It’s Not Rocket Science

Ted Cizma — I’m Just a Cook

Highlights

The inside out (00:43)

"My dad and my grandfather were butchers… and so the two coolest guys I knew cooked, so it always seemed like something that would be cool to do… I worked with my grandfather as a young man. I learned to be a butcher at a young age. I like to tell people that I learned about food from the inside out."

The sign (04:13)

"I was leaving the house before everybody got up in the morning and coming home at night after everybody was in bed… My daughter at the time was 11, walks through the kitchen. I turned to my wife and said, is that your shirt she's wearing? … I missed something. Right? And I took it as a sign… Put together a deal, sold my businesses, all the underlying real estate in one fell swoop."

The Winter X Games (05:46)

"They gave us a parking lot and said, hey. You got to provide 3,500 people breakfast, lunch, and dinner for ten days straight in this parking lot. Make it happen. Right? And this is in January in Aspen. So it's dumping snow… And we pulled it off and it was great. But I came away from that experience knowing what I wanted to do in the next phase of my career."

Elon's mandate (11:26)

"SpaceX only recruited the best of the best… He's like, when you build my restaurant in this rocket factory — and this is legit, this is exactly what he said — it's gotta look like it belongs in a twenty first century rocket factory… and it's gotta be badass… He's like, I will give you all the resources you want, but you just gotta be successful."

Breakfast burritos in mission control (19:56)

"I happened to be in mission control delivering breakfast burritos at the time. And I was standing next to Gwen. And when Dragon docked successfully, Gwen turned around and hugged me. I was the first person that she hugged after that… The power and the energy in that room was incredible."

SpaceX spring break (20:32)

"He gave the whole company a week paid vacation off after that. We called it SpaceX spring break… There were people getting dropped off on top of glaciers in New Zealand to do extreme skiing… people just went all over the world and did these fantastic SpaceX things."

No Kid Hungry (27:11)

"Right now one in six kids in America is experiencing food insecurity, which is unfathomable to me, because I know how much excess food we have… It's a completely solvable problem, right? This is not like curing cancer. Feeding hungry kids just means feeding hungry kids."

The takeaway (28:32)

"My dad said to me, he's like, listen, the best thing you could do is live your life right, set a good example, and hope they're paying attention… My dad lived his life and he let me watch him… That's how I've taken my approach to parenting to my children. Like, hey, man, I'm trying to do the best I can. I hope you're paying attention to what I'm doing."