We recorded this live today, January 12, 2026…..and as predicted, the tech is going to take a minute to get used to. I (Nicole) managed to record this on my primary substack (Truer Words) but I want it archived here where it belongs. Long story short, I loaded the live into Descript, cut out the very beginning “is there an echo on our mic” portion and the ending chit chat (guess it’s a bonus for those who were live and boy did the rest of you miss out!) and then added in a quick intro/summary and the awesome theme song Deb made last month and here you go. Thank you for those who joined us live, and for those who couldn’t, we hope you enjoy the recording. We look forward to next time! Let us know if there’s something you would like us to use as our initial topic, just remember, the rails are optional ;)Transcript:Rails Optional Episode 1 with Intro [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to Rails Optional. I’m Nicole, and today I recorded with my friend Deb Huss, and we absolutely did not stay on the rails As promised, we started with HR is not your friend, and then we dropped live chickens out of airplanes to explain why change management is broken and discovered that Swedish food names sound unfortunate in English and debated whether y’all is actually the most inclusive word in the English language, and somehow ended up on tater tot casserole. Somewhere in there. We also covered the last 20 years of how HR became a strategic business partner, right when unions collapsed. What it actually means when your job is to overcome resistance instead of listen to it, and why being strategic often translates to cost playing as the CEO when you absolutely did not sign up for that. We talked about moral injury, self betrayal, burnout, which I [00:01:00] think is a phrase I made up, but who knows? And the exact moment when you realize the seat at the table cost you so much more than you thought. There’s also a thing about HR getting their revenge through 3D printed chicken, which made more sense in context. This is what happens when two A DHD entrepreneurs in corporate recovery decide that the rails, in fact, are optional. Let’s go. We still believe in the reason we started Let We Love Behind. Hello everyone. Welcome to Rails optional. I’m Nicole and my friend. Purple. Over here is Deb. Hi. I are incredibly glad you’re here, especially those of you who are going to join us live. This whole thing is an experiment, so you get to watch it happen [00:02:00] in real time. So you know if the tech breaks or we go on a tangent about an Arby’s slogan from 2003, you were here for it. You didn’t miss a thing because you don’t miss a thing, didn’t miss a thing. All right, so quick intros. I am the founder of Truer Words. I help leaders whose transformations keep. Failing and whose dashboards tell them sweet little lies. How to find their policies, metrics and workflows that are blocking execution. Deb has a much cooler reminder. Oh my God. Tell me, tell me sweet little lies. That’s your fault. You put that in my head. Um, hey everyone, my name is Deb Haas. I’m a 56-year-old former corporate executive, uh, luring in public, building a business in public where I train women 40 plus to make AI their, can you tell I haven’t taken my drugs today, or at least I waited too long to take my drugs. This, [00:03:00] by the way, is why we’re doing this together. So between the two of us, we’ve got over 30 years in HR and HR adjacent worlds. We might actually have closer to 40 years, but we’ll just wanna talk about that. We’re being very kind to me there, Nicole. This is, we realize this being very kind to Deb. You’re elder as well. That’s all I have to say. You’re not that much elder over me, but Okay. We’ll, uh, we’ll count it. I mean, I, so I’m the oldest grandchild in my family, and I’m older than my next oldest cousin by three whole months, not even, because his birthday is the 4th of August and mine is the 9th of May. And I spent our entire childhood, um, holding those three months over his head and telling him he wasn’t allowed to talk back to his elders. So, I guess, I guess your couple of years passed me counts. You don’t. And so my, so I’m adopted, right? Hey, [00:04:00] everyone. Um, I, I, I’m adopted and it just turns out that one of my cousins was born three days literally before me. I was adopted when I was three months old. What ended up happening was that he was a great grandchild of my grandparents. I was a grandchild and there was one Christmas where the grandchildren got, I think it was like 20 bucks or 25 bucks, and the great grandchildren only got five bucks. So he was three days older than me holding his $5 bill going, why’d you get all that money? And of course they tried to explain it to him and it was, it was a cluster. So anyways, there we go. All right, so for those of you who don’t know, which I don’t think is anyone in the chat so far, but you know, maybe we’ll pick up some new people. Um, we are both A DHD entrepreneurs in corporate recovery, which means this podcast has a topic and is going to wander. And that’s the exact point. We have both been guests on podcasts multiple [00:05:00] times, and the, the comment that we always hear both on our own and on other people is it’s not just us. Oh, let’s try to keep it on the rails. And so I messaged Deb after listening to one of ‘em and I was like, we need to start a podcast and we just need to call it Rails Optional. And I immediately felt chills up and down my spine and I was like, once again, Nicole is seeing the future. Deb, I just realized that you like that Substack life has the same functionality that some of the other like butter in. ‘cause you held your thumb up in a little like thumb up, like things another, oh my gosh, there’s fireworks. How did you do that? It’s my look it. Look it. We’re gonna have balloons here in just a second. S okay. Deb has magic in her tech and I get nothing. This is some garbage. I got honey and if I’m really sad it’ll rain. Okay, so now I know what the next subject of our next call is gonna be. Okay. So format simple. We are gonna start with something in corporate life that you know is [00:06:00] weirdly complicated. HR. Work in general, systems, ai, implementation, transformation, all of those invisible rules we are apparently supposed to follow without asking questions. And we’ll follow the thread wherever it goes. So it’s gonna be shaped by what shows up in chat, what stories people bring. Deb, what are you trying to make your thing do? I was doing voguing. I was voguing. ‘cause you were saying, oh, corporate. I, it’s just the way that my brain works. You know, this, I, I just thought you were trying to get more like cool background effects. I was, I was really jealous for a second. All right, so today’s topic, we’re starting with this phrase that is now so deeply ingrained in our culture that if you say the word hr, hr, the next phrase that shows up is, is not your friend. Yes. So, I mean, like, there are, there are actual memes. I can’t believe HR is like on the. On the cool side. Is it cool to be made a meme of, I don’t know, but I, you know, [00:07:00] maybe, I don’t know. I cool to be hated possibly. She got the peanuts right? I I, I, I definitely signed up for all of that education just to be hated. That was, that was totally my intent. I was like, cool. Please hate me. I don’t, I was so clueless. I had no idea. I literally just stumbled into hr. I started out, I graduated from college. I graduated from St. Ola College in Northfield, Minnesota. Yeah. If you watch the Golden Girls, you heard Rose refer to St. Olaf. That’s what she’s talking about. But it’s an actual college. It’s a liberal arts college in, uh, Northfield, Minnesota. There, don’t you know? And, uh, I graduated with a degree in English and Latin, and of course this was at a time when that’s useful. Yeah, so useful. And, uh, I couldn’t get a job to save my fricking life. This was when downsize, God, I’m giving my age away here. This is when downsizing was first introduced into. Vocabulary. Uh, so we’re talking early, early nineties and couldn’t get a job to save my life. So exec, I ended up as an executive assistant at what [00:08:00] was then Anderson Consulting for, was then an associate partner who, by the way, is still out there. I’m not gonna say her name. Yep, they are. Yep. She’s still out there. And she’s a and yeah. So, yeah, so, you know, I, and then, and I was like, oh, here’s a job in HR that sounds fancier. It’ll pay me more than I’m making. Why don’t I do that? I like humans. Okay, so HR is not your friend, right? That’s the topic. We’re both HR people, um, we’re both HR people who have been personally insulted and said like, but wait, I wanna be your friend. And then actually looked at our jobs and been like, oh, oh, yeah. Now I see why we’re out here. I I, I can’t, I can’t be your friend. What do you remember? Do you remember the first time you had that, that realization, Deb? Like do you remember like where you were and what you were doing and like the first time you were like, oh, so Nicole, here’s the deal. I’m one of those [00:09:00] people, my friends are always telling me, they’re like, you know, for being such a smart person, you can be really fricking clueless. And so I’m like that. People are always telling me you’re like the absentminded professor. So I can’t remember exactly the first time it happened, but I do remember one of the times when it like really struck me was I was taking a design thinking course and I was really excited because I was in globally strong. We never got budget to do anything. And I got clearance to attend this in-person design thinking, like learning, design thinking. I was like, yeah, because I’d been doing virtual design thinking for a whi
