?

Like you, the stories that I have heard through all of this will curl your hair of, you know, of a lady at Microsoft who was actually fairly far up the food chain. She was using her team's meeting and she had an American flag for a background.

And she was told by HR the next day that that was triggering to some employees. And she was never to have that on her background again, because it's a sign of white supremacy in America, right? An American flag on her team's background.

She said, literally, and this is her words, uh, next day, a different employee had a background image of a black man being lynched. And the, and the caption said, a good man died at your hands today. It's straight out of the CRT playbook.

And it is this like, um, think about if you're in that environment, like it is demoralizing. It is, I think DEI is actually a liturgy designed to try and change the worldview and change the thinking of conservative employees.

So wokeness in the workplace is not a it's real. It's having an impact on a lot of employees. If you look at the history of wokeness in the workplace and why do these big businesses, great question, why these big businesses decide to ostracize at least some of their customers, employees, vendors, et cetera.

Um, you can track it back really to 2008, um, 2008. If you remember, we had the occupy wall street movement. There's all, you know, the economy crashes because we had this house of cards and wall street, um, the housing market crashes.

And then we have this occupy wall street group that is saying big banks are evil. Big corporations are evil because they're making all this money and we're poor and we're greedy and we're envious. And therefore we want your stuff.

And so big businesses kind of looked around at that moment. Um, and you can see this, um, a number of books kind of cover this Vivek Ramaswamy's, um, woke ink talks a little bit about this, but 2008 businesses are like, okay, so how do we solve this problem?

Cause we know we don't want to change our behavior. We and we're not giving them any of our profits. So we're not giving them our profit. I want to change the behavior. How do we make it go away? And they looked around and they said, who is the biggest microphone in our society?

Well, it was the liberal media. They're like, great. If we can say the things that the liberal media will be happy with, then we can get away with whatever we want. So if you're Nike, you can decry the sins of slavery and white supremacy while effectively using slave labor to make tennis shoes in somewhere in Southeast Asia, right?

As long as you say the right things, um, then you're going to be fine. And that works. The problem is words matter. And so when you say that stuff over and over and over and over again, and then you hire a recent college grad out of a woke Marxist university to be your head of HR, and then you've said this stuff over and over again, everyone starts to believe it.

And all of a sudden you believe that this is the way you should do things. DEI CRT microaggression training. I talked to someone who was at Silicon Valley bank after they went out of business. And he's like, look, the CEO said things that just, you cannot believe that American would say that to another American.

The things like, you know, I wish people would go to all the unvaccinated people would go to an Island and die together. Um, that was said, uh, you know, that, that kind of thing is said and they go through this weekly microaggression training.

Well, the problem is he's like, we all knew that the bank was going to fail, but we knew that if we went to the credit department and told them that it would be seen as a microaggression, we'd be written up by HR, we'd be tarred and feathered and probably lost our job.

So let's just ride the Titanic into the ground, lose our job and go that way. Um, so unfortunately that's, what's happened is they back in 2008, they're like, okay, we'll say the things that'll make people happy.

Um, but the problem is when you compromise like that, when you start to, um, just say the words to try and make everyone happy, you start to believe it. And this is where a lot of conservatives and Christians, they're like, you know, I go through a lot of DEI training, but I just kind of tune it out.

Be careful. It is having more of an impact on you and on your family than you realize. And if you don't stand up, if you're just the person who self-censors, get along, go along to get along, um, that is affecting who you are as a person.

Um, don't think it has a zero impact on you. So I think that's where it came from for all these corporations. Wow. No, that's very well explained. And I would agree with that as well too. I'd heard that theory and the more I look into it, cause I was around then too, you did see a shift of placating by the corporations, uh, and no real change, but then it started as placating and platitudes.

And then, like you say, you repeat it enough times, then you have to start acting it out and start believing it. And now we're, you know, we're getting into the next generation removed where they're coming through the universities and they actually do believe it.

You, you sit down with someone who's 16, 17, 18, 19, and believes that way they, they will look straight in your face and say, you know, there's no such thing as a two sexes. A gender is a spectrum. It's just what you think.

And I can claim to be a chair. I mean, I've had people tell me, you know, there's a guy in Japan who's turned himself into a border collie and that's completely legitimate. That's fine. So, yeah. So in the workplace, especially it's tough.

I mean, I know we, we chuckle at that, but it's, it's a, it's a, it's a deranged horrible thing when you support something like that, when someone has a mental illness, you know? Uh, um, so yeah, so let's get into the workplace stuff.

Cause I just want to take a snapshot since you're in this industry and really quick, just backing up. I wanted to tag on what you said and agree with you that, you know, so I work with a lot of Christians too, and sometimes they can be the best and sometimes they can be the worst.

Sometimes they think they're owed business just because, Hey, I say I'm a Christian. And I think deep down a Christian will do themselves well. If, if, if they are a red blooded capitalists and believe in a free market and just outwork outperform, give a better service, a better product than anyone else do it with godly principles, with a cheerful heart and your business will grow because that's the way that God, God has created the world.

And I think if more Christians did that kind of what you're doing, um, I think we'd be in a, in a better place within the Christian community as well, because like you said, we're playing catch up right now.

We, we coasted on the coattails of kind of being in a priority position as a, uh, as a Trinitarian Christian in the United States. And boy, now that they're turning, we go, Oh, what do we do? Well, we can't go to tech.

They own tech. We can't go to the media. They own media. Oh, we can't go to job placement. They own all those. And to see some, someone like red balloon coming in and going, Oh no, no, no, no, no. They don't.

We can do it better than them. We can place better workers. We have better employers. We have, you know, far superior services. Well, that's what we need within the Christian space. And like you said, then you have leftists coming to you and going, well, we'll bend our principles because we need what you have.

We have become indispensable. You have become indispensable. And I think that's the way it really should be. So I compliment you on that. But, uh, with, with that being said, um, the past 50 years and going forward the next 50 years, I mean, what, what is this, what does the workplace look like?

Uh, the secular workplace look like for Christians? We've seen how it's changed just rapidly in the last 10 years, even 15 years in very rapidly in the last three years, four years since COVID what are we looking at into the future?

What should we be concerned about? What is there to be, um, optimistic about you're in that space? What could you tell us if someone's listening right now? Yeah. If you look at the future, I think, you know, you always, the, the best way to predict the future is always to look at the past because, uh, you know, Ecclesiastes, um, there's nothing new under the sun.

It's all come around before and it's going to come around again. So, uh, if you look at the workplace over the last 50 years, you had a generation, uh, my parents generation who believe that neutrality in the workplace was a possibility.

Um, they believe that as long as you didn't talk about politics and, and as you stated, you know, you ask many Americans today, they'd like to stay away from all of those things. Um, and while I think that is fine, I think it's actually far better to engage in debate, um, where is applicable in the workplace.

Obviously you don't want to spend all your time, you know, debating baptism at a tech company. Um, cause that's not, doesn't have anything to do with, well, it has a lot to do, but that's a subject for another podcast maybe.

But, um, it doesn't have anything to do necessarily with your day to day operations. You should focus on those things, but being afraid of, um, if you're a Christian and you're a CEO, everyone should know that.

Um, and it shouldn't be a weird thing or a prerequisite, but you need to hold the line because the only way that we're going to have freedom in the workplace, true freedom, um, is to have people who have the courage to not bend to the latest political ideology.

Um, and what happened is the left said, Hey, we need everyone to feel inclusive and welcome in the workplace. We want everyone to bring their whole self to work. And the conservatives are like, ah, that sounds pretty good.

I guess we should do that. Um, and then as soon as they got in a position of power, they're like, just kidding. You can't bring your whole self to work, but we're going to bring all of us to work. Um, and so I think that's, what's happened in the past.

Although if you look at history, pendulums always swing back and forth. And so I think a lot of the DEI stuff is, um, losing ground. Um, I see the pendulum switching right now, which I think is encouraging, should be encouraging to everyone.

Um, but what happens is the liberals turn it up to 11, the conservatives freak out like a COVID or any of these other things. Um, then the liberals dial it back down to eight, wait for everyone to calm down, which they do.

They go back to sleep, they get back to racing their family. Um, and then they dial it back up to 13. And so that's unfortunately kind of the, the, the, the, what history has shown. And so as I look at the next 50 years in the workplace, um, AI is going to have an impact, but I think it's going to have the same kind of impact that computers had on the workplace, right?

It used to be, if you were doing manufacturing, you were there with your, you know, your cranks and your pedals. Um, now you're, uh, you're putting all your numbers into a computer and then voila, it's manufacturing the pieces and parts for you.

Obviously the white collar jobs have been deeply impacted by computers. Um, I think AI is going to be a very important tool. I do not think it is going to kill anyone. Um, I think obviously, um, any tool, a hammer or a gun or anything else can be used for harm, but I think it's going to, it's just going to be an interesting tool that if used well, we'll just increase the productivity of human beings.