Twenty years in the Army. Five deployments in ten years. A Lieutenant Colonel with a wife and four kids — and in 2016 Jeremy did the most unpredictable thing he'd ever done. He took the uniform off and went to go sell a car.
Except Tesla didn't find him. He'd been calling them for eleven years.
His 2005 Army email password was "TeslaRoadster." In 2008 he told a friend on Facebook to buy a Roadster. In 2010, in a plywood building in northern Afghanistan, he walked out of his office holding a Wired magazine with Elon Musk on the cover and told a room full of day-trading lieutenants: this is the stock you should be buying.
None of them listened. There is still a text thread.
Then on December 8, 2016, a LinkedIn message arrived — and this is the story of what eleven years of asking looks like when somebody finally picks up.
Also in this one: Terry wins a radio call-in contest and ends up at the San Diego Comic-Con watching the Star Trek premiere on an outdoor IMAX with the San Diego Symphony playing the score live. Jeremy runs a job hunt like a recon mission — ten LinkedIn profiles a day, every day, for seven months. Eleven interviews in one weekend at Fremont. An offer accepted in a used-tire lot outside San Francisco. Day one: Autopilot on, hands off, FaceTiming his dad from the freeway. And then the Tesla Regional Manager spends his first six months driving the Mid-Atlantic in a Honda Civic.
Plus: the Cavs come back from 3-1 and the Indians blow 3-1 in the same Ohio year, a customer accuses Jeremy of laughing at him, a job candidate confesses to smoking in the parking lot, and one casual sentence to his boss in December — "if anything ever opens up in Ohio" — creates a region that didn't exist.
Ever reinvented yourself completely — walked away from twenty years of something? Tell us in the comments on YouTube, or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show, and we reply to everyone.
Next week the DeLorean goes back to 1981. Jeremy is seven years old in Shreve, Ohio, and one of his little brothers does something in the men's room of the High Noon Saloon that the entire bar is still talking about.
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A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.