Coffee Badging, Silent Depression, AI Taking Our Jobs, Ep. #208

Welcome to the latest episode of Capitalist Investor, where we dive deep into the evolving landscape of work and finance. Derek and Luke ignite a thought-provoking discussion on the generational shift towards seeking work-life balance and the complications of treating jobs solely as income sources. Tony brings a personal touch, reflecting on career pivots influenced by social media's shiny portrayal of life. But it's not all about the hustle; we explore the dark side of our online world, discussing its impact on mental health and societal values. As we unpack the future of financial advising with AI and debate its reliability, we invite you to ponder with us: Is technology the adviser of tomorrow or the barrier to human connection?

1. The Quest for Work-Life Balance

In this generation, there is a noticeable shift in attitude towards work. Unlike the previous generations that prized long work hours and limited vacation, today's workers are embracing a revolutionary approach to work-life balance. Derek and Luke lead a probing conversation on this cultural shift, examining the consequences of viewing jobs merely as income sources rather than lifelong careers. They explore how this view could potentially lead to job dissatisfaction and stunt personal growth and development.

2. The Social Media Effect

Tony opens up about his career transition journey and expounds on how the omnipresent social media affects lifestyle aspirations. In particular, they discuss the dark side of social media – its impact on mental health. The hosts unpack a slew of issues including escalated suicide rates and the addiction to attention and approval online. Furthermore, they touch on how the online world has contributed to a decline in moral foundations, religious engagement, and respect among users.

3. The AI Debate in Financial Advising and Planning

One of the more technologically forward-looking discussions of the episode revolves around the use of AI in financial strategy. They contemplate the feasibility of AI providing robust financial planning advice, such as leveraging IRA funds for purchasing a home. Luke champions the necessity of human touch in advising, whereas Tony expresses ambivalence about our growing reliance on AI for complex and personalized decisions.

4. Changing Office Culture and Dynamics

The hosts throw a light on today's office atmosphere marked by "coffee badging" – where showing up and being noticed takes precedence over real productivity. They draw a contrast between work cultures in small businesses versus large corporations and discuss how remote work has reshaped our working habits. This part of the episode critically examines the current generation's respect for work and their productivity levels.

5. AI's Ascendancy and Future Job Market

A thought-provoking segment centers on AI's role across industries, and whether its advancement might eventually eclipse human roles, dramatically altering the job market. The hosts dispute AI's trustworthiness and ponder its implications on free time and mental health, should it replace human jobs. They also speculate on AI's capacity to handle complex tasks in tax and finance sectors, and whether an AI-driven market will become overly efficient, referencing insights from the film "War Games."

Don't forget to leave your comments below and let us know what topics you would like us to cover in future episodes. If you have specific questions or need advice, please consult a professional, but we're also happy to steer the conversation here with your input.

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Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Capitalist Investor. As always, you got me, diamond Hands D, and we got the boys back again. Tony the tiger. Cool hands, Luke. What's going on, guys? Can't get rid of me yet? No. I'll tell you what. The office is trying hard in a sense that there's just like an outbreak going on. Everyone's sick. Everyone like. Except me. Except me. I was sick maybe a month ago with a two week cough, but everyone's got going down with these 24 hours fevers and stuff. It's crazy. Watch yourself. Everyone's got the vid. I don't know what I mean, but is it? I don't know. Apparently there's a new strain. There's something coming. Pfizer has been rocking the past two days. Novavax, a couple of other vaccine stocks are rocking because apparently there's a new virus. That's what they say. Covid strain. Well, I read into. Let me put again, what do I believe? But they said the reason you keep on hearing about it is that it's like some beefed up flu cold thing. It's not a weird strain of COVID that no one's ever seen before. That's what I read. We're never going to get away from this. Now. I hear a conspiracy theory talk. I love it. I know. We're going to keep these episodes. This week is going to be 15 minutes episode. Next week is going to be a 15 minutes episode. I know everyone's going to be busy around the holidays. If you guys get bored, just throw on the capitalist investor 15 minutes. Disconnect from your family for a little bit. We all love our fans, but sometimes. Doing some last minute Christmas shopping, like throw it on. That's right. So what do we got this week? And maybe tee up next week as well real quick. All right, so we're going to talk about coffee badging, what that's all about. Heard that is the US silently slipping into depression. Economists are worried about social media like TikTok and things like that. We'll talk about that and then are canceled and we'll get to that here in a moment. But your job may be at stake. My job? Your job? My job. I think everybody, this whole office going down, whole world's at stake. AI is taking our seats. All right. Coffee badging. I think. Luke, you found this article where? So last year, or maybe within the last two years, a lot of there was the big craze called quiet quitting. Right. These crazy terms of people coming in so quiet quitting was like, I don't like my job. So rather than resigning and turning off the paycheck, I'm just going to stop working and let them notice that I'm not working. And then they'll have them fire me and maybe get a severance. All this quiet quitting, it was unique technique out there. Today is the new term, is coffee badging a coffee badger. But no, the coffee badging is where you come in, you swipe your badge. So that's the badging part, right? And then you clock in, go grab a cup of coffee and make your laps around the office, let you be seen. Once you're seen by nearly everyone, make some conversations, you go home and work. So coffee badger is not me stealing Derek's coffee when I walk in. No, that's some random one. I made my french press coffee every time a few weeks ago, and somebody drank it before I got to. Made a. I made a sign. I made a big ass sign that says, stay away from my coffee. It says, did you make this coffee? Then don't drink it. It did taste really good. Are you son of a bitch. No. But this is interesting because at all the big corporations, as you know, there's a lot of inefficiencies the bigger you get as a company. So a lot of these big corporations will track whether a person comes in or not just by their badge. Swipe doesn't. You don't have to be seen. So you can literally walk into these, like the Tesla's of the world, Microsoft's, Google's of the world, swipe your badge, get your cup of coffee, then end up leaving some way, somehow the back. How do you log out, though? Well, I'm sure there's backdoors, ways to get out of the premises without swiping again. It's Elon Musk, man. You'd think he's the most technology savvy person, man. He probably has, like, all the monitors. Yeah, well, you never know anyway. But they're at least swiping in, trying to get their face seen. Like you said, this is a state of the world we live in. The bigger issue at play is that there are people that do this. They don't respect their own job. They don't have enough respect for themselves to say I care about my job enough. And adding productivity to the system to actually show up to work and do my job because my superiors are telling me to do so. There's a lack of respect in today's world. That's the bigger issue at play is that the fact that this is actually happening and the younger generations, including my generation, are so lost in the fact that they don't actually understand how the system works anymore. I don't know, man. I think we're obviously creatures of habit and we get used to things quickly. And when you're sitting at home and you made your home office and you're working from home and you're able to go mix in a thing of laundry and make yourself a nice lunch and grill out, and whatever you're doing at home and working simultaneously, you take that away. And now the mentality forcing me to come to jail. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be around anybody. I enjoy being secluded at my house and doing what I want to do when I want to do it. I think everyone should work for a small business because this stuff doesn't have. We never closed down, so I don't have this. I hated it. It took me way too long to get comfortable to be well, let's say. If you work for a company, let's say like ours, we got 20 to 30 employees, right? Somewhere in between there. One guy doesn't do their job, doesn't show up to work. There's a big lack of productivity, a big lack of work that's being done by one person not showing up. When there's 10,000 people and one person doesn't show up or coffee badge and whatever it be, then you can kind of get away with it. And this is the problem that the bigger you get, inefficiencies you get. But also it teaches the young people to not respect their work. What do you think, d you coming in? Coffee badging? I am not. We don't have. Well, I guess we do have a badge, technically on the side door to get in. I have a. You don't track my. Know, I think what Luke said is extremely accurate. There used to be, rightly or wrongly, some pride involved in the job that you would do. You would see. It's hard to say because some of those people get taken advantage of as well by their employer. I think you see that a lot from the generation before us. Right? There was the, hey, you just have to work 50 to 60 hours a week at this job. Like it's just expected, right? You're not going to take much vacation. And slowly people started revolting from that. I totally agree with Luke, but it is a two way problem that has come to a head real quick. I know we were times up, but there's a disconnect now between having a job and having a career. You go to college to get a career. And this is the problem that people get themselves in trouble. Why college doesn't pay off as well as people think that it should is because they don't look at their job as a career, they look at it as a job. I'm going to go to go to work, get a paycheck, and that's all I'm going to do. They aren't looking for that growth. And that's the problem. I mean, I started off college, I have an engineering degree, and I do this. And that's why everyone asks me, like, how the hell does that correlate? Right? Solving problems. But yes, I can tell the story on how it correlates, but I don't do what I did, what I learned in college. Right, but you switched. You created a career. I made a career move. Yeah. You're co founder SWP. It's a career. It's not a job. This is not what you show up to work in a job you're building. I'm like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix. I'm wired in this place. I can't get out. We know,

Tony. I think you were here like 09: 8:11

00 p.m. Last night. I might have been. Anyway. The US is in a silent depression question mark. Economists are worried that viral TikTok and other maybe Instagram and Facebook posts and stuff are making us depressed. I would have to say I would agree with that. When you're on tv, or, I'm sorry, when you're on all these social media things and you're watching all these celebrities or maybe even people you used to know, and they're like extravagant vacations and cool houses and cool cars and cool watches and fake bodies and whatever, they're strapping on my six packs like the lipo man belly just paying off. All right, but seriously though, I would have to say, yeah, we all think we should be living a certain way. It's the modern day, keeping up with the Joneses. There's no doubt. I used to be able to watch go up and down my block. I'm like, oh, so and so got a new car. That means now I just turn on thing and it's like Lambos and Ferraris and corvetes and just ridiculousness. Right? Yeah. So lost. People are so lost. Absolutely. I mean, I'm the generation this is first being tested on. I mean, literally, I grew up in the first wave of social media as I was getting older and cell phones for the first time coming out when I was like twelve years old, eleven years old, right? Or like smartphones coming out. I mean, 1112 years old. There's no doubt about it. Mental health is one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue in today's world. Suicide rates are highest ever in history. The spike in the thing yesterday, like the ten year teenage suicide rate is up like 60% over the last decade or something. You know why it's interesting? We are the most bored we've ever been as a society. We have the most things to do, but also we're the most bored. We are just addicted to these dopamine rushes of social media swiping, trying to get attention, approval from other people. We're always comparing ourselves, like you said, to other people, 100%. There's this constant ego. Everyone has an ego. Everyone's narcissistic in today's world. I mean, the younger people at least are. I observe it all the time. I think everyone has to have some sort of realization that what's important in life is the old school stuff, family. I mean, just religion. Lack of religion is another reason. No moral foundation. I don't care what religion you have, but there's lack of morals in today's world too, which is leading to unhappiness. Yeah, I mean, we can see what happened in the White House in DC this year. Two illicit acts of degenerate, maybe slightly illegal. Well, no respect. Again, no respect. They found drugs in the White House and inappropriate behavior in the courtrooms in the place where the Senate and stuff hangs into duck congress of our institution, of our congressional constitution. It's crazy. Like imagine that. You said you don't even go out to dinner anymore. Staying away from this stuff, hunty? Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's just less joy, I would say. It seems to be that everyone needs to get topped, right? It needs to more and more and more and more. That takes away from some of the simpler joys in life. Yeah, well, I'll even use this example. So like traveling, for example, now that I've been traveling a good bit for work, which. It's cool. It is cool. I get to meet new people, but I'm always on trying to network, whatever. You find new things. I always wanted to travel growing up, but now it's like every time I don't want to travel now because I'm so exhausted from it, I don't get any more joy from traveling. Like vacation. Even more. I want to staycation at this point. Right. I've done a couple of staycations. Healthy, going out to restaurants. It was kind of seen as, for a lot of people, once or twice a week, it was kind of seen as something you didn't do often. You got excited to do it. Now everyone's going out seven days a week, kind of like you mentioned. There's nothing exciting about it anymore because everyone's so used to it. The more you do something, the less excited you are. I feel like life is so middle class. America complains they don't have any money. I get that times are tough, but your lifestyle has increased a lot the past 40 years compared to back in the. When you took one vacation a year, had one car, one house, and you did nothing ever because you didn't have any money to do it or you're too busy raising a family. My generation doesn't have kids. They're not getting married. They're spending money elsewhere. Man, that's making me go back to my college days, man. I used to enjoy going out, like Thursday, Friday, Saturday, maybe all three days, maybe one day. Who knows? I'm too old for that. But think about it. You're going out. You want to see that chick you like and stuff, and the only way you're going to see her is you got to run into her, because there wasn't instagram, there wasn't anything. You had to literally hope she's going to be there. Hey, Derek, do you know if she's going to be there? Oh, we own match group Tinder hin your stadium. Dude, that stuff was not existent. It was like, I had to go. And today I can hop on and see a picture of something like, oh, I'm satisfied. What's the term nowadays? You had to go use your Riz. You call it Riz. I've seen the word. Yeah. It's like you had to actually go talk to girls or guy girls. Had to talk to guys. You had to talk game. You had to talk some game. Actually talking to people. Talk. Wild, crazy concept. All right, and let's get to the canceled tax and finance jobs are at risk by being replaced by AI. Yes. I feel like AI is losing its fizzle. You don't hear about it as much. Like before, it was like going earlier in the year, midway through 2023. It's like, AI, AI, there's nothing there. People got bored. Chad, GBT just helping out. Boring stuff. Boring, boring stuff. All right, so I'll kick it to you. How do you feel about that, Dee? I think every job is at risk by being replaced by AI. I would not put it towards the top of the list of what I would be worried about. Writers, I think, is the number one group I would be worried about, because I have seen that work and worked it myself. You can ask Chat GPT to do pretty much anything and it'll spit out a story, a song, lyrics. It's crazy how fast that works. But the things that involve a human element, I think, is going to take longer for people to trust that AI is going to do the job that they need it to do. You look at it with fully autonomous driving, right? It is much safer to have that computer drive the car than humans, statistically, right? But no one wants to let that computer drive if one person gets hurt, right? No one wants to look at it. Logically until there's a glitch in the matrix, right? The car goes off the road. I love this. I'm sorry, I love this topic. After talking about what we just talked about with the mental health and things like that, and TikTok, social media, because it goes hand in hand. Okay, let's say finance, tax jobs, whether there's a trust factor, non trust factor, AI is either going to exasperate. Is that the word I'm looking for? Exasperate the issues that we currently have that we just talked about, or it's going to solve the issues we just talked about. Because AI is supposed to fill. If it takes everyone's jobs, finance jobs, tax jobs, manufacturing, whatever you talk about, if it takes those jobs, it frees up time for people. And the question is, what do people do with their time? Are they using it for the purposes we just mentioned, the boredom factor, and are just searching for that dopamine rush, excessive mentality. Are they using it for those purposes, or are they going back to what actually matters? Family, spirituality, going back to traveling, seeing the world. Are they using it for the right purposes? Their time? That's where there's a pessimistic view of where they have more time. It creates more time, more issues in the world, crime, things like boredom, whatever it be. Or the optimist view is, hey, gives people more time to do what they actually care about, what actually matters in life. I'm interested to see how this turns out next 50 years. Yeah. So I kind of dissected them like CPA. So many people like, I need to talk to my CPA. No one talks. Some people do it, I guess turbotax and boom, boom, boom. But they're pulling the triggers and they're making things happen that they want to make happen in their financial life. If I just give it to a software and who knows what it's going to pump out, then I got to check it, because I don't trust it and things like that. But I have seen some crazy softwares, though, where there's this tax software that you can take the front page of your 1040, put it on a PDF kind of screen, and it'll give you like ten tax tips. That's pretty impressive, right? But then again, do you want to do it? Can you do it? Does it even know you have a roth IRA to do conversions? Does it know maybe not like, flaws? Can AI really go in and do an audit and really decipher what needs to be in what categories and stuff? So the higher end cpas, I always feel they'll have to be a human touch. And then you also have that. I'll call it. When you're doing your taxes, you got. Your. Black and gray, I'm sorry, black and white. It's like right and wrong. And then there's that middle area, that gray that you can say, hey, no, it's really for this. Is it really? I'm going to say it is like, hey, I'm going to write this off because I'm a business owner, blah, blah, blah. Well, maybe they make the tax code simpler because of things like this, so that the technology can actually. Good luck with that. Holy cow. Unwind this tax system. But then what about financial advisors? Can it replace my job? No one can replace you, Tony, man. Thanks, Luke. That's the holiday. That's the holiday spirit. Yeah, holiday spirit, for sure. Spirit. I appreciate that, Luke. I can't replace you either. Thank you, special boy. That's not what a lot of people say about me. But think about the algos that are already out there, and you got AI watching being manipulated by other AI. They can maybe team up against each other, and then you get this huge whipsaw event. The market crashes, your account sells, and then it bounces back the next day. I did research on this back in college, and it's been my theory of efficiently inefficient is what I call it. Technology becomes so efficient that everything becomes inefficient because there's no discrepancies in the market or the economy because everything's so efficient. So therefore, there's no way for capitalistic system to work because everything's so efficient, there's no ways to take advantage of competitive nature. Yeah, there was a movie called War Games. It was computer generated war, right? I mean, that's crazy. And it was trying to enact what a human would do. Right. And so they're going back and forth. I'm going to, game of chess is basically what the game wanted to play. It's a good movie. And then are they going to come up with financial planning strategies? Like, I use this example a couple of times where client got a sizable IRA, wants to buy a new house, knows that the house is going to cost $200,000 more than their current house. They need to finance. Is AI going to come up with strategies? Are they going to consider doing home equity lines rather than taking a distribution from your IRA? Does AI know? Is it going to know to ask that person saying, hey, when is your house going to be ready or built? Maybe you can take a distribution from your IRA and put it back in there in 60 days and not pay the tax. Does it know to do those kind of things? I don't know. We'll find out. We will find out. I think it's going to be a combination. It's always going to be a combo, at least in our world, the advising world, people want that human interaction element, in my opinion. I think they always will want that. I saw a meme on Facebook that said in 1980, they're like, in 2023 we're going to have flying cars. And then they show a picture of like a hamburger. And then the rapper says, please do not eat the wrapper. So who knows where this is going? Maybe we will be too so uneducated that we need AI to function. Who knows? I hope not. I don't know how we function sometimes in society, today's world as it is. All right, so Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Well, merry Christmas. Yeah, next, we got New Year's. So whatever you celebrate this time of year, happy holidays, and we'll see you next week. And take us home. D, anything else you want to add? I think you did it. Oh, yeah. Everyone. Well, I think next week you can kind of look into our episodes. We're talking about New Year's resolutions, both personal and financial. Right. And we're going to talk about some of our hot takes on the economy and world headings of next year. All right, I like it. Sounds good. Well, everyone, thanks for listening. Hit us up at info@swpconnect.com if you got any questions or ideas for shows, and we'll talk to you next week. The opinions expressed in the podcast are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any investment, legal, financial or tax strategy. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. Please consult a qualified professional about your individual needs.