Trish 0:09 The HR Happy Hour Network is proudly supported by Workhuman. Every year, companies spin their wheels searching externally for senior leaders. Meanwhile, their next VP is already on their payroll, recognized by peers, but overlooked by the org chart. Future Leaders by Workhuman fixes that using AI and real-time recognition data. Future Leaders identify your highest potential talent four years ahead of schedule, before they burn out, check out, or get picked up by someone who saw what you missed. Build smarter, promote confidently, build your best people, future leaders only from Workhuman. Learn more at Workhuman.com Thanks for joining us. Steve 0:52 Welcome to the At Work in America show. My name is Steve Boese. I am thrilled for today's show. Welcome, Trish. How are you? Trish 1:00 I'm good. I'm back home, so that's always a good thing. Been traveling a ton, it's crazy. We're supposed.. it's May, we're supposed to be off the road by now, right? Steve 1:11 Yeah, it's been a busy month, lots of really cool things happening, lots of great shows, right? Check out HRHappyHour.net for everything we've been doing on the network lately, plus what Mervyn's been doing, and Sabrina has been doing, and Nick and Jack, everybody, right, good stuff on the network, and Trish, great show today. One of our favorites, our semi-regular Workplace Movie Hall of Fame series is back, and we are talking about a new movie, it's still in theaters, I think. When folks, most folks, will be listening to this, still in theaters, we are talking about, of course, The Devil Wears Prada Two. We're revisiting the franchise. Trish, do you remember our show on The Devil Wears Prada, the original? Trish 2:00 I do. I should have gone back and listened to it. Did you listen to it again before? Steve 2:03 I didn't, but I recall it a little bit. Yeah. Trish 2:07 So I, I loved that movie, and it was a very easy movie to talk about, and this one is too. Obviously, the whole thing is a workplace movie, right? Yeah, but I hated it. I really don't like this one. Steve 2:07 Okay, so for folks who may not, most folks are probably familiar, but Devil Wears Prada two sequel to 20, the 2006 Devil Wears Prada. So 20 years later we have returning in their original roles Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, the four main characters in the movie, some other characters kind of filter in, who are newer, much like the films are set 20 or were created 20 years apart. The setting is 20 years apart as well. The characters have aged and career progressed, if you will, 20 years too, and we find some of them in the same place and some of them on a little bit different places, and boy, but a modern take on so many of the things that are happening in the world of work, that was my big takeaway, and I think I liked the movie more than you did, by the way. Trish 3:13 Well, I think as we get into it, maybe I'll be able to explain what I disliked, but I mean, would I see it again? I really don't have ambition to see it again, but I think it's worth seeing once, especially if you like the first one, so that you can find out what happens to these characters after 20 years, but I shouldn't say I hate it, I think I was disappointed in some of the things that didn't change over 20, 20 actual years with these characters, so but I think that makes for a really good work discussion, because when we start talking about the individual topics, it's like it made me really sit back and think. It's probably made me think more than any Oscar movie I've seen in recent years, for example, because you know, you have to think about, like, how have I changed in the last 20 years at work, or just in general, so yeah, I mean, I'm glad we watched it, I'm glad we're doing the show, but yeah. Steve 4:06 So quick warning, there'll be some spoilers, we'll try not to give away the maybe end and ending of this thing, if possible, the, and it does require, I think, to appreciate this movie, probably does require having knowledge of the first movie, having seen it, it dives into these characters sort of like we know them. I mean, there's a little bit of sort of help to understand them somewhat in part two, if you didn't see part one, but definitely would help. So I think for me, Trish, three three big ones for me, I'll say just themes, and then I'd love to hear if you agree or disagree, or have some other themes. One is kind of the modern world of work, and kind of the cruelty of it, in some, at some, some level, right, and the capriciousness of it, at some level, where we see the beginning parts of the movie basically a mass layoff of a whole bunch of people in a particular workplace notified via text message, right. Essentially all at the same time, right. Text message mass layoff, part one. Second to me, there's an AI theme, shocking, right, in 2026 right. AI theme, the folks in this movie largely operate in a very creative field, right? They're in publishing, they're in fashion, right, in those kinds of roles, creative fields, very kind of human fields, maybe not the fields we think of immediately are going to be disrupted by AI. There's a very real subplot about AI shaking up this world and potentially shaking up their characters and their ability to to work, and then I guess the last thing I'd say is for me people's relationship to work, or the role of work in our lives, right? We see a few characters in this movie really defined by their work, right, and even to the point where explicitly talking about how much they love work and how that's an okay thing to do, and meanwhile that same ethos, though, tends to churn up a lot of the people around them, right, so particularly the people in leadership, the Meryl Streep character, for example, right, really is kind of, you know, the devil, right, and churns up a lot of her underlings, if you will, and colleagues. So that those are my thoughts, big high-level thoughts. I love to hear sort of your big picture views on this. Trish 6:41 Yeah, I think you hit the major ones again. I don't want to give spoilers, because I do want people to watch the movie, especially if they've watched the first one, right? And just wanting to see the continuation, so I definitely think those themes are spot on. The only other thing that really just kept nagging at me, and can we just say, like, this is the first time I think maybe ever that we've watched the movie together, because I happen to be in the same city with you, and we made a point to go right. Steve 7:09 We had the whole H3 team almost there. Trish 7:12 We did, we had, we did, we had the whole H3 team there, and so one of the, one of our colleagues, I won't say who had not seen the movie, so that the first movie, so that was interesting, right, to hear her perspective, and then you know the rest of us had seen it, so for me the biggest thing that was just nagging at me immediately was that these characters really hadn't changed much, especially the one that Anne Hathaway plays, like the Andy character, right. So, in the first one, you know, she's in her probably mid 20s now. In this one, she's in her early to mid 40s. I felt like maybe in the first one, maybe because I was 20 years younger when I saw it, right, similar age there. I really felt like the boss, you know, the Meryl Streep character was horrible, but it was a lot like the bosses I had, and by horrible I mean, like, really tough on you, really like just driving, and you know, expected the world to be delivered at a whim, right? So I related to being the Andy character a little bit more 20 years ago, so now having become a boss in several different companies in my this later part of my career, I was viewing it differently, like I was annoyed that Andy's character really didn't change much, she was still kind of fumbling and bumbling and spilling things on her clothes, and like, you know, running for taxis or subways, it was just a lot of chaotic energy, like, and she was that way in the first one. It just didn't annoy me as much in the first one. So that really, I guess I'm going to pose this question to you. It really got me thinking about, do we change as workers as what we show up with at work, and I had said after the show, I think that we should change right as we go through work experience and trainings and all of the things I would think we would elevate and we would change, and Karen actually challenged me on that, and she said, "But do we really change? Like, why are you annoyed by this?" And I said, and I remember saying, "I said, well, I would hope at 24 that I'm different than I am at 54, and that I've really thought about this the last week, and I don't think I am." So, I guess my question to you is this: we talk a lot about work, we talk a lot about learning, and just training people, and you know everyone's always saying, Oh, managers need to be trained more. Do you really think it fundamentally can change how we show up to work? Steve 9:59 Yeah, probably not a ton, right? I think I think who you are at your core probably can't change all that much, particularly once you've become an adult, and you're talking about really a young adult into a mid-career adult. There is some changes that can happen there, I think. Probably by the time you're 24 or 25, some of those core elements of how you approach leadership and management, interpersonal relationships are probably not going to change too much your preferences, right, for work, whether you like to be in a big team or you like solo work, whether you want to be the leader or you want to be part of the team, right, whether you want to be creative and spontaneous and have a lot of ambiguity, or whether you want to line up in a lane and stay in it, right, and work that way, probably can't change too, too much. And I think we see this in the Miranda, the Meryl Streep character as well, the boss, the demanding boss, right? She's still pretty demanding, pretty similar how she was 20 years ago, with just a few of the rough edges maybe worn down a bit, some of that through time, some of that through necessity, because work has changed a little bit too, right? And there's a really.. I'll give away a little bit in the first movie, right, there's a famous repeated little scene, or little series of vignettes of the Miranda characters dry striving striding into the office and taking her coat or overcoat or shawl scarf wherever she's got on and just basically hurling it at some underlaying some serpent right throwing it at him essentially right to take care of and go put it away or hang it up, etc. etc. And in part two, right, we see a scene where she's in her same office and she's struggling with the hanger to hang up her own coat and they even point out like hey what's going I never would have believed this woman would hang up her own coat and the comment was all there was a bunch of HR complaints right and she can't throw things at people anymore right so but she's still the same kind of person, but the world of work and sort of the workplace expectations and norms have changed at least somewhat, right? And I think that is, if you talk about just character analysis, one of the one of the interesting things in the movie is the changes as much as they are in that character, because she has been altered a little bit by time, and also by work is different now too than it was 20 years ago. Trish 12:28 Yeah, I think you're right. I like how you phrased it, that she's been a little bit, you know, worn down around the edges, maybe just from time. I do feel that, right? I don't know, I would imagine you do too, right? We've been through, we're in our 50s now, right? So we're going to have some of those things that seemed super important in our 20s and maybe early 30s. We were, you know, we're driving, but in a different way. Yeah, right. We had aspirations in a different way. And so, as you do start achieving, I think, whatever your, your personality is, once you start achieving some things through your career, yeah, you don't feel like you have to push just quite as hard, right? It's not like when you're in your 20s, I think. Also, I really related to it being in professional services, and I know you started out your career in some big, big organizations, right, where there were probably really similar people that you could think back to that were like Miranda, right? I mean, I remember that we had a partner, a female partner, who would have her executive assistant put on her riding boots to get them shined, and like it seemed like, what, what are we doing? Like, that would never happen. I would hope that would never happen. Steve 13:38 We would do that three or four times back in the 90s. Yeah. Trish 13:40 Right. Like, can you imagine putting on your boss's boots, and then, like, having.. but back then, that was if your boss said to do something, you did it. Period. I didn't feel empowered, and maybe that's the change in the 20 years of this, you know? You're seeing to me, Andy's character is the one that just, just bothers me on so many levels, right? Because she's become a successful journalist, she comes back - we won't say how, because I don't want to give it away - but she comes back to work for Miranda, basically. Steve 14:14 20 years later. Trish 14:15 20 years later, and, and Andy now has an intern who is from Yale. She's very highly educated. She's going to do everything, so I felt like not only is Andy a very chaotic, troubled employee to Miranda, she's not a very good boss to her intern, she's not developing her intern. So I think that brings us back to what we see in the workplace all the time, we put people into leadership roles, even at a mid-level leadership role, because they do good work. So, Andy could write, so she got to be basically a boss of that team. It doesn't mean she's a good leader, and I just.. it really.. I don't have any answers here, so I think, also, like, do you ever feel like coincidences happen? So, I just got back from the Cornerstone event this week in New York City, and they obviously have been known for many years as a learning platform now, with use of AI and just a lot of innovation, you know, they are a workforce intelligence platform, but I say that because you know I have every job I've ever had was a Cornerstone customer. Steve 15:28 Oh, nice. Trish 15:28 When I was a practitioner, every single employer we used Cornerstone, so I've, I've grown up using that tool, being taught and educated, and now it kind of makes me think like this shift that they're doing to workforce intelligence with AI, is that going to maybe help more than what the you's and I's the people our age have have grown up with in learning? I think it's going to really be impactful, and that's what I would love to see. I don't know, maybe they come back in another 20 years and do another Devil Wears Prada, because I would love to see, does Andy actually become a better boss, you know, with some personalized learning just for her, because again, you can be really skilled, really highly skilled at what you do and not make a good leader, and I think that's what bothers me the most. I was expecting monumental growth of her. I feel like Miranda's still, even as she's, what, in her 70s, probably by the, by the time. Steve 16:32 I think, character-wise, for early 70s, early 70s, which is another interesting, just as an aside, and I have this in my notes to talk about, but it is interesting to talk about that too, because there are a lot of people in the workplace, workplaces are getting older, right? Right, both from a leadership perspective, but just a general perspective, right? I just did a Workplace Minute on this, I've done a couple on this in the last month or so, talking about aging workers, and honestly, ageism in the workplace for folks, older workers, or perhaps older folks who are looking for work and want to stay in work and are encountering difficulty finding work, much like many other people are right now too, but yeah, that's an interesting point, and it comes up in the movie as well as a plot, a small subplot, where the Stanley Tucci character, who 20 years ago was essentially the deputy, if you will, right, to the Miranda character, to the big boss, really capable, really respected, really good at his job, right, real critical player on the team. 20 years later, they're in the same two roles. Miranda hasn't gone anywhere, despite being, let's just call her in her 70s somewhat. Stanley Tucci, 20 years later, hasn't, hasn't budged. And, in fact, one of the.. I'll spoil this, because it was in the first movie, and you can't spoil a 20 year old movie, but if you remember, in the first movie, Miranda basically screws him over, right, for a big promotion, right, and really just puts the knife in his back, and he stays anyway, right, and in fact she's surprised, and halfway when she returns to this, this fictional magazine, right, or 20 years later, she's a little bit surprised he's still there after what had happened 20 years prior, and he's still in the same, essentially in the same job, and you could certainly argue that a 72-74 year old Meryl Streep has basically blocked his path to perhaps the job he was destined for, because she didn't, she didn't wind it down or retire, essentially, right. Trish 18:45 Right, no, and I think that's, you're exactly spot on. I think we see that in the workplace all the time, but that also begs the question back to the do people really change, you know? You, yeah, Anne Hathaway's character, Andy, may have left, but she's back, she's also back in the same position. So, do we do that because that's the role that we become? It's sort of like your role in your family, right? If you think about, like, maybe birth order or whatever, everybody in a family or an extended family kind of has a role to play, that doesn't really change, that's who you are, that's the role you play. So, I wonder, in work, is that the same thing, because you know we are going to see older and older people in the workplace, and you can tweak, and maybe I give another good example. I just saw our friend Jerry Crispin this week. I won't give away Jerry's age, but he has been just a huge thought leader in the space, especially around talent acquisition and recruitment over decades, and we also talked about he still wants to stay in the industry because he's learning, he's learning so much from the generations coming up behind him, and it's challenging his way of thinking, and so I wonder, is that where the real opportunity for true growth and us changing is not early in our career, is it really, later in our career? We'll say 50 plus, is that, and maybe that's.. I don't know if you've thought about that. Do you feel like the change that you've made from say 20 to 50 is bigger than what you're making, say, from 50 onward? Steve 20:22 Probably. Yeah, but I mean, but I think there's certainly a lot of things that are changing in the modern world of work, maybe perhaps a little bit faster than in the 80s and in the 90s, right? When we were just starting our careers, it's probably a little bit more difficult to stay current, I suppose, as an older worker, maybe today, than it used to be, although, quite honestly, I'm saying that, and I don't even know, I don't even know if I believe that, quite frankly, because I'm old enough to remember and be working in a very, very large fortune at the time, probably a Fortune 10 or or so-sized company. Trish 21:03 Right. Steve 21:04 When we were, they were in a professional job, and I was in a finance department. They were just beginning to roll out personal computers to everyone's desk, everyone's desktop, to have a desktop personal computer at work, and have email, corporate email. At the time, when I got there, when I showed up there, some people had this, but not everybody, right? I remember one of the very first things I did, right, few months into that job, I, as I helped set up everybody's, you know, PCs, because I knew a little bit more about it, because I used them in college, right, and I was just out of college, so, but the shift, though, that those folks were asked to make, and were expected to make, right, the shift from this weird mainframe reporting system we had, and ledger books, and typewrite typewriters, for gosh sakes, to word processing, and graphics, and personal computing, and you know, spreadsheets, you know, Excel, or I think it was called something else back then, but you can't tell me that the shift now to learn, say, AI tools, that this is harder than it was for those folks to go from the analog age to the early digital age. I don't know. Trish 22:20 Yeah. Steve 22:20 That was pretty tough. Trish 22:21 I think it's interesting when you and I are, we're coming out a little bit different we wind up at the same place. I literally, right before this, was talking to my daughter, who's 22 right, fresh out of college, and I told her, I said, I don't think there's been a change like this since then, since we actually moved work from a manual paper process for every single piece to something that was on a desktop computer, and I can remember getting my first laptop at work and thinking, like, wow, this is so cool, and, but you know what, I, I didn't want to give up like Lotus Notes when that went away, you know, things like that. So I remember that being a huge challenge early on, and I do think you're right. I think AI is really very similar, using it for augmenting your work, whatever your work is. It's, it's very difficult to get your mind around it, and especially as we go to different software events, I think you know when we hear about customers that are still not in the cloud, like, how is that still a thing 20 years later? Steve 23:27 Yeah. Trish 23:28 But it's true. Can you imagine? So, it's different. I think that there's a, an arc you mentioned in the movie, and I'm, if you want to talk about that, like, AI was coming in and making some big changes, but. Steve 23:39 There's certainly a threat of it. It's a subplot in the movie. It's not a major - I wouldn't call it a major theme in the movie - but it's a subplot, essentially. A tech mogul is swooping in, he's going to buy this company and buy this brand, and has visions of a world where hardly anybody works there anymore, because we can replace the writers with AI and the models with AI, and the designers with AI, etc. etc. Right. Trish 24:05 Right. So, if you're thinking like that, I mean, I would say we're fairly astute, right. We study artificial intelligence and all of the variations of that, and we've done this for years. Right, AI is not new. We're talking about agentic AI is what is really taking hold now, and making some big changes. What if your company isn't even, you know, you're still on premise right now? I can't even imagine how stressful this must feel to those workers who haven't even gone to software, and you know, in the cloud. So I think each company is going to have to really look at their employees and figure out what can we do to make sure that they understand the advantages of something like augmenting the intelligence that your, your teams have, but yeah, in this movie I think you're right, they could if they have data from, you know, what Andy's role is as a writer, and what you know, Stanley Tucci's character's role is as a designer and someone that chooses the fashion that could be easily replaced very quickly. Steve 25:10 Yeah, and I think the thing to think, if you want to think bigger picture, right, part of why we do these shows is to talk about these, these films, talk about what happens in these work, these fictional workplaces often, and try to extrapolate these ideas to what it might mean for what we do, and what people who listen, what happens in their work, and I think the interesting thing here is this AI threat, right, that we see a little bit of in the movie, and we certainly see playing out right in workplaces today, the transformations that we discussed, right, the analog to digital into PCs, and even to the cloud, quite frankly, right, the transition from, you know, on-premise software to cloud software, they didn't come along with this kind of existential dread of mass layoffs of mass, you know, you're going to be just disrupted, you're going to, your skills will no longer be useful or valid, and you're going to be cast aside. Some of that did happen, right, with every technological wave of change. Some, some folks, some skill, I wouldn't say people, some skills become obsolete, certainly, and people have to adjust, but it didn't seem like there was a widespread, oh my gosh, you know, kind of dread or a loathing or a fear, right? And while there was always some pushback, any technological change, and particularly in a workplace, right, everybody who's listening, I'm sure, has experienced this, when any new change is introduced, right, there's often going to be reluctance, pushback, maybe even some sabotage, right? It could happen, but I didn't feel like back then, like the folks, even the folks that I dealt with, who had been working at this company for years and years and years, were like, "Oh my god, they're going to throw me out on the street because I have a PC now on my desk, right, and AI is different, right? I mean, the long tail of how this is going to play out is uncertain at best, right now, but it's hard to be at least not a little concerned when every single day it seems like Trish, and there was, in probably one or two this week already, major companies doing significant job cuts, and talking about either AI replacement of functions, or even more sinister in some ways to be able to fund investments in AI capabilities, technology, and infrastructure, which is what's going on largely at Meta lately, right? And they just did like 8000 layoffs because they want to spend another 125 you know, billion dollars in the next few years on AI things, right? So that's different, right? Trish 27:56 I think that's the big displacement, but yeah, because I think it's frustrating to me again, you and I work in this field, so we're talking about with a full understanding of what AI really is, and the various types of AI, right? But I think when you just think about the main stream listener worker who isn't doing this every day, isn't researching every day, what you hear on TV, or I was just listening to a podcast. There's a St. Louis show called The Dave Glover Show, and I literally want to call in because to hear the three people on the podcast every day talking about, and this is on KMOX. This is a radio show in St. Louis, listened to by, I'm sure, tons and tons of listeners. I still listen to it, and I'm in Colorado. The way they talk about what AI is, and how it is not predictive, and it cannot make recommendations, and they're thinking it's just like asking Google, like, "Hey, what's the temperature? And then it gives you the answer, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is not it. This is not so. I think there's a huge difference. Steve 29:03 Maybe you should become their expert contributor there on the show. Trish 29:06 I seriously want to call them, and I'm not an expert. I mean, like, I don't think of myself as an expert, but I guess we, we are, because we do research this, we talk about it, we know the differences. And so, my point being, though, if the average worker, whether you are an entry-level employee all the way up to a CEO, right? If the workers who are not working in a technology field, where you are learning about AI specifically in the various types, I think that the word that's getting out about it is not accurate. If you watch, you know, I sit and watch sometimes with my parents the morning shows, pick one, NBC, ABC, it doesn't matter, the way they talk about it, it truly is like robots are taking your jobs, so I think there's a disconnect, I think AI is getting a bad rap, yes, there are companies, it's business, there are companies that are going to cut a ton of people to fund technology, because they have to. It's business, but the workers need to figure out that just because you can go into Chat GPT and say give me a recipe that uses, you know, beef and tomatoes and pasta, that's not the kind of AI we're talking about, when it comes to workplace, right. We're talking about agentic AI that's going to actually change the way people work, and that people are approaching their work and elevating their work. And I think that's very different. And I think in the movie, to tie it kind of back in, that's the kind of threat there is, so if you look at the bumbling Andy character, I'm sorry, if I'm Miranda, I'm firing her today, not because of AI, but because I want competent people to come to work with a good attitude and get shit done. So I guess I've always been that way since 24 I don't know, but maybe that's why I had trouble enjoying the movie, because I was just like, 'Fire her. What are we doing? Steve 31:09 Yeah, and I think, too, like I think I think we're will yet to see, probably. And I'm sure it's coming that will be in the next couple years kind of a mainstream, whether it's a book or a movie or TV show, there'll be something that more accurately captures this AI tension in workplaces, and maybe, maybe it's out there now, and I just don't know about it, but I think we're not, this movie doesn't really get there either, because it's, it's not central to the movie, it's part of it, but there is one other thing in this movie I do want to talk about before we wrap. Okay, which I thought was interesting, and it was some commentary I read about the movie as well before I prepping for the show, which is kind of really a commentary a little bit about where we call it maybe a double standard, a little bit, that we often have in workplaces, particularly with women leaders, and how similar behaviors, similar attitudes, similar styles of leadership in a male leader, a man, a man leader, and a woman leader are treated and considered very, very differently, right? Like, and I love your thoughts on that, and also just this little bit about, about like, like, are women judged unfairly, both for that, but also for kind of this. I'm, I love my, you know, Meryl Streep talks towards the end of the movie about, don't you love this? I, we, I love this, isn't I love work, I, you know, you don't really hear in kind of entertainment pop culture too much of that, or even just on the business news, right, from from women leaders all that much, that's kind of an attitude in a position much more assigned, if you will, to to men to men in the workplace. I'd love your thoughts on just kind of the gender dynamics that play out in this movie. Trish 33:13 Yeah, you're.. I'm glad you called that out. Just speaking with some, we'll just say very high-level executive women this week, in fact, some who have children, some who don't, and we were kind of just recounting the changes over the last 20 years, oddly enough, and you know, I feel like there is still the traditional roles, male-female roles, that are expected, good or bad, right? I love being a mom, and all the things that go with that. However, I love work. I really, really love work. I love being creative. I love having someone think that my opinion matters. I love that someone might do something differently in their own work because of something that I teased out in their, in their brain, you know. So, being around a lot of women executives this week, but also a lot of male executives, it was interesting to me that even after being in the workforce for, I was looking back, next year will be 30 years for me working in like bigger executive jobs, right, and a lot still hasn't changed, a lot of business is still the the guys club back padding and glad handing, and we're just all kumbayaing as men, and I just want to say, for anybody listening, like, you are not like that, you are one of the most inclusive leaders I've ever come into contact with, and that's before we work together, so I know of you at other companies, so I'm not saying all men are this way, I'm not a man hater, but for the one. Steve 34:53 I am, I'm a bit of a man hater myself. Trish 34:56 Right, but if you're being honest, a lot of work still gets done when one executive guy talks to another executive guy, and there's some handshaking and some fat padding, and we don't have that as women, we don't get that, and if we speak up, if we complain at all, or if we act that way, if we act that way, we're horrible, we're bitches. So, there's an element there still, and women have to, you have to watch where you speak up and who you speak up to, and I just don't see that men are having that same constraint. So, in this particular movie, bringing it back to that, you know, Miranda, I kind of feel sad. I'm, and as a former HR person, I'm sad that she's been gotten on to by HR for making someone hang up her coat. You know what? Like, to me, that's not that. To me, that's not that bad. And so it shows that if a woman wants her assistant to hang up her coat, that's not okay, but if a male boss wants to put his hands around your waist and tell you how tiny and cute you are, HR stays away from that, like, oh, we don't want to talk about that, because that guy's a rainmaker, he's bringing in millions of dollars. Steve 36:18 Well, I'm gonna just say, if you're, if you're a man in a workplace, who does that kind of nonsense, like you deserve a punch in a punch in the throat and... Trish 36:26 A promotion? Steve 36:27 ...and a kick out the door, because you're fired. Trish 36:30 Let's be real, that's not how it occurs. I know, I won't say who, but a very well-respected woman in our industry was giving me a story, she worked in professional services, like I did, and she gave me that story, and I said I'm sure HR did nothing about that, and she said, no, not a thing, not a thing. Steve 36:48 I want to come back to that, Trish 36:49 It irritates me. Steve 36:50 on another show, or maybe people do some, we'll do some more on it, maybe in the back half of this year. I want to, I want to circle back on some of these topics a little bit more, because I think they're really interesting, and ones that I think we need to talk about more here in other places too. I do think, yeah, the last thing I'd say was that the film kind of gets its emotional kind of pinnacle, if you will, through the efforts of these women leaders and women professionals, right. It's, it's almost exclusively through their intellectual ability, their cleverness, their work capacity, all the things, right, that that sort of culminates in the movie, and sort of how it ends, and I thought that was that was a good message too, right, like, like... Trish 37:51 Oh, for sure. Steve 37:52 and I think maybe a smaller message, but one I took away, like I think, despite all of this, despite having to overcome a lot of obstacles, including, right, just the some of the just the standard workplace sexism stuff that you're talking about, right, that that these folks show that that they could rise above all that. I shouldn't have to rise above it, but they do. Trish 38:17 Yeah. Steve 38:17 I think I said I liked this movie a lot more, probably after talking about it for 37 minutes, probably even than I did. I liked it initially too, probably worth a rewatch, right? To pick up some of these subtle foods, I would look.. I'd encourage people to check it out if you haven't seen it yet. Trish 38:35 Absolutely. Steve 38:35 If you like the first one, you'll like this one, and even if you know you're kind of middle on it. I mean, we don't get as kind of world of work type people. I mean, this movie is almost entirely about work, right? Steve 38:36 It's not like you can pick, we're not even talking about three or four scenes, right? This whole movie is a workplace movie, and there's elements we didn't even we didn't talk about, like, the Nepo baby things, where we didn't talk about some of the conniving and the scheming, and kind of the, you know, the, you know, invisible labor, the people behind the scenes keeping organizations held together, they get no credit. We didn't talk about that, you know, burnout, hustle culture, right? There's a whole element there, we could talk like this movie is a workplace movie, that's why it's in the workplace movie hall of fame, and it is why I was glad we were able to see it and to talk about it today. Trish 39:31 No, and I think you're right. After talking about it with you, I definitely am seeing things a little differently. I just, I'll just say, I mean, like I said, the top of it, I, I think from the trailers, when you see Miranda, I think on the elevator next to Andy, and they're both dressed, you know, pristinely and very professionally, and I guess in my world going into it, I was really hoping that not that Andy would become Miranda's character but, a little bit. I was hoping to see that there would be growth as you change and evolve, and, but I will say this, it made me think about work in a whole different way than I had been thinking, which is really the point of going to a movie, right? It's to, it's to spark something in you that makes you even question your own existence. Steve 40:21 Yeah. Trish 40:21 And how you approach the world, so yeah, it also can we just say it's gorgeous clothing, it's, you know. Steve 40:29 Great clothing. Trish 40:30 Fashion shows, and all of the.. and I, we didn't even talk about Emily Blunt's character, I mean, I just love her as an actor. Steve 40:35 We didn't really didn't even get to her but she has an important part in the movie as well. The villain if you will, if there is a villain, there's really two, and they're both like tech bros, if you will. One. Trish 40:48 Yeah. Steve 40:49 real tech bro type, you know, Jeff Bezos type-ish character, and the other one more of like that Nepo baby kind of idea, right? The son of the wealthy owner of the business, also kind of a jerk, and it's fitting, maybe, right, too, with what's going on in the world of business at this time. Trish 41:08 The Miranda character that was the big villain in the first one suddenly isn't the big villain in the second one. Steve 41:17 All right, I think that's it. We probably talked 40 minutes on the movie, the movie is longer than 40 minutes, but I, Trish 41:23 Not much. Steve 41:24 Probably two hours, but go check it out. Devil Wears Prada two, still in theaters, probably by the time you hear this, or when it starts streaming, definitely. Trish 41:33 You know, if you're on the fence, stream it. Steve 41:34 Stream it, let us know what you think. I liked it a lot, and it was great fodder for the podcast today. So, good stuff. Trish this was super fun. Trish 41:42 Yeah, I'm glad we did it. And for anyone listening, be sure and send us your suggestions. We do these at least once a quarter. We'd love to have another movie. It can be older, could be more current. I kind of like the current ones, if I'm being honest, you know. So gives us something that's very relevant right now to talk about work. So yeah, all right. Thanks, Steve. Steve 42:03 Thanks to our friends at Workhuman, of course. Thanks for listening. Go check out all the archives, HRHappyhour.net. All the shows are on YouTube as well, and everywhere you get your podcast. So that's it. My name is Steve Boese, for Trish Steed. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai