One, two, three, we're rolling.
Okay, so I've got to tell you,
I was telling my best friend
that I wanted to start a podcast.
And he said, yeah, you're not that guy.
So I'm pretty excited that you and I are kicking this off.
He said, you're not that guy.
He's like, you're not made for a podcast.
So I'm, we're recording.
So hopefully when I make it big
and make tens of dollars with my podcast.
That's right.
We'll take him to lunch or something.
That's right.
My podcast money is paid for this lunch.
I do remember being told I had a face for radio
and I thought, so you think I got a shot.
I'm a celebrity.
There you go.
It was years later before I really understood
the nature of that compliment.
So, but why a five minute podcast, Chris?
The world is full of hour long, 10 hour podcasts.
Yes.
Five minutes.
Yes.
Is this like five minutes?
Five minutes.
So basically that's about as long as it takes.
Actually, it's probably closer to 10 to 15 minutes
for my walk from my car to work.
And so we'll hit a topic and it will be good
and funny sometimes.
And other times it will be terrible
and we'll see what happens.
Nice.
I like what you did there to manage expectations.
Keep them low.
What's not.
Yeah.
Keep them low.
We know early listeners will both mostly be
like a sympathy play.
There's some sense of obligation
and we'll really lean into that empathy.
Kind of like when we took the kids around in grade school
and sold all that crap to our neighbors.
Totally.
My mom might listen, but my dad definitely won't.
I'm just kidding.
They're like, call me when you have three users
or three listeners.
I don't want to be the first.
I'm not an early adopter, but if you have three,
I'll listen.
It has to be more than Toby and your mom.
All right, fine.
We'll see what happens.
All right, well good.
So we already have a game plan
for how we're gonna get to maybe as many as five.
So I like this.
No, Chris, you and I have been talking
about something like this for a while.
And I think it's because we just,
we stumble into different things
and we both have a tendency to get wrapped around the axle
on different ideas.
And so maybe this will be a therapeutic way
to get it out of our brains.
Absolutely.
And if you and I can't find value in it,
maybe somebody else can.
Or they'll just buy us out.
Maybe somebody will launch a hostile takeover
and golden handcuff this podcast
before we get too started.
And boot us out.
I think where this kind of got started is I purchased,
and I have a habit of starting and not finishing,
but I purchased process debt because one, it was available.
And I've told a couple of friends about it.
And they're like, oh, that's so good.
Because so many people see it in their day-to-day job
and they're so tired of doing things
that they don't understand and working with things
and being like, why do we do this?
And there's no real good like focus or direction or reason.
And so I think that's kind of where this started.
You and I kicked it off.
And we're like, hey, we come from two completely
different worlds, right?
I come from the corporate world.
You come from consulting.
You've been doing consulting for a really long time.
I think you have a super strong finance background.
I'm an operations nerd.
And so maybe we can come together and make some people laugh,
make people cry when we tell them about their life.
We'll have to see what sparks the ratings.
It may not be the things we think are funny.
But I think what's really resonated with me
about the idea of process debt is that oftentimes, we've
heard tech debt and making bad choices early and not
doing the hard work upfront.
And then you're just kicking the can down the road.
And the more we've talked about over the last year, 18 months
or two years or however long decade, what I do think,
though, is that I see these forms of debt
in every facet of our lives.
And so now into my early 50s, and I think, gosh, I
have processed debt in my exercise right now.
I have processed debt in how I eat and how I sleep.
good person, I'm going to be a good person, I'm going to be a good person.
I have processed debt in how I eat and how I sleep
and in my relationships.
And it's not always equal.
But it comes back to you live an easy life and you have
hard outcomes and that's hard.
You do the hard things to make an easy life and that's hard.
There's however you choose it.
And the same is true in business.
You take the time, do it right, build good habits, and I think that's where
we start to really impact process.
That is when we think about why are we doing it and what is the habit
we're trying to build.
I think that can be as valuable as getting the process right.
Yeah, the first time.
It's kind of funny because I've told you I've kind of gotten back into running,
right, which competitive and I want to run fast.
And so I bought this really nice Garmin watch and I bought this heart,
heart monitor rate because I wanted to be like, look, well, I just want to do
a baseball on my heart rate because I think that will be better.
And my watch gives me all these metrics, just tons and tons of metrics.
And so yesterday I got running a half marathon in two weeks.
Feature rich.
Yes.
OK, nice.
All the metrics in the world.
Right.
And yesterday I'm like, I just have this wild hair where I'm like, you know what?
What if I lost 10 pounds?
Like, what would that be?
And I go to the Google sphere and they're like,
yeah, it's basically like two minutes off of your off your five K.
And I feel like we have like this happens in what happens in business all the time,
where it's like we want all the best metrics.
I want, you know, I want the I want a blood pressure cuff.
I'm going to get I'm going to get the heart rate strap.
I'm going to get the great, great watch.
And really what it comes down to, I'm too heavy to run as fast as I want to.
But wait a second, I cut the track.
But I want I was I received the year.
I want the metrics.
Give me the metrics.
You're like, we have some weight.
Let's just start there.
But anyway, like I just let me give you a story from my own life.
Dude, I am in that same vein.
You know, I know more steps is what I need to do.
I don't think I'm quite as competitive, clearly not because I'm not running.
But I'm walking and I'm like, well, I can walk faster.
I want to get the steps in, but I don't want to take as much time.
So this is why people run.
That's what I decided.
It's not because they like it.
It's because they have a certain amount of exercise and not enough time to walk it slowly.
It's awesome.
But as an ambler, I thought I'm going to really walk like a man with purpose.
And what I discovered was I'm still only walking three and a half miles an hour
when I think I'm power walking like Billy Crystal.
Like, I don't know if I need the tights.
Now I'm a little worried that I'm just too heavy.
And I have so much gravity that I'm wrestling.
But you're right. That's awesome.
Businesses deal with the same gravity.
They still think that you buy the gear and you get all the results.
But you've got to you got to suit up and get in the game.
So I think that kind of maybe lose to the kind of leads into one of the first kind of
topic areas that we want to talk about, which is the other day I posted on LinkedIn
that about knowledge work and it's something that I've told you and you're like,
well, that's really good.
But which is absolutely work has to be discoverable and it has to be transferable.
And if it's not those things like, what are you doing?
And like, I got this thought, I think I got some of it from the design of everyday
things, which is a phenomenal book on design, which is it talks about discoverability,
but that transferability.
Yeah, you think about how white developers get paid so much.
It's because the work that they do is just consistently transferred to everybody in the
org. And if you think about like, if you go to management and product managers and
project managers and different parts of the org, a lot of knowledge work is just stuck
in someone's head. And so we are over our time.
We're at, you know, we're over our five minute threshold.
So what we should do is we should pick that up for next time.
I'm excited to get these under our belt, publish them out to the world and get made
fun of by, you know, people like my best friend.
It'll be great.
That's it. That's it.
That's really it will be the envy, the bell of the ball, the not paying attention to
our own self-imposed five minute limit.
But I like that you're teasing the next episode.
Maybe this will be our most.
So those eternal optimists will continue to tune in.
Very cool. All right.
Sounds great. Thank you.