Brace yourselves: The Chad & Cheese Podcast is back, this time with retired Lieutenant General Russell L. Honoré—who proves you can train and lead half a million troops and drop some epic truth bombs on HR, AI, and America’s obsession with cheap stuff.
In this spicy episode, we cover:
HR Meets Boot Camp: General Honoré schools us on why leading people isn’t about asking, “You’re good, right?” and walking off like a clueless middle manager.
Robots Can’t Cook Gumbo: Automation might make life easier, but it’s not making you a killer bowl of Cajun deliciousness—or fixing that flat tire you’re whining about.
Recruitment Woes: From the Army’s “12 teeth rule” (yes, you read that right) to recruiting Gen Z kids glued to their phones, the General doesn’t hold back on what needs fixing.
Boomers vs. Gen Z: Growing up poor meant fixing TVs with tinfoil and watching The Lone Ranger without a picture. Now? Kids need a new flat screen if the remote has dust on it.
Mental Health Wake-Up Call: Spoiler alert: If your employee mentions seeing floating elephants, maybe don’t just tell them to get back to work.
Sprinkled with Honoré’s signature wit, biting honesty, and a dose of “adapt-or-die” wisdom, this episode delivers laughs, snark, and some much-needed perspective on leadership in a rapidly changing world.
Strap in, folks—it’s time to break things (figuratively) and rebuild smarter.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Podcast Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad & Cheese podcast.
Joel: All right, let's do this. We are The Chad & Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel Cheeseman.
Joel: Joined as always, Chad Sowash is in the house, and we are privileged to be chatting with retired Lieutenant General Russell L. Honoré. General, welcome to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast.
General Honoré: We'll see.
[laughter]
Joel: Yes, we will. It's a very low bar in HR for danger. Your level of danger is much different than ours.
General Honoré: Y'all have grown up a level where you can associate HR with being dangerous and humorous. That's normally not associated with HR.
Joel: They don't.
Chad: Which is, yeah, which is why we stick out, which is why we stick out, yeah. So, being a general, US Army, there's a lot to do. You cover a lot of different bases. Today, you talked a lot about HR, 'cause obviously you're in an HR compliance kind of conference, but you felt at home in talking about all of those different things. In coming up through the military, how much did you actually have to deal with personnel, HR, those types of things?
General Honoré: Because the Army is about people.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: They get paid minimum wage, that swear and to defend and support and defend the Constitution. That work for about $12 an hour, get deployed all around the world, get their ass shot at.
Chad: I know.
General Honoré: I have to move frequently. So, the Army's about people.
Chad: Yeah, and you moved 25 times, didn't you?
General Honoré: It's about mission.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: It's about being on a damn team. So, yeah, I mean, I'm comfortable in this space, not that I know what civilian HR do any more than what I picked up in my graduate courses, but it parallels, it deals with the issues of people, whereas a mission commander, it starts with the people, end with the people.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: If you don't get a mission accomplished and the information that's coming to you from being with the troops, watching the troops, listening to your grapevine, you got your chaplain, you got your sergeant major, you got your NCOs, and then I've always practiced leading by walking around and asking the soldier, how's it going? Then shut your damn mouth and listen.
General Honoré: Or how you doing? Whereas I saw a lot of my contemporaries, how you doing? You're doing good, right?
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: Well, they answer the old question.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: They're not interested. They ask the question out of...
Chad: They're leading it in the witness.
General Honoré: Right. How's the child? Good, right? As opposed to, how's the food?
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: How's your room? And listening, and you get a pretty good feel for what's going on in your unit because if you're listening, the troops will tell you.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: I mean, as I said, we asked a lot for them to raise their right hand and support and defend the Constitution of the United States and we're prepared to put them in jail if they don't do it.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: But they do it willingly, at minimum wage, in the outdoors, all weather condition. So you better hell to know people if you're gonna be an effective leader in the Army and you better hell respect your people.
Chad: So one thing real quick, when you were your highest command, how many soldiers were under you at that point?
General Honoré: We were training and mobilizing a half million troops a year.
Chad: Half million troops, okay, so...
General Honoré: And over about four years.
Chad: Okay.
General Honoré: It was every National Guard and Reserve unit that got mobilized or went through sustainment training. We did it in First Army, that was our mission.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: And my ultimate mission was to respond to disasters like Katrina.
Chad: Right.
General Honoré: But my day job as First Army Commander was preparing troops to mobilize and deploy.
Chad: So as you say, going down to talk to the troops, I know, 'cause I was one of those little E2, E3s and the general come down and talk to us.
General Honoré: Yeah.
Chad: You think of it on the CEO side, 'cause you're the CEO of that company at that point, right? As a brigade, battalion, or battalion brigade. That's scary, right? You really don't wanna say anything that's gonna screw up your day, right? How did you get personable enough to get real with that soldier, knowing that you were the CEO and they are literally just entry-level maybe two, three years in? How did you make that personal connection? 'cause that's important.
General Honoré: Remember you were young and inexperienced at one time.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: And how can you connect with that soldier? One of the days I would say, where are you from? What would come out of your towel? Football players cowboys. Just a couple of leading questions. To get to the soldier, to talk about them. And you can see some that will stay away from that because they didn't wanna tell you. They may be embarrassed that they came from a very poor or very humble, but most of them will tell you. Mom, a single mom with four kids. I was the oldest one and I decided to come in the Army so I could help out. And that's okay. I mean, I was poor, came from a family of 12, but I think that gives you an attribute. And I see in a lot of kids compared to, when you're poor, you learn how to fix shit.
Chad: Yes, you do.
General Honoré: So you learn how to adapt. Like when I was growing up, we initially had two TVs, one with sound, one with a picture. And the youngest and the dumbest would hold the aluminum on the antenna so we could watch the Long Ranger. You adapt and overcome. You walk in the room now and the kid will say, hey, we need a new TV.
General Honoré: There's no picture. Shit, we watch TV all the time with no picture 'cause you couldn't get a... You just listen.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: It's not like you couldn't figure out Long Ranger's about to pop somebody in the ass, you know what I mean? You just listen.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: You adapt 'cause the story is still there.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: It's either that or listen to the crickets on the front porch. But we come from a generation... I come from the boomers raised by the greatest generation who were raised by the silent generation. The silent generation was some hard song bitches, boy. They were born in the pandemic in World War I, survived that, survived the depression and fought World War II.
Chad: Obstacle, after obstacle, after obstacle.
General Honoré: So you don't tell the silent generation like, well, I think I need two tires. I need a whole set of tires for my car to walk out. They say, boy, you need one goddamn tire. That's all you need I mean. Oh, you don't tell them, well I had a flat tire, I need a new set. No, they say, hey, let's fix this. Let's take that tire off, we're gonna fix it. Same thing with the greatest generation. Would you walk up to a Gen Z and say, what's the problem? I need new tires. Why? 'Cause I got a flat. Well, bullshit. I was raised by the greatest. Let's go fix the one tire.
General Honoré: Then we'll go from there. But it's a different how each generation adapted and the impact it made on society. And as a boomer, the greatest generation, they didn't have much patience for you 'cause what the hell are you complaining about?
Chad: Oh, it feels like the boomers, we were raised by boomers, so it feels like that's kind of like my dad didn't have much patience.
General Honoré: No, we put a case of whoop-ass on you. We'd put you in the back of the station wagon with no seatbelt on and smoke a god damn cigar while we were driving down the road. We didn't give a shit. We drank too much, cursed too much.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: We'll tell you to go take your ass outside and come back when it get dark.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: Or when we turn the light on, you can come in. Go find something to do, drink out of a hose. Go find something. We ain't giving you no god damn cold drink, you know?
Chad: You're clearly a fan of people and you made a comment about automation that you're not such a fan. I think it was something around a robot can't make a good bowl of gumbo. What are your thoughts on automation and where the world is going with more automated tools and AI?
General Honoré: I think we gotta adapt. The first 10 years ago, everybody was pissy as hell about the robot, the robot taking the job. Well, the robot didn't take nobody's job. They made something, they made something better and they made some things quicker, but we're still standing. There's a lot of... I could take you back a generation and tell you what technology. When you look at the Ninth Ward that was all destroyed during Katrina, all those poor houses, every four houses empty. And one time the Ninth Ward was a middle-class neighborhood because it was a longshoreman.
Chad: Okay.
General Honoré: They got paid well, but it was all brick, bolt, freight then. Pallets, big bags. Then along came the container. When the container arrived, it destroyed the Ninth Ward. The guy lost his job.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: That's a clear case where technology didn't bend and it broke it.
Chad: Decimated the entire class.
General Honoré: And by the time Katrina came, all those guys had aged out and the kids and grandkids owned their homes and they couldn't take care of them properly.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: Multiple heirs to the property. But when I was 12 years old, it was a straight up middle-class neighborhood. People had cars, they had a grocery store in every corner, a barbershop and a deli and garage. It was a functional community.
General Honoré: And by the time Katrina hit, it was one out of every four houses were abandoned because when that economy transitioned and left them in the city of New Orleans, when they transitioned the port, they tried to go to a tourist economy. That's how we ended up with the Superdome. That's how we ended up with the convention center and had the World City Fair thing here.
General Honoré: When you go from a job, union job with benefits to their kids being in the entertainment field, either playing music or working in hospitality, putting them drinks out, cooking.
Chad: More commercial.
General Honoré: Those are minimum few benefits.
Chad: Right.
General Honoré: And it changed the community. So when you go from that as an example, when we modernize the ports, to go to containers where you do the same thing all with machines where you had 50 men, you might have two spotting the machine and the thing go about. We've done okay with that because it reduced the cost of ship and handling a product. And we like cheap shit. America like cheap shit.
Chad: Oh, yeah.
Joel: We do.
General Honoré: We don't care where the shit come from long as it's the cheapest stuff we can buy. We like it. And when the robot came up, there was a lot of discussion about how many people it was gonna take.
General Honoré: Well, I've been in automobile assembly line still a lot of people out there working. But what they're doing now is they're doing all the sub-assembly breakdown 'cause that shit's arriving in America already made, but it got to be unpacked. So where you lost people at $25 an hour, you got five working at $18 an hour.
General Honoré: Less skilled, but you got... And then you got to seal the packing and send it back because it's not cost effective if you don't use it again. So the robots doing the tap, tap, tap, but to get that robot to do that, all that stuff has got to be in place for multiple countries and multiple packaging. Some of it's plastic, some of it's cardboard, some of it's all kinds of stuff.
General Honoré: And all that has to be put back in the container and sent back to make the business profitable. So we go now to AI, which is more of a knowledge based thing. And I don't pretend to be an expert on it, but basically it's just a collection of word salad of information. And it's a pretty damn good job. You went into CP Chat and said, tell me about this chat group, this HR chat box. It'll put some shit out about you.
Chad: Easily, yeah.
General Honoré: And all it's done is it's done a collection of adjective, verbs, and pronouns.
Chad: And it's made contextual sense out of it. So you sit on boards, correct me if I'm wrong, boards of companies, and you obviously advise CEOs and boards and whatnot. So what are you seeing out there now with the landscape? Obviously the election's coming and a lot of people are waiting and they're kind of on pins and needles to see what the hell happens. But beyond that, what do you see in the landscape when it comes to business? Is it as robust as we're being told?
General Honoré: I'm not quite sure I understand your question. Say it again.
Chad: So the economy.
General Honoré: The economy, okay.
Chad: Right. And you're talking to these CEOs and whatnot and getting vibes from them on what's actually happening. Some are telling us that literally, we're waiting for all hell to break loose or the dam to burst. One or the other, depending on who get...
General Honoré: Okay, let's start at the top of the food chain.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: The stock market is just continuing to grow.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: And value to investors. It's only done in a pretty secure environment where people feel pretty secure about investing in it and continue to bring value. I think some of our... During COVID, we went through this with all the essential workers and what happened when they did show up. Let's say a food chain. It was always screw them. We'll pay them $12. What happens when they don't show up, bro?
Chad: And we saw what happened. Pie chain got busted.
General Honoré: So you see all over town now, you see food chains that pay you $17 an hour to go flip burgers. I think what it is, it takes you 22 to break even in the economy.
Chad: Yeah, depending on where you're at.
General Honoré: And then that's even short, yeah. So you go... I went to Popeye's last night and bought a couple dirty rice, what they call ke six fucking dollars.
General Honoré: And that's ridiculous. You can buy a whole chicken for $6. And this is just rice with chicken livers in it.
Joel: Popeye's is good, but it's not that good.
General Honoré: I'm I right? They are good. So they have said, well, we're gonna pay our workers more and we gonna pass the price on. And that's fair enough. But the price of fast food and it's starting to buy them, it don't make sense for people to pay $8 a night. There's people like me that remember... When the hamburger was 50 cents.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: Now we paying $3 for a plain hamburger at McDonald's.
Chad: You're lucky.
General Honoré: Wait a minute.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: It is not correlating.
Chad: Yeah. That's what happens when we...
General Honoré: People are starting to back off from them.
Chad: Yeah. When we have a McDonald's on every show, on every corner, that's what happens.
General Honoré: You look at the big wall or the big drug stores. They're closing them. Some of them are left and right. And you say, but when they were building all of 'em, did it make sense to put 'em a mile apart? Who the fuck was thinking about that?
Chad: Right across the street from each other. Yeah.
General Honoré: But you go back and you figure out them. Somebody was grabbing real estate. They were grabbing real estate. They bought out the competition, in some cases all they were doing was grabbing real estate and now they sat on prime corners. And every small, now I saw that they gonna close a thousand stores. They cash it out on real estate, moving that product to, they have four stores in the town. They'll go to two, sell the real estate. So as a part of the market, I don't understand, but back to AI, I'm not afraid of it. Wish I knew more about it. But as with all emerging technologies, humans adapt to 'em. It's like there's a story we told used to tell about change. The guy who made buggy whips made the best buggy whips and carriages in New York and England. And people would order them from all over the country. Then Henry Ford come out with the goddamn car and he see, so Charles, you need to adjust your prices on how many buggies and buggies you continue to make. He was a tycoon. They had to take up money to bury him. 'Cause he wouldn't change. He kept building them. He wouldn't change. They had to take up money in the family of the bury him.
Chad: But we've always been taught, and I heard different today that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And we're in a different age, which is.
General Honoré: Then they broke. You gotta fix it. You gotta break it.
Chad: Yeah. You gotta break it, right? If it ain't broke, break it.
General Honoré: Break it.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: Because you gotta keep up with change... You can't act like people are not sensitive to what they get their paid and their benefits. And you got, some companies are real asshole. They're pushing people out in their 50s, 'cause that's when women get sick all of a sudden, hey, we are zeroing your position out. The fuckers know that she's subject to breast cancer or, and that's the kinda stuff that scare me when AI might pull up, is people that might have some co-mobilities 'cause they go after women like that. Now, did this eliminate their position because that drags out the cost that they gotta co-pay.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: And them fuckers are doing that left in right now. And your non-union soft skill jobs like education, medical and that's the piece that scare me where they can use AI and screen out. By the time this employee gets 60, they need to be gone because of coming to co-mobilities. Or by the time they get 45. And the way we do it, we eliminate the job.
Joel: I've always been fascinated, I'll let you out on this. Recruiting is hard. Recruiting for a job that you might die is particularly hard.
Chad: Especially hard. Yeah.
Joel: What is the military secret sauce to recruit young men to come work for them?
General Honoré: The greatest story we had is connecting with a young person who, uncle, father, brother, mom was in the military. They're already sold by the time we get 'em, the majority of our recruits come from somebody was in the family, was in the military.
Joel: This guy.
Chad: So the thing though is that the army has been missing their recruiting targets, right? So that's how we used to do things, right? And we need to break it. How do we break it? That's the hard part.
General Honoré: You know what the standard was for World War II to be in the Army?
Chad: Probably not much of one.
General Honoré: You had to have 12 fucking teeth.
[laughter]
General Honoré: And [0:17:14.9] ____ a World War.
Joel: Are you serious? That that was it. 12 teeth.
General Honoré: Yeah. Didn't have to read to be able to see, but your dental plan is you had to have at least 12 teeth.
Chad: And today?
General Honoré: It's like you gotta have high school diploma, pass the GT and no fat on your ass. You gotta be able to do run and do so many pushups. And I said for years the Army Bill Soldier.
Chad: Yes.
General Honoré: So you give me a kid that so weight, no problem.
Chad: I'll knock 40 pounds off his ass on heartbeat.
General Honoré: We'll deal with that.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: But they weren't taking them because they were overweight or they couldn't do 50 pushups. That's so we teach.
Chad: We're being too selective is what you're saying. There's no reason.
General Honoré: A head up in the air.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: The economy was bad. The COVID hit people, retracted kids graduate on Zoom and shit. They lost that connection. The recruiters lost some contact. They stopped listening to grandpa's story. All that kind of made a dip. All that made a dip. And I said, hey, we built soldiers. I don't give a fuck what kind of shape they in. If they got a willing mind, we'll take 'em. We'll work with 'em...
General Honoré: What kind of kid gonna sign up to you and say, I'm gonna submit to you in pre-basic training with the promise. If I make it to it, I'm gonna allow you to put me in 22 more weeks of hell. Without a phone, without my girlfriend, without my wife, without my car. I want that some bitch.
Chad: Oh. Yeah. And it is one I the best public service program we have in the United States today because we take a bunch of these kids. I was one of 'em. 18 years old, six days out of high school. I was at base training?
General Honoré: We're still doing dumb shit.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: Oh, you smoke marijuana. You shouldn't have come. Get the fuck outta here, man.
General Honoré: We had to get to drink a quarter whisk every night and you gonna tell his kid if you smoke marijuana, he can't come in the fucking Army. Fuck you.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: And they started that. Oh well, can we get the three urinalysis test to make sure stand still yet. Get the fuck past it. Half of the Congress smoke weed.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: And still smoke it.
Chad: Yeah, common sense approach.
General Honoré: But you tell the kid, hey, oh, you admitted to smoking weed. Oh, we can't have you in the army.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: It was another one. I felt good last week when I was division commander, I had a major in my aviation battalion. Who investigation had started before we left, but it was an administrative thing. So he came on the career doing a good job. Then the package catch up with him, his wife submitted to the CID and the MPS, a video of him doing a homosexual act. We had to discharge that fucking major.
Chad: Why?
General Honoré: 'Cause that was a rule at the time when that was a don't ask, don't tell.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: Well, what'd he do last week? He said, Hey, fucked up. We fucked up. You can give me honorable discharge? You come back in, go apply for your veteran's benefit. But we knew what the law said.
Chad: Yeah.
General Honoré: You think I wanted to get rid of that agent?
Chad: Oh, hell no. Yeah. Does he mean...
General Honoré: I didn't know it I saw him. I'd flown with the guy I didn't fucking know. But the rule was since the shit came up with the tape and all that, because it was, but if you tell, you had to go. So, I mean, we've evolved as a nation, obviously. So that being said, when you talk about recruiting, you talking about retention, you talking about we gotta evolve in World War II. We took him in, we got em. We gotta take 'em as we got 'em.
General Honoré: These kids have been through a lot. They survived COVID. They've been through, up and down the economy. They've seen their parents go through all that fentanyl shit. That shit is that shit. Fucking police depart, man. You got three or something died. They, you know how many widows and babies and moms and dads and 300 a day.
General Honoré: And we were losing that many in a war. The country would be going crazy. We lose 20 a day of suicide and we still ain't solve that problem 'cause we don't recognize mental health as an illness. If you say, I got a 2D, okay, go ahead on Joe. Go get that two taken care of, boss. I ain't feeling good today. I'm seeing fucking little elephants floating around in the air. Well, fuck you, man. Go to your desk. Get to work. What the fuck are you talking about with elephants floating in the fucking air?
General Honoré: Fuck you, get to work. You know, I said, my knee hurt my knee playing basketball last night. I need to go say, okay. He come in and sit.
Chad: Go TMC.
General Honoré: Man, I'm not feeling well. I feel like I wanna hurt myself. Oh man. Go see the chaplain. Go see the priest. We don't recognize. All we missed the nonverbal cry for help. Why is this guy yelling and screaming at everybody? This is not him or her? What's going on here? We don't pick up on it. We don't pick up on it. And we didn't act on it.
Chad: We gotta care. And that's where, going all the way back to that first question is you're a people person. And that's where you are focused in on. So these things obviously make sense to somebody like you, but a lot of people who only care quarter to quarter profits to profits. They're not focusing on the people. They're just trying to focus on the profits.
General Honoré: Well, that's still their own fault. That still their own shortness and organization that spend more time on process and on procedure in people will fall short.
Joel: Well, general, it was a privilege to sit down with you today. Thank you for your service. That was retired Lieutenant General Russell Honoree, Chad. That's another one in the can.
Chad: We out.
Joel: We out.
Chad: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? Podcast, the Chad the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs to people you don't even know. And yet you're listening it's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one cheddar blue nacho, Pepper Jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any who, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or whatever. You listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.jetcheese.com. Just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese is so weird. We out.