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

Shaan Puri

Here's the headline: **"Millionaire Working at McDonald's."** Actually, it's much more interesting than that. This is the story of a guy named Scott. Meetup.com is probably the most popular thing that he made. Meetup is a really cool site; I used it when I moved to San Francisco. I joined a bunch of groups and met a bunch of people. It's basically a way to go from the internet to actually meeting people in real life. So, I knew about Meetup, but I hadn't even known about Scott. 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. 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 people saw him update his LinkedIn, and it said "Amazon Associate" or "Warehouse Associate" or something. Basically, he's back at an Amazon warehouse now, being a pick packer—kind of a minimum wage job again. 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." I found this fascinating, and I went down the Scott rabbit hole. I want to talk to you about it. You have some good stuff there too, right? Is that how it caught your eye?

Sam Parr

Yeah, so basically, he grew up, I think, in Iowa or Idaho, somewhere in the Midwest. He grew up there and saw that Marc Andreessen released Netscape. He was like, "This is amazing!" So, in the mid-nineties, he starts, I believe, one of the world's first online internet agencies. I think it was an advertising agency, something like that. He sells it for around $15,000,000, which is something like $30,000,000 in today's money. After he sells it, he reflects, "I've been working for 6 or 7 years at this internet startup. I work in marketing, but I'm only around bankers, lawyers, and other yuppie people. That's horrible for my position as a marketer. I also feel so out of touch with the people."

Shaan Puri

Here, let's use his words. He wrote this on his site, and you found it back at the Internet Archive, which I thought was great. So it says: **"Why I Got a Job at McDonald's"** "I spend a lot of time with bankers, lawyers, internet freaks, corporate wonks, 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 whirlwind, I wanted to experience a profitable, well-oiled, multibillion-dollar machine. I deserved a break today."

Sam Parr

And then he goes and works at McDonald's, and he even talks about it. He shows his application and says, "I just walked in off the street. It was at like 5th and Broadway in New York City." He walked off the street, and the manager was like, "So, are you used to working with teams or something like that?" And Scott, in his blog post, goes, "Yeah, I was honest. I said, 'Yes, I am used to that.'"

Shaan Puri

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 iTraffic. I said, "It's an internet thing." He said, "Okay," and then asked me for my waist size for the pants.

Sam Parr

And he works there for like 6 months. He has this amazing blog post about everything that he's learned.

Shaan Puri

By the way, I don't think he worked there for six months. I think it was more like three or four weeks, something like that. But that $5.75 isn't much. He was making $5.75 an hour, times 40 hours a week, times 52 weeks a year. That's $11,960 pretax. He goes, "Some people said it was disrespectful to me to take a job at McDonald's. 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 for people that bust their butt for such low pay. It's one thing to scan past 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 within a fry, heaving McNuggets, wielding a six-hour shift, and go home smelling like fries and McNuggets, realizing you only made about $30 that day. It's an eye-opener. Interpret that as you see fit.

Sam Parr

And then what happens is, while he's working at McDonald's, Crain's, which is a business publication, wants to do a story on Scott about CEOs and post-acquisition life. 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’s in the McDonald's uniform, and it's just the greatest photo I've ever seen. If you scroll through this old blog post [we'll link it in YouTube], you can see some of these pictures of him working. It looks pretty wild.

Shaan Puri

Well, they spun it like he was struggling, right? It's like "Dethroned CEOs" is the title, and they're like, "How are they handling the dotcom crash? This dotcom CEO is back working at McDonald's." So it's like, wait, that's not what happened at all, but okay.

Sam Parr

Sure, and now fast forward to today.

Shaan Puri

By the way, he made **$15,000,000** in that sale. I think he sold his agency for about **$15,000,000**. Who knows if this was stock or cash, but it's a ballpark figure, right? Then he goes from there to working at a McDonald's, you know, just to kind of reacclimate with the real world, which I thought was really good.

Sam Parr

And fast forward to today. In 2018 or 2019, something like that, he sells Meetup.com to WeWork. The price was rumored to be $200,000,000, 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 ordeal out of this. He doesn't tell people about it; he just puts it on his LinkedIn. Someone finds it and shares it. So, he ends up doing a podcast where he talks about the story of why he's at Amazon. It's the same type of thing where he's like, "I just felt out of touch with average people, and I wanted to feel that again." He doesn't exactly say this, but he says something like... the interviewer was asking him about his experience there, and he's like, "Isn't that that place where they just had a big issue with 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." He sort of insinuates that.

Shaan Puri

That he was part of it. That he was part.

Sam Parr

Of it, and he was kind of like whispering in people's ears. 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, 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." It's as if he's the one riling people up. In a weird way, he's like a little Forrest Gump character. He's experiencing all these things in the background, and he's potentially a pivotal part of the story, but he doesn't really talk about it.

Shaan Puri

It reminds me of, you know, like movies... This is a messed up analogy, but it's like movies where the genius nerd gets sent to prison. But then he's like the master, then he brings a new angle and sort of rallies the crew inside the prison in a different way.

Sam Parr

Right.

Shaan Puri

Or like we had Shkreli 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 learning clubs for technology inside the prison. But then they also taught him a bunch of things. It was just like a meeting of the worlds. That's what this reminds me of... this sort of going into the fulfillment center and stirring up the union efforts.

Sam Parr

I have a friend of a friend who was a banker. He was a really successful Wall Street guy, and he retired. But he got bored, so he was like, "Dude, I'm gonna drive for Uber." He starts driving for Uber, and after doing that for a little while, he starts a private driving business where he's like a broker. For example, when I go to the airport, I do use a private driver, but it's only about $30 more than an Uber. It's not much more expensive, but it feels a little bit nicer. He started one of these businesses and ended up being a broker for it. Now, he is making around $1,000,000 a year being a broker for some of these drivers when you want a car. It's kind of a similar thing. Would you ever, if you had a break in your career, want to do one of these kinds of blue-collar jobs?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, dude, when I saw this, I was inspired on three fronts. The first is that this is a guy who plays his own game. 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 and 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. How many founders sell their company, then become a VC, then go from VC back to being a founder and adviser, and go on podcasts? By the way, I did all this after I sold my company too. I sold my company, started investing, started a podcast, and followed the normal path. So when I see people who think from first principles about what they care about in life, decide what they want to do, and do it—even though it sounds weird or unconventional—I have the highest level of respect for them. The second thing that inspired me is the idea of basically just getting out of your bubble. I do this in a different way, not usually by a job. You told me about that conference, FarmCon, which is a conference for farmers. I went there; that was the only conference I attended. I didn't go to any tech conference or investing conference. I went to a farming conference because I knew it would put me completely out of my bubble, exposing me to a whole bunch of different people with different thoughts, philosophies, and views about the world. I knew I would get new ideas, and sure enough, a business came out of that. We ended up launching a business, The Milk Road, out of that. So, I'm a big fan of that, and I'm inspired by it. The only thing I would do differently is that I wouldn't necessarily just copy what this guy did and go get a blue-collar job. The lesson for me is to think for myself: What's my version of this that feels more real to me? What would I actually feel compelled to do and be excited about? Maybe it would be driving Uber, maybe it would be working at a warehouse, or maybe it would be something different. I'm not sure, but this really sparked something in me to use my time to go do something like that.

Sam Parr

I completely agree.

Shaan Puri

By the way, you know one version of this for me? It's either teaching at a school, like being a 2nd grade teacher for a year, or being Gordon Bombay and just coaching a team. I want to do my version of the Mighty Ducks. I've actually been itching to do this—go and coach like a 7th grade boys' basketball team or something. I did this for a while; I coached at a school for autistic and Asperger's kids. I coached their basketball team, and it was one of the best experiences of my life, just doing that on the side for fun. I think I might go back and try to do something like that. I think that would be my version.

Sam Parr

Alright guys, really quick. Back when I was running The Hustle, we had this premium newsletter called **Trends**. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and created a sort of playbook for researching different companies, ideas, and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses. Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool. They took this playbook that we developed and gave to our analysts, and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. It breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends and identifying different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly. It's pretty awesome that they took this internal document, which we use for teaching our analysts how to do this, and turned it into a tool that they are giving away for free. Anyone can download it! So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea exist, this is the ultimate guide. If you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now, back to the show. Dude, a few weeks ago, I emailed this high school asking if they needed an assistant track and field coach, right? I got a response, and I was so pumped up about it. I'm like, "This is so Philly! This is awesome!"

Shaan Puri

The best is when they're like, "You're not qualified for that." Well, yeah.

Sam Parr

I honestly was a little nervous about that. I get the hours and what they demand of me, and I'm like, "That's a lot of work. That's a huge commitment." So, my inspiration very quickly lowered down. I gotta figure out if I'm going to do it.

Shaan Puri

Can we finish Scott? Because there's more of his story that I think is pretty interesting. So, he's born in a big family and, like you said, sort of in the middle of the country. I think Illinois or something.

Sam Parr

Just named three different states, by the way: Illinois, Idaho. Sorry, sorry, I'm from there and I...

Shaan Puri

Told you, we offended all of them by grouping them all together. Alright, so he's the youngest of five. His siblings are like 20 years older than him, just kind of the way their family dynamics worked. 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?

Sam Parr

No, what?

Shaan Puri

Scott's slave service... oh, which a 9-year-old can get away with because he's basically saying it's free labor for his siblings. So he's like, "Hey, whatever tasks you got, I'm yours. I will do whatever task you have." But he gets the entrepreneurial bug there and starts learning to decode. His first job out of college is actually at Sony. He tells Sony, he's like, "Hey, this is like '94, '95. The internet's gonna be a thing." And they're like, "Okay, kid, whatever you say." He's like, "No, no, no, you should have a website." And they're like, "Alright, well, if you want to build one, go for it." So he ends up building the first website for Sony.com. He realizes pretty quickly, he's like, "Okay, this ain't it." He also, in '93, had started one of the first internet shows. So, one of the first podcasts, essentially. He started his own radio show on the internet called "Advertorial Infotainment," and he was basically questioning consumer culture. He considers himself sort of an anti-consumerist in many ways. So he does that, then he does the first thing, which is that business we called iTraffic, which is a media buying agency. He was joking around like at the time there was really no media to buy on the internet yet, but he knew people were going to want to advertise on the internet. This would make websites have a business model, so let's do this. He sells that thing for about $15 million.

Sam Parr

Which, by the way, doesn't... I mean, it's so obvious now. Yes, he's right, but that's pretty wild to be that bold in '94 or '95 to make some of these predictions. He nailed them.

Shaan Puri

He was 100% right. He knew that because when he was a teen—and again, he's 20 years younger than all his siblings—he had a lot of alone time. He was basically spending it programming just for fun. He became convinced that computers and the internet were where it's at. Then he did the McDonald's thing. By the way, do we want to read a few of his blog post takeaways from his McDonald's experience that you sent me? I thought those were really good.

Sam Parr

Why did he take it down? You know, we had to use the web archive to find this post. I wish he hadn't taken it down. I know it's fantastic.

Shaan Puri

Well, we still got it. We'll show some of the pictures on here. He's got a picture of his burn from the fry machine and stuff like that on his arm. But here's one of them: He goes, "Nobody, number 4, 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 be made just right. I was trying hard; I was doing an okay job." Now, I've been a leader and a manager for most of my life. I've had plenty of crap jobs, but I've been the boss for the past few years. I faithfully read *Fast Company* magazine and my *Harvard Business Review*. I've read that countless times: the value of a leader or manager showing appreciation for people's efforts. However, my instinct has often been 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." That would have been sufficient. But no, neither management experience nor reading about management teaches us a lesson in the same way as feeling it—being an underappreciated employee.

Sam Parr

So, I read that a few hours ago when I was getting ready. I went and messaged a bunch of employees and I said, "You're doing great! You're doing great!"

Shaan Puri

You're doing okay.

Sam Parr

Because this is... everyone should go and read this post. It is awesome! This is a very inspiring thing.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he talks about the dollar menu and a bunch of things. Okay, so he does that.

Sam Parr

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 gonna try it. Well, I'll try to get him on.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I would love that, Scott. Come on, that'd be amazing! So then he has his next step. He's got 30 ideas and he's like, "What do I want to do next?" He has 30 ideas. Have you read the story about how he narrowed that down to 2?

Sam Parr

Was it the September 11th story?

Shaan Puri

Yes, exactly. So, he lives a few miles away from the Twin Towers. When September 11th happens, he sees the planes hitting the buildings. I think the story was that he was kind of on the rooftop of his building or outside of it. It was the first time he had ever met any of his neighbors. He had been living there for a while but just didn't know anyone. Now that they were all outside witnessing this crazy event, they were all talking and meeting each other. He was struck by the realization that he really lived a pretty solo life and was just on the internet. He had a couple of other experiences that triggered this reflection. So, there's the September 11th event, and then a week later, he reads this book called *Bowling Alone*. I guess this book had a big impact on him because he ended up giving it to every Meetup employee. *Bowling Alone* is basically a book about statistics. He's honest; he says, "I didn't even read the whole thing," but he notes that the beginning of the book makes a very clear point.

Shaan Puri

That more and more, we're doing fewer things with other people. This lack of interaction with strangers causes us to trust strangers less, which then leads to spending even less time with them. It's a terrible cycle that we get caught in. He notices this in his own life. He's a big fan of the band Aluna and goes to a bunch of their shows. They're a small band, so he ends up in conference centers and hotel ballrooms. While listening to the band play, he reflects, "You know, I used to just go alone. I would dance or sing alone, and then go home alone." But soon enough, he started to see some other familiar faces there. There weren't many of us who were big fans of this band, but he notes, "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." That's when he decides to narrow down his list of ideas from 30 to 2. One of them is Meetup. He thinks, "What if we made it so the internet could help people meet up in real life?" This could solve the "bowling alone" problem, where people interact more with strangers, which increases their trust in strangers. This, in turn, increases the amount of time they're willing to talk to others and makes it okay to have real-life interactions, even with the internet. The second idea, which he hasn't discussed much, is something called Photo Log. Did you see this? It's like a Flickr-like service.

Sam Parr

Yeah, he was early, man. He was too early.

Shaan Puri

He was super early. I think he sold it for like $90 million or something, so he did well with it. It was like the biggest social network in certain countries around the world. But then Flickr came out, and Flickr was growing faster. And then the next wave of social networks came out.

Sam Parr

I saw him describe it as "Instagram before Instagram," but I didn't know that it was that financially successful. That's amazing.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so he did really well with that as well. He sells that company.

Sam Parr

Does he start the meetup and photo log at the same time?

Shaan Puri

That's a good question. I'm not sure if it was at the exact same time, but I know they were somewhat in tandem. They were sort of like, you know, either at the same time or close to each other. So, he does Meetup, and Meetup starts growing. Then he makes a pretty controversial move, which is he decides not to make Meetup's business model just ads. He's like, "No, I'm gonna charge people for the service," which at the time was very anti-mainstream. He goes counter to what everybody else was doing with their websites at the time, and traffic drops off by like 95%. But he stays with it. He's like, "I believe that this is the sustainable path for this." He argues that the people who are organizing these meetups should pay a fee because they're the ones hosting and getting the value. It'll keep the quality bar high, so let's do that. He survives the big 90% drop in usage, and Meetup becomes a profitable, sustainable business. It goes on for a long time until they sell to WeWork for, I don't know, $150 to $200 million. By the way, I have a friend, Greg, who used to work there. He also got acquired by WeWork. So, I texted Greg this morning and I was like, "Greg, do you have any stories about this guy Scott?" He goes, "I got one." So, he goes, "I get to WeWork, and Scott tells me, 'Hey, meet me at 555 Broadway at 6 PM.' I go, 'Okay.' He texts me right before and says, 'By the way, clear your calendar for the night.' I'm like, 'Okay, I don't know what's gonna happen here, but alright, 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, 'Alright, I'm gonna die. I don't know what's happening tonight, but I guess tonight's the night I die.' Scott walks in, tells the driver, 'Let's go,' and then he says, 'Hey, 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 experience them firsthand. First day, let's go.' So, he was just taking six new people in the company to go, and they crashed like a Harry Potter meetup and then a women with diabetes meetup. They went to six different meetups that night and stayed out all night basically at this thing. 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 amongst the users and the people, and to make that part of the culture for new people in the company. How awesome is that?'

Sam Parr

Dude, this guy is amazing! I love it.

Shaan Puri

Him, so good, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, and that he's been in the game for so long. He's still not like a high and mighty executive, you know what I mean? He still kinda seems like he's in it.

Shaan Puri

Well, then it takes another twist. Meetup gets carved out of WeWork. This connects to two other data points from our podcast. In the episode with Jeremy Giffen, he talked about one of his biggest underrated opportunities right now: messy carve-outs. What he meant was that sometimes, when an acquisition happens, usually about a year later, the company realizes that they didn't really want one of the assets. Alternatively, the company that acquires it starts to go south, and this good company they bought is embedded inside of a bad company. This is exactly what happened with Meetup. WeWork bought Meetup for, I don't know, $150 million to $200 million. But then WeWork itself became, you know, a dumpster fire. However, Meetup was still a good asset inside of this dumpster fire. Here comes a guest of the pod, Kevin Ryan, who has been on the podcast before. He came in and actually bought Meetup for peanuts out of that sale.

Sam Parr

I remember looking... I mean, I didn't have the finances at the time to be able to afford it. But someone was like, "Hey, do you want to get in on this?" and I was like, "Yeah, this is super interesting."

Shaan Puri

On the podcast, I think you shared the numbers, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, and I didn't think that it was going to be Kevin Ryan. It was a bunch of, you know... I'm not even in the ballpark to be able to afford whatever it was, but I was like, "Maybe I could throw in just a small amount of money to like a group of people who are trying to buy it." I thought it was very interesting. And then, lo and behold, the man Kevin Ryan comes in. And if he comes in... to me, he's a really good signal that something is interesting here.

Shaan Puri

So he bought it and then they put in a CEO. They turned it around; it's profitable now and they just did a great job with it. They got a great... it turned out to be a great investment for them.

Sam Parr

Is it a big business, or is it just like a pretty good business that's just not automated? But like, we'll see what happens. You know, it'll grow 15% a year maybe.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so I mean it's all relative, right? It's a better business than any business I've ever built. However, in the grand scheme of things, I know what question you're asking, which is: is this some sort of rocket ship type of crazy $1,000,000,000 business? I don't know. I don't think so. It looks like it's a...

Sam Parr

Slow and steady.

Shaan Puri

Slow and steady, a profitable cash-flowing business that's good for humanity. So in that sense, it's an awesome business.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I think this guy's the man. I think he's absolutely awesome. You should listen to the podcast; it's called *Internet Misfits*. I think he was on it, and he's the definition of an internet misfit. He talks a little bit about his time at Amazon. He's a cool guy; this guy's really fascinating. I've recognized this guy forever. You know, when you and I were just getting going on the internet, that was when Meetup was in its heyday. I would go to so many meetups. I actually started my event, HustleCon, because of Meetup.com. I created a small meetup event on Meetup.com and got a lot of free users that way. That's how I built my email list. I love Meetup.com. I like this guy, Scott. We gotta have him on board.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, by the way, "Internet Misfits" is a great podcast name. If we didn't have such a cringe name, that could have been ours. That would have been a great, great name for us.

Sam Parr

Let me tell you about a different story. It's actually somewhat similar to Scott going to McDonald's. Have you ever heard of Rosie the Riveter? No? So basically, in the early 1940s, America went to war. All the men between the ages of 18 and 35 went off to serve in the war. There was a huge need for workers in manufacturing plants to create bombers, like the B-17s, and other supplies. They needed to get young women, who had never worked before, to come and work in factories. They had to make it look appealing. They ran ads saying, "If you can work an electric mixer, you can work a drill." They did all these things to entice young women to join the workforce. Westinghouse, which was a huge manufacturing company at the time, created a campaign featuring a character named Rosie the Riveter. The ad said, "Yes, we can!" It was a call to young women, encouraging them to contribute to their country. Before the war, I think something like 2 million women were working. After that campaign went live, it was around 20 million young women who got jobs. It was a significant moment for women's empowerment and also helped push America forward. By the way, you should see the ads from the 1950s. They were called "Back to Normalcy." They asked, "What does Rosie do now that the war is over?" The ads were very much about selling household products, like refrigerators, and featured scenarios like, "What should Rosie do with strawberries on a summer day?" The answer was to make a strawberry shortcake. It's pretty crazy how the narrative shifted.

Shaan Puri

Who... so who's paying for these ads? Is this the government or the first part? Maybe I think it's the manufacturing companies.

Sam Parr

Both.

Shaan Puri

But then, why would they pay for Rosie back to the kitchen? I don't understand that part.

Sam Parr

Well, because I mean obviously there was sexism. When originally Westinghouse and a bunch of other manufacturers did these campaigns to convince women to come work for them, the government was involved too. You know, it's propaganda, but it's like good propaganda. They would do this stuff saying, "We all have to do this together." So, the government did it as well as private companies. The company that created Rosie the Riveter was Westinghouse, which was a large manufacturer. By the way, Rosie the Riveter is one of the most recognized images in American history. It's in the Smithsonian; it's a big deal because it was a turning point for American feminism and the war. You should see the ads in the fifties when they were like, "Alright, the men are back! Back to normalcy." That was the campaign—back to normalcy. The reason I'm saying this is that back then, in the forties and fifties, we were kind of booming with manufacturing. In fact, have you heard of the phrase "the Rust Belt"?

Shaan Puri

I have heard that one.

Sam Parr

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. Then the name changed to the Rust Belt, meaning all these old, rusty factories that no one uses anymore. So that's actually how the name came to be. Now, where I'm getting with all of this is there's this company called Blueforge. They created an ad that is the best ad that I've seen in years.

Shaan Puri

Thank you. The most she can ask for is $2,000,000. Who would you like? Okay, ring me later. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." No, no, no, no. I'm leaving my car right now. I dearly apologize. Hey, what do you do here?

Sam Parr

Get a gig that's built to last. The ad is basically all about the gig economy and how it crushes your soul. They refer to the women working in factories as "Rosie the Riveters." They interviewed a bunch of them when they were older, and they said, "You know, we built this B-17," which is a large bomber. They saw it roll off the manufacturing line, and they felt so much pride. They were helping America, but also, they were working together to achieve this task. They felt amazing about themselves. Now, this ad shows that when you're driving for Uber and things like that, you feel terrible. You have people complaining, and you're not working towards a common goal. This company, Blueforge, was put together—I believe the Navy funded it. What they're trying to do is convince young Americans to go back to manufacturing jobs. They don't mean to do this, but it sort of encourages a return to trade jobs. Basically, they want to rebuild manufacturing in America. I saw this ad and did a little research on the reindustrialization of America. It's incredibly fascinating. This ad is so good; it's trying to make these manufacturing jobs, which don't even exist that much right now, look appealing. If they do exist, they're often seen as unsexy. What this company is doing is trying to make it look cool, and they are totally succeeding. You're seeing this a little bit with Anduril. You know Anduril? Palmer Luckey is a defense business in 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. I think it is so great. I was thinking about different ideas, and a really simple one is that if you refer someone to some of these jobs, you can earn up to $500. It's actually a pretty interesting opportunity. If you just Google "trade jobs" or "manufacturing jobs," you go to the website, and they kind of look silly. They're not that enticing; there's no sex appeal. However, I think these jobs are quite romantic. They are really cool, and you can make them seem and appear really cool because I think they actually are. A lot of them will pay $30 to $40 an hour, depending on what it is, particularly the trades, which are incredibly popular right now with Gen Z on TikTok. I just thought this ad was so awesome.

Shaan Puri

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... you know, a delivery person?" Or... and then the doors open and the manufacturing is happening, and it's like, "You could, or you could step in here and really build something." It's a really, really well-done ad.

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's badass. I think originally, that company BlueForge, 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. That's something I never even would have thought exists, right? But it does.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, really cool! I hope this happens. I hope America shifts back to a much more "we build things here" culture, which I think they're trying to do. You know, Tesla and SpaceX being based here is really awesome. Then there's the Chips Act, which is trying to build a giant chip factory here, instead of being reliant on Taiwan. So, there's an effort to try to do modern manufacturing here. I really want to do an episode where we go down to what's it called... El Segundo or whatever. There are 10 interesting companies all in this one block. Our buddy John Coogan did an amazing video worth watching—17 minutes long. Basically, he goes to this area of El Segundo where he's like, "You got SpaceX, Radian, Nuclear Varta, ABL Space Systems." There's a whole bunch of companies all in this one area. He went and hung out with them, took a camera and a crew out there. It's worth checking out; I think it's pretty inspiring. There are these hotbeds, right? There are AI hotbeds, there are crypto hotbeds, and then it's like, where is the kind of hard tech hotbed? It seems like this is the answer. If you're interested in that, or you're doing that, or you just want to feel that energy, I think it's cool to watch the videos or go visit a place like this.

Sam Parr

And it is happening, by the way. Like, the Toyota Tundra is made in Texas. So if you're in Texas and you see a Tundra, a lot of them have a "Made in Texas" sign. Also, when I lived in Nashville, Tennessee, I lived like 10 miles from the Nissan plant. I remember thinking, like, I used to think "Made in America" meant I had to get a Ford. It's like this Nissan is just as "Made in America" as anything else. So, like, it's definitely happening. But I think that there's an interesting group of people who are making it seem very sexy, and I dig that. You want to do one more thing?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I got one related one. 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? His 5-step problem-solving method?

Sam Parr

No, but it's like step 4: have kids or something.

Shaan Puri

He said he's got **12 kids**, by the way, which is impressive. He talks about, I think, the last one is Lex Fridman talking about it. But he's said this many times over the years, which is a good signal because it's kind of more fundamental to his philosophy. They've been talking about it for a while. Lex asked him, "How do you engineer great things?" You're building rockets that can land on themselves. You're building the best electric cars on the planet. You just did the Neuralink chip in a guy's brain, and now the guy's like playing Civilization using his brain to control the computer game. "What is your... is there some general process you do that works?" Elon said the following **5 steps**. He goes, **Step 1**: Question the requirements. All of this was born out of pain, by the way, of not doing this. He goes, "Questioning the requirements means, do we need to do this at all? If we need to do this, how exactly do we need to do this?" Before you go in and just build the solution to the first prompt that people have, like, "Oh, we need X," or "We need to do Y," right? Instead of just immediately jumping to it and saying, "I can build it, I can do it," you first really drill down. You try to make the requirements as true and simple as possible. You try to figure out what is actually needed, what the requirements are, and why that is the requirement. All that stuff. So that's **Step 1**: Question the requirements. **Step 2** is basically like delete. He goes, "The biggest mistake that smart people make is optimizing something that shouldn't have existed in the first place." I thought this was the best.

Shaan Puri

That he made in this whole thing, he goes, "In my companies, we will try to... if it's a machine, we'll try to delete a part. 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 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? 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. Actually, it is because we add four more than we ever subtract. This happens in big companies too. In every big company, you add people, processes, and more requirements to every single thing. Very rarely is there any "trash cleaning" function that gets rid of the bottom 20%. We're willing to add 20%, but we're very rarely willing to get rid of 20%. So he talks about how when you remove... he goes, "This is a limbic system override." 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." Then, if you ever get rid of something, and one time out of ten you really needed it, it turns out that removing it was a bad thing. When we add it back, our brain basically inflames right away, and we're like, "Oh my God, see?" We overcorrect. 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, by the way, I'm going on a family vacation. My wife is like, literally, I told her, "I think you're trying to take our house and just bring it with us on vacation. This is not how packing is supposed to go." She's like, "Well, we might need this one thing," or "We can't get rid of that." 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 life," which is that we will always remember the one thing that we decided to remove that we needed, even though nine out of ten times you could have gotten away with it.

Sam Parr

Dude, but I think he removes too much stuff. Like, I have a Tesla, and sometimes you don't even need to switch into reverse; it automatically does that. 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.

Shaan Puri

You know.

Sam Parr

What I mean is, he removes a lot of stuff.

Shaan Puri

I mean, look at the iPhone, right? The most successful product of all time. When they came out and removed the keyboard, people were freaking out. Then they removed the home button. I remember thinking, "You got rid of the home button? Are you nuts? This is crazy!" Then they got rid of the port, and they kept removing things. The best companies in the world actually do this. The thing he says is, "We measure basically if we are not adding back at least 10% of the time the thing that we removed," whether it's a process in the company, a role in the company, or a part of the product—a feature of the product. If we're not adding back at least 10% of the time, that means we have not been removing enough. So that's his benchmark. He goes, "That is the only..." We set that as a target. In the same way that when you set goals in any good company, 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. Most people, like at Amazon, would say, "Whenever we worked there, you want to hit 70% of your goals." Hitting 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, which builds a culture of missing and disappointing expectations. Elon talks about that as like step 2: to remove a thing. You look like you had a reaction to that.

Sam Parr

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 sometimes negatively. 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.

Shaan Puri

Simple but hard. Exactly. There are other steps in the process. So, he's talked about, you know, then you want to simplify. Then you want to automate. Automate is kind of the last step, basically, of the five that he talks about. He's like, "Hey, 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 speed it up. Then I try to simplify it. And 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 finally questioned the requirement last. He's like, "I got tired of doing that wrong so many times that I made this my process so that I can make sure I don't fall into that trap again." 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, "Oh, why do we need to do all this? We'll just automate the whole thing." 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.

Sam Parr

Dude, that's pretty fascinating. I'm not a fan of Elon's personality, but I'm a huge fan of his work. I like to read these old books, particularly about the Gilded Age and all these industrialists. I'm reading one about Andrew Carnegie, who is one of my favorite guys to read about. He was a really big deal because back then, no business people would ever talk publicly or write publicly about their ideas. He wrote a book that was considered groundbreaking because one of these rich guys actually shared his ideas. Compared to now, the barrier to entry for sharing ideas is so low. It is pretty awesome that we get to learn and gain insights from people who are doing amazing and big things.

Shaan Puri

Totally. This happens right now in sports, by the way. Like, the Olympics is going on, and you see there's the Netflix documentary about the sprinters, but there's also one about quarterbacks and receivers. You get to see how these people live, how they prepare, how they recover. I'm doing an episode or a series... this is my new email series called "Good Friday." We just did one together, but the next one that's coming out in a couple of weeks is with Mike Mancias. He's LeBron's trainer of 20 years.

Sam Parr

No way.

Shaan Puri

He met LeBron when LeBron James was 19 years old. He's been his trainer now... LeBron's 39 years old and he's thought to have had the best longevity of any basketball player, really, ever. Like, playing at a peak level for 20 straight years is insane.

Sam Parr

**Longevity, physically and emotionally. I'm shocked that guy has not screwed up.**

Shaan Puri

Oh yeah, exactly. I mean, he's been a model citizen, right? In many ways, he's a child star. You know how screwed up most child actors or child stars are. This guy was on the cover of *Sports Illustrated* at like 15 or 16 years old, and he was called "the chosen one." Somehow, he did not get all screwed up from that. He has great kids, a great wife, and a great life. He’s never been in trouble with the law—none of that stuff. It's really incredible. One of the things he talks about is, during this series, I was like, "Man, I'm getting access to information that 30 years ago, people just didn't have access to." You didn't know what the guys did for their pregame nutrition, their postgame recovery, or how they trained. But now, it's filmed, it's documented, and the skills trainers have their own Instagram. So if you're a young basketball player, the blueprint is there. The access to information is there now because of the way everything is documented on social media or in interviews. You now have access to information like you would have never had before.

Sam Parr

Which, by the way, if you watch the Olympics, particularly running, is the easiest one because it's a very clear standard. You just look at the data and you can see we're going faster. When I was like 16, they would just tell you to eat loads of pasta the night before. You don't need to do that unless you intend to burn 2,000 calories. You don't need that many carbs, you know? But there are all these little things. Like, well, this one guy said that he would eat pasta before, so that's just what we're going to do. You just hear these rumors. And like, well, this one guy said one time in a famous quote, "Don't have sex or don't masturbate like a week before a big event." So therefore, you have to do that. Have you heard that, by the way? That's like a thing.

Shaan Puri

Of course, yeah. Boxing is still a thing, and fighting is still a thing.

Sam Parr

It's still hugely a thing, but... by the way, there's no evidence that that does anything. It's like you hear these things, like he's saying, "Oh, 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...

Shaan Puri

You looked into that. You looked into the research. You wanted to see what you're supposed to do for podcasting.

Sam Parr

You know, ChatGPT makes it easy.

Shaan Puri

Alright, I think we're... I think that's the signal. We're reaching that time. We're turning into 8th grade boys.

Sam Parr

Alright, that's the part.