A Conversation with Seth Stump

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Early Days

Sam: Have you always been inclined to a life in the outdoors?

Seth: I grew up in Pennsylvania on a family farm, it was 15 acres or so. I had horses, pigs, go karts, ducks, and chickens. I was splitting firewood and getting up early before school to feed the animals. There was a creek in the back with a rope swing and we would build a dam every summer. We played up in the hay silos. I didn't realize it at the time but looking back it was the ideal childhood. We didn't have money, but we didn't need money because we had a farm.

Growing up, I was always a bit of an oddball. I played guitar and jammed out with my friends all the time. The girls liked me, the guys liked me. I hung out with the gay kids. I hung out with the gangsters - literally.. I hung out with some bad kids. Some of them didn't make it. Drugs were a big thing in my town. They hit the scene and it ate all of the kids.

Sam: Is that what led you to leaving?

Seth: Yeah, I knew I had to get the hell out of here. I didn't have anyone that went to college in my family that knew the pathway. If I stayed, I just knew I would end up working in a factory not making much of myself.

Once I got out of high school I worked at the steel mill on third shift. It was hot as hell and dirty.

I was working with full on adult dudes - guys with scars and tattoos and ex-wives and Harley Davidsons. And boy I went from being a scrawny kid to a gangly muscly dude in just a few months. In addition to working we would get in actual physical fights. I got into fight with this guy named Richie one time and he fought the crap out of me. I had cut him accidentally on his arm with a piece of steel for like the third time. He told me if I did it again he would kick my ass - so he did. I laid there on the ground crying while he got me a cigarette and a gatorade. He patted me on the back and said, "While you may be stronger and faster than me, I'm way meaner than you'll ever be."

I was up that next morning, still crying. I was exhausted and filthy from work. Bloody and bruised. My mom saw me and asked, "What the hell happened to you?"

I ended up moving down to Myrtle Beach to do construction. After falling off a scaffolding I broke my heel and had to move back home to Pennsylvania. So I started working in the steel mill again.

Into the Army

One day an Army Recruiter called me up and said "Hey man, how's life going?" I said life is not going well my friend. I'm back in my hometown, working at the steel mill, and I had just crashed my jeep through my neighbors house.

Sam: I haven't heard this one!

Seth: I wasn't even in the damn thing! I fell out of it and it just kept going into my neighbors house.

So the army recruiter asked me, "What do you think about going into the army?"

I said dude I would love to but I have a pin in my leg - which I got in a car crash with my buddy.

Sam: What happened?

Seth: We rolled a Toyota 4 Runner down the side of a mountain doing about 75 miles per hour. I was 16 and my buddy was 15. He had a lifted 4 Runner with a Chevy 327 V8 with a supercharger. We should not have been driving it. We were going way too fast. We went around a corner at the top of a hill and rolled this truck down this mountain.

We ended up landing on our wheels. Well, what was left of them. The tires blew off the damn thing. I still remember it like yesterday man - we were listening to Jimmy Hendrix Purple Haze. It was still blaring through the radio. I looked over at my buddy and his arm was completely smashed at the elbow. But he started the truck - somehow it started again. We drove it back to his house on smashed wheels. Then we both went to the hospital.

Sam: Did you drive yourself to the hospital? Or did one of your parents?

Seth: Oh nooo. We went back to his house and I went inside. Bill, my buddy, couldn't get out of the truck - he was smashed too bad. I limped over the house and told his Mom, "Hey we just crashed the truck."

Sam: So you head to the hospital and they put a pin in your leg?

Seth: Yeah where the ball joint on my femur snapped off.

Sam: Oh man.

Seth: Yeah so they had to bolt that back.

But short story long I was planning on going into the Coast Guard to be a rescue swimmer after high school. But the Coast Guard said, "You can't have hardware in a joint." So I was permanently disqualified from the military after highschool.

But then the recruiter calls me after my time in Myrtle Beach and says, "If I can get you in, would you go?"

I said. "Hell yeah man, if you can get me in I will go."

Sam: Has there always been inspiration to join the military?

Seth: Yes. My uncle was in the Marines working as a jet mechanic. He was a hero to me. He came home every few months and told stories crazy stories about Japan. Uncle Stuart was a wild dude and he was always fun to be around. So I was always fascinated with aviation, helicopters in particular.

The recruiter asked me, "What do you want to do?"

"I want to be a helicopter pilot," I told him.

He was like, "Yeah, no man. You can be a helicopter mechanic, not a pilot"

I said, "That seems badass," because I love helicopters. I'm fascinated with them. So a week later he got me in on a waiver for this pin in my leg. He asked me where I wanted to go - I said as far away from here as possible. So I picked Fort Lewis, Washington.

Sam: That's sweet - how far is it from Seattle?

Seth: It's about 60 miles. So once I fixed the jeep that I crashed through my neighbors house, I drove it from Pennsylvania to Seattle for basic training. That was wild. It was the first time I saw the size of the country. 5 days at 70 miles per hour. Wow - it's so big, so big.

So I get to the first day of basic training, I'm standing proud, shaved face, ready to do my best.

After basic training I was sent to Korea from 2001-2002. I was right up on the DMZ working as a helicopter crew chief. I would ride up in a helicopter calculating fuel burns + hooking up sling loads.

We got to go down to Seoul. I would say Korea is living about 10 years ahead of the United States in terms of cultural advancement. The whole reality tv, scripted crazy shit that we watched 15 years ago. That was in Korea 10 years before. I would watch this and think what the hell is this crazy shit? The style was Gonzo up in your face craziness. They had toilets that would play music.

Korea was interesting. After Korea I went to Iraq for a year and a couple months. It was wild.

Sam: So you finish your time in the military and find yourself back in the States. What's next?

Seth: So while I was at Fort Lewis in Washington, I met a woman that was pregnant. I was chasing her older girlfriend, but then she got deployed. So she asked me to keep an eye on her pregnant friend.

So I ended up looking after this girl that was pregnant. She had the baby and had to live off post. She didn't have any common sense when it came to safety. My buddy and I ended up helping her fix her car, clean her house, and take care of this screaming baby all the time.

I ended up marrying this girl - that tells you the type of moron I am. Her daughter Madison, ended up being my daughter. I adopted her. Then we ended up having a baby of our own. She got pregnant before I went to Korea.

So when I got back from Iraq I had a 1 year old baby, an 18 month old baby, and a wife. I went from lifting weights, flying helicopters, shooting machine guns, screaming at people - just being wild. All of a sudden now it's time to be a father and a husband and deal with Walmart and McDonalds. It was definitely a thing, man.

Sam: That is quite a change up.

Seth: Oh yeah.

So PTSD. I don't think it's a disorder as long as you're under that stress.. and this is my bullshit, and I'm full of shit. My definition is now that you've acclimated to violence and a higher level of intense existence - when you come back to America and it's time to shop at Walmart and eat McDonalds and go to work and be nice to people - now you have a disorder. Now you have to jam your head into this box and behave. If you take a lot of these guys that do have PTSD and strap a machine gun back on them and throw them into the war, or find a war to throw them into, which doesn't seem to be too hard nowadays - they'd be fine. They wouldn't have a disorder. They would be fully functioning people.

It's very hard to un-program yourself from extreme ways of being.

Sam: Yeah you can't just go from one side of the spectrum to the other and immediately feel acclimated. I felt this to a degree bouncing from free-form traveling to structured working.

Seth: I feel like we're all wearing masks almost all of the time. And you don't tell the truth because the truth isn't always functional. When you're in the military you put on your military mask - sadness doesn't count, you've gotta do what you've gotta do. So you wear this tough guy mask for so long and now you're back to being a dad carrying toddlers around listening to your wife tell you how hard it was to slice the apple without the apple slicer because you're too stupid and you put it in the dishwasher which you're not supposed to do. And you've got this mask on saying, yeah I really care about this and yes this is valid…… I'm joking, I really do care about apple slicers.

Lean Manufacturing

Seth: When I got back from Iraq this factory happened to be hiring for jet engine mechanics. I jumped in there and started work again. It was a jump from hardcore regimented military background to a free for all, team based work environment. This is where people's opinions count and there wasn't a strict chain of command. We would rule everything through compliance and consensus.

A teaming environment is when everybody gets to fly the helicopter - it doesn't really work out that well. Certain people should and shouldn't fly the helicopter but now I'm in this environment where everyone does. It was absolute chaos. I dealt with it for 15 years because I had children.

Sam: Was it chaos for 15 years straight or did you see progress over the years? And how does this tie into "lean" manufacturing?

Seth: It was running fast enough to outrun the grizzly bear, but there was no proactively trying to get better. They were trying to get better just enough to stay functional. It was a miasma - you didn't have to come to work if your dog was sick.

One of my biggest regrets was staying there for so long. But the money was good and I had a wife and kids to take care of. After 15 years I decided it wasn't going to be the thing I would do the rest of my life. I wanted to eventually get out and let the mystery happen.

But right before I was about to leave I ended up going overseas to do a lean (manufacturing) action workshop. I met a woman… we'll say her name - Angie Norman. She's a lean practitioner. She was amazing. She said the most factual, poignant, beautiful things about logically solving problems scientifically. We would drink beer and literally talk about manufacturing all night.

What she described was what we were supposed to be doing back at the factory. This is what the factory is laid out to do. It was laid out like a board game to play the game of lean manufacturing. They just weren't doing it.

Sam: Can you touch on what "lean" is and how it's applied to factories and situations as a whole?

Seth: A lot of people misunderstand lean and it's been crammed in peoples holes by people that don't know what they're talking about. I'm not by any means a lean sensei or master - but I am a self taught guy because I had to teach it to myself. The company I was working for asked me to become a lean leader and read all the books I possibly could until it started making sense.

All it is, quite simply…. I mean you and I definitely did it together for a bit in South Carolina...

a) can you tell the truth? - If you can't tell the truth about what's actually going on, you can come up with any business model you want. If your culture is where you can't tell the truth but everyone knows what the truth is but no one says it and the culture won't allow you to fix it. There's no chance.

However if you can correctly tell the truth and assess where you're at, then

b) it turns into a management structure which says. 1. This is where we're at. 2. This is where we want to be. 3. There's a bunch of stuff we have to figure out between where we're at and where we want to be. So we tell the truth about where we're at. We tell the truth about where we want to be. Then we empower the people that work for you to solve problems to get you from where you're at to where you want to be.

At every level it's a fractal. So you ask a guy at one machine that know's exactly how it works - hey what do we need to make this better? He'll give a suggestion and then you try it. If it works - hey that's great. If it doesn't work - at least you learned something.

A process of experimenting and learning your way into the unknown. A lot of Western culture is to pretend what the hell is going on.

All of the 5S, the hijunka, the pretty colors, the pull, the value stream mapping - all of those are games you can play once you can tell the truth in order to experiment in a general direction + support it. People want to play all of the games without installing the operating systems.

Once you've learned how to go about problem solving, it's really hard to show up and play the game for money.

On The Road: RV

Sam: Along those lines of implementing a new thought process, you introduced me to a few unique thinkers like Chuck Marohn, Thomas Sowell, David Foster Wallace… did the gravitation towards viewing society critically derive from "lean thinking" or when did this begin?

Seth: I read Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard when I was 10 and thought it was some secret to the universe haha.

For 15 years I was indoctrinated in that factory and we were told we were awesome. But then you realize there is a way to be better, a different way to look at it, and an "other" side to almost everything you can think about.

The whole plan that had been stewing in my mind was to buy a sailboat and disappear. I realized what I was doing in the factory and what I was taught is just one way of going about it. We're all taught it's Game A. But there's Game B, Game C, and Game Double Z.

My buddy asked if I knew anything about sailing - I didn't. So then he recommended a RV. You have to learn how to ration your water, navigate, and plan - but at least you're not going to drown.

So I bought my little RV and hit the road. For some reason you can live on the road for $30 a day. If you're not playing Game A - buying home owners insurance, and lawn mowers, and furniture in order to simulate reality while playing Game A - you can get it in real life when you unplug.

In my experience as you go West, you don't necessarily have to pay "to be." There's federal land, BLM Land, you can be there for 14 days at a time.

Sam: Out West there are beautiful campsites that cost $5 per night. There were homeless people using their social security money bouncing from campsite to campsite.

Seth: Yes absolutely. Everything you're experiencing is just one way of doing it. And it's yours - it's yours to do.

What I realized is that this is mine to do. When I left the factory we both worked at both of my kids were adults. I think you met them?

Sam: Yeah we went up to Brevard.

Seth: Yeah you met my people (children). So they're on their own and I realize I don't have to play this game anymore - let me try to play some other games. So I sold everything. I sold my house, my cars, my boat. I bought a little RV for $24,000 and it was just the most badass little RV.

So I hit the road - I didn't' know what I wanted to do. But I wanted to see new things, gain new perspectives, and be afraid of new things. Fear is a hell of a motivator.

$30 a day is a good rule of thumb. $15 a day for food - some eggs, a loaf of bread, some meat, some drinks. And if you're willing to park for weeks at a time to do yoga, mountain bike, hike - you use the other $15 accrued over the week to drive 200 miles to get to the next destination.

I would definitely recommend it.

Advice for Young People

Sam: I remember being in the factory and you mentioned how it's interesting that 21 year olds jump right into jobs, families, and houses. One comment you made was to head to Thailand or go overseas to experience life and then come back and see what you want to do. Would you still say that to young people today?

Seth: Everything I can say, I can say the exact opposite with just as much conviction. That's the beauty of life.

All I will say is that you will never be in control. You can have the semblance of control. If the carpets are clean, and the dishwasher is running, and the kids are in bed you feel that you're in control.. but you're not - things are just quiet now. You have to learn to let go of control of everything and just enjoy life.

Now this is somebody else's quote that I'm going to butcher. But I heard life is like a song - you don't listen to a song to get to the end. The point of listening to a song is to listen to the song. Every little drum, every little sound. You don't want it to end, you want it to last as long as possible.

We spend so much of our programming as young people thinking about the end of the song. You're thinking about retirement your whole life, you're thinking about saving for when you're old the entire time. You're thinking what do I need to do to win this game and be successful in the future? Stop and let now happen.

Now to say both things at the same time, I told both of my kids - don't worry about going to college unless you want to, don't worry about joining the military, don't worry about anything for awhile. 2 rules: don't do hard drugs and don't get pregnant or get anyone else pregnant. You don't have to figure anything out for a long time. You can be 27 and as long as you're not on drugs or have a kid - you can do anything you want and be just fine. You can go back to college.

During that pause to breathe, and see, and smell things, and scare the living shit out of yourself, and meet crazy people like bank robbers in the canyon. Then you can say this is something that really interests me and I want to pour my heart into it.

Rather than trying to use the limited scope that you have as a high school student to say, "I'm going to be a trauma surgeon or I'm going to be a dentist or a race car driver."

It's very hard to see what's going to feel right.

Enjoy the travels. Enjoy the song of life, because it's yours.

If you want to wake up every morning and when your feet hit the floor you go, "Ahhhh shit." Do that until you die and that's what you did.

Or you go, you know what, "F this, I'm done. I don't have to do this and I don't want to do this...." If you can save $5000 - you can escape. You can go to a new city, set yourself up in an apartment. You can live in a RV. You can live in a tent. And you can get a new job.

You can come out here, live in your car, start all over again and you don't have to apologize to anyone. Nobody cares.

When you die people are going to be sad. And then they're not going to be sad anymore after a couple of months. They'll go, "oh I miss Sam" But at some point they will move on with their life. Then the next generation of people past that generation of people, they won't even know you. They won't know how you laughed, what you thought was funny, or what you did with your life.

It doesn't matter - we don't know what this is. And yet you're taught by the people in charge that they know what's best for you.

When you get to being a super adult, you realize nobody knows. Nobody has the answers. Nobody knows what this is. It's yours, it's for you.

Sam: Right on. So what's next?

Seth: Well I'm in Colorado now. I was out floating around in my RV drinking beer and doing yoga. When I came back to the planet I thought - what is important to me? I want to have the best impact on humanity with my skill set - this would be building spaceships.

I believe in outer space and that the stars are suns and the suns have planets and the planets have life on them. It's amazing what could be out there. We need to go. We need to get there.

I worked for a rocket company for a year in Seattle. Now I'm in Colorado working for a rocket company. I'm staying in an RV park and living with 1 monthly charge to my credit card. I'm taking flight lessons and becoming a pilot. It's been a dream of mine for a long time.

But this is just a chapter, for at least a year. If I like it, I stay. If I don't, I say thanks for the opportunity and unplug the RV.

I don't know what's next. It's scary man, you like to think that you have a plan but you just let it happen. I'm here now as much as possible. Life is a song that you listen to every part and enjoy as much as possible without just waiting for the end.

Sam: I love it Seth. Thanks for hopping on. Looking forward to seeing you down the road.

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