Hey, what's up, Toby? We've made it to, I think, I think it's 17.
I mean, eventually we're going to stop counting.
I like the sound of that. Let's say 17.
Let's do 17. 17 sounds good.
We could just keep doing 17 over and over again.
That's right. This is the best episode 17 all week.
All right. All right. Today's topic.
Starting a new job.
Yeah, I've done it a lot.
You've done it less than I have.
We'll talk more about that.
Yeah. OK. All right.
We could we could have a we could have a competition there.
A little competition.
All right. So you start a new job, right?
What's what what what do you do to be successful?
The first the first thing every time I walk in is just try to understand the land.
Yeah. And I I joke about starting new jobs.
Having consulted for 20 years.
You know, that's basically starting a new job at least every year
because every engagement with a new client had all that same dynamic.
And so I feel like in some ways I've kind of perfected the art of starting a new job.
And oftentimes it's the admission of I know absolutely nothing about blank,
meaning nothing about your company.
But here I do know about and so leading with some context
and then opening the the gateways for future conversation.
Yeah, that's that's kind of my my typical two week kind of motion.
What's what's the craziest thing that you've ever stepped into? Yeah.
Yeah. I got hired by a CEO.
And after the after the specs on the contract were agreed, he mentioned,
oh, and next week is my last week and we were doing strategy planning.
So that was probably the biggest left turn.
That's crazy.
Oh, yeah, that was just pre-COVID.
So that was a little bit about you, though.
You know, you've you've moved around a little bit.
I have moved around.
I think the craziest was when I started my own business.
Oh, right.
I think like, you know, like, you know, I was young and probably foolish.
And I thought, oh, I'll just go start my own company.
It'll be easy.
Because I won't have a boss.
And then I found out very quickly that your boss become your bills
and they are brutal.
They just they just want to be paid.
Yeah. And I was doing, you know, I was doing property management, as you know.
And, you know, I would get these tenants.
They're like, I can't pay my rent.
And I'm like, I would love to call Idaho Power to and say, I would like to pay
my my power bill with a little bit of love.
Yeah. And, you know, a couple of hugs.
And it just it just never worked.
They actually I mean, there was so bad that I think I've got my power.
I think I got my water turned off.
It was that bad. Like that was that was that was that was an experience.
All right. OK, yeah.
Let's let's talk about our our our favorite new hire.
Yeah. Not everybody.
You know, this is a perfect example.
And it happens in companies where folks are not always unanimous
about the next hire. Yeah.
Right.
Right. Yeah.
So like, it's interesting, like he he hit the ground running.
Right. Yeah. And let's you know, we will do our best to keep politics out of this.
But like what we're talking could you imagine?
Yeah. The newly inaugurated president here.
Yes. Yeah.
Could you imagine that just starting a job just like he did?
Hold on. OK, well, let's OK.
So let's say you're a boomerang, right?
So you're you're working at a place, you're Steve Jobs.
Yeah. And you come in.
Do you think that that's what he did?
Did Steve Jobs do this?
That's an interesting question.
I know he stepped away and he did next.
Yeah. Which became Pixar.
Like the guy did OK.
Kind of worked out right.
It depends. It's a relative scale, I guess.
But yeah, when you come back for a second act,
you know, what what is it that you expect?
And is it reasonable to expect incredibly decisive edicts?
Or, you know, that's it's a really interesting question.
I think we see a lot of leaders.
Howard Schultz did the same thing at Starbucks.
Yeah. And I think it is a common thing.
But those are examples of of more founder returns.
Yeah. Then then elected.
Yeah. What do you think of this first week?
You know, well, I'm going to say that none of our,
you know, America's founders are going to come back to the to the office.
But I I would say, you know, my my wife was was like, oh, my gosh,
I can't believe they did this.
And I was like, look, this is just how you start now.
Like, this is like the new trend.
It's like what they need to do is start having records.
Like you come in.
The records for number of executive orders
sits at one thousand four hundred and ten or whatever.
Like it would be silly.
But like the thing that interests me is, I mean, it's definitely a splash.
And it's definitely, you know, per per how he how he runs his runs his life, really.
Yeah. I just wonder.
I wonder how much.
He's going to run into the legal system and then what happens?
Yeah. Well, but you know, he's a.
I can't help but think of him as as Teflon,
and I don't mean that in a celebratory way.
Yeah. I'm myself, I'm not a fan.
And so that means that half our viewers and at least the domestic ones,
I'm still tangling to lead off in the Yukon
nor where I will probably more appreciate. But now, you know,
what's interesting is imagine Steve Jobs coming back
and immediately saying half of you, I simply don't even care about.
Yeah, yeah. Like you didn't you weren't in you weren't in support of it.
And though I'm supposed to be the CEO of all of Apple,
I'm just not going to deal with you guys. Yeah. Right.
And then the other half being of those that you're that are left.
Yeah. The craziest thing, I think, was the focus on getting rid of
nonpolitical career civil service folks.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
And that thought about, you know, that's really that's the that's the weight
in the bottom of the ship. That's what keeps us on beam. Right.
And you get rid of all of that ballast.
And I don't mean it in a pejorative way, but it's a stabilizing force.
And so there's a lot of disruptive stuff and the winds have blown.
So whatever party you're in favor of, you know, that's that's had time to shift.
But yeah, you're right.
The legal system, though, is not going to embrace this.
And I don't know that it'll slow down.
Well, that's the other thing that's weird is like you have like.
It you're just going to end up with a lot of stuff.
Yeah, just jammed.
Because yeah, that's the way that's the way our system works.
Like, sorry, it's kind of designed that way.
Well, it is a complicated.
You know, we've talked in the past about the economic concepts at play
or the household, you know, it it's perhaps as straightforward
as one might think, or like with our kids and allowance.
Yeah, we cut them allowance.
They blow it on video games.
And 30 seconds later, they need us to buy more credits.
But when we start talking about household or business or national economics,
the machinery is so complex.
Right. The simple answers by Edek are just not going to cut it.
And this is where, you know, I think before we jumped into the call,
this idea of process debt, it has a place.
Oh, yeah, for sure. Managed.
And I don't think anybody would argue that that we are running our nation
in the most efficient way.
Sure. But.
But what is surgical versus
versus just blunt force trauma cuts is is to be discussed still.
Right. Well, it makes me think of, you know, Daniel Kahneman
and thinking fast and slow. Right. Where it's like.
Like, I think process debt almost always lives where people think fast.
Yeah, that's where it's like, explain this to me.
Like, people are like, well, I just think we should lower our debt.
Like, people are like, well, I just think we should lower taxes. All right.
Try to just give it a go for you.
You know, you're like, I want to raise taxes. Great.
Tell me how. Like, how are you going to do this?
And how are you going to do that and stay in office?
Like, these are human beings that are running our running our government.
Right. Yeah.
Well, and what's interesting, Chris, too, is that as you touch on that,
a lot of it feels like zero sum game.
And when you're working in a budget, it's not ever expansive.
Yeah. Right. And so you are not making a bigger pie.
Yeah. Necessarily, you're reallocating.
And some of these are like multi decade commitments that are in the mix.
Can you imagine, like, well, we're going to lose the house,
but I'm going to pay the water bill.
You know, did that ever cross your mind when you started
that job? Damn it.
We paid the water bill, though. Good for us.
So so I've done I've done Excel stuff for a really long time.
As you know, I've got my YouTube channel.
I'm probably I I I love Excel for analysis, despise it for process.
But, you know, that's a that's a personal problem.
But one of the things that I did probably a decade and a half ago
is I like I got this job for this person wanted me to go through this
this. It was it wasn't a bill.
What's what's it before it's a bill?
Before you issue a invoice before they before they actually make the budget.
Oh, oh, yeah. Like a proposal.
You're talking. Yeah, it was basically it was a proposal.
I'll think of it. But I'm going through this.
I'm going through this this document and it's and it's a military one.
And there I don't know what they were doing.
I forget. But there was a chart.
And so I'm hand keying in this chart, which is like the
most boring Excel work that you could ever do in your life.
But it was it was paying good money.
And so I took the job and I did the thing.
And I'm on this thing.
And one of their charts didn't add up.
Like it was off by like two million dollars.
And you're just like rounding air, baby.
Appropriation was an appropriation bill, right?
Where it's basically like ice.
We're not actually going to allocate the budget.
We're just going to talk about we're going to we're going to talk about
what the budget should be.
Whatever you want to do, you know, you're going to have to do it.
Should be what everybody what everybody does in Q4, right?
We're not going to.
Yeah. So you can take the budget, but you can't keep the budget anyway.
But I literally built out this like spreadsheet, fill it all.
And I like it's off.
Like every single one of them was right.
But one was off by like two million dollars.
And you're like, this is the craziest thing.
Like it was this really long document.
It was like 300 pages with like hidden tables that I went.
I mean, it was crazy.
And you're the guy that found it by rekeying it.
How many other eyes do you think that had passed in front of?
I who knows, like who who reads this stuff?
Mostly lobbyists is my entertainment.
And it's not even the lobbyists themselves.
It's the intern assistants.
It's not the interns. Those are future politicians.
Really, the nonpolitical assistants, interns that actually.
And today it's probably most of its AI is my understanding.
Oh, I mean, that's how I would read it.
You know, clumped in the tearing.
The interesting thing is like some of these some of these laws,
if you write them right, you can just set yourself up for all sorts of crazy stuff.
I'll take the the rule of unintended consequences.
So, oh, yeah. You know, in the in the late 1990s,
we had Enron and we had MCI and we had all these egregious sins
committed by officers and senior board members.
Right. And so two elected officials, Sarbanes and Oxley, helped author,
meaning again, put their names on the bill from lobbyists.
Yep. And swear to God, it had to be the big five firms that wrote this
litigation because Section 404, which I did a lot of Sarbanes,
Oxley compliance work, still have nightmares and
you know, sweats, hair sweats, but super valuable, super important.
But it was unbound in terms of how it was to be executed.
Oh, yeah. And so they essentially passed the law and then flip it over
to the accounting firms. Yep.
That, you know, they set up an entity, but they're supposed to be
self-policing at five hundred bucks an hour.
Oh, not a bad gig. Right. That's crazy.
So. Right.
Yeah, it's it's it's it's funny.
Like that whole thing that happened with Enron, it's like everything gets
so complex and just people like your brain just can't handle it.
It's like it almost goes out.
It almost like forces it into thinks thinking fast because you have no other.
You can't you can't digest it. Yeah.
And so you have all this complexity and, you know, they're making up numbers
and it seems right. Yeah.
And you're just on the preposite on the precipice and you just walk right over.
Yeah. So we are we are at time, my friend.
What? I know.
Crazy. It's barely getting started.
I know. It'll be really interesting.
Like that's the thing that I'm the most fascinated about is just what happens
as you get to the courts. Yeah.
And then and then what happens with what happens with public opinion?
Because a lot of like
I think Trump's genius is that the problem is always out there.
It's always out there.
Yeah, it's around the corner.
Well, it's just it's it's somewhere.
Something of the three hundred and fifty million and there's some crazy stuff
that went down like I'm telling you, especially in Philadelphia with the whole.
You know, Eagles winning, but you know, we are humans, humans.
We do some stupid things and so we'll see.
We'll see what happens. We'll see what happens.
It's going to be all right.
All right. Thank you.
Catch you next week.
Neil. Bye.