When Your Mom Comes to the Interview

Alicia and George are back with a mix of tech, family, and finance talk that somehow leads to a debate about eye contact and manners.

What They Talk About:
• The recent AWS outage that broke half the internet — Starbucks, United, and even Reddit went dark.
• How a handful of tech giants control most of the world’s data and what that means for all of us.
• Whether AI is becoming a crutch for small talk and connection. Alicia’s advice: get a dog instead.
• The McKenzie kids’ investment portfolio update — 35% up since the start. A reminder that financial literacy starts early.
• Modern money habits worth trying, from daily savings to paying your credit card the moment you swipe.
• The wildest job interview stats from new grads: bad eye contact, casual dress, and yes, some even bring their parents.

Takeaways:
Teach your kids how to make eye contact, manage their money, and show up for their own interviews.
And maybe, just maybe, think twice before letting AI pick your conversation starters.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Married to the Startup
00:55 AWS Outage and Its Implications
09:44 The Rise of Data Centers and AI
14:10 Teaching Kids About Investing
23:37 Job Interview Etiquette for the New Generation

Transcript

Alicia McKenzie (00:00.15)

And 19%, get this, brought a parent with them to their interview.

Like phone a friend? Or for emotional support? Like I don't know that question. Hang on, dad? What's the answer?

Can you imagine having an interview in person and your mom is with you? Bring my mom to my interview. What in the actual f-

your parents to your job? Can I bring my mom to my job?

George McKenzie(00:25.382)

Good boy. You should hire him.

going on in the world. Welcome to Married to the Startup. I'm Alicia McKenzie, a wellness entrepreneur and digital creator. Alongside me is my amazing husband, George, the CEO who's always ready for a new challenge. We've been navigating marriage and running startups for over a decade, and we're here to share the real unfiltered journey with you. Join us for insights and candid conversations about integrating love, family, and entrepreneurship.

This is Married to the Startup, where every day is a new adventure.

Alicia McKenzie (01:04.494)

All right, and we are back for episode 49 of Married to the Startup. I am your host, Alicia McKenzie.

I am the co-host, George McKenzie. Yes. I am. I feel like we hit or miss on this opening. Yeah? Yeah, do we do it every time? I don't think so.

Very formal. are.

Alicia McKenzie (01:21.622)

Maybe. Anyways, let's jump right in here. AWS.

of that DNS outage.

All right, AWS had a huge outage yesterday. Yesterday was Monday, correct? Correct. And it took down United. It took down the Starbucks mobile app. It took down...

and lots of high end, I'm sure, I mean, those are the big names that you heard about. There's tons of others that use AWS. Of course. And apparently all because of some DNS issues in the Virginia data center of all.

But what happened? All right, explain to me what happened. what I think was really strange is that I didn't realize anything was down yesterday. Maybe I was just in my little oblivious tennis world all day, but I had no clue anything happened. So explain it to me, Mr. McKenzie.

George McKenzie(02:12.846)

haven't researched this, so I'm not super open. No, I just, I read an article, but it didn't give me a lot of the technical details, just that it was a DNS issue, but it's not very informative. Yeah, I don't know if there's a ton of technical data out on exactly what happened. Because why would they? But I can only imagine, mean, AWS has tons and tons of contracts that are guaranteeing five nines and having...

No? Really?

Alicia McKenzie (02:25.238)

Huh.

Alicia McKenzie (02:29.858)

Why?

George McKenzie(02:40.116)

outages is not in their business interest and it also raises a lot of questions around should I have diversity not just in geo but in provider?

And I think that's a lot of the conversation that I'm seeing is that there's only two or three different companies that make up most of the world's computing infrastructure.

A cloud infrastructure for sure. That's why I guess maybe because I'm in the world or I work in it all the time that, you know, it's not something I question or even think about. mean, the predominance of all SaaS companies or internet hosted anything exists either in AWS or GCP or Azure. Then I guess you can go down the list. There's some tertiary and forth like Oracle Cloud, and then you have Alibaba and some others. And there's other ones, but...

The predominance are those three. So if you were to think about every major company that uses SaaS-based applications, or even hosts their data, everybody moved from data center to cloud, all of their infrastructure is in one of those three.

Of course. this is so just like a handful of the companies, you've got Amazon, Amazon Alexa, DoorDash, Fortnite, FanDuel.

George McKenzie(03:55.224)

Roblox, McDonald's, Venmo, everybody.

Yeah, are all of the companies that were affected yesterday.

Okay, I was pretty much on it. AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba is fourth, Oracle is five. The biggest cloud providers. The question is, is that a problem or is the problem if you have the entirety of your infrastructure in AWS? say all of my, you know, United, the whole application runs in AWS. Do I have a backup copy that I can hydrate into GCP if it was an issue?

Yeah. No problem,

George McKenzie(04:28.27)

my single thread it and I rely on Amazon for my redundancy and disaster recovery and I'm just multi geode in AWS, but I'm AWS everywhere. Yeah. And if I'm sharing DNS services, know, and AWS owns all of that and there's a DNS issue, then yeah, it impacts my global footprint. Yeah. It's interesting. And I mean, it's similar to the CrowdStrike. I yeah, not in what happened. Yeah. Like, because CrowdStrike was a completely different issue. That's what I think because

I haven't gotten a full read on it. It's, you know, the CrowdStrike one was pushing an over-the-air update, you know, and it was a QA issue. And this seems to be, I don't know if it's a QA issue, but it was, all I'm seeing is a DNS issue. it may, it could be, could have pushed out something, a DNS entry that corrupted the DNS servers.

me thinks it was a QA issue.

Alicia McKenzie (05:16.91)

Yeah. It just doesn't stop working.

Yeah. But yeah, so the CrowdStrike one brought up a lot of people were saying, Hey, is it wise to have the same EDR agent on all of my infrastructure? all of my laptops, all of my servers are all running the CrowdStrike EDR agents. So when there's an issue with CrowdStrike, it impacts me in my totality. Or should I start to, as part of my coop or disaster recovery plan, do I use two? Do I have Microsoft EDR on a subset?

And I have CrowdStrike on the predominance or however you want to run it. Yeah. Such that I'm not, my entire infrastructure is not taken out by one, know, poorly coded up.

Yeah. So this is saying that the issue stemmed from a subsystem that monitors load in the EC2 network and a DNS malfunction in one of its key data regions.

Here, U.S. Virginia. The DNSA issue was here in Virginia. That's sort of the problem.

Alicia McKenzie (06:15.736)

from DC. Yeah, so apparently everything went down and I had no clue.

Well, I read about it, but it didn't impact me.

It impact me. Maybe I was just so like non-productive yesterday.

I mean, it depends on what system you're using, Yeah, I mean, if you're using something that used Google and their infrastructure was in GCP, you wouldn't have been impacted.

None of them appear.

Alicia McKenzie (06:42.222)

But like Zoom was impacted. So guess I didn't do a single Zoom call yesterday.

Alicia McKenzie (06:50.583)

Of course, but then some functions in Reddit weren't working, which I'm surprised that I didn't realize that then.

It's interesting, I it just points to how much of our day-to-day life, our day-to-day life is dependent on these cloud providers because all the services that we use to enhance our lives are all hosted in these. And these data, you know, and there was another, I read an article that, you know, these data centers are popping up everywhere, especially if you live in the Northern Virginia area. It's a grower kind of a...

Name five.

Alicia McKenzie (07:22.894)

There's a garden center in the Loudoun County area. It was huge and it was like one of our favorite garden centers to go to and find flowers and all this other stuff, but they just sold.

mean 160 million reasons to sell. And now they're going to convert that into a data center.

is really sad. loved that spot. It was beautiful.

Like outside of Virginia, I was reading some articles that there's been several other municipalities that Amazon or Google were investing in and going to be building data centers there. And they had to go to a vote in the council around, are we going to rezone this land to be what used to be agricultural or residential and make it industrial so they can put these warehouses or these data centers in? And for a lot of us, the data center, you know...

the more data centers you have, the bigger the proliferation of AWS and GCP, but also with rise of AI, you need more compute, you need more data centers, right? So they're building them and then you could see the economic impact in that rural area that, there's going to be tech jobs here, there's going to be construction jobs here, there's going to be plumbing jobs, electrical, like all these things that are required to build and maintain, they're all going to come in, but they're voting them down. And I think Amazon...

George McKenzie(08:40.792)

think the article was reading, was Google, they decided to pull out before it went to vote because they knew they weren't going to get the votes and they didn't want the black eye. And these towns are saying, hey, we don't want this because one, it's a pollution impact, but two, it's you raise the cost of power, right? So now power becomes scarce in these smaller regions. And then now all of us have to pay more for our power, which translates to more for groceries, which, and they're just saying they don't want it. So it's got to be, you we're so dependent on

the data centers to give us all the things that we want to enhance our lives and yet it comes at a cost. I think that was one of the articles I reading was pushing it back to these big companies and maybe they should be spending some of the profits to subsidize electricity for these towns or have some way to offset potential price increases.

Yeah, does this not make you think that we're like leaning towards... Have you seen the movie Elysium? I don't think so. It is a movie and I want to say Matt Damon was the star. He was the lead character, but Elysium is a city that was built in outer space after the world was destroyed by humans. And the people that were left on Earth...

are there to work and run in the nuclear plants and make sure that I guess, yeah, no, I think you've seen it. not. But it's an older movie, but like the earth was just destroyed with data centers and now like you're there to just live in squalor while everybody else lives in this beautiful out of this world city that is.

This sounds familiar.

George McKenzie(10:21.336)

powered by the engine of the earth with these data centers. It's wild. It is interesting.

I feel like that's the direction we're heading. mean, we're killing garden centers for more data centers and like it's...

The data center proliferation here is crazy.

It's either Elysium or Wally. Those are the two that we're heading towards. I don't know. Okay. I don't want to talk about AI anymore. All we do is talk about AI.

Wally.

George McKenzie(10:42.594)

Are you prophetic? We talked about AI since we're already here.

George McKenzie(10:52.236)

I thought the article I had sent you was interesting. How to make small talk more impactful and meaningful. And I read it because I was like, this could give me some tips. Because I hate small talk and yeah, I hate networking. So all those things I'm like, yeah, maybe it'll give me some tips on things that could be like conversation starters, yada, yada, yada. And all it was is really, it's just this person was, you know,

I didn't even look at it yet. I've been a little bit.

Alicia McKenzie (11:00.15)

Okay.

George McKenzie(11:21.066)

writing about how she leverages OpenAI to help her. So what she was saying that, when you go into the networking event, type in what networking event you're going to, what's the commonality of the people that have patrons that are going there, and ask OpenAI to give you conversation starters, give me follow-ups, give me, and then if you're selling your product, hey, here's what I do, give me three...

anecdotes or stories or taglines that could be used as catchy takeaways. And then it was great. Yeah. then it went even further where the third thing she suggested, she suggested was that if you know who's attending like the event, even if it's like friends of yours, feed all their LinkedIn profiles into OpenAI and say, give me specific conversation starters for this person based on their LinkedIn profile.

subscribe.

George McKenzie(12:18.207)

and their online presence.

If I could bash my head into a wall right now, would do it.

Just think about it like, hey, do a person search and tell me something I can talk to about this person.

Was there a disclaimer at the bottom of this article that said written by AI?

It was AI trying to propagate AI. Hey, talk to me more, more tokens, more money. But I just, I mean, I had this and I'm not going to name names, but this got me to thinking too, because I was talking to somebody at one of our kids events. No, talking to someone at one of our kids events. And I have yet to, I didn't know, I guess I knew, but I haven't used it.

Alicia McKenzie (12:37.622)

my god.

Alicia McKenzie (12:47.894)

You had an AI interaction.

George McKenzie(12:56.174)

You can have like the voice assistant in your Tesla now is Grok and you can talk to Grok and it will make reservations. It'll do everything for you. this person was telling me how, yeah, they, they, they talk to Grok on their drives all the time. And he goes in the beginning, it was, I was talking like it was kind of a, you know, asking it to do something for me. And eventually now I just have conversations in the car. It's like, I have another passenger in the car and really well informed.

So we talk about current events. It's like, you know, meaningful conversations. And I'm like, wow, that's interesting. I've never done that before. I've never used the voice chat feature of any AI.

Do not subscribe. Don't do it.

I don't know. Do you think, mean, if you, outside of listening to talk radio or podcast, if you were in there and you were like, Hey, you know, fill me up on today's headlines and then, no, talks about this Israel peace treaty or whatever. you're like, well, give me more information. What is it really about? And then, you you're able to have this conversation. Well, you think that's good and get data and be relevant. Like probably a more in informed conversation than you'd have with a regular person.

why? That's what I'm getting at. Listen to a book. It's the constant need for productivity that drives me crazy.

George McKenzie(14:08.354)

I don't know.

George McKenzie(14:15.008)

Is it productivity or is it companionship?

I don't know, buy a dog. Exactly. Fitz just sits there on my lap and I pet him and he's just, he's therapeutic and it's great. I don't need that. I enjoy silence. I love. Do you though? Like maybe you need to, you need to sit with your thoughts.

Talk some talk.

you

George McKenzie(14:34.85)

Those need conversation.

George McKenzie(14:41.134)

You haven't heard my thoughts. You don't want to sit with them. They're not nice. They're handsy. You don't want to be next to them.

sit with your thoughts. getting out of control, right? This is how you go to having robots that destroy the earth. We're on a very slippery dam slope. I don't know.

Crazy. My AI conversation for today. I just wanted to link it to the data center.

Yeah. I don't like this. We're good. All right, moving on. I wanted to do an update on our family kid finances. Right? last Friday. We did. We had Finance Friday for a little bit with the kids during the pandemic.

You

George McKenzie(15:22.946)

good because we talked about investing and then we put it into practice.

Yeah, we gave each kid $1,000.

When we started, this was, I had looked it up today. We started and well, we started the picking in May and then we funded everything in June. So yeah.

Yeah, so in June, we allowed each child to invest $1,000 into their preferred stocks. And I have the stock list for each kid, except for the two oldest. I don't know where their list is. I think they made their own.

They And it was interesting because they did some research on companies they know. Some of the things they came up with are privately held companies so can't invest in, but seeing the world through their eyes like companies that they know.

Alicia McKenzie (16:11.714)

like Home Depot, Walmart, Topgolf, Atlanta Braves. Maddox wanted to invest in pizza, so we found a chef stock that's actually doing really well.

Yeah, Atlanta brave.

George McKenzie(16:24.752)

Yeah, it was just interesting how their little brains worked around things they know and like...

Yeah. And then I picked the baby stocks and so she got to participate and those are doing really well too. Because, shocker, they're all AI based. Yeah. Good job. would say Maverick, the eight year old, is he eight? Yeah. He invested in Nike, Netflix, Chewy. He was Walmart, Target, Maddox was FedEx. FedEx. FedEx.

You think? yeah.

George McKenzie(16:48.064)

And think he was at Walmart too.

George McKenzie(16:54.903)

Yeah.

the Atlanta Braves and then the girls picked like Google, the heavy hitters, and Apple that they know. But 18 months later.

Yeah, 18 months later, I think it's up about 40%. Yes. Yeah, about 40%, which is not bad.

It's up 35.45%. They invested $5,000 and now they currently have...

Pretty good.

George McKenzie(17:20.814)

Like 68, Yeah. And it's interesting that, you know, we review these probably once a quarter with them and we're not like day traders. not trying to jump around, but it's good, I think, to teach them about investing and compounding and how it works. Right.

I would say $6,800.

Alicia McKenzie (17:38.574)

It's also a lesson and you don't need a ton to get started. If you had an extra hundred dollars, and that was actually another thing that I want to share, but you don't need a ton to get started in investing. Go open up a Charles Schwab or Weibull or any of these.

And anybody can do it. I think it's good for the kids to understand that that is their investment, their money, they can track it and it's not something they're looking to spend, but money is an asset just like anything else and it's a tool that you can use, right? So put your money to work for you. Your money's out there working eight hours a day.

And there's this account that I follow on social media and I just saw this one that she posted today actually. And I was like, this is perfect, but it's unconventional things I do to manage my money. And she's like, they may sound odd, but they actually work. And this isn't necessarily, I would say it doesn't directly relate to us, but I think the tips are unique and anything to get people saving money because how much debt is currently in this country right now? The average person has how much in credit card debt? Wasn't it like some 12,000 or something?

big number. And you think about like the government shut down and people worried about a recession and stagflation. Like I think saving is, you know, some, it's a lost art in the U.S. It's become a spend society, credit society.

Absolutely, like instant gratification, all this, but there's five or six tips here. And the first one is that she divides her rent by 30 and saves that amount daily. And this is just for fun. It's not like she- interesting? Yeah. So whatever her rent is- Put that aside every day. Yeah, she puts that aside every

George McKenzie(19:12.654)

aside every day. Does she start with a number?

I don't know. Okay. Not sure. But she's like, worst case if I'm ever in a bind, I'm only a few days short instead of a full month behind. Right. And then the next one is that she automates $1.11 to savings every single day. Right. It keeps and her thought process behind is that it keeps money moving and it builds towards the habit of saving without pressure. Right. So it's a small.

What's the significance of 111?

I don't know. I feel like 1111. That's a good number. But 111, it's just, small, it's insignificant. You're not gonna miss it.

It's like the roundup that some things do. They take every charge and round it up to a dollar and put that delta in safe.

Alicia McKenzie (19:56.986)

Now, this one is a little interesting. It says that I rotate my streaming subscriptions around new seasons.

See, I wish I was that disciplined. Maybe if you're forced to be that disciplined because of financials.

Right. And she says that if nothing is airing that she wants to watch, she pauses the app. She pauses or cancels it until something comes about that she wants to watch. Which if you're paying $9.99 here or $12.99 there, it starts to add up, especially if you're going through a shutdown phase. How easy is that? Pretty easy. It's easy. You can just go into the app and just pause. Really? Yeah. So that's something to have in your back pocket. She says she f—

Is it us?

Alicia McKenzie (20:37.314)

pays future bills when she's having a good money week. So when things are flowing and she's a creator, right? She's a creator. She's. Yeah.

gig worker. it is truly a daily economic struggle. It's like, much did I make today?

She's an author, so on and so forth.

All right. Does that make sense? That's why she looks like Daily versus Weekly. Yeah.

And then she pays her credit card the moment she swipes, right? So you use your credit card for purchases and then you pay it off that day, right? Transactions go through, the payment goes out and she doesn't have balance anxiety, which if you were coming from a place of scarcity, like let's say you grew up poor. Yeah.

George McKenzie(21:15.234)

I have balance anxiety every month. I don't know what you're talking about.

Yes, but then there's no balance to have anxiety over. She just pays it off daily. And I'm assuming like this is something that maybe she's worked through with a therapist, right? There's something called post-traumatic broke disorder. Right. Yeah, I heard that. think, my gosh, who's the psychology of money author? Morgan Houseoul.

I have that. I'm pretty sure I have that.

George McKenzie(21:41.23)

D.

PTP. PTP. So post-traumatic broke disorder is a thing. It is a mental mindset where if you were broke, you still fear constantly going broke. Yes. I don't have that.

I know, you're a rare bird.

No, in the sense that I think growing up boom or bust, it's that always, okay, I can make more money, right? Like it was never just pure bust. It was boom and then bust and then boom and then bust. Like, right? We had money and then we had fucking nothing. And then we had money and then we had fucking nothing.

I was just a pretty consistent bust. There was no boom. It was just lots and lots of bust.

Alicia McKenzie (22:23.438)

Yeah. So, I mean, it is what it is. And then the last one is, which I get this, I like it. It's she runs a price per use test on everything. So the cost divided by planned uses and she, if it looks good, it's great. If it looks terrible, she doesn't do it. And she says it has killed 80 % of her impulse buys.

sure but I don't know I think

I know you have a different thought on that. But I also believe that you've grown into that different thought.

Yeah, I have thought that way before and I think it takes a lot of the joy from life. Because you stop boiling everything down to its utility. Yes. Right. So, I mean, how far do you go with it? Like, oh, I like hanging around this person. It's a great relationship. But, you know, how often am I hanging around this person? Is it worth the investment? Is it, you know, you can take it to nth degree.

Okay, how so?

Alicia McKenzie (23:15.852)

No, I think it's a big difference.

No, because it's hard to look at certain things in that utilitarian like, am I going to get the usage out of it versus you start looking at everything that way. And like, where am I spending my time? My time is a resource. It's valuable. OK, am I spending my time and getting the most out of it? And then you look at a purchase. Like, I really love this shirt, but I'm only going to wear that shirt one time, so I just won't buy the shirt.

I mean it kills impulse bias.

You know, same with what about then experiences like, I want to go on a Disney cruise. That's different. But how is it different? It's a Disney cruise is X amount and I'm only there five days. It's really this amount per day. Is it really worth it?

It's different because the memories last forever. It's different. I think you have to look at each item as what it is. If it is a coat, it is a coat. If it is a person, it is a person. You cannot boil down your experiences to that person with that person to a dollar amount.

George McKenzie(24:06.954)

I know someone who thinks about purchases that way a lot and it creates more unhappiness than it does happiness. And then you end up buying things and then you force yourself to continue to use them because you want to get the maximum utilization out of it to make the purchase justifiable in your eyes. And I think that it's a slippery slope.

Well, if you are in this generation of instant gratification and you want to have everything that you see on social media, I think this might be a good tool to talk yourself out of your impulse buys.

Yeah. think that, and I think you had said something before about put it in your cart for a week, 24 hours. And I think that would get down on a lot of the impulse buys too. Like if you just waited 24 hours where it wasn't that instant dopamine, I saw it, I want it, click it, got it. 24 hours later, you're like, why did I put that in my cart?

yeah, it's 24 hours.

Alicia McKenzie (24:59.682)

Yeah. What is that? The 24-hour rule is a good one for me. Okay. Moving on. The last one that I want to touch on. I worked with a woman. She did event planning for one of my companies and she also hosts etiquette classes for, actually, I think she said high schoolers, maybe even college kids, but the older generation or the generation that is getting ready to go into interviews, job interviews. And she sent me this study.

Yeah, I like that one.

Alicia McKenzie (25:29.07)

It was run by Intelligent.com. It was a survey done in December of 2023. It surveyed 800 different employers. And of those employers, it said that their job interviews with recent college graduates have yielded the following results. 53 % struggle with eye contact. 50 % asked for unreasonable compensation.

drum roll.

George McKenzie(25:52.856)

can see it.

George McKenzie(25:57.646)

billion percent see that.

47 % dressed inappropriately. 27 % used inappropriate language. Yep. 21 % refused to turn on the camera during a virtual interview. And 19 % get this, brought a parent with them to their interview.

Yep. Get it.

George McKenzie(26:12.832)

Yeah, that's a big thing.

George McKenzie(26:22.306)

Like phone a friend? Or for emotional support? Like I don't know that question. Hang on, dad? What's the answer?

Can you can you imagine having an interview and your mom is with you? Can I bring my mom to my interview what and the actual fuck

your parents to your job? Can I bring my mom to my job?

George McKenzie(26:41.858)

boy. You should hire him.

What's going on in the world? This just doesn't, it doesn't seem real.

wow.

Doesn't, I can't believe it. that, do think that's true? Yeah.

That so weird. Right? Would you go to Maddox's interview? I know. He'd kick him in his ass for even asking.

George McKenzie(26:58.228)

no.

George McKenzie(27:02.388)

Yeah, I know. It's like going to like little league tryouts. like, I'll go on the field with you. How about I back you up and I'll field it with you.

I just, I don't, I don't get it. But the one thing that refusing to turn your camera on.

There's lots of people to do that even in current working conditions where people, it's not, they just find better excuses. my camera's not working. And it hasn't worked for like a month. Like what's going on? Didn't we buy you a camera?

But for an interview?

Yeah, yeah, we've done interviews like that where people say, my camera's on the fritz or it's not working with teams for some reason today or zoom.

Alicia McKenzie (27:36.558)

I have literally never had that happen in the, what is it? It's 2025. The five years that I've been using Zoom and Teams never.

You've never had someone tell you their camera's not working?

I've never had an issue with my camera.

Yeah, I agreed. But other people do all the time. I remember one time at us two, we interviewed some lady and we did three rounds of interviews, like three different interviews with her. She was good through the interviews. And then her first day at work, right, that she was struggling. She was struggling. And then we got one of the interviewers, we called the people that interviewed him like, what is going on? Like this person, how'd they get through the tech screen? So he jumped on the call with her to figure out what was going on. Then he's like,

My birthday.

George McKenzie(28:19.372)

texting us back, like, that's not who was in the interview. Like, that's not the same person. Yeah, so that's kind of crazy. Shit happens.

So, IE, so what you're saying is that they had somebody else perform those three rounds of interviews.

Got the job and then someone else showed up.

And how did you think you were going to get away with that?

I don't know. think, I mean, back then it was more prevalent maybe. Back then it was only like three or four years ago. I think that was a common thing that they were scammers were doing. then by the time you get hired and you know, most likely you get a week or two before you get fired and then you get a severance and then they just split it with the person and they get like five or six jobs going.

Alicia McKenzie (29:01.384)

Wow. Yeah. That is wild versus actually like finding a job that you are good at.

Yeah, but probably the person that did the interviews has probably already got a full-time job and they're just using this to supplement.

man. But back to the reason why we were even talking about this, we have our children do some form of cotillion when they're in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, because I want them, I mean, cotillion is where they do the, like they teach you forks and they teach you manners, so on and so forth. You put your napkin on the lap, teach you how to dance, like those cute little ballroom that Michaela did.

Yeah, just teaching you basic etiquette.

Yeah, teaching you basic etiquette, but I feel like the thought process behind cotillion is very outdated and I love some form of etiquette training for our kids. I don't know how to go about that.

George McKenzie(29:59.586)

Yeah, I mean, how do you, how do you work on zoom? How do you do work calls on zoom? Cause I think that's an etiquette that's lost. Like people just wearing t-shirts or whatever and eating while they're in the middle of the meeting.

I was on a call with somebody. I was in the car. I was in the car and I was in route from somewhere to somewhere. And I'm like biting this apple and she's like, how's that apple taste? I'm like,

Exactly.

I'm sorry. I'm so hungry, but also I need to talk to you. But yeah, like eating during interviews, but just like even in person though, right? I want our kids to be able to go to a restaurant and know how to not act like an asshole when we're not there.

Sorry.

George McKenzie(30:46.134)

Yeah. And it's the same thing we do with our kids. When you're at the restaurant, you order, you look at the waiter, you address them, and you tell them what you would like. You look into their eyes and you speak so they can understand you and you say what it is you would like.

My point, like my frame of reference, you say please, you say thank you, but when I'm speaking to anybody in person, I want to know what color their eyes are. That's always a question that I'm asking in my head. So it will force me to look them in the eyes so at least I know what color their eyes are. That's my little trick to looking at people in their face, almost a little uncomfortably. Is this too much eye contact? But I just, her mindset on teaching etiquette to children and I'm like, we need more of it.

Never.

George McKenzie(31:29.486)

It's kind of like, you know, it's a mix between like interview prep and just like.

How to

Maybe we've lost something with this internet generation where they're probably way more comfortable behind a screen than IRL. So IRL becomes the awkwardness.

Yeah, which I mean, it's good, right? You need those awkward times, but you need them younger.

Yeah, but you just need to, it's, yeah, I don't know. I think my generation, was less because there wasn't much internet income until I was in high school, right? So it was... Back in my day. Everything was face to face, right? You talk to people. Yeah. And you called them on the phone. That's the one thing that I found how fast the Overton window, like how fast we've changed. That it used to be meetings were conference calls. Yeah. And you've realized how to not talk over people and, you know...

George McKenzie(32:25.12)

how to stay engaged and you didn't need always to see them. And then now we've gotten to like, no one does calls anymore, really. They just, everybody wants to be on zoom, even though or email. Like the other thing I feel like email is people want to shit on email all the time, but it's still the most, I think it's the best way to have business communications. Like it.

Let's get a bit of phone call.

Alicia McKenzie (32:39.564)

I don't really start it with text messages.

George McKenzie(32:52.428)

You can take your time, you can write out a succinct thought and you can send it you can have some accountability based on when you sent it and when it comes back and if they read it or didn't read it, put attachments to it and like everyone who wants to just move to Slack or text for everything. It's great for quick answers, but it's really hard to get a cohesive thought because it's more like fire, ready aim fire. People are just typing out. You don't think about it and proofread it or do anything. just, or as emails, you know, read it, write it.

Read it

But it's really annoying because now I feel like I'm missing stuff because so many people text me. I really just want to get a separate phone for work texts. It's like I had somebody call me the other day. She's like, you never responded to my text message. And I'm like, shit. And I go back and I look through all of my text messages and it got lost in this barrage of like 130 texts. I'm like, this is insane. I can't live like this.

Like, I'm just gonna cut off all comms and go live on an island. It's too much.

I'm Let's go. I'm lobbying for Aruba. I'm ready to go. Podcast will travel.

Alicia McKenzie (34:03.662)

We could totally do this anywhere.

I I could do it on a beach. I be on a beach. Maybe I'm on a beach right now.

So bottom line, don't bring your parents to an interview.

Okay, it is not and show up for your own interview and Put your camera on and have an actual like you know business attire. Yeah, just for the job you want people

I think needed to tell you.

Alicia McKenzie (34:29.419)

and the next time you go to Starbucks, look in their eyes.

You order them and here's all the other hand. If you work at Starbucks, look at your customer when you take their order. Yeah, it goes both ways. Like a lot of those people, they don't look at you. There's, what do you want? okay. Grande? Okay. And they're like, Hey, can you look at me engaged? Just don't hit the buttons.

That's new.

Alicia McKenzie (34:52.246)

I know, but I also feel bad for them because they have a, they're trying to do a job and the people suck and I get it. I get it. Okay, we're done.

Jeez.

You

Alicia McKenzie (35:07.81)

Thank you for tuning into Mary to the startup. hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please take a moment to like, rate, and subscribe to our podcast. Your support helps us reach more people and keeps the conversation going. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, drop me a message. I love hearing from you guys until next time.