Asheville

Last month, I got yelled at in a bar.

Okay, so…I tried recording audio again.

But I’m very bad at it.

And I want to get better.

If you choose to listen to it (above), please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Ex: “Alex, you should try to make your voice sound Slower/Calmer/LessHomosexual”

Tx

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Asheville

Asheville, North Carolina: a cute tree-filled mountain town known for being liberal but not to the point where it’s annoying.

Like Savannah meets Ann Arbor.

Last month, I flew up there because Ben was gone and I wanted to leave Miami because I am a person who likes having conversations with people who have things to talk about other than how the weather was nice and so they went to the beach.

Friday night, I wound up at a bar.

I stood next to two women in their 50s — one tall and one short. We were drinking and laughing, and eventually, they asked about my job. 

That’s when,

“You’re disgusting,” spat the short lady. Her eyes were glazed over from the tequila, but she kept them locked on mine like daggers piercing through milky tea.

“Wait. What?” I said, confused.  

We had spent the last half hour taking shots and giggling; just moments before, she leaned in closely, asking me to try her Paloma, resting her boobs on my arm. “So nice that I can do this because you’re gay,” she said.

But now, a new, angry version of her arrived, and this one needed no gay breast stool. 

“THERE ARE AMERICANS WHO COULD USE THOSE JOBS,” she shouted over the Dua Lipa song.

“Hey hey,” the taller friend intervened, trying to reel Short in, “I think you should get some water.”

“This has NOTHING to do with me,” Short responded, standing her ground. Her face was scrunched — neck muscles tensed. And then she turned to me. “I’m an energy healer,” she said, like a weight loss coach who was morbidly obese, “and when you said ‘American companies’ — I felt an ENERGY shift.”  She looked to Tall. “DON’T talk to him anymore. He’s a bad person.” And then she placed her drink on the bar, scoffed, and walked to the restroom.

You’re wondering what I do for work.

That makes sense.

In sum, though I wish I were a writer who wrote about his feelings all day, I don’t have enough money to do that and so, instead, I help run an international recruiting business where we find super smart people from all over the world and then we land them work-from-home jobs for American companies.

Some people don’t like that.

People like Short.

“Whoa,” I said to Tall as I let out a breath.

“Sorry about that,” said Tall, who was not a healer but, in fact, had a real job. 

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“You’re fine,” she responded, tucking her long blonde-gray hair behind her ear. She was pretty and, ironically, had great energy. “How does it work, though?” she asked. “I have a couple of clients who could use you.”

Tall asked for my number and typed it into her contacts as fast as she could. I liked that she wanted my number. It made me feel that maybe I wasn’t as disgusting as Short had decided — that maybe I was only semi-disgusting. Chocolate cream cheese. 

Tall went to hand me my phone back. As she did—

“—WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING TO HIM?” Short said, out of nowhere.

‘S O R R Y’ Tall mouthed as Short dragged her into darkness. 

I stood at the bar alone but was still within eyeshot of them both, and so, after 10 minutes, I left. 

It doesn’t feel good getting yelled at by an adult you’re not related to. 

It’s unnerving.

Breaks the rules.

On my walk home, I called my friend, Margaret Carr. She’s always the person I call for emotional crises because she never gets emotional about anything. 

Perhaps that’s why she has lots of money, while I do not. 

“I don’t think I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster,” she said from her Chelsea penthouse balcony, looking down on the ants of Manhattan while probably sipping the darkest red that wine can offer. Maybe a black merlot. “Just work on your pitch,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Well,” she said, “knowing you, you probably said something like…‘We help companies replace their overpaid Americans’.” 

I stayed silent.  

The cold Asheville air blew across my face.

“Well. That’s what works on our ads!” I responded. “It’s our lowest cost-per-meeting by a landslide!”

“Right. Obviously. It’s—”

“—and we tried the nice stuff! It doesn’t convert to meetings!”

“Look, you’re being inflammatory, which gets people angry, which probably makes your clicks cheaper, but when you’re in person, you’ve gotta start with something else.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe say that you give opportunities to people abroad.”

“What does that even mean? What are we like, some loser non-profit that mails protractors to kids in Ghana?”

“It worked for Toms.”

“Didn’t they go bankrupt literally because of that?”

“Oh. Interesting.” She took a sip and thought a bit more. “Are your people good?” she asked.

“Like, good at their job?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah they’re great.”

“So just say that.”

The wind calmed.

“Goodnight,” she said, walking inside to place her wine atop a custom-cut marble counter and returning herself to an evening of not listening to the plights of the poor.

I don’t think I’m a monster. 

Doth he protest.

Everyone who works for us seems really happy, and not even in a Stockholm Syndrome way, but in a real way.

One of our marketers in Egypt told me, “You’re overpaying us all. Two months for you guys is a down payment on a house here.”

“Okay, but that’s not a bad thing.” I said. “If you keep hitting your numbers, we’ll just keep paying you more. That seems good, right?”

Yes. That’s obviously right. 

That’s one of the advantages of hiring abroad.  

You can leverage the strength, albeit dwindling strength, of the American dollar. 

Overpaying by 40% - 60% in, let’s say, Kenya, Argentina, or South Africa costs U.S. companies very little. When people earn more money, they adjust their lifestyle, and then, in fear of losing said lifestyle, they stay hard-working, and though capitalism is a dark drug, I’d still consider this a win-win.

But none of this self-masturbation helped me shake the lingering feeling from the yelling bargoer who accused me of being anti-American.

Before she yelled, but after she had told me that she was also an acupuncturist who gives Botox because those things somehow don’t conflict, I would’ve pegged her as some sort of far-left, jaded hippie — someone who shouted things she learned from TikTok recently like “Americans are living on stolen land!” but instead, she hopped on the other side of the I-Don’t-Like-Alex’s-Business train, which is a very politically diverse train with many sections of angry people, including the politically-far-Right section she chose to sit in — the section that preaches took ‘er jobs.

And maybe she really believes that’s the correct place.

Maybe she really believes that my tiny international recruiting business is responsible for the decline of American discretionary income and rise in inflation, along with the very real tragedy of people in the U.S. not being able to easily find high-enough-paying jobs. 

Maybe she also separately reads about an influx of illegal immigrants, or she saw the TikTok I saw the other night, which made me cry, about an older woman in Colorado talking about how she and her husband are trying to live off $30k/year after having had to quit being a teacher due to a disability, and how now she’s had to learn to stitch her clothes back together because she can no longer afford to go to Goodwill and how, at the food bank, the line is too long because of the new immigrants standing in front of her who take more food than they’re supposed to, which I guess would somehow be connected to our too-liberal immigration policy but then that doesn’t seem true based on this thing I spent 30 minutes studying before realizing that it mostly applied to legal immigration which is completely different from illegal immigration and so perhaps I was studying the wrong thing.

And maybe both Colorado AND Short are right.

Maybe we have too many immigrants, and they’re all from the wrong places, and we should only give jobs to people already in and from the U.S., and we should completely close our borders, and cobble our shoes using only what we can find in our own backyards.

But I don’t think that’s true.

And that’s because A) I believe that we do have an obligation to help humans who are less fortunate than us, including the Coloradan and those standing in front of her, and B) we objectively need more people in America because of this thing that has nothing to do with being nice to others called the replacement rate, which is basically the number of kids that the average couple in a society must have in order for the society to successfully “replace” itself over time. 

In the U.S., that number should be 2.1. 

But we’re only at 1.7. 

And that’s bad.

Because if your country stays below where it should be for too long, your population dwindles, the ratio of young to old falls, and eventually you have too many old people with too expensive medical bills who can’t militarize or caretake, just like what happened in Japan, and after a while you lack the required amount of youngins to keep the pensions fat and the lights on and the shelves stocked and the people alive.

But I guess that’s not totally relevant to what I came here to write about.

Because I originally came here to write about Short, who had interrupted the Dua Lipa song to yell at me about how everyone who works for our company steals jobs from Americans.

And those people are not immigrants.

In fact, those people are taking jobs and dollars from Americans and shoving them into their own bank accounts offshore, and by not spending those dollars in the U.S. they’re probably even further destroying the U.S. economy.

Someone said to me last week.

Unless…just like the platitude of “let’s close our borders to curb problems that aren’t actually solved by closing our borders,” the whole “hire people abroad cripples our economy,” thing is also not true.  

Because maybe every $1 spent outsourcing ends up returning $1.12-$1.17 to the U.S., and maybe closing off our economy and issuing too many U.S. dollars here in the U.S. without enough consumption of those dollars abroad potentially weakens the U.S. dollar — cue YouTube video about Argentina, and, maybe, it’s in our best interest, as Americans, to keep the rest of the world addicted to the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency for as long as possible, God-forbid South Africa, Brazil, Russia, India, and China wise up and come up with a digitally re-invented reserve currency of their own.

And maybe Short is just mad for the same reasons that most people, in life, are mad.

People like J:

Or Mr. H (the H is for horny):

Or Fuck. 

Actually, Fuck was nice. 

Thank you, Fuck.

I think people are mad because life is just scarier right now, and people don’t seem as happy as they used to be.

We’re all nervous about an election where there is no good outcome, coupled with the fact that it feels like we’re all one podcast or Substack article away from believing that the people who believe there’s a WW3 or Civil War coming aren’t wearing tin hats.

And I do think there is a winter en route.

Especially with jobs.

Some weird combination of COVID having made many jobs remote, followed by the inevitable re-allocation of those same jobs to lower-cost laborers abroad, which is just a bandaid-of-a-scapegoat for us sheep to flock to in order to avoid looking at the greater problem where AI eliminates all of those remote jobs, especially mine and everyone else’s I work with, including the guy who was paid to translate the original version of the Argentine video that came before the AI-translated one, and I don’t believe there is a way out of this.

And because of that, it behooves us to do whatever we can to survive. 

To learn how to leverage other people/AI to figure out where new types of income are going to come from because they won’t come from doing clicky-clacky things on a keyboard.

And as someone with no real skills but with lots of visions of how I’d like my life to be, I do wonder what an inflation-ridden economy is supposed to do with me and my entitled-yet-inept peers, and perhaps Mr H. (the H is for Horny) is correct: perhaps we should just be brought to the chopping block. But, until then, as someone who likes America a lot, I think the best way for our self-important country to adapt to the upcoming job collapse is to let the rest of the world get better at shoe-cobbling, powerpoints, and customer service, while we figure out how to stay at the top of some sort of money-making food chain for as long as we can, maybe leading the world in exporting creativity and business-launching the same way we already lead as the largest exporter of culture.

And though I’m not economically studied enough to be writing any of this, maybe that’s the point — maybe, just like Short yelling at me in a bar for things she doesn’t understand, I don’t really have to know what I’m talking about to put it onto the page and push “Publish.” Maybe Short and I are both just sheep.

Sheep, running around ingesting images and videos about wars and fiscal policy and multivariate problems that our tiny sheep brains can’t possibly understand, taking stances for or against interest rate cuts or puberty blockers or hostage flyers while simultaneously confidently shooing away the homeless woman in front of us asking for a dollar, having told ourselves that we’re capable of quantifiably measuring how our energy, money, and compassion are most effectively spent, and ignoring the fact that we’re not as intelligent nor as kind as we’d like to believe.

Dumb sheep, pressing doo-doo-covered hooves into the screen, thinking it will prevent the coming winters, while probably not thoroughly understanding the articles we post or cite (like that 2003 McKinsey article I linked to above but didn’t read lolz) in order to yell/defend concepts or causes we only seem to care about for little blips of time.

Because even after all of this, when I take a step back, I don’t care very much about globalization, AI or even the end of jobs.

Sure, I love our company (scalearmy.com), and I really hope I’m able to cockroach us through whatever comes next for America both at home and abroad, but my motivation for doing so exists only for one reason: to amass enough money to fund a blog where I can write about my feelings, so that when a lady yells at me in a bar, there is a place where I can go to complain about her to thousands of people.

And given that I really like self-telling the lie that everything happens for a reason, maybe the lesson I’m supposed to learn here is that when I get publicly scolded by a lost short woman in Asheville, I should be grateful of the fact that I’m not her, and that I’ve found a love of writing that allows me to scream back at her later, but in my own special way that fills me with pride, and that developing this specific craft of whining about her means more to me than how many children I have, or custom-cut marble countertops I own, or people in America I’ve employed, and that I should put my time and focus into being appreciative of that, rather than into the launch of my new business, OutsourcedOnlineEnergyHealers.com which, instead, exists for the sole purpose of speeding up one specific Ashevillian sheep’s march to the slaughter.

Now accepting investors.

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Okay. Hi. Sooooooooooooo.

Questions from my readers/friends (please put your answers in the comments!)

1. Even though this piece was intentionally less funny than my others, were you bored?

2. Was the voiceover good/bad? If bad, please give suggestions.

3. What is the meanest thing someone has ever said to you in person? What’s the meanest thing someone has ever said to you online? If you don’t have a good answer for either of these, would you like me to Tweet something mean at you so that you don’t feel like you’ve been shafted from having a universal experience?

Lylas