Episode 110: Report: J. Lo Says ‘No’ to Hiring Virgos

Voiceover: You’re about to listen to another episode of What The Hell Just Happened?! Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss and sometimes even solve some interesting HR problems.

Paul: And… I’m gonna go off the rails sometimes and talk about whatever I want!

Tiana: Hi, Paul.

Paul: Hi Tiana! What are you going to surprise me with today?

Tiana: Oh, some hot celebrity gossip.

Paul: Ooh, I like.

Tiana: Are you ready for it?

Paul: I am.

[Tiana Laughs]

Tiana: Okay. You’ve probably seen this in the news, Paul. I don’t know if you have. Maybe you have, J. Lo. Jennifer Lopez…

Paul: Yep, know who she is.

Tiana: Okay, you know who J. Lo is. So rumor has it she…

Paul: Doesn’t she sing or something?

Tiana: Yeah, Paul. She’s like a major singer.

Paul: She does like, she dances on stage and stuff?

Tiana: She dances. She had, like, the most epic halftime show ever.

Paul: Oh! That’s right.

Tiana: That J. Lo.

Paul: That J. Lo, got it.

[Tiana laughs]

Tiana: So that J. Lo, which…

Paul: She’s actually a good actress.

Tiana: She is a good actress. Yeah.

Paul: Unpopular opinion…

Tiana: Hmm?

Paul: I don’t love her singing.

Tiana: Really?

Paul: That’s how I… Yeah. I’m just going to get that out there.

Tiana: Well, you and my dad have that in common. He’s not a J. Lo fan.

Paul: Yeah.

Tiana: Yeah, I am. Jenny from the Block. Are you kidding me? It’s a classic.

[Tiana laughs]

Paul: I mean, it is. But, you know, you play anything a thousand times an hour, and people will start tapping their toe to it. Did I just say… “tapping my toe to it”? It’s like my grandfather just took over. [Laughs]

Tiana: Let the record show that Paul has been tapping his toe to J. Lo. [Laughs]

Paul: That’s not true.

Tiana: Okay.

Paul: Wait. I’m thinking… I have a lot going on now that we started talking about J. Lo and my…and how I feel about music.

Tiana: I promise this is going to be an HR-related topic. [Laughs]

Paul: It is going to be an HR-related topic?

Tiana: Yeah, it is.

Paul: You know, I’m just saying, J. Lo… I could do without J. Lo., Melissa Etheridge…

Tiana: Mm hmm.

Paul: I recognize they’re talented. Who’s the other one? She’s really got an amazing voice. It’s a one word… What’s… she’s one word…

Tiana: Jewel?

Paul: No, I love Jewel.

[Tiana laughs]

Background voice: Adele?

Paul: Adele! Yeah.

Tiana: Adele? Not a huge fan?

Paul: Oh, yeah. I could do without…. Well, I mean, J. Lo doesn’t fall into this, but for Melissa Etheridge and Adele, I get it. You’re depressed, and you’ve had a breakup.

Tiana: Right. They’re singing from their souls.

Paul: They are… every single word of every single song they ever wrote.

Tiana: So, speaking of which, J. Lo is making decisions from the soul.

Paul: Oh! Nice. What is she?

Tiana: Well, something that we found out on a national platform this week. Okay, so, just to set the stage, this was revealed in a podcast between Heather Morris… Do you watch

Glee

? Have you ever watched

Glee

, Paul?

Paul: Okay. I admit it. I saw Glee.

Tiana: You saw Glee?

Paul: But I would never listen to a podcast about Glee.

Tiana: Okay. Well, one of the people from

Glee…

Paul: Tiana, you… okay. I just found something about Tiana. Okay. Go ahead. I’m sorry. [Laughs]

Tiana: [Laughs] The true motive of this podcast is I’m just, like, trying to find out every cranny of, like, Paul’s pop-culture knowledge.

Paul: Uh huh.

Tiana: Okay. Okay. So, Heather Morris from

Glee

, she’s on a podcast with some other dude. Justin something. I don’t know who he is, personally. Heather Morris is also a dancer, so I should just preface it with this.

Paul: Okay.

Tiana: So she’s, like, connected to the dancing community. She reveals on the podcast that through hearsay – and she admits that this is hearsay. She didn’t see it happen directly.

Paul: Ooh, so we’re spreading rumors. I like it.

Tiana: So, this is already a rumor.

Paul: Okay.

Tiana: And I should also preface, this has not been verified or refuted by J. Lo.

Paul: Uh-huh.

Tiana: But this is just what the news is.

Paul: Uh-huh.

Tiana: Heather Morris says that other dancers in the community have this story going around that apparently at an audition, J. Lo dismissed dancers actually on the basis of them being Virgos.

Paul: All right. I have a lot to say. First of all, pretext. Okay, so, if your reason for letting someone go is so ridiculous, so far-fetched that it is not believable, then it’s a good platform for saying that it’s a pretext for some other reason.

Tiana: Hmm. Good point.

Paul: And, you know, so look, from an HR point of view – downer time – I I just… especially letting go of everybody who raises their hand on the stage.

Tiana: Mm hmm.

Paul: Now, I know that it probably wouldn’t work out this way, but if everybody who raised their hand on the stage was African-American or everybody was LGBTQ or…

Tiana: Over the age of 40.

Paul: Over the age of 40 or whatever, then you need to kind of take a step back when you mass release people who you haven’t quite hired yet. And, by the way, I think this is important: they were in the interview stage for dancers.

Tiana: Completely. Yeah, yeah.

Paul: So, interview stage counts. Like, it’s not, you know, the laws that kick in to protect people kick in at that point. Now, I – it’s not a protected class. So we always look at, you know, the reason that was given, is that a protected class? So I guess in that way it’s… it’s okay but going back to be… just be… articulate the thing about pretext… pretext is someone makes the case that you use some other unrelated thing, but you had another reason for doing it.

Tiana: There is, like, another underlying agenda.

Paul: There’s another underlying… maybe some kind of protected class. Like, you know, you’re trying to figure out, “How many of you here are planning on having kids?”

Tiana: Mm hmm.

Paul: You know, just like, in the news, some kind of other pretext to figure that out.

Tiana: Yeah. That’s a really good point. Yeah. Because I think, you know, when we look at this face value, your astrological sign, it’s not a protected class. You know, just like…

Paul: It’s also not a job-related… a job-related, science-based, fact-based thing.

Tiana: Right! [laughs]

Paul: In fact, again, unpopular opinion…

Tiana: Some people might refute this… [laughs]

Paul: Some people… in this podcast! No, you know, while I got to tell you… astrology, okay. If you listened to our podcast where I have an astrophysicist on, which is one we just did recently, and so he’s not an astrologer. He’s an astronomer.

[both laugh]

Paul: He makes the point that astrology has some difficulties based in reality because things happen light years away. That means in time and distance that many of the things that people are talking about that are aligning, they’re saying, well, I mean, when you look at the moon now, that light is not…

Tiana: Not, like, current light happening.

Paul: No! No things aren’t current that you’re basing…

Tiana: We are getting really deep here into…

Paul: Positions and things on. It’s like, what’s the position from 11 million years ago that you see now. It’s moved today. It’s not where you say it is, so… Okay.

Tiana: Oh that’s – I like that nugget.

Paul: Okay. But I’m a Scorpio and I kind of fit with the… the descriptions. So, I think it’s stupid that you would use that to get people off the stage.

Tiana: Yeah.

Paul: I think it makes you not a good employer.

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