Founders - #200 James Dyson (Against the Odds)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Isambard Kingdom Brunel was unable to think small, and nothing was a barrier to him. The mere fact that something had never been done before presented to Brunel no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible. He was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age. While I could never lay claim to the genius of a man like that, I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. And at times in my life when I have encountered difficulty and self-doubt, I have looked to his example to fire me on.

Starting point is 00:00:39 When I was deeply in debt and the dual cyclone looked as if it might remain a drawing board dream, I thought of his father, Mark Brunel, who spent time in a debtor's prison when the tunnel that he was building seemed destined for failure. When I have considered relinquishing total control and taking a backseat consultant's role, and there have been many fantastic buyout offers, I have remembered how Brunel never accepted such a position in his life. I have tried, in my own way, to draw on Brunel's dream of applying emerging technology in ways as yet unimagined.

Starting point is 00:01:17 He was never afraid to be different or shocking. He never shirked the battles with the money men. And he had to overcome the most incredible resistance to his ideas. When he applied the system of the screw propeller to a transatlantic steamship, he actually filled a boat with people and sent them across the sea. I have asked people only to push my inventions around, not to get inside them and try to float. And so I have sought out originality for its own sake and modified it into a philosophy which demands difference from what exists. And I have

Starting point is 00:01:53 told myself when people tried to make me modify my ideas that the great western railway could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man, pursued with dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession. Throughout my story, I will try to return to Brunel and to other designers and engineers to show how identifying with them and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it would all turn out the way it has. And that was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today and the one I just finished rereading for the third time, which is Against the Odds, an autobiography by

Starting point is 00:02:38 James Dyson. So I reread the book because I wanted to do something special for episode number 200. And out of the more than 200 books that I've read so far for Founders Podcast, this is still my number one recommendation. I think every single entrepreneur, every single investor, every single person that is trying to do something difficult in their life should read this book. In his lifetime, Steve Jobs said a lot of brilliant things. But I think one of the most important things he ever said was this quote.

Starting point is 00:03:07 He says, I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. And the book that I hold in my hand is pure perseverance. It took James Dyson 14 years of struggle, 5,127 prototypes before he had a high quality product that he owned completely. And 90% of this book is all about that struggle and the lessons that he learned during that time period. And the reason I started with that specific excerpt is because James Dyson calls Isambard Kingdom Brunel one of his personal gods. And what's amazing about that is the fact that Brunel was doing his work a hundred years before James Dyson was. And yet Dyson is constantly talking about, hey, I got this idea from Brunel. Hey, the fact that I'm going through a difficult period, the fact that I read and learned about Brunel actually fired me on and gave me the confidence to continue

Starting point is 00:04:05 knowing that everything is going to turn out okay in the end. It's the perfect illustration of this idea that good ideas are timeless. And James, like all the greatest founders in history, were also students of histories themselves. So much so that James wrote a book. I actually have it right here. It's called A History of Great Inventions, written by James Dyson. I actually recorded like a small little bonus episode. I think it's like 45 minutes, maybe an hour long. It's a very unusual book. It's almost like a textbook, like a small textbook, or like maybe like a small coffee book. But anyways, I'm going to, I recorded a bonus episode for this other podcast feed I was going to do,

Starting point is 00:04:39 but I realized, hey, that doesn't make any sense. I need to just have one podcast feed. So I'm going to include at the very end of this episode, you'll see that I'm going to include the bonus episode that I did on James Dyson's book, The History of Great Inventions. And I'm just going to put that at the end of this episode. Okay, so I want to get into James tells us right up front, like, why is he writing this book? And he's writing the book to help other inventors and entrepreneurs. He says, part of this has to do with all the correspondence I received from other inventors. So at this point, I guess I need to pause.

Starting point is 00:05:08 James Dyson to this day, and I'll talk about this several times throughout the podcast because he tries, he attempts to sell parts of his business along the way and nobody wants it. So to this day, James Dyson owns 100% of his company. It's still a private company. It's one of the most successful private companies in the world. This results in James having a net worth somewhere around $15 and $20 billion to this day. But when he wrote this book, the book was published in 2003. At the time, his company's only doing a couple hundred million dollars a year. Fast forward, I think last year they did $10 or $11 billion, something like that in revenue, about a billion or $2 billion in profit. But even at this point in his life, he's still really well known. His product has his name on it. It's one of the

Starting point is 00:05:48 most successful companies in Britain at the time. And right as he's writing the book, he's jumping into, he's starting to introduce his product into America. So let's go back to this. He's getting a lot of people writing in saying, hey, how do I do, essentially, how do I do what you did, right? Part of it has to do with all the correspondence I received from other inventors. And when I say inventors, I do not mean men with workshops and science degrees and designs registered at the patent office. I mean ordinary people who have had an idea. Believe me, and this is the most important part of this. Believe me, there are a lot of them. They ask for advice on developing their ideas. I can't offer real advice to all those people individually. So to an extent,

Starting point is 00:06:24 this book represents my attempt to enter a dialogue and answer the questions that are put to me so often. The way he thinks of himself, he's very an anti-businessman. He's an, and this is an anti-business philosophy. And a lot of my personal heroes, James Dyson being one of them, Yvonne Chouinard, Steve Jobs, they all thought this way too. They have an anti-business philosophy. And what they mean by that is like, I'm not doing things the way it's always been done. I'm going to think about it from first principles, and I'm going to come up with my own unique way of doing things. And so he says, this book is an exposition of a business philosophy, which is very different from anything you might have encountered before. The thing about this one is it wasn't conceived by a businessman and it has worked.

Starting point is 00:07:06 And then he talks about the fact that people are saying, oh, you know, Dyson's an overnight success. He's like, there's no such thing as an overnight success. It's going to take time. And he says, it is said that to be an overnight success takes years of effort. So it has proved with me. There were 20 years of debt, personal overdraft liabilities, and at times millions of pounds. I have not taken over the market with a barrage of free offers, bombastic rhetoric, and gilded promotions. This has all happened, I really believe, because of the intrinsic excellence of the machine,

Starting point is 00:07:37 because it is a better vacuum cleaner than anything that has gone before, and because it looks better than anything like that has ever looked and so one of his main points in this book that he talks about over and over again is like everybody's got ideas there's been millions of people that probably thought hey i could approve this product or approve that product most people don't actually act on it and he's like the people that actually change things the people that actually succeed are the ones that actually do something about it and so he says for a hundred years the vacuum cleaners had remained essentially unchanged. And then he talks about, like, I shouldn't have been the one to solve this problem. I was just one that had the idea, like, maybe you would have had a similar idea, and

Starting point is 00:08:14 actually did something about it. But I'm not an actual qualified engineer. And that reminds me of another quote from the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, which I think is one of the most important quotes of the book, because I think it especially applies to the time period in history that you and I are in right now. And Naval says the best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets. That last sentence, creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets. This is exactly what James did here. And so he says, if anyone was going to step in and shake up and shake this up a bit, it was very unlikely to be me who wasn't even a qualified engineer. And yet that's how it turned out.

Starting point is 00:08:55 So in this introduction, he's just giving like an overview of the philosophy and the way he thinks about building a product and building a business that he thinks applies to whatever it is that you're doing. Right. We are going to go in fairly chronological order through the struggle, but I am giving you like this overview of his belief system. And so a lot of this is the fact that if you're making a physical product, it should look weird. So he says, the look of the product, the intangible style that sets one thing apart from another is still closest to my heart. And we're going to see he steals another idea from his personal hero, Brunel. It is only by remaining as close as possible to the pure function of the object that beauty can be achieved.

Starting point is 00:09:33 My greatest hero was always Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose inverted cantonary curve, I'm probably pronouncing it incorrectly, was crucial to the structure of his bridges and gave them the distinct stylistic power that still wows onlookers today. Another main idea from James Dyson, he's not into inventing new markets. He's saying, listen, everyday products sell, you should examine the products that you use and then think of ways that they can be improved. Mature products are obviously a lot harder to improve, but if you succeed on some kind of breakthrough,

Starting point is 00:10:06 you don't need to invent the market. And so I'm going to read this paragraph to you, but what's wild to me is that back on podcast number 178 on Johnny Ive, if you remember in that podcast and in that great biography of Johnny, him and his dad, his dad taught design. And even when Johnny was a kid, they would have a lot of their dialogues would be just examining products that already exist. And they would use that as a prompt for new design ideas. in daily use, which it was always assumed could not be improved. Bilateral thinking, so that's another main point of his. Another one of his heroes is Thomas Edison.

Starting point is 00:10:53 I've done, I think, two or three podcasts on Edison by now. But he uses the Edisonian approach. So I'll go into more how he defines that later. And this is something that he says in present day. It's like the hardest thing to teach new employees because they want to rush and rush and rush. They want to change a bunch of different things. He's like, no, no, you got to do it the way Thomas Edison did. You change one thing, you make a test.

Starting point is 00:11:15 Then you get the results of the test. You change another thing. So he says it's extremely slow, but you but you can make wild progress over a long period of time. Bilateral thinking, which I call the Edisonian approach, it is possible to arrive empirically at an advance. Anyone can become an expert in anything in six months. So what does he mean by that? After the idea, there's plenty of time to learn the technology.

Starting point is 00:11:36 My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape long before I understood how it worked and this is where he gets in like what he feels is the best kind of business to build and his the main there's two main things that he talks about over and over in the book and he says explicitly hey this is the main point I'm trying to get across to you difference and total control so he says the best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes. For that, you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing ones. That type of investment is long term and high risk, or at least it looks like a high risk policy.

Starting point is 00:12:16 In the longer view, it is not half so likely to prove hazardous to one's financial health as simply following the herd. Difference for the sake of it, in everything, because it must be better. From the moment the idea strikes to the running of the business, difference and retention of total control. Now, I don't think a book that can be summarized is a book worth reading. Biographies are obviously worth reading. That's why you see over and over again the greatest people that have ever lived spend time reading biographies. They feed your brain. They nourish your soul.

Starting point is 00:12:54 But if you had to have a six-word summary of this book, that would be it. Difference and retention of total control. This is not even a business book. It is, if anything, a book against business. Against the principles that have filled the world with ugly, useless objects and unhappy people. And then he wraps up and we see is one of the reasons I recommend this book so heavily is because it is fun to read. He's hilarious. His personality shines through. He has a very sharp point of view that, you know, there's some things in the book. They're like, oh, I don't agree with that. But that's the point.

Starting point is 00:13:23 He knows the worst enemy of any product or business is not hate. It's indifference. And so the sharpness of his writing is going to evoke emotion. So he's going to wrap up this whole introduction. And this is beautiful. He says, we all want to make our mark. We all want to make beautiful things and a little money. We all have our own ideas about how to do it.

Starting point is 00:13:41 What follows just happens to be my way. So he starts out. he's going to tell you a little bit about his childhood but again he he understands this book is written to be read and he's like listen you don't need too much about where my parents were born or all that other stuff and i agree 100 completely what he's saying but he's like i am going to give you like stories from my early life so you understand why i am the way i am which is extremely important uh and he talks about you know even from a very early age i'm'm going to get into, and I think a large degree why he felt like a misfit. And that's his word was because his dad tragically dies of cancer. James is nine years

Starting point is 00:14:17 old. I think they leave behind, he's got three kids. So it's James is nine. I think it's nine, 12 and 14. So it's just devastating. So he says misfits are not born or made. They make themselves and a stubborn, opinionated child desperate to be different and to be right. Encounters only a small refraction of the problems he will experience. And he carries the weight of that dislocation forever. I have been a misfit throughout my professional life and that seems to have worked to my advantage. So this is where we get to losing his father and how that makes him feel. The fact that

Starting point is 00:14:58 because he didn't have this mentor that somebody can show him the path that's in front of him. He has to wind up working out everything for himself. It winds up making him extremely competitive. He vowed. And then he also has a really important lesson that I missed the first two times. At least I think I did. The first two times I read the book was the fact that the death of his father and the fact that his dad was going to make a career change right before he died to doing something he actually loved but didn't get the opportunity to do. James is like, no, no, no, that's not going to happen to me. So he says, my father died of cancer in 1956. I was only nine at the time. His death put me at a great disadvantage compared to the other boys. It made me feel like an

Starting point is 00:15:38 underdog, someone who was always going to have things taken away from him. It made me feel that I was alone in the world. I had no one to help me through my boyish problems and no one to cite their own youthful experience as an example to me when I thought I might be troubled by something that no one else had ever been through before. Life became something I had to make up as I went along and I had to work everything out for myself. I suppose it made me a fighter. This made me very competitive. So his dad has the opportunity to the BBC television is just about it's just I guess, starting. And he was given the opportunity to join BBC television, he wanted to do that. And he says his move to career chain to change careers came too late. Seeing him thwarted by death in that way, having done something else for so long,

Starting point is 00:16:22 made me determine that that should never happen to me. I would not be dragged into something I didn't want to do. There is a fantastic quote. Jim Carrey is giving a, I think it's a commencement address. I can't exactly remember. But I saved the quote. I think Jim Carrey teaches an important lesson. And he says,

Starting point is 00:16:42 My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn't believe that was possible for him. So he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant. And when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job. And our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father,

Starting point is 00:17:03 not the least of which was this. You can fail at what you don't want to do. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love. Okay, so let's fast forward to something that these are lessons that James learned from running. He's a few years older. He's like an early teenager at this point. And one of the things that sticks with him throughout his life is that you should learn from the greats, right? And then difference itself can be the means in which you actually win. And so he says, there was no one to teach me how to run. There was no dad to tell me how great I was.

Starting point is 00:17:38 And it had become a very introverted kind of obsession with me. So he starts reading books. James winds up reading a few books on this guy named Herb Elliott. He was considered the world's greatest middle distance runner of his era. And so Herb's coach in these books tells him, he's like, you can build stamina by running up and down sand dunes. And so James does something smart here. He says, okay, well, I'll just copy that approach. And you also see he's extremely dedicated and hardworking so he'll do this twice a day he does it once at six in the morning and then once at 10 p.m but it says um

Starting point is 00:18:11 herb elliot was a big name at the time so i read a few books about him and discovered that his coach had told him that the way to develop stamina and strengthen his leg muscles run was to run up and down sand dunes i would get up at six in the morning and run for hours and put on my running kit at 10 o'clock at night and not reappear until after midnight. Out there alone on the dunes, I got a terrific buzz from knowing that I was doing something that no one else was. They were all tucked up in bed. I knew that I was training myself to do something better than anyone else would be able to do. I was out there learning how to do something and getting a visible result. he's always going to compare and contrast the way he's doing it to the way other people like his competitors he's doing this and his competitors are running later on and throughout the book he talks about

Starting point is 00:18:52 his competitors in the vacuum cleaning business the way other companies think about sales and marketing he's just I I have notes on this later so I'll probably bring this up but just in case I forget I really when you read this book I feel a large, like the implication that he's telling us is just think about what you're doing. So many people are not thinking, they're just out there copying what everybody else is doing. And if you just slow down and say, why am I doing this? Why am I trying to sell my product like this? Why am I trying to manufacture my product like this? Why is my marketing set up like this? Why am I hiring the same employees everybody's doing? And you just take everything one at a time and then just look for a better way to do it. The accumulation of

Starting point is 00:19:33 all these new ideas you have actually make your business stronger and better. So he says, the act of running itself was not something I enjoyed. The best you could say for it was that it was lonely and painful. But as I started to win by greater and greater margins, I did it more and more because I knew the reason for my success was out there on the sand dunes. I was doing something that no one else was doing apart from me and Herb. No one knew they were all running around. They were all running round and round the track like a herd of sheep and not getting any quicker. Difference itself was making me come first. And so let's go back to that idea about what Steve Jobs said.

Starting point is 00:20:14 I'm convinced that what separates successful entrepreneurs, half of what separates the successful ones from the unsuccessful ones is pure perseverance, meaning most people quit. And so James was learning from long distance running, the importance of not quitting in so many ways. It taught me the most significant lessons in all my youth. I was learning about the physical and psychological strength that keeps you competitive. I was learning about obstinacy. I was learning how to overcome nerves. Again, he's talking about running. It's the same thing when you're trying to do anything that's hard, right? You're going to be nervous. You're going to want to quit. You're going to be in pain. So let me start this section over again. In many ways, it taught me the most significant lessons in all my youth. I was learning about the physical and psychological

Starting point is 00:20:56 strength that keeps you competitive. I was learning about obstinacy. I was learning how to overcome nerves. And as I grew more and more neurotic about being caught from behind, I trained harder to stay in front. This is wild. Listen to this. To this day is the fear of failure more than anything else, which keeps me working at success. So something else that jumps out when you're studying and reading this book is that James believes that you should be intellectually open-minded and broad uh he does not believe in like the silos of intellectual

Starting point is 00:21:30 disciplines and you could see that because who is like his heroes were um this reminds me a lot of what Charlie Munger says uh there's a quote from a speech that Charlie gave he says listen since your academic structure by and large, doesn't encourage minds jumping jurisdictional boundaries, you're at a disadvantage. And why you're at a disadvantage is because no single intellectual discipline has all the answers. And so Charlie's always saying, listen, you need to learn the big ideas in physics, math, chemistry, engineering, biology, psychology, business, all of them. And he's saying you need to be a generalist. And so James was inspired by generalists, like people like Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci was a generalist. I james was inspired by generalists like people like leonardo da vinci da vinci was a generalist i read his biography i think it's episode 15 something like that and so he he's

Starting point is 00:22:12 constantly drawing on james ice and that is he's constantly drawing on people that inspired him so it's like da vinci francis bacon michelangelo thomas brown thomas hobbes and so james's point is wrapped up in one partial sentence. He's like, listen, you need the intellectual open-mindedness that it takes for a renaissance. James is not big on deferring to experts or just accepting dogma. And the best definition of dogma is it's just the results of somebody else's thinking. And we're going to see why, because his mentor, the most important mentor he has in his life, is this guy named Jeremiah Fry, which I'll get to first or in a little bit.

Starting point is 00:22:48 First, at this point, James is at the Royal College of Art. He does not know what he's going to do with his life. He thought maybe I'll be an artist, maybe I'll be a painter. He was really attracted to design. And then he winds up, he's like, oh, I'll be a designer. And then he realizes that he's got to combine design with engineering. And this is another one of his personal heroes, this guy named Buckminster Fuller. And this is, Buckminster is the one that teaches him, reading about him, that is, teaches him, no, no, I have

Starting point is 00:23:14 to do the engineering too. And there's a couple of books that James mentions in the book about Buckminster Fuller that I might order and actually read. Because again, books are the original links. So it says, then came Buck, Mr. Fuller. So his teacher, he had a really great teacher in his academy, Anthony Hunt. Anthony Hunt often mentioned this American engineer who I had never encountered. So I bought myself a copy of the Dymaxion World of Buck, Mr. Fuller. And he starts reading. He says, Buck, Mr. Fuller had been described as one of the century's greatest dreamers which he thought they were trying to to be critical of Fuller

Starting point is 00:23:48 they thought it was an insult and he's like no I understood that now they're saying that it's a good thing he says but I could not have been more wrong Fuller dreamt because his vision was of a world that did not yet exist the value of dreaming was the first thing that I learned from him. And we're going to see the second thing you learn from him is the fact that I don't have technical training, but neither does this guy. And so again, we see James doing something smart, right? Seeing parallels in people's lives that came before him and realizing they're no different than me. So it says Fuller had no technical training at all, but absorbed his mechanical education by osmosis during his wartime service in the Navy Navy and then years working as an

Starting point is 00:24:25 underling in the construction industry. Mocked in the early stages of his career, just like Dyson would be, Buckminster Fuller knew well that the only way to make a genuine breakthrough was to pursue a vision with a single-minded determination in the face of criticism. Same, you could say that exact same sentence about James, right? If you try, I just love this, this, when you see these parallels, it just gets me super excited. And it obviously excites James too, because he mentions same sentence about james right if you try i just love this this when you see these parallels it just gets me super excited and it obviously excites james too because he mentions it over and over again it's like wait a minute what happened this guy's just like what i'm going through if you try to change things then you upset the establishment which is why invention

Starting point is 00:24:57 and vilification have always gone hand in hand and james knows that because he wrote a book in my left hand i'm holding a history of great inventions. He's done the homework to understand that this is a constant throughout human nature. I saw then that to do what Buckminster Fuller did, to make real progress in the way we live or think, it was not enough to be just a designer. You had to be an engineer as well. And again, you didn't have to be a classically trained engineer. While Buckminster Fuller inspired my first idealistic design dreams, he takes ultimately second place in the pantheon of my personal gods. And so this is the part where I read at the beginning, the excerpt part where he introduces to Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Starting point is 00:25:41 I actually have a biography of Brunel that I'm going to read and do a podcast on because he's hugely influential. We should obviously learn about him. I'm going to skip ahead a little bit. This is one of my favorite ideas that James has, and it's on the importance of stubbornness. I am led to believe that for vision, one might equally read stubbornness. At any stage in my story where I talk of vision and arrogance seems to have gotten the better of me, remember, I am only celebrating my stubbornness. I am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule. Another thing I love about the book is because he just, he lays things out. He communicates extremely clearly. And so he says, hey, this is

Starting point is 00:26:24 a very important business principle I learned. i learned the crucial business principle that would guide my later attempts so he's trying to sell in college trying to make some extra money by selling like importing cheap wine but every like the product was not differentiated so he says i learned the crucial business lesson that would guide my later attempts at making money from invention the only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new that has style value as well as substance in which they cannot get anywhere else. So that reminded me of a quote that I read a long time ago from In Zero to One by Peter Thiel. And he says monopoly businesses. Right. And that's not he's not talking about the classic monopolies where like you could

Starting point is 00:27:00 actually control physical infrastructure and then just increase prices. Right. He's talking about completely differentiated businesses, one of one. Right. Like think of like a Google. So he says monopoly businesses capture more value than millions of undifferentiated competitors. And we'll see that later on in James's story because his company makes more in profit than the other vacuum cleaners that just try to clone the Hoover and not actually try to do anything unique and just compete solely on price. Okay, so the note of myself here is finding a modern Brunel or how to cold call a mentor. So this is crazy.

Starting point is 00:27:38 And again, this is something I forgot. Like I knew he worked with Jeremiah, Jeremy Fry or Jeremiah, Jeremy, Jeremy, excuse me, with Jeremy Fry, but I forgot how he was introduced to him. And so he's going to cold call Jeremy Fry the same way that a 12-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett, which is one of the co-founders of HP, right? Which is one of the most influential companies ever created in Silicon Valley. Generations of technology companies have copied the ideas of Bill Hewlett and David Packard. And so this is a quote I found from Steve Jobs talking about this. He says, listen, I never found anybody that didn't want to help me if I asked them for help.

Starting point is 00:28:19 I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 12 years old. He answered the phone himself. So he's saying at that time, everyone was just listening to the white pages, the directory. So he just looks it up. He calls him. He's like, hey, I need this part for this thing I'm making. I told him I wanted to build a frequency counter. I asked him if he had any spare parts I could have. He laughed and laughed. And then he gave me the parts. And he also gave me a summer job at HP working on the assembly line, putting together frequency counters. I have never found anyone who said no or hung up the phone. I just ask.

Starting point is 00:28:47 Most people never pick up the phone and call. And that is what separates the people who do things versus the people who just dream about them. You have to act. And so he's still in design school at this point. Or art school, rather. And he winds up having this meeting. James, that is. He winds up having this meeting and he sees this video of like this quote unquote businessman, which we would refer to as entrepreneur.

Starting point is 00:29:09 He's like, he's not in a suit. He's out there doing the work himself. He's sweaty. Like he just he seems to be active. And James is, you know, he thought the business guys were just the ones in suits that disappear for long periods of time to have like liquid lunches. He's like, who is this guy? And all you should meet him. And so he gets his name. He says, listen, I had simply dialed the directory after my meeting and asked for Jeremy Fry's phone number. And he invited me to his home for supper. See the parallels between Steve Jobs and Bill Hewitt and James Dyson and and Jeremy Fry. So began my association with Jeremy Fry, a mentor as important to me as any of the engineering heroes of the past with the great advantage of being alive

Starting point is 00:29:52 and keen to nurture such talents that I possess. So Jeremy winds up making money. He made his fortune inventing motorized valve actuators for pipelines, but he was involved in all kinds of businesses he would start new businesses and he winds up inventing him and james are going to invent something called the c-truck and he puts james who just as a young kid in charge of the whole business and it was like the best learning experience of his life and there's a lot i'm going to talk to you a lot about

Starting point is 00:30:18 that about all the lessons that he learned that he did wrong in the c-truck that he fixed when he when he did dyson which was that was really interesting uh so he says as a novice anything uh you were like a sponge looking to soak up mentors and models and in Fry I had an ocean of experience to absorb Fry I think is about two decades older than um than James at this point or he's always two decades older he's obviously passed away now unfortunately but he says like Brunel he operated empir. He had no regard for experts from other fields, and he was always teaching himself whatever he needed to know as he went along. And he was an engineer interested in building things that derived not only excellence from their design, but elegance as well. So this is where he's really learning how to work from Jeremy Fry. And a lot of things that he's

Starting point is 00:31:03 learning as a young person here, he keeps for his whole career. And one of this, the fact that he repeats over and over again to the reader of this book, like, listen, you don't need to be an expert. You need intelligence and enthusiasm. And then another thing about Jeremy Fry and about James Dyson is like, there's no work about work. I don't want to sit in meetings and you write me memos, just work. And then the very act of what Fry is doing here, think about what Fry, like, so from Fry's perspective, he meets Dyson and he's thinking, well, okay, here's a bright kid. Why don't I try to put him to work?

Starting point is 00:31:30 And really, when I thought about this, when I'm reading this, this is an asymmetric bet. There's limited downside if it doesn't work out and unlimited potential if James turns out to be competent. And Dyson actually steals this idea. This is, he says in the book, this is exactly what I now do at Dyson. I hire bright young people that are enthusiastic and I let them work, see what they can do.

Starting point is 00:31:49 So it says, this is Dyson describing Fry. Here is a man who is not interested in experts. He meets me. He thinks to himself, he's a bright kid. Let's employ him. And he does. He risks little with the possibility of gaining much. It is exactly what I do now at Dyson.

Starting point is 00:32:02 I kind of just summarize that whole point. This attitude to employment extended to Fry's thinking in everything, including engineering. of gaining much. It is exactly what I do now at Dyson. I kind of just summarize that whole point. This attitude to employment extended to Fry's thinking in everything, including engineering. Like Brunel, he did not. Remember, he refers to Fry as a modern Brunel, right? Like Brunel, he did not, when an idea came to him, sit down and process it through pages of calculations. He didn't argue with anyone. He just went out and built it. When I came to him and said, I have an idea, he would offer no advice, no more advice than to say, well, you know where the workshop is. Go and do it. And then I would say, but we'll need to weld this thing.

Starting point is 00:32:37 And he would say, well, then get a welder and weld it. When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about, say, hydrodynamics, he would say, the lake is down there. The Land Rover is over there. Grab a piece of wood down to the lake and tow it behind a boat and see what happens. It's so wild rereading these words because this is exactly how James works, right? Now, this was not a modus operandi that I had encountered before. College had taught me to revere experts and expertise. Fry ridiculed all that. As far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence, anything was possible. It was mind-blowing. No research, no workings, no preliminary sketches. If it didn't work one way, he would just try it another way

Starting point is 00:33:16 until it did. This is the Edisonian principle, right, that he references constantly in this book. And as we proceeded, I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. So think about this like that's how you know it's a good idea right this edisonian principle it's used by thomas edison it's used by james dyson it's used by isambard kingdom brunel it's used by jeremy fry and he gets to this is a part i actually missed the first time the first two times i read the book the root this is this actually blew my mind um the fact that the mind-blowing part for me was like your way is greater than the optimum way, which is like a really bizarre way to think. Right. The root principle was to do things your way. It didn't matter how other people did it. It didn't. This is the mind blowing part. It didn't matter if it could be done better.

Starting point is 00:34:03 Remember, difference for the sake of it and retention of total control. That's James' motto, his thesis, right? As long as it works and it is exciting, people will follow you. And so before we get into the lessons from the C-Troc, this thing that they're building, James just has a line here. Again, I missed this the first time too. Maybe it's just a desire to be rich and successful that motivated me for i was motivated in an almost devilish way compared to other students that reminded me of when i when you read about a young arnold schwarzenegger who has this this psychopathic very similar to like a bill gates to this psychopathic like mindset like the fact that he he says over and over again i was more motivated than anybody else around me

Starting point is 00:34:45 my drive was unusual he talks about even when he gets to california and he's already you know semi-successful won a bunch of bodybuilding competitions but he meets all these american bodybuilders and he's like they're they're lazy bastards they wouldn't work every day he's like i was in a rush to be rich and james is saying a very similar thing here he's like listen i'm willing to work harder because i this is the life that I want for myself. So this is a bunch of lessons from the C truck. And again, these are lessons that he's going to apply over and over again. Note that myself, don't try to sell a half finished product.

Starting point is 00:35:18 People do not want all purpose. This is number two. People do not want all purpose. They want high tech specificity. And actually, I'm just going to read my notes here because I think it's faster so it says uh you cannot sell a half finished product you are doomed from the start if you do this don't stint on investment in the early stages so james tries to sell c truck c truck is like a flat bottom boat that you can then push on the land that is used to uh like move heavy machinery there's so you can actually google c truck and they're,

Starting point is 00:35:45 they're they still exist to this day. And this was a unique design that him and Fry made. So he tries to sell at first, he tries to sell the reason he's saying, you can't finish sell a half finished product. So James is running the business, but he's got like the shareholders of the business and the board telling him what to do. Right. And so initially they start, they try to sell a sea truck without like a cabin and james not only designed this thing but he's

Starting point is 00:36:08 traveling all over the world try to sell it and the board he goes back he's like listen we need to finish the product like let's put a cabin on this and then we'll be able to sell them and they keep telling well they they just set like these imaginary sales goals it's like okay sell four a month and then we'll build a cabin and so he gets to four a month and then he said, okay, sell six a month and then we'll build a cabin. And James's point is like, listen, if we invest in the cabin first, the sales will be a lot higher. And so the quote he says about this, he's eventually, he says, I got my cabin in the end and sales took off. Now, James's second point here, people do not want all purpose. They want high-tech specificity. So if you wanted the sea truck as like a diving boat, everybody would have different use cases.

Starting point is 00:36:47 Right. James would offer to add compressors and a slower engine. If an oil company wanted a sea truck to haul their crew, he would add better seating and more powerful engine. So, again, he's not selling something that's very specific for a specific need or niche. Right. He's saying, oh, it can be whatever you want it to be. The military would ask him. They would say, hey, can you make it bulletproof? He's like, yeah, I can make it bulletproof. He's essentially trying to be all things to all people

Starting point is 00:37:14 and in the process failed to convince anyone. And so the lesson he takes away from that later on is that they don't want all purpose. They want high-tech specificity. He applies that to when he's building the Dyson vacuum. It's the best vacuum cleaner in the world, but it's also a dry cleaner. He never even mentioned that part. And he says, this leads into the third part, do not mix your messages when selling. Pick your product's main benefit and focus on that. And the way he describes

Starting point is 00:37:41 this idea, a consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone several. And then another, the fourth lesson he talks about over and over again, you have to learn to sell your own product. You are in the best position to tell others its value. And so he says, I set off around the world to start selling it properly. it was to teach me that only by trying to sell the thing that you have made yourself, by dealing with the consumer's problems and product failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done, to bond with your invention and to improve it. Only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others and demand a heavy price with all his heart.

Starting point is 00:38:24 And then the fifth lesson, selling becomes easier when you believe in what you're selling. I'm going to talk about, I want to first pull this, this is an idea I've seen over and over again. The best example of this was in Phil Knight's autobiography, Shoe Dog, founder of Nike. And he had a bunch of sales jobs before he started selling running shoes. And he ran track at Oregon, that's why he started Nike. And he's just like, what the hell? I couldn't sell encyclopedias. I couldn't sell mutual funds. Why? He would literally start to sell running shoes out of the trunk of his car. He would just pull up to track meets and then he'd soon sell out all of his inventory. And so he says, driving back to Portland, I'd puzzle over my sudden success of selling. I'd been unable to sell encyclopedias and I despised it to boot.

Starting point is 00:39:07 I'd been only slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because I realized it wasn't selling. I believed in running. Now watch how this parallels with exactly what James Dyson's experience selling the sea truck. Selling back then was really pretty easy because I believed in what I was trying to push. As with selling anything, it was about seeing how the boat would fit into the life of the customer, not about mouthing off about how great it was.

Starting point is 00:39:39 It is not about the right adjectives or shouting your mouth off. It's about discovering a need and satisfying it. So he's got this great job. He's working with his mentor. He loves the guy. He winds up being able to design new products and run the business. But he also realizes a lot of my work, like I'm not a shareholder in the business. So he's going to quit this job and he's going to try to do an invention. And so I'm not there yet. At the business. So he's going to quit this job and he's going to try to do an invention. And so I'm not there yet. At the time, I guess I got to back up.

Starting point is 00:40:09 So James is living in a farmhouse, which is wild. That's over 300 years old. And so they're doing a bunch of like home improvement work when he's on his days off and when he's not working with Fry. And he found himself spending a lot of time using a wheelbarrow. And he comes up with this quote. He says, in all the thousands of years since his first conception, no one has ever stopped to say and said, I can design this thing better. I set my mind to possible improvements. So he realizes it's getting stuck.

Starting point is 00:40:33 He's like, well, it shouldn't have a wheel. It should have a ball. And so he this is one of his first inventions. It's called the ballbarrow. And the same way he makes these mistakes in the C truck, a lot of the mistakes he makes in building this company, he had like, what I'm trying to convey to you is like, he had to go through all these experiences because it was, it taught him all these failures taught him how to do it the right way once he has his vacuum cleaner company. And so this is where we get into the James the Misfit because he's leaving the best, what he describes as the best job in the world to make a better wheelbarrow. Here I was kissing goodbye to the best job in the world, a $10,000 a year salary and a company car driven only by my desire to do something on my own. I had seen that most of my efforts went to rewarding the shareholders

Starting point is 00:41:15 and I just thought it was time to start. I started doing it for myself. It was in retrospect, a stupid decision, not least because my mortgage was large and my two children were small. And so this desire, this realization that, hey, if I don't have any ownership, I'm not going to get to enjoy the fruits of my labor, right? The benefits are going to accrue to other people. This was like the main theme of that book, How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis. He took it to the extreme. He owned 100% of all his and uh he would not give out equity at all no matter what and that's uh podcast number 20 129 if you haven't listened to it yet terrible um title of the book but fantastic book i mean it's it's a cringy title it's i think on the

Starting point is 00:41:56 podcast i said it shouldn't be how to get rich it's how i got rich would be a better um title but there's two things two quotes excuse, three quotes that I pulled from that book. So these are from Felix Dennis. Number one, ownership is not the most important thing. It is the only thing that counts. Number two, if I had only a short time to pass on the wisdom I've accumulated about getting rich to a son or daughter, then it would be this. Ownership shall be half the law. Doing an outstanding job shall be the other half. And number three, ownership is power. Ask Bill Gates of Microsoft or Larry Ellison of Oracle. So that's Felix Dennis. So in the ballbarrow, though, OK, this is something that, again, I'm trying to focus on the lessons that he the failures that he made trying to build his company that he eventually applies correctly.

Starting point is 00:42:41 He tries selling the ballbar barrel to stores and the buyer is responsible for making these purchase decisions. Like, no, what the hell is this weird thing? Like, why would we do this? We have, you know, wheelbarrows sell perfectly fine. Like you don't need to improve it. And he's like, this is madness. Like I have a better product. It's very obviously better than, than what's on the market. And he's going to have the same thought when he does the vacuum cleaner. Like, why am I running into such resistance? And he just realizes, I'm just going to go direct to the customer. And when he starts going direct to the customer, he starts making sales. And so he says, this is such an important sentence in this book, and I'm going to pull it out for you.

Starting point is 00:43:17 It was an interesting lesson in psychology, teaching me that the entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer. That is so important. And how does he learn that? So tries, you know, for a long time, they're not buying the better product. He's like, I'm desperate. What am I gonna do? In desperation, I turned to the newspaper. So he talks about like, I'm just going to do a direct response ad. It's in the book, the picture of it. It's hilarious. Tiny little drawing just says what it does. It says, and I slapped down some direct response ads. And what do you know?

Starting point is 00:43:48 The checks start rolling in. I was astonished. This was the same object that had been rejected completely by builders and retailers who had been able to see it in the flesh. And it was being bought by the members of the public who were sending off checks to a company no one had ever heard of, all on the strength of a little drawing in a tiny newspaper advertisement. It was fantastic. And the business began to gradually show a profit. We were producing up to 30 a day. And from here on, things snowballed. Now, this is hilarious because, again, you have a profitable business, rather simple. And as it grows, they bring in, quote unquote, experts and business people and they destroy this business through sheer incompetence.

Starting point is 00:44:33 I'm not there yet, but the business began gradually show profit from here. Things snowballed. The gardening correspondent of the same newspaper actually sees this ad, had seen one of our ads and called up asking if he could see one. So James gives him, lets him like demo the product. This guy loves it. So that's going to lead to a lot more sales. And this is something that James talks about over and over again. He's like, listen, actually, let me just read it to you. So he's talking about the editorial produced so many more sales than even his ads did. And he says, it's the editorials are the very best way of convincing the public. One decent editorial counts for a thousand advertisements. From that point on and throughout my struggles to launch the dual cyclone,

Starting point is 00:45:15 I made editorial the basis of all my thinking about publicity. One thing he talks about over and over again, it's like a lot easier to have people write about first. He's like, don't ever try to control what they write about your product, right? That's not a good idea. And two, they write about if your product is strange looking, if you're building a physical product, and you can make it look weird, it's more likely to be written about by journalists. Now, this is what I mean. Like, again, this is a small but successful business.

Starting point is 00:45:41 He's selling about 45,000 ball barrows a year. It's like, all right, that's a wonderfully growing, nice business, right? So they bring in, the board decides, hey, so again, I'd skip over parts just for time's sake. He brings in, he's got investors on this company, so he doesn't own all of it. He doesn't control all of it. The board, they have people that were quote unquote successful business people in other industries are sitting on the board but they don't know anything about like the design of the product that he made and so like okay this is what we need to do we need to bring in a sales manager now the business is growing and then the sales manager who who um who uh james calls a complete bastard uh decides hey we're not gonna sell

Starting point is 00:46:24 directly anymore. This doesn't make sense. Let's sell now. Let's sell to wholesalers and retailers. And so the note of myself on this page is a direct relationship with the customer is the holy grail. There is no improving on that. What the hell are you doing? And number two, don't expand.

Starting point is 00:46:43 If you are losing money, you just make the bigger that is meyer rothschild to his son nathan on that two-part rothschild series i just did they talks about that it's like what are you doing so you're losing money like you're expanding the business you're losing money the problem just gets bigger and so they make the mistake they make both those mistakes here like you had the holy grail and then you went away from it like so it says in following his advice the direct the bastard that is to abandon direct selling and supply shops via wholesales, we began to lose that contact with the customer that was the basis of our success. As with the dual cyclone, so with the ball barrow. The establishment of a client based by word of mouth, which is the best form of advertising in the world, right?

Starting point is 00:47:17 The establishment of a client based by word of mouth is what gives a product longevity and integrity. A sort of wise man building his house on rock principle. But we went away from that. So now we're selling to wholesalers and we're making less money. So not only do we now have the relationship with the customer, but now we're making less. So now we're going to start going from profitable to losing money. And then what are we going to do?

Starting point is 00:47:39 We're going to expand on borrowed money. And at this time in history, the interest rates are crazy. It's like 15, 20%, some wild stuff like that. So this business is going to go kapoo. We were only making about half as money in each sale because we had to incorporate a margin for wholesalers. The business became cash negative and we started to finance ourselves, excuse me, to find ourselves sinking into debt. What was the response of the board? To expand. And so he's eventually going to get kicked out of this company. He's like putting up a fight. He tries to invent, they're losing so much money on the ball barrel.

Starting point is 00:48:11 So then they said, okay, now we need to invent. It's so stupid that people running this company were at the time. So, okay, we're losing money in the ball barrel. Let's invent another product to get us in a better financial position. Now realizing you were in a fine financial position. You just were growing slower than you wanted to. So anyways, he actually offers them he and what's fascinating is he comes up he realizes he doesn't know what the hell a cyclone is and he's trying to fix a problem with the production

Starting point is 00:48:35 line on the ball barrel that has to do with filtering dust in the manufacturing process that would actually have them close the um the assembly line every hour and so they lose and he's like well if we can fix this the assembly never never has to close and we can produce more and he winds up realizing uh somebody another company that has a similar problem with him it's like filtering out this this dust area would use like a giant cyclone and so he makes a giant cyclone uh for the ball barrel and then realizes at the same time hey Hey, wait a minute, why can't I use this for this, this crappy Hoover vacuum cleaner that I've been using in my house. So we'll get

Starting point is 00:49:09 there in a little bit, but he's going to get kicked out. And this is where he, he arrives at the main idea and why he owns his entire company to this day. It's always about maintaining control. One of the strains of this book is about control. If you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and then designing it, I have been trying to say, then you will be the better able to sell it and then to go back to give their very best efforts to developing it and to remain true to it and to see it through all the way to its optimum point, to total fruition, if you like. And this is more about the struggle where, you know, he's not doing well.

Starting point is 00:50:00 He's getting kicked out of his own company. And then he's going through a terrible terrible time in his business and then his mother dies young from cancer and this is why it's so important to read biographies and not business books because you see the entire spectrum of the human experience not just work and just the low lowest of low points in his career and his mother dies this is his last surviving parent and i'm going to read this section to you and he says i was very low at this point but business traumas were put in their proper perspective by the sad death of my mother she had been suffering from cancer of the liver a disease who discovery whose discovery in her And this is the part that just kills me right here. her children and grandchildren mature was very cruel. During her sickness, my wife had been

Starting point is 00:51:07 pregnant with Sam, who was born just before she died, and I will always remember her cuddling him. The death of my last parent was a terrible blow and outweighed all my own personal disasters. And that is one of the powers of a biography of a book where you you see the person as the whole person and not just their work. And I had to like pause when I got to that point because I went through this a few years ago. My mother died of breast cancer. And that line that he says to be deprived in only her mid-50s of seeing her children and grandchildren mature was very cruel. And that's how exactly I feel. My daughter was five and my niece was three when my mom died. And it's completely devastating that she didn't get to see them grow up and they

Starting point is 00:52:02 didn't get to know her. And then you add to the fact that James's mom never got to see him succeed. It's just devastating. And if you've gone through this, you know exactly what I'm talking about, where it's just periods of being okay, getting on with your life, and then just wave of despair and regret. I don't think it's something that ever goes away. You're permanently damaged for the rest of your life and then just wave of despair and regret. It's, it's, I don't think it's something that ever goes away. You just, you're permanently damaged for the rest of your life. Okay. So let me fast forward.

Starting point is 00:52:34 Let me go ahead and start. I'm going to go to the start of the vacuum business. This is the first vacuum business. This is not Dyson. A lot of the stuff he's going to do here. He obviously uses when he builds his company and he's just like you know what the the ball barrel he's kicked out of the company at this point uh right before he gets kicked out he goes to the board they're like you're you're invention stupid um if it was possible to make a a better vacuum cleaner hoover would have already done that he hears that that saying oh it's you know hoover would have done this if it was possible over and over again.

Starting point is 00:53:05 And so he goes back to Jeremy Fry and cause he's determined to make the product himself. And he starts in an old shed. They're called the carriage houses. I actually looked up what this was. So for horse drawn carriages, they're like a, a garage with no water, no electricity. That's where he's going to start his vacuum cleaner company. And this is, he builds almost all the, I told you he builds 5,127 prototypes. Almost all of them happen in this carriage house. Okay. And the first three years he has no money. So he's got to work alone at doing this. So he says, before I went into production with the dual cyclone,

Starting point is 00:53:39 I had built 5,127 prototypes. So far, you only know about one. Well, this little room in the coach house is where I built most of the other 5,126. So he talks about needing money and it's very obvious where he's going to go. He says, listen, the obvious man was Jeremy Fry. He was someone who knew that things don't always work out immediately, that innovation takes time and persistence. Furthermore, I was fed up with the type of non-executive directors who knew little of the manufacturing business. Obviously, Jeremy knows he's an entrepreneur. He knows what's up. Assuming you only had to set up a company and then rake in profits. He talked about the people in the ballbarrow. So this is something that he actually repeats over and over again.

Starting point is 00:54:22 Very similar to Steve Jobs and very similar to Yvon Chouinard. That profits only allow you to make the best products in the world. You can't reverse the order. James loves profits a lot, but it's not his primary motivation. So he winds up getting $25,000 of funding from Fry. He put up $25,000 of his own money, and then he borrows money against his house. This is something he does over and over again. The fact that many times no one would give him money. So he winds up borrowing and putting his, you know, risking the house that his family's in to chase after this dream. It's really wild. And the crazy thing is this is the start of the struggle the start it is now going to be 14 years from this point before Dyson he has his actual vacuum cleaner that he owns that of his design that he owns completely and so he talks

Starting point is 00:55:17 about this this is going to be three or three years the first three years of toiling with really nothing to show for it he's trying to prototypes, trying to prove that his idea, that his concept actually works. All the while I was making cyclones. For three years I did this alone. I could not afford for anyone to help me. When you start out, you just don't think it's going to take that long. Sam, his youngest kid, grew up and started walking, then talking. All the while I made cyclones.

Starting point is 00:55:40 Over the next three years, we used up all the money that had been borrowed. And our mortgage steadily grew bigger and bigger. And so during these three years, this is where he's doing the empirical testing. He's using the Edisonian design process or experimentation process. And I'm going to just bring you the highlights because this is one of my favorite things he says. There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence. And in the. There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence. And in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap.

Starting point is 00:56:09 And this might be the most important thing to remember in this entire book. While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that it's all you need to succeed, the truth is that it would demoralize me terribly. I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day in the coach house, exhausted and depressed because that day's cyclone had not

Starting point is 00:56:31 worked. There were times when I thought it would never work, that I would keep on making cyclone after cyclone, never going forwards, never going backwards until I died. So after three years, he's got an initial prototype. Remember, the vacuum cleaner he's going to produce himself 11 years from now is a lot better than the one he has in here. But he said, hey, we've got technology. We can patent it. So him and Jeremy are like, hey, we don't want to put any more money into this. Instead of manufacturing a brand new physical object,

Starting point is 00:56:59 it's going to be extremely expensive. Why don't we, says Jeremy Fry, and I decided that rather than sell, than attempting to produce the thing ourselves, we would try to sell a license for its production and i'm going to read you a sentence this is crazy and so it was that over the next two years i approached every manufacturer you could think of and no doubt myself was two years trying to sell a license question mark after three years of development alone and so there's a saying um that that that popped in my mind when I was reading this part, that you don't have to worry about people stealing your idea, that if it's any good,

Starting point is 00:57:29 that you're actually going to have to ram it down their throat. This is a little bit about that. It was really extraordinary and quite unexpected. Every single one of them seemed to miss the point that here was an innovation of real benefit to the consumer, a massive leap from a crappy old carpet sucker to a cleaner of total efficiency and undiminishable power for each manufacturer in turn it represented an opportunity to bring out a new product with a major technical advantage over their competitors everybody and here's the problem almost everybody doesn't say no they just never say yes there is a uh number of podcast number 50 mark andreason's blog uh blog archive he talks about silver nerving and i'm pretty sure in that if i remember correctly

Starting point is 00:58:10 in that blog archive which you can actually read for free online it's on their website and i think i linked to it if you just scroll on your podcast player to number 50 i'm pretty sure i include the link in the show notes but anyways mark andreason makes this point uh that you got to stop if you're a startup stop chasing deals with a large company. They waste time. They move slow. And the biggest problem is they never say no. They just don't say yes.

Starting point is 00:58:32 It's exactly what James is dealing with over this two-year period. He says, in those two years, I plotted around Europe. I survived on a sort of manana attitude. Tomorrow would always be better. You have to think like that. Otherwise, you just can't go on. But he's running. He's to the end of his line here. And there's many, many, many times in the book. It's not just like, oh, I'm going to be persistent. That's it. No, it's like he I'm going to quit right now. I'm going to quit soon. If this doesn't happen,

Starting point is 00:58:59 I'm going to quit. So this is his state of affairs right before he signs his first license agreement. He is 38 years old. In the early weeks of 1985, I was broke, hungry, and depressed. My doggedness and self-belief, in the absence of any real evidence that they were justified, were beginning to look more and more like insanity. My nerves were fragile enough to be susceptible to doubts i needed a success to help knock down the doubt and so at this point he gets this random single inquiry from a from a company in japan that wants to license his technology he says japan gets the concept right away and there's another thing that I'm skipping over many parts of the book.

Starting point is 00:59:45 The problem with licenses is they're all, they're all unique. So there's a ton of, and I think I have more notes on this later, but there's just, they're not easy deals to get done. Like lawyers get rich off of them. They take a long time. He says dealing with this Japanese company was completely different. They got a deal done in three weeks. So he went to getting some upfront money and then a guarantee minimum of making at least 60 000 a year so it's a rather small deal but it comes at the perfect time he needed a small win now i'm gonna just give you like broad strokes here it

Starting point is 01:00:15 winds up selling really well but his license deal was bad because the business he's doing business with was the company he's doing business with was crooked so he only ever gets the 60 000 a year uh a year minimum even though it's obvious that it's selling more than that uh part of it's like you know what are you gonna sue them in japan you know like the the the upside is probably smaller than how much it would cost you to actually enforce the contract right and this is another reason later on why dyson keeps insisting on total control and he gets away from licensing. He's got to make mistakes for several, several years trying to license his his invention. Then he's like, I got to build the thing myself. It's like everything else. It's like when anytime I introduce other people, other companies, there is a ton of people ripping them off in the book, a ton of lawsuits, a ton of distractions.

Starting point is 01:01:02 And so that's why he's just like, forget it, man. Just do if it's important. If it's important to your business, you got to control it. The main point I want to bring to your attention about this section, though, is that in 1979, he has the initial idea for a bagless vacuum, right? It's 1986 before it goes on sale. And it's still not the main goal of an idea that he owns and sells and controls completely. But just that, that's seven years. Remember, we still have another seven to go, seven to eight years to go before he actually gets to his optimal point. But I thought this point was interesting because he's in Japan a lot. And he compares the way that the Japanese approach building up their industry. Remember, this is post-World War II, with the way that

Starting point is 01:01:44 Dyson builds up his company. And this is very similar. war ii uh with the way he that dyson builds up his company and this is very similar we learned a lot about this from the founder of sony akio marita who actually influenced jeff bezos and steve jobs with some of his ideas that's uh founders number one or two if you if you haven't listened to that or haven't learned more if you want to learn more about that but the idea that the japanese and james dyson's james dyson don't they don't believe in quantum leaps they believe believe in progress over stages, excuse me, progress in stages over a long period of time. They believe in progress by stages.

Starting point is 01:02:12 In the iterative development that I have described as Edisonian, the persistent trial and error that allows them to wake up one morning after many, many mornings with a world-beating product. They were learning all the time. Remember, he's talking about the Japanese industry as a whole, right? Not one specific company, but he uses this principle for his specific company. They were learning all the time, improving little by little. They lived in anti-brilliance culture, and that was healthy.

Starting point is 01:02:38 They know full well that quantum leaps are very rare, but that constant development will result, in the end, in a better product. And that is a mindset I share with them. I am not a quantum leaps are very rare, but that constant development will result in the end in a better product. And that is a mindset I share with them. I am not a quantum leaper. So I'm going to fast forward a few years. In the interim, he winds up signing another few licenses. He's still doing the license route. And eventually just he gives up because he realizes other companies are just incompetent. They're not going to do things. He's a very hard, you know, nose dude that wants things done his way. And, you know, people like that, there's no point in trying to work at other companies because they're not going to be like you. You might as well just do it yourself. So in 1991, things are a little better. He's still in the carriage house, but he

Starting point is 01:03:16 can hire a small staff. He's inventing different, like, different variations of vacuum cleaners. Again, it's still not his goal. He winds up signing another license, has difficulty working with this company too, and then another lawsuit. And in the interim, I skipped over this huge issue with him is that he signs a deal in America with Amway, the giant American company.

Starting point is 01:03:37 So they wind up signing an agreement with him. Then they cancel it. Then they copy his technology and there's this gigantic, he's saying, hey, you're using my patent so they're having this huge lawsuit and they're you know they got a lot of money he doesn't so they're just kind of drain them they're like okay we're going to keep you tied up in litigation till you quit even though we know that you're right so at the same time this thing's happening in america he's he signs this deal with uh to introduce the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner in britain and so he signs up a company because he still doesn't

Starting point is 01:04:09 have a lot of money he doesn't think he can manufacture himself so in 1991 he signs up with them but there's no here's a problem there's no sign of them starting production uh they would ask for one change right like oh we don't like the handle we don't like this james would change it then they would disappear for a while this is exactly what mark andreason describes in his blog archive interesting enough so then they would disappear for a while then they pop up and ask for another change they would repeat this process over and over again until james loses it and he says listen if you're not going to make the damn thing i will and then they say you can't and then they sue him and so then he counter sues and he this is where he goes into in the book he talks multiple

Starting point is 01:04:45 times that he just he hates licenses he um how they're each is unique the companies love complicating them and then the lawyer bills just get way too high so i would describe this entire process so basically why i'm telling you this section is because it's one step forward two steps back two steps forward one step back at every every step back, other people quit. Somehow James doesn't, but he feels like it. And so at this point, this is the closest he ever gets to quitting. He's like, all right. And he says, I began to consider forgetting the whole thing and doing something else with my life. It's 1991. He started this in 1979. And he's still, he's like, I'm 12 years in, forget it. I give up. And just as he's about to quit, a miracle happens. He gets a call from his attorney. He's about to fly back to America again

Starting point is 01:05:33 to do another deposition. And he says, we've settled with Amway. It is safe to say that this was the greatest turning point in my life since the day I tore the bag off my Hoover. Coming at a time when my single largest problem was assorted of funds to produce my own vacuum cleaner, the fact that I would no longer be hemorrhaging thousands into legal fees was like a gift from heaven. That leak in the cash flow that had only days before made me consider giving up altogether

Starting point is 01:05:58 was now finally plugged. So this is when he's like, forget licensing. I'm doing this myself. And this is when he's like forget licensing i'm doing this myself and this is the insane thing remember this company now gives him a net worth of 16 20 billion dollars it's a hugely valued company right he tries to give to sell equity and no one wants it he tries to raise money by selling equity and no one was interested and this is what he said so he winds up having to go into debt and then he winds up barring against his house again. But this is what he says about this.

Starting point is 01:06:27 I was tearing my hair out as these doors were slammed in my face for the most obtuse reasons. The poor buggers were so wrong to think that designers knew nothing about business or about marketing or about selling.

Starting point is 01:06:39 It is the people who make the things that understand them and understand what the public wants. And a lot of them are saying, you know, oh, yeah, we'll give you a loan, but you got to hire a professional CEO or whatever the case is. It's like, this is ridiculous. I can run the company. And so we get to his entire point here.

Starting point is 01:06:56 A vacuum cleaner designed entirely by me, incorporating innovations up to the very latest point at which my technology had arrived to be produced and marketed and sold under my own exclusive direction was, to be frank, what this whole thing had been about. So now we finally got to the very early days of Dyson. He takes this little crew. Jeremy Fry decides, hey, I don't want to continue on with this. He's much older. I think he's like in the 70s by then. So James now owns the company 100%. He names it Dyson instead. I think it was like something, I forgot the name of the other vacuum cleaner. It's not important. Vacuum cleaner company that is. And you know, he's still got a great relationship with Fry. He completely understood. So he winds up barring against his

Starting point is 01:07:37 house, like I said. But really I'm reading this section is because when you're reading these biographies and almost all like reflections of an entrepreneur's early career they talk about like a yearning for the early days of a company and so this is a little bit about the early wonderful days of Dyson it was a fantastic environment to work in for it was just engineers and designers and no one to mess us around there were no salesmen no advertising people no marketing managers to interfere or to try to guide us in their direction we had nothing to do but to deuce our own dream product. There was no market research and there was no focus groups. It was unique.

Starting point is 01:08:10 The world just isn't like that. You were not supposed to do things like that. Just go ahead and do it all on your own. It felt almost naughty. And this is what I was referencing earlier. I finally made it to my point in the notes where his point that is implied when you read the book is like, listen, if you have a product that makes someone's life better, and that is still the best description. Yeah, that's a quote from Richard Branson that a

Starting point is 01:08:33 business is simply an idea that makes other people's lives better. And if you have a product that makes someone else's lives better, then you can learn how to build a business as you go. And so a large part of the book is just James telling you to slow down and think about what you're doing. And if you do that for all parts of your business, you won't make the same mistakes that you see other companies make. And so he says, I was following the path of my long cherished dream that designers could lead business from the front. So then he just has a bunch of just upfront ideas that I want to share with you real quick. How can you show a potential customer the benefit your product provides quickly? And so he calls his idea to keep the bin where all the dust is collected,

Starting point is 01:09:11 keep it clear and transparent, the most Brunellian, going back to Isambard, Kingdom Brunel, thing he ever did. And retailers and other designers try to get him to change it and to like cover it up. He's like, no, no, no, that's the point.

Starting point is 01:09:23 And this is his his thinking it's really smart the sight of a transparent vacuum cleaner full of rubbish would draw the eye of the potential customer if the customer sees a long line of pristine vacuum cleaners and then this weird looking one on the end all visibly full of dirt well then it clearly works doesn't it and now we get to the point that he's waited his entire life for. The no life myself, my lock screen on my phone right now, it's a picture of Ernest Shackleton, right? From the book Endurance that we did back in the 140s or something like that. And it's a picture of Ernest Shackleton.

Starting point is 01:09:57 His beard is full of snow. And it's a reminder to myself because Shackleton, his family motto was, by endurance we conquer. And so I like to have that little reminder every time I see his face, I think of that. By endurance we conquer. And that's what James Dyson did. 14 years by endurance he conquered. As I have often said, I aim not to be clever, but to be dogged. And my doggedness had got me to a point where I had

Starting point is 01:10:26 my very own cyclonic vacuum cleaner at last. On May 2nd, 1992, I found myself looking at the first fully operational, visually perfect Dyson Dual Cyclone. I was 31 years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole. May 2nd, 1992 was my 45th birthday. So I want to pull out some of his ideas because I like he's got a really gifted mind for marketing and sales, too. Something he does here that's really smart was was he talks about why he named the company after himself. And this is a quote from founders number 191 from Naval Ravikant. He says, embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage. And so Dyson echoes that idea here. He says, the company name

Starting point is 01:11:24 was crucial. I was about to go up against these big multinational companies. And my great advantage in a jungle ruled by faceless conglomerates was that I own the product myself and was personally responsible for everything I sold to my customers. And so I made this clear in the name of both the company and the product. Another thing that James believes is that people always pay for quality. This reminded me of Yvon Chouinard's piton story. So before he found Patagonia, Yvon is a blacksmith and he starts making pitons, which is what mountain climbers use.

Starting point is 01:11:57 And before he starts making them, you could buy them for 20 cents. And he thought they were crappy and that he could do a better job. And so he winds up making the highest quality pitons in the world and he sells them for $1.50 each, which is seven times what they normally cost. And he winds up taking 75% of the market.

Starting point is 01:12:15 It was interesting. It was a high price, but still a low margin item that he actually starts selling clothing, which leads to Patagonia because he needed a higher margin product. I think that's kind of hilarious. But this is James echoing the same idea. We hit the number one slot, selling more vacuum cleaners than anyone else, despite costing twice as much. Another idea James has, I think is fantastic. If you help educate potential customers, they are more likely to buy your product, right? So there's a great

Starting point is 01:12:46 talk that Steve Jobs gives on marketing when he comes back to Apple. And in it, he's about to introduce the Here's to the Crazy One campaign, that famous ad, Apple ad. I think it was released in like 1997. That's actually the reason the Misfit Feed is called the Misfit Feed, because it's like, here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels. That's where I got that idea from. But anyways, in that, this talk, Jobs talks, he's like, listen, you know, he's analyzing other great, how other great companies, how other companies are great at marketing rather, excuse me, like how they approach it. And he's like, listen, Nike doesn't even talk about their products in their ads. They celebrate great athletes. And he, Jobs says, one of the most successful ad campaigns is about the absence of

Starting point is 01:13:26 the product. And that's the Got Milk campaign that he's referencing. And so James comes to a similar conclusion here. He's like, I can't go out and advertise the fact that my vacuum cleaner gives you 100% suction 100% of the time because customers didn't know that Hoover's didn't and that they get clogged as soon as you start using them. They didn't know that Hoovers didn't and that they get clogged as soon as you start using them. They didn't know that. And so all vacuum cleaners, like at the time, all vacuum cleaners had bags. So there's no way for the customer to know that the bag was the problem. So James realizes, well, if I start educating customers on the problems with bags, this will lead them to understand the drastic improvement that my product offers, right? Compared to the existing products on the market. And so he winds up hiring a brilliant copywriter.

Starting point is 01:14:09 And this is the ad that the copywriter came up with. I'm going to read the whole thing. It's so, it's amazing how much you can learn in just a few sentences. And so this is a copy they wrote for a television ad. A woman walks up to the camera and says, look at this, a vacuum bag. Did you know that it clogs so much that after vacuuming just one room, you can have you've lost 50 percent of your suction? She then tears up the bag and chucks it away and says the new Dyson has no bag. So you get 100 percent suction, 100 percent of the time.

Starting point is 01:14:38 She then vacuums, vacuums up with the with the Dyson and you see pieces spinning around like inside the transfer at bin that I told you about earlier. And the voiceover says, the new Dyson vacuum cleaner, we've said goodbye to the bag. And then this is James writing about this ad worked really, really well. And he says, listen,

Starting point is 01:14:57 it's not designed to win advertising awards just to sell vacuum cleaners. And that sentence was particularly interesting to me because I've been fascinated by reading a bunch of, about the founders of like the advertising and the modern advertising age. And that sentence, like look at how this all fits together

Starting point is 01:15:13 with what we've been learning on this podcast, right? Not designed to win advertising awards, just to sell vacuum cleaners. That last sentence James said could easily have been said by David Ogilvie or Claude Hopkins. They say that over and over again. And you know, these,

Starting point is 01:15:23 Claude Hopkins was writing about, writing stuff like that over a hundred years ago, and it still works to this day. I just love when they see these, these little pieces like fit together. This is another example of how books are the original links and then how he works. So there's this legendary British polar explorer. His name is Ranuf, Ran, Fiennes. I should know how to pronounce this. I looked his name up on, I actually listened to him say it on a couple of YouTube videos, but Ranuf Fiennes. Fin, ah, it doesn't matter. So anyways, this guy sends James one of his books. I actually just ordered one of his books. Uh, cause again, he's just like Shackleton. Um, his, the book I ordered

Starting point is 01:16:02 was called mad, bad, and dangerousous to Know. So he sends James's book with an inscription. It says, James thought the book was fascinating, and he learned that he and Rand approached work the same way. This is what James says. His approach was so much like my own. He did what he did not by flashes of brilliance, but by working very hard for long periods in the face of great hardship. And the way Rand discovers who James Dyson is, is he goes to buy a vacuum cleaner. The sales rep shows him the Dyson. Rand says, no, I don't want a British made one. And there's this whole thing in the book that I've skipped over about the issues with the way certain industries are perceived and the fact that you know britains would want like german made stuff or japanese made stuff more than their own but again that's essentially what ran is saying here but going back to james's idea about hey

Starting point is 01:16:55 take risks under your own name right each vacuum cleaner had a tag with i think a picture of james dyson and the story behind the machine. And Rand reads that and buys one. And that reminded me of another Steve Jobs quote. The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. So Hoover doesn't have a tag that talks about the company history or why the product's made that way or any of these other competitors. But here it is. Like, think about, put yourself in Rand's shoes.

Starting point is 01:17:20 You have a selection of products that all say, that all say they're going to, you know, clean your carpets. And that you have, all of them are just, you know, nameless, faceless conglomerates, to use the words that Dyson used. And one has a picture of the founder and saying, hey, this is what I, this is why my, this is what my product does and why it's different and why I think you should buy it. And so it winds up leading to a sale.

Starting point is 01:17:43 And then they wind up having a friendship and a relationship. James winds up raising money for different charities and stuff with Rand. And Rand, I think, inscribed the book. It's like from one British explorer to another, one British pioneer to another. So I thought it was interesting. But the cover of the book is fantastic.

Starting point is 01:17:57 And that's one of the best names of a book I've ever heard, a biography that is. Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know. I have to read that. Are you kidding me? So James, one of James's idea, he believes that companies are built and dangerous to know i have to read that are you kidding me um so james another one of james's idea he believes that companies are built and they're not made and you do that one brick at a time and this story is sometimes literal this is the guy that he winds

Starting point is 01:18:16 up hiring to run his dyson business in australia ross was exactly the sort of dogged stubborn active achiever that we needed when i first met him he'd been in the process of dogged, stubborn, active achiever that we needed. When I first met him, he'd been in the process of building a house at the bottom of a very steep slope, down which the builders refused to carry the bricks, claiming it was too difficult and dangerous. So Ross, with the help of his two young sons, carried every single brick for his house down the slope himself by hand, working at it steadily every single morning before showing up for work. This is a reminder that if one distribution channel is not working, you can always find another one. So James, at this point in the story, he still has these odd

Starting point is 01:18:58 arrangements for other companies in other countries to sell the Dyson vacuum cleaner. They do it under a different name. It's not called the Dyson dual cyclone. Eventually he realizes this is a mistake and he stops doing it completely. But at this point in the story, there's a company that's set up in America that is selling a different version of the Dyson, just using a different name. I think it's called like the Phantom or something like that. And they're not doing well with retailers. So they try to go direct. And this is what James said. For a couple of years, it sold unspectacularly. And then the company relaunched it using infomercials. It skyrocketed, becoming the most successful product ever launched by television shopping channels. A nauseating method, but productive.

Starting point is 01:19:36 So, again, exact same product, just one distribution channel they were pursuing wasn't working at all. They try another one and it takes off like a rocket. Some more advice from James to be different, unconventional, determined, and obtuse. Goes back to this anti-brilliance campaign that he has. You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse. There are billions of people out there

Starting point is 01:20:06 thinking in train tracks and thinking what they've been taught to think. If you go in and you be illogical, then half the time people will laugh at you. And half the time you will strike up something interesting because you've stopped everyone else from thinking logically, which up until this point has failed to provide a solution. Be a bit wacko and you shake people up a bit. And we all need shaking up. So he's talking about hiring now. And he does not like people with experience. He wants to train them brand new.

Starting point is 01:20:36 He hires a lot of graduates, just like Jeremy Fry hired him when he was a graduate or about to be a graduate. And so the main point here is it's better to hire someone who is enthusiastic and inexperienced than have to retrain somebody that has bad habits. The basic reason is they are unsullied. They have not been taught to think by a company with nothing on his mind but short-term profit. We are trying to do things differently from everyone else. So it's easier to teach fresh graduates this new way than we train someone with experience. I began employing graduates because I was so appreciative of the opportunities given to me when I was younger by Jeremy Fry. He gave me carte blanche on the C-Truck project and entrusted me with running the business from the start.

Starting point is 01:21:15 I enjoyed and benefited from that, the responsibility of learning things by doing rather than being taught by superiors. This made me feel that I was a pioneer. And finally, the product you make should always be improving. The way you do that is you have to obsess about it. I have mentioned iterative development as part of innovation, and that extends to the workplace. We are never satisfied with the product and are always trying to improve it. We take any complaint very seriously and solve the problem. We are fascinated to the point of obsession with the product. It is this that allows us to maintain ownership of our product,

Starting point is 01:21:56 and without it, we don't have a business. I hope Dyson's story inspires you as much as it inspires me, and I hope the next time you get knocked down, you remember his story, and you say, all right, then let's give it another go. For the full story, read the book, buy the book, keep the book forever. It's fantastic.

Starting point is 01:22:13 If you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time, do that by using the link that's in the show notes of your podcast player. If you want to stick around, I will add to the end of this episode, the short little bonus episode on the history of great inventions. And that is 200 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.

Starting point is 01:22:33 We humans are astonishingly inventive. The proof is everywhere. The paper you hold in your hands now, the ink, the presses that printed it, even the notion of using words to put these thoughts into your mind. They are all inventions, acts of creation by someone, somewhere. In this book, the stories behind the most important of these inventions will be told, and what amazing stories they are, spanning a range of human emotions and motivations, fear, lust, greed, and altruism. It has certainly prompted me, as an inventor, to ponder why I do what I do. It can be enormous fun to think of new ways of doing things and then to prove they are no mere pipe dreams by turning them into real, live products sold around the world.

Starting point is 01:23:26 But another big motivation for inventors has been frustration. Frustration about things that have been around for years, doing an okay job, but not anything like as good a job as they could. The breakthrough was realizing that things don't have to be the way they are. Frustration over the countless ships lost at sea through navigation errors led to John Harrison's invention of extraordinary accurate clocks. Frustration at the appalling death rates in maternity wards led the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis to invent antiseptic practice. And frustration at the many blunders in mathematical tables led the Victorian mathematician Charles Babbage to take the first steps towards the computer. Necessity has indeed been mother to countless inventions. The Sumerians invented written language to keep their

Starting point is 01:24:20 business in order. In 1856 Henry Bessemer invented steel to make stronger cannons. And today's computers, for example, are direct descendants of the electronic machine invented by post office engineers during the Second World War to break Adolf Hitler's most secret ciphers. What all inventions have in common is that they start from a knowledge of what's already out there. Every invention draws in some way on the huge accumulation of know-how built up over millennia. Any inventor must understand what I see as two of the key intellectual breakthroughs of the past 2,000 years. The first is the recognition, due mainly to Newton, that the laws of science don't just apply here and there.

Starting point is 01:25:10 They are literally universal. Spotting the underlying unity in apparently totally unconnected things can lead to world-beating inventions. The other key idea is that of the scientific method. That is, studying systematically things you don't understand. You have your idea, you design an experiment to test it, and then draw your conclusions. We owe that to the 17th century thinker Francis Bacon. And it sounds trite until you try the alternative.

Starting point is 01:25:42 Random guessing and wishful thinking. But for most of recorded history, having a bright idea was no protection against being ripped off by the unscrupulous. Thomas Edison said it first, no sooner does a fellow succeed in making a good thing than some other fellow pop up and tell them that they did it years ago. There is something that, in theory at least, makes sure that the credit and the money for the invention goes to where they are due. Patents. The idea that ingenious people should benefit from their creativity emerged in the 15th century Italy. The earliest known English patent was granted to John of Utenaum, who was a stained glass maker. John received a 20-year monopoly to exploit the fruits of his ingenuity.

Starting point is 01:26:32 In return, he was required to teach his process to others. That, too, is still part of the philosophy behind the modern patent, that it doesn't just encourage innovation, but also the spread of that innovation. Inventors have to disclose how they did it. To my mind, the key test for any invention worthy of the name is whether it can be made practical and put into production. Making an idea actually work and perform well is what inventing is all about. Indeed, overcoming manufacturing challenges had led to some of the most important of all inventions. Take the ship's pulley block.

Starting point is 01:27:11 In the early 1800s, the Royal Navy needed 100,000 wooden pulley blocks for its ships every year. That's about 10 an hour, every hour, month in, month out. Producing so many while maintaining quality was not easy. But in 1801, a patent was granted to an engineer who claimed to have the answer. Mark Brunel, the father of Isambard Brunel, he built the first mass production facility, its machines turning out more blocks of higher quality with 10 men than had previously been possible using 100 men. Henry Ford famously made a science of mass production, cutting the

Starting point is 01:27:53 time needed to make a car chassis from more than 12 hours to just 24 seconds. Some of the most important inventions of the last 100 years have not been products at all. But the methods used to make them, methods such as job scheduling and linear programming for optimizing production in the face of all kinds of constraints, and Toyota's famous just-in-time method for operating minimal inventory. Knowing when to ignore experts is also important. important edison's proposal for electric lighting circuitry was greeted with total skepticism from eminent scientists until he lit up the whole he lit up whole streets with his lights similarly in the 1830s brunel faced skepticism as to whether his steamship the great western would reach america it couldn't carry enough coal for the trip, the experts declared. Brunel went ahead anyway, and when the Great Western docked in New York after a 15-day trip, half the usual time, it still had 200 tons of coal. The Wright brothers faced no less incontrovertible proof of the futility of their task.

Starting point is 01:29:02 Leading scientists decided the idea of heavier-than-air flying vehicles as impossible. Years later, they were saying the same about supersonic travel. Being able to focus on problems and stay focused for days, even years, is critical. Edison never stopped until his ideas were on the market. If anything, he stayed too focused. He discovered radio waves during his lab experiments, but failed to pursue the discovery because of his determination to get products out the door. I certainly hope that this book kills off the myth of the mad-capped inventor in his shed having a eureka moment and making a fortune.

Starting point is 01:29:43 Having the bright idea is crucial, of course, but it is just the start of the process of making successful inventions. 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, as Edison so accurately put it. Whatever obstacles are thrown in their way, people will continue to invent. It is part of the human drive to create to improve our lot. It is my sincere hope that this book will fascinate and inspire in equal measure. For invention the chance to make something work a whole lot better is something within the reach of everyone. You may not make a fortune with your invention or become famous, but you may one day hear someone say, hey, I bought one of those. It's brilliant. And that is priceless.

Starting point is 01:30:37 And that was James Dyson writing in the introduction of the book that I hold my hand on the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The History of Great Inventions. It's written by James Dyson and a whole other team of journalists. It is unlike, I don't know how to describe this book. It's like the size of a thin textbook. It's illustrated. It's almost like if you took like many Wikipedia articles, about 500 inventions over tens of thousands of years, and just wrote basic summaries behind the inventions. And then throughout the book, there's, I don't know, maybe 50 to 75 of them that James Dyson

Starting point is 01:31:17 writes about personally. So those are the ones I'm going to mainly focus on. And I'm just going to pick out ones I thought were interesting. And if you listen to enough founders episode you probably hear me say over and over again that even though I read you know hundreds or I guess not hundreds where I'm at 160 something books for the podcast so far if you can only read one I would still recommend James Dyson's autobiography it's still my favorite book that I've read for the podcast not not only is because his story is remarkable, and you

Starting point is 01:31:45 fast forward, I mean, you see, you know, multiple decades of struggle to get to where he is now, where he owns 100%, thanks to his private company, he's a multi-billionaire, he gets to go to work on engineering problems that he thinks is interesting, but also he's very funny, and the book, it's also short too, which I think I've talked about many times where I think more people would read if we could compress ideas down you know books don't have to be seems like the standard book regardless of the subject is about three to four hundred pages you know dyson's is maybe what 220 in the paperback version very short very fast and he's really really funny um now this book is older it's uh i think it was published first in 2000

Starting point is 01:32:27 or 2001 if i'm not mistaken so it's before he wrote his autobiography but we'll also see his wit and just the funny ways his mind works but it also says um i guess i'll tell you this up front because i i realized that when i got to the end of the book is that, wow, this guy has an unbelievable amount of historical knowledge about inventions and commerce and business. And it's kind of that thesis that we have on founders where you learn a lot by just studying the best ideas of people that have come before you. And it's very clear through James Dyson's writing and just the level of detail that goes into that he spent a tremendous amount of time building up that set of knowledge for himself. And I think that pays dividends in his work, pays dividends in mine, and it would pay dividends in yours as well. So let me go ahead and jump into, the book goes in chronological order. This is 1500 BC Egypt.

Starting point is 01:33:18 And this is about the technology and the invention of shoes. And there's the name that he's going to talk about, Bill Bowerman. It's going to be familiar to you because I just did a podcast on him a few weeks ago. But this is the shoe from Otzi the Iceman to Bill Bowerman. And it's written by James Dyson. When Otzi the Iceman set out around 5,200 years ago to cross what is now the Austria-Italian border, he was wearing purpose-made shoes of waterproof deer hide and bearskin soles with soft grass inside. Even in the Stone Age, people knew the importance of

Starting point is 01:33:52 comfortable footwear. The discovery of such sophisticated footwear stunned archaeologists who discovered Otzi's remains in 1991. Around 1500 BC, the Egyptians knew it too. They had well-made, good-fitting sandals, often highly decorated. This was the first footwear to be shaped to fit left or right feet. So that's why he's using 1500 to designate the invention of the shoe as opposed to, let's say, you know, 3000 BC or whenever Atsu lived. This was the first, okay, so I just read that part. Footwear has long been expected to say something about who was wearing it, which leads us to that long standing icon, the trainer. In 1971, the American athlete Bill Bowerman poured molten rubber into a waffle iron and produced the grid-like sole still seen on trainers today. In 1979, Bowerman helped set up Nike,

Starting point is 01:34:47 which launched the innovative air cushioning system and began the trainer's evolution from a simple sports shoe to a piece of high technology footwear. Okay, and I read that entire part. So I give you an example of what I meant by like little mini Wikipedia articles about 500 inventions, I guess, with illustrations. This is how I would describe this book. And in this, the ones I went back and read my notes this morning, and there's just, you'll see him express the same idea over and over again, which I think is important. And there's going to be a handful of ideas that he feels is important,

Starting point is 01:35:20 and that's going to be apparent through different time periods and different examples. So this one happens to be in 400 B.C. in Greece, and it's the catapult. And the main, I would say, his main point behind this section is him telling us that a great idea never becomes obsolete. And we've seen this studying hundreds of years of the history of entrepreneurship on founders, right? You can have an idea that worked in 1700s, and it's a great idea that worked in 1800s, it works in 1900s, works today, and it'll work in the future. So he says, bottling up energy until it is needed is still a major challenge in engineering. Over the years, people have come up with all kinds of answers, from batteries and flywheels to pumping water up hills. None of them

Starting point is 01:36:03 are ideal. But around 400 BC, Greek engineers exploited one of the simplest and best means of storing energy, elasticity. Using the elasticity of rubber, even a child can make a catapult with a pent-up energy, with pent-up energy that can be unleashed to send decent-sized stones zooming at 100 miles per hour towards targets 50 meters away. If the amount by which the elastic is stretched is increased, the range of the catapult increases dramatically, as the Greeks realized when they built their first ballistas. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

Starting point is 01:36:38 Maybe ballista. Let's go with ballista. Essentially, he's now describing what a ballista is. Essentially, a scaled-up bow and arrow. The ballista used an energy storage system in the form of a rope tightly twisted and stretched back using a crank. The elastic energy pent up in the rope was then ready for release whenever needed and would send a spear hurtling towards the enemy. The catapult had a new lease on life in the 20th century when its elastic energy principles found use in hurling fighter aircraft from seaborne carriers. And this is where James is best. He gives us the history, gives the evolution, and then talks about other

Starting point is 01:37:18 people building on that idea because they understand there's always room for improvement in other applications. That is a main theme behind the book so let me start that that paragraph again the catapult he just got done describing something that was happening in 400 bc now he's going to describe something that that was invented what like the maybe 1950s 1940 something in that area uh the catapult had new lease on life in the 20th century when its elastic energy principles found and found found use in Okay, so now we're in 118 AD in China, and this is about the wheelbarrow. And I would say this is probably the most common idea of his in this book. And it's that there's always plenty room for improvement. So it says, it's difficult to imagine now, but the wheelbarrow was once classified as military hardware.

Starting point is 01:38:14 Developed more than 2,000 years ago to allow the Chinese army to transport heavy or large loads quickly and easily, the wheelbarrow is indeed a clever design. So clever, in fact, that it can be hard to see beyond it, to how it might be improved. It was only after spending days using a wheelbarrow while renovating my house that I became aware that the 2,000-year-old design could use some improvement. And what's more, improvement of the component widely regarded as the greatest of all inventions, the wheel. The result was the ball barrel. This is one of his first inventions that he talks about in his autobiography, which I launched in 1975. It did away with the wheel using a pneumatic ball that

Starting point is 01:38:55 didn't sink into the soft ground or damage lawns. In designing the ball barrel, I followed the more efficient European design and put the ball in front of the load. So some he talks about some of the early I'm skipping over parts of like the 13th century. They had wheelbarrows where the where the the wheel was in the back. So he's talking about different cultures came up with different versions of the same invention. So essentially, it's a summary of that part. So he says, I followed the more efficient European design and put the ball in front of the load. While I was about it, I made other improvements, such as replacing the metal pin with a plastic one because plastic didn't rust. The result was a barrel, was a wheelbarrow or ballbarrow I would be happy to work with.

Starting point is 01:39:40 And so when I think about that section, it's not important to focus on wheelbarrow, ball bar or anything. The main point is, hey, there's an event. There's a tool that's been around for a long time used by countless humans. Me, just a normal person realizing there's some deficiency can actually improve that. That is the main point that you can apply that idea to whatever is that you use in your daily life. Like, hey, this could be this could work a lot better if somebody actually just improved a few different things on this. And if you think about it, that's the foundation of James Dyson's career. When he's like, you know, why are we bagged? Like the Hoover vacuum sucks.

Starting point is 01:40:13 Why are we using this? There's got to be a better way to clean our house. And that simple idea pursued with dogged determination and invention and engineering actually built a foundation for James Dyson, James' mini empire, or I guess large empire that he that he has now. And so we're going to see he's going to talk about this idea. Now, this is complex powered machinery. We're in the year 1280 in England. And the section of this, I'm just going to read the main point up front, the note I left myself, a lot of people may think, hey, there must be a better way. Almost no one does anything about it. So he gives us an example. I'm only going to read

Starting point is 01:40:52 a part. This is a longer section, but I'm only going to read the first three paragraphs. If there's one word that sums up the daily lot of people in the ancient world, it is drudgery. Their lives involved tasks that had to be repeated over and over again. It often also involved considerable power output, making it physically demanding. Over the thousands of years that people laboriously ground wheat or raised water, more than a few must have thought, there must be a better way. Watching water race by as they worked, or seeing the wind repeatedly slam a door, someone must have wondered about harnessing these free and limitless sources of energy to release them from their miserable chores. Yet the first serious attempts to do so do not seem to

Starting point is 01:41:31 have been made until around 2,000 years ago, and it took to around 1280 for water power to be used to drive hammer systems, the first powered complex machines, and a vital step in the establishment of textile and paper industries in England. Such a slow development reveals something about the low status of the average person in ancient and medieval society. Now this next one is just wild. This is the making of false limbs in the 1500s. This is crazy. So this is 1536. He says necessity may be the mother of invention, but compassion has been godmother to a fair to a fair few until the mid 16th century. Little was done to improve the lot of those born without limbs or those who lost them in accidents or war. Then a French doctor showed that medics just hadn't been trying to see that same that same expression, the same actually a different expression of the same idea, that people just weren't trying. It's a main theme behind the philosophy of Dyson, I would say.

Starting point is 01:42:29 When Ambrose Paré began work as a military surgeon in 1536, he was only 26 years old at the time, the techniques used were indistinguishable from those of a butcher. Badly damaged limbs were treated by amputation. The stump was sealed with boiling oil and patients were packed off to cope as best they could. Ambrose, I'm most likely butchering his name. I'm going to call him Ambrose. Ambrose decided this was not good enough. Following the teaching of Hippocrates as to do little harm as possible, he minimized the amount of surgery and used hygiene, oils, and ligatures to treat wounds more effectively and humanely. But he reserved his greatest innovation for those whose limbs he could not save.

Starting point is 01:43:16 Now, this was mind-blowing. Using his knowledge of anatomy and an all-too-ready supply of patience, Ambrose designed a range of artificial arms and hands. As his skill increased, so did the ingenuity of his solutions. One of his prosthetic hand designs had fingers that could be moved individually via a set of gears and levers. This is in the 1500s. That's insane. His biggest contribution was not so much the devices he made. The sheer numbers left disabled by war meant that simple poles and hooks would have to suffice for most. Rather, in the past 20 years, medical technologists, many in military hospitals, have used lightweight materials, sophisticated electronics, to create so-called myoelectric limbs. These detect nerve impulses sent to a limb by the brain,

Starting point is 01:44:21 allowing the disabled person to activate a prosthetic like the original limb. Ambrose would surely have been delighted by such miracles. So what he was doing in the 1500s mechanically, we can now do electronically. That's another main theme. This is just a real quick thing on the vice, which he credits to the year 1600 in Europe. And it says, no workshop worthy of the name is without a vice. And he talks about what is a vice. A vice acts like an extremely strong but uncomplaining assistant

Starting point is 01:44:54 who is willing to hold anything you're working on and not yell if you miss. Variations of the same theme were developed and adopted by different trades over the years, each evolving to a particular demands. But it took the genius of the inventor theme were developed and adopted by different trades over the years, each evolving to a particular demands. But it took the genius of the inventor, Ron Hickman. This is the main point of why I'm reading the section to you to see that even after 400 years, the vice still had not reached its full potential.

Starting point is 01:45:17 So again, the main point of the section is even after 400 years, it had not reached its full potential, meaning things that we use constantly. How many people use the vice over those 400 years and never thought to make it portable? That's what Dyson's point. It's like it was relegated to be installed in your workshop. You couldn't move it. And if you wanted to use it, obviously you had to bring things to it as opposed to bring the vice to things. And that's what he's saying that Ron Hickman's innovation is here. So it says even after 400 years, the vice still hadn't reached its full potential. One of the best features of his world-famous workmate, which he launched in 1971, is that it could be turned into a big portable vice.

Starting point is 01:45:54 Now, this one is really actually, it surprised me. It's how the lawnmower is a descendant of the guillotine. The guillotine is a gruesomely effective device but it was not but it but it was not always thus early versions dating back to at least the early 14th century had a simple plate like blade which did not always do its job properly dr joseph guillotine's claim to fame is that in 1789 he proposed that the device be used for aristocrats and hoi polloi alike. I think that's just like normal people because he has parentheses. He says how democratic.

Starting point is 01:46:29 So it's used for everybody. And prompted research into the most effective shape of the blade. Experiments using animals and cadavers led in 1792 to the characteristic oblique blade, which slices rather than crushes, causing complete decapitation in one seventeenth of a second. This grisly research did have one useful spinoff. It led to the design of a much more effective paper and cloth cutters. It may thus also have led to the lawnmower, which was inspired by cloth cutting equipment in 1830. See what he's doing there? He's tracing the idea through different manifestations

Starting point is 01:47:05 of that same idea. So you start with the guillotine. Guillotine inspires a way to cut paper and cloth. Paper and cloth cutters inspires the lawnmower, which inspired the cloth cutting equipment in 1830

Starting point is 01:47:16 and brought well-tended lawns within reach of everyone, not just the wealthy. No doubt the democratically minded Dr. Guillotine would have approved. In addition to talking about ideas and inventions he likes, they also talk about people. So he idolizes James Dyson, idolizes Thomas and Thomas Invention, Thomas Edison. But they also talk about I don't even know how many Wright brothers, like half of the people that I've read biographies on for founders is in this book.

Starting point is 01:47:48 And one person is Benjamin Franklin. Just want to read this. You know, they offer like mini, I don't even know, it's not a mini biography. It's just like a mini summation of interesting things that that individuals happen to do. And this is called Lightning Mind, and it's about Benjamin Franklin. Born in 1706, the 15th child of a poor Boston candle maker, Benjamin Franklin went on to become one of the most remarkable figures of the 18th century. After George Washington, he was probably the most famous American of the period. He was an author, printer, publisher, inventor, and scientist who became a diplomat, playing a key role in representing the colonies and

Starting point is 01:48:22 negotiations with the British Crown and Parliament. He had a hand in writing the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and the treaty that gave the 13th former British colonies their independence. As an inventor, he devised bifocal spectacles and the Pennsylvania Fireplace, a wood-burning stove that could generate a greater heat than a conventional iron stove by using a grate for the wood and controlling the flow of air by means of sliding doors. It warmed millions of farms and city homes and is still being made today. Franklin's biggest achievements came in the field of electricity, which by 1745 had become a fashionable subject on the east coast of America. His full-hearty demonstration of the electrical effects of lightning impressed the Royal Society so much that they made him a member. Franklin used this discovery to invent the lightning conductor,

Starting point is 01:49:10 suggesting that pointed metal rods should be built on tall buildings and earthed on the ground. By 1782, Philadelphia alone had installed 400 of his conductors. Franklin conducted many other electrical experiments, coined terms associated with electricity such as battery, conductor, negative and positive, and published a well-regarded book on the subject. So I've already done two books, two episodes on Franklin for founders, his autobiography, and then the biography by Walter Isaacson. I have another one that I haven't read yet, but I will. It's called The First American. So there's going to be, he's too important a person not to keep reading any book that I can

Starting point is 01:49:50 get my hands on about him. In fact, I've talked about, there's many different ideas that coalesce in my mind to start Founders and to arrange it, design it the way it is. And one of that, the first one is listening to this interview by Elon Musk, like back in like 2010. And he was asked, he's like, you know, how did you come, you emigrated from South America, or excuse me, South America, South Africa to Canada, then to you land in California, you don't have any money, you don't have any resources. Like, how did you learn how to build all these companies? Did you read a bunch of business books? And his response gave me

Starting point is 01:50:25 the idea for Foundry. He's like, no, I didn't read any business books. He's like, I like biographies. I think they're very helpful. And then he went on to list biographies that he liked. He talked about Benjamin Franklin

Starting point is 01:50:36 being one of the people he most admires and that he liked reading both his autobiography, but also the biography by Isaacson, which I've obviously read since then. This one's really important because everybody's talking about it in present day, and it's about vaccinations, invented 1796 by Edward Jenner. I'm going to read the whole part. Infectious diseases

Starting point is 01:50:55 have claimed countless millions of deaths throughout history. The Black Death pandemic in Europe in the mid-14th century alone left 75 million dead, while the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 to 1919 killed another 22 million. Okay, that number has been updated since books published. They think it's 50 to 100 million for the Spanish flu. Yet over the centuries, stories emerged of certain people who somehow remained free of the disease, and various explanations began to circulate to account for their miraculous escape. A common theme was that people exposed to weak doses of the disease were somehow protected against its worst ravages. By the early 18th century, some European doctors were advocating the idea of combating smallpox by deliberately injecting people with infectious matter taken from those with a mild case of the disease. The risks of such inoculation were very high, however, and those

Starting point is 01:51:47 who were supposed to be protected often fell victim to the full-blown disease. During the 1770s, a young surgeon named Edward Jenner began pondering another curious claim, that people who fell victim to a relatively harmless disease known as cowpox somehow subsequently became immune to smallpox. Jenner wondered if exposure to cowpox might provide a safe way of inoculating people against smallpox. So this is going to be the first quote unquote vaccine, right? In May 1796, he decided to find out in an experiment so outrageously unethical that would today undoubtedly land him in prison. Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps with matter extracted from the finger of a dairymaid who was infected with cowpox. Six weeks later, the boy had suffered only a mild

Starting point is 01:52:38 fever. So on July 1st, Jenner deliberately gave the healthy boy a dose of lethal smallpox. Fortunately for the boy, now how crazy is that? He's testing it. If he's wrong, the boy's going to die. Fortunately for the boy, Jenner proved to be right. We now know that the inoculation had trained the boy's immune system to recognize and destroy both the cowpox and the smallpox viruses. While this was unknown to Jenner, he recognized the significance of his discovery the cowpox and the smallpox viruses. While this was unknown to Jenner, he recognized the significance of his discovery about cowpox,

Starting point is 01:53:10 which he named, this is the most interesting part, because everybody knows what a vaccine is. How many people know that it was named after a cow, right? While this was unknown to Jenner, he recognized the significance of discovery about cowpox, which he named vaccination after vacca, the Latin for cow. It went on to save the lives of millions,

Starting point is 01:53:31 and it remains the primary defense against infectious diseases. Okay, so now we're in the 1800s. This is Francis Smith, and this is on the propeller. And really, I'm bringing this to your attention because in his autobiography he talks about reading biographies of people that inspired him and then using their life stories to draw strength so one of his main influences was this guy named

Starting point is 01:53:56 Isambard Kingdom Brunel okay and in James Dice James's autobiography he talks about periods where he was just, he was like, I'm giving up. This is crazy. I'm going to fail. And then realizing the lessons that he learned from the biography of Brunel, that he went through the exact same thing and he kept going. So I'm going to keep going as well. I have a biography of Brunel. I just haven't got around to reading it for the podcast, but I will obviously be on the main founder's feed. So, okay. The Propeller is a perfect example of a great idea that has been staring people in the face for centuries. There's that same idea expressed in another way, right? We're just tons of people, tons of opportunities staring in the face of everybody, maybe even inconveniencing you or frustrating you,

Starting point is 01:54:40 but such a small percentage of people do anything about it. Okay. It is simply the reverse of the water raising screw invented by Archimedes more than 2000 years ago. So that is also featured in the book. I read and reread the section. I still don't even understand what the hell that, like how it works. It seems like it's black magic. But again, this idea, the main point here is it's not important for us to know how a water raising screw works. It's just taking an invention that happened 2000 years ago and realizing that if you change it, in this case, reverse it, it also can produce another invention, which is the propeller. A number of people toyed with the idea of using a screw like device to propel waters through the

Starting point is 01:55:19 air. James Watt seems to be the first to think about using it for ship production in 1770. In 1835, Francis Smith carried out experiments with a small boat driven by a wooden propeller and went on to launch the first purpose-built propeller-driven ship. And what did he name it? This is in 1838. He named it the Archimedes because it's the reverse of Archimedes' idea from 2,000 years prior. How crazy is that? It's kind of cool. Among those to be impressed by the ship's

Starting point is 01:55:48 performance was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, then in the process of revolutionizing transatlantic travel. After seeing the Archimedes, he decided that his next ship, which he named the Great Britain, would also be equipped with a propeller. And in 1845, it became the first

Starting point is 01:56:04 propeller-driven ship to cross the Atlantic. I just love what Dyson did there. He talks about, okay, it starts off, we have an idea, Archimedes 2,000 years ago. And then we have another idea, the variation of this by this guy named James Watt. And then Smith seems Watt's innovation, you know, it's that 65 years later and he built something. He used the same idea to build it with another purpose. And then 15 years after that, Brunel sees is able to to take a variation of Smith's idea. You see how like I did a really poor job there.

Starting point is 01:56:40 And this is a convoluted way of describing that. But you see how he's tracing the same idea used in different applications by different people for different purposes through different times. I think that is a very, very fundamentally powerful human idea. Okay, so the next one I'm bringing to your attention, I covered all the way back on Founders number 69. It's about Charles Goodyear and the vulcanization of rubber. Rubber is the most extraordinary natural polymer with probably more varied uses than any other. From wetsuits to car tires, gaskets to surgical gloves, it is the perfect material for all sorts of applications, as long as it's used with care. Discovered in the jungle of South America in 1736, rubber was long regarded as a tricky material to use, becoming brittle in cold weather and squidgy in summer. Then in 1839, an American

Starting point is 01:57:26 named Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped some rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove and invented vulcanization. His invention was not entirely a fluke. He had already spent some years looking at ways of making rubber more robust. Even so, his process was all too easily copied, and he spent the rest of his life trying to prevent others infringing his patents. Seeking new markets, he took out patents in Europe, only to have them rejected on technicalities. The process did make money, but not before Goodyear died with debts totaling around $4 million in today's money. Vulcanization boosts the resilience of rubber, but some applications call for untreated rubber's ability to remember and return to its shape.

Starting point is 01:58:05 Now, look how he takes. This is fascinating. Again, I'm really impressed with his just the base of his knowledge and how much time and effort he had to put into developing his mind. So he's going to talk about the mistakes. He just gave us the complete history of rubber and then talking about how even if with an invention, you still we don't know everything about that invention and that lack of knowledge can be fatal.

Starting point is 01:58:30 So it says, Vulcanization boosts the resilience of rubber, but some applications call for untreated rubber's ability to remember and return to its shape. That's when it has to be used with particular care. As NASA discovered to its cost in January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger took off in weather so bitterly cold that a 12-meter rubber gasket on one of its boosters

Starting point is 01:58:53 lost its flexibility and allowed hot gas to escape. The resulting explosion led to the deaths of all seven astronauts. Okay, so now we've gotten to the unbelievable, what I'm calling the unbelievable story of antis seven astronauts. Okay, so now we've gotten to the unbelievable, what I'm calling the unbelievable story of antiseptics. 1847, this is a reference in the introduction. Perhaps single most important of all medical inventions, antiseptics, have saved the lives of countless millions. Yet their use was initially bitterly resisted

Starting point is 01:59:19 by the medical profession. There's another lesson about human nature there, right? Because history doesn't repeat, human nature does. And we're going to see the same resistance that Ignaz Semmelweis, the inventor of antiseptics, received is Hospital, was trying to find out why one in 30 young mothers was dying of some kind of fever, I can't pronounce, on a ward staffed only by midwives. So one in 30 are dying, right? What the hell is going on here? But Semmelweis realized the figure jumped to almost one in five on the ward where medical students examine mothers. Okay, so way too many people are dying when there's only midwives. Why does that number go up by a factor of six when medical students are examining mothers as well?

Starting point is 02:00:13 He then discovered that the students were arriving at the ward after performing dissections on corpses, still carrying dead tissues on their hands. His suspicions that the students were causing the deaths hardened after attending the autopsy of a medical friend, a pathologist who had pricked himself while dissecting a corpse. Semmelweis was struck by the similarity between the lesions of his friend's body, on his friend's bodies, and those of the women with that fever I can't pronounce. He decided the students were carrying some lethal agent on their hands and forced them to wash in dilute bleaching powder before examining his patients.

Starting point is 02:00:48 Within eight weeks, the death rate plummeted almost 20-fold. This failed to impress Semmelweis' superiors, who resented being told that they had caused so many deaths and they soon got rid of him. So, thank you for greatly reducing deaths by 20-fold. You're fired. Among those who read of Semmelweis' work was Joseph Lister, an English surgeon who was attempting to reduce death rates in his operations. In 1865, this is 40 years later, in 1865 Lister began using carbolic acid to clean his hands and his equipment before surgery and produced a threefold drop in mortality rates. But only after Lister showed repeated success with formerly high-risk operations did other surgeons finally begin to use antiseptics routinely. So what is the cost to human life on our species' ability to be arrogant, right?

Starting point is 02:01:46 40 years worth of people dying when Ignace discovered, hey, just wash your hands. Keep your utensils for surgery, your workspaces, your medical offices clean and free from deadly bacteria. And guess what? Less people will die. And him discovering that the reward for him discovering that rather is, hey, you're fired.

Starting point is 02:02:12 And lucky that Lister picked this up 40 years later. Who knows how many people died because of that, because the decision of these people being arrogant. Okay. So this is one of my favorite wild stories in the entire book. It's about moving pictures, which obviously gives birth to the movie industry, and the history of moving pictures is crazy. The movie industry might be the apogee of glitz today, but its origins lie in nothing more glamorous than a simple bet. The story goes that in 1872, the Californian railroad tycoon and racehorse breeder Leland Stanford, which Stanford University is named for, there's actually a book on this

Starting point is 02:02:53 subject right here called the, I think the Tycoon and the Murderer, about Leland Stanford and this guy, Edward James Muggeridge, who we're going to get to here in a minute. All right, so it says, the story goes in 1872, Stanford got into an argument over whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground. Experts and artists alike agreed that horses always kept at least some contact with the ground. But Stanford decided he knew better and bet $25,000, which is the equivalent of half a million dollars today, that horses sometimes left the

Starting point is 02:03:25 ground completely. As horses' legs moved too quickly for anyone to see exactly what happened, Stanford hired an English photographer named Edward Muybridge with the intention of capturing the truth on a photographic plate. He had to wait five years for an answer. Muybridge was something of an eccentric, which was blamed on a serious head injury sustained in a stagecoach accident after he emigrated to America in the 1850s. In 1875, after being tried and acquitted of the murder of his wife's lover, he lay doggo in Central America. On his return in 1877, Muybridge set up a battery of 12 cameras parallel to a racetrack in Sacramento, with each camera's shutter connected to a wire

Starting point is 02:04:05 stretched across the racetrack. So as the horse gallops, he's going to trip the wire and it's going to take the picture, right? It created a series of photographs showing the position of the horse at each instant. Muybridge stuck the images on a rotating disc and shown any light through them. The flickering images proved that Stanford was right. The horse did, in fact, sometimes have all four hooves off the ground. Muybridge went on to carry out similar studies of the movement of animals and humans, his academic interests being shared by a French scientist, we're going to call his last name is Mary, who in 1882 invented a single camera capable of taking multiple exposures in rapid succession. See where we're going here? We're going to the evolution of moving pictures. Others, however, were less interested in making

Starting point is 02:04:48 discoveries with new technology than in making pots of money. They included that doyen of creative entrepreneurs, Thomas Edison. So this was a new word for me. Let me make sure I have it correctly. It means like the best of whatever they do. So the most respected or prominent person in a particular field. Doyen. Doyen is what Google is telling me how to pronounce it. So let's go back to this part. They included the Doyen of creative entrepreneurs.

Starting point is 02:05:20 You see once more Dyson's unlimited admiration for Edison. Thomas Edison, who in 1887 asked one of his assistants, William Dixon, You see once more Dyson's unlimited admiration for Edison. Thomas Edison, who in 1887 asked one of his assistants, William Dixon, to devise a suitable camera and means for projecting the resulting images. The result was the kinetograph. This is the early, we credit with the first movie. A camera which could capture images at 40 frames a second and the kinescope a form of peep show allowing individuals to watch the resulting film. The first kinescope booths opened for business in 1894 and among the first to visit was a French photographic materials manufacturer named Anton Luminaire. See this is there's a lot of words

Starting point is 02:06:04 here and I apologize for that too, because I always get lost in words, but this is Dyson doing what he always does. He's taking us through the origination of an idea and how one person builds on where another person had left off, which is what he talked about in the very opening of the book, how every invention is built on the previous work of others, right? So why are you not studying the previous opening of the book, how every invention is built on the previous work of others, right? So why are you not studying the previous work of others? Suitably impressed, Luminaire instructed his two sons, I'm not going to say their names,

Starting point is 02:06:31 to develop a lightweight camera and projection system capable of making movies that could be viewed by an audience. In March 1895, they gave the first demonstration of their Cinematic System, a one-minute film of workers emerging from a factory in France. It was not the last word in entertainment, perhaps, but it was the first genuine motion picture and the beginning of something that has become more than merely a form of entertainment. It has also been an important medium of social and even political change. So that all started because

Starting point is 02:07:02 Leland Stanford wanted to prove that horses left the ground. That's crazy. Now, with the invention in 1895 of the razor, the main idea that Dyson's giving us here is invent something people use once and then throw away. That way they keep going back for more. And that's what this person who you're going to recognize his last name, King Camp Gillette. Trying to make something both lethally sharp and safe has exercised inventors for centuries. In 1771, the French cutler, Jean Perrer, developed a razor designed to minimize cuts. But facial trauma was low down the list of priorities of the most famous man in shaving. And what a name. King Camp Gillette of America.

Starting point is 02:07:47 He took the advice of a former employer who made a fortune selling disposable bottle tops. Invent something that people use once and then throw away. That way they'll have to keep coming back for more. The story goes that in 1895, Gillette twigged which product could make his fortune while shaving in the mirror. It was a razor fitted with disposable blades. Gillette patented his idea in 1901, and within a year of launching, in 1903, he had sold more than 12 million blades. This is Dyson on his love and admiration for the Wright Brothers. If you haven't listened to it, it's Founders number 28, based on David McCulloch's biography of the Wright Brothers. Fantastic book, by the way. Highly recommend to anybody.

Starting point is 02:08:28 The Genius of the Wright Brothers. Many people still think the Wright Brothers as a couple of bike mechanics who cobbled together a machine that flew a bit. Yet Wilbur and Orville Wright combined rigorous scientific methods and extraordinary engineering skills to bring success where others had failed. Like Edison, the Wright Brothers systematically studied the many variables involved building a series of gliders and carrying out empirical tests on a sandy beach with constant winds in effect they found a wind tunnel to develop ailerons so we talked about uh with the on the chuck yeager podcast uh but what is astonishing was what they had to design their let me start that over actually but what is astonishing was what they had to design their let me start that over actually but what is astonishing was was that they had to design their own propeller system

Starting point is 02:09:11 and the first true aero engine they succeeded in building an engine whose power to weight ratio was as high as a modern day as modern day cars it was like inventing the this is this is a great way of summarizing it and this shows the the beauty of dyson's mind it was like inventing the, this is, this is a great way of summarizing it. And this shows the beauty of Dyson's mind. It was like inventing the car, wheel, and petrol engine all at once. Most impressive of all, they not only built the first airplane, they also flew it in the face of enormous scientific skepticism. This is another idea that he repeats over and over again. They put their lives on the line in order to learn more about what they were trying to achieve. And the whole project costs less than $1,000 or around $15,000 in today's money. So this book brings us all the way up into the year 2000 and just ends. Just a few more ideas

Starting point is 02:10:00 from James Dyson. Here's one of them. When failure is exactly what you need. This is about the Post-it note, which I have myself consumed thousands, maybe tens of thousands of these things in my lifetime. The Post-it note owes its existence to the frustration of American churchgoer and a useless glue. Useless is in quotation marks.

Starting point is 02:10:20 During the early 1970s, Art Fry was a product designer with 3M Corporation. Each Sunday, as a member of his local church choir, he would check which hymns he was to sing during the service and mark them with bits of paper in his hymn book. Inevitably, just as the hymn was about to start, the paper would drop out and Fry would have to begin a frantic search for the right page. During one service, Fry's mind started to wander, and he suddenly remembered some work done a few years earlier by a 3M colleague, Dr. Spencer Silver. While studying adhesives, Silver had made a glue,

Starting point is 02:10:55 which he discarded when it proved to have poor sticking power. Fry realized in 1973 that this quote-unquote failure, this is what I mean by when a failure is exactly what you need, that this failure had precisely the powers he needed to stick the bits of paper in his hymn book. A glue that was sticky, but not so sticky that it could not be removed. The following day, Fry obtained some of the glue and started making his bookmarks with it. And I do the exact same thing today with for founders. It took another 18 months to turn the idea into a commercial product. One key problem was solving the paradox of making this not very sticky glue stick permanently to the message paper,

Starting point is 02:11:36 but not to anything else. Trial marketing began in 1977. People soon found they couldn't live without them. And the final idea Dyson has for us is instead of adding features, make your product easier to use. And this is about the Apple tragedy. And again, keep in mind when he's writing this, this is before the, you know, the renaissance of the iPod, the iPhone and everything else that came after Steve Jobs came back to Apple. The appalling difficulty most people have using their computer is nothing short of a scandal. Using a computer generally means using Microsoft Windows 95, software so intuitive that you press a button mark start to shut the computer down. Or so I'm told.

Starting point is 02:12:22 I have always used Apple machines, having bought almost every model since the 1984 Macintosh. The machine's brilliantly user-friendly graphic features were based on technology acquired by Apple from Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center, also known as PARC, whose computer design team was led by the visionary Alan Kay, an unsung hero of the computer revolution. Xerox bungled its own attempts to market a computer based on Kay's vision in the early 1980s. Sadly, Apple failed to capture the market too. Not for the first time has the best technology failed to win out, and Microsoft's dreadful mockery of Apple's approach has come to dictate the way most people interact with their computer.

Starting point is 02:13:02 The failure of Apple's philosophy to dominate the design of computers is a major technological tragedy. It is a pity the computer industry doesn't spend more time on making software and hardware easier to use instead of adding yet more unintuitive, useless features. And that is where I'll leave it. I'll leave a link in the show notes if you happen to buy the book. It'll support the podcast at the same time. If you do buy the book, it's rather weird. Like I said, it's like a textbook.

Starting point is 02:13:34 I read it straight through like you would read a normal book. I don't recommend doing that. It gets kind of boring in certain points. It's more of a book like you just want to pick up and read a section. It might be interesting or read about a time period. It might be interesting. Again, it's more like if you had like a Wikipedia of inventions. So use this book more as a reference as opposed to when you're going to sit down and enjoy the actual reading process. Anyways, I've talked enough.

Starting point is 02:13:56 I got to go work on this other biography I'm reading for this week's podcast. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Hope this is kind of weird. I know it's different than what I normally do, but hopefully it was enjoyable to you, and I'll talk to you again soon.

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Founders - #200 James Dyson (Against the Odds)

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