He Sold His Company For $15M, Then Got A Job At McDonald’s

here's the headline millionaire work at mcdonald's and actually it's it's actually much more interesting than that i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a roll this is the story of a guy named scott meetup up dot com's probably the most popular thing that he made meetup is a really cool site i used it when i moved to san francisco joined a bunch of groups met a bunch of people it's basically a way to go from the internet to actually meeting people at real life and so i knew about meet up i didn't even known about scott but what i didn't know is the story that scott after he had sold his first company actually went and worked at mcdonald's just to kind of reset and he did that for while and now he was going viral because he's kinda doing it again he didn't tell anybody but but people saw him update as linkedin and it said amazon associate or like warehouse associate or something basically he's he's back at a amazon warehouse now being a pick packer kind of minimum wage job again and people were like dude this is not the first time he's done this he did this with mcdonald's like you know twenty years ago and i found this fascinating and i went down to scott rabbit hole and i wanna talk you about it you have some good stuff there too right is that how caught your eye yeah so basically he grew up i think in iowa or idaho somewhere in the midwest and he grew up there and he saw that mark recent releases nets and he was like this is amazing and so he's like i'm get in the internet and so in the mid nineties he starts i believe like one of the world's first online internet agencies i i think it was an advertising agency something like that he sells it for around fifteen million dollars yeah which is something like thirty million bucks in today's money and he sells it and after he sells it he was like i've been working for six or seven years at this internet startup and i work in marketing but i'm only around like bankers and lawyers and other like y people that's horrible for my position as a marketer but also like i feel so out of touch the people here let's use his words so he wrote this on his site you found it back at the internet archive which are those great so it says why i got a job in mcdonald's i spent a lot of time with bankers lawyers internet freaks corporate wants and other people living strange lives as a good marketing guy that's a bad thing and as a practicing anti consumers that's a bad thing so i got a job at mcdonald's to help get back in touch with the real world also after six grueling years of the internet whirlwind i wanted to experience a profitable well oiled multi billion dollar machine and i deserved the break today and then he goes and works at mcdonald's and he even talks about he shows his application he goes i just walked in off the street it was at like fifth in broadway in new york city i walked off off the street and he's like the manager was like so are you used to like working with teams or something like that and he and scott was like in his blog post he goes i was honest i said yes i am used to that yeah he goes i was truthful in my interview he asked if i can handle a fast paced intensive environment i said yes he looked at my resume and that's about my current part time job as chairman of eye traffic i said it's an internet thing he said okay and then asked me for for my waist size for for the pants and he works there for like six months and he has this amazing blog post about everything that he's learned by the way i don't think you worked there for six months i think it was like more more like three or four weeks something like know but he said five seventy five eight much so he's was making five seventy five an hour times forty hours a week times fifty two weeks a year that's eleven thousand nine hundred and two dollars pre tax hey some people said it was disrespectful for me to check it job and make mcdonald's i didn't need the money they thought i was making fun of people that work there the opposite is true gained a bucket of respect for people that bust their butt for such low pay it's one thing to scan past like statistic you see about how many people make twelve thousand dollars a year read about them of the paper it's another thing to sit back there with in a fry evening mc wielding six hour shift and go home smelling like fries and mc and realize you only made about thirty dollars this day it's an eye opener interpret that as you see fit and then what happens is while he's working at mcdonald's cranes which is a a business publication they wanna do a story on scott about like ceos and post acquisition life and he's like yeah come and see what i'm up to now and they use this photo of him working at mcdonald's it's where he gets mcdonald's uniform and it's just the greatest photo i've ever seen and if you scroll through this old blog blockbuster we'll link it in the youtube you can see some of these pictures of him working it looks like it it looks pretty wild well they they spun it like he was struggling right it's like d thrown ceo's is the title and they're like how are they handling the dot com crash just this dot com ceo he's back working adam mcdonald's since it's like i that's not what it's not even what happened at all but okay sure and now fast forward to today by way he made fifteen million dollars i think in that sales so he sold his agency for about fifteen million bucks who knows stock cash who knows if this is like but ballpark right let's take a directional and then he goes from there to working at a mcdonald's you know just to kind of like reactivate with the real world which i thought was was really good and fast forward to today so in eighteen or nineteen something like that he sells meetup dot com to we work the price was rumored to be two hundred million dollars but who knows it's enough that he doesn't have to go and work some place like this turns out he has a job at at an amazon fulfillment center and he doesn't make a big ordeal out this he doesn't like tell people about this he just puts it on linkedin someone finds it and shares it so he ends up and does a podcast where he talks about the story of of of why he's at amazon it's the same type of thing where he's like i just like fell out of touch with average people and i wanted to i wanted to feel that again and he doesn't exactly say this but he says something like the interviewer was asking him about his experience there and he's like the interview was like in that that place where like they just had a big issue with them the workers in the warehouse warning to union unite and he's like i don't wanna talk too much about that but yeah that's where it was and i think it's a good idea and he sorta of ins that that he was part of it that he was part of it and he was kind of like whispering of people's ears and he doesn't explicitly say that but the language that he uses and where he's like i really wanna talk about it but yeah like i was there i saw it all happening and he was like you know it's funny i'm like an entrepreneur and i'm usually the guy who you'd unite union eyes against but i thought it was a good idea to have a union and it's it's that he's like the one r people up and so this guy in a weird way he's like a little horse character like he's like experiencing all these things in in the background and he's like potentially a pivotal part of the story but he's doesn't talk about it it reminds me of you know like movies and this a analogy but it's like movies where it's like the the genius nerd gets sent to prison but then he like does you know then he's like the master and then he like brings a new angle and and sort of rallies the the crew inside the prison in a different way right or like we had sc on the podcast and he was talking about the same he said he went to prison and he started the bitcoin club like the crypto club and he started all these like learning clubs for technology inside the prison but then they also taught him a bunch of things it was like meeting of the of of the world that's what this reminds me of this sort of going into the fulfillment center are and and like stirring up the union the union efforts i'm i have a friend of a friend who was a banker he was like the really successful wall street guy and he retired but he got bored and so he was like dude i'm gonna drive for uber so he starts driving for uber and he ends up after doing that for little while he starts a private driving business where he's like a broker so for example when i go the airport i i do use a private driver but it's only like thirty dollars more than an uber it's not like much more expensive but it feels a little bit nicer he started one of these and he ended up being a broker for it and he is now making like a million dollars year being a broker for some of these drivers when you want a a a car and it's kind of a similar thing would you ever if you had like a break in your career would you ever wanna do one of these kinda of blue collar jobs yeah dude when i saw this i was inspired on three fronts the first this is a guy who plays his own game and if you done anything about me you know that is what i respect the most people who have their own viewpoint they bring their own frame to the game and they say this is how i wanna use my time and life and this is what i think is right they don't really follow the hurt right like how many founders who sell their company then become a vc then go from vc all back to big a founder and adviser and go on podcast by the way i did all this after sold by company too right it's all my company started investing started a podcast started doing the the normal path and so when i see people who just thought from first principles well what they cared about in life it decided what they wanted to do and did it even though it sounded weird or unconventional highest level of respect for me so that's the first thing inspired by that second inspired by the the the idea of basically just getting out of your bubble i do this in a in a different way not usually by a job but like you know you told me about that conference farm con which is a conference for farmers and i went there and that was the only tech that was the only conference i which i didn't go to any tech conference any investing conference i went to a farming conference because i knew we would put me completely out of my bubble exposed to a whole bunch of people with different thoughts and philosophies and different views about the world right now i knew i would get new ideas and sure enough a business came out of we ended up launching a business bill grow out of that and so there was you know i i'm i'm a big fan of that inspired by that the only thing i would do differently is i wouldn't necessarily just copy what this guy didn't just go get a blue color job necessarily like it's the lesson for me is think for myself what's my version of this that's few that's more real to me right that that i actually do feel compelled to do that i would feel excited to do and go to it maybe would be driving uber maybe it would be going working at a warehouse maybe be something different i'm not sure but this this really like sparked something in me to to take my to use my time to go do something like that i completely agree by the way you you don't one version of this for me it's either teaching at a school like go would be a second great teacher for like a year or gordon bombay and just go coach a team and go go do my version of the mighty ducks i i've actually been itching to do this to go and just coach like a seventh grade boys basketball team or something i did this for a while i i coached at a it was actually like a school for autistic and as kids and i i coach their basketball team and it was like one of the best experiences of my life just doing that on the side for fun and i think i might go back and try to do something like that that's i think that that'd would be my version of this a few weeks ago i emailed this high school asking if they need like an assistant track and field coach right and i got and i was so pumped up about it like this this is so filling this is awesome the best is when they're like you're not qualified for that well yeah i honestly with little nervous about that but i get like the hours and like what they what they demand of me and i'm like ugh that's a lot of work that's a huge commitment it's sort of like my inspiration like really quickly like lower it down so i gotta figure out how i'm gonna do it to we we finished scott because his story that i think is pretty interesting so he's born in a big family and like you said sort of middle of the country i think illinois or something and we just named three different i states by the way illinois yeah sorry sorry i'm from there and like how we offended all of them okay buy by grouping them all together alright so the youngest of five his siblings are like twenty years older than him kind of the way they're finding the family dynamics worked and so he's the youngest by like fifteen to twenty years and he starts his first business when he's nine do you know what it's called no what scott's slave service which a nine year old can get away with because he's basically saying it's free labor for for for my siblings and so he's like hey whatever whatever tasks you got on your yours i will do whatever whatever task you have that but he gets the entrepreneurial bug there starts learning to code his first job out of college he's actually at sony and he tells sony he's like hey this like ninety four ninety five he's like the internet's gonna be a thing and they're like okay kid like whatever you say hey he's like no should have like a website like alright well if you wanna build one go you don't have at it so he he ends up building the first website for like you know sony dot com and he realizes pretty quickly he's like okay this ain't it he also in ninety three had started one of the first internet shows that one of the first podcasts essentially he started his own radio show on the internet which is called editorial infotainment he was basically questioning consumer culture so he's he considers himself sort of about anti consumer in many ways so he he does that then he does the first thing which is that that business we called eye traffic which is a a media buying agency and he was joking around like at the time there was really no media to buy on the yet but he knew people are going to wanna advertise on the internet this will make websites have a business model so let's do this he sells that thing fifteen million ish which by the way that doesn't i mean it's so obvious now yes he's right but that's pretty wild it's like be that bold in ninety four ninety five to make some of these predictions he he was he nailed them he he was a hundred percent right he knew that because when he was a teen and again he's twenty years younger hear that all his siblings he's get a lot of a loan time and he's basically spending it you know programming just for fun and he just becomes convinced that like computers in the internet like this is where it's at then he does the mcdonald's thing saying by the way do we wanna read a few of his like blog post takeaways from his mcdonald's did me i thought this was really good why did in why i don't you know we we had to use web kind to find his this post he took it down i wish she did it's fantastic well we we still got it we'll show some of the pictures on here he's got like a picture of like his burn from the the fry machine and stuff like that on his arm but like here's one of them so he goes nobody number four nobody thanked me i worked hard i got paid peanuts i even ate mcdonald's during my food break deducted from my pay it was intense the cash register was complex the people want their food now the lines get deep the mc fury must be made just right and i was trying hard and i was doing an okay job now i've been a leader in a manager for our life i've had plenty of crap jobs but i've been the boss for the past few years and i faithfully read fast company magazine and my harvard business review and i've read the countless times that the value of a leader of managers showing appreciation for people's effort however my instinct has been often that showing appreciation really isn't too necessary or good for people they just take pride in a job well done and they could read my mind and see the appreciation well from day one at mcdonald's i was yearning for someone just to say thanks or you're even doing okay would have been sufficient but no neither management experience nor reading about management teaches this lesson in the same way as feeling it being an underappreciated employee so i read that a few hours ago when i was getting ready and i went message a bunch of employees and i said you're doing great you're doing great you're doing okay because that it it this is everyone should go and read this post it it is this is awesome this is a very inspiring thing yeah he talks about the dollar in a bunch of things okay so he does that by the way if you look on this page he left his phone number in the photo of the application i texted i texted him i'm gonna try well i'll try trying to get him on yeah i would love that scott come on that'd be amazing so then he has this next expert he's like he's got thirty ideas he's like what i wanna do next he's got thirty ideas and have he read the story about kinda how he narrowed that down to two within the september eleventh story yes exactly so he lives a few miles away from the twin towers since september eleventh happens he sees the the planes hitting the building and i think the story was like he was a kind of on the rooftop of his building or he's outside of his building and it was the first time he had never met any of his neighbors like he'd been living there for a while he just didn't know anyone and this now that they were all outside and they're seeing this crazy thing they're all talking to their meeting and he was like kinda struck by man i really live a pretty like solo life and i'm just on the internet and he had had a couple of other experiences that that kinda triggered him in that so there's the september eleven thing a week later he reads this book called bowling alone and i guess this book has big impact on him because he then ends up giving this to every meetup up employee and bowling alone was just basically a book about statistics he's honest he's like i didn't even read the whole thing but he's like the beginning of the book makes a very clear point that more and more we're doing less things with other people which is caught which the less interaction you have with strangers causes you to trust strangers less which then causes you to spend less time with them and it's this terrible cycle that we go into and he's like then he notices in his own life he's a big fan of this band a luna and he goes to a bunch of their shows so they're a small band and so he's ends up he's like dude i'm in like conference centers and a hotel ballroom b and he's like i'm listening to this band play and he's like you know i used to just go alone i would you know you know kind of the are saying alone i'd go alone is like but soon enough you know i started to see some other faces there that were the other regulars like there weren't many of us who are big fans of this band but he's like we still didn't talk to each other that much because it wasn't clear that it was okay to go talk to each other so that's where he decides he narrows down his list of ideas from thirty to two one of them is meetup up where he's like well what if we made it where the internet could help people meet up in real life and we could solve this bowling alone problem where people interact more with strangers which increases their trust and strangers which increases the amount of time they're willing to talk to other people and make it okay to just have these real life interactions even with the internet the second one which you guys to talk about too much is something called photo log did you see this it's like a a flicker like service yeah he was early man he was too early he was super early i think he sold her for like ninety million bucks or something so he did well with it it was like the biggest social network in certain countries around the world but then flicker came out and flicker was growing faster and then then the next wave of social that came out i saw him describe it as as instagram before instagram but i didn't know that it was that financially successful that's amazing yeah so he did really well with that as well and so he you know he sells that company does he start meetup up and photo log at the same time that's a good question i'm not sure if it was the exact same time i know there were yeah somewhat tandem up they were they were sort of like you know either same time or over very close to each other and so he does meet up meet starts growing and then he makes a pretty controversial move which is he decides not to at not to make meet up business model just adds he's like no i'm gonna charge people for the service which at the time was like very anti again he goes counter to the main mainstream of where what everybody else was doing with their websites at the time and traffic drops off like ninety five percent but he's like he stays with it he's like i believe that this is the sustainable path for this he's like the people who were organizing these meetups they should pay a fee because they're the ones kind of hosting getting the value it'll keep the quality bar high so let's do that and he survives the big ninety percent drop in usage and meet becomes a profitable sustainable business and it goes on for a long time until they sell for to we work for i don't know a hundred and fifty to two hundred million bucks by the way i have a friend greg who used to work at he also got acquired by we and so i texted greg this morning and i was like you got any stories about this guy scott he goes i got one and so he goes i get to we work and scott tells me hey maybe at five five broadway at six pm and then i go okay he he he text me right before he goes by the way clear your calendar for the night okay i don't know what's gonna happen here but like alright i'm interested i'm game so he shows up and there's just a white van with five other people in it az alright i'm gonna die i don't know what's happening today but guess tonight is night i die and scott walks in tells the driver let's go and then he says hey you're you're new here and i wanna do something i do with everybody who's new which is we're gonna go crash five or six meetups tonight and you're gonna get to actually like go experience them firsthand first day let's go and so he was just taking six kinda new people in the company to go and they crashed like harry potter meetup up and then like a women with diabetes meetup up and they went to six different meetups that night and they stayed out all night basically at this thing and greg was like dude i'll never forget that such a cool founder move to do that and to kinda stay in the community stay like amongst the the the users and the people and to make that part of the culture for new people there are in the company how awesome is that dude this guy is amazing i love him so good right yeah and that he's been in the game for so long and that he's still he's not like a high mighty executive you know what i mean like he's still kinda seems like he seems like he's in it well and then it takes another twist meetup up then gets carved out of we work and so this brings up this connects two other data points of our podcast so on the episode with jeremy gif and he talked about one of his biggest like underrated opportunities right now is messy carve outs and what he meant was that sometimes there's companies that acquisition happens and usually like either you know a year later or so the company realizes that hey of all the assets they didn't really want one of the assets or that the company that acquire it starts to go south and this good company they bought is embedded inside of a bad company and this is exactly what happened with meetup up so they buy we work buys meetup up for i don't know hundred fifty two hundred million dollars but then meetup up itself are start we work itself becomes you know a dumpster fire but meetup up was still a good asset inside of this dumpster fire and so here comes a guest of the pod kevin ryan who's been on the podcast came in and actually bought meetup up for peanuts out of that sale i remember looking i mean i i didn't have like the finances at the time to be able to afford it but someone like hey you wanna get it on this and i was like yeah this is like a super on the podcast i think you shared the numbers right yeah yeah yeah and and i didn't think that it was gonna be kevin ryan it was a bunch of like you know i'm i'm not even in the ballpark to be able to afford or whatever it was but i was like you know maybe could throw just a small amount of money to like a group of people who are trying to buy it and i thought it was very interesting and then lo behold the man kevin ryan comes in and and if he comes in like to me he's a really good signal something is interesting here so he bought it and then they put in a ceo they turned it around it's like profitable and they just did a great job with it and they they got a great it turned out to be a great investment for them is it a big business or is it just like a a pretty good business that's just not automated but like it just we'll see what happens you know it'll grow fifteen percent a year maybe yeah so i mean it's all relative right so it's a it's a better business than business i've ever built however in the grand scheme the i know which i know what question you're asking which is like is this some sort of rocket ship type of crazy billion dollar business i don't know i don't think so it looks like it's a flow and steady slow and steady profitable cash flowing business that's good for humanity so in that sense it's an awesome business yeah i think this guy's the man i think he's absolutely awesome you should listen to the podcast it's called internet mis fits i think that he was on and he's the definition of an internet mis fit and he talks a little bit about his time at amazon it he's a cool guy this guy is really fascinating he's a fascinating dude i and i always i've recognized this guy forever every you know when you and i were just getting going in the internet that was when meetup was in a heyday day and i would go to so many meetups ups i actually started my event hustle con because of meetup dot com i created a small meetup up event on meet dot com i got a lot of free users that way that's how i built my email list i love meetup up dot com i like this guy scott we gotta we gotta have them on board yeah by the way internet missed that's a great podcast name if if we didn't have such a cringe name that could have been ours that would have been a great great name for us let me can i tell you about a different story yeah sorta actually similar to scott going to mcdonald's so have you ever heard of you're weird with your pop culture i i don't know what you do and do not know because you don't know many things about pop culture have you ever heard of rosie the river no so basically in the nineteen four in the early nineteen forties america goes to war all the men between like you know eighteen and thirty five go off serve the war so there's this huge need for manufacturers or workers in manufacturing plants to go trade like beach b seventeen like these bombers or whenever we're making not only just what we are making before but now we have to make all these weapons and all these supplies they needed to get young women which who never worked before to come and work in factories and they needed to make it look cool and so they had these ads like if you can work an electric mixer you can work a drill and so they would like do all these like things to get young women to entice them to come in the workforce and then west house which at the time was like a huge manufacturing company they created this campaign called rosie the name of character was rosie the r and the ad says yes we can and it was like yes young woman women you gotta come and do this you owe it to your country and you're a strong young woman you should come and do this and so at the time before the war i think something like two million women worked after that campaign went live it was something like twenty million young women went and got jobs and so it was very like a women empowerment type of thing but also like push america forward and so it was incredibly effective and by the way you should see the ads in the nineteen fifties it's called back to normalcy and it was like what does rosy do now that the war is over and it's very much like we're gonna sell you this refrigerator and there's always these ads like what should rosy do with strawberries out a summer day and it's like make wow make like a strawberry short kick so it's like pretty crazy how like so who's so who is paying for these ads is this the government or the first part maybe think it's the manufacturing companies both but then why would they pay for rosie back to the kitchen i don't understand that part well because i mean obviously like sexism but like when the when when the originally it was west house and a bunch of other manufacturers did these campaigns to to to convince women to come work for them but then also the government you know it's propaganda is what it is but it's like good propaganda where they would do this stuff it's like you know we off do this together and so the government did it as well as private companies and so the company that did rosie river was it's called west house it was a it was a large manufacturer rosie the river by the way is one of the most recognized images in american history and it's in this smithsonian and it's like a big deal because it was like a turning point for american feminism and things like this but also like the war but yeah you should see the ads in the fifties when they're like alright the men are back back to normalcy that was the campaign was back to normalcy but the reason i'm saying this is back then in the forties and fifties you know we were kinda of booming with manufacturing in fact have you heard her the rust belt i've heard that phrase the rust belt i ever heard that one that refers to where i'm from missouri places like saint louis cleveland chicago things like that before it was called the rust belt in the fifties and sixties it was called the steel belt because that's where we manufactured everything and then the name changed to the rust belt meaning all these old the rusty factories that no one uses anymore so that's actually how the name care to be now the where i'm getting with all of this there's this company that is called the blue forge they created this ad that is the best ad that i've seen in years and they and so the ad is basically all about this gig economy and how it like crush your soul because when rosie the river they so they they call them rosie the derivatives that's like the women who are working in these factories they interviewed bunch of them when they're older and they were like you know we built this beat this b seventeen which is a large bomber and we saw it roll off the the manufacturing line and we were we had so much pride you know we were helping america but also we were working together to achieve this task we felt amazing about ourselves now this ad basically shows like when you're driving uber and things like that you feel shitty yeah people complaining you're not working towards a common goal and so this company blue forge it was put together i think in i believe the navy funded it and what they're trying to do is to convince young americans to go back to manufacturing jobs or they don't mean to do this but it sort does it go back to trade jobs so basically things that where you work with your hand to rebuild manufacturing in america and i saw this ad and i did a little bit of research on what's going on with like the industrialization of of america it's incredibly fascinating this ad is so good and it's trying to make these manufacturing jobs which don't even exist that much right now but if they do exist they're like un shit like they're not cool and what this company is doing is they are trying to make it look cool and they are totally succeeding and you're seeing this a little bit with andrew you know andrew yeah so palmer luck defense business in orange county where it's cool again to work in factories it's cool again to make stuff and i one hundred percent buy into this premise and i think it is so great and i was thinking about like different ideas and things like that but a really simple one if you refer someone to some of these jobs you can earn up to five hundred dollars and so it's actually like a pretty interesting opportunity if you just google like trade jobs or manufacturing jobs you go to the websites they kinda look silly they're not like that enticing there's no like sex appeal which inherently like these jobs i think are quite romantic like they are it is really cool you can make them sense seem and and appear really cool because i think they actually are and a lot of them will pay thirty dollars forty dollars an hour depending on on what it is particularly the trades which are incredibly popular right now at gen z on tiktok but i just thought this ad was so awesome yeah it's an amazing ad it just shows kind of like do you wanna spend your whole life running around doing tasks for other peep people basically being a you know a delivery person or and then the doors open and the manufacturing is happening and it's like you could pour you could step into here and really build something and it's it's a really really well done ad yeah it's it's badass and i think originally so that company blue forge i think they're built around the submarine industry apparently they couldn't get enough people to work on submarines and so they won these huge contracts to help them get more submarines workers and that's something i never even where have thought exists right but it does yeah really cool i hope this happens i hope america shifts back to much more of a we build things here culture which i think they're trying to do you know you know tesla spacex being based here i think is really awesome and i think that then there's the chip act which is trying to build a giant chip factory like the you know instead of being reliant on taiwan so there's a there's an effort to try to do kinda modern manufacturing here i really wanna do a episode where we go down to what's it called like el gun or whatever there's ten interesting companies all in this like one block our buddy john k did an amazing video worth watching seventeen minutes and it's basically he goes to this area of el where he's like you got spacex reading nuclear var ab l space systems like a whole bunch of companies he's like all in this one area and he went and he hung out with them he took a camera and a crew out there it's worth check it out it's i think pretty inspiring it's you know there there are these hotbed right there's like ai hotbed there's crypto hotbed and then it's like where is the kind of like hard tech hotbed and it seems like this is the answer and if you're if you're interested in that or you're doing that or you just wanna just go feel that energy i think it's cool to watch the videos or go visit place like this and it is happening by the way like the toyota tundra tundra are made in texas and so if you're in texas and you see a tundra a lot of them have a made in texas sign and also when i lived in nashville tennessee i lived like ten miles from the nissan plant and i remember thinking like i used to think like made in america meant i had to get a forward it's like this nissan is just as made in america is anything else and so like it's definitely happening but i think that there's like it it there's an interesting group of people who are making it seem very sexy and i dig that you wanna do one more thing yeah i got one related one so there's a thing that elon talks about that i think more people should hear have you heard elon talk about his problem solving method is five step problem solving method no but it's like step four like have kids or something he said he's got twelve genes by the way which is impressive so he talks about the i think i don't know the last one is le had been talking about it but he's he's said this many times over the years which is a good signal because it's kinda like more fundamental to his philosophy they've been talking about it for a while and alex asked he goes how do you engineer your great things right you're building rockets that can land on themselves you're building the best electric cars on the planet you just did the neuro link chip in the guy's brain and now the guys like playing civilization using his brain to control the computer game like what is your is there some like general process you do that that works us and elon said the following five steps he goes step one question the requirements and and all of this was born out of pain by the way of not doing this he goes so you know question of the requirements means do we need to do this at all if we need to do this how exactly do we need to do like before you go in and just build the solution to the first prompt that people have of like oh we need x we need to do y right he instead of just immediately jumping to and saying i can build it i could do it it's you first really drill down and you try to make the requirements as true and simple as possible so you try to figure out what is actually needed what are the what are other the requirements why is that the requirement all that's up so that's the step one question of the requirements step two is basically like delete and so he's like he goes the biggest mistake that smart people make is optimizing something that shouldn't have existed in the first place and i thought this was the the best point that he made in this whole thing he goes in my companies we will try to if it's up if it's a machine we'll try to delete a part can it can we do without this part altogether rather than trying to make that part work or lower the cost of the part can we get rid of the part and will the things still work if it's a process inside your company instead trying to optimize the process what happens if you delete the process or there's a role in the company could you delete the role and what he says is that just like the government always adds new rules and regulations and that's why the tax code book is this thick and actually it is because we add four more than we ever subtract and this happens in big companies too and every big company you add people and processes and more requirements to every single thing it very rarely is there any like trash cleaning function that gets rid of the bottom twenty percent we're we're willing to add twenty percent we're very rarely getting willing to get rid of twenty percent so he talks about how when you remove he goes he goes this is a limbic system override he goes because our brains are wired so that we are kind of hoard by by nature we're we're afraid to get rid of something because we're worried something bad will happen and then if you ever get rid of something and one time out of ten you really needed it and it turns out that removing was a bad thing when we add it back our brain basically flames right away and we're like oh my god c and we over correct and then the next time we're way more hesitant to get rid of something just because we all remember that one time that we got rid of that thing and we ended up needing it and you know i'm i by the way i'm going on a family vacation my wife is like literally like i told her i was like i think you're trying to take our house and just bring it with us on vacation like this is not how packing is supposed to go and she's like well we might need this one thing or we can't get rid of that and i'm like i'm watching my wife pack i'm listening to this elon thing and i'm like this isn't true not just in business but in life which is that we will always remember the one thing that we we we decided to remove that we needed even though nine out of ten times you could have got away with it dude but i think he removes too much stuff like i have a tesla sometimes you don't even need to like switching to reverse like it automatically does that but and you also don't have any buttons you know it's just a screen i want the damn button i don't want the screen do you know what i mean removes a lot of stuff i mean look at the iphone right most successful product at all the time when they came out and they removed the keyboard people freaking out then they remove the home button i remember him being like you were governor rid of the home button or your nuts like this is crazy and they got rid of the home button then they got rid of the port and they governor rid of this they keep the best companies in the world actually do this the the thing he says he goes we measure basically if we are not adding back at least ten percent of the time the thing that we removed either a process in the company a role in the company or a part of the of the product a feature of the product if we're not adding back at least ten percent of the time that means we have not been removing enough and so that's his benchmark and it goes that is the only like we we set that as a target in the same way that when you set goals and you're any good company if you set goals you do not wanna hit the goals one hundred out of the time because that means you were being way too cautious with your goals you were not being ambitious enough nor already do you wanna hit your goals zero percent of the time because that means you were being way too unrealistic about your goals and so most people like at amazon they were saying whenever we we worked at there they're like you wanna hit seventy percent of your goals seventy percent of your goals means you're stretching enough but you're also not overs stretching and being unrealistic about what you're can achieve in building a culture of missing missing disappointing expectations and so elon talks about that is like step two is to remove a thing you would like you got a reaction to that i love it it's hard to do like not only do i know people react negatively to that at like any company i've been it because i've done the same thing i react to sometimes negatively like well it's it's working why break it and remove it you know what i mean i agree fundamentally with it it's very challenging to to to do simple but hard exactly there's other steps in the process so he talks about you know then you wanna simplify then you wanna you know automate automate is kind of the last step basically of the five that he talks about he's like know i can't tell you how many times i've done this backwards you know i start off trying to automate a process and then i try to you know speed it up then i start to simplify and then i try to then he's like basically at the end i realized i just needed to remove it in the first place it wasn't even the right thing i quite then i finally questioned the requirement last he's like i got tired of doing that wrong so many times that i made this as my my process so that i can i make sure don't i don't fall into that trap again and there's a famous story of the tesla manufacturing plant where he tried to create basically a robo factory right off the jump he's like why do we need to do all this we'll just automate the whole thing and they basically almost killed the company by trying to overdo the automation at the start rather than doing that at the end of the process dude that's pretty fast i i'm not a fan of elon personality i'm a huge fan of his work i i like to read these old books like particularly about the gil the age and all these industrial and i'm reading one about andrew carnegie who's one of my favorite guys are read about and he was a really big deal because back then no business people would ever talk publicly or they would write publicly about this and he wrote a book and it was considered groundbreaking that one of these rich guys actually shared ideas it's compared to now it's the barrier entry is so low for sharing ideas it is pretty awesome that we get to like learn and get all these good insights to people who are doing amazing and big things totally this happens right now in sports by the way like the olympics is going on and you see there's like the netflix documentary about the sprinter right but there's also one about quarterback and receivers and you get to see how these people live how they prepare how they recover right i'm doing a an episode or a series of this my new email series is called friday we just did one together but the next one that's coming out or or in a couple weeks is with mike van cs he's lebron trainer of twenty years you know way he met lebron lebron was nineteen years old he's been his trainer in a lebron thirty nine years old and he's he's has had the best longevity of any basketball player really ever like playing at a peak level for twenty straight years dude insane longevity physically and emotionally i'm shocked that guy has not screwed up or yeah exactly i mean he's been a model citizen right like since and he's like in many ways as a child star right a child you know how screwed up both child actors are or child stars are this guy was on the cover of sports illustrated like fifteen or sixteen years old and i just sent the chosen one and somehow did not get all screwed up from that right has like you know great kids great wife you know like has a great life never been in trouble with the law not none of that stuff so really incredible and one of the things he talks about is like or in doing the series i was like man i'm getting access to information that thirty years ago i feel like people just didn't have access to this right you didn't know what the guys did for their pre game nutrition and for their post game recovery and how they train but now it's filmed now it's documented now the skills trainers have their own instagram and so if you're a young basketball player the blueprint is there the access to information is there now because of the way that everything is is you is documented on social media or in in interviews where you now have access to information like you would have never had before which by the way if you watch the olympics particularly running is the easiest one because this is a very like clear standard where you're like i just look at the data and i can see we're going faster when i was like sixteen like they would just tell you like eat loads of pasta the night before you don't need to do that unless you're like unless you're unless you're intend to burn two thousand calories like you don't need that many cards you know but there was like all these other things like well this one guy said that he would eat pasta like before so that's just what we're gonna do and like you just hear these like rumors and like well this this one guy said one time and the famous quote like don't have sex or don't mas like a week before like a big of event so therefore you have to do that have you heard that by the way like that's like a thing of bonds never still a thing and fighting a still still hugely a thing but like by the way there's no evidence that it does anything but it's like you hear these things like these like well i heard this i heard muhammad lee did this one time so i have to do it and and that's how it was up up until like you looked into that you looked into the research you wanted to see like for podcasting what you're supposed to do you know chat gp makes it easy alright i think we're i think that's the signal we're reaching that time we're turning into eighth grade boys alright that's the bob i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from all in it like a day's off on a travel and never looking bag