EP122 | Two Sacketts, One Workplace - and a Lot of AI Questions

[00:00:15] Hey everybody, it's Tim Sackett. I'm back with another edition of HR Famous. And for this episode, I have a very special guest. My middle son. He's not the oldest. He's not the youngest. He's smack dab in the middle. He was planned for almost. Cameron Sackett. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:43] Cameron, introduce yourself. I know we've been doing HR Famous. You were with the original crew. You were the producer. Yeah. And then we've kind of done all this kind of reset and now you're coming back as a fully fledged adult contributor working in the real world. Tell everybody what you do.

[00:01:01] Cameron, I feel like I've been involved in like so many of your different ventures through the years from the podcast, which I was like you said, like the COVID producer of that when I just graduated college. I'm featured in the book. I've been on the blog before. I've been everywhere in the Tim Sackett universe. But I didn't have you to like go out and like work the fields. You know, it's not what I do.

[00:01:27] Yeah. I'm the only one of my of my brothers that will engage in this. So you got to milk me for all I'm worth. I work at Away, the luggage company. I'm a social media manager. I've been there for a little over three years and I've worked in the social marketing space, influencer space for almost five years now, which makes me feel really old. But yeah, that's what I do. I live in Brooklyn and work in New York. I've been here for four years. Yeah. And I work with my dad sometimes, too.

[00:01:57] Cool. And your pop culture is kind of your thing. For sure. You like that a lot. What are you watching lately that you love? There's a lot of good TV on right now. We were just talking about this before we hopped on. I'm watching White Lotus, of course. Away did a White Lotus collection. So I've been in that. Third season?

[00:02:14] Third season. Yeah. They're in Thailand now, which is really cool. They always create an amazing cast of character actors, which you're like, I've seen all these people in like three to five things, but no one has really broken out majorly yet. So that's great. Watching Severance as well. That's probably my favorite show on right now. So good. Ben Stiller. Who knew he edited him? He's really killing it.

[00:02:38] Severance makes me laugh out loud multiple times to stuff that nobody else is laughing just because of the work stuff. Yeah. Like I look at it from like the HR perspective of life. And sometimes it just like the little like the melon parties and stuff like that. Yeah. It literally makes me cry laughing. Like that's so funny. Yeah.

[00:02:58] I always do like, I get like, it seems like this is a big meme or Gen Z millennial kind of social shares. Like everyone wants to hate on the pizza party. It's like, don't give me a pizza party. Give me a raise.

[00:03:09] And it was like, look, I got a hundred bucks in my HR budget. I can buy some pizzas. I can't give everyone a stupid raise. Do you want the pizzas or not? Like I'm not the pizza guy. I think it's so funny. I'm like, you know what? If people are working hard and they're doing stuff and like, you know, you show up to the office and you guys, you know, if somebody came in like, oh, we're going to have a cool luncheon or whatever, you're not going to go, oh, don't give me a luncheon. I want a raise. Like, that's just dumb. That's like, you can do both, you know?

[00:03:39] Yeah. Honestly, I mean, for very few companies, do we have the like everyday lunch and breakfast provided left? Like no one's doing that anymore. You got to work for like the select five companies. And I feel like that was such a thing when I was looking for jobs, like the best companies were giving you lunch every day and you could have like an Uber credit. I'm like, that doesn't exist anymore. That's a dream, not a reality.

[00:04:01] It was like a weird like decade of that happening. And like, and again, it's all coming back, right? Every time you do like the bill has to be paid by somebody. And these investors literally gave billions of dollars to these tech companies, 99% of which failed, right? I mean, we hear about like the big ones and you got the NVIDIAs and the Teslas and all this stuff that like, you know, are worth trillions of dollars or whatever. Cool for them.

[00:04:24] 99% of that money was set on fire for stupid crap. Like, hey, we have matcha on tap or we have, you know, kabocha in 25 flavors. And you're like, why? Like, can you, how about you make money? You know, they're like, oh, it's the only way we could get people. No, it's not. Stop it. You're dumb.

[00:04:44] Before I worked out of way. So this is like way back in the early days, they used to send the whole company on a company wide retreat out of the country. Like every single person would go to like Costa Rica.

[00:04:55] By the way, so you and I are falling to the same pattern of career wise. I felt like every time I took a new job with a new company and some of the best brands, I got to hear all like, well, gosh, just before you started, we had bonuses of seven figures and they would give us gold plated Cadillacs. Now I'm like, they're whipping us to work 12 hours a day. I'm like, how did I miss the good days every time?

[00:05:24] Yeah. Maybe one day we'll get there. Maybe I can hope I can aspire to be a part of a good day segment. I, my, I think, I think the people that work for me were like, you know, we do it. We get, we have some good days. And if they ever like, I'm the only one in my company that bitches about the pizza parties. Like, because every, like, it seems like everybody, like, I just, I'm, you know me, like, I just want to do it myself.

[00:05:48] Like, I'll just order the pizza because then I get what I want for sure. And I get as much as I want of what I want. And then I put it to somebody else and we come to the pizza party and there's one pepperoni pizza, 14 veggie pizzas. And like, and you're like, what's going on here? Everyone loves veggie. No, there's like, there's 12 and a half veggie pizzas left. Everybody's hungry. It's like, what's going on? I hate this. You know? Yeah. Well, I'm not, I'm not there yet.

[00:06:16] I've fired 327 people over ordering pizzas in my career. That you set a world record there. Guinness is going to give you a call. Every time someone fucks it up, I just go, you're fired. You're, you're fired from ordering pizzas for the rest of your life. You can no longer do this. Um, you know, it's terrible. So White Lotus, Severance, mom and I were watching, um, Yellow Jackets season one. It's on season three now. Season three now. Yeah.

[00:06:45] I, we obviously, I made it through a season, so, so it's not terrible. I mean, it's good, you know, acting story, blah, blah, blah. What I hate is Paramount Plus now wants me to buy up to Paramount Plus Showtime, Plus Hulu, Plus blah, blah, blah. I did watch the next season, which I, again, I kind of respect them for it. I'm like, cool. You got me. I'm not going to buy up. I'll just say like, uh, I'll wait for it to come on Netflix at some point in the next 10 years. Who cares?

[00:07:09] Mom had me watching some stupid agent movie. Like she loves like the agent. Like they're like, oh, we're going to. There's so many agent shows right now. We're going to save the world from apocalyptic AI, you know? And by the way, the one she'd be watching, I watch it only because the two main actors were so God awful. They weren't even beautiful people. Okay. I understand like if you go, oh my gosh,

[00:07:35] you're the most two beautiful actors of all time. And like, okay, I'll put up with bad acting. If you're beautiful, they were average looking horrible. Like I would make fun of like, they would have no inflection. Like they would be like, like he was like the girl had to leave the boy. And he's like, you just have to quit me, Gene. You know, like, what is like, I said, what is this? This is the worst acting of all time. And so I laugh watching it and she just gets pissed off

[00:08:01] beyond belief that I'm actually laughing. And I'm like, it's entertainment. She's like, will you just please shut up and I can watch this? I'm like, wait, it's, this is terrible. Is the show the night agent on Netflix? Yes. Yes. Okay. There's two seasons. I had to watch both seasons. I couldn't, I couldn't. It's the worst acting of all time. That guy should never be hired as an actor. I wouldn't hire him as an actor at a local production of like, you know,

[00:08:28] Les Mis. Like there's, it just couldn't, he's awful. I actually feel like it's a Netflix strategy thing where they want to make shows that are so easy for you to understand if you're on your phone or like reading a book at the same time. And so they do like, they hire the most average people and the average scripts. Cause it's then it's just like way easier to understand. I think it's a Netflix. Now I wouldn't say conspiracy. We'll call it a scheme to figure out how cheap they can actually

[00:08:57] produce something that people will watch. Absolutely. Like I'm sure this guy's getting $200 an episode, right. And like living in his van, like that's how terrible he is. And I don't even know the actor. What's the actor's name? Look it up. I have no idea. I have no idea. I think that show is actually a huge hit, which is crazy. It is. No, I like, I talked to so many people. They're like, Oh, you have you watched the night agent? And I'm like, Oh my God, I judge you and your intelligence based on

[00:09:24] if you watch the night agent. Um, Gabrielle Basso is Peter Sutherland. And then Luciana Buchanan. Again, I like her better. She's, I mean, she's arms, she's head and shoulders above from an acting standpoint. He has got awful. And again, nice super, I'm sure the guy's a nice guy. He's paying for his family. He's got like 13 million followers on Instagram. He actually has 461, which makes me laugh even harder. Cause you know, if you have like, you have a successful TV show and you only

[00:09:54] have 461,000 followers on Instagram, it just shows me how bad you are. If you can't have a million, come on, you have two seasons on a Netflix show. You can ride. Yeah. You can ride Netflix hit show to start them. I could be in one episode of the agent and I would have a million followers on Instagram. I can tell you that right now. Okay, great. I would leverage that. Netflix, if you want to try this out, send him back in a DM. Okay. Hey, let's, let's talk shop a little.

[00:10:21] Great. So, uh, we just got back from spring break. I know you're, you're pained because your youngest brother got to go on a yet another free trip, um, for spring break. But it got me thinking when I got back is like, we kind of, we don't really do like a Christmas break either or a summer break or stuff like that for employees. But almost everybody in America, it's like between

[00:10:46] Christmas and new years. If you're working a white collar job, either you take it off completely or you say you're working, but you're not really working. Like no one really is working. It's a shutdown. It's a shutdown. Why don't we do a spring break for adults? Yeah. I don't know. It would seem like, I mean, already, I mean, the reality is, is if you have kids, you probably have to take it off anyways. Right. At some point.

[00:11:12] So it feels like we need to align nationally on what spring break is if we're going to do that, because I remember even growing up, like the town over from us would have a different spring break. And it's like, why aren't we all aligning on the same spring break or maybe doing a couple versions of it? Maybe the Midwest has this one. The South has this one. The West coast has this one. And then we can actually implement something like that. That makes sense. Except every time we would try to go on spring break, because you're up north, if you're Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, well, every is like,

[00:11:41] it's all you want to go anywhere. Like the worst, think of the worst warm place in the world. And they're like, it's thousand dollars per ticket for, you know, sitting in the spirit airlines backseat. You know, you're like, what, how, why is it cost so much? It's because everyone's trying to go on spring break. I almost think you have to like schedule it, like, you know, kind of like rotate it like Michigan. Your spring break is this week to this week, Wisconsin, Minnesota, you get this one. And like, you can kind of do that because it kind of gets,

[00:12:08] you know, warmer later, the farther you go north. Like you could figure this out. We can't even figure out like the time change, you know, like spring forward and you wake up and you're just like, why are we still doing this? Every president in the last 100 years has said, like, I'm going to end daylight savings. That's like on their platform. And not one of them, I think it's like an Illuminati conspiracy thing. Like, why can't we end daylight savings?

[00:12:35] It's people that wake up before 6am, which nobody wants it. No one wants it. No one. No. Anyways, spring break. I would love a spring break because I haven't had a spring break in, I'm aging myself five years since I graduated college. That would be a good employee benefit after five years out of college. So they should do this for early career. So like if you started right out of college after five years, they should say, Hey,

[00:13:02] one of your five year benefits is we're going to send you on spring break. That's fun. That would be fun. I took like a makeshift spring break. I went to Mexico City for not like a full week, but five days. And I took just PTO and went over a long weekend. I actually went over President's Day. So I had one of those days off. But I would love a spring break in like March, April, because that's really when

[00:13:26] you need to take a trip because it's so gross out. And especially in Michigan, I mean, it always like snowed in the middle of April and you're ready to to get out. Well, in Michigan, they do like the universities have the spring break, like first week of like first or second week of March. And then like high schools and like all those don't have it until like April, like Easter, you know, time frame, all that. So it's a little they do break that up a little bit.

[00:13:52] But and part of that is like for universities, like they're getting out like at May 1st now. Like, can you imagine like, hey, April, the first week of April, we had spring break. And three weeks later, we were out of school. Yeah, that's crazy. But I know I think so, too. It's because so many people are already just taking breaks over the summer. You have a lot of built in breaks. You have Memorial Day, you have Fourth of July, you have Labor Day. You basically go Christmas to Memorial Day with no built in breaks, unless your company will give you like a President's Day or something like that,

[00:14:21] or an MLK Day, which not everyone does. But even then, that's January, right? Like MLK, isn't that like it's really early? Yeah, so it's like right after. Yeah. Yeah. And when at that point, you're just like, look, I want to get back to work. I can't. I've been with my family for two straight weeks. Oh, yeah. Shoot myself. Oh, get me out of the Sackett household and get me back to my apartment. Yeah, I'm trying to think of like, that's really the only time where you have like an extended

[00:14:45] break. Because if you get out of like Labor Day, the next one is like Thanksgiving and then you're right into Christmas, New Year's. We bunch them together. We need to spread them out more. I know. There needs to be like quarterly breaks. We should move Thanksgiving. I've always said this. There's no reason. I was saying we should move. We should do Thanksgiving in March. Well, I don't know about that. I think we should move. It's still cold. So you can still have turkey. I think Thanksgiving should be in October.

[00:15:15] I think Thanksgiving should be around Halloween time because Halloween is not like a gathering holiday. That's like you spend two hours on Halloween. Thanksgiving is like a real holiday. Then November and December become about Christmas. You could do they should do Halloween like the when like the Tuesday of Thanksgiving. So you have Halloween on Tuesday. You have Thanksgiving on Thursday. And you just knock it out. Right. This is our presidential platform. Yeah. Come on.

[00:15:43] Abolish daylight saving. Move Thanksgiving. Yeah. Who cares that Thanksgiving is on some random Thursday in November? Like we don't care when it is like it's dumb. Yeah. I'm here for it. Let's move it. Spring break. All right. We need an official employee spring break. That's what we're saying. The other thing I want to talk about is and I keep running into this. I'm trying to find

[00:16:06] like real world examples of workers using AI because if you see the marketing coming from all the AI companies from all the big companies from every media outlet like everything is AI and workers and AI and and then I talk to people and they're just like what? They don't either they don't know they're using AI they're using AI or they're just not using AI.

[00:16:32] I and I'm an early adopter so I tend to use I mean I use AI daily and I'm just wondering like are you like in your company or in your role in your industry are like is that something like you're talking about are you using if so like what how blah blah blah. Yeah. I think so I work in marketing obviously and like in a more creative side of marketing and I that is definitely uh I think it's definitely frowned upon in more creative spaces. I mean we see

[00:17:01] places like the Oscars it being a really huge controversy when movies have used AI because it infringes seemingly on artists rights a lot of times or like the integrity of creativity which whatever we're not here to discuss that but it is interesting when like I create a lot of things for a living that AI could help with to be honest like I just haven't integrated it into a lot of a lot of my processes yet and

[00:17:29] especially when I'm thinking about how I create video which is the majority of my job is like creating video and and yeah and content for social is I actually don't think the technology is there unless you really know how to use it so you have to be like an expert to really use it in a great way in a way that people are going to uh enjoy and then you actually see a lot of I've experienced this

[00:17:55] on our own social is like we don't we haven't really used AI in a meaningful way we've worked with a few people that have used AI to like you know make elements within their video and we get backlash like people aren't people are really turned off against it and they don't like AI uh for in their marketing it seems and a lot of times they don't know they can't tell and so sometimes they think it's AI when it's truly not it's just that it looks like it but yeah yeah I know

[00:18:21] I'm using it because you know every time you google something now you're using AI yeah yeah yeah a lot of the programs that I use for reporting and data like those are obviously have AI integrated into it but I've also found we get I monitor a lot of like comments dms to our social accounts like we get so many dms from celebrities and influencers who are writing using chat gpt to send their dms and

[00:18:46] it's just like there's no thought behind this the editing needs to be improved I don't know about you but I don't know very many people that are hopeful about the world of work and I'd like to change that my name is Marcus Mossberger and I started the Hope at Work podcast where you'll find two things number one really interesting guests and number two innovative ideas about the future of work check it out

[00:19:12] I will say like I am like I constantly like again for creative work I what I'll usually do is just write the entire thing myself and then throw it into you know gpt or something like that grok whatever and then ask it for specific things sometimes it's like hey can you you know make this more seo friendly or um sometimes like I'll say hey I'm I'm working on this presentation about this this this and this and

[00:19:37] this is the audience and give me like 10 titles that are you know exciting and grabbing attention blah blah blah and then it'll come up with just it's like more brainstorming then I'm like oh I like that part that part that part so you're still like using that creative process but it's almost like you have this kind of this agent you know that's kind of brainstorming with you from that standpoint the video stuff literally at one point I was trying I was writing a post and I wanted to put in an image

[00:20:05] and then I'm like oh I should do like a little quick video AI and it was all about like I like I always make the joke of having a candidate throw up on your desk and I say that they don't really throw up on your desk but they get they come in and they're nervous and you know blah blah blah so I really would I said I asked the AI to like give me this video of a candidate throwing up on the desk and it it was literally it was like the candidate would be like and it would like and then a wave like like literally an ocean wave would come out of its mouth onto the desk and then disappear and I'm

[00:20:34] like and I kept trying like prompting it differently differently differently it just never looked real it was just this wave that came out of the head basically that's so funny you know I'm like okay you can't do it but then I see somebody that does like a really good AI video and I'm like holy crap but then I'm like oh they have to be like that's their thing right like they're probably they don't tell you like oh it just took me 13 seconds it probably took them you know 30 hours to put together this 15 seconds of AI video that looks real let you know that speaks to a story blah blah blah but

[00:21:04] eventually hopefully I can just tell them like hey I want to show a candidate with a hiring manager behind a desk throwing up on the hiring manager and I'm like wow that's perfect awesome that's amazing the people that I hear like of my friends and people that I work with that tend to use AI the most it's really the writing and editing standpoint like you're talking about I think I hear a lot of like project manager type roles where it's like they're just taking notes or they're summarizing things they're sending emails they're writing copy for decks and it just is you using it to summarize

[00:21:34] and then to cut down on time and I feel like that's where it's been most acceptable in my experience but I think when you're thinking about everything being internal facing it's more acceptable but as soon as you're creating something for a consumer external facing I think AI raises a lot of red flags especially with the away following community which I get it and I don't I did see like at first when

[00:21:59] like the whole AI stuff came out everyone was concerned about like students like oh they're gonna do all their work through AI blah blah and they're like and then all of a sudden there was this creation of all these solutions I could check if something was written by AI and then there was more you know technology built to you know say like I can like write this like AI can't detect it you know so you had that detection anti-detection blah blah blah yeah and now like you don't even hear about it I think like especially at the university level I think they've just gone this is a tool these kids these people

[00:22:28] will always have in their life and if you still have to prompt it you still have to go back and cite and get the real information let them know like what you want like if that's a tool it's kind of like having a calculator like you don't ask a college student to do long division now right you're like that's dumb like you know like that's this is something where they should be able to use a computer or you know write code to like do that problem whatever like why would we have them try to solve for that the creativity side of me though is like because you know how that is is like when

[00:22:57] you start to go develop something there's a part of you where the sausage is made that it's just like it's in the moment it happens you try things it doesn't work and if you're just like prompting an AI to give you something and you're like okay it's good enough like do we really get that creative out of it plus AI itself isn't creative AI itself is actually just replicating everything it knows in in a different like you know lineup right so it's like yeah it's not really giving you something

[00:23:25] fresh it's giving you stuff you've already seen maybe just mixed together a little bit differently and you go oh well isn't that creativity and you're like well but there's there's nothing new necessarily that can be created out of that which is kind of interesting um from that standpoint like from a corporate standpoint do you guys hear about it are you giving tools about you know that says hey here's this new AI tool that you guys can use like when you guys give an access to GPT or like an enterprise version or anything like that I haven't been given access to anything I haven't

[00:23:54] been given like necessarily explicit instruction on like what I can and can't do but I of all the companies I've worked for like my career I everyone's taking it very seriously and like how we use this and it seems like they're moving quite slow in adopting it and I know certain like companies that I've worked for are like doing you know tasks for task forces and and really spending their time

[00:24:22] determining like what will be implemented what won't be implemented I think it probably stems a lot from just employee concern that you know the classic like my job is going to be taken by AI and so they want to take a lot of consideration into that rather than move quickly that's why I wanted to talk about that's my entire point is I I just don't think AI is moving as fast as what we think it is in terms of adoption of usage in the workplace yeah like you just and again part of that I think is lack of

[00:24:52] understanding education like what I hear constantly is people are interested but the interest is turned in automatically to tell me exactly what tool and how you used it to do what thing because I want to replicate that I want to do that too if it's going to make me more efficient if it's going to make me better whatever that might be and yet even the vendors aren't telling people they're like they have all these boastful kind of marketing language like oh my gosh you can be a 10x employee but then they

[00:25:19] don't never say how it's like I know just tell them why are we hiding like how these tools actually work and use you know yeah it's interesting we're in this like brand marketing phase of AI where it's not it's not product marketing we're not like understanding how to use it I've not I have like get emails from vendors all the time those kind of things like with AI you can 10x your results I'm like but I don't know how and you could like send me a trial of your program and I still won't know how yeah it's and

[00:25:48] I can figure it out like I'm you know young and work in the workplace and know how to use tech but someone teach me how this actually works this has been yeah like my you know I've been in the HR tech space for probably you know 12-15 years and like it's been my one gripe I've always had to product marketing people is they assume the end buyer user is way more you know higher level than what they

[00:26:13] really are around the technology right around the processes they might be a great HR person or a great recruiter or a great whatever but you still have to tell them show them exactly how to use that technology and if it's something like AI where they go oh well you you could build an agent to do trillion different things well cool start with five start with yeah show you know let them get used to

[00:26:39] what that can actually do and then show them how to build but they don't even do that they just launch the product and go here you go and then they're like oh there's no adoption and your goal of course there's not because they don't know how to use it moron like figure it out like help them to help themselves and like I just think that's so crazy that we still haven't figured that out on the product marketing side so yeah I also think about like the brand I work for we're not a large company and we

[00:27:05] don't have the people that could just dedicate the time to doing this and I'm sure a lot of companies can have those resources when you think about you know big finance companies or big tech companies like they can figure it they can have task forces and they can have like entire teams that are geared towards implementation but like we're all busy all the time like we don't have time to take to figure out how we want to use this and build a system and it'll probably make us more successful in the long run but it's hard to think about that in the short run and so that's like a huge

[00:27:34] thing facing a lot of us you bring up a great point because I think one of the issues that we see that we're facing is like people are scared of job elimination right because of AI but we we also know that every tech revolution we have more jobs created because of the technology and like what you said is like okay so now we have IT and like learning development like struggling like okay so who should go out and do this and IT is like well we're not trainers and we don't know you know and then

[00:27:59] learning development is like well we don't know technology and so so now you have this creative kind of position that creates this saying like well really IT needs trainers in workforce productivity management tools blah blah blah it's kind of like this weird conglomeration between you know technology and learning and development and like again very few companies are at that level of even talking about that saying hey if we want to be if we want to get to this 10x then we have to create

[00:28:28] these resources to help our people get there you're going to have some early adopters that get there fast but if you're just waiting for the early adopters to teach everybody else there's no way you're going to move fast enough you know do you know who that generation of people is going to be it's going to be the people that either work for or have worked for the apple store like that's going to be who is doing this all the genius bar employees yeah right those are great employees for that like now so yeah

[00:28:52] so like those companies that are like i don't know how to launch you know ai go hire a genius person at the apple bar seriously they have to explain tech to like the dumbest people in the world the amount of times i've seen an apple store employee have to struggle through explaining to like a 78 year old couple how to use an iphone like they're they have to be the most patient people in the world and they probably would be great at implementing these new technologies as well cam i think you just

[00:29:22] launched a hack like you're gonna see all these big companies now like just like stealing all the talent from apple store no i'm literally gonna start like a new hru and ai and ai consulting practice we'll send our people in it's just gonna be a bunch of like you can you can just like you know change the name tag and they'll still have the red like are they red shirts still on the apple in the apple store i don't know yeah okay great i have my billion dollar idea there you go you better get it

[00:29:49] now anything else no just living the dream living the dream what's the new product for a way that everybody can buy well we'll have hopefully still our translucent collection which is like pink and green and really fun spring break colors i saw that tiktok it was a little bit of uh what's the wicked it kind of themed to it right with the green and the pink yeah it very it much is giving that we do not have an official partnership so we're not claiming a wicked partnership but i wish we did um and so that's

[00:30:18] new we also will have like it's called a stadium bag it's like a clear little bag that you can bring to sports games concerts so go check that out away travel.com and follow away on instagram and tiktok awesome where can they find you on the linkedin they can find me cameron sack at linkedin instagram i'm posting on tiktok a lot these days you can find me there i'm basically everywhere all right everybody that's hr famous another episode in the books i'll try better next time we'll see you then bye