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Hey, what's up Toby?

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We are on to podcast number nine of Process Debt.

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The thing that that makes me think of first is that we almost have a top 10.

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Oh my gosh.

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Or a bottom 10.

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Yeah.

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I like it.

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We got a bell curve.

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I always like to tell people like, you know, in that profession, half the people are below

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average.

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That's right.

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If you know, they think about it and then they're like, hey, that's right.

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That is not the topic we're talking about today.

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Today we want to talk about, you know, our friend, my close friend.

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I don't even know.

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Elon Musk.

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He is all...

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I could, we should put him on our list of who we should invite.

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Right.

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And by the way, I got shut down.

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I invited someone as a guest and he said no.

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So we are even more official than we've ever been.

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That's right.

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We're on a real podcast until somebody has blatantly said, of course I can't join you.

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Or would I want to?

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And so much like Grabs and Marks, you know, we don't want to be part of any club that

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would have us anyway.

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So yeah.

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So Elon Musk, he is all the rage.

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I think he is, he is very brilliant in some ways and not so much in others, but he, he

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actually has kind of the way that he goes to business is, and he has five steps.

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And so I want to talk through the five steps and just discuss those specifically around

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him heading into government.

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Yes.

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And the challenges that he's going to have.

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And so his, his five tenants of just taking on something is remove dumb process.

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That's step one.

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So this one's tuned sounds very specifically for government.

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So yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Step two, delete steps.

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Yes, please.

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Okay.

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Right.

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Absolutely.

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Step three, simplify or optimize.

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What's ironic is that we're three steps in and I don't hear anything about automate yet.

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No, no counterintuitive.

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Probably it's the first folks.

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So I'm not expecting.

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Okay.

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Keep going.

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So yeah, four is accelerate.

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Yeah.

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So once you, once you've simplified everything, just move as fast as you can.

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And then number five, the last step is automate.

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Isn't that interesting?

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Finally some automation.

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Well, so what Chris, I think I love the list and I, like many of our listeners, you know,

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from the Brussels to the Philippines are probably equally confused about like, why is he such

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a contentious character when these drips of them are also perfectly aligned.

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So setting aside the debates on Elon, let's talk about what does that look like?

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I mean, we've seen the outcome of these steps being executed.

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What do you think then?

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No, well, I think it's really interesting because these work very well in business.

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Yeah.

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When you have all the authority to do whatever you want.

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If you want to do the, the billionaire's version of hold my beer, let's go by Twitter and see

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what happens.

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You can do that.

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It's good to be Uber wealthy.

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It's taken away from this latest election cycle.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So let's, let's, I'm going to go through the list rapid, rapid phase and then let's, let's

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just talk about maybe the buzzsaw that he's going to run into, which is, is processed

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step up, but by design by the, by our founders.

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But first one is make processes less dumb.

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Speed steps is two, simplify and optimize is three, accelerate once you've simplified

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and then once you've, once you can accelerate, then automate.

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So I think it's going to be very interesting to watch Elon walk into a structure that he

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is not used to and doesn't have the authority to change.

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Chris, let me ask you, cause you know, here we are young middle-aged guys, just on the

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30 something plus side of things.

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We've lived with these dumb processes, you know, with taxes or trying to navigate health

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insurance or, you know, any of the myriad of rules, you know, renewing your driver's

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license, but now we have a brand new and improved driver's license that you can go by for absolutely

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no reason, but because we required it.

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Not that I have any energy around that, but I'm getting on a flight later today, so it's

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top of mind.

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So what happens when, which of these processes would you like for him to begin with making

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it less dumb?

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If, if it was feasible, because I think you're alluding to this idea that lacking the authority

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that he exercises elsewhere, dear sweet Elon might be in for a shot.

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Yeah, I think the hardest part is it's easy to say I want to reduce taxes.

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Yeah.

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Or lose weight.

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It's hard.

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Yeah.

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Oh yeah.

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Weight.

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It's, it's, you just, you know, you just get a different scale that weighs differently.

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You just change it to kilograms.

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That's what you do.

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But I think it's really easy to say, Hey, let's, let's go and let's cut X, Y, Z. Yeah.

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Until you actually figure out what that means.

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Yeah.

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It, it, it's actually very difficult.

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I think it's a very hard problem.

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I, you know, the, the idea of, so we'll make the process less dumb, I think is a totally

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legitimate challenge.

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And if we did nothing else on the list, if we, if we asked elected officials just to

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make things less dumb, we're going to put a whole bunch of CPAs on the street.

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And I don't care what the tax rate is, just make it a flat tax for everybody.

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Yeah.

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Right.

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And I'm sure that, you know, ones of our listeners is going to take issue with that, but yeah,

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let's do that.

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And half the country's already on universal healthcare.

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So let's just do that.

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If we did those things, oh my God, what are we going to do with all the insurance brokers

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and CPAs that we just put out of work?

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Yeah, it'd be huge here, right?

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It'd be huge.

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And the other challenge is like to make stuff less dumb.

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Yeah.

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Takes a lot of time.

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Oh, especially when you have two centuries of policies, two centuries of rules, two centuries

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of legal precedents, like to unwind that stuff, you just don't unwind it quickly.

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And so, and you know, and our, our, our presidents have four years of which the first two years

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is figuring out how stuff works.

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The next two is trying to figure out how do I get back in?

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And it's, and stuff isn't getting simpler.

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It's not like they run to the president and say, Hey, look, here's an easy question.

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Here's an easy problem for you to solve.

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Yeah.

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Those are all, those are all solved.

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Good news, bad news.

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Those of all are, you know, I, you know, I love these steps and, and whether we're talking

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about, you know, the, the, what's preparing to happen on the national stage or if we're

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even doing our own local businesses, that first step just to ask customer or your team,

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like what are we doing?

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It just seems dumb.

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Great place to start in terms of getting value just lying around, you know?

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Yeah.

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It's always been so shocking to me to be like, well, what do you do and why do you do that?

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And they just say, I do this and I need to do this faster.

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And they, there's, there's no idea of where this goes downstream, why they're either even

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doing it.

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I think, I think that that's what makes Elon really fascinating is he's just very curious.

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Yeah.

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And he also, he also has the courage to make hard decisions, at least in his business.

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Now that might be a little different when he gets to, you know, in the government, but

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I do think that these, these simple steps, even, even, you know, our podcast comes out

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on Friday, even if you were to take a Friday and say, what can I do that's less dumb?

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Yeah.

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What steps can I delete because they don't add value?

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One of my favorite things is, well, do we have a metric around that?

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Well, what are you going to do with the metric?

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Right?

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Yeah.

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Like, great.

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You got a metric, but are you, are you going to make decisions off the metric?

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No, you're just going to alleviate some stress in your head because you now have a metric,

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you know?

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And then once you've deleted steps and you've got rid of all the dumbness, then, then optimize,

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then simplify, then, then reduce and then go fast and then automate.

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And I think what's, what I've done in my career just too many times is let's over engineer

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and let's over automate something that isn't going to be done.

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I'm not going to be doing the same thing in three years.

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Yeah.

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No, yeah.

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I've spent an enormous amount of time trying to simplify what was originally just kind

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of a stop gap.

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Yeah.

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You know?

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One of my favorite stories is the, the multi-generations of this is how we cook a ham.

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Yeah.

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And my grandmother always cut both ends off of it.

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And so the question becomes, why do we cut the ends off the ham and throw it away?

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It has nothing to do with cooking it.

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It's that great grandma had a pan that was too damn small.

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So there you go.

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Yeah.

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And I feel like that's a little bit of what we're talking about here.

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We have 200 years of history and rules and design that were built in a pre-technology

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age.

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And so that idea of fair and equal representation, you know, there's a whole debate that I'm

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not going to get into around electoral college.

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And I've seen the arguments for why it creates value.

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But the fact that every single human in our country could readily raise a hand in favor

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of one choice or another and represent that today, not on X of course, because that's

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just a message.

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But on, you know, like on InstaBook or Snapface or something, we're so far beyond what the

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founders had originally thought about representation and voice.

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And so I'll be fascinated.

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Yeah.

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And political leanings aside, I think we would all vote for a less cumbersome government.

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Yeah.

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Right.

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Something that is more straightforward.

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But I do wonder, you know, part of the his magic and so many of these folks is that they

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have a reality distortion field that they've got turned up to 11.

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And so it'll be interesting to see how that collides with, you know, long standing bureaucracy

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and self interest.

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So well, it's interesting.

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Like I saw something on it on LinkedIn and we'll kind of wrap it up here.

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But I saw something on LinkedIn where it was like, hey, here's the new CEO, CTO, CTO, blah,

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blah, blah, blah, blah of the company of the nation.

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And I'm like, do we really want a CEO and a CEO and a CTO?

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Do we really want that in a nation?

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Because I continually am being pressed for what do we deliver today?

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And by design, government is not what do we deliver today, but how do we basically, I

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mean, the system's beautiful in that you have a Congress that spins over really quick and

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you have the Senate that spins over really slow and you have a judiciary that's even

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slower than that.

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And so by design, it prevents us from doing stupid, irrational things of which I think

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is kind of at core of process debt is just the predictably irrational.

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Yeah.

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You almost sound like you're arguing for the value of the process debt that we've accumulated.

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I think it makes, you know, it kind of goes back to a couple episodes where we talked

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about, you know, debt has a purpose.

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And if the purpose makes sense, I just think it will be really interesting to watch Elon

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bump into that.

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And what you see even with most presidents that they start off with their domestic policy

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because they've got to answer all their promises of their, you know, their pre-election.

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Yeah.

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And what happens is generally they will move towards domestic policy because they don't

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have oversight.

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And so you see that in almost every single presidency where they're trying to, you know,

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they want to lower taxes because that's what they said when they were campaigning.

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And they realize, oh shoot, I've got the Congress and the Senate that I got to go through and

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they may not agree.

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But if I go and play with Russia, no one really, like it's okay.

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I can go hang out with Kim Jong-un.

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It's cool.

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That's right.

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That's right.

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Cop what?

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Yeah.

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Well, Chris, I'm like so many of our listeners eager to see $1.99 eggs again in my lifetime.

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It may be that I sell them to myself and start raising chickens, but until then, yeah, we'll

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fire up some popcorn.

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It looks like we're just a smidge over our five minutes.

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So treat that as bonus content.

245
00:13:24,040 --> 00:13:25,040
Love it.

246
00:13:25,040 --> 00:13:26,040
All right.

247
00:13:26,040 --> 00:13:27,040
Love it, man.

248
00:13:27,040 --> 00:13:28,040
All right.

249
00:13:28,040 --> 00:13:29,040
Thanks for your time.

250
00:13:29,040 --> 00:13:30,040
See you, man.

251
00:13:30,040 --> 00:13:48,440
Question time.