Jason Pfeiffer

Yeah, see, I've probably done it with you guys.

That is true.

Right. Nothing. Does it taste like anything? For context, for people who don't know, I literally genuinely do not have a sense of taste. I cannot taste food. So people who know this ask me a lot of questions.

Stick around. Help Wanted will be right back. Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it.

Oh, I have strong feelings about this too.

Yes. Or when somebody else is naked. I used to work from my bedroom and my wife would come in after the shower and she would always be like, is the Zoom off? And I'd have to turn it off. So I feel like companies, I feel like I'm going to deputize everyone listening to slowly, slowly try to drive your company culture towards camera off.

Yes. Camera off. We don't need this. We don't need to be on camera all day to see each other.

Well, that's wonderful for, for filming, for making podcasts and stuff. But like, you know, if you were just talking to colleagues all day, I just don't think that you need to see their faces. And whenever I have a meeting and I tell people, you know, we don't need an, you don't need another zoom meeting in your life. I am sure we can do camera off. They always say, do you know what they say to me?

They say the same thing every time. When I say, I'm sure you don't need another Zoom meeting in your life. We can keep the cameras off. What do they say?

Thank you. They always say thank you. Thank you. Because they don't want it. Nobody wants it. I have found that entrepreneur, there were a couple colleagues who just started showing up with their camera off. Shout out Deepa. Deepa's camera's off and off. And it inspired others. It created permission for other people to keep their cameras off.

And now most, in a lot of meeting settings at Entrepreneur, cameras are all off. I think that is wonderful. Cameras off.

Oh, I think it's entirely dependent upon the existing set of expectations. If this person works well and shows up and there's just never a question about whether they're working... Deepa is a great example of which. It's just a colleague of mine, Deepa. Deepa is the Swiss army knife of entrepreneurs. She does everything. And there is never a question of whether or not Deepa is on it.

Deepa is always on it. And as a result, nobody cares if Deepa's camera is off because... She's there. Everything will get done. There's just no worry. So in a way, you almost have to earn the camera off.

Yeah. Safety first.

I have thoughts on this too. Oh, I didn't know I have strong feelings on all these subjects.

Yeah, that's a nice thing to do is to be clear about it. And if you're taking notes and people know you're taking notes because you care about what is being discussed, then it's like, whatever, there's a little clacking and that's fine. But a couple of things to say. Number one, you can always mute. I do that often.

If someone's going to be talking for a few minutes and I'm typing, I will just mute myself and then type away. But also, shout out, we are not getting any money for this, though we probably should. I have been using Fathom. Fathom is an AI note taker. It joins my meetings. I think it's fathom.video is the website. And it is awesome. It's just there in the background.

It transcribes all your calls, but it also does this great job of organizing all the main points using AI. It's really impressive. So now I have it in all my calls, and now I don't need to take as many notes.

I actually think that this is a really good move for anybody, which is to think about how other people perceive seeing you on the phone. So if you're in a meeting and you pick up your phone and you're taking notes, it's worth saying, sorry, I'm just taking notes. And that way people don't think that you're sexting or texting the dog walker.

Like when you do it when we're recording or whatever? Yeah. I always assume you're dealing with something and it's fine because you also... Again, this comes back to like what have you earned and what's the set expectations? I know that you're not going to pick up your phone and disappear into it in the middle of a conversation. And therefore, if you pick up the phone, it's not like a problem.