Sam and Shaan dig into the story of Scott Heiferman — founder of Meetup — who famously worked at McDonald’s after selling his first company for $15M, and recently returned to the workforce as an Amazon warehouse picker. The conversation branches into the reindustrialization of America (via a BlueForge ad campaign), Elon Musk’s five-step engineering process, and how unprecedented access to elite knowledge is reshaping sports training and performance.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder of Milk Road)
Scott Heiferman: The Millionaire Who Worked at McDonald’s [00:00:00]
Shaan: Here’s the headline: millionaire working at McDonald’s. And it’s actually much more interesting than that.
This is the story of a guy named Scott Heiferman. Meetup.com is probably the most popular thing he made. Meetup is a really cool thing — 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 in real life.
I knew about Meetup. I had even known about Scott. But what I didn’t know is the story that Scott — after he had sold his first company — actually went and worked at McDonald’s, just to kind of reset. And he did that for a while.
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” — basically he’s back at an Amazon warehouse, being a pick-packer, kind of a 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 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?
Sam: Is that how it caught your eye?
Shaan: Yeah. So basically he grew up in Iowa or Idaho — somewhere in the Midwest — and he saw Marc Andreessen release Netscape and he was like, “This is amazing.” He’s like, “I’m going to get into the internet.” So in the mid-90s he starts what I believe was 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 in today’s money.
And after he sells it, he was like, “I’ve been working for six or seven years at this internet startup. I work in marketing, but I’m only around bankers and lawyers and other yuppie people. That’s horrible for my position as a marketer, but also I feel so out of touch with real people.”
Let’s use his words — he wrote this on his site. You found it back in 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, and corporate wonks — 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, multi-billion dollar machine. And I deserved a break today.”
Scott’s McDonald’s Experience [00:04:30]
Shaan: Then he goes and works at McDonald’s. He even talks about it — he shows his application. He goes, “I just walked in off the street. It was at Fifth and Broadway in New York City.”
And in his blog post he writes: “The manager asked if I was used to working with teams. I was truthful in my interview. He asked if I could 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.”
He works there for — and by the way, I don’t think it was six months, I think it was more like three or four weeks — but he said $5.75 an hour times 40 hours a week times 52 weeks a year is about $11,960 pre-tax.
He writes: “Some people said it was disrespectful to take a job at McDonald’s — I didn’t need the money — they thought I was making fun of people who worked there. The opposite is true. I gained a bucket of respect. People who 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, 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 that day. It’s an eye-opener. Interpret that as you see fit.”
Sam: Well, they spun it like he was struggling, right? The article title was something like “Dethroned CEOs” — like, how are they handling the dot-com crash? This CEO is working at McDonald’s. It’s like, wait, that’s not what happened at all. But okay, sure.
Shaan: Right. And by the way, he made $15 million in that sale. So he sold his agency for about $15 million — who knows, stock, cash, ballpark — and then he goes from there to working at McDonald’s just to kind of re-acclimate with the real world. Which I thought was really good.
Fast-Forward to Amazon [00:08:00]
Shaan: Fast-forward to today. Around 2018 or 2019, he sells Meetup to WeWork. The price was rumored to be $200 million, but who knows. It’s enough that he doesn’t have to go work somewhere like this.
Turns out he has a job at an Amazon fulfillment center. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it. He doesn’t tell people about this. He just puts it on his LinkedIn, someone finds it and shares it.
He ends up doing a podcast where he talks about why he’s at Amazon — the same type of thing. He felt out of touch with average people and wanted to feel that again.
And here’s what’s interesting: the interviewer was asking him about his experience there, and the interviewer mentions that Amazon had a big issue with warehouse workers wanting to unionize. And Scott goes, “I don’t want to talk too much about that, but yeah, that’s where I was, and I think it was a good idea.”
He sort of insinuates that he was part of it. He was kind of whispering in people’s ears. He doesn’t explicitly say that, but the language he uses — “I don’t really want to talk about it, but yeah, I was there, I saw it all happening” — and he says, “You know, it’s funny, I’m usually the entrepreneur you’d unionize against, but I thought it was a good idea to have a union.”
Shaan: It’s as if he’s the one riling people up. And so this guy, in a weird way, he’s like a little Forrest Gump character — experiencing all these things in the background, potentially a pivotal part of the story, but he doesn’t really talk about it.
It reminds me of movies where the genius nerd gets sent to prison and then becomes the master and rallies the crew inside in a different way. Or we had Scylla on the podcast and he was talking about the same thing — he went to prison and started the Bitcoin club, all these learning clubs for technology inside the prison. But then they also taught him a bunch of things. It was like meeting a different world. That’s what this reminds me of — Scott going into the fulfillment center and stirring up the union efforts.
Sam: I know a friend of a friend who was a banker — really successful Wall Street guy. He retired but got bored, so he’s like, “I’m going to drive for Uber.” He starts driving for Uber, and after doing that for a while he starts a private driving business where he’s a broker. So for example, when I go to the airport, I do use a private driver, but it’s only like $30 more than an Uber. Not much more expensive, but it feels a little nicer. He started one of these and ended up being a broker for it. He’s now making like a million dollars a year being a broker for private drivers.
It’s kind of a similar thing. Would you ever — if you had a break in your career — want to do one of these blue-collar jobs?
What This Inspires [00:12:00]
Shaan: Yeah, dude. When I saw this I was inspired on three fronts.
First: this is a guy who plays his own game. And if you know anything about me, you know that’s what I respect the most — people who have their own viewpoint, who 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 follow the herd. Like, how many founders sell their company, become a VC, go back to being a founder, then advisor, then go on podcasts? By the way, I did all of this after I sold my company too — started investing, started a podcast, did the normal path. So when I see people who thought from first principles about what they care about in life and just did it, even though it sounded unconventional — highest level of respect for me.
Second: inspired by the idea of just getting out of your bubble. I do this in a different way — not usually through a job, but like, you told me about FarmCon, the conference for farmers, and I went there. That was the only conference I went to last year. Didn’t go to any tech conference, any investing conference — I went to a 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, philosophies, different views about the world. And I knew I’d get new ideas. Sure enough, a business came out of it — we launched Milk Road out of that.
The lesson for me isn’t necessarily to just copy what this guy did and go get a blue-collar job. The lesson is: think for myself. What’s my version of this that feels more real to me? Maybe it would be driving Uber, maybe working at a warehouse, maybe something different. But this really sparked something in me to use my time to go do something like that.
Sam: I completely agree. One version of this for me is either teaching at a school — like, go be a second-grade teacher for a year — or go full Gordon Bombay and just coach a team. I’ve actually been itching to do this, to go coach like a seventh-grade boys basketball team. I did this for a while — I coached at a school for autistic and Asperger’s kids, and I coached their basketball team. 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. That’d be my version of this.
Shaan: Dude, a few weeks ago I emailed a high school asking if they needed an assistant track and field coach, right? And I was so pumped up about it — “This is so fulfilling, this is awesome!” The best is when they’re like, “You’re not qualified for that.” Well, yeah. But then I got the hours and what they demand of me and I’m like, that’s a lot of work, that’s a huge commitment. My inspiration quickly lowered. I’ve got to figure out if I’m going to do it.
Can we finish Scott’s story? There’s more that’s pretty interesting.
Scott’s Origin Story [00:18:00]
Sam: So he’s born in a big family — I think Illinois or something.
Shaan: We just named three different I-states by the way. Illinois, Idaho, Iowa…
Sam: Sorry! Sorry, I’m from there. We offended all of them by grouping them together.
Shaan: So he’s the youngest of five. His siblings are like 20 years older than him — just the way their family dynamics worked. He’s the youngest by like 15 to 20 years.
He starts his first business when he’s nine. Do you know what it’s called?
Sam: No, what?
Shaan: Scott Slave Service.
Sam: Which a nine-year-old can get away with, because he’s basically saying it’s free labor for his siblings.
Shaan: He gets the entrepreneurial bug there, starts learning to code. His first job out of college is at Sony. He tells Sony, “The internet’s going to be a thing” — this is like ‘94, ‘95 — and they’re like, “Okay, kid, whatever you say.” He’s like, “No, no, you should have a website.” And they’re like, “All right, if you want to build one, have at it.” So he ends up building the first website for Sony.com. He realizes pretty quickly: this ain’t it.
He’d also started, in ‘93, one of the first internet shows — one of the first podcasts essentially. His own radio show on the internet, called Advertorial Infotainment. He was basically questioning consumer culture. He considers himself something of an anti-consumerist in many ways.
Then he does that first thing, which was the business we called iTraffic — a media-buying agency. He was joking around that 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 will give websites a business model. So let’s do this.
He sells that thing for $15 million. Which — I mean, it’s so obvious now, yes he’s right, but it’s pretty wild to be that bold in ‘94 or ‘95 to make some of these predictions. He nailed them. He was 100% right. And he knew that because when he was a teen, he’s 20 years younger than all his siblings, he had a lot of alone time, and he basically spent it programming just for fun. He just became convinced that computers and the internet — this is where it’s at.
McDonald’s Blog Post Takeaways [00:22:30]
Shaan: Then he does the McDonald’s thing. Do we want to read a few of his blog post takeaways? I thought this was really good. We had to use the Wayback Machine to find this post — he took it down. I wish he hadn’t, it’s fantastic.
He’s got a picture of the burn from the fry machine on his arm and everything. But here’s one of them:
“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, and I faithfully read Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. I’ve read countless times about the value of a leader showing appreciation for people’s effort. However, my instinct had often been that showing appreciation really isn’t that necessary — people just take pride in a job well done, and they can read my mind and see the appreciation.
Well, from day one at McDonald’s, I was yearning for someone just to say thanks. Or even ‘you’re doing okay’ would have been sufficient. But no. Neither management experience nor reading about management teaches this lesson in the same way as feeling it — being an underappreciated employee.”
Shaan: I read that a few hours ago while I was getting ready, and I went and messaged a bunch of employees and said, “You’re doing great. You’re doing okay.” Because this — everyone should go and read this post. It’s awesome.
Sam: Yeah, he talks about the dollar menu and a bunch of other things.
Shaan: By the way, if you look at this page, he left his phone number in the photo of the application. I texted him. I’m going to try to get him on.
Sam: Yeah, I would love that. Scott, come on!
September 11th and the Origin of Meetup [00:27:00]
Shaan: So then he has this next period where he’s got 30 ideas. He’s like, “What do I want to do next?” Have you read the story about how he narrowed it down? Was it the September 11th story?
Sam: Yes, exactly.
Shaan: So he lives a few miles away from the Twin Towers. September 11th happens, he sees the planes hitting the building. The story was that he was kind of on the rooftop of his building, or outside his building, and it was the first time he’d ever met any of his neighbors. He’d been living there for a while and just hadn’t known anyone. Now they were all outside together witnessing this thing, and he was struck: “Man, I really live a pretty solo life. I’m just on the internet.”
He’d had a couple of other experiences that kind of triggered him too.
So there’s the September 11th thing. A week later he reads this book called Bowling Alone. And that book has a big impact on him — he ends up giving it to every Meetup employee. He’s honest: “I didn’t even read the whole thing, but the beginning makes a very clear point that more and more we’re doing fewer things with other people.” Less interaction with strangers causes you to trust strangers less, which causes you to spend less time with them — it’s a vicious cycle.
And then he notices it in his own life. He’s a big fan of this band Aléa Luna, and he goes to a bunch of their shows. They’re a small band, so he ends up in conference centers and hotel ballrooms, listening to the band play. He says he used to just go alone, dance or sing alone, go home alone. But soon enough he started seeing the same faces — the other regulars. There weren’t many of them who were big fans, but they still didn’t talk to each other much, because it wasn’t clear that it was okay to go talk to each other.
Shaan: That’s where he decides to narrow his list of 30 ideas down to two. One of them is Meetup — what if we made it so the internet could help people meet up in real life? We could solve this Bowling Alone problem. Increase interactions with strangers, which increases trust in strangers, which increases the time people are willing to talk to each other and make it okay to have these real-life interactions.
The second one — which he doesn’t talk about too much — is something called Fotolog. Did you see this? It’s like a Flickr-type service.
Sam: Yeah, he was early, man. He was super early.
Shaan: He sold it for like $90 million or something. He did well with it. It was like the biggest social network in certain countries around the world, but then Flickr came out, and then the next wave of social networks came out.
Sam: I saw him describe it as Instagram before Instagram, but I didn’t know it was that financially successful. That’s amazing.
Shaan: Yeah, he did really well with that too. So he starts Meetup and Fotolog either at the same time or very close to each other.
Meetup’s Controversial Pivot to Paid [00:33:00]
Shaan: Then he makes a pretty controversial move. He decides not to make Meetup’s business model just ads. He’s like, “No, I’m going to charge people for the service.” Which at the time was very anti-mainstream — everyone else was just doing ads on their websites.
Traffic drops off like 95%. But he stays with it. He believes it’s the sustainable path. The people organizing meetups should pay a fee, because they’re the ones hosting, getting the value — it will keep the quality bar high. So let’s do that.
He survives the big 90% drop in usage. Meetup becomes a profitable, sustainable business, and it goes on for a long time until they sell to WeWork for — I don’t know — somewhere between $150 and $200 million.
Sam: By the way, I have a friend, Greg, who used to work there after it got acquired by WeWork. I texted Greg this morning and I was like, “Greg, do you have any stories about this guy Scott?” He goes, “I got one.”
He goes: “I get to WeWork and Scott tells me, ‘Hey, meet me at 555 Broadway at 6 PM.’ Then he texts me right before: ‘By the way, clear your calendar for the night. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you need to be available.’ I’m like, okay, I’m interested, I’m game.”
“So I show up and there’s just a white van with five other people in it. I’m 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,’ then says, ‘Hey, you’re new here. I want to do something I do with everyone who’s new — we’re going to go crash five or six meetups tonight and you’re going to experience them firsthand. First day. Let’s go.’”
Sam: He’s just taking six new company employees to crash meetups all over the city. They crash a Harry Potter meetup, a women with diabetes meetup — they went to six different meetups that night and stayed out basically all night. Greg was like, “Dude, I’ll never forget that. Such a cool founder move. And to make that part of the culture for new people at the company.”
Shaan: How awesome is that?
Sam: Dude, this guy’s amazing. I love him.
Shaan: Right? He’s been in the game for so long and he still doesn’t seem like a high-and-mighty executive. He seems like he’s still in it.
The WeWork Carve-Out and Kevin Ryan [00:38:00]
Shaan: Then it takes another twist. Meetup gets carved out of WeWork. And this connects to two other data points from our podcast.
On the episode with Jeremy Giffon, he talked about one of his biggest underrated opportunities right now being messy carve-outs. What he meant was that sometimes an acquisition happens and a year or so later the acquiring company realizes they didn’t really want one of the assets — or the acquiring company starts to go south, and a good company they bought is embedded inside a bad company. This is exactly what happened with Meetup.
WeWork buys Meetup for $150–200 million. But then WeWork itself becomes, you know, a dumpster fire. And Meetup was still a good asset inside of that dumpster fire.
So here comes Kevin Ryan — a guest on the pod — who actually bought Meetup for peanuts out of that situation.
Sam: I remember looking at it. I didn’t have the finances at the time to afford it, but someone was like, “Hey, do you want to get in on this?” And I was like, “Yeah, this is really interesting.” I thought it was going to be some random group of people, not Kevin Ryan. But lo and behold, he comes in — and to me, Kevin Ryan buying something is a really good signal that it’s interesting.
Shaan: He bought it, they put in a CEO, turned it around, it’s profitable. They did a great job.
Sam: Is it a big business or is it just a pretty good business that’s slow but steady?
Shaan: We’ll see what happens. Maybe 15% a year growth. But look — it’s all relative. It’s a better business than any business I’ve ever built. I know what question you’re asking: is this some kind of rocket ship, crazy billion-dollar business? I don’t think so. It looks like a slow-and-steady, profitable, cash-flowing business that’s good for humanity. In that sense, it’s an awesome business.
Sam: 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 — and he was on it. He’s the definition of an internet misfit. He talks a little bit about his time at Amazon. He’s a cool guy.
Shaan: This guy is really fascinating. And 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 Hustle Con because of Meetup.com. I created a small Meetup event on there, got a lot of free users, built my email list from that. I love Meetup.com.
Sam: I like this guy Scott. We’ve got to get him on.
Shaan: 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.
Rosie the Riveter and American Reindustrialization [00:43:30]
Sam: Let me tell you about a different story. Sort of related to Scott going to McDonald’s. Have you ever heard of Rosie the Riveter?
Shaan: You’re weird with your pop culture. I don’t know what you do and do not know.
Sam: No. So basically in the early 1940s, America goes to war. All the men between 18 and 35 go off to serve. There’s a huge need for workers in manufacturing plants to go and create — bombers, weapons, all these supplies. They needed to get young women — who in many cases had never worked before — to come work in factories. And they needed to make it look cool. So they had these ads: “If you can work an electric mixer, you can work a drill.”
Westinghouse created this campaign. The character was called Rosie the Riveter. The ad says “Yes We Can” — strong young women, you owe it to your country, come and do this. Before the war, I think something like 2 million women worked. After that campaign, something like 20 million young women got jobs. Very much a women’s empowerment moment, but also one that pushed America forward. Incredibly effective.
Shaan: And you should see the ads in the 1950s — it’s called “Back to Normal” — about what Rosie does now that the war is over. It’s very much: “We’re going to sell you this refrigerator.” All these ads like, “What should Rosie do with strawberries on a summer day?” And it’s, “Make a strawberry shortcake.” Pretty crazy.
Sam: So who was paying for those ads? The government, or manufacturers?
Shaan: Originally Westinghouse and other manufacturers ran campaigns to get women to come work for them. But the government also did it — it’s propaganda, but it’s good propaganda. “We all have to do this together.”
And by the way, Rosie the Riveter is one of the most recognized images in American history. It’s in the Smithsonian. It was a real turning point for American feminism.
Sam: The reason I’m bringing all this up is: back in the ’40s and ’50s, we were booming with manufacturing. You’ve heard of the Rust Belt?
Shaan: I have.
Sam: That refers to where I’m from — Missouri, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago. 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. Then the name changed to the Rust Belt — all these old rusty factories that no one uses anymore.
Where I’m going with this: there’s a company called BlueForge. They created an ad that is the best ad I’ve seen in years.
The ad basically shows the gig economy and how it crushes your soul. When they interviewed the original Rosie the Riveters — the women who worked in those factories — when they were older, they’d say, “We built this B-17 bomber. We saw it roll off the manufacturing line. We had so much pride. We were helping America. We were working together to achieve this task. We felt amazing.”
Now this ad basically shows: when you’re driving Uber and doing gig work, you feel terrible. People are complaining at you, you’re not working toward a common goal.
Sam: BlueForge — I believe the Navy funded it — is trying to convince young Americans to go back to manufacturing or trade jobs. Things where you work with your hands. To rebuild manufacturing in America.
I saw this ad, did a little research on the reindustrialization of America, and 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, and when they do exist they’re considered unsexy — look cool. And they are totally succeeding.
You’re seeing this a little bit with Anduril, you know? Palmer Luckey’s defense business in Orange County — it’s cool again to work in factories, cool again to make stuff. I 100% buy into this premise.
A really simple opportunity here: if you refer someone to some of these jobs, you can earn up to $500. If you just Google “trade jobs” or “manufacturing jobs,” the websites kind of look silly. They’re not enticing, no sex appeal — which is a shame, because these jobs are actually quite romantic. You can make them seem really cool, because I think they actually are. A lot of them pay $30, $40 an hour depending on the trade.
Shaan: Yeah, it’s an amazing ad. It basically shows: do you want to spend your whole life running around doing tasks for other people, essentially being a delivery person? And then the doors open and the manufacturing is happening and it’s like — you could be building this. Really well done.
Sam: And BlueForge, I think, was originally built around the submarine industry. They couldn’t get enough people to work on submarines. They won contracts to help get more submarine workers — something I never even would have thought existed. But it does.
Shaan: Yeah, really cool. I hope this happens. I hope America shifts back to a “we build things here” culture. Tesla, SpaceX — being based here I think is really awesome. The CHIPS Act trying to build giant chip factories instead of being reliant on Taiwan. There’s a real effort to do modern manufacturing here.
Sam: I really want to do an episode where we go down to El Segundo. There’s like 10 interesting companies all on one block. Our buddy John Coogan did an amazing 17-minute video — it’s worth watching. He goes to this area of El Segundo where you’ve got SpaceX, Radiant Nuclear, Varda, ABL Space Systems — a whole bunch of companies in one area. He hung out with them, took a camera and crew out there. Pretty inspiring.
There are AI hotbeds, there are crypto hotbeds — and then it’s like, where is the hard tech hotbed? And it seems like this is the answer. If you’re interested in that energy, go watch the videos or go visit.
And it is happening, by the way. Toyota Tundras are made in Texas. When I lived in Nashville, Tennessee, I was 10 miles from the Nissan plant. “Made in America” doesn’t have to mean Ford anymore — that Nissan is just as made in America as anything else.
Elon’s Five-Step Problem-Solving Method [00:55:00]
Sam: You want to do one more thing?
Shaan: Yeah. I got a related one.
Sam: So there’s something Elon talks about that I think more people should hear. Have you heard Elon talk about his five-step problem-solving method?
Shaan: No. But is step four like, “Have kids”? He’s got 12 kids, by the way.
Sam: He talks about this — I think on Lex Fridman’s podcast, but he’s said it many times over the years, which is a good signal because it’s more fundamental to his philosophy.
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, you just did the Neuralink chip and the guy is playing Civilization using his brain to control the computer — what is your general process?”
Elon said the following five steps. And all of this was born out of pain from not doing this, by the way.
Step one: question the requirements. Don’t go in and immediately build a solution to the first prompt. Before you jump in and say “I can build it,” really drill down on what’s actually needed. Why is that the requirement? Make the requirements as true and simple as possible.
Step two: delete. He says the biggest mistake smart people make is optimizing something that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. In his companies, if it’s a machine, try to delete a part. Can we do without this part altogether, rather than trying to make it work or lower its cost? Can we get rid of the part and will the thing still work? If it’s a process inside the company — instead of optimizing the process, what happens if you delete the process? There’s a role in the company — could you delete the role?
Sam: He says the government always adds new rules and regulations — that’s why the tax code book is this thick. We add far more than we ever subtract. This happens in big companies too. Every big company adds people, processes, requirements. Very rarely is there any cleaning function that gets rid of the bottom 20%.
And he talks about how this is a “lymbic system override” — because our brains are wired to be hoarders. We’re afraid to get rid of something because we’re worried something bad will happen. And if you ever get rid of something and one time out of ten you needed it, your brain basically inflames immediately: “See? I told you.” And then you’re much more hesitant to remove anything next time — because of that one time.
Sam: By the way, I’m going on a family vacation. My wife is literally trying to bring our entire house. I told her, “You’re trying to take the house with us.” She’s like, “Well we might need this one thing.” I’m listening to this Elon thing and watching my wife pack and I’m like — this is true not just in business but in life. We will always remember the one thing we decided to remove that we needed, even though nine out of ten times you could have gotten away with it.
Shaan: Dude, but I think he removes too much stuff. Like, I have a Tesla, and sometimes you don’t even need to shift into reverse — it automatically does that. And there are no buttons. It’s just a screen. I want a button. I don’t want a screen.
Sam: He removes a lot of stuff. But look at the iPhone — most successful product of all time. When it came out they removed the keyboard and people were freaking out. Then they removed the home button — I was like, “You got rid of the home button? Are you nuts?” Then they got rid of the port. They keep removing things. The best companies in the world actually do this.
Shaan: And his benchmark: if they are not adding back at least 10% of the things they removed — a process, a role, a product feature — that means they have not been removing enough. That’s his target.
He says: just like when you’re setting goals — a good company doesn’t want to hit its goals 100% of the time, because that means you were too cautious. You don’t want to hit 0% of the time because that’s too unrealistic. At Amazon they’d say you want to hit about 70% of your goals — stretching enough, but not so unrealistic that you’re building a culture of missed expectations.
Same framework with deletion. If you’re adding back almost nothing, you’re not being brave enough.
Sam: I love it. It’s hard to do. I’ve seen people react negatively to this at every company I’ve been at, because I’ve done the same thing — “Well, it’s working. Why break it and remove it?” I agree fundamentally with it. Simple, but hard.
Shaan: Exactly. There are other steps in the process — he talks about simplify, then automate. Automate is basically the last step. He says he can’t tell you how many times he’s done this backwards: started by trying to automate a process, then tried to speed it up, then simplify it, and then realized he just needed to remove it in the first place. The requirement wasn’t even right. He got tired of doing that wrong so many times that he made this his explicit process.
Sam: There’s a famous story of the Tesla manufacturing plant where he tried to create basically a robo-factory right off the jump. “Why do we need to do all this manually? We’ll just automate the whole thing.” And they almost killed the company by over-automating at the start rather than doing it at the end of the process.
Shaan: That’s pretty fascinating.
Access to Elite Knowledge [01:03:30]
Sam: 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 industrialists. I’m reading one about Andrew Carnegie, one of my favorite people to read about. Back then, businesspeople would never talk publicly about what they did. Carnegie writing a book was considered groundbreaking — one of these rich guys actually sharing ideas. Compared to now, where the barrier to entry for sharing ideas is so low.
Shaan: Totally. And this happens right now in sports. The Olympics are going on and you see Netflix documentaries about sprinters, about quarterbacks and receivers. You get to see how these people live, how they prepare, how they recover.
I’m doing an email series called Good Friday. We just did one together, but the next one in a couple of weeks is with Mike Mancias — he’s been LeBron’s trainer for 20 years. He met LeBron when LeBron James was 19 years old and he’s been his trainer ever since. LeBron is 39 now and has had the best longevity of any basketball player really ever — playing at peak level for 20 straight years.
Sam: And I’m shocked that guy has not screwed up somehow.
Shaan: Right — he’s been a model citizen. In many ways he’s a child star. You know how screwed up most child stars are? This guy was on the cover of Sports Illustrated at 15 or 16 years old. It just said “The Chosen One.” And somehow he did not get all screwed up from that. Great kids, great wife, great life, never been in trouble with the law — none of that.
One of the things I was thinking about doing this series is: man, I’m getting access to information that 30 years ago people just didn’t have. You didn’t know what athletes did for their pregame nutrition and postgame recovery and how they trained. But now it’s filmed, it’s documented, skills trainers have their own Instagram. If you’re a young basketball player, the blueprint is there.
If you watch the Olympics, running is the easiest one because you can see the data — we’re going faster. When I was like 16 they’d just tell you: eat a ton of pasta the night before. You don’t need to do that unless you’re burning 2,000 calories. But that was the received wisdom: “Well, this one guy said it one time, so that’s what you do.”
Sam: Or the famous thing: “Don’t have sex or don’t masturbate for a week before a big event.” Have you heard that? That’s still a thing.
Shaan: Still hugely a thing in fighting.
Sam: And there’s no evidence it does anything. But, “I heard Muhammad Ali did this one time,” so you have to do it.
Shaan: That’s how it was up until you actually looked into the research. All right — I think that’s the signal. We’re turning into eighth-grade boys.
Sam: That’s the pod.