Work Like a Mother: Jess Von Bank on AI and the Human Contract

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_02] Greetings, everyone, and welcome to Drive Thru HR, where discussions about HR, talent, technology, and workplace trends are always on the menu. I'm Robin Schooling, along with my co-host today, Michael Vandervoort. Michael, how are you?

[00:00:17] [SPEAKER_00] Hello, Robin. I am doing pretty well after marching through a gauntlet of death over the end of the third quarter. I had a ton of stuff, trips and travel and conferences, back to back to back to back. So glad that that's done. And now all I have to do is survive the holidays, which are coming up fast. There we go. How are you?

[00:00:37] [SPEAKER_02] You were busy. I was watching you from far zipping all over the place. As I was watching our guest zipping all over the place, I stayed home. I did nothing. I went nowhere. It was really weird. But that's okay. And we've got a lot to talk about today. So I do want to dive right in because I'm really excited for this conversation we're going to have today.

[00:01:03] [SPEAKER_02] A, because this is just one of my favorite people and one of the coolest people in our industry. Because think about it this way. Anyone who runs Spartan courses and these long distance races and stuff for fun that go on for days, that's a whole different, you know, relationship with discomfort than I have for sure.

[00:01:28] [SPEAKER_02] But I think that that's part of why she always heads straight into, you know, talking about the things that make for hard conversations, right? About AI and work and ultimately who pays for things when they don't go as planned. And so she's a global speaker. She's a thought leader. And we don't pass that one around, you know, lightly at all.

[00:01:53] [SPEAKER_02] She's an advisor. She has worked across our industry in strategy and engagement roles. She's a founder of Now to Next. She founded and leads Diverse Daisies, which I love. And I have to put that out there. A nonprofit for girls. And she's a super role model for many of us in our industry and for her own three daughters as well.

[00:02:17] [SPEAKER_02] And she's here today to talk about her new book, Mother of Disruption, Reshaping the Human Contract in the Age of AI. That's why she's here. So welcome, Jess Von Bank.

[00:02:30] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, my goodness. Thank you. Thank you. I had to write a book to get this conversation. I really just wanted to hang out with the two of you. Right? If a book does the trick, here we are.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_02] That's right. We make people work for this privilege.

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Plus, Robin just gave you like the world's longest intro. It was a long intro. Which had stuff in it I didn't know. So that's amazing. I know. It's great to have you, though.

[00:02:53] [SPEAKER_01] Thank you. Thank you. I love that intro. Any excuse to talk about Spartan racing?

[00:02:58] [SPEAKER_02] Oh, my girls. It was painful.

[00:03:00] [SPEAKER_01] Well, I'm glad Michael survived the gauntlet. I did not. My body knows when it's allowed to get sick. I got home from Paris and immediately got sick because my body, you know, like, was sort of like, oh, here's your adrenaline crash and your little fall cold and all the things. So maybe, Robin, you're the smart one. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I bet you didn't have, did you really have that much FOMO? When I stay back from something, I'm like, oh, I'm so happy.

[00:03:26] [SPEAKER_02] I really, I really didn't in that, you know, really the two that I usually go to that I didn't were Wreckfest and HR Tech. And I was able to watch them from Nashville exhausts me. So I didn't really mind not going to that. I missed the event, but I didn't miss the let's run up and down Broadway.

[00:03:48] [SPEAKER_02] And HR Tech, I thought that people, people did a really good job of capturing the stuff that I would have wanted to see or ask about anyway. So I kind of didn't. I always miss the people. Yeah. But I also slept well and so rested and not dried out.

[00:04:08] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Yeah. I've never been to HR Tech and I used to feel like, oh, I should go. I should go, but it always clashes with events that I attend professionally. And so there's never, never been a good opportunity. And now it's always in Vegas, which I know everybody loves, but I don't. I don't either. You know, it's, I don't, I didn't have any FOMO either. And I was otherwise occupied, but I don't usually, I think about Wreckfest because that's a cool event. But anyway, but that's not what we're here to talk about.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_00] So let's get to the conversation.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_02] Let's dive into learning about this book. And I really want to start with the title because the title, Mother of Disruption, is, is it, is it a description? Is it a brand? Is it a warning? Where'd the title come from?

[00:04:58] [SPEAKER_01] That's actually a good story. I think, well, and to answer your question first, I think it depends on your state of mind and your viewpoint. If you think that, if you think that this opportunity, if you are attached to the way things have been going all this time, then it probably feels like a little bit of a warning. And I know we're tired of all the doomsday warning. And I'm not about that, by the way.

[00:05:24] [SPEAKER_01] But I think if you're super attached and think things have been going just fine, the way work has always been designed, the way we've created systems for people to thrive. Like if you think that everything is good, let's just leave it alone, then it probably feels like a little bit of a warning.

[00:05:41] [SPEAKER_01] I think that if you're opportunistic and positive-minded and hopeful about the opportunity to create something better and different than the systems of work we've been living within, if there's one stat that drives me crazy and it never moves, it might inch forward or backward here and there, it's the burnout stat. People do not feel like they're thriving. If anything, they're surviving systems of work.

[00:06:11] [SPEAKER_01] And it's cultural. I mean, Americans are worse at this than anybody else. But most people work because they have to. They hope to do work they love and feel passionate and purpose-driven around. And if they feel fuller at the end of the day for doing it, that's a lucky, lucky thing. And so I don't think it has to be that way. I am a huge advocate for system design. Literally everything.

[00:06:38] [SPEAKER_01] Everything in our culture, in our society, our systems of work, politics. Like everything is by design. And so if you want to change something at scale, I could try to Joan of Arc this and punch kick my way through it and make incremental. Like I could try to go about this with individual heroics. I would rather go about this by redesigning the systems that actually scale.

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_01] And I think that this is, I have a ton of side eye for AI, for example. I have hard questions about what it is and what we can do with it, what we should never do with it. But I think it's a tremendous opportunity to design something better and different at scale. And it requires a ton of vigilance, which makes me want to be in that conversation to make sure that we are asking hard questions. But to me, this is hugely opportunistic.

[00:07:38] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. We use it a lot in the consulting practice that I work at. We use it not to build final product, but to speed up and gather information. And it's really been transformative. And we have a small shop, so it's 13 people. But everybody uses it at some level. We're not all on the same systems. And it's been really intriguing to watch how people have kind of flipped it in. And we're not trained, right? I mean, we're not given special training. And it's not, you know.

[00:08:04] [SPEAKER_00] Anyway, so I totally agree with you on the system side as well as the, it's such a great opportunity, but it needs to have guardrails.

[00:08:14] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, for sure. And in terms of how the, I actually think it's a great band name. I think we need a rock band, a punk rock, mother of disruption. My working title when I started drafting this was Work Like a Mother. And so the fact that mother survived is a little bit intentional. I really did, you know, for those of you who have found your way through the book already,

[00:08:41] [SPEAKER_01] you know what I write from the language of a mother and from the language of a woman. And that is very intentional. That is something that I would have arm wrestled for if I needed to in the editing process. But I didn't need to arm wrestle for it. It's a lens. And for me, it's a very helpful lens. There's no other lens I look through or that most people can relate to when it comes to protecting people, when it comes to nurturing human development, for creating safe systems of care.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_01] When you're, like, there's no more sort of, like, unforgiving, no questions asked. Like a mother protecting her young. A mother designing systems of care, nurturing, development, upbringing, belonging, safety, fairness. Who needs to win if it's my child versus, you know, fear, danger, evil. Like, there's no questions.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_01] And that's the kind of lens I think we need to adopt when it comes to, like, if you're battling in your organizations around who wins and who loses, and it's for the sake of progress, for the sake of technology, for the sake of innovation, but people have to lose. I think that conversation is wrong. There needs to be one clear winner in this conversation or fold. You're playing the wrong game or you're playing it wrong.

[00:10:00] [SPEAKER_01] That needs to be such a clear, guiding North Star. And so I used that sort of maternal systems thinking when I wrote this to say, guys, we need to be super clear here. People win or we don't play this game. And we can still do a lot of good with technology. We can still pursue progress, but it can't be at the sake of people. We're the ones creating the future we have to live in and we're handing to the next generation.

[00:10:28] [SPEAKER_01] I wanted to be unapologetically punk about that North Star.

[00:10:34] [SPEAKER_02] Yep. Well, and it and, you know, but this is this is your writing and your. Again, this is why I always love your writing, because you you are just you are you. You know, I read something. I know it's you and just woven throughout the book, which was right up my alley, of course. You know, you even have a chapter specifically titled about the cost of being female.

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_02] At work. Right. And so and woven throughout the book, that whole the whole maternal intelligence piece. Absolutely. Yeah. We just talked about. But just I love the lens that that you looked at it through because you talked about, you know, the design bias that can come in and the critique around designing. If it's not, you know, inclusive or looking through. Through all the lenses, if you will. Yeah.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_01] I think people don't think about it enough. You're right. Everything is by design. So if something exists, it's by design and you need to design it out. If you don't want it to be. Just like I say, work is not a moral contract. You have to design morality into it. You have to design ethics into into into technology systems. They're not designed inherently to be ethical. You have to design it in. So when I point things out like the pay gap, that's by design.

[00:11:56] [SPEAKER_01] And the only way to get rid of it is by design. And you have to look at how it got in there and what conditions we keep inheriting and carrying forward. We're just waving through a bunch of stuff that's always existed. If you want to design something out of a system, you have to use sort of ruthless interrogation of what you're waving through, what you're allowing to continue to exist in the system you're designing. Or it will continue to be there.

[00:12:23] [SPEAKER_01] And systems are tilted by design. They were designed by and for some people, not all people. And so if you're looking at designing better systems for all people, you have to look at where those tilts are. And again, design them out. Yeah. And unfortunately.

[00:12:40] [SPEAKER_02] All right. We're going to I'm going to go off. Yeah.

[00:12:42] [SPEAKER_00] We don't really do that.

[00:12:45] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. In the world, we certainly don't do that. But in U.S. politics, as an example, that's right. Certainly don't do that.

[00:12:52] [SPEAKER_00] So, Jess, you and I don't move in the same crowds in the big HR world that often. I don't see you in person much. But when I think of motherhood, that's how I think of you. You were always fiercely posting about your daughters and the things that were going on and how you were trying to raise them. And that's what I think of as well. But I also learned that you had some fairly strong parental role models. Your father farmed wheat and your mother was a nurse for almost 35 years.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_00] And you dedicate the book to your dad as one of the greatest feminists you ever knew. How did a farmer and a nurse become the frame for a book about AI?

[00:13:28] [SPEAKER_01] That's my favorite question. When I saw your prepped questions, oh, my gosh. Number one, I love to talk about my parents. Incredible role models. I couldn't have asked for better people, better humans to raise me up. And I do think it's ironic. And I love, I like literally love the irony and the duality of a feminist farmer. My dad was so old school. He was such a simple, genuine, generous person. His upbringing was simple.

[00:13:57] [SPEAKER_01] He never traveled far. He didn't see the world like I'm seeing the world. And so how can such a simple man and a man, no less, and a farmer, no less, be one of the greatest feminists I ever knew? He saw everybody for who they were and what they could become. And there were no rules to that, including gender rules.

[00:14:22] [SPEAKER_01] He raised me to know how to change a tire, just like he raised my brothers to sew their own buttons on. Like everybody had equal. And we were farm kids where literally like hands were labor. Everybody did everything. So there were no rules. Girls did everything. Boys did. You could drive a tractor. You could drive a tractor. If lunch needed to be made, it needed to be made. It didn't matter who you were. Hands were hands. Everybody helped.

[00:14:48] [SPEAKER_01] And so sort of that sort of like communal, everybody does everything upbringing. I also had some of the best arguments I've ever had with my dad. We used to argue about whether the best female runner could beat the best male runner in a foot race in the Olympics. And he would say, no, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. And imagine young feminist punk teenage me like arguing. Why? How could that not be true?

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_01] And he explained it's the conditions of your gender. You were not raised with the same hamstrings, with the same like it's the conditions of how your gender evolved, how the species evolved. If you were born the same, conditioned the same, trained the same, had the access to the same resources. If a track coach invited you to saw something like girls just don't have the same conditions.

[00:15:43] [SPEAKER_01] And so and he actually made some of like I learned a lot from just arguing with my dad. He didn't have any he didn't go to college for women's studies like I did as a minor. He was just arguing from what he knew to be true and testing my thinking. I like I wish he actually I don't know if I wish he were alive today to see the way politics and like I wish we could have healthy intellectual debate like that.

[00:16:11] [SPEAKER_01] I think we would be so much better served. But that's why he was just an incredible teacher and man to raise a girl like me.

[00:16:20] [SPEAKER_00] Jess, are you are you Minnesota native or is the farm somewhere else?

[00:16:24] [SPEAKER_01] No, I grew up in North Dakota, small town North Dakota, and I came to college in Minnesota. Minneapolis was the closest big city. Yeah, of course, that's where I ended up.

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. So North North Dakota is very similar, though. The winter's very strong forestry, all that stuff, right?

[00:16:42] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, for sure. Yeah, you were just raised to be hardy and hardworking and everybody worked and you didn't brag about it. You didn't complain about it either. That was my upbringing.

[00:16:52] [SPEAKER_02] Awesome. I miss my I miss my Midwestern upbringing when I talk to a Midwestern.

[00:16:58] [SPEAKER_01] I'm getting over. And he would have loved the Brewers. I have to say, I watched every second.

[00:17:05] [SPEAKER_00] Oh, yeah. Congratulations, Robin, for beating my raise. I forgot about that. My own team from back in the day. Yeah, I know.

[00:17:11] [SPEAKER_01] And I just like the nature of the Brewers, the fact that they didn't have a title, that they were so hardworking. So defensive. So that was a scrappy team. Yeah. Just raw talent making it happen. He would have loved the team. It's certainly a case where the team fits the environment.

[00:17:28] [SPEAKER_02] Yes. Yes, for sure. Couldn't say that anymore. So, yes. Yay. Yay, Brewers. So back to, let's get back to work. Work, work. Talking about work, work, right?

[00:17:42] [SPEAKER_02] Because one of the things that, you know, the big part, obviously, within the book is examining how through this, the years, the decades, the centuries of work, companies, here's another thing, by design or became by design initially, right? Companies have spent years squeezing these human parts out of work, expecting employees, expecting people to pick up the slack.

[00:18:10] [SPEAKER_02] And now AI, of course, is in here. The same thing is happening. It's faster. And it's high. It's across the org chart, right? We see that squeezing of the human elements out of work. And, you know, go to an event, hop on a webinar. We hear about, you know, folks and their adoption of AI, right?

[00:18:36] [SPEAKER_02] But you define what people are feeling, what employees are feeling, not as resistance, but you call it injury. Yeah. And then you name five of them, five injuries. Yeah. This always gets a reaction. Take us through those. What are those five? And what are companies getting wrong?

[00:18:56] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. So when I started, I actually added a section to the book in the prologue. I felt the need to zoom out a little bit and explain, like kind of go back to the beginning. So if we're living in sort of systems of design and like this current contract, our current understanding of work is not that old. It's maybe a hundred years old. Yeah.

[00:19:24] [SPEAKER_01] The concept of Monday to Friday, nine to five availability, even showing your light, your slack light shows that you're available, means you're available. Like all of these sort of modern understandings and rules of work are not that that old. But if you go back and sort of understand how people got compensated for value and where they saw protection and how even like modern economy was created.

[00:19:49] [SPEAKER_01] I didn't want to be like super geeky and nerdy about this, but I did want to make the point at the beginning of the book that we have understandings of how value is exchanged. And those understandings have evolved over time. So we inherit them or we disinherit them or they evolve for a reason. There are there are conditions at play that make this the case.

[00:20:13] [SPEAKER_01] So the current understanding of work is still this kind of commercial capitalist construct of you rent my time and talent and and that's what I give you. And now we started started this like bring your whole self to work like our work family is our family. And like that's weird. Like how are we evolving into this?

[00:20:34] [SPEAKER_01] But we keep sort of pressing the edges of what work is and what it isn't and how we show up and contribute and get rewarded for our value and what protections that gives us. I like to say we have almost we're family until we're not until until the riff announcement. What happened to family? You just laid off your daughter.

[00:20:56] [SPEAKER_01] It's just a weird sort of conversation we stumble around when it comes to our relationship with work. And I do think that and it's especially exposed now with AI. I think the the idea that time is money and the time that we spent and how hard we work and how much for ourselves into work that equates to our value and our contribution.

[00:21:22] [SPEAKER_01] That's going to be a trickier conversation as we move forward, because if everybody is supposedly going to become this super worker and have all of these superpowers and AI is going to do most of the work for us and we're going to recapture all of this capacity. So do I become worth less or do I become worth more because I actually know how to create that and to use more tokens than anybody else?

[00:21:47] [SPEAKER_01] So, yeah, so it's just becoming and so and I and I honestly think what you're referring to these injuries. There are what I call five wounds of change when we're working in systems that aren't all that well designed and the weight falls unevenly. There are there's friction that we feel. We often end up compensating and overcompensating for for things that aren't working well inside of work. And then we call that resilience.

[00:22:16] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, it's so the five wounds of change or trust erosion. Number one, when you say we're doing one thing or something is going to happen or we're moving in one direction or we're doing this because whatever the leadership messaging or the employee value proposition or whatever the cultural promises. When I don't experience that, when I don't actually see that happen, when change doesn't produce something different or better, that is an erosion of trust.

[00:22:44] [SPEAKER_01] And it's usually something not happening the way you said it was going to happen. Yeah. And people, people in the workforce absorb this. That becomes trust erosion. This is happening a lot with AI because we're making all of these lofty AI strategy statements and promises. That reads to the workforce like potential substitution. I don't see my employer protecting me.

[00:23:09] [SPEAKER_01] I don't see AI augmenting and accelerating me in the ways my employer might have promised. If I'm seeing productivity, it's probably my own individual use that's making me feel efficient and productive. It's not necessarily my employer unlocking a bunch of career development and a bunch of career pathing and a bunch of opportunities for me because of this holy grail of AI. And so the promises aren't quite ringing true. When I hear change fatigue, people don't have change fatigue. They have failure fatigue.

[00:23:38] [SPEAKER_01] They're tired of trying and trying and trying to do something different and new on behalf of their employer. And then things don't really change. Where's all of this beloved transformation that was promised? Where's all this time back that I'm being promised? And so these five wounds of change happen. Like loss of mastery, for example. We're wondering what to do with all of our expertise, all of the wisdom and lived experience we've gained. It's all being handed over to a machine, which is being clumsy with it so far.

[00:24:07] [SPEAKER_01] So there's all of these things happening with the workforce. And if you're not identifying them and properly remedying them, you're not going to get to the transformation gains you're hoping for. What you read as adoption resistance or lagging use or whatever, it's really just people not being properly brought along on a journey they understand and know how to participate in.

[00:24:34] [SPEAKER_02] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:24:36] [SPEAKER_00] We are coming up on like five minutes left. So we're going to head towards a wrap-up, Jess. Yeah. With a title like Mother of Disruption, that almost sounds like setting up people to expect a takedown. But in the book, you write, thank God for AI, honestly. So why are you hopeful when there's problems?

[00:25:01] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. We keep talking about this. We've been in this industry long enough. We keep talking about broken candidate experience. And, you know, it's 2026 outside of work. What year does it feel like inside of work? That's system design. That's old technology, not modernizing fast enough. That's transformation we keep trying to do in our organizations. But we have the same old excuses. This is how it happens here. Or the organization doesn't move that fast.

[00:25:31] [SPEAKER_01] People don't just change that fast. So we have the same old excuses we've always had when we know we can do better. We know tech can be designed better. We know experiences can be delivered better. We know people could be thriving and happier and healthier, even in their workplaces. So what are all of our excuses? Why haven't we done this yet if we know better? So, yeah, it's not a... I'm not... I'm pro-AI. I'm pro-people. I'm literally pro-people.

[00:25:59] [SPEAKER_01] So if we needed something to finally... If we needed a straw to finally break the camel's back on this, like, this is it. AI will change the way your business operates. And it will either be good for you or bad for you, depending on your approach, how opportunistic you are about this moment, how much you understand the advantage that you could create with this. And the advantage, by the way, isn't the tech. Tech is a commodity. Always has been. Always will be.

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_01] Everybody's going to have access to the same tech. They're going to bring the same tech into their business, and they're going to do all the process redesign, workflow redesign. Like, that's the commodity. Your people will always be your competitive advantage. So if you don't understand how to empower and better enable people in AI-native workforce systems that you design for them, you're going to miss out on a massive window of opportunity

[00:26:54] [SPEAKER_01] to move your business, to grow and innovate your business, to capture new customers, create new product. I do think this is a hugely advantageous moment, but it won't be if you rush to the tech and forget people. If you bulldoze people on your rush to progress, you'll get it completely wrong. But if you flip, if you reframe this opportunity, how can I better create systems where people can deliver value

[00:27:23] [SPEAKER_01] and where they win to, that's the moment that we can capture in my mind.

[00:27:29] [SPEAKER_02] And it's so—I don't want me to make it sound like this book is the last thing you're ever going to do because, of course, it's not. But this is a really sort of—I see this book, and you get putting this all down in this format, in your voice, in this writing, as hitting this point on this journey of your career thus far. Because what you just talked about is always what has struck me as the work

[00:27:58] [SPEAKER_02] that you've been doing within the Now to Next framework as well. You know? And so you're kind of like, okay, here's all these things that we've learned doing these exact things.

[00:28:12] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Keeping the people there. A few years ago, when AI was like all— what are we coming up on? The four-year anniversary of everybody seeing chat GPT the first time. Yep. Remember, it was only four years ago. We were like, what is this? It blew me away.

[00:28:29] [SPEAKER_00] I was like, oh my God. Yes, exactly.

[00:28:31] [SPEAKER_01] It felt like sorcery and magic. And wow, it was like the shock and awe of it all. And now here we are four years later, like, wow, this can do everything. We can have a billion-dollar company with 100 people. Yeah. Maybe. That sounds risky, but maybe. So how far we've come so fast. But I remember early, early, early on, I said, I feel like human— like the quality of a person's work life and human protection, human capability, human development,

[00:29:00] [SPEAKER_01] I felt like we needed an ESG metric for this. I literally—it was so early on to say something like this. I feel like we're going to need our human—are we advancing humanity? Yeah. Or are we only advancing technology? Yeah. Because I could feel—I felt, like, weirdly protective from the very beginning. And I still believe—I think this moment is about—we need to be as ambitious, hopeful, and ambitious about the quality of people's working lives

[00:29:28] [SPEAKER_01] as we are about the capabilities of the tech itself. If those aren't parallel, married, like yoked metrics that you are tracking side by side, I think you're doing a disservice to people. And a disservice—we can pursue profit and progress and productivity, but still protect people. I believe that.

[00:29:47] [SPEAKER_02] What a way to wrap it up. Love that as a summary thought. So as we get ready to close things out, thank you very much, Jess Von Bank, for being our guest today. We, of course, have the book linked on the show page and all those sorts of things. But tell our listeners where they can find you, find the book, reach out to you, etc.

[00:30:09] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, absolutely. So motherofdisruption.ai, I can't believe—I feel—if I had, like, a claim to fame, the fact that this is my domain— That's right. Like, I might swap it out with the actual rock band one, you know, in 12 months or something. But that's a great place to find the book. It's up on Amazon. There's also some—if you're anti-Amazon or whatever, there's independent booksellers where you can find this as well. I'm recording the audiobook next week.

[00:30:39] [SPEAKER_01] So that'll be out in, like, early December, I think. So I'm very excited. Perfect for Christmas. Perfect. And your other holidays. Yes, exactly. But other than that, LinkedIn and Substack are where I do most of my pontificating. I do try to share—and number one, I love writing. I love writing and storytelling. And I think authentic human stories are the best way we can all change together. And do this together.

[00:31:07] [SPEAKER_01] And so I talk a lot on those two platforms. I encourage everybody to find me there. And send me notes. I love, like, personal messages from people. I had a college student reach out this morning saying, how do I position myself best to a recruiter should I get to one? Like, a real person. Wow. And I literally cannot wait to talk to him.

[00:31:28] [SPEAKER_00] That's a nuanced question, right?

[00:31:32] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. When somebody is brave enough to reach out and ask for help and be specific and ask for your time, you have it all day long. I think that's the best we can do for each other.

[00:31:44] [SPEAKER_00] Well, thanks so much for doing this, Jess. It was great to catch up with you. Thank you. I was thinking here while we were sitting here that you and I first met in person at Dwayne and Crystal's wedding, I think. Oh, my.

[00:31:53] [SPEAKER_01] And that was. It was.

[00:31:54] [SPEAKER_00] I think you rode down with Josh Rock. I did. Or something like that.

[00:31:58] [SPEAKER_01] We did car karaoke all the way down.

[00:32:00] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I remember. And I had not met you in person before. But, of course, they used to be our co-hosts on the show once upon a time.

[00:32:07] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, my gosh. Still one of my favorite. What a fun wedding weekend. Of course, who gets married on New Year's Eve? They do.

[00:32:15] [SPEAKER_02] I had to miss that wedding because that was my working at the casino days. And New Year's Eve was all hands on deck. So I couldn't have. I couldn't have. It didn't matter. I ran the HR department. I had to go. I kind of missed your HR at the casino stories. Fun. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. And talk to you on the next Drive Through the Drive Thru. Bye.

[00:32:44] [SPEAKER_01] Thank you.