Episode #31: Finding Alignment: Workplace Ideals and the Freedom Economy - with Andrew Crapuchettes of RedBalloon
In this episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today, host Matt Horine sits down with Andrew Crapuchettes, Founder and CEO of RedBalloon, to discuss the important role of values in the hiring process and the challenges facing the current labor market. Andrew shares his journey from leading a labor market analytics firm to founding RedBalloon, a platform designed to connect employers with job seekers who prioritize freedom, merit, and work ethic. The conversation delves into the impact of AI on hiring practices, the implications of the H1-B visa debate, and the broader cultural shifts around labor and employment. Andrew also offers insights into the 'Freedom Economy' and how RedBalloon is helping to transform the world of HR tech by focusing on human judgment over automation. The episode concludes with a look at RedBalloon's future plans and the importance of maintaining an employment brand that values individuals.
Links
- Andrew Crapuchettes on LinkedIn
- RedBalloon Website
- Navigating Trump 2.0
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
- Veryable Shop
Timestamps
- 00:00 Introduction to US Manufacturing Today
- 00:30 Meet Andrew Crapuchettes: Founder of RedBalloon
- 01:45 The Birth of RedBalloon
- 07:53 The Impact of AI on Hiring
- 13:19 Challenges in the Labor Market
- 16:35 The H-1B Visa Debate
- 20:39 Historical Context and Economic Impact
- 21:39 RedBalloon's Focus on Merit-Based Hiring
- 23:15 Challenges in the Current Labor Market
- 24:28 The Pendulum Swing in Workplace Ideologies
- 26:33 Impact of DEI and Woke Culture
- 33:54 The Freedom Economy and Its Evolution
- 38:44 RedBalloon's Future and Growth Strategy
- 41:17 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: Welcome back to U.S. Manufacturing today, the podcast powered by Veryable, where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers, shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of the industry, the changing landscape policies and more.
Today we're stepping a little bit beyond factories and supply chains to one of the most critical battlegrounds in our country's future. The labor market itself. Who we hire, how we vet them, and the values we demand in the workplace. Our guest is a bold voice in that space and the Freedom economy. Andrew Crapuchettes, Founder and CEO of RedBalloon.
Andrew is a veteran of the labor market analytics world. Having previously co-founded mz, which is now white cast, building it from a handful of people into a global data firm, he started RedBalloon in 2021 with a mission to reconnect employers and employees who believe in freedom, merit, and dignity at work, not ideology.
At RedBalloon, job seekers are screened for values and work ethic first, not just on credentials. The platform's promise work for an employer who respects your [00:01:00] beliefs, doesn't force you to comply with ideological mandates and rewards, merit and competence. If you follow them on LinkedIn, they have some great advertisements that are a little bit real to life as well.
Andrew, thanks for joining us today.
Andrew Crapuchettes: Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, just the elephant in the room. Yes. The last name is Crappy Shez. It's not a stage name. I actually grew up with that. It's French, and you can imagine every variation of this possible has been brought forward to me. The other thing that's funny is Reddit doesn't like me at all because when you stand for freedom, they know that you're the antichrist or whatever, and there are literally thousands of people on Reddit who believe that they're the first one ever to realize that there are swear words in my last name.
Matt Horine: Leave it to the Redditors. We, we could have a whole nother episode on thoughts on Reddit, but that's, that's a great jumping off point. So. I would love to tell our audience about the background of RedBalloon and what convinced you there was this need for the values aligned job process and how you came to found it.
Andrew Crapuchettes: I was leading a company called mz. It was a labor market data company, and I know that sounds [00:02:00] super boring. I think was it economics is the dismal science, and so we were squarely in the dismal science with labor market data, but the reality is that most people. Have great decision ready information on their phone about where they're gonna go to dinner tonight or vacations, whether they can get a loan for their house, right?
Massive decisions, but what skill should I add to my personal skill portfolio that will make me a more valuable person to employers in the labor market? There is not good decision ready information around that, and particularly for people in community colleges or universities or people early in their career, like if you've just gotten your computer science degree.
You're having trouble getting a job. Should you take a class and Hadoop or sequel? Well, there's not actually information on what you should do. What's gonna give you the best outcome? What's in the most demand? If you actually believe in the laws of supply and demand, and the Democrats try and legislate everything out of existence, but they can't legislate supply and demand out of existence.
That is a. Infallible law, you have to, you have to [00:03:00] understand that. And so we built a labor market data because I cared a great deal about prosperity for individuals. And we firmly believe that a job is more than just a nine to five hobby. It's a vocation. It's an opportunity to use your skills, knowledge, and ability to bless other people.
And if that's true, then we should give people the best decisions so that they can get the best data so they can make great decisions about their career. Yes. Built that data. That company sold data around the world to all kinds of organizations. Unfortunately, 2020 came around. As we remember, 2020 was the year the world lost their mind, and unfortunately, my board was in that category.
They basically came to me and said, look, you're a conservative Christian, and that's just not something that we are comfortable with as a CEO, even though I was not vocal about this outside of the way I ran my business, but they wanted me to start making statements about George Floyd and COVID. BLM and I'm like, what?
Why would I a) ostracize half my customers and B), I'm not going to 'cause I don't believe it. No matter what [00:04:00] you tell me I have to do. They said, we're gonna go a different direction for CEO. CEOs don't get fired, they just go a different direction. I found myself delightfully unemployed and about mid 2021, um, I think they fired me on my birthday, which is just rude.
And I thought, I'm gonna take a year off. I'm gonna hang out with, I've got five kids. I like to play a little golf. I'm doing a housing development. I've got a bunch of real estate. I'm on the boards of a variety of businesses. I don't need to start another business or take another job. I'm gonna take a deep breath.
But God had other plans for me and two months in, I'm like, I just had to make a decision between my job and my values, and I bet a lot of other Americans are gonna be faced with that same choice. I should make a spot where they can find a new job where they won't have to make that choice, where they can live their values out loud and be hired based on the hard work they're doing.
Because DEI was just in full swing at that point. We might get into that topic a little bit later on, but it was in full swing at that point. I'm like, I wanna have the backs of other people. So literally knocked out a job board in my basement with [00:05:00] my brother over a weekend and we called it RedBalloon because if you have ever been on a hot air balloon, it is really quiet up there.
It is. You're going somewhere. You have very little control and it feels a lot like the job search process and job seekers. Were moving to red businesses, red regions of blue states, red states. There's this great migration going on based on ideology and so I just wanted to help on the job side. So. I, I knock out this job board J.
Redballoon.work. I thought it was cool. Then I'm like, okay, I've done my job. Now I'm not starting another business. I've done a job board piece of cake. Hopefully people are going to use it and find it, and people Did. I put some videos on LinkedIn. I was getting some reasonable traffic. We had 20 some odd employers, maybe a thousand job seekers, no big deal.
But I wasn't even paying attention to it. And I get this call from Fox and Friends, Fox News, Fox and Friends, and they're like, Hey, would you come on and talk about the nation's leading job board for businesses that don't have a vaccine mandate? I'm like, what in the, are you talking about? I [00:06:00] have, I just created this thing in my basement two months ago.
They're like, no, literally no one else is willing to say this stuff out loud because my stance was, look, if you wanna get a vaccine, you're an adult. Knock yourself out. I like, it's a free country, but you should have that conversation with your doctor, not your HR department, about what you put in your body.
That seemed really like common sense to me, but nobody else was willing to say that in late 2021. When those vaccine mandates came out. And so I'm like, oh, Cheryl, I'll come And Fox and Friends. And as a side note, Matt, I am not a news junkie. I did, I didn't even know what Fox and Friends was. I thought it was a kid show.
Hey, Mr. Weasel, what are we gonna do? I don't know. Fox and Friends. Sounds like a kid Show. Anyway, so go on Fox and Friends. And lo and behold, a lot of people watch Fox and Friends and I had a thousand businesses sign up that day because there are a lot of people using a hot button issue, right? People were like, no, I wanna hire people based on merit, not based on their vaccination status.
All of a sudden it's, shoot, I now have a business 'cause my phone's blowing up and people are like, Hey, [00:07:00] where's your customer service line? I'm like, I don't have a customer service line. Thank you very much. So anyway, that's how we started RedBalloon. It was a big accident, but here we are.
Matt Horine: That is an incredible story.
I think back to, I don't know why it seems so long ago, but it seems like we've been a perpetual 2020 for five years now in some way, shape or form. How much was going on back then and how things were so different. I was fortunate to be at a company at the time that did not enforce those types of vaccine mandates that it was, we're back to work.
If you remember all the, the stuff on LinkedIn, all the experts were talking about the future of work and. Nobody knows the future. And so it's just the kind of this brutal PTSD that we all have about it because to your point, a lot of people were sitting there and they didn't think that there were other like-minded people out there.
It was just get on the bandwagon. This is prescribed, think this is how you have to think, this is how you have to do it and how you have to say it. So I can't wait to get into that a little bit more in the show. But I think one of the big things, jumping straight into it and Red Balloon and some of the AI stuff that's going on out there right now, and we'll come [00:08:00] back to.
Some of these other hot topics, but the automation of hiring and the death of human judgment is how, I think you framed it on LinkedIn. There was a great quote that you had. You're reviewing a great candidate phrase them highly. This is what happens when you build a system that values efficiency over discernment.
When employers automate humanity out of the process, people start gaming the machine instead of earning the opportunity and how can you blame 'em? So I thought that was a really. Huge thing. It's cutting through a lot of the noise on AI right now, but would love to hear your take on that. I think it is funny because I think
Andrew Crapuchettes: the COVID stuff, the work from home, the Zoom culture that we were all living in, what was that?
As a dehumanization, it was saying people don't need other people. People don't need to interact with other people. People can be treated as cogs in the machine, and I think big corporations have been doing that for a long time. There's this phrase that's being used where you're a scalable organization.
What does that actually mean? It means none of the people actually matter. You can slot anybody into any slot and it's gonna be fine. And that's not actually how God [00:09:00] built the world. People have different skills, knowledge, ability, desires, drive. Courage. All of those things are gonna be unique for individuals and when you try and cookie cutter people, it doesn't usually go very well.
So as we started to look at the labor market in RedBalloon and we're helping place people, we did see this kind of growth of ai and what was AI doing to the labor market? You need to understand some of the background. People are rational actors, right? If you look at economics, it's always, people are rational actors.
Rarely are people, nefarious actors where they're trying to do a bad thing to other people on purpose. Often they're just trying to do what's the logical thing based on the information that they have. And so what happened? Do you have these businesses that are all of a sudden drowning in job applicants?
And you have this growth of what we call the ATSs applicant tracking systems. These are systems designed to help you filter through candidates, and give you an example of this. There's a company I was just talking to down in Los Angeles, they don't believe in ai, but they had 1300 applicants [00:10:00] for an inside sales manager.
1300 applicants. They're like, we're not gonna use AI 'cause we don't believe in that. Okay, so what are you gonna do? So they paid someone a full week of full-time labor to read through 1300 resumes. Do you think you've introduced a significant amount of human error? Yes. Do you think there's a chance that a resume doesn't actually capture who that person is and you're missing the best person?
A hundred percent. Absolutely. And you basically are in this spot where there's so much noise in the labor market, so job seekers are now using. AI apply and they're using Robo Apply, and they're basically saying, what if I could apply for $10 a month? I'll apply to a hundred jobs a day while I sit on my couch and watch Netflix, and my resume will be perfectly tailored to every single job that I apply to.
If you're an employer and you've actually hired people before you do know that you don't want a perfect resume, you want a perfect employee. So you've got this now, this vomit of resumes coming onto the labor market. You have [00:11:00] ATSs that are filtering it, and actually the Atlantic just recently did an article saying a HR is using AI very effectively.
Job seekers are using AI very effectively and nobody's getting hired because. That perfect resume is not actually a perfect employee. And in fact, if you are using an a TS as a company to basically algorithmically decide who gets seen by a human being, what resumes do you think actually make it through that AI algorithm?
The best AI generated resumes, right? Because they speak the same language. It's a perfect resume. That's a perfect match. And there was one study that showed that only 7% of resumes. Are perfectly. Basically, if you look at all the skills, all the requirements for a job, and then all of the skills, knowledge, and ability that a person has, only 7% of resumes are a hundred percent match.
That means that most resumes miss, therefore the machines are gonna downgrade it. And so unless you wanna rewrite your resume for every job. You should just have AI do it and then you have these perfect resumes. But [00:12:00] again, that's not a perfect person. This is what's happening in the labor market today.
And it's actually fascinating because I was talking to a veteran, and we'll get into this a little bit. We acquired military hire.com talking new a veteran. He applied to a job at a big corporation at 6:00 PM and by 2:00 AM he got his rejection letter. Turns out probably wasn't the HR department pulling an all-nighter rejecting people.
Chances are, so he was never seen by a human being. So if you're that person, what do you do? So he's now applied. He has manually applied to over a hundred jobs as a veteran, after serving our country. He gets automatic rejections in every single one. Like you don't have a chance to actually pitch yourself to actually, like, how do I outhustle those algorithms?
How do I have better character? How do I have a better work ethic? There's not really an answer to that, right? And we know that AI is really good at boring things, but it is very bad at judgment calls and, and most of HR tech today is racing towards AI for everything. I saw an advertisement today. [00:13:00] That basically said, do all your hiring through ai.
Just tell us what you want and we'll bring you seven perfect resumes. But again, that's not perfect people. And so a lot of people are just getting caught in the crossfire on this situation. So we have this AI war going over here and then nobody's getting hired. So that's kinda the moment we're in the labor market.
Matt Horine: It's really a huge disconnect because I have talked to so many, I, we call them cohorts or people. Peers, you know, friends who are in the job market right now, and there's such discouragement. About, I think one stat that I've seen, we will get into this on H-1B here in just a minute, but kids coming outta college and on the other side of that Gen X, gen X that I saw a stat, and I'll have to get the exact number on it, but essentially one in four workers over 50 or 55 may not work again because of the fast paced.
Environment around this kind of hyperloop we're in with AI talking to each other, and so that's, I think that the talent shortage, it's an interesting phrasing [00:14:00] because I think, yes, there's probably a disconnect, but there are millions of capable Americans on the sidelines getting these rejection emails.
Have we lost the courage to do things the old fashioned way or the hard way in HR departments is, I guess the question.
Andrew Crapuchettes: Absolutely, because if you're h the AI system, the very complicated system we just spent a bunch of money for is not finding us people. So it must be impossible and, and we unfortunately, I would say courage is, if you look at all the character qualities in an HR department, I would not say courage is near the top or maybe even on the list there, there are, I'm sure some very nice people in hr and I've even worked with some, but yeah, you're absolutely right.
Where. They aren't willing to put in the work and do that, or they are willing to put in the work. 'cause they're saying, okay, AI is not the answer to this. I'm gonna go through those 1300 resumes on my own. And then they're just not being smart, right? They're not using some of the tools that are there. If we think about where does AI belong in the hiring process, we believe that hiring is a distinctly human activity.
Okay. Then where does AI belong? [00:15:00] AI should bring the humans closer together. AI should make humans effective and efficient. Not be given any decision making responsibility and, and so summarizing resumes or, and I can go into some of the tech that we've designed here at Red Balloon and we're now implementing it at military hire to solve for this problem because there are ways to get around this, but the whole point of AI and algorithms, you don't want to just completely go full Luddite.
We're never gonna touch ai. You also don't want to be, I'm going to let the machines make all the decisions and I'm gonna watch Netflix. There has to be a middle ground, and that is harder generally to figure out, but it is always the most effective and is always the most efficient if you use AI to bring the humans closer together.
Rather than having AI make the decisions. Does that make sense?
Matt Horine: Absolutely. I think it's that discernment can't be outsourced mentality, right? Correct. Yeah. I think that's one of the biggest things, and I think of things back. You always go to yourself first. In my own career, the best connections I made were point to point because I introduced myself.
I didn't. Go through [00:16:00] an application process. I think the only time I've ever went through an application process was maybe going into the military and it was like a number, right? It was like a, yep, you're good. You check you, you hit these boxes. But then there was a board, but there was somebody there making a decision and saying, Hey, let me look this guy in the eye and see if it's somebody we want to have.
And so that's, I think we can't underline that enough because we talk about digital transformation all the time, but it's, we have to avoid this kind of digital surrender. Where we give it over to the big machine. And I think those were some of your words and some of your sentiment in that LinkedIn post, but it's a huge implication and hopefully some of the other macro trends that are coming around this.
I'd love to get your thoughts on the H-1B debate and what we're currently seeing. Right now, pivoting a little bit here, but it looms large in tech, in the professional sectors. From your perspective, what's the real impact on American workers? And these are very relatable to manufacturing 'cause it's adjacent to manufacturing.
It's everybody that's in the supply chain. It's people that are doing any kind of tech. With manufacturing, it impacts manufacturing heavily.
Andrew Crapuchettes: The H-1B issue, and I [00:17:00] need to take a step back. I'm a free market economist. I'm a fan of free trade generally, if it's actually free. Right? And people, a lot of my free market economists, friends have been beating up tariffs and those things, and I'm like, yeah, but the issue is they've been taring us to death.
And so it hasn't been free trade. So don't let the illusion of using the correct words actually define what's happening today. And if we were in an actual free trade environment where governments were being free on both sides, then yes, I'm all for comparative advantage, free trade generally. I'm okay with that.
If it's actually free, but it hasn't been free for many years, and so I'm actually very grateful. Even though there's gonna be some short term pain for some of the tariffs, it is, I think, the right way forward to fix the US economy. And I think the H-1B issue is that as well, when the H-1B issue started, when it used to be that you could bring in these high-end scientists or engineers.
People who had a unique skillset [00:18:00] that they could not find in the US and we made a mechanism to be able to fast track them into our labor market. Those people actually generated an enormous amount of. Economic activity in the us So it was not necessarily a bad thing. And I'll give you an example of this.
I was talking to the head of HR for Samsung, Samsung us, so all of their US operations, this was their head of HR for that. And he said, look, an A level engineer, if we don't hire an A level engineer, we believe we're losing a million dollars a year. That person is gonna be generating intellectual property, designing the next product, and that's a big problem if we don't hire a B level engineer.
And this is pretty shocking. He said, we think we lose about $300,000 a year. So the difference between an A and a B level engineer is pretty significant, and it's hard to define those, right? They're human beings, they're not. It's not a math problem, but it someone who is outstanding. So if you bring in that a level engineer from [00:19:00] India or wherever, and they're able to produce that just wild innovation and ideas, that's fantastic and it creates a bunch of jobs underneath them.
But what's happened with the H-1B system over the last couple years is people just started bringing in people as an opportunity to get cheap labor from other countries for. Tech support or IT support jobs that could with a small amount of training been hired by a US worker. Right. And if you can't find the person right away, it is not that hard to train someone to be a technical support desk Right.
In the us. That's actually, and I think that's where the employers. Went too far. And they said, look, the whole vision behind H-1B is how do you bring in that complete 10x rockstar engineer or innovator that can produce thousands of jobs with their innovation, thousands of US jobs for US workers with their innovation?
And I was totally okay with that. Yes, that made [00:20:00] sense. But then we went way, way too far. And I even look at some of the unions that we have in the US today. I think there was a place and a time when there were some unions were. Could be productive. They could be valuable. They're helping children not working coal mines in the middle of the night or whatever it was.
But the problem is it can go too far. And so the legislation around making it really expensive to bring in an H-1B, everyone's, ah, this is terrible. But what's that doing? What's actually forcing you to get back to is this person actually a rockstar engineer? That is going to have a 10 x impact on your organization, and in which case it might be worth it to pay the money to do that.
H-1B. Again, I'm a free market guy generally. I don't love government getting involved in these kind of things, but I totally understand where that's coming from, and you have to understand the history and if you understand the history. It's not actually that bad.
Matt Horine: No, it's spot on. I think one of the best comparisons you made, and I hadn't heard this before, was to the previous dominance of unions.
That's right. Way back a hundred years ago. Yes. The time and place for everything, but when you cut start to take [00:21:00] advantage of the system or you can short path the advantage taking of the system, that's where it gets a little bit detrimental, not just to the overall economy, but to the American worker, which is foundational.
To everything that's adjacent to manufacturing. We've talked to folks that with manufacturing's decline, the towns around them decline too. All of a sudden there's no need for services. There's not a need for diners, restaurants, whatever you wanna call it. And so the implications of the domino effector are staggering, but something that's certainly taken off of the past few weeks.
Can platforms like RedBalloon help catalyze that demand for American talent, you think? Is that something that you see? It's juxtaposed to like the software outreach and how they do this.
Andrew Crapuchettes: Yeah, absolutely. That's really where we're focused is redballoons focused on how do we focus more on merit than on the latest political fascinations of the woke ideology.
That's the heart of what we're trying to do. Now we are in a weird spot, right, and I think we've talked about this a little bit, but there's a lot of people who they say they'll never work again. Sometimes that's 'cause they don't want to ever work again. They it, they, we've [00:22:00] made it. We had, and you have to understand the economics around this, the baby boomer.
Demographic was the wealthiest swath of people in the entire history of the world because we had the automation and we washing machines and dishwashers and all the things that allowed for two income earners. So we have a doctor and a lawyer, and they have one kid, right? They're a dink, dual income, no kids or dual income, one kid.
And so they have all this wealth that was generated and then they have this one child. Who doesn't have to work for the rest of their life because of the hard work that their parents did. And that's this moment we're in where it's either government welfare, which is really bad or it's I don't have to work because I'm a trust fund kid and my parents generated all this capital.
I believe that work is good for your soul, right? We were put on this world to work. I always hate it when economists talk about the US Consumer Index or the US consumer sentiment. We're not just consumers, we're producers. We have two hands in one mouth, and we should be [00:23:00] generating twice as much as we are consuming.
And so I don't want to think of people as consumers. I wanna think of 'em as producers. We're put in this world to work, to do things, to be able to use our hands, our labor, to bless other people. And we are in a very weird world. Right now, because we have a lot of people who don't want to work, and red balloon's been on the job board side, we're successful.
A lot of people are doing that, but we're finding that the people who are having the most success are using something like our recruiting service because you have to go grab someone and say, Hey, this is an opportunity that's the right opportunity for you. Job seekers are fatigued from applying to jobs.
That's why they're using ai. Apply. Indeed, in fact has robo apply built into their system so you can just be like, Hey, apply to all these jobs for me 'cause I don't want to go through the fatigue anymore. And so the labor market's definitely broken and we're trying to help fix it and yeah, it's a funny world we live in right now.
Matt Horine: Yeah, it's definitely a funny world. I think you highlighted the boomers generation and we've seen that kind of playing out in the current. [00:24:00] Economic cycle where there's this kind of inflation of assets where they're also now heading towards social. They're on social security where the backfill is not there.
And we could do another show on social security at some point, but, and thoughts on that, especially tying in to free market economics, but I think you summarized that really nicely. We're all free market economists at the end of the day, but sometimes when you see. Playing field, not level, and other people who are geo geopolitical rivals taking advantage of you.
That's not a level playing field. They're out there to play to win. So I think that's a really good point. I want to come back to something we talked at the top of the show and where RedBalloon came from because it's worth doubling down on this. The censorship and COVID mandates. They were the chance to really see this out in the open, in the workplace.
You've seen it, it happened a lot of other ways prior to that. I think back 10 years ago, maybe, like extreme, ESG was the, the buzzword at the time, and there was like white DEI that was more just considerate. That wasn't, it wasn't mandated. One motivation. I think the big [00:25:00] motivations many users cite and they've had this experience over the past couple years, that requirement for some type of ideological compliance, the vaccine mandates, speech limits, mandatory trainings.
You've seen that demand surge from their first appearance on Fox and Friends. Is that a sustained thing if people, have you seen people step back and say, oh no, it's good. It's back to normal now. Or they've recognized that at the Catalyst moment where people truly showed their hand and showed their cards.
Now people think about this at the top of their considerations as job seekers.
Andrew Crapuchettes: So the pendulum's definitely swung back significantly since the COVID crazies of 2020 & 2021. In fact, I will leave the name of the company Anonymous 'cause it's a very large Fortune 500 business. We're working with them because we just acquired military hire and I was talking to their head of HR and I said, I'm the CEO of redballoon.
We've acquired this and this is most nervous moment for me. Don't care. Are we about to lose this massive customer? Because RedBalloon is a scary center right organization. And her comment was really funny to me. She says. I still believe in [00:26:00] DEI, but evidently that's illegal now. So everyone's talking about merit-based hiring and that kind of feels like what Redballoon's been doing the whole time.
So we're excited to work with you. I'm like, huh? It also means that if there's somebody else in the White House, the pendulum could swing right back in a minute, so I'm not gonna plan on that sticking around. These are not ideologically driven changes. This is, the wind is blowing a different direction.
Therefore, I'm gonna be happy with that. So I think the pendulum is definitely swinging back. The wokeness in the workplace really has left a mark, though there's gonna be scars from this for a very long time. We talk about DEI, I'll just pick on that for a little bit. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, those are fine words, and in fact, you think about like pronouns.
Like pronouns have been weaponized. We all learned about pronouns in kindergarten. They're not evil in and of themself. Diversity is great equity, great inclusion, great. But these words have been used, they've been weaponized, they've been turned into a bludgeoning device. And I would actually go so far, and if you haven't picked this up, I'm a Christian.
If I [00:27:00] would go so far as to argue that DEI is a liturgy designed to make you think a certain way about yourself, about your coworkers, and about the world around you. It says you are bad because you are in this category. It's Marxism all the way down, right? It's class warfare. It's bourgeoisie and the proletariat fighting against each other.
It's the haves and the haves nots, and everybody has to be put into a category. And so that, that's what it is, but it really is a liturgy to make you think a certain way about the world. And I know this. We have at RedBalloon been able to help thousands and thousands of people find jobs. And I've also gotten hundreds of thank you notes from Perfect strangers saying things like, Hey, I just wanted you to know you saved my marriage because of the job that I found through Red Balloon.
And they're like, what do you mean I saved your marriage? They're like, if you swim. Woke waters for eight to 10 hours a day with a liturgy with a DEI liturgy designed to make you cer think a certain way about yourself, your coworkers in the world around you. Is it going to have an impact on all any of [00:28:00] your re relationships?
And the answer is 100%. I had a single mom write me and say, Hey, I found a job through RedBalloon Dream Job love. It's amazing. Three weeks into the new job, one of my two boys says to me, mommy, you're not angry anymore. She's, her first reaction was like, oh my word. I was angry. Mommy, you never had such a bad experience for my boys.
But then she's, I had no idea because when you are, if that's just the air you breathe, the way you think about the world. Is this liturgy that's being jammed down your throat. Liturgy is very potent. That's why the movie industry is completely captured by the left, because it's a way to make people think about the world.
So anyway, my point is those that, that, that swath of time, which I think the pendulum has swung back in the same way that people, you know, all the kids that didn't go to school for a year like that demographic is never going to be able to recover from that in the same way unless we hold them back a full year because math builds on itself.
If you really didn't learn math that year, you're gonna be behind forever. I was talking to people in the military. All the people who got kicked outta the [00:29:00] military were the last four years where we didn't have recruitment like we should have. That demographic bubble is gonna have to work its way through the snake because you don't just become a lieutenant commander or a a captain until you've actually put in your time, and we miss the beginning of the pipeline.
I'd say the workplace is the same way. There's a lot of people who, they're lost years because they were living in this woke workplace, and that's what Red Balloon obviously was pushing for. It was not just a side show, it was the show to try and affect the mindset of the American worker.
Matt Horine: No, it summarizes the experience that a lot of people have had over the last half decade at this point, which is a crazy thing to say.
Your point about liturgy and it's designed for demoralization, I think at the end of, at the end of the day, it forces compliance. It's a form of soft censorship in a way that you don't speak out. Versus you can I, one of my favorite phrases is like bringing your whole self to work, right? Some people have taken that and weaponized it.
Of course, I bring [00:30:00] my whole self to work. I bring my whole self everywhere because I don't compartmentalize or do those types of things. I try to be a, an authentic person, but I think it's one of those things that so many people have felt discouraged and the ramifications of it have caused all kinds of problems in society because people are splitting this down the line.
When I've had teams, I've been told that I unsolicited. Had hired one of the most diverse teams that somebody had ever seen. I was like, I hired the person. I didn't go. Imagine that. Imagine that. I didn't, it was not like a a case of I have to hit this many check boxes, or I need to consider this person's experience and say maybe he's had too many opportunities and this person has it.
They presented themselves in a way that I looked at him in the eye and I said, I wanna hire you. It was an unsolicited comment. I was like, I had no aim to do this. It just worked out that way, and we grew a big team. It was way understaffed and it's get out of the framework. If you want to grow, hire the right people and take the investment risk of hiring and bringing somebody on and build your business.
I think the, the big thing on soft censorship at work and people think of that now [00:31:00] as surveillance. Can you speak your mind outside of work? That's a big outcome of all of this is do you think that there's this big force to conform or are people generally growing out of it? And I think you really said it well on this, gotta work its way through the snake now there's this bubble.
The connection between the COVID era mandates were really the trigger for that. Do you see broader pushback on that kind of still fomenting somewhere, or are we just resetting
Andrew Crapuchettes: and back to normal? We're not resetting it back to normal.
This is what always happens:The liberals turn the volume up to 11. The conservatives finally wake up and go, oh, this is bad, and they'll turn it back to eight. Then that eight is their new five, and then they wait a minute until the conservatives go back to sleep and then they're gonna turn it up to something else.
No, we're not back to normal. Pendulum has swung back a bit, but I think like the problem is we like to raise our families, build our businesses, have a beer, and watch football, and not get involved in all these political things.
We're a live and let live people. We're not trying to push our worldview down anybody else's throat, but it's happening to us as conservatives constantly. [00:32:00] And so I would say we are not back to where we were before. COVID, we are better than we were at the height of the COVID craziness, but we're definitely not back to that.
And people just need to learn to be courageous. Live your values out loud. It's interesting, we did this, this, maybe it'll make somebody mad. We thought that the month of June should be coming out conservative month, where people like, live your values out loud. This is the thing we're doing in June. And so we encourage people like, Hey, come out conservative.
Here's some simple things like when people ask you how your weekend was, if you went to church, say, I went to church and it was awesome. I asked for an exception. I'm not gonna do the DEI training. And just don't be afraid of say those things because what you'll find, and we started to hear from hundreds of thousands of people who were doing this, they're like, turns out like 85% of the people at my office agree with me.
We were all self-censoring and just hiding our light under a bushel. And so that's the big message is just continue to be courageous. Don't go back to sleep, and then the pendulum will continue to go back and we'll [00:33:00] actually get to a better world, not just a not as bad world, if that makes sense in the workplace, but we're not back to where we were.
We're better, and it really is still affecting peoples and we're not called to be careful. We're called to be courageous. I
Matt Horine: think that's the line of the show here because the Overton window shifted very hard. We're in more like violent Overton window shifts, is what I would call it. It's like a bad, bad pendulum where it's extremes on both ends, where just back to normal, take care of my family, take care of my business, and enjoy my life.
That's a lot of this. I think that. Leading into the framing around where RedBalloon stands and the brand is part of it. When we mentioned it, the Freedom Economy, you consider yourself part of the freedom economy from your data. Have you seen an increased demand for that type of thing? And I know there's a lot of cohorts and people who are adjacent to RedBalloon and things like Public Square and there are others out there.
That make a lot of sense, but that is the natural process of where this is going. I think.
Andrew Crapuchettes: Yeah. So the freedom economy, I would say was an absolute necessary step back in [00:34:00] 20 21, 20 22, the Biden administration's in full swing taking freedom, curb stomping freedoms, wherever they find 'em. And we needed an alternative economy because if you were on.
Social media, there's a good chance that you were gonna get kicked off if you actually, you know, had a belief that didn't align with their leftist views. If you went to Target or if you went to Amazon, your kids were gonna be indoctrinated and having an LGBQ or whatever agenda was jammed down their throat.
That was just, we needed to have an alternative, and for a lot of PE of us, we saw it as a safety mechanism. Amazon Web Services did not want to host RedBalloon. So if we didn't have companies like patmos or Liberation Technology or other Freedom Economy, IT Server Farms available, we might not have even been able to get on the internet.
And so it really was a safety mechanism for a lot of conservatives to support and work with the Freedom Economy. I will say that as people like Target have down downgraded their leftist [00:35:00] ideology to, um, adopt the changing winds of our culture right now, that there is less demand for that freedom economy kind of thing.
I know my friends at Public Square, they're still crushing it. They're doing a good job, but they're finding that their payment systems for their Second Amendment business that they hired or that they acquired. Is driving more and more of their revenue, their every life brand with their diapers. They've got a good subscription system.
Like it's good, but there's not that dramatic. I have to go to a freedom economy business, or I'm gonna be canceled or censored or whatever. Right? And, but I, I think all of us, I know as I talk to people at Old Glory Bank or Revere Pay. Public square. All of us knew that this moment was an opportunity to bless people at scale, but this moment was also gonna change.
Conservatives aren't gonna go through the time and effort necessary to go out and try and find a conservative deodorant anymore. They'll just get whatever's at the store. That's just, that's okay. That's gonna happen. RedBalloon has actually exploded our growth [00:36:00] because using a liberal deodorant is not going to hurt you.
Getting a liberal employee who is going to sue you for your business will hurt you. And so not getting a woke employee is still a top priority, even as the culture has shifted back and the, the. The number of businesses who are willing to work with a conservative brand like RedBalloon has grown significantly since the election.
So our business has exploded. Not all the businesses in the freedom economy have exploded, but I think everybody who knew that this was coming. But I think I talked to Michael over at Public Square quite a bit about this. This is a moment we need to capture this moment, but we can't long term just say, I'm a conservative.
You're a conservative, so use my crappy product. But, and unfortunately there's a lot of people that like, yeah, that's the way it is. I know that's not gonna work long term. It might work in a moment where everyone's terrified of the woke mob coming after 'em, but I always knew that, man, we need to have the best products.
We need to be absolutely obsessed with excellence so that when this moment passes, we have companies that totally disagree with [00:37:00] us. They're like, yeah, but RedBalloon has the best tech. RedBalloon has the best employees RedBalloon knows how to take care of, they have operational excellence that nobody else can keep up with.
So I think the pendulum swung back and the businesses in that freedom economy that were grown out of that moment who focused on excellence are gonna continue to take off.
Matt Horine: No, that's really straight to the point because I think it drives the overall message that competency. People want that extreme competency and their products in their daily life and everything.
And, funny you mentioned, every life, we have a 3-year-old that we've used every life for a couple years, so it's actually, it's a great diaper brand if anybody's curious about it. But I think that decoupling from old institutions of control, we look at that consolidation over the past half decade. Where because my bank disagrees with me, I can be turned off at de banked.
That is levels of social credit system that are not only just bizarre but very life-threatening in a lot of ways because it's our American way of life is is different. Like you don't, you get the same opportunities just as, [00:38:00] as much as I believe something somebody else may believe something else. And that's great 'cause there's space for both of us.
But the second that somebody says, you can't do that, or you can't think that. I think that's where people have found this to be just such a compelling moment and such a change from things in the past where I'll tolerate the ESG talk, I'll tolerate talking about this, okay? We can have a debate and nobody's at each other over if you're going to wipe the world out of existence because you don't believe in this type of climate change.
Whatever. Sure. carry on, let's go execute on our jobs. But I think that's probably been the go along to get along where it's like, Hey, there's a line here. There's a, we think that there's something where there's room for everybody at the table, but there's also, you cannot cross that line and tell me what to think.
What's, I think the, the big thing, and congratulations on all the success at RedBalloon, what's the, what's next? You just acquired military hire, that's an exciting prospect and new products, expanded services. How do you see growth over the next couple years?
Andrew Crapuchettes: If you're an employer today and you're using a left-leaning HR tech platform that's using AI to decide what, who you're gonna [00:39:00] actually see in the job application process, or even on an onboarding and offer letters and all those things, you are hurting your employment brand more than what's kinda this invisible thing that is happening to you right now because.
Job seekers are getting a horrible experience from your ATS because they're simply not being treated as human beings. They're being treated as AI cogs, and so you're hurting your employment brand and you're gonna increasingly struggle to get good people. And we know that while there are a lot of people unemployed right now, the number of good people who are looking for a job is very limited.
And so as an employer. You need to be obsessed about your employment brand, not just your brand, to get new customers, your brand, to get great employees. So your employment brand is one of the most critical things you're you need to do. And most employers don't focus on it. And when you use AI tools, you are kicking your employment brand in the shins every time someone applies.
And so my obsession is I want to dominate the HR tech world. And that's where red [00:40:00] balloon's going. By the grace of God, we're gonna build a billion dollar business that redeems a world of work today. When you use a redballoon, a TS, rather than a left-leaning HR tech a TS. Your job seekers are gonna get a totally different experience.
They're gonna be treated as human beings, even if there's thousands of them applying. We're gonna bring efficiency and effectiveness through AI as an algorithm, but at the end of the day, we're gonna bring humans closer together, and we hear that from all of our customers that are using this, that it just, it has revolutionized their employment brand just by giving a good experience to the job seeker.
Because when you do that, even if you're not gonna hire that person, you don't know who they know or if you're gonna need to hire them at some point in the future. And so when you ghost them, when you auto dq them, when, and you're not doing that, when your software does those things, you are hurting your employment brand to pretty significantly.
So that's really what RedBalloon's focused on today. How do we build great teams for companies around the country? We have, call it 5,000 businesses we're working with around the country. I want that to be 500,000 [00:41:00] businesses around the country. So we're just getting going. But the ones we're working with today, they're seeing their employment brand stronger.
They're seeing the employees that they're bringing in as people who are gonna build their culture, not tear it down. And that just makes a huge difference. So we're just excited to be part of that story for more and more employers every single day.
Matt Horine: It's a compelling one, and I wish you all the best. And success and glad you could join us today.
Where if our listeners want to go find out more about it, the website again, or what socials can they find you on?
Andrew Crapuchettes: Yeah, so redballoon.work, it's not.com because comm sounded too much like communism and we want hard work. So redballoon.work. And then I'd encourage you go follow me on LinkedIn. I try and put meaningful and sometimes entertaining content on there.
Every single day. So those are probably the two. I'm on all the other social media platforms, although I ignore them. Sorry, everybody. LinkedIn's really where I put my time and effort.
Matt Horine: That makes sense. Andrew, thank you very much again for joining us today and we wish you all the success and it's an exciting platform and something to be really looking forward to seeing it out there in the marketplace.
Andrew Crapuchettes: Thanks so much for having [00:42:00] me, Matt.
Matt Horine: To stay ahead of the curve and to help plan your strategy, please check out our [00:26:00] website at www.veryableops.com and under the resources section titled Trump 2.0, where you can see the framework around upcoming policies and how it will impact you and your business. If you're on socials, give us a follow on LinkedIn, X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please feel free to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and leave us a rating and don't forget to subscribe. Thank you again for joining us and learning more about how you can make your way.