Here's the headline, Millionaire Working at McDonald's.
And actually, it's actually much more interesting than that.
I feel like I could rule the world and know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like a day's all.
This is the story of a guy named Scott Meetup.com, 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 Meetup.
I didn't even know about Scott.
But what I didn't know was 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 a while.
And now he was going viral because he's kind of doing it again.
He didn't tell anybody, but even people saw him update his LinkedIn.
And it said Amazon associate or like warehouse associate or something.
Basically, he's back at a Amazon warehouse now being a pickpacker, kind of minimum wage job again.
And people are like, dude, this is not the first time he's done this.
He did this with McDonald's like, you know, 20 years ago.
And I found this fascinating and I went down to Scott rabbit hole and I want to talk to 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 Marc Andreessen releases Netscape.
And he was like, this is amazing.
And so he's like, I'm going to get in the internet.
And so in the mid 90s, he starts, I believe like one of the world's first online internet agencies.
I think it was an advertising agency, something like that.
He sells it for around $15 million, which is something like 30 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 yuppie people.
That's horrible for my position as a marketer.
But also like, I feel so out of touch with the people.
Here. So he wrote this on his site.
You found it back at the internet archive, which I thought was great.
So it says why I got a job in McDonald's.
I spent a lot of time with bankers, lawyers, internet freaks, corporate walks and other people living strange lives as a good marketing guy.
That's a bad thing. And as a practicing anti-consumerist, 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 world wind, I wanted to experience a profitable well oiled multi-billion dollar machine and I deserve 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 and 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 Scott was like in his blog post, he goes, yeah, 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, intense environment.
I said, yes, he looked at my resume and asked about my current part-time job as chairman of I traffic.
I said, it's an internet thing.
He said, okay, and then asked me for my waist size for the pants.
Hey, real quick, you know, one of the cool parts about what we're doing is that people have reached out and told me that they've built actual million dollar businesses, made their first million, often idea they heard on the show.
That is crazy. That's why we want to do the show.
And we want to see more of that.
One of the questions we get asked over and over again is, is there some kind of idea, database or spreadsheet, where we list out all the different business ideas that we've talked about?
Well, the answer is finally yes, the fine folks at HubSpot have dug through the archive and pulled out 50 plus business ideas and put them into a business idea database.
It's totally free. You go to click hubspot.com slash MFF and get the database for you.
All right. Now, back to the show.
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 he worked there for six months.
I think it was like more like three or four weeks, something like that.
But he did it. 575, eight months.
So he was making 575 an hour times 40 hours a week, times 52 weeks a year.
That's $11,960 pre-tax.
He goes, some people said it was disrespectful.
If it means to check it out, it makes a lot of holes.
I didn't need the money.
They thought I was making fun of people that worked there.
The opposite is true. I gained a bucket of respect.
People that bust their butt for such low pay.
It's one thing to scan past like statistics you see about how many people make $12,000 a year or read about them in the paper.
It's another thing to sit back there in a fry heaving, McNugget wielding six hour shift and go home smelling like fries and McNuggets and realize you only made about $30 a 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 business publication, they want to do a story on Scott about like CEOs in post acquisition life.
And he's like, yeah, come and see what I'm up to now.
They use this photo of him working at McDonald's where he gets McDonald's uniform.
And it's just the greatest photo I've ever seen.
And if you scroll through this blog post, we'll link it in YouTube.
You can see some of these pictures of him working.
It looks like it looks pretty wild.
Well, they spun it like he was struggling, right?
It's like de-throened CEOs is the title.
And they're like, how are they handling the dot com crash?
This dot com CEO is back working at a McDonald's and it's like, wait, that's not what, it's not even what happened at all.
But okay, sure. And now fast forward to today, by the way, he made $15 million I think in that sale.
So he sold his agency for about 15 million bucks.
Who knows, stock cash. Who knows if these is like, but ballpark, right?
Let's take it directional.
And then he goes from there to working at a McDonald's, you know, just to kind of like re-acclimate with the real world, which I thought was really good.
And fast forward to today.
So in 18 or 19 something like that, he sells Meetup.com to we work.
The price was rumored to be 200 million, but who knows?
It's enough that he doesn't have to go and work someplace like this.
Turns out he has a job at an Amazon fulfillment center.
And he doesn't make a big or deal out of it.
He doesn't like tell people about this.
He just puts it on his LinkedIn.
Someone finds it and shares it.
So he ends up in does a podcast where he talks about the story of why he's at Amazon.
And it's the same type of thing where he's like, I just like felt out of touch with average people.
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, isn't that the place where like they just had a big issue with them, the workers in the warehouse wanting to unionize?
And he's like, look, I don't want to talk too much about that.
But yeah, that's where it was.
And I think it's a good idea.
And he sort of insinuates that he was part of it.
And he was kind of like whispering and people's ears.
And he doesn't explicitly say that, but the language that he uses where he's like, I don't really want to 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 unionize against.
But I thought it was a good idea to have a union.
And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like the one riling people up.
And so this guy in a weird way, he's like a little horse gump character.
Like he's like experiencing all these things in the background.
And he's like potentially a pivotal part of the story.
But he doesn't really talk about it.
It reminds me of, you know, like movies, it is a F-Dup analogy.
But it's like movies where it's like the genius nerd gets sent to prison.
But then he like does, you know, then he's like the master, then he like brings a new angle and sort of rallies the crew inside the prison in a different way.
Right. Or like we had Schraile on the podcast.
And he was talking about the same thing.
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.
And this is like meeting of the of the world.
That's what this reminds me of.
This sort of going into the fulfillment center and like stirring up 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 going to drive for Uber.
So he starts driving for Uber.
And he ends up after doing that for a little while.
He starts a private driving business where he's like a broker.
So for example, when I go to the airport, I do use a private company.
I drive a driver. But it's only like $30 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 a year, being a broker for some of these drivers when you want 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 want to do one of these kind 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 know 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.
They say, this is how I want to use my time in life.
And this is what I think is right.
They don't really follow the herd, right?
Like, how many founders who sell their company, then become a VC, then go from VC, all back to make a founder and advisor and go on podcast.
By the way, I did all this after I sold my company too, right?
I sold my company, started investing, started a podcast, started doing 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 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 there was the only tech conference I would do.
I didn't go to any tech conference, any investing conference.
I went to farming conference because I knew it would put me completely out of my bubble exposed to a whole bunch of different people with different thoughts and philosophies and different views about the world right now.
And I knew I would get new ideas and sure enough, a business came out of that.
We ended up launching a business, milk road out of that.
And so there was, you know, I'm a big fan of that.
I'm inspired by that. The only thing I would do differently is I wouldn't necessarily just copy what this guy did and just go get a blue color job necessarily.
Like, the lesson for me is think for myself, what's my version of this?
That's fear. That's more real to me, right?
That I actually do feel compelled to do that.
I would feel excited to do and go do it.
Maybe it would be driving Uber.
Maybe it would be going to work in a warehouse.
Maybe it's something different.
I'm not sure. But this, this really like sparked something in me to take my, to use my time to go do something like that.
I completely agree. By the way, you know, one version of this for me.
It's either teaching at a school like, it would be a second grade teacher for like a year or Gordon Bombay and just go coach a team and go do my version of the Mighty Ducks.
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 coached at a, it was actually like a school for autistic and asperger's kids and I coached their basketball team.
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 would be my version of this.
Dude, a few weeks ago, I emailed this high school asking if they need like an assistant track and field coach.
Right. And I got that I was so pumped up about it.
Like this is so filling.
This is awesome. The best is when they're like, you're not qualified for that.
Well, yeah, I honestly was a little nervous about that.
But I get like the hours and like what they, what they demand of me and I'm like, that's a lot of work.
That's like, you just come in man.
So like my inspiration like really quickly like lower down.
So I got to figure out how to do it.
Can we finish Scott? Oh, yeah.
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 think three different eyes states, by the way, Illinois, I'm sorry, I'm from there.
So how we offended all of them by grouping them all together.
All right. So he's the youngest of five.
His siblings are like 20 years older than him.
Just kind of the way they're finding the family dynamics worked.
And so he's the youngest by like 15 to 20 years.
And he starts his first business when he's nine.
Do you know what it's called?
No, what? Scott's slave service.
Oh, which a nine year old can get away with it because he is basically saying it's free labor for for for for rice siblings.
And so he's like, Hey, whatever tasks you got.
I'm yours. I will do whatever whatever tasks you have.
But he gets the entrepreneurial bug there.
Starts learning to code his first job out of college is actually at Sony.
And he tells Sony he's like, Hey, this is like 94 95.
He's like, the internet's going to be a thing.
And they're like, OK, kid, like whatever you say.
And he's like, no, no, you should have like a website.
I'm like, all right. Well, if you want to build one, go for me.
Don't have at it. So he ends up building the first website for like, you know, Sony.com.
And he realizes pretty quickly.
He's like, OK, this ain't it.
He also in 93 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 Advertrovers Advertoral Infotainment.
And he was basically questioning consumer culture.
So he considers himself sort of an anti-consumerist in many ways.
So he does that. Then he does the first thing, which is that that business we call it, I traffic, which is a media buying agency.
And he was joking around like, at the time, there was really no media to buy on the internet yet.
But he knew people are going to want to advertise on the internet.
This will make websites have a business model.
So let's do this. He sells that thing 15 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 to like be that bold in 94 and 95 to make some of these predictions.
He was, he nailed them. He was 100% right.
And he knew that because when he was a teen and again, he's 20 years younger than all the siblings, he's got 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.
And by the way, do we want to read a few of his like blog posts takeaways from his McDonald's thing?
I thought this was really good.
And I don't, you know, we had to use web archive to find his, this post.
He took it down. I wish he did.
It's fantastic. Well, 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 five, 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 McFlurry must have made just right.
I was trying hard and I was doing an okay job.
Now I've been a leader in a manager for most of our life.
I've had plenty of crap jobs, but I've been the boss for the past few years.
And I've made through red fast company magazine and my Harvard visitor review.
And I've read the countless times that the value of a leader of managers showing appreciation for people, for people's effort.
However, my instinct has been often that showing appreciation really isn't too necessary or good for people.
It just take pride in a job well done.
And they can read my mind and see the appreciation.
Well, from day one in McDonald's, I was yearning for someone just to say thanks or you're even doing okay, it 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.
Hey, so you're listening to a business podcast, which means you probably like business and you like podcasts.
And because of that, I've got another business podcast and you need to check out.
It's called Marketing Made Simple.
And it's host is Dr. J.J.
Peterson. Again, Marketing Made Simple.
Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work.
One of the episodes that I think you need to check out, it's called Get Your Audience From Don't Care to Buy Now with Better Copy.
And he basically just breaks down all the biggest mistakes that most marketers make when it comes to their audience in respect to copy, which is obviously a topic I love and I talk all about.
So you guys need to check it out.
Marketing Made Simple.
You can get it wherever you find your podcast.
So I read that a few hours ago when I was getting ready and I went and messaged a bunch of employees and I said, you're doing great.
You're doing great. You're doing okay.
But because everyone should go and read this post.
This is awesome. This is a very inspiring thing.
Yeah. He talks about the dollar-renuant of 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 him. I'm going to try it while I try to get him on.
Yeah. I would love that.
Scott, come on. That would be amazing.
So then he has his next period where he's like, he's got 30 ideas.
He's like, what do I want to do next?
He's got 30 ideas. And if you read the story about how he narrowed that down to two.
Was it the September 11th story?
Yeah. It's exactly. So he lives a few miles away from the Twin Towers.
So September 11th happens.
He sees the planes hitting the building.
And I think the story was like he was kind of on the rooftop of his building or he's outside of his building.
And it was the first time he had ever met any of his neighbors.
He'd been living there for a while.
He just didn't know anyone.
And now that they were all outside and they're seeing this crazy thing, they're all talking, they're meeting.
And he was kind of struck by men.
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 kind of triggered him in that.
So there's the September 11th 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 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.
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 loo-da.
And he goes to a bunch of their shows and they're a small band.
And so he ends up, he's like, dude, I'm in like conference centers at a hotel ballroom B.
And he's like, I'm listening to the band play.
And he's like, I used to just go alone.
I would, you know, kind of dance or sing alone.
I go all alone. He's like, but soon enough, you know, I started to see some other faces there that were the other regular.
So like there were many of us who were 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 30 to two.
One of them is meetup 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 in 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 he doesn't talk much too much is something called photolog.
Did you see this? It's like a flicker like service.
Yeah, he was early, man.
He was too early. He was super early.
I think he sold it for like 90 million bucks or something.
So he did well with it. There was like the biggest social network in certain countries around the world, but then flicker came out and flicker was growing faster.
And then the next wave of social networks came out.
I saw him describe it 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.
So he sells that company.
Does he start meetup and photologue at the same time?
That's a good question.
I'm not sure if it was the exact same time.
I know there were somewhat in tandem.
There were either same time or over close to each other.
And so he does meetup, meetup starts growing.
And then he makes a pretty controversial move, which is he decides not to make meetup business model just ads.
He's like, no, I'm going to charge people for the service, which at the time was like very anti again, he goes counter to the main mainstream of what everybody else was doing with their websites at the time.
And traffic drops off like 95%.
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 are organizing these meetups, they should pay a fee because they're the ones kind of posting getting the value.
It'll keep the quality bar high.
So let's do that. And he survives the big 90% drop in usage and meetup 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, 150 to 200 million bucks.
By the way, I have a friend, Greg who used to work at, he also got acquired by we work.
And so I texted Greg this morning and I was like, Greg, do you got any stores about this guy Scott?
He goes, I got one. And so he goes, I get to we work and Scott tells me, hey, maybe a 555 Broadway at 6 p.m.
And then I go, okay, he text me right before he goes, by the way, clear your calendar for the night.
Okay, I don't know what's going to happen here, but like, all right, I'm interested.
I'm game. So he shows up and there's just a white van with five other people in it.
He's like, all right, I'm going to die.
I don't know what's happening tonight, but I guess tonight's the night I die.
And Scott walks in, tells the driver, let's go.
And then he says, hey, you're new here and I want to do something I do with everybody who's new, which is we're going to go crash five or six meetups tonight.
And you're going to get to actually like go experience them firsthand first day.
Let's go. And so he was just taking six kind of new people in the company to go and they crash like a Harry Potter meetup and then like a women with diabetes meetup 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 kind of stay in the community stay like amongst the the users and the people and to make that part of the culture for new people that are in the company.
How awesome is that? Dude, this guy is amazing.
I love him. It's 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-mody executive, you know what I mean?
Like he still kind of seems like he seems like he's in it.
Well, and then it takes another twist meetup then gets carved out of we work.
And so this brings up this connects to other data points of our podcast.
So on the episode with Jeremy Giff and he talked about one of his biggest like underrated opportunities right now is messy carve outs.
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 acquires 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.
So they buy we work buys meetup for I don't know, $152 million.
But then meetup itself are sorry, we work itself becomes, you know, a dumpster fire.
But meetup 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 for peanuts out of that sale.
I remember looking, I mean, I didn't have like the finances at the time to be able to afford it.
But someone was like, Hey, do you want to get it on this?
And I was like, yeah, this is like, it's super interesting.
Yeah, I see on the podcast, I think you shared the numbers, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I didn't think that it was going to be Kevin Ryan.
It was a bunch of like, you know, I'm not even in the ballpark to be able to afford whatever it was.
But I was like, you know, maybe I could throw in 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 and behold, the man Kevin Ryan comes in.
And when 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.
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 pretty good business that's just not automated, but like it just, we'll see what happens.
You know, it'll grow 15% a year maybe.
Yeah. So I mean, it's all relative, right?
So it's a, it's a better business than any business I've ever built.
However, in the grand scheme of things, I know what you, I know what 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, flow 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.
He's absolutely awesome.
You should listen to the podcast.
It's called Internet misfits, I think, that he was on and he's the definition of an Internet misfit and he talks a little bit about his time at Amazon.
He's a cool guy. This guy's really fascinating.
He's a fascinating dude.
And I always, I've recognized this guy forever.
You know, when you and I were just getting going the internet, that was when meetup was in a day day and I would go to so many meetups.
I actually started my event hustle, because of meetup.com.
I created a small meetup event on meetup.com.
I got a lot of free users that way.
That's how I built my email list.
I love meetup.com. I like this guy's got.
We got to have him on board.
Yeah. By the way, Internet misfits, that's a great podcast name.
If we didn't have such a cringe name, that could have been ours.
That would have been a great name for us.
Let me, can I tell you about a different story?
Yeah. Sort of actually similar to Scott going to McDonald's.
So have you ever heard of your weird with your pop culture?
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 Riveter?
No. So basically in the early 1940s, America goes to war.
All the men between 18 and 35 go off and serve the war.
So there's this huge need for manufacturers or workers in manufacturing plants to go and create like beach, be 17s like these bombers or whatever 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 Westinghouse, which at the time was like a huge manufacturing company.
They created this campaign called Rose, the name of the character was Rosie, the Riveter and the ad says yes, we can and it was like, yes, young women, you got to 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 20 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 1950s.
It's called Back to Normal C.
And it was like, what does Rosie do now that the war is over?
And it's very much like we're going to sell you this refrigerator.
And there's always ads like what should Rosie do with strawberries on a summer day?
And it's like make make like a strawberry shortcake.
So it's like pretty crazy.
How like who so who was paying for these ads?
Is this the government or the first part maybe think it's the manufacturing companies.
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 the originally was Westinghouse and a bunch of other manufacturers did these campaigns 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 all have to do this together.
And so the government did it as well as private companies.
And so the company that did Rosie the River was called Westinghouse.
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 the Smithsonian.
It's like a big deal because it was like a turning point for American feminism, things like this, but also like the war.
But yeah, you should see the ads in the 50s when they're like, all right, 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 40s and 50s, you know, we were kind of booming with manufacturing.
In fact, have you heard of the rust belt?
Have you heard that phrase the rust belt?
I have heard that one. That refers to where I'm from, Missouri, places like St.
Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, things like that.
Before it was called the rust belt, in the 50s and 60s, 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 rusty factories that no one uses anymore.
And so that's actually how the name came to be.
Now the where I'm getting with all of this, there's this company that is called Blue Forge.
They created this ad that is the best ad that I've seen in years.
And so the ad is basically all about this gig economy and how it like crushes your soul.
Because when Rosie, the Riveter, they so they call them Rosie, the Riveters, that's like the women who are working in these factories.
They interviewed a bunch of them when they were older and they were like, you know, we built this beat this B17, which is a large bomber.
And we saw it roll off 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 the young Americans to go back to manufacturing jobs or they don't mean to do this, but it sort of 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 reindustrialization 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 unsexy as 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, um, uh, androle, you know, androle.
Yeah. So Palmer Lucky's, uh, defense business in, uh, Orange County where it's cool again to work in factories.
It's cool again to make stuff.
And I 100% buy into this premise.
And I think it is so great.
And I was thinking about like different ideas and things like that, uh, but a really simple one.
If you refer someone to some of these jobs, you can earn up to $500.
And so it's actually like a pretty interesting opportunity.
If you just Google like trade jobs or manufacturing jobs, you go to the website, they kind of look silly.
Uh, 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 seem and appear really cool because I think they actually are.
And a lot of them will pay $30, $40 an hour, depending 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 want to spend your whole life running around doing tasks for other people, basically being a delivery person or, and then the doors open and the manufacturing is happening.
And it's like, you could, or you could step into here and really build something.
And it's a really, really well done ad.
Yeah. It's badass. And I think originally, so that company blew forage.
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 submarine workers.
And that's something I never even would 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 built 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 an effort to try to do kind of modern manufacturing here.
I really want to do an episode where we go down to what's it called like El Segundo or whatever.
There's 10 interesting companies all in this like one block.
Our buddy John Cougan did an amazing video worth watching, 17 minutes.
And it's basically he goes to this area of El Segundo where he's like, you got SpaceX, reading a nuclear, Varda, ABL space systems.
There's like a whole bunch of companies 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 checking out.
It's I think pretty inspiring.
And it's, you know, there are these hot beds, right?
There's like AI hot beds.
There's crypto hot beds.
And then it's like, where is the kind of like hard tech hot bed?
And it seems like this is the answer.
If you're interested in that or you're doing that or you just want to just go feel that energy, I think it's cool to watch the videos or go visit a place like this.
And it is happening, by the way, like the Toyota Tundra, Tundra's 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 10 miles from the Nissan plant.
And I remember thinking like, I used to think like made in America, man, I had to get a Ford, it's like this D sound is just as made in America is anything else.
And so like it's definitely happening.
But I think that there's like a there's an interesting group of people who are making it seem very sexy.
And I dig that. All right.
So listen to how ridiculous this is.
So I remember in the 90s when I used to go to dinner with my family, I was just a kid and you would get to the host's stand and she would say something like, do you want to be in the smoking or non smoking section.
And we look back at that now.
We think that is ridiculous.
I cannot believe that existed.
Well, I often ask myself that question now, which is in 20 years, what am I going to look back?
And it's going to be sort of like the smoking versus non smoking sectioning question.
And that my friends is why I love the A16Z podcast.
They look at how technology is changing so quickly and how you can stay on top of it.
The podcast is put on by VC firm and Jason Horowitz is one of the best firms out there in the world.
And so they're able to see all this amazing information that people like you and I, we don't normally get access to.
And I love hearing steps opinion on it.
So they look at topics like autonomous vehicles, the science behind drugs like ozempic and things like that and the security behind LLM's and how it's on all of our devices and whether we should be freaked out or not.
So check it out. It's called the A16Z podcast.
It's hosted by Steph Smith on my favorite people on earth.
Again, the A16Z podcast.
You can find it wherever you get your podcast.
You want to 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 12 kids by the way, which is impressive.
So he talks about the, I don't know, the last one was like, he's been talking about it, but he's, he's said this many times over the years, which is a good signal because it's kind of like more fundamental to his philosophy.
They've been talking about it for a while.
And Lex asked him, he goes, how do you engineer great things, right?
You're building rockets that can land on themselves.
You're building the best of lecture cars on the planet.
You just did the neural link chip in the guy's brain and now the guy's 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?
And Elon said the following five steps.
He goes step one, question the requirements.
And all of this was born out of pain, by the way, of not doing this.
He goes, so you know, question requirements means, do we need to do this at all?
If we need to do this, how exactly do we need to do this?
Like before you go in and just build a 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 it and saying, I can build it.
I could do it. Once you first really drill down and try to make the requirements as true and simple as possible.
So you try to figure out what is actually needed?
What are the requirements?
Why is that the requirement?
All that stuff. 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 best point that he made in this whole thing.
Because in my companies, we will try to, if it's a machine, we'll try to delete a part.
Can we do it 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 thing still work?
If it's a process inside your company instead of trying to optimize the process, what happens if you deleted 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.
He very rarely is there any like trash cleaning function that gets rid of the bottom 20%.
We're willing to add 20%.
We're very, very rarely getting willing to give rid of 20%.
So he talks about how when you remove, he goes, he goes, this is a limbic system override.
And he goes, because our brains are wired so that we are kind of hoarders by nature.
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 10, you really needed it and it turns out that removing was a bad thing when we add it back, our brain basically inflames right away and we're like, oh my God, see?
And we're 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 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 is true, not just in business, but in light, which is that we will always remember the one thing that we did.
We decided to remove that we needed, even though nine out of 10 times you could have got away with it.
But I think he removes too much stuff.
Like I have a Tesla. Sometimes you don't even need to like switch into reverse.
Like it automatically does that.
But you also don't have any buttons.
You know, it's just a screen.
I want the damn button. I don't want the damn screen.
You know what I mean? He removes a lot of stuff.
I mean, look at the iPhone, right?
Most successful product all the time when they came out and they removed the keyboard.
People freaking out. Then they removed the home button.
I remember being like, you were gathered to the home button or you nuts?
Like this is crazy. And they got rid of the home button.
Then they got rid of the port and they got rid of this, right?
They keep the best companies in the world actually do this.
The thing he says he goes, we measure basically if we are not adding back at least 10% of the time, the thing that we removed either a process in the company, a role in the company or a part of the product feature of the product.
If we're not adding back at least 10% of the time, that means we have not been removing enough.
And so that's his benchmark.
And it goes that is the only way 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 want to hit the goals 100% of the time because that means you were being way too cautious with your goals.
You were not being ambitious enough.
Nor do you want to hit your goals 0% 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 when we worked out, they're like, you want to hit 70% of your goals.
70% of your goals means you're stretching enough, but you're also not overstretching and being unrealistic about what you're going to achieve and building a culture of missing disappointing expectations.
And so you want to talk about that as step two is to remove a thing.
You look like you got a reaction to that.
I love it. It's hard to do.
Not only do I know people react negatively to that at any company I've been at because I've done the same thing, I react to sometimes negatively of like, well, it's working.
Why break it and remove it?
You know what I mean? I agree fundamentally with it.
It's very challenging to do.
Simple but hard. Exactly.
There's other steps in the process.
So he talks about, you know, then you want to simplify, then you want to, you know, automate.
Automate is kind of the last step, basically, of the five that he talks about.
He's like, 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 try to simplify it.
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, I've been like finally questioned the requirement last.
He's like, I got tired of doing that wrong so many times that I made this as my process so that I can, I make sure 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 robot factory right off the jump.
He's like, Oh, 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. I'm not a fan of Elon's personality.
I'm a huge fan of his work.
I like to read these old books, like particularly about the Gilly age and all these industrialists.
And I'm reading one about Andrew Carnegie, who's one of my favorite guys to read about.
And he was a really big deal because back then, no business people would ever talk publicly, but 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.
And that'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 sprinters, right?
But there's also one about quarterbacks and receivers.
And you get to see how these people live, how they prepare, how they recover, right?
I'm doing an episode of a series of, this is a new email series called Good Friday.
We just did one together.
But the next one that's coming out or in a couple of weeks is with Mike Van Seas.
He's LeBron's trainer of 20 years.
He made LeBron, LeBron, LeBron, LeBron, he was a 19 years old.
He's been his trainer now, LeBron's 39 years old.
And he's, he's had the best longevity of any basketball player really ever, like playing at a peak level for 20 straight years.
Dude, you'd say longevity, physically and emotionally.
I'm shocked that guy has not screwed up.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, he's been a model citizen, right?
Like since, and he's like, and many ways a child star, right?
If you know how screwed up, most child actors are, child stars are, this guy was on the cover of Sports Illustrator like 15 or 16 years old and it is said to 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.
None of that stuff. So really incredible.
And one of the things he talks about is like, or in doing this series, I was like, man, I'm getting access to information that 30 years ago, I feel like people just didn't have access to this, right?
You didn't know what the guys did for their pregame 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 documented on social media or 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 it's 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 16, 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 in tend to burn 2000 calories, like you don't need that many carbs, you know, but there was like all these little things like, well, this one guy said that he would eat pasta like before.
So that's just what we're going to do.
And like you just hear these like rumors and like, well, this, this one guy said one time in the famous quote, like, don't have sex or don't masturbate like a week before, like a big event.
So therefore you have to do that.
Have you heard that by the way?
Like that's like a thing.
Of course, Jay. You know it's still a thing and fighting it's still a thing.
It's still hugely a thing.
But like by the way, there's no evidence that that it does anything.
But it's like you hear these things like these like, well, I heard this, I heard Muhammad Ali did this one time.
So I have to do it. And that's how it was up until like you looked into that.
You looked into the research.
You wanted to see like for podcasting and what's your choice to do?
You know, chat GPT makes it easy.
All right. I think we're, I think that's the signal we're reaching that time.
We're turning into eighth grade boys.
All right. That's the pot.
I feel like I could rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days on.
I put my all in it like no days on.
