SPEAKER_00: So here we are in year 13 of, you know, this week in startups, I'm like, I want to do more of these

SPEAKER_01: like business breakdowns with lawn because they're fun for us to do and the audience loves them. So here we are. Resiliency is the big takeaway for me. Grinding it out.

SPEAKER_04: And just that understanding of branding from such an earl, like today, we take that for granted. Everybody is, we're all personal brands. Everybody thinks in that, in those terms. But in 1954, to be like, you know what, those golden arches in every town, you'll be on the road and you'll drive and you'll know what that is. And you'll really, it's going to be consistent everywhere I go. McDonald's is McDonald's like, no, he was way ahead of the curve thinking about

SPEAKER_07: how important that would become for Americans. This week in startups is brought to you by

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SPEAKER_14: to masterworks.com slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. We've got

SPEAKER_01: another business breakdown for you today. You may remember Lon Harris and I on episode 1773. That's the episode number, not the year. We reviewed an incredible film, Blackberry, and we broke down the major business lessons from it. You went crazy for this. We made clips. People went crazy on TikTok about it. So since we got so much great feedback, Lon and I, who are huge fans of cinema, decided we would do another one for you here in the holiday season. While you're on your break, you get to dive into the story of Ray Kroc taking over McDonald's. The movie is called The Founder. It came out in 2016. Nobody saw it, but Lon and I both love this film. We're going to go through the plot. We're going to pause during the plot to highlight and explain the major business lessons with some real world examples that we as founders and just human beings on planet earth trying to reconcile entrepreneurship and capitalism and its impact on society and why it's done so many great things. But also, hey, this is a perfect story to talk about the underbelly of capitalism as well, the sharp elbows and all that great stuff. And at the end, we'll do some award categories and recommendations like we did last time. Lon and I love movies. I love Lon. He's one of my favorite human beings

SPEAKER_16: on the planet. Great to be with you again, Lon. So the film right now on Amazon Prime,

SPEAKER_18: Freebie. It's actually on the Freebie part of Amazon Prime. So you'll see a few ads, not too cumbersome, but it's there if you want to watch it. And from this point on, we're going to have

SPEAKER_19: spoilers. So if you have not yet seen The Founder, pause this, go watch The Founder. It's on Freebie. It's free. Free. And then come back here. We're going to talk about it. You literally can't do better than that. It is free.

SPEAKER_20: Spoiler alert. At some point, they make the Filet-O-Fish.

SPEAKER_22: We don't care. That'll be the sequel. We'll get into the McRib in the Filet-O-Fish. No post-credit scene where they tell them about the McRib initiative.

SPEAKER_24: All right. So give us the quick hits. You're such a fan of films. Give us a quick hit. So who's in this? Who directed it? Give us the biography here.

SPEAKER_25: So this is a guy named John Lee Hancock who directed. He did not write the script. This was a

SPEAKER_19: script. I think it was a Blacklist script. The Blacklist, they have those like, every year they publish a list of the most popular, the most well-liked unproduced screenplays that were distributed that year. In 2015, I believe, or 2014, this script was one of those

SPEAKER_18: ones that was just a guy wrote it on spec based on Ray Kroc's biography. And it was floating out out there looking for a director until John Lee Hancock came in. He also made The Blind Side with Sandra Bullock, that Oscar-winning film that has since been sort of questioned the veracity of it.

SPEAKER_19: Saving Mr. Banks, that film about Walt Disney making a deal for the rights to Mary Poppins to adapt that. That's actually, I was thinking that would be another interesting movie for this segment because it's also about negotiation, business, making deals, and sort of these different parties

SPEAKER_18: that had very different takes on the same project and what to do with it. So it's kind of an interesting balance here. And then he just did one called The Little Things with Jared Leto and Denzel Washington, a serial killer thing a few years ago. Got it. So he seems to have inspirational

SPEAKER_32: and business mixed into his biography or what do you call it? Filmography.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, definitely an interest in deal-making, how sort of business is done and how, you know,

SPEAKER_18: like kind of the impact of that on individual lives that are caught up in that sort of system. I think, you know, there are a lot of different sort of films he's made that have kind of takes on that. Michael Keaton obviously stars as Ray Kroc. You also get great character actors, Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch. They play Dick and Mac McDonald, the actual original creators of the very first McDonald's burger stand. Laura Durd plays Ray Kroc's wife, Ethel Kroc, and Linda Cardellini plays Joan Smith, who becomes his next wife. During the course of the film,

SPEAKER_19: we also see her perspective. Patrick Wilson plays her husband. They are early McDonald's franchise

SPEAKER_18: owners who have their own kind of way of doing business. So that's kind of the, you know,

SPEAKER_38: the long and the short of the cast. Also written by Robert D. Segal, who I looked up. He also did

SPEAKER_26: two films I very much enjoyed. There's one called Big Fan that was with Patton Oswalt. That's a very

SPEAKER_40: like Sundance-y kind of film, 500K. Very dark comedy, but interesting. Dark comedy. And he also

SPEAKER_45: did The Wrestler or wrote The Wrestler, I should say. He wrote The Wrestler. I love that movie. Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: He also, interestingly, worked in comedic writing. So he was a senior editor at The Onion from 1996 to 1999 and editor-in-chief from 1999 to 2003. So I thought that was also notable, the path of the screenplay writer. You and I are both writers. But it's so hard to make movies, huh? When you're

SPEAKER_49: a screenplay writer or a director, you work every five years or so on something. Yeah. One, I mean,

SPEAKER_18: I feel like this is clearly the sort of thing that comes from a veteran screenwriter because it takes so many sort of odd, unexpected turns. Like it's a format that we're very familiar with. The like,

SPEAKER_19: you know, person made good, Horatio Alger, rags to riches, the rise of this great brand. I mean, we, you know, we had even a ton of those movies this year about the story behind all these famous brands. But this one takes a very different tack where it's like, it's very conflicted about the guy and what he has to do in order to succeed. And it neither completely trashes him and presents him as a monster, nor is it a hagiography that presents him as a saint-like great man. Usually a biopic, you're going to come down on one side or the other. Like Ray, the Ray Charles movie, great movie, not, not. But even when Ray Charles does things we recognize are not good or struggles, it's never like, well, Ray Charles wasn't a good guy. It's always like, Ray Charles was a great guy. He was a troubled man. He had problems like everybody. This movie, I don't think is Ray Kroc was a great guy. He just had troubles. It's like, maybe Ray Kroc wasn't such a great guy. It's kind of asking you to make the decision about what kind of a guy he was and how early in the process did he make the decisions about what he was going to eventually do with this company. So we'll get more into that. But that's a very

SPEAKER_18: interesting screen, screenwriting thing that I think this movie does that a lot of other movies

SPEAKER_58: would not do. And I think the reason is, if you were in Hollywood, correct me if I'm wrong,

SPEAKER_61: you're going for the biggest box office possible. And if it's a conflicted, complex character, maybe you don't feel as jazzed after watching it. Maybe you're not over the moon. Yeah. And so it would have been better to just, you know, sugarcoat the whole thing and make it like

SPEAKER_63: champagne and more exciting for people. Audiences love rousing, inspirational biopics when it's

SPEAKER_19: something that's going to make you feel good and make you feel like, hey, this guy, and we were talking too, this is a story about, you know, he's in his fifties when this story starts. Yes. So there is an angle on this that's just like, don't give up. Persistence is key. Even this 52-year-old down on his luck guy created McDonald's. There is a take on this story that's that, which would have been more of a crowd pleaser. This is the more sort of like layered, thoughtful

SPEAKER_72: take on it. Yeah. These are people in the final act of their business careers, like I am. I'm 53

SPEAKER_26: now. Ray Kroc was 52. Mac and Dick McDonald were 52 and 45. Yeah. This was a 25 million budget film. Feels like more, probably because of Michael Keaton in the role of Ray Kroc. $24 million box office, so the thing broke even. Hasn't a really strong 81% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought

SPEAKER_72: it would be higher. I thought this would be something that the critics would like a lot

SPEAKER_49: more than that. Just overall on a film, you thought this was excellent, great. Where would

SPEAKER_04: you put it in your scoring system? I think this is really good. I think it's definitely above average for a biopic. And I think it makes, it takes some interesting risks. It takes some interesting chances in exploring Ray Kroc's story with a little bit more thoughtfulness. I think

SPEAKER_18: there's a more obvious, easy version of this movie out there that you could make that this one kind of

SPEAKER_77: doesn't go for. And I sort of admire that about it. Did you know of this film before I suggested it?

SPEAKER_19: Had you seen it? Yeah. I didn't see this in theaters, but I think I saw it. I think there was a little bit of Oscar buzz this year around Keaton. And so when it first hit VOD or home video, I probably would have checked it out to see that Keaton performance. How I discovered this is people

SPEAKER_26: know my favorite musician is Mark Knopfler from the band Dire Straits. When Dire Straits broke up in the late 90s and stopped touring, he went on to do solo work. One of his solo albums, Shangri-La,

SPEAKER_64: which is exceptional from 2004, has an amazing song on it. And the song is called Boom Like That. And this song, it was just, I rocked out to this song, Driving. I always loved it.

SPEAKER_01: And I listened to the words and I, you know, as you frequently do, you listen to the lyrics and you start to put together, what is this song about? I just like the catchy beat, right? And the guitar

SPEAKER_42: riffs. And then I found out Mark Knopfler had read, grinding it out, the autobiography of Ray Kroc.

SPEAKER_87: I guess Mark Knopfler had read it, then wrote the song. The person who wrote the screenplay

SPEAKER_01: had also, like me, been a fan of Mark Knopfler. And that is the origin story of the movie, is my understanding, is that he heard the song, then read the Ray Kroc book, Grinding It Out,

SPEAKER_61: which the movie The Founder is based on. And the song by Mark Knopfler is called Boom Like That. I just want to give you the lyric here, Lon, and get your reaction to it. Sometimes you got to be an SOB. You want to make a dream reality. Competition? Send them south. They're going to drown. Put a hose in their mouth. Do not pass go. Go straight to hell. I smell that meat hook smell. Oh, my name's Ray Kroc. That's Kroc with a K. Like crocodile,

SPEAKER_64: but not spelt that way. Oh, it's dog eat dog, rat eat rat. Kroc style. Boom like that.

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SPEAKER_19: His take seems to be the more negative one that, that, you know, this was, this was almost theft. This was corporate theft. And I think, you know, again, that that's, there's a movie that's that version of it where it's just, here's this monster. He stole this company away from these two good guys who just wanted to make people delicious cheeseburgers. And I think that they don't go for that either. They, they definitely, it's a measured, like, cause I think the movie's very aware of McDonald's would not ever have been McDonald's if it was up to Dick and Mac. Like they were never, they might've franchised it around. There might've been 10 or 12 locations around the Midwest or whatever. Those guys were never going to turn it into this juggernaut that has changed the world chain, created the fast food industry, you know? Yeah. So, I mean, there, there's a balance there. It's something to think about.

SPEAKER_26: Just so people know, we took the screenplay, we took the autobiography and put it into

SPEAKER_106: notebook, uh, LM, the new Google notebook LM, which we had the creator of on the pod recently.

SPEAKER_01: We tried to see if, you know, they're going to drown, put a hose in their mouth. Which is in the film and is in the song is in the biography or autobiography is we couldn't find them. So if you find the origin of that quote, I think Mark Knopfler made it up, but I love that evocative line.

SPEAKER_109: Yeah. It's interesting because if you look at, if you Google it, which I did, uh, a lot of those

SPEAKER_19: fake SEO bait, like brainy quote sites, bring it up and say they, they misattributed or attribute

SPEAKER_04: it to Ray Kroc, but I could not find an actual citation. So I think all of those are

SPEAKER_19: quoting him from this movie, which are quoting probably that Mark Knopfler song.

SPEAKER_110: Yeah, absolutely. Don't trust the internet. All right. Let's get into the plot here.

SPEAKER_19: Unless I mean, it is possible he read a different, he maybe read the autobiography of Ray Kroc and then he read a different book about Ray Kroc that does have that quote in it. Cause it does seem like if you were writing your own autobiography, you wouldn't, you probably wouldn't self attribute that quote.

SPEAKER_59: Yeah. I mean, a song does not need to be, uh, it's an interpretation of the spirit of

SPEAKER_19: the person here. It wouldn't need to be a quote. He didn't say all those other things. He's putting words in his mouth throughout and that's, uh, we should know Mark Knopfler does that all the time. Like a lot of his songs are, it's not him speaking. It's a character speaking.

SPEAKER_22: Most famously.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. I was going to say that the money for nothing where he's using slurs, it's not the Mark Knopfler, the singer. He's, he's playing a guy who's narrating that song.

SPEAKER_119: Look at those yo-yos. That's the way you do it. Make that money on the MTV. Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_59: All right. So let's get into the story here, because the story of McDonald's has so many business lessons and the movie is super compelling. So we'll use the movie as the bones of the architecture as we go through the story.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. So we open in, in 54 in St. Louis, uh, at this point, Ray Kroc, he's, he's in his fifties.

SPEAKER_04: He is a traveling milkshake mixer salesman. He's got this five spindle milkshake mixer that I guess

SPEAKER_19: if you had a very busy fifties diner and you needed to make a bunch of milkshakes at a time and customers didn't want to wait for you to individually make the milkshakes, this would

SPEAKER_04: be a helpful device, but he's, he's bombing out. We see him going to from diner, a lot of those fifties drive in diners, and he's trying to sell them on this milkshake. Nobody's nobody's biting while he's there. We kind of note him. He's clocking the problems with this entire restaurant concept that you end up waiting a ton of time. They're not efficient. They don't get you your food quickly. When it does arrive, a lot of the time the orders are wrong. And then it's just, it's also not an environment where you want to sit and spend time and eat. There's hoodlums and teenagers. It's noisy. It's chaotic. There's trash everywhere. It's not a place he feels welcome and invited, even as he's there trying to sell them this milkshake mixer. Then crucially, he gets an order for six of these devices, which if you've been paying attention up until now, he's had trouble selling even one. So he's thinking about what kind of restaurant could possibly need to make, you know, six times, five 30 milkshakes simultaneously. He finds out it's this, it's this burger place called McDonald's in San Bernardino, California. Uh, you could still go

SPEAKER_18: visit that, that very first, uh, San Bernardino. It's not still a McDonald's. Now it's like a museum dedicated to the first McDonald's, but it's still standing.

SPEAKER_26: It's a really good observation you had of him clocking the joint. And then they do this visually in the film with, you see him looking at the garbage, seeing somebody smoking the loud music.

SPEAKER_61: He gets his food. He realizes like he's selling into a suboptimal business in and of itself. And they don't have any conception of, well, if we made food faster than people would come more

SPEAKER_01: often. And it really is an interesting insight that not only he had, but that the McDonald brothers

SPEAKER_61: had the same one at the same time. And so in entrepreneurship, often many people come to the same epiphany, the same opportunity at the same time. When, before, um, Facebook came out, there were, there were Friendster and my space and a number of other, uh, social networks, for example, but sometimes it takes somebody like Zuckerberg to come in and see it be a mess. Like my space was a mess. And I thought of my space as the analogy here to these, you know, burger joints. Like he

SPEAKER_01: came in there and made it fast and organized and clean and friendly, friendly and efficient. Right.

SPEAKER_19: And so, I mean, the movie really does give you, and I don't know how accurate, like maybe there were other fast food operations at the same time doing this,

SPEAKER_18: but according to the film, the McDonald brothers had a tremendous amount of innovations, all,

SPEAKER_19: all in one that Ray Kroc is seeing all together. It was instead of driving your car up, you park and you, you walk up, which cuts down on the, you know, sick chaos of people sitting in their cars and the

SPEAKER_04: people on roller skates, having to go between navigate through all these cars. It cleans it up. It allows them to control the environment more. They use this incredibly efficient factory style assembly line to make the burgers, which we see Richard McDonald has worked out in extreme,

SPEAKER_19: explicit detail where everybody is and what their movements are, where they have to go to get their supplies. And, and so maximizing efficiency to get the burgers done in 30 seconds or less,

SPEAKER_04: which may allows them to handle so many more customers. And even there's a great moment when Ray Kroc first arrives at this McDonald's. He gets it. It's a long line and he gets to the back

SPEAKER_19: and the lady in front of him, she says, don't worry about it. It goes really quickly. And it's, it's the right here, the opposite of the, the exact opposite 180 of the experience. We just saw him have at the other drive and restaurant where it takes, it takes forever. The, they became known. The brand became associated with taking forever, getting your order wrong. Whereas this lady is so confident that they're going to be fast. She's like, don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_131: We're going to worry about it. And when he gets to the window, he gets his change. It's 35 cents.

SPEAKER_26: He gets 15 cents change. I remember. And the guy turns around, grabs a burger from the rack, grabs a milkshake because they have a little menu and they hand it to him. And he thinks it's a

SPEAKER_61: mistake. Michael Keen's like, I just ordered. That's a mistake. And that shows you how profoundly different this experience was. This is very important for founders to understand. You can make

SPEAKER_01: something so profoundly different that it viscerally changes a person's experience. Right. And you have that experience. I think Uber is a really good analogy for that. When you first use an Uber or you first use DoorDash, it was so dramatically different than calling on the phone and getting

SPEAKER_61: an order before that using movie phone to buy tickets or Amazon prime. And so my mind was like,

SPEAKER_01: always there's room to make something faster and cheaper. And this did essentially both.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. And I mean, there are other innovations to the all paper packaging. So before you had to worry about plates and forks and where are people going to sit to eat their meal and breaking the dishes are shattering constantly. It costs a lot of money. They're constantly replacing dishware. So that was

SPEAKER_19: another McDonald's innovation was, you know, it's all paper. You just throw your trash away when you're done. And and, you know, he's sitting there sort of marveling at all of these lessons that they've learned. He introduced himself. He gets a little tour behind the scenes. And then he tells the McDonald brothers, he wants to take them out to dinner, hear all about their story. He says, I've been in the this is the most amazing restaurant I've ever seen. And I've been I've seen it all. I've been in the food service industry for years. So then, you know, we get to this whole see where we're sort of they let the movie let's Mac and Dick kind of

SPEAKER_04: relate to us the McDonald's story up until 1954. Yeah, they had a, you know, couple different companies, couple different concepts before they made a lot of the same observations that Ray Crockett made about how inefficient these drive in diners were. And they kind of came to their own

SPEAKER_03: conclusions. And then they kind of walk them through how they fixed. Yeah. And this is really the

SPEAKER_01: product market fit moment of the film. And in our industry, product market fit is you conceive of a product, and then you try to find if a market responds to that product. And here, they talked about how they tried to get people to embrace this, but it was really hard, because people were upset that they couldn't get service in their car. But then once people got it, and they enjoyed how amazingly consistent was, and how good it tastes, and the price, and the speed, all of that added up to that they had market pull. And they demonstrate market pull in the film, when they have a big opening. And,

SPEAKER_61: you know, the big openings amazing, they put big lights out there because they previously worked in the movie business, they put those floodlights out there, they put jugglers and clowns, whatever, to get people excited. Everybody showed up, everybody loved it, a bunch of flies showed up, and it kind of canceled the party. So the next day, they thought they had to go back to the drawing board. But then slowly, people started showing up because they had such a great experience and word of mouth happens. And Lon, this is the key to the success of McDonald's. But it's also the key

SPEAKER_01: to being a great entrepreneur, you know, you've done it. When you have market pull, what is market pull? That's when you get virality where people are telling their friends about the product. This can be experienced with something called net promoter score when people rate you a nine or 10, as opposed to a one through eight. But it's so good that people promote your service for you. McDonald's was so good. It was so revolutionary. This humble burger, fries and shake, very simple for the pickup window. It was so dramatically different that people told their friends about it. When

SPEAKER_110: people tell their friends about it, you cut out one of the major expenses in business. Lon,

SPEAKER_142: what is that major expense? The acquisition, the cost of acquisition.

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SPEAKER_01: slash twist today. That is Northwest registered agent.com slash TWIST today. And so when Uber came out, they didn't need to market. When Tesla's came out, they didn't need to market. Why? The net promoter scrolls were so high that when I got my first Tesla and you were there when I had it, people asked for

SPEAKER_61: a ride in it. People asked questions about it. It was so transcendent. So this is this super important and I'll just end on this part in terms of product market fit. I don't know if you noticed this as well on, they made a point of demonstrating the ketchup and mustard dispenser. Now, the reason I believe

SPEAKER_01: they did this was because they wanted to show that it wasn't that they had actually made physical innovations. So they had made some sort of a funnel with a handle and a grip. And when you

SPEAKER_42: squeezed it, it portioned out four dots of ketchup or four dots of mustard perfectly. And what that

SPEAKER_04: allows them to do- This is still used in the fast food industry today. You'll see behind the scenes at like Taco Bell where they've got a little gun because it puts the exact right amount of sour cream

SPEAKER_109: on the taco or guacamole on the burrito or whatever. So yeah, it's exactly like that.

SPEAKER_00: And so they had, and he asked them, where did you get that piece of equipment? And they said,

SPEAKER_01: Oh, we made it. We fabricated it. And so I just want to end on this piece. You may think a business is too simple, like getting a cab, right? Or, you know, making a burger. But if you make it 20% better across 10 different vectors, now you might have something that's 200% better than what you had previously. So you don't have to have one thing that makes it better. What McDonald showed was they had a series of maybe 30 innovations, hard fought. Some of them were simple. Some of them were complex,

SPEAKER_61: but they had the audacity to not stop innovating and creating efficiency.

SPEAKER_109: Paul and Nick Offerman plays Richard, who's sort of the brains behind the operation. And I think he's, he's presented as being completely relentless. Like it was never good enough.

SPEAKER_04: Even when he figured out a problem, he was just immediately onto the next problem. He was just constantly looking at this entire operation holistically and thinking about, how can I make it like the first scene we see of them? He's talking to his brother about, I think if we increase the temperature on the fries by 25 degrees and put them in there for a slightly less amount of time, they'd come out a little crispier and everybody else is like, Oh, you're crazy. They're already delicious. But that's just the way his brain works. He was constantly like, how do we shave an extra 1% off the time it takes to make this? Or how do we make

SPEAKER_03: it taste 1% better? And, and if you come in with that attitude every single day, yeah,

SPEAKER_26: eventually you get McDonald's, you know? Yeah. And, and to not make it all about

SPEAKER_01: the McDonald brothers, Ray Kroc during the same thing, um, was listening in his hotel as he's driving from town to trying town, trying to sell his five spindle milkshake maker. He's listening to self-help

SPEAKER_61: records and the self-help author, and he's got like a portable record player with them that he's ostensibly sets up every night in his hotel room to listen to the same records over and over again. And it's talking about resiliency and what business is about. And so when I meet young founders and I

SPEAKER_01: introduce them to a business book to be inspiring or like we're doing right here, or when I'm doing this

SPEAKER_61: week in startups, I was thinking how important it is to tell stories and to look for inspiration. And Ray Kroc was a relentless entrepreneur who was relentlessly trying to make himself better and

SPEAKER_01: find a big win. He just needed one win because the two or three things he had tried to do previously didn't work. And he's constantly getting mocked for those things. But here he is the person who

SPEAKER_26: created McDonald's, the modern day McDonald's, not the original, uh, drive-in. It's important for you to remember the self-help, uh, that he was listening to self-help would be the equivalent of today.

SPEAKER_18: Listen to podcasts. Well, I mean, that that's still like a, a trope in the, in the, in the,

SPEAKER_109: in this kind of movie in the, the sort of the, the go getter plucky upstart. They, a lot of the time they're listening to motivational stuff in the car, uh, at the beginning of the movie. And I think

SPEAKER_04: they, they play it, they tweak it in a really interesting way here where we do, we open with him listening to this motivational record about resiliency. And then at the end we see him and he's preparing to give a speech of his own and he's ripping it off. He's, he's plagiarizing the record he listened to in the opening scene as his own speech, talking about the importance of resiliency. So I think it's shading it in a way it's like, well, is it just resiliency? Cause the McDonald brothers were resilient as well. Is it just resiliency or is it the, the willingness to do whatever it takes? Oh yes. We're going to get to win. Yes. Like it, I, I think there, there is an element of that too, that it resiliency is the nice way of putting it. Not as nice way of putting it is. And you won't stop. You won't let anything stop you. Not ideology,

SPEAKER_163: morality, nothing. Ethics. You're going to win. Winning is all that matters. Win at all costs.

David Friedberg: Right. And I think it reminded me of, remember the scene. It's a two sided coin. It's a two sided coin. You remember the scene from, I think it was American beauty. I will sell this house today.

SPEAKER_109: Right. I will sell this house today. I mean, this is a, this is a trope. A lot of these movies about ambitious people or people are down on their luck, but they're, they're go-getters. They're driven. They're ambitious. They're going to win. They need this. They're desperate. A lot of that,

SPEAKER_19: you know, those are the people who are listening to sometimes podcasts, sometimes how to win friends and influence people, you know, those kinds of, those kinds of stuff. All right. Tony Robbins,

SPEAKER_26: Tony Robbins comes up in a lot of movies. Totally. So at this point, Croc has lost his mind, right? He's totally blown away. And one of the brothers comes out and says, oh, how are you enjoying your hamburgers? There's some people sitting on a bench. Croc says, this is the best one I've ever had in my life. This is, oh, well, we aim to please. And how would you like a tour?

SPEAKER_182: Right. So yeah, he takes them to dinner. They, they, they, they give them the whole kind of story.

SPEAKER_185: Uh, and immediately he's like, let's, let's get into business. This, there need to be McDonald's all over the place. What are you guys doing with one burger stand? And they're, they're hesitant at

SPEAKER_04: first because they, apparently they've had bad experiences. Other people have come to them with similar deals that it didn't go well. They weren't able to keep quality consistent. They are so focused on their San Berdu location. They wanted other people to come in and start these other franchises, but then those other franchises aren't as good and don't keep up the standard. It's their name. It's their business makes them feel bad. So they've had this bad experience. And as Mac tells Ray,

SPEAKER_109: he'd prefer to have one great restaurant than 50 mediocre ones. It's not just about the money for them. It's about the brand. It's about the pride. It's about making great burgers for people. They don't want to make a subpar product. So they say no, but you know, that, that obviously does not, you know, everything we've talked about with Ray already, that doesn't sit well. So he's immediately scheming. How am I going to, going to get these guys to say yes. And he,

SPEAKER_04: while driving around doing his sales trips, he comes up with the, the sort of pitch in a very, it's a kind of mad men inspired sequence where he gives them like a Draper kind of pitch where it's

SPEAKER_19: like, don't, don't do this for me. Don't do it for yourselves. Do it for your country. America needs McDonald's. Uh, he's talking about, you know, he was driving around and he sees every community. There's a cross. Cause that's where people gather for the church and in his, and there's a flag. Cause that's where people gather for the government or for the court. And then he's like, he, to him,

SPEAKER_04: the golden arches of McDonald's, which was not his invention, which was Richard McDonald's idea. But he thinks the golden arches need to be just as prominent and it's just as important and central to

SPEAKER_109: American life. And it's this very patriotic, do it for your, your country kind of pitch.

SPEAKER_01: And this is where like complimentary skill sets of founders, you know, comes into play. The people who start a company are not the ones who always get it to the promise land. And, you know, you'll sometimes have complimentary people on the team. Uh, you know, Steve jobs, uh, and his partner was the act is a perfect example. Was, was like, you know, building the circuit boards was the nerd was

SPEAKER_26: the technical person, but Steve was the visionary clearly. And, you know, people sometimes remember Wozniak and sometimes they remember the third co-founder who got bought out of Apple, but most of the time they just say Steve jobs. I say Apple, you say Steve jobs. Right. And you, you know, you had Dick McDonald, who was just insane at operations, you know, doing all those little innovations. And Mac was like, uh, you know, kind of like a storytelling CEO type and jovial, you know, shaking

SPEAKER_03: hands, kissing babies type guy. If you think of it in restaurant terms, like Dick was running the kitchen

SPEAKER_163: and Mac was front of house, you know, greeting customers, managing the staff, that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_61: But neither of them were the scaling CEO. And when we are talking about technology startups here in,

SPEAKER_01: uh, you know, Silicon Valley, we talk about like a zero to one founder, a product visionary, somebody who can get a product into the world, but then you need people who know how to scale a business. If you want it to become a venture scale or a truly significant business in the world, McDonald's and the McDonald's brothers didn't want to do that. They wanted to have one really great business, but that was not the ambition of the scalable, you know, CEO in Ray Kroc. He saw a vision of how to make this grow across the country. And that really becomes the central tension, I guess, of the second

SPEAKER_59: act you would say is the friction between the brothers and Ray Kroc's ambition. Listen, public markets

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SPEAKER_109: It becomes, as we've seen in so many of these kind of business movies, especially based on true stories. This was the sort of the theme of BlackBerry as well. Uh, when you've got multiple large personalities with very clear visions for what they want to do and what the company should be, you're setting up these, these kinds of power struggles become almost inevitable. So yeah, Ray, uh, gets the brothers to agree to make him sort of director of franchise operations or something similar. So he's going to go around the country, starting new McDonald's franchises. The brothers will take a small cut. He'll take a somewhat larger, but still fairly small cut. And he'll manage all of these other McDonald's restaurants and keep their quality up so that it, it befits the

SPEAKER_04: brand. Uh, so he opens the first McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois. I believe it's still there as well. This is where we get into him. A lot of him like hustling. So first working the people at the country club, working his connections there, uh, and then finding new ways to find new people to kind of recruit. It's almost a little bit of like an MLM scheme for him at this point. Like the more franchisees he signs up, the more McDonald's he opens, the more 2% takes he's

SPEAKER_201: getting of everybody's business. So it's kind of like he's the upstream and they're the downstream

SPEAKER_191: a little bit. And that is the criticism of the franchise business model. And it's also

SPEAKER_61: the great part about it is, you know, the franchisees have to do all the work,

SPEAKER_196: but they may get this incredible formula. Now, this is something that's hotly debated. If you, if you dive into subway and we should do a deep dive into subway, because I'm sure they'll make

SPEAKER_26: a movie about this, about subway at some point, those franchisees are really ground down and grinding it out is the name of Crocs book. So there is something to this. You have to be a grinder. And in terms of this film, you know, it really shows that food service and restaurants is a grinded out business. It is not a business for rich people who are, you know, retiring and don't want to work.

SPEAKER_59: And there's this very important moment as he's trying to find people to open up these franchises,

SPEAKER_61: he starts at the country club with people who have the money and it's no big deal. They sign it and then they go back to playing golf and drinking, you know, martinis. But the problem is those people have

SPEAKER_26: no standards. They don't care about the restaurant. They just want to flip their money kind of, and that infuriates Crocs. And of course that infuriates the McDonald's brothers who care about quality above all else. And so there's this great pivot where he goes from country clubs to synagogues,

David Friedberg: veterans associations, who else does he hit up? Oh, the first person, tell everybody about the first person that he recruits as a franchisee, when he decides rich people are not going to get this done, I need blue collar, hard work and salt of the earth people. The Jewish Bible salesman,

SPEAKER_182: this guy, is that who we're talking about? Yeah. So he's, there's a lot of, there's a lot, I guess

SPEAKER_109: you see it in older movies where people are just in the same office and they overhear somebody's conversation. They're like, that's the guy I need to be in business. But I feel like this doesn't

SPEAKER_212: happen in today's world as much. There are random collisions. This would fall into the category of

SPEAKER_04: collisions or sliding doors or no, he goes to his own office and there's this very pushy Bible salesman

SPEAKER_109: trying to sell to his own secretary, uh, who's not interested in this guy is just relentless, not giving up. And then he stops him in the hallway and he's like, Hey, you know, who, who are you? Tell me about yourself. The guy, his name's green bomb or something, something obviously Jewish. Uh, so it's like, you're a, you're a Jewish guy selling, uh, Bibles. The guy's like, look, I gotta, you know, I gotta make

SPEAKER_04: my nut. I gotta, I gotta earn a living. And that's how he's like, oh, this, that's the kind of light bulb moment for Ray is like, I need people who they need this. This is going to become their life. They're

SPEAKER_109: going to be obsessed with this the way I'm obsessed with this, not these country club guys who don't really care. They've already made their money. I need hungry people. You know, in our industry,

SPEAKER_26: we want people to have skin in the game. And this is why in our industry, you know, people selling or founder selling their secondary shares and not having a mortgage payment or kids in private

SPEAKER_61: school or, you know, um, 12 months of runway, six months, 18 months of runway, the venture capital community and the architecture of the entire system is a bit of a pressure cooker. It's very

SPEAKER_26: rare that somebody gets five years of funding and some huge salary that competes with the salary they had at Apple or something. Um, and that pressure makes the diamond skin in the game is what we're

SPEAKER_224: looking for, uh, with founders and with venture capitalists, they have to put a certain percentage

SPEAKER_19: of their money into their venture funds. And the, the movie also, uh, it sort of does this with Ray and his wife, uh, who's played by Laura Dern, uh, Ethel, Ethel code where even, even

SPEAKER_109: she, they, they don't see eye to eye because she's at the point where they're in their fifties. She's

SPEAKER_04: like, we own our home. You, you've had your years of being a salesman on the road. Like, isn't it time for you to slow down and start thinking about retiring or spending more time with me going to dinners, you know, enjoying your life to go to Spain. She wants to go to Spain. Yeah. And, uh, he just, he, he can't function that way. That's just not who he is. That's. And we sense that that's never going to be who he is. It doesn't matter how much money he makes, how comfortable he gets. He's never going to want to just rest on his laurels and stop building. He's just that kind of a person. He wants to win. He's competitive and, and, uh, that's the only sort of life that he can envision for himself. And so, you know, later over the course of the film, he meets, uh, a franchisee named Raleigh Smith and his wife, Joan, who's much more of his kind of mindset. She's a go-getter. She's hungry. She's ambitious. She loves money and wants to make more money. And so, you know, you can see that's the attraction of him to her is that, you know, uh, again,

SPEAKER_109: it is about skin in the game, but it's also just about having that kind of motor, just having that personal ambition versus, you know, just a different kind of person who's not as caught up in

SPEAKER_61: the rat race. You know, I was going to bring this up. Spouses are so critical in the formation of

SPEAKER_26: startups. Now you'd think like, well, they don't go to the startup every day, but if you think about it, like an Olympic, uh, athlete, or if you think of it, like a Navy seal or, or somebody who's doing some extreme pursuit, well, their spouse might have to sacrifice. Oh, they're on a tour of duty, you know, uh, in Afghanistan or they're, uh, going to the Olympics and they've got to do three workouts a day. And they're going to be, you know, doing some competitions all over the world. The spouses bear the brunt of that, uh, often in startup land, they have to take care of the family. If there's a family, they have to manage their domestic stuff. And this becomes, uh, a bit

SPEAKER_61: of tension often because one person is pursuing their life dream and they're getting all this glory. And the other person is doing all the chores and having to cheer them on. And then the person who's cheering them on will become resentful. Uh, and then the person who is going out and working on this, they might have their spouse then become critical of what they're doing. And then that is

SPEAKER_01: the death of the marriage. It's the death of the partnership. It just becomes irreconcilable often.

SPEAKER_26: And that's why often when I talk to people who have families and kids, uh, and they're starting a company and they want my advice to say, well, have you talked about this with your partner slash spouse, whatever your, you know, a common term is, make sure you have that aligned, uh, because some people are work to live and some people live to work. And this is like the tension you see when I tweet on Twitter or X on Twitter, whatever I'm doing on Twitter, posting on X, you know, and I say

SPEAKER_64: like hard work pays off. And then people are like, ah, but what if it doesn't? It's like, well, that's kind of implied, but okay. And it's just fundamentally some people, when the whistle blows

SPEAKER_26: at five o'clock, that's when their life begins. Other people, when the whistle blows in the morning,

SPEAKER_241: they get to work. That's when their life begins. Yeah. Um, so different strokes for different folks.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. And I think that that is part of the sort of, it's both the McDonald brothers versus Ray

SPEAKER_04: Kroc it's Ray versus his wife. And then we see, we see that kind of play out several times over the course of the movie. There's kind of this very different ways of measuring success and what does it mean to be a success and what does it mean to like have a successful company or marriage or, you know, whatever else. So I think that that's really interesting. So at this point in the movie,

SPEAKER_109: Ray is kind of, he started having the same kind of success and market pull that the McDonald brothers had. Now Ray is starting to experience where rather than going out and recruiting, people are coming to him. McDonald's is becoming a breakout sensation. He takes this trip to Minneapolis where they're opening

SPEAKER_04: a new franchise and he gets this kind of hero's welcome. And he realizes like, oh, this is really, I'm onto something. This is really taking off. And that's the point where the tensions really start to build between him and the McDonald's brothers, because he starts to feel more ownership.

SPEAKER_109: Like I built this into this huge thing. Sure. You guys had the idea of how to make the burgers, but now we're, we're, we're all contributing. It doesn't just feel like it's, it's your company

SPEAKER_04: that I'm helping with. It's also my company now. I think part of what they're implying is that this was always kind of who Ray Kroc was. And he's just becoming unleashed. The more powerful he gets, the more rich he gets, the more status he gets, the more he's sort of free to become that person. And he doesn't have to be the salesman anymore. Who's constantly pitching and glad handing everybody. So as he kind of comes into his own more, we get a lot of back and forth where he wants to make changes. And the McDonald brothers are not into it. Like the main one being that the contract he's getting, I think it's 1.9% of the revenue from these franchise restaurants. He was so eager to sign the deal. He didn't really worry about the math at the time. Now that it's really taking off and succeeding. He's recognizing that that's not that much money. I've got all this overhead that I'm managing and I'm only getting 2% of all of these actual locations. I'm not getting rich the way I

SPEAKER_01: should be getting rich. And this is a path that founders go along. You have complete doubt and uncertainty and fear, and then you start winning and then your confidence builds. And then that confidence can become arrogance. It can become narcissism. It can become, you know, momentum. It can go either way. And it's often it goes multiple ways. And so it's important for founders to not feel so low in the beginning when you're figuring out product market fit and you're figuring out the business because that is the part of the process is the suffering is the, you know, not making enough money is being underappreciated. And then what happens is you hit it. And when you hit it, then all of a sudden, everybody wants to be your friend. Everybody's giving you applause, thanking you, hugging you. You're the greatest person ever. And this is where, you know, having a strong foundation as an individual, a strong sense of morality, a strong sense of ethics, a strong sense of who you are as a person. And this is where you're parenting and everything

SPEAKER_61: comes into this. And what will happen is people who are not grounded, man, you can see them go off the rails, all different kinds of directions. And tragically, people who don't get product market

SPEAKER_01: fit, you know, they can get depression and worse. And so I thought that the movie did such a good job of capturing his journey from just being considered a loser by everybody, knowing he was actually a winner, knowing he saw these opportunities that other people couldn't see. He knew, Lon, that he had it. He knew he had it. But the world doubted him. And then he starts turning a corner. And every week, every month, every franchise that joins, he realizes he's awesome at this. And everybody who doubted him is wrong. He gets the divorce from his wife. He gets the new wife, who is, you know, aesthetically, you know, played as younger and more beautiful. And more importantly, who wants to be his partner in crime, and his partner who pumps him up and says, you can do it, and you're awesome and wants to be involved and celebrating the victories not needs real ice cream. We need profits. Yeah, Nick, producer Nick coming in with a really great drop. Maybe you could take us to that moment where the new wife is like getting involved in the business and rolling up her sleeves and his thinking like rock, and how that moment plays into his relationship, where croc finally

SPEAKER_109: confronts the McDonald brothers. So this is one of those movie, the law of efficiency of characters, what Roger Ebert would call it like you can't just constantly introduce new characters. So you got to consolidate when you can. So this did not all come from the real Joan Smith. She was a McDonald's franchisee. They did eventually get married. But the movie for convenience sake also gives her the powdered milkshake idea. And apparently this was not that's apocryphal. But anyway, yeah,

SPEAKER_19: in the movie, she comes to him with this discovery that one of the major expenses of running a

SPEAKER_04: McDonald's franchise at that point was these big walk in freezers where you'd store the ice cream. And that's what it's a thing that it annoys Ray and his franchise. It annoys the other franchise owners. It's it's soaking up a lot of what should be their profits. So Linda Cardellini, who plays Joan Smith, she discovers in one of those trade industry magazines, powdered milkshakes, which you

SPEAKER_109: can sort of simulate the milkshake experience, but it doesn't require a freezer. It's not real ice cream.

SPEAKER_19: You just mix the powder into water. And they love one of those food science discoveries in the 50s and

SPEAKER_26: 60s. They were so into it's kind of a NASA kind of moment, right? They were taking freeze dried stuff. Yeah, you know, and, and, and, and, and, right. The food chemistry and food labs and all that,

SPEAKER_19: all those discoveries in terms of like chemical artificial flavoring and all that, all that was big, big business at this time. And they were constantly coming out with these new kinds of products. And, you know, today stuff like powdered milkshakes and powdered potatoes or whatever, there's a lot of we've, we are already stereotype that as like, oh, that's institutional food. That's cafeteria food. That's prison food. But in the 50s and 60s, they were obsessed with technology.

SPEAKER_04: They thought that stuff was amazing. This is the future that everybody's going to eat powdered milkshakes one day. So Ray and Joan, very excited about this idea, but Richard McDonald is like,

SPEAKER_266: milkshakes have ice cream in them. It's a part of the deal. No. And just refuses to negotiate or

SPEAKER_19: discuss or talks about it. So that, that kind of becomes the last straw. And this is a key because

SPEAKER_172: we, we haven't talked about deal making and negotiation, but in order to get the deal for McDonald's, he had to agree that the McDonald's brothers would approve every change to what happens in that restaurant. So if he wanted to change the ice cream and milkshakes to a powdered one, he needed to get explicit written approval from the McDonald's brothers, which they would never give. And they were slow and they were resistant to change.

SPEAKER_19: Right. So he's trying to sort of figure out this power struggle. And it's another one of those kismet. He's just having this conversation that somebody's like, Hey, I have the answer. But he meets Harry Sonnenborn, played by the office vet BJ Novak, who would later go on to become McDonald's

SPEAKER_109: first CEO. He's just at the bank as a fellow customer overhears this problem and meets with Croc and figures out the solution. This very elegant, somewhat devious solution,

SPEAKER_04: which is rather than focusing on the franchise itself and taking a little piece of the profits of the franchise, McDonald's should be buying the plots of land that the restaurants go on. And then they lease those plots of land to the franchise owners, which gives the McDonald's company all the control over the location rather than the franchise owner. And they're just taking a

SPEAKER_61: little chunk of change every month of the profit. So let me reflect this back so the audience doesn't

SPEAKER_01: miss it. McDonald's had franchisees. The McDonald's brothers own the McDonald's experience

SPEAKER_126: and Ray's in the middle. He can't make enough money off of the 1.9% he negotiated.

SPEAKER_276: Is there a problem? A big one. You don't seem to realize what business you're in.

SPEAKER_61: And so this clever person says, Well, you know, you're really in the real estate business.

SPEAKER_01: Why is he in the real estate business? It turns out when McDonald's opens a restaurant, the entire world goes next to them. So they're so successful that they in fact are distribution. And Starbucks has a similar phenomenon. If you put a Starbucks, they research where they're going to put them really well. When you place a Starbucks, the block on either side of that Starbucks now goes up massively in value. Why foot traffic, obviously. So they were leasing the land under the McDonald's building these iconic buildings with the arches, as you can see in Lot's background there, key part of the story. But they were leasing it for landowners who benefits from that, the landowners. Now, if you wanted to get around the McDonald's brothers deal,

SPEAKER_61: well, if you own the land, if Ray Kroc had a separate company that owned the land, and he leased it to the new franchisee, so the franchisee signs a franchisee documents, finds a construction person builds it, and then opens their restaurant. Does it matter if they get the land from Ray Kroc, or they get it from some random landowner?

SPEAKER_01: Well, Ray Kroc realizes that's the business. I'm assuming, they didn't mention this in the story, we could ask our Google notebook LM, which has a bunch of McDonald's information in it,

SPEAKER_26: if they would also buy the plots of land around them. It would seem like you should buy as many

SPEAKER_61: plots around a McDonald's as possible before you install it. But that was the key there, because now,

SPEAKER_01: they're the landlord in a 10 or 20-year lease, if it's successful, then what's the price going to be? They own the land outright, and then they get to charge the franchisee whatever they want. And the thing that they don't mention, Lon, they know the franchisee's economics. So they can match

SPEAKER_61: the rent for that land, the lease, to what they think is the maximum breaking point that doesn't make the franchisee go find another location. Right. Which I'm sure is what they did.

SPEAKER_19: It's an exclusive deal. You can't open a McDonald's unless you're leasing the land from

SPEAKER_109: the McDonald's corporation. So they have to, they don't have a choice. In one other way, it's clever, too. From Ray's perspective, it gets him around the McDonald brothers. Like,

SPEAKER_04: at this point, now he's the center of power. They might be able to say, well, contractually, we control what you do with the burgers. But now he owns the land. The franchisees are working

SPEAKER_109: through him. It gives him control over the entire company. And it really gives him free reign at this point to just start ignoring the brothers altogether, which he does in a big display by

SPEAKER_262: sending all the franchisees the powdered milkshakes and just doing it anyway, even though the brothers

SPEAKER_26: said no. And the brothers come to him and the brothers say, hey, we're not going to allow it. And when they don't allow it, they say, hey, we have a contract. Ray Kroc just says, well, you know what they say about contracts? They're meant to be broken. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: And that's when he goes to the dark side. In my mind, you realize he has the money, he has the power. He's now somehow wrestled control from them. And he feels emboldened to, in any situation in his life, to use the law or to use might and power, money to just create the world he wants. And this happens in business as well. We just had a situation where Apple is being accused of hiring all these people who built patents for the Apple for for smartwatches and

SPEAKER_26: healthcare, like oxygen reading on your watch, and they stole employees. And you know, they're

SPEAKER_01: apparently being sanctioned down. But you know, coming like Apple might get reckless as they have money distribution and power, and they will roll over people around them. And so this is when Ray, I think, kind of crescends into the dark side, but just being cutthroat. If you want, if you don't agree

SPEAKER_61: with me, sue me. If you are not going to support me as a wife, I'm getting divorced, I'll give you

SPEAKER_26: everything, but you're not getting to share a McDonald's. And he just went hardcore. This is

SPEAKER_04: the hardcore moment. Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting. I think the movie is doing something really interesting here. Did Ray go to the dark side? Did the money and the power and the status

SPEAKER_109: get to him and get in his head and change him? Or was this always who he was in the back of his mind, and he just it had to wait to come out like in the beginning of the movie?

SPEAKER_04: He doesn't think that's accurate. I think that's accurate. He doesn't have the power. He can't his goal the entire time is to get a few money so that he can unleash his inner capitalist tycoon bastard. I think I think that's a I think that's a fair read. But I don't know if that's I don't think that I think you could read the movie the other way that he wasn't. He wasn't always so cutthroat. He did learn that that's how you have to be. Or that's the way he wanted to be over time.

SPEAKER_01: My take on it is, as you get more confident, and you get more power, you will take more risk, or you'll be more hardcore. So that would track more with me. He didn't have the power when he was selling milkshakes to roll over anybody. In fact, he was instead of being on a heater and accumulating

SPEAKER_26: power and having momentum as a founder, he was kind of the other way, right? He was on his heels. And when you're on your heels, and you're not confident, the idea that you would fire off a lawsuit, or you tell somebody, well, have you sue me if you don't like it? You might not do.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we meet him and he's in full salesman mode. I think it's really the very first scene we see of him. And it's not only just a sales, but it's that kind of Willy Loman, like down on his luck, Shelly Levine, like, I gotta make this sale. It's that desperation, like, hey, you look like a smart guy. I don't have to tell you the business, you know, like, he's got that. And so I think that's kind of what we're watching too, is this the how it sort of unleashes him to be able to put that persona aside permanently. I don't have to be the salesman anymore. And that's kind of the scene when he's getting drinks and he gets back from Minneapolis and he's talking to his wife and

SPEAKER_249: he's like, they love McDonald's. They were all over me. We gotta have a drink. That's what he's really

SPEAKER_04: celebrating is I get to put away being servile forever. I'm nobody's, you know, be worth stool. Any, any more. I get to be in charge now. And I, you know, I think, and it goes, it goes from there. Like it gets, it only builds from there.

SPEAKER_191: And there's a lot of technical things that occur, you know, around company formation, when he makes this real estate company, calls it the franchise realty corporation. Yeah. But then eventually he's like, you know what? I'm going to call it the McDonald's corporation. If you don't

SPEAKER_26: like it, you can sue me. It's confusing. Yeah. And he's like, oh, that's the whole point. I'm going to confuse people. I don't care. And this actually happened to go back to Zuckerberg as well.

SPEAKER_01: Another incredible entrepreneur with, you know, many would argue, you know, less than top shelf

SPEAKER_61: morals or ethics. He screwed all his original business partners, restarted Facebook, sold the

SPEAKER_01: assets from an LLC into a C corporation. And that's what the social network was about, was about this same thing. A person who didn't have power was building, you know, software for the Winklevii, all of a sudden getting some power, getting somebody like Sean Parker in his corner, getting Peter Thiel in his Parker, getting success, and then be like, you know what?

SPEAKER_26: Might is right. I have the chips. I have the power. Now I'm going to just do whatever I want. And if you are my previous partner and friend, you can sue me. And so the arc of, and we should do the social network at some point, the arc of Zuckerberg going from, you know, a coder with, you know, a certain ability to copy other people's products and do it better than them. All of a sudden,

SPEAKER_01: he just becomes a person who doesn't care and will screw anybody, including his best friends. Uh, and that, this is a central theme of business. Is it necessary to screw everybody around you to be successful? The answer is it's not. There's many more stories of people being mensches and being, having a moral compass and being ethical and making sure everybody's taken care of, than Zuckerberg and Ray Kroc.

SPEAKER_306: How much of it do you think came from Kroc feeling like he was being screwed because the percentage was so small. And obviously he was doing so much of a brunt of the expansion work, basically a hundred percent of the expansion work. Resentment. Exactly. And the McDonald brothers wouldn't budge even a little bit. They wouldn't even give him 2% or 3% or 4% or whatever he was asking for. And another like follow up to that is, do you think McDonald's would exist in its current iteration if the brothers had just been like, you know what, why don't you take 5%, we know you're doing all this work, and we're going to cut you in on 2% of the net profits from everything at the end.

SPEAKER_32: Okay. These are great questions. I'll take them in reverse. If the brothers had played ball with him and gave him more leeway,

SPEAKER_01: I think actually it would have grown faster because he wouldn't have been wasting so much time arguing with them. It is possible that he could have destroyed the product, but I think it's unlikely.

SPEAKER_04: At some point that power struggle was going to come to a head, right? Because no matter how much compromise each side made, their fundamental view of the business was just so different. The McDonald brothers really, they were, they cared about the food quality. They cared about family. Consistency. They really bought into that sales pitch of like, no, this is about bringing people together and community and making something great.

SPEAKER_64: How does he eventually get what he wants out of them?

SPEAKER_314: I mean, I think at some point, Ray Kroc was going to screw them and get rid of them. So how does he get what he wants from them?

SPEAKER_04: Sue me. He points out what has become obvious, which is by making this land real estate deal, by forming this huge corporation, he now dwarfs them in terms of power and status. He, he is the owner of this massive company, McDonald's. They own a burger stand in San Bernardino. Uh, so I think once they realize that they've already lost before the argument has even started, because he has this tremendous lead on them. There's basically no choice. They can't sue him. He'd tie them up in court forever. They've got to make a deal. So he makes this deal that is a pretty terrible deal for them. He gives them 2.7 million to split between the two of them.

SPEAKER_07: That's worked out mathematically. So each brother walks away with a million after taxes, right?

SPEAKER_04: So they get to keep their San Bernardino location. That's theirs. And then, uh, they ask him for, they want 1% of all McDonald profits in perpetuity forever. Uh, and he says, well, I'd like to give that to you, but the board, we're going to have to do it as a handshake deal.

SPEAKER_26: And I'll fight for you. And then he screws him. My point is eventually he just negotiated with them.

SPEAKER_01: And so I think that there was a negotiation to be at here. We're playing Monday morning quarterback. I think if the, if the brothers had just extracted a small amount of money, each time you wanted a concession so that, you know, if you wanted to go to two and a half percent, okay, well, they want

SPEAKER_26: this payout or they want this percentage of the real estate company, et cetera.

SPEAKER_03: But they didn't want to play ball. They didn't want, they didn't want powdered milkshakes,

SPEAKER_01: even if it made them $10 billion. But eventually, but eventually they wanted a payout. So I think that the strategic, I'm talking about strategy here. I agree with you. Their motivation was, you know, this purity at a point. They said, we don't want to deal with this chaos. We want our money. And I think they should have got better lawyers. And I think they should have been negotiating a slow exit until the company went public. And this is an important lesson for everybody watching. If you are in a situation that like the McDonald's brothers are in, keep your equity in the business, make sure you have the equity in the business, because what that means is no matter how big it gets, if lawn owns 10% of the business, and let's say I'm Ray Kroc and I own 20%. Okay, for every dollar, those shares go up and you own $10 worth of shares and I own 20, you go to 11, I go to 22, you're still getting the benefit, but you're not doing any of the work. And this is really why equity and stock ownership, as opposed to licensing deals and royalties is the gold standard in business, because the share price goes up, everybody wins. Now, of course, people can do funny things like dilute the shares and issue more shares. But in general, those things are frowned upon. The McDonald's brothers did not have great representation, it was clear,

SPEAKER_26: and they should have. And they should have never, obviously, walked away without owning equity in the business. And so, Ray Kroc was dogged, but man, they could have held on to percentage ownerships. Yeah, McDonald's net income in 20, oh, go ahead.

SPEAKER_172: The Facebook partners did. Eduardo and then the other people, all those early people did wind up keeping shares in the company. Not the Winklevosses.

SPEAKER_327: The Winklevosses, I think he specifically did not want them to own shares.

SPEAKER_328: Yeah, Eduardo, Saverin and those other guys. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_172: So again, all of those things become negotiations. So here's the two lessons.

SPEAKER_01: Number one, if you're the king or queen, and you've won power, you can really negotiate hard,

SPEAKER_26: and you're going to wind up on top in all likelihood. But if you're the person who's getting

SPEAKER_49: screwed, you really want to fight doggedly to make sure you own equity in it, because that person

SPEAKER_26: has proven to you that they're a lunatic. And if that person has proven that they're a lunatic, and they'll fight to the end, well, you want to have equity in them.

SPEAKER_172: Eduardo Saverin wound up with over 50 million Facebook shares. So he did quite well for himself.

SPEAKER_330: Yeah, he's doing fun. I just think there's a lesson here about like fiscally compensating people based on their

SPEAKER_306: value to the company. Like he was so valuable. And you see, which I think it goes back to Lon's point earlier about this being like a really measured take on this. It didn't make him look like a total terrible guy, but it also didn't paint him like a hero. That scene where he's like behind on his mortgage payments. And you're like, how is this guy expanding this business so rapidly, doing such an amazing job, and he's missing his mortgage payments. And you know, he's not gambling the money away. He's just like being underpaid. You're like, that's crazy. It was crazy.

SPEAKER_04: There is definitely a personal, emotional dimension to this rivalry that I think both sides probably kept them from seeing things entirely clearly like Ray Kroc kind of a hot headed guy, even by his own admission, he talks about this in the autobiography. I believe that he could, he could, he was very emotionally this, he cared about this a lot. He could fly off the handle. Yeah. He hangs up on them. And the guy's like, he just hang up on us. The McDonald's brothers immediately get turned off from dealing with him because they, they're not like that. They're these very gregarious Midwestern, even keeled, calm guys. And this guy I screaming at them on the phone. They don't like it. So I think they're hesitant to make changes both because of their ideology, but also because who the hell is this guy to call and bark orders at us. And I think it's the flip side to Ray by the end of the movie has become vindictive where it's not just about, I want to get the most money. I got to take care of myself. It's like, oh, I'll leave you

SPEAKER_19: your San Bernardino restaurant, but then I'm going to open my own McDonald's right across the street and put you out of business. Yeah. He wants to bury them. It is personal. Exactly. Just,

SPEAKER_109: just because now I hate you and we've, we've been combative for so long that now I want to get my sort of revenge and stick the knife. And so I think, yeah, it's a business negotiation, but it does inevitably take on this personality clash as well, where they start to hate each other.

SPEAKER_40: The film ends, the McDonald's brothers get their money.

SPEAKER_04: Well, I think there's a, there's a fascinating scene at the very end where Dick McDonald and Ray

SPEAKER_22: Kroc end up after the legal proceedings, they end up in the, the restroom together.

SPEAKER_343: Yeah. And it's a total, total movie trope, by the way, the epilogue in the bathroom. It's a very screenwriter-y. I'm sure this never happened, but you know. Take a leak and do the debrief. Yeah.

SPEAKER_314: You got to get them together for one big final, you know, whatever, uh, scene.

SPEAKER_345: Recap of what happened, right? It's like, what just happened? Why did we see what we saw?

SPEAKER_04: We as an audience, right. We want closure. We want them to have a final moment coming to terms with each other or whatever. Uh, so, uh, you know,

SPEAKER_208: Dick McDonald's basically asking him like, Hey, if you were willing to just steal from us and screw

SPEAKER_314: us over, why did you want to make a deal with us in the first place? Like we, we showed you

SPEAKER_109: everything. We showed you what we did. You saw the restaurant. You could have just gone home and made your own McDonald's and called it something else. And you didn't have to be in business with us at all. Why not just do that? And, uh, he says it's, it's the name McDonald's that that was part of it, part of the package and the brand. And the, when he showed up that day to get his burger and was blown away, that was part of the experience was that it was called McDonald's, this very welcoming, friendly, all American name. He points out his own name,

SPEAKER_349: crock, very Slavic immigrant sounding. So correct. Who would ever want to eat a crock's is a great

SPEAKER_60: line. Who would ever want to eat a crock's? And then in the epilogue to the epilogue. So that's like kind of a mini epilogue, but there's another one at the end where they actually show Ray crock

SPEAKER_26: speaking. And he's talking about how beautiful the McDonald's name is and how iconic it is. And he says, you know, I never liked gimmicky names like burger, you know, castle or whatever.

SPEAKER_282: He's kind of obviously talking about burger King or, you know, burger stop or whatever.

SPEAKER_354: Astro burgers we have here in LA. Yeah. And he's kind of mocking

SPEAKER_01: burger King and other people who copied it. But it is such a key point of, I think, Ray crock's brilliance. Ray crock was an observer of humans and opportunities. He was a hustler. He

SPEAKER_59: was a grinder, thus the term grinding it out. And he took pride in that and grinding it out is what startups are about at their best. It is what innovation is about at its best. It is a grind.

SPEAKER_61: And it is about resilience and confidence and momentum and just never stopping your innovation. And as an entrepreneur myself, people who have worked for me and you, you

SPEAKER_26: both have worked for me, you know, I might come in after, you know, a break and be like, Hey, we're doing this new thing. It's founding university. Hey, we're doing this new thing. It's called this week in startups. Hey, we're going to try this.

SPEAKER_01: And you have to be constantly trying to come up with something new that clicks. And then you have

SPEAKER_00: the thing that clicked and you got to keep tweaking it. So here we are in year 13 of, you know, this week in startups. I'm like, I want to do more of these like business breakdowns with lawn

SPEAKER_01: because they're fun for us to do. And the audience loves them. So here we are. Resiliency is the big takeaway for me, grinding it out, having great lawyers. And just that understanding of branding

SPEAKER_04: from such an earl, like today, we take that for granted. Everybody is, we're all personal brands. Everybody thinks in that, in those terms, but in 1954, to be like, you know what those golden arches in every town, you'll be on the road and you'll drive and you'll know what that is. And you'll really, it's going to be consistent everywhere I go. McDonald's is McDonald's like, no,

SPEAKER_07: he was way ahead of the curve thinking about how important that would become for Americans.

SPEAKER_01: Which by the way, at the start of our careers, we saw this information superhighway as this

SPEAKER_61: incredible opportunity because you could transmit information and go anywhere, get any information for free or close to free. And really the highways, the American highways built in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, were essentially like the platform shift of its time. Route 66, he says early on, Ray Kroc, I have this vision of Route 66 and you can go across the entire country, which was built off the innovation of the factory, which created cars by Henry Ford and the McDonald's factory. And when they're making that tennis scene, it's based on Ford and him making the assembly line, assembly line. So we should sit here for a moment, I think, and reflect on platform changes, right? We're sitting here with AI as a platform change. We witnessed

SPEAKER_26: cloud, we witnessed mobile, we witnessed broadband and the internet itself, PC revolution, cloud revolution, all this kind of great stuff. You know, it just when there is a new innovation that occurs,

SPEAKER_01: like factories and the assembly line, many people can profit from it. Or when there's something like, you know, infrastructure that's built, many people can profit from it. McDonald's wasn't the only

SPEAKER_157: people who profited off of Route 66 and, you know, the highway system, hotels, Howard Johnson's

SPEAKER_01: would have been the same area. Yes, tons of brands. And then going big is my final lesson here. You know, people do not have a gambler's mindset. And if you look at the McDonald brothers, they had a protectionist mindset, Lon. They wanted to protect what they had, because what they had was really special. They weren't willing to risk what they had to have what McDonald's has become. And that was

SPEAKER_26: their choice. It's obviously a critical mistake. If you want to make a ton of money, but they did make them, you know, a killing, you know, for people who made a hamburger joint, but they only wound up capturing, if you take it as 10 million in today's dollars, or, you know, close to 500 million, so if you had put it into the S&P, or it would have been a billion dollars between the two of them,

SPEAKER_314: they only got a fraction of the actual- Yeah. I mean, McDonald's last year made 6.1 billion in net income. That would have been 61 million if they got their 1%. Yes. And that would have been

SPEAKER_371: every year. And that's for one year. That's one year. That's one year. That happens every year. So lots of big lessons there. McDonald's big company. I think there's one other really

SPEAKER_04: interesting- Yeah, tell me your lessons. We were talking about these sort of sea changes and shifts in not just, you know, individual companies, but the way kind of business is done and approached. And I think this movie is also about another kind of pivotal shift or sea change moment. The McDonald brothers are like, when you, in elementary school, when they teach you Adam Smith and capitalism, you know, you do those, like you make something at home and then you bring it in and you do a little like mini economy in class. Like I'll sell you, you know, here's what bartering is. And here's, I'll sell you one of these for two of those. And that's how we have an economy. And I think that's where the McDonald brothers stopped. They were like, we want to make the best product for the best value. And we're going to be better than all of our competitors. It'll be faster. The cheeseburger is going to be juicier and we're going to make everything as perfect as we could. And then that's where they stop. And I think Ray Kroc represents a modern take on capitalism, which is not just about looking at one product and looking at how much of that product do we sell to how many customers, but all of these elaborate financial systems and products and institutions and ways of investing, ways of thinking about scaling companies and growth. Keyword, Lon. It's changed so much. And I think now it's all about how much are you making this

SPEAKER_379: quarter versus last quarter or this quarter versus the same quarter last year? What's your five year,

SPEAKER_21: what's your 10 year projection? How are we going to keep, you know, innovating and how are we going to

SPEAKER_110: keep your total addressable market and what percentage of it are you? Exactly. And so the Kroc brothers were

SPEAKER_61: never thinking, well, how many milkshakes and hamburgers are eaten every year? And how many of those can we capture? They're just thinking, well, there's a person in front of me, how delighted are they with the burger? And so that was the first half of capitalism. And here we are in the second half of capitalism is how much can I capture? Producer Nick, any moments or lessons from this that you take

SPEAKER_306: away? It really was profound to me when he went to Phoenix for the first time, which was the first golden arches establishment. And I just thought it was amazing how, you know, that's still a feeling that we all have. If you're on the highway in the United States, if you're on a long road trip and you see the golden arches, you're like, oh, I can get some food there. Look, Mickey D's. I just, you know, Jason, you talk about real world virality a lot and back in the fifties that basically didn't really exist, right? Like what was that? And he, he just saw it. And I also, I said this before, but my other main takeaway was just like, if somebody is doing such a lion's share of the work, you have to get them in on ownership and compensate them properly and keep them around. Cause that would have been much more lucrative for the McDonald's brothers in the, in the end. And what they did wound up just, and who knows if that's actual, really the reality,

SPEAKER_26: but we're just talking about the movie, multiple sides to the story, both of their sides and the actual reality are the three that we're left to deal with. Right. Yeah. I think those are great thoughts as well. All right. We do, we like to give a little awards here. So Nick, lighten you around here. These are the awards for the film producer Nick came up with. What's your first award

SPEAKER_385: you want to give? The number one award. Well, you guys have to give them, but you could just choose any character you want. The would hire award for a character you would hire immediately.

SPEAKER_386: So you're telling me there's a chance.

SPEAKER_172: A would hire award. Hmm. Well, I mean, can we say Ray Kroc? You could say Ray Kroc. Yeah. I mean, when you got somebody with that much to prove

SPEAKER_26: and who's that resilient and dogged and hardworking, that's the, that's the person you pick. I mean, after that, it's gotta be the guy who explained to him, his like basic conciliary who explained to him how real estate works. Those would be my two.

SPEAKER_389: Harry Sonnenborn. Harry Sonnenborn, first CEO of McDonald's.

SPEAKER_183: Yeah, Harry Sonnenborn. Yeah. That's, I mean, I think we gotta take Ray Kroc out of it. So I go with Harry. Who'd he go with, Lon?

SPEAKER_109: I mean, I feel like Dick McDonald is a, is a good answer there. Dick McDonald being the,

SPEAKER_163: the sort of the innovator. He's the, the wouldn't, none of it exists without him coming up with the

SPEAKER_185: ways to make the burger better. You know, like he's gotta, he's gotta be there at the ground floor.

SPEAKER_172: You don't have a product. Got it. So you, you got the product market fit guy. I got the financial

SPEAKER_398: Ray Kroc first. I assume the wood fire award for a character you would fire immediately. Who would you fire immediately? God, I don't want to say the first wife. She doesn't even work there.

SPEAKER_364: She's just the wife. I know, but she's such a downer and she's like,

SPEAKER_403: doesn't believe in him. And yeah, she was a man. I didn't give Laura Dern a lot to work with, by the way, in this movie. No, she played a sourpuss.

SPEAKER_19: That's such a thankless role. The, like the, the, the wife who just wants her husband to stay home.

SPEAKER_404: I always think of, they didn't even really give her like a, like a mad scene either. They didn't

SPEAKER_19: let her go. I always think of, uh, I love Donnie Brasco, but Anne Heche in Donnie Brasco has the most

SPEAKER_109: thankless role of her job is literally stand in the kitchen and yell at Johnny Depp for not being home enough. And like, there's like four scenes, they keep cutting to it and it's the same every time. And this is one of those thankless Anne Heche and Donnie Brasco type roles where she's just there to

SPEAKER_408: be, you know, why aren't you home moral? We should go to space. No, and you're a hundred percent right.

SPEAKER_64: Not giving Laura Dern, you know, uh, a really juicy character is just huge mistakes. She's Laura Dern.

SPEAKER_157: She's a queen. Queen. Can I jump in here? I have, I have an answer for this one. Okay.

SPEAKER_404: Who do you hate? Uh, I would immediately fire, um, Joan Smith's like nerd husband who just lets

SPEAKER_417: Ray Kroc like completely ogle his wife in front of him at the, at the dinner scene. I mean, Ray Kroc should have been smacked there. And that guy is just what a, what a loser. I would fire him in two seconds. He sings a song with her. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's an instant toss.

SPEAKER_385: He's just ogling her like, and he's like, that's my wife, dude. And he's like, yeah, I don't care. I mean, maybe you grab him by the belt. That's actor Patrick Wilson. I know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_427: I know it's Patrick Wilson. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm firing. Imagine treating Aquaman's brother

SPEAKER_163: that way. Uh, let's see who, who would I fire? That's the, oh, oh, all of the hoodlum teenagers. Get them out of there. None of these hoodlum teenagers can hang around. Okay. Next one,

SPEAKER_385: Scarface push it to the limit award for the best money making montage.

SPEAKER_431: Oh, there's a few good ones. There are some good ones in here.

SPEAKER_26: Push it to the limit. So in the film, there's the montage. When they're on the tennis court.

SPEAKER_417: And they're going four montages right now in the film that are all, there's a tennis court one,

SPEAKER_282: right? That would be considered a montage. Yes. Yes. I love that. Cause that's the product market fit tennis court montage. Operational excellence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that one.

SPEAKER_25: There's another good one where it's where they're opening up all of the McDonald's and you just get

SPEAKER_109: those lower thirds of like each new location as it goes up and they do a really good job of, I I I'm assuming it was probably one plot and they would just build out a few different looks to get, to make it look like it was different McDonald's locations. I'm sure they didn't build like five whole old school McDonald's, but they shoot it. They're very clever. It, it definitely does not look like the same location over and over again.

SPEAKER_385: I love the one where he's pitching. He's at like the temple, he's at the synagogue,

SPEAKER_440: he's at the mosque, he's at the church and he's like mazel tov. Like, yeah, he's like doing the

SPEAKER_441: difference. Make me part of your tribe. Yes. Yeah. The VFW. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that one.

SPEAKER_208: That's pretty great actually. Yeah. I, these are good ones. Yeah. Cause he's, he's even peppering in Yiddish phrases. Yes, exactly. That's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_103: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's good. The next one,

SPEAKER_417: the Travis award for biggest force of nature.

SPEAKER_446: Yeah. We are going to dominate every city that we go into. I mean, this one's, you gotta.

SPEAKER_449: Right. Croc. There's no, there's no, there's no other answer. Yeah. There's no other answer.

SPEAKER_26: It's Croc. Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting that you call it the Travis award, because if you look, in the case of Uber, most people felt that, uh, he went to, to Ray Croc perhaps, right. And pushed it too hard is that always been the criticism that he was going too hard, too fast, bending, breaking, whatever your interpretation of it, you know, of breaking the rules around who gets to, you know, give people a ride from point A to point B. And then you bring in somebody like, uh, you know, Dara. And so, you know, something like Dara wants it to grow, wants it to be profitable, but does care about maybe not knocking as many things over. And so that's like the balance between

SPEAKER_09: the two, but yeah, it's Ray Croc. Gotta be a hundred percent. All right. Any ideas for the next one, Jason, you mentioned social network, Ron, man, are you on board for that? Do you have any

SPEAKER_109: other ideas? Oh, Oh, for our next episode. I mean, I think social network makes, makes a ton of sense.

SPEAKER_314: Uh, I think money ball would be the other one I would say is, is an interesting movie that still

SPEAKER_185: has a lot of like fans and is part of the sort of discourse people talk about a lot. I think that

SPEAKER_460: would be, it's fun too. Cause it's not directly business, right? It's baseball thinking about, but thinking about it analytically, like you would operating a business.

SPEAKER_282: How come there's no business bio of Oprah? Why is there no movie about Oprah's career?

SPEAKER_109: Oh, I mean, probably when she, she gets a little old the way, I think she's still too in the public eye. Like you need to wait a few more years for her to be less present. And then

SPEAKER_465: you do the Oprah move. Uh, you know, private parts is a pretty good business movie. Uh,

SPEAKER_466: it might not have enough to it, but that's an interesting one. There was, uh, it's on prime video.

SPEAKER_109: Now, uh, there is a, a really good movie called the burial that came out this year with Jamie Foxx and

SPEAKER_19: Tommy Lee Jones based on a real lawsuit from the nineties where a small mortuary owner took on like one of these huge funeral service conglomerates in court. Uh, and Jamie Foxx plays this kind of

SPEAKER_109: ambulance chasing TV defense lawyer who ends up representing the small business. Tommy Lee Jones is the owner of the small business really well done, like kind of a throwback courtroom drama, but really well done. And it does touch on a lot of the kinds of, you know, like David versus Goliath kind of stories. Like it might be, it's an interesting one to check out as well.

SPEAKER_467: I think boiler room comes to mind. Moneyball comes to mind. The big short would be iconic.

SPEAKER_63: Did I see margin call on here? That's a good one too. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's an indie about

SPEAKER_404: the financial crisis. Like the, I almost feel like the big short is a bad one because it, it kind of does that to itself in the movie, right? They have those cutaways where they're like explaining

SPEAKER_63: everything. Yeah. I almost feel like margin call is the more interesting take that fewer people have

SPEAKER_314: seen. Margin call is like 48 hours behind the scenes at Lehman brothers. Like the day that their analysts figured out that the entire market was about to collapse. I think it's actually Goldman

SPEAKER_404: because Goldman was the one who sold and survived Lehman was the one that went under. Yeah.

SPEAKER_475: You're right. It's Goldman. Yeah. It's amazing. Jeremy Irons, greatest movie speech. Jeremy Irons,

SPEAKER_131: Zachary Quinto. Incredible. Yeah. The goal of this is to get business lessons out of it. And this one had so many business lessons. Yeah. I mean, we could go like totally off the wall has a lot of good ones.

SPEAKER_203: That's why I think money balls got a lot of business lessons. Yeah. What does Jeremy Irons say?

SPEAKER_385: Uh, it's, you can either be buyers. There's three ways to get ahead in this business. You can be first, you can be the smartest or you can cheat. We don't cheat. And I'd like to think we have a lot of smart people in this room, but it's a hell of a lot easier to be first. That's like the, the, the big

SPEAKER_64: thing when he decides to sell. It's amazing. All right. This has been amazing. Great job, Lon. Our Twitter handle or X handle is TWI startups. And let us know which business breakdown you want next.