Hey, what's up Toby?
We are on to podcast number nine of Process Debt.
The thing that that makes me think of first is that we almost have a top 10.
Oh my gosh.
Or a bottom 10.
Yeah.
I like it.
We got a bell curve.
I always like to tell people like, you know, in that profession, half the people are below
average.
That's right.
If you know, they think about it and then they're like, hey, that's right.
That is not the topic we're talking about today.
Today we want to talk about, you know, our friend, my close friend.
I don't even know.
Elon Musk.
He is all...
I could, we should put him on our list of who we should invite.
Right.
And by the way, I got shut down.
I invited someone as a guest and he said no.
So we are even more official than we've ever been.
That's right.
We're on a real podcast until somebody has blatantly said, of course I can't join you.
Or would I want to?
And so much like Grabs and Marks, you know, we don't want to be part of any club that
would have us anyway.
So yeah.
So Elon Musk, he is all the rage.
I think he is, he is very brilliant in some ways and not so much in others, but he, he
actually has kind of the way that he goes to business is, and he has five steps.
And so I want to talk through the five steps and just discuss those specifically around
him heading into government.
Yes.
And the challenges that he's going to have.
And so his, his five tenants of just taking on something is remove dumb process.
That's step one.
So this one's tuned sounds very specifically for government.
So yeah, yeah, yeah.
Step two, delete steps.
Yes, please.
Okay.
Right.
Absolutely.
Step three, simplify or optimize.
What's ironic is that we're three steps in and I don't hear anything about automate yet.
No, no counterintuitive.
Probably it's the first folks.
So I'm not expecting.
Okay.
Keep going.
So yeah, four is accelerate.
Yeah.
So once you, once you've simplified everything, just move as fast as you can.
And then number five, the last step is automate.
Isn't that interesting?
Finally some automation.
Well, so what Chris, I think I love the list and I, like many of our listeners, you know,
from the Brussels to the Philippines are probably equally confused about like, why is he such
a contentious character when these drips of them are also perfectly aligned.
So setting aside the debates on Elon, let's talk about what does that look like?
I mean, we've seen the outcome of these steps being executed.
What do you think then?
No, well, I think it's really interesting because these work very well in business.
Yeah.
When you have all the authority to do whatever you want.
If you want to do the, the billionaire's version of hold my beer, let's go by Twitter and see
what happens.
You can do that.
It's good to be Uber wealthy.
It's taken away from this latest election cycle.
Yeah.
So let's, let's, I'm going to go through the list rapid, rapid phase and then let's, let's
just talk about maybe the buzzsaw that he's going to run into, which is, is processed
step up, but by design by the, by our founders.
But first one is make processes less dumb.
Speed steps is two, simplify and optimize is three, accelerate once you've simplified
and then once you've, once you can accelerate, then automate.
So I think it's going to be very interesting to watch Elon walk into a structure that he
is not used to and doesn't have the authority to change.
Chris, let me ask you, cause you know, here we are young middle-aged guys, just on the
30 something plus side of things.
We've lived with these dumb processes, you know, with taxes or trying to navigate health
insurance or, you know, any of the myriad of rules, you know, renewing your driver's
license, but now we have a brand new and improved driver's license that you can go by for absolutely
no reason, but because we required it.
Not that I have any energy around that, but I'm getting on a flight later today, so it's
top of mind.
So what happens when, which of these processes would you like for him to begin with making
it less dumb?
If, if it was feasible, because I think you're alluding to this idea that lacking the authority
that he exercises elsewhere, dear sweet Elon might be in for a shot.
Yeah, I think the hardest part is it's easy to say I want to reduce taxes.
Yeah.
Or lose weight.
It's hard.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Weight.
It's, it's, you just, you know, you just get a different scale that weighs differently.
You just change it to kilograms.
That's what you do.
But I think it's really easy to say, Hey, let's, let's go and let's cut X, Y, Z. Yeah.
Until you actually figure out what that means.
Yeah.
It, it, it's actually very difficult.
I think it's a very hard problem.
I, you know, the, the idea of, so we'll make the process less dumb, I think is a totally
legitimate challenge.
And if we did nothing else on the list, if we, if we asked elected officials just to
make things less dumb, we're going to put a whole bunch of CPAs on the street.
And I don't care what the tax rate is, just make it a flat tax for everybody.
Yeah.
Right.
And I'm sure that, you know, ones of our listeners is going to take issue with that, but yeah,
let's do that.
And half the country's already on universal healthcare.
So let's just do that.
If we did those things, oh my God, what are we going to do with all the insurance brokers
and CPAs that we just put out of work?
Yeah, it'd be huge here, right?
It'd be huge.
And the other challenge is like to make stuff less dumb.
Yeah.
Takes a lot of time.
Oh, especially when you have two centuries of policies, two centuries of rules, two centuries
of legal precedents, like to unwind that stuff, you just don't unwind it quickly.
And so, and you know, and our, our, our presidents have four years of which the first two years
is figuring out how stuff works.
The next two is trying to figure out how do I get back in?
And it's, and stuff isn't getting simpler.
It's not like they run to the president and say, Hey, look, here's an easy question.
Here's an easy problem for you to solve.
Yeah.
Those are all, those are all solved.
Good news, bad news.
Those of all are, you know, I, you know, I love these steps and, and whether we're talking
about, you know, the, the, what's preparing to happen on the national stage or if we're
even doing our own local businesses, that first step just to ask customer or your team,
like what are we doing?
It just seems dumb.
Great place to start in terms of getting value just lying around, you know?
Yeah.
It's always been so shocking to me to be like, well, what do you do and why do you do that?
And they just say, I do this and I need to do this faster.
And they, there's, there's no idea of where this goes downstream, why they're either even
doing it.
I think, I think that that's what makes Elon really fascinating is he's just very curious.
Yeah.
And he also, he also has the courage to make hard decisions, at least in his business.
Now that might be a little different when he gets to, you know, in the government, but
I do think that these, these simple steps, even, even, you know, our podcast comes out
on Friday, even if you were to take a Friday and say, what can I do that's less dumb?
Yeah.
What steps can I delete because they don't add value?
One of my favorite things is, well, do we have a metric around that?
Well, what are you going to do with the metric?
Right?
Yeah.
Like, great.
You got a metric, but are you, are you going to make decisions off the metric?
No, you're just going to alleviate some stress in your head because you now have a metric,
you know?
And then once you've deleted steps and you've got rid of all the dumbness, then, then optimize,
then simplify, then, then reduce and then go fast and then automate.
And I think what's, what I've done in my career just too many times is let's over engineer
and let's over automate something that isn't going to be done.
I'm not going to be doing the same thing in three years.
Yeah.
No, yeah.
I've spent an enormous amount of time trying to simplify what was originally just kind
of a stop gap.
Yeah.
You know?
One of my favorite stories is the, the multi-generations of this is how we cook a ham.
Yeah.
And my grandmother always cut both ends off of it.
And so the question becomes, why do we cut the ends off the ham and throw it away?
It has nothing to do with cooking it.
It's that great grandma had a pan that was too damn small.
So there you go.
Yeah.
And I feel like that's a little bit of what we're talking about here.
We have 200 years of history and rules and design that were built in a pre-technology
age.
And so that idea of fair and equal representation, you know, there's a whole debate that I'm
not going to get into around electoral college.
And I've seen the arguments for why it creates value.
But the fact that every single human in our country could readily raise a hand in favor
of one choice or another and represent that today, not on X of course, because that's
just a message.
But on, you know, like on InstaBook or Snapface or something, we're so far beyond what the
founders had originally thought about representation and voice.
And so I'll be fascinated.
Yeah.
And political leanings aside, I think we would all vote for a less cumbersome government.
Yeah.
Right.
Something that is more straightforward.
But I do wonder, you know, part of the his magic and so many of these folks is that they
have a reality distortion field that they've got turned up to 11.
And so it'll be interesting to see how that collides with, you know, long standing bureaucracy
and self interest.
So well, it's interesting.
Like I saw something on it on LinkedIn and we'll kind of wrap it up here.
But I saw something on LinkedIn where it was like, hey, here's the new CEO, CTO, CTO, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah of the company of the nation.
And I'm like, do we really want a CEO and a CEO and a CTO?
Do we really want that in a nation?
Because I continually am being pressed for what do we deliver today?
And by design, government is not what do we deliver today, but how do we basically, I
mean, the system's beautiful in that you have a Congress that spins over really quick and
you have the Senate that spins over really slow and you have a judiciary that's even
slower than that.
And so by design, it prevents us from doing stupid, irrational things of which I think
is kind of at core of process debt is just the predictably irrational.
Yeah.
You almost sound like you're arguing for the value of the process debt that we've accumulated.
I think it makes, you know, it kind of goes back to a couple episodes where we talked
about, you know, debt has a purpose.
And if the purpose makes sense, I just think it will be really interesting to watch Elon
bump into that.
And what you see even with most presidents that they start off with their domestic policy
because they've got to answer all their promises of their, you know, their pre-election.
Yeah.
And what happens is generally they will move towards domestic policy because they don't
have oversight.
And so you see that in almost every single presidency where they're trying to, you know,
they want to lower taxes because that's what they said when they were campaigning.
And they realize, oh shoot, I've got the Congress and the Senate that I got to go through and
they may not agree.
But if I go and play with Russia, no one really, like it's okay.
I can go hang out with Kim Jong-un.
It's cool.
That's right.
Cop what?
Yeah.
Well, Chris, I'm like so many of our listeners eager to see $1.99 eggs again in my lifetime.
It may be that I sell them to myself and start raising chickens, but until then, yeah, we'll
fire up some popcorn.
It looks like we're just a smidge over our five minutes.
So treat that as bonus content.
Love it.
All right.
Love it, man.
All right.
Thanks for your time.
See you, man.
Question time.