The Tim Ferriss Show - #514: Chip Wilson — Building Lululemon, The Art of Setting Goals, and The 10 Great Decisions of Your Life

Starting point is 00:00:00 Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. Top of the day to you. My guest today is Chip Wilson. You can find him on Twitter at ChipYVR. We'll explain what that means. And online at chipwilson.com. He is a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist. There are a couple of names you may recognize in this bio. His career in the apparel industry began in 1979 as founder and CEO of West Beach Snowboarding Limited. In 1998, after selling West Beach in 1997, he founded Lululemon Athletica Inc., creating an entirely new category of technical apparel called Athleisure, which is now a $400 billion or so global industry. Through his holding company and family office,

Starting point is 00:00:48 Chip focuses his interests on apparel, real estate, private equity, passive investments, and philanthropy. Chip and his wife Shannon's passion for design led to the creation of the internationally recognized KPU Wilson School of Design in 2018. In 2019, the Wilsons partnered with Antisports to buy Amersports, which includes brands such as Arcteryx, Salomon, and Wilson Sporting Goods. Chip currently sits on Amor's board of directors. The 2021 edition of his business memoir, The Story of Lululemon, is available for free at chipwilson.com forward slash book. So be sure to check that out, chipwilson.com slash book. Last but not least, Chip is steadfast in his pursuit to cure fascio scapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, known as FSHD. He is on the board of Fascio Therapies, that's F-A-C-I-O, and has begun his latest big 2021 project, Cure FSHD. As I mentioned,

Starting point is 00:01:41 you can find him online, chipwilson.com, Twitter at ChipYVR, Facebook ChipYVR, Instagram Chip Wilson Official. And we cover a lot of ground in this one, a lot of different angles, a lot of different facets, and a lot of really good stories. Please enjoy this conversation with Chip Wilson. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, which is part of my morning routine, also part of my afternoon routine. Routine saves me. So there are a number of ways that I use Four Sigmatic. In the mornings, I regularly start with their mushroom coffee instead of regular coffee, and it doesn't taste like mushroom. Let me explain this. First of all, zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my

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Starting point is 00:04:09 know how we arrived at 39%, but 39% off. It's a lot. They're bestselling Lion's Mane coffee bundles. To claim this deal, you must go to foursigmatic.com slash Tim. This offer is only for you and is not available on their regular website. Go to foursigmatic, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash Tim to get yourself some awesome and delicious mushroom coffee. Full discount is applied at checkout. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end-all be-all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried

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Starting point is 00:06:27 So check it out one more time. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Chip, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me. Well, thanks, Tim. I hope my smile is coming through. It is. It is. And I'm excited to have this conversation for so many reasons. Number one, you mentioned before we started recording, you had a theory about being 43, which is my exact age.

Starting point is 00:07:16 So we may start there. But also because as you said, in your words, you said, I'm an open book. And I wanted to share a little backstory. So when we are looking at different podcast guests, possible guests, we have a whole process for looking at different types of interviews, audio, video, doing a whole vetting process, asking all these questions. And I got two responses back from two different people on my team. And one was, oh my God, I don't know. He says exactly what's on his mind. Look at all of these things.

Starting point is 00:07:48 Might be a red flag. And then the other person basically came back saying, he says all these things, absolute green light. And I was like, okay, that's perfect. And as I also mentioned before we started, I can prepare until the cows come home, but I need somebody who's willing to play ball. So I've been looking forward to this. Certainly know at least one of the brands that you're very well acquainted with, Lululemon. I wanted to start with a couple of questions. One will

Starting point is 00:08:19 seem kind of odd, but I recognize in your social media handles, ChipYVR, ChipYVR on Twitter, Facebook, and so on. For people who don't know YVR, I happen to, but what is YVR? Well, that's the airport code for Vancouver, YVR. And how long has Vancouver been your home stomping grounds? Yeah, I moved from California when I was five to Calgary and then moved out of there when I was 16 to go to university in Edmonton and then left there to work in Alaska for two years on the oil pipeline. Came back to Calgary, got a job, moved to Toronto for a year, and then I moved to Vancouver when the World Expo was here in 1986. Thank you for adding a few signposts for me that we're going to touch

Starting point is 00:09:13 on because I'm not going to leave Alaska alone. But before we get to Alaska, I certainly want to explore that chapter. Could you speak to a bit of your upbringing? I'd love to hear perhaps of your primary influences. I know you've mentioned your father before, at least in some interviews, which I'd be curious to hear about. But what did your upbringing look like? I'd say it was near perfect. Yes, my parents got divorced, but they both remarried people that were perfect for them. I was raised in the suburbs of Calgary. My dad was a phys ed teacher and my mom was a home sewer. And, you know, she loved the house and, you know, anything to do with decorating with that, but the sewing machine was her love.

Starting point is 00:09:57 I think I was eight years old and my dad was running the Kiwanis camp for underprivileged kids outside of Calgary. And this woman saw me swim and said, you know, you should get this kid into competitive swimming. And so the Speedo cost $7 and there was no such thing as goggles at the time. So it fit into our budget perfectly. And I started swimming. You know, I think I had the perfect, I don't even have near the perfect body as some of the people you've interviewed before on this program. Me neither. But good enough. And I believe it added incredible structure to my life around getting up in the morning, early swim practice. I'd train with my dad who I went to his school when I was in grade seven or something like that. And then training again at night, weights, the whole works. And I had Olympic coaches. And I think more than anything,

Starting point is 00:10:50 I learned about hard work equals results. And I think I learned that goal setting really works. So when I think about other influences of my life, I think just that middle class, not having anything, being creative, learning how to go door to door and selling to raise money for the swim trips I had to go on. Just good prairie people. I can't say enough of that, especially as I built a global business. Just hiring people from the prairies right through the US up to Canada is beautiful people. Anyway, I think I can leave it there. Let's hop to Alaska. How did you end up in Alaska? What chain of events or decisions

Starting point is 00:11:31 led you to Alaska? Isn't it fascinating? Kind of go back a bit and just say that at dinner parties, I say, I started off and I say, you make 10 great decisions in your life. And then I asked people for their top three. And so there I was in the Edmonton airport, small little thing. And a woman comes up to me and says, oh, you know my son? And I went, oh, yes, I know your son, Mrs. McCarthy. And we'd start talking and she says, well, my husband is going up. He's running one of the five sections of the Alaska oil pipeline, which at the time was the largest free enterprise project in the world and massive. So from Valdez to Prudhoe Bay. And I said, too bad you're not American. You can come up and work with us. And I went, well, it just so happens I'm American.

Starting point is 00:12:16 So she says, great. So, you know, so one thing leads to another. And I know if I get up there, I can get a job. It was just a couple of years after the Vietnam war. And I think I didn't, you know, I was like 17 years old or something like that. And, and so I, I went up there and I went, I got to customs and I went, I said, what are you doing here? I said, Oh, I'm just tourist. And I'm coming in as a Canadian. And he looked through my bags. It was all construction, clothing, et cetera. He says, well, you're coming in here to take an American's job. I can't let you in. And I said, oh, God. He says, okay, I'm coming in as an American then. He says, okay, step across. I stepped across. He says, report to your draft board first thing tomorrow morning.

Starting point is 00:12:57 You know, it was a great fear because he'd heard so much about the Vietnam War, and I still didn't really understand, you know, what would the repercussions and would war start again? Would I be in that? That was my entry into Alaska. And what were you doing as your job? I was, I would say the highest paid 18 year old laborer in the whole world. It was a cost plus job. I was working, getting paid 18 hours a day, probably working 10, travel time, overtime, the whole works. And I think I made more in my first three days because it was a U.S. holiday than I made my whole summer working in Calgary, working in the parks. So I did everything from help build a largest pipeline suspension bridge in the world to putting holes in the ground in order to put in vertical structural members to build a bridge and then put the pipe across. And then I

Starting point is 00:13:50 worked on, we sent this go-kart into the pipe with a couple of welders in it. My job was to put a fan on the end and make sure it didn't run out of gas. So, and that would have been like four or five hours with nothing to do. And I think maybe that's leading to the biggest change in my life and in something that I know you love. And my mother had sent me an article from a guy, Art Bushwald. Is that the right pronunciation? It was a long time ago, maybe too old for you. Oh, good question. I don't know who that is. New York Times. Anyway, it was, you have to train your brain the same way you train your body. And then I was an athlete.

Starting point is 00:14:25 I understood how to train my body and the results of that, but it never occurred to me training my brain that way. I decided to figure out what the top 100 books of all time was, and I was going to read them. And so there I was, probably 18 years old, and I was probably one of the best-read 18-year-olds in the world. All right, we're going to absolutely come back to books. But before I get lost in my own train of thought or the train that careens off the tracks, the theory about 43, selfishly, I must ask this before we move on. I am going to come back after that to the 10 great decisions and some of your other great decisions. But what is your theory about 43?

Starting point is 00:15:04 Well, what I noticed after watching thousands and thousands of people is that people get glasses at 43. Have you ever noticed that? They get glasses, physical glasses. Physical glasses. And I was going, you know, and I think there was, I also noticed there's an incredible correlation of people getting divorced at 43. And I started to look at what was going on and I thought, I think you get glasses. And I think for the first time in your life, it occurs to people that they're going to die. And I think they start thinking about what happens on my deathbed. And a lot of things that I think matter don't matter. And a lot

Starting point is 00:15:41 of things I'm doing, if I do this for the rest of my life, I'm going to die a miserable death. And I think people really start looking at the person they're married to, the children they have, the city they live in, the job they have. And of course, this is what occurs in men's midlife crisis. But I think the same thing happens to women. Men probably go out and buy that red convertible, or they did at one point. I think they've probably found something else now. But you get the idea. It's a come-to-Jesus moment about what life really is. 13 years old, because I'd say most people get married at 30, and suddenly the children don't really want to be around the parents anymore and don't need the parents. And the parents don't really know what to do with themselves, especially if the couple is living vicariously through their children. Now, you're 43 and you might be having children right now. And my assistant just had,

Starting point is 00:16:43 he's 42, just had a child. Like things are changing drastically about how long people are waiting to have children. So that age may change. Yeah. I'm happy to say that I have a 0% risk of getting divorced this year because I'm not married. So I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled that I've, at least for the time being, dodged that one. But I do think there, I mean, certainly for me, this year has been an eye-opener with respect to visiting, thinking about mortality, because I've looked at the average lifespan through my lineage on my maternal and paternal lines, and the men tend to croak around 85. It doesn't really matter what they do. They tend to croak around 85. And so that would make me just past the halfway mark, which is very different from being before the halfway mark in terms of orientation. So certainly mortality is on the mind.

Starting point is 00:17:41 What's your goal? What's your goal to to live how long would you like to live you know i don't have a number in mind i have kind of techno optimist crypto anarchist life extension friends who are planning on 150 175 these types of dreams are not new. One could argue that there are technologies, ways to deconstruct the aging can still play sports with my kids when they have left the home, which is at this age already asking me to really keep up a good regimen, I feel like I'll be quite happy with that. So I don't have an exact number, but having that vision in my mind, like whether we live, not to make this a soliloquy from me on aging, what do I know? But I lost my hair early, which I guess was a blessing in disguise since I shaved my head with wrestling. But so I've had to face some of these fears already. I spent a good amount of time thinking about organisms such as trees or shifts that take very long periods of time. So whether I live 85, 75, 95, 125, it's all kind of the blink of a firefly relative to so many other things.

Starting point is 00:19:18 So I don't have an exact number. Do you? First off, I wonder if by just setting a longer goal, first off, I wanted to live till 80. And then I went, oh, well, that's maybe self-defeating. Maybe if I think I'm going to live to 80 and all my goals are fulfilled, maybe I'll live to 80 and then die. But if I set my goal at 120, well, my physiology and my brain and the way I make decisions and move around the world have me live to that age. And I am at 150 also. And I think everything's pointing through Peter Diamandis at the Singularity University and that type of thing. If we can live 20 years longer, we can almost live forever. So technology is changing fast. It is. It is. I think mostly in terms of performance or health span. I was chatting with a friend of mine named Peter Attia. He's an MD.

Starting point is 00:20:14 He's been on the podcast a number of times and he describes something called the centenarian Olympics. So it's like, if you live to a hundred 100 what do you want to be able to do at 100 right and is it sort of a goblet squat picking up grandkids or great-grandkids if so where do you need to be now to look at the incremental loss of muscle mass what can you do to hedge that so that when you are at 100 you were able to do sort of the heptathlon or decathlon of centenarians. So I do spend some time thinking about that. So 43, check. I'm also hopefully not getting glasses this year. We'll see. If I need to, I will. So Alaska sounds like, is that one of your top three of your top 10 or it's one of your top 10 decisions? Sure. It's definitely in my top 10 to be able to go to drop everything, go somewhere where I didn't know anything about being 17 years old. That's a big decision. It's more like connected to the

Starting point is 00:21:17 word suicide. It's one or the other where I'd say it's more like a choice. I had many choices. I could have just quit university and gone traveling, go to university, gone and worked in the city, been secured. A lot of what other people did, I think it looked weird to me. I felt like with what people had told me about the money there, but I didn't really believe it, that I could trade my life in for money for a short period of time. And then I could leapfrog my life forward, which in fact it ended up doing, and change my context for the world, you know, because it's very easy to kind of get into a rut even when at 17. Yeah. What was your, and maybe this isn't the best way to look at it, but chronologically, so let's just say we timestamp Alaska as a great decision, what was your next great choice or decision or one that comes

Starting point is 00:22:10 to mind? Because I'd done so much goal setting with swimming, I didn't come to it out of reading. I think I just did it on my own. And I set these goals that by 19, I was going to buy a house. By 30, I was going to be in my own business. So maybe it was a choice to set goals at by 19, I was going to buy a house. By 30, I was going to be in my own business. So maybe it was a choice to set goals at that time, which really then started affecting the rest of my life. And I think to be sitting and I was working for an oil company in Calgary at the age of 30 and to actually quit all that security and all that money to start a surf brand in the middle of the prairies in Alberta was a little bit crazy. As I said, one of my quotes is like, an entrepreneur is someone who's just too incompetent to work for anyone else. And many people told me I wasn't that great a corporate worker and I got to believe them.

Starting point is 00:23:03 And in fact, I just had to follow a dream. But choices. Yeah. So those are three. I think buying the house at 19 and going to my own business at 30 were the next couple. Starting a surf brand and leaving the security, I want to take a closer look at because I think many people at some point in their lives have an argument or a rationale along the lines of, I'm just going to make and save money for X number of years, and then I will do Y. More often than not, though, I would say that does not happen. That does not play out according to that, let's say, haphazard commitment. But in your case, you wanted to have your own business by 30. You made that a goal. Could you walk us through how you made that decision? Did you have a day in the calendar you knew a year in advance when you were going to quit? I mean, how did that actually come to manifest? When I graduated out of university when I was 25, so I was on what I'd call the eight-year bachelor program. But I mean, part and parcel of that, I have to go back and

Starting point is 00:24:15 just say my dad remarried a stewardess with Air Canada, and I got five free trips anywhere in the world. And I had in that time, because in today's dollars, $700,000 from working the last oil pipeline at the age of 19, I mean, my life is, it was on steroids. And I was the luckiest guy in the world. That's a huge sum of money. That's a huge sum of money. It's unbelievable. And of course, I blew a lot of it. I used a lot of it to educate myself for the future. What do you mean by that?

Starting point is 00:24:50 Well, I forced mistakes. I forced mistakes. I, well, when I traveled a lot with the money, I would take courses in university that I thought were bizarre. I'd take public speaking and agriculture, novels of the American mid-50s type of thing. And I had time, so I had time to learn. But I think when I got into the business of making apparel, which was really when I was 25, as at the same time I had this corporate job, my travel to Brazil or Bermuda to find out about long shorts,

Starting point is 00:25:22 because long shorts had never been seen before, but in Bermuda all find out about long shorts because long shorts had never been seen before. But in Bermuda, all the men wore long shorts to going to San Clemente, California to the Hoffman's fabrics there and learning about how much fabric I had to buy in order to get up in my own pattern and where to import it from and how to do financing for it. I mean, these are all things that I forced upon myself and it was all very expensive, but I had the money to do it with. How did you go from pipeline to apparel or when did that interest slash direction develop? It was probably always there. I mean, my dad is a phys ed teacher and my mom is a sewer and myself as an athlete,

Starting point is 00:26:05 especially being in a speedo, when I started moving out of competitive swimming and I started to do triathlons when they first started in maybe 1980 or something like that, the clothing was terribly made. So my, actually my first, my first venture into apparel was making triathlon clothing. And of course there was a global market of about 200 people for it. So that was a, I learned that I needed economy of scale production to make any money. And that was one of my learnings there. What happened is I brought that triathlon clothing. And at the same time, I, you know, as I said, I was originally from California and my parents

Starting point is 00:26:43 would ship me back every summertime and probably from 1960 on. So I got to see how apparel in California changed year by year. I mean, in snapshots. I think if you're living in the forest, you can't see the trees growing. If you're outside and you come there, you can once a year, you can see it. And definitely there's this thing called surfing, which was and surf clothing, which is really coming from Australia into California at the time. I kind of put that together with having traveled to Brazil and like I said, Bermuda to learn about long shorts and then putting the technology together about what I wanted to wear as an athlete and then what I wanted to wear when I wasn't being an athlete. So it was the advent in the, what was I'd say, 1963 or four of the hoodie, you know, on the beach, you know, which I think Silicon Valley has adopted as their de facto uniform. Yeah, exactly. So what really happened is I came back

Starting point is 00:27:40 in night when I was 25, I came back from California with a pair of these shorts for my girlfriend they were kind of wrap shorts made like diapers but made out of flowered fabric she loved them all her friends loved them because I had context from my mother about how to make a pattern and how to sew I just put those two things together I said well if you like them so much and your friends like them let's make a whole bunch so and then we kind of went through the process of pattern making, getting sewers, creating an industry out of that. And so that's how it got to be when I was 30 years old, I could afford to quit my corporate job and go into that full time. You mentioned a few goals.

Starting point is 00:28:16 You mentioned buying the house. You mentioned starting your own business. Did you have goals going out 5, 10, 15, 20 years beyond that? In other words, by the time you started that business, did you have a longer list of goals ahead of you that you'd already written out? Only one more, and that was to be retired by 40. And when I mean retired, that means getting up in the morning and doing exactly what I wanted to do. And it took me until 42 to get there, so I failed. But it got me there. Yeah. You mentioned the goal setting with respect to athletics. I know that there are a number of

Starting point is 00:29:00 authors and books that we may end up talking about during your period of voracious consumption in Alaska and then beyond. I know a couple of names, Jim Collins, Brian Tracy, and then Ayn Rand, Alice Shrugged, and others. Did any particular books influence you when it came to how you set goals? Definitely inside of the psychology of achievement by Brian Tracy has about maybe an hour, hour and a half on goal setting. So I learned the linguistic structure of goal setting. I think they were smart goals, but fundamentally I didn't like them. I did like them. What I didn't like was I learned that I was setting my goals from my past. So in other words, I had lived a life with experiences and maybe the easiest one for me

Starting point is 00:29:54 to say is just, you know, weight, you know, I was probably 242 pounds. So, you know, just thinking about being 242 pounds, I went, well, I want to be 220 or something. So I would set a goal a year in the future that I want to how constraining my life was creating my future from the past as opposed to creating my present from the future. It's really easy. If I woke up in the hospital with amnesia, having been in a car accident, and I got to set goals, well, I wouldn't be able to set them from my experiences in the past. So basically what I'm saying, I'd be unconstrained. And so I started to think about that weight one and going, well, if I was to wake up in the hospital with amnesia, I'd probably do a little bit of research and then find out

Starting point is 00:30:55 that the optimum weight is 208. So I could start to see how constraining goals were from this past base part. I think putting those two ideas together changed goal setting for me. In smart goals, the A is for achievable. I got to find out very young age how failure was, you know, because I pushed for failure a lot, that failure was actually a great thing to learn and to accept it as a kind of an exciting thing, like a learning experience. So I like to set my goals so I'll fail 50% of the time. Now, I don't go out of my way to fail, but if I fail, now I get to reset my life, reset that goal, and go after it again,

Starting point is 00:31:39 if it's exciting to me. Could you give us any examples of goals that you are proudest of achieving, goals that you are proudest of achieving, goals that you're proudest of not achieving? I don't know if that's the best way to word it, but there's part of me, and this is just thinking out loud, I was going to say speaking out loud, which is usually the case, is if the achievable needs to be modified so that even if you're failing half of the time, you're not failing completely. In other words, if you set your goals really aggressively and you succeed partially, you're probably still quite ahead on the scoreboards when you look at how things settle.

Starting point is 00:32:18 Could you walk us through any examples of goals you've set that you've achieved and not achieved? I'd like to take it back into my dad, as you asked about earlier, because I don't want to let the story go to waste. And it's really a good one on goal setting. So I was 10 years old. I was a mediocre swimmer. I'm at the end of the pool about to do the 100 meter backstroke my dad comes up to me and said instead of like going 80 percent and trying to save to the end and trying to look good at the end by kind of sprinting or having anything left at the end why don't you just try once to go full out like full out and you know if on a 25 meter pool if you drown on the third length, I'll come and get you type of thing. And so I can sense in my mind like there was, okay, so there's a goal. Now, the goal is the Canadian record.

Starting point is 00:33:13 I'm eight seconds off the Canadian record. There's no way. But in fact, by going full out and giving 100%, that's exactly what happened. I broke the Canadian record. So my context then for goals and things that I do, if I don't give 100%, I'm afraid I'm going to fail, which is the very opposite than how most people or how you phrase it about always saving a little bit. Again, even at that young age came from, I never wanted to be on my deathbed going, if I didn't give it all when I was 10 years old in that race,

Starting point is 00:33:48 would I be spending 90 years thinking about, oh, I wish. I never want to be in that position. So consequently, I've failed a lot because I do exactly that. But the wins that I get far exceed those failures so that I end up, it appears as though I've ended up living the life that I wanted to live. Are there any goals that you can share that you haven't program that I'd set up, you know, including the landmark psychology of achievement, good to great, seven habits of highly effective people. It was a program that I had set up that way, which I probably got to 20,000 and then I kind of lost control of the company. I felt like I could have really changed the way corporate America changed how to make profit, how to develop people. I think just by coincidence, I just

Starting point is 00:34:58 happened to end up in a business with women at exactly the right time when they were just so highly educated and nobody else was really training and developing them. So I think I got attached to developing women and board of directors and everything like that, but I think I was more just in the right place at the right time. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Laird Superfood, founded by one of the kings of big wave surfing, Laird Hamilton and volleyball champion Gabby Reese. Laird Superfood delivers high-impact fuel to help you get through your busiest days. I just had a bunch of their products this morning,

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Starting point is 00:37:11 So you have West Beach, that's 1979, getting it right. Why didn't you continue with that indefinitely? I guess I'm wondering if you could just share with me and with listeners what transpired once that found its groove and what led you to Lululemon. This probably isn't a secret to anybody that's watched businesses rise and fall, but the surf business started off with about three or four companies and then very quickly went to 500 companies when everyone discovered I can make clothing in the whole world and want surf clothing. So let's say that's between 1978 and 1985. And so it gets to 500 companies and suddenly there's too much supply for too few buyers.

Starting point is 00:38:00 And then there's the mergers and acquisitions phase the bankruptcy phase and then I'd say three or four of the strongest companies end up buying all the rest of the brands or whatever brands are left and then that's that's how it ends up being same in the U.S. auto industry and then it went global and now it's happening on a global stage so I saw that happening in surf and just so happened that skateboard starting and I decided to switch the company from surf into skateboard. And of course I had the perfect shorts for them because I had these long shorts. So it was the first time long shorts that came out. The kids loved them for their knees because they kept falling on their knees and there was no knee

Starting point is 00:38:40 pads at the time. So I guess that context of context of saying oh I saw what happened that surf industry I bet you the same thing's going to happen in skateboarding and sure enough skateboarding went straight up you know from 1983 to probably you know 1987 and then started to decline and at the same time this thing called snowboarding happened and so I could see now I had kind of like this winning formula. Okay, there's a time to get in and there's a time to get out of an industry. So it just so happened I'd moved from Calgary to Vancouver. And because of Whistler, it's got a glacier that's opened all summer long. And all the best snowboarders from the world would congregate in the summertime in

Starting point is 00:39:25 Whistler to practice on the glacier. I saw that occur and then went, okay, so now I got it in my mind, like every five years, the world of which I'm, let's call it, I'm an expert in now changes. And so the idea is I got to get in on a sport at its beginning and then understand a sport that is not just going to be technical, but is also people want to wear on the street to kind of show that they're part of that sport. And so I failed in mountain biking and beach volleyball. That didn't work. So there's some failures for you. But I had an opportunity to sell West Beach, the snowboard company, to Moro Snowboards out of Salem, Oregon in 97, when the Japanese yen was at its very highest because Japan was buying 30% of all snowboard gear around the world. And the trend was kind of moving over. So it was the right time to sell.

Starting point is 00:40:21 And I sold and I had nothing to go to. And then it was just, I did something which I'd seen in a lot of my life is I saw three things happen in one week and I went, this is a trend I got to get on it. And it was yoga. So I had a bad back from skateboarding and snowboarding. I'd fallen so many times. And, and so I picked it up and, uh, no, first off, I saw one of those ripaway tabs on a telephone post for yoga. And then I read an article in the paper that said, you know, something about yoga. And then I was in a coffee shop and I heard two women talk about yoga all

Starting point is 00:40:59 in one week. And I went, man, this is, I got to like, look at at this. So that's how that ended up happening. Where I did fail was actually moving into meditation for Lululemon. I tried to move it there, but I mean, that's another story or maybe we can talk about it later. All right. I'll take a note of meditation. Lululemon, there's all sorts of lore around this name. What are some of the other options, if you remember, that you considered for the company and how did you end up on Lululemon? I wish I could remember more than names now, but the only one I can remember is one of them was athletically hip. And it's because I was a tragically hip music fan, but also because in the book Catch-22, you know, there's a part in there where they write letters home and the censor would write on the bottom, tragically yours.

Starting point is 00:41:52 And so it's kind of like this combination of things. Yeah. So, well, it's a great story as I think all good brands have. And so when I had the skateboarding business, I bought another company called Homeless Skateboards. You know, I started selling it to the Japanese and to the Europeans and it was all going well, but skateboarding, I said, like it's going down and snowboarding was going up. So I made that tough business decision to go, I'm stopping on skateboarding. I'm going to put all my efforts into snowboarding. So, you know, I had to know the Japanese at the time. Like they really put a lot of money and effort into the brand of homeless. They really

Starting point is 00:42:30 liked the style. And I was cutting this brand off at the throat, so to speak. One of the things I tried to do, I tried to trademark it, but HOM is French for male. And there were too many names like that. So that wasn't possible. So I'd stopped producing the brand. I didn't own the name. And later that year, I'm showing the Japanese, our snowboard brand. And afterwards, they go, oh, Mr. Chipsan, we want to, where's homeless? And I said, I told you guys, I'm not doing it, you know, and I gave them the reasons. Meanwhile, the Japanese yen was at its very highest. I mean, they were buying Pebble Beach, the Empire State Building. They were buying up America, a lot like the Chinese are doing now.

Starting point is 00:43:09 And so they called me up and they went, Mr. Chipson, we want to buy name homeless from you. So I went, okay, well, I'm selling pure air here because I don't own it. I'm not making it. I gave them a price I thought was absolutely ridiculous. And they went, okay. And I went, oh, that's the easiest money I ever made in my life. And I went, why did they like that name so much? And I started to surmise that the young people who wanted to buy American brand names, they were being fed by the five big trading companies in Japan, the American brand names, you know, that they brand names that the Japanese trading companies were making.

Starting point is 00:43:49 But real authentic American names had an L in it because a Japanese company wouldn't come up with a name with an L in it. So I went, oh, okay. So I know what I'm going to do. Next time I have a name, I'm going to come up with a name for a business. I'm going to put three L's in it and see if I can get three times as much. How did you come up with the name Lululemon? Well, it was purely, I think I was just working on alliterations. And it was like, maybe for two or three years, it was just la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. And I just

Starting point is 00:44:20 wrote it down one day amongst these other 20 names of which I got 100 women to choose from the names and the logos. So they ended up picking the name Lou Lemon. And then they liked the logo from Athletically Hip, which is just an A with a circle around it. Amazing. When you sold that brand, the homeless brand, do you recall the year or the rough timing of that? 94? 94. Yeah, that would have been a few years

Starting point is 00:44:47 after I left Japan. I was there as an exchange student where I was the... At one point, he only wears Waldo American student in a school uniform in Japan. And it was fascinating to see the

Starting point is 00:45:03 cult devotion developed around certain brands and there were amazing both foreign brands or brands that were perceived to be foreign but were actually created on home soil in japan i mean there were these denim brands that had brad pitt as a spokesperson there was mr coffee which had tommy lee still, I think, uses Tommy Lee Jones. And then separately, this incredible excitement around actual US brands or European brands. So something I got to see firsthand. question of l and r in japanese is an interesting one linguistically because japanese is a syllabary so they have syllables instead of independent consonants so you have like kaki kuke ko mami mu me mo and then there's da di ru de do and so it's the sound that they use that is most approximate to an l is actually a combination of r l D. And that's part of the reason they have such a challenge with distinguishing those. So Lululemon, what were your expectations or hopes for Lululemon in the beginning?

Starting point is 00:46:15 Quite honestly, after working for 20 years at West Beach, not paying myself $30,000 a year and then being able to sell it for a million dollars, pay $200,000 in tax and buy a house and buy a car, put my kids in a school, which they're appropriate for. I was sitting around and I didn't have anything. So it was in the quest of nothing. So I started Lululemon with the goal of being able to ride my beach cruiser to work and back every day, have one store and make it the best in the world. And I was really, really, really tired of being around people who I didn't want to work with. And so to be with people I wanted to work with, then I knew that I had to set up a development

Starting point is 00:47:00 program in order to develop people that had the opportunity to be people I wanted to be around. So my goal was ride my beach cruiser and work with great people and have the best quality product in the world and then determine whether this new idea I had of vertical retailing, so missing the wholesale business. And of course, the analogy now is people that go direct to e-commerce. So, but at that time, you know, I was on the forefront of that. So I wanted to see these three things work. And just to, for my own clarity, when you say vertical, you mean rather than going through distributors and wholesale accounts and all of that, you're creating your own retail outlets to sell directly to consumers? Correct. I mean, it's not like other people weren't doing that. I mean,

Starting point is 00:47:49 maybe the gap was doing it and maybe a few others, but I'd started it in 1980 with West Beach, but I was trying to run two different businesses, a wholesale and my own retail stores where I could design, manufacture and sell right to my own store. So I was missing the manufacturer's markup and the wholesale markup. It seemed like an easy business to me. I didn't realize I'd actually invented something, I guess. So I want to give a nod before we move any further to a listener of this podcast named Christian Butzek. I might be getting that pronunciation wrong, but who suggested a whole number of questions for you. And they, I think this is as opportune a time as any to present a few of them. They're actually

Starting point is 00:48:38 very well thought through, but very difficult to fact check. So you'll have to, you'll have to let me know if any of these are off. I'm just going to use almost like sentence fragments that we can launch off of. And I'm doing this right now for a reason. So one of the bullets that he put in this email is, Chip pitches a tent in his store and sleeps in it to save on theft insurance. For how many years did he sleep in his own store? Can you elaborate? Is this a true story? It is a true story. I really had run out of money almost three times starting Lululemon. And we had a store. There was starting to be a lot of break-ins in the area. I couldn't afford

Starting point is 00:49:19 the insurance on break-in insurance. And I determined that break-ins only happened on Friday and Saturday night. And so I took my two sons and that's where we spent Friday and Saturday night in a tent in the store. Did anyone ever try to break in? Did you ever thwart any invaders? No. How long did you do that? Over over what period of time i'd say about six months yeah all right so i wanted to introduce that because then it offers a contrast with where i want to go next which is this number you mentioned like around 20 000 like 20 to 30 000 people who've gone through this transformational curriculum, which was set up at Lululemon. And I think those numbers, if not all of those people, a very high percentage would have gone through the landmark training, which is involved and not inexpensive. I found an interview where

Starting point is 00:50:21 the following came up, and I'd love to hear you elaborate on this, because I'm sure a lot of thought went into it. Firstly, we had five books or courses, which everyone took in the first two to three weeks they were with the company. Out of this, we created a linguistic abstraction of 30 terms and definitions, which became the culture of our company. That allowed us to expand exponentially, because suddenly everyone was speaking the same language. So this is all super interesting to me. And I'd love to start with the five books or courses. I think you mentioned a number of them earlier, but if you wouldn't mind, to the best of your memory, what were some of the required books and required trainings, so to speak, that people would go

Starting point is 00:51:00 through? So the 3D Landmark course, which in summary really taught me about integrity, responsibility, and choice. The Brian Tracy psychology of achievement, which really did a study of successful people and what successful people do and don't do. Everything from raising children to religion to communication to philanthropy to goal setting, the whole gambit. The third would have been, and of course, you know, we both love this book, Good to Great. And just the context that good is the enemy of great. It's just an amazing context for me. The next one would have been The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey.

Starting point is 00:51:46 All these things are so relevant today. I mean, maybe they're a little bit outdated. Anyway, so is Carnegie, I guess. And then the fourth one would have been The Goal by Goldblatt. And it's really a fiction book, very fun to read about the constraint theory of production. So, you know, he has children and he's having a hard time getting the factory, but he gets the factory. I can't believe that someone's taken something so boring and made it so interesting. What was the, I'm going to admit, I don't know what that constraint refers to. I don't know what that is. Why was this important for people to read? Coming from Japan, I think a lot of this came from Japan because things are

Starting point is 00:52:26 in there that big public companies can't do. If you have a factory that's at 80% capacity and is making a profit and is fulfilling on what you want it to do, then if you can fulfill on the rest of the 20% in the factory, your profit margin on that is almost exponential. So for instance, Lululemon went to move into Australia. So in order to win Australia, we could actually move our production up from the 80% to the 100% and then take a lower margin in Australia to win the marketplace because it really didn't cost us anything more to put on a few zeros on the production line. That's one of like 20 ideas that would be in the book. Is it a book you would recommend to people who operate outside of manufacturing or is it really

Starting point is 00:53:18 a kind of specialists? I'd say anybody that's producing anything that's not digital because digital works on a whole different level. Got it. So the goal. And are there any others you'd like to mention before I ask some follow-ups on Landmark? I love Mindset by Carol Duke. I think you had her. You may have talked to her at one time. I think we've had some communication uh but that is certainly a book that comes up as recommended quite a lot on the podcast i really like black box thinking the amazing story there of the planes that were coming back and landing in world war ii and they'd have a bunch of holes in the bottom and they looked at the patterns and go yeah we'll cover up where all the bullet holes are where really those those are the ones that we're making it back.

Starting point is 00:54:07 It's where the bullet holes weren't is where you need to put the extra protection in. And it's really a way of looking at businesses, which I don't think, especially boards of directors and people who aren't really in the business and don't really understand the business are looking for the holes in the planes that are landing where probably the entrepreneur, founder, someone who's looking in the forecast can actually see what's occurring that doesn't look normal. Were these books, these recommendations, Landmark, were they required or just available and recommended? No, the five books, the five, the landmark and the four courses were required. In other words, we set up our training and development program to talk about these almost, well, quarterly, but because we had goal setting set into place and the goal setting, like I said, creating your goals from the future and failing 50% of the time, we would have those

Starting point is 00:55:05 done monthly. And really, we would bring a lot of the learnings from the other books into the practice of goal setting. How did you have those conversations? Was it broken down by location? Was it virtual? How were those conversations taking place? What we learned from the Brian Tracy is to set the goals and then to post them. So if you went into a Lululemon store, every store had maybe 15 to 40 goals set up in the back room. And so everyone could look at everyone else's goals. And the idea is to put it out there in the public. In other words, the landmark course really got rid of people's fears about what people think of them or what they call in the linguistic abstraction is looking good. So mostly people go around in the world looking good,

Starting point is 00:55:59 trying to pretend there's something that they're not. So by putting up the goals then and recognizing that we're all human beings and we all have different things that we want to do and there's no right or wrong in our goals. And also a real underlying part of it was that we actually encouraged people to quit Lululemon. Like we wanted them to have goals that were superior or that moved on to somewhere in their future that we were training and developing these people and they were going to go on and do what they really wanted to do in life. And my theory was if we train people to be great and they left Lululemon and went and did something else, they would talk so well about Lululemon in the future that that was the best branding and marketing we could possibly do. Were those goals that were posted publicly revisited in some systematic way or reviewed in such a way that people felt somewhat accountable?

Starting point is 00:57:00 Yes. So they were reviewed, I think, quarterly. And we encourage people to not get stuck in any goals. You know, if something worked last quarter but doesn't work anymore, dump we started from something that would be at that time was a vision, your 10-year vision, and then you had your values, maybe three values, which I've changed a lot of my thinking around this. And then we'd have goals for one year, five year, and 10 years. So from your vision, then it's easy to set 10-year goals. From your 10-year goals, once those are done, it becomes easier to set five-year goals. And then it becomes quite easy to set one or two-year goals. And everything has to be with conditions of satisfaction with a by-win date. So as you know from Brian Tracy, it's fascinating how people will get around setting goals and being specific about it because they

Starting point is 00:58:05 don't want to be responsible for actually fulfilling on them. So I found 80% of the time people would not put a buy-win date when they were going to do it, or they would put the condition of satisfaction so vague that nobody knew whether it actually got done or not. Because people don't want to fail and people want to look good in front of other people. But once you kind of get that the whole world is walking around trying to look good, I found it really released our people from looking good and getting rid of all the shoulds and wishes and tries in life and actually become an authentic human being that has issues just like anybody else, then I think it just freed

Starting point is 00:58:46 our people up to be open and undefended about their goals. What do you think if, and I know you've already described a few, but what are the strongest aspects or the greatest strengths of Landmark? And what are any of the weaknesses, if any, come to mind? Well, the weakness is that people come out of it like they've seen Jesus. So, you know, this is where the cult part comes in it. But I first took it when I was 35, and I really, really didn't get the life that I was living. And basically, I was always living in the angst of something I'd done wrong in the past or living in the future that wasn't here yet,

Starting point is 00:59:32 and I was trying to figure out what to do to survive. I had lived my first 35 years of my life never really being in the present. And as my dad would say when I was 17 years old, as I rolled my eyes, that the meaning of life is living in the moment. And of course, he, you know, is a burnt out hippie. And I, you know, why should I listen to him type of thing? Anyway, he ended up being right. So this ability to freely choose as though I have amnesia to be in the present. And then it was very clear to me because after years of athletics, of swimming and triathlons and squash, recognizing that three hours after an aerobic workout, my mind was so clear. And I surmised it was for the same reason, is that endorphin rush kind of eliminated my past and I didn't care

Starting point is 01:00:25 anything in the past. If you don't have a past, then you don't have a future. Now, what does that mean? Imagine it's impossible to think about anything in the future without relating it to some experience in the past. So if I don't have a past, then I don't have a future. And I think this is the same reason that people get drunk or stoned to a great extent, because it's the act of eliminating the past. So there's no past, there's no future, all there is is the present. You know, I think it's the 45 seconds after sex. I think it's, you know, you can see a three-year-old child crawling around the rug. They have no past, they have no future. They're all so creative.

Starting point is 01:01:06 And I also see it in older people when they're told they've got three months until they die. They could care less about their past. They have no future. And they're looking at every blade of grass. So anyway, that's the come to Jesus moment that I really got. And the second part was integrity. And what I really got out of it is that everybody thinks they have integrity. But in fact, because everyone has a different definition of integrity, there is no integrity. So then the act of actually defining integrity was super important. And I took the same line that Landmark does, and I'm going to bastardize it a little bit, but integrity is doing what I say I will do when I say I will do it in the expected way. And if I can't get it done, then I have to clean up my mess and be responsible for that mess, clean it up, and then set new conditions of satisfaction and new buy-win dates.

Starting point is 01:02:09 So the whole company of Lululemon operated under that integrity principle. And it meant, you know, our meeting started on time. You did what you said you were going to do. And it's not like if I say that I'm going to be on a meeting on time and I'm driving to work and I get a telephone call saying my boy has been run over by a car, I'm not going to make it to that meeting. It doesn't make me wrong. That's not what integrity is. There's many times when people can't be in integrity, but to clean up the mess caused by lack of integrity is where more integrity occurs. So that's the other thing. So the third thing then I think is most most interesting to me is this

Starting point is 01:02:47 thing about being responsible i could sense that i was a complainer in life you know i complain complain complain but you know of course we all know that after two complaints nobody would listen to me anymore it took me a while to get that but more interesting is that when I was responsible for whatever the situation was, then immediately I have the power to do something about it. You know, when I left Lululemon, I could complain about it, or I could decide to do something about what I saw wasn't working inside the company. So then to be responsible, they got, okay, I'll write the book on how I think Lululemon should operate and give context to the history and to the future so that the existing management board of directors

Starting point is 01:03:31 can have some template to go on. So that's how I was being responsible. Are there any companies that come to mind that you think do a good job of talent development or employee development? And alternatively, why don't you think more companies do what you did with the required curriculum? I don't think I would know about other companies because I'm not really in them, except for the ones I'm in now through the new purchase of Amr and these eight brands that are inside of it. I think fundamentally, more companies don't do it because of litigation out of the U.S. I think in order to take the landmark course, because people have this kind of come to Jesus moment and they've had to put into the writing of it before you go into the course that you have no psychological issues

Starting point is 01:04:24 and blah, blah, blah. All the literature, all the legal literature that actually, if someone was to look at it, would scare the hell out of you. There's just no way you would do the course. Could you give some more examples of the linguistic abstractions, those terms and definitions, which I guess are sort of shorthand for fast communication, if I'm understanding it correctly? As I said, I used to think it was values, but I found that like the word extreme in the 80s, everyone started making fun of the extreme and advertising started using that. And I think that

Starting point is 01:04:56 people now hear values in a company as they start to roll their eyes and yeah, yeah, everyone's got the same values type of thing. I have been encouraging the companies I'm working with, what are the five books that really define this company and really light people up? And then out of those, take 30 terms and definitions that are key to those five books and develop a linguistic abstraction, which you can grow a global company on

Starting point is 01:05:22 and everybody knows and understands. So you're right. It's about speed of communication. Some of them we've already gone over, and that would be conditions of satisfaction and a by when date, the definition of integrity. I have them listed in my bathroom on the wall. So they're sitting there and I've read them 5,000 times.

Starting point is 01:05:43 This is in your personal bathroom? Yeah. Well, our office bathroom also. In also in our office bathroom yeah we have the linguistic abstraction and then something i call the code which is um originally at lululemon i think it was the best and most incredible marketing thing anyone's ever done and we put this code that really came from the landmark and all these five books that we've talked about and things my dad told me. And we put them on the side of the bag, the shopping bag, the Lululemon shopping bag. And it probably existed like that for about maybe until a year after I left. But then the marketing department or the legal people kind of came into it again and went, you can't say that anymore.

Starting point is 01:06:28 Social media is making us in trouble. You know, it'd be something like instead of suntan lotion, which probably has a lot of chemicals in it, why don't you just get the right amount of sun? So, of course, the fear around suntan companies like Suing Lu Lemon, you know, just overtakes the company. And so those are the kind of things that, so anyway, they did away with it. Well, I want to come back to those types of conversations, but let me ask a maybe fundamental question about another term that much like integrity is either not defined at all or defined in so many different ways that it might as well not be defined. Brand. I think a lot of people, if they were asked, does Lululemon have a strong

Starting point is 01:07:13 brand? They would say yes. But if they were pressed to define what that means, I think a lot of people would struggle. So what is a brand in your mind and what is it not? It's a fascinating conversation, especially in today's social media world about, you know, as things have moved further to the left and anything that is said can be, you know, construed one way or the other. I believe that people originally set up a brand in order to target a certain market. And the more specific you are about who your market is, then the better job you can do about giving them the product that they want. And I think if I see any failure in American public companies over infinitum, it's eventually

Starting point is 01:08:01 trying to be everything to everybody. And of course, this flies in the face of these terms like diversity. I think it's impossible to be great being everything to everybody. So, you know, for instance, clothing lines have always been separated between children's lines, teens lines, women's lines, and then maybe retired people's lines because bodies change, tastes change, colors change. And a company that tries to be everything to everybody, it's just too messy. You end up with so much product and you have no, what are you getting out there as who you are to those people? My fear is, is for a company like Lululemon that's trying to be everything to everybody, is that will they end up going the way of the gap and just becoming another common company? And then, you know, because I think we, you can become everything to everybody and you're going to make a lot of profits for five years because all those people who weren't your

Starting point is 01:09:09 customer before now start flooding in. But what eventually happens is that the key drivers are the key consumers are the mavens and the connectors who really move a brand forward, start, stop buying the brand, but the board of directors and a CEO who's got three-year options is going to go for the short-term profitability. So there's almost no stopping it, unless you have an owner-operator type CEO. Yeah, I suppose whether we like it or not, humans are driven by incentives, right? Oh, God, do they ever. And it's like, if you want someone who's incentivized to outperform

Starting point is 01:09:55 for three months over a few successions because of their option plan versus an owner operator who's in it for a hundred years, you're just going to get very different behaviors. Well, if I could say one more thing about this, really this just came to me like a couple weeks ago, but if you have an owner that's out there making decisions for 100 years and you have a private equity firm inside whose goal is to get in and out in seven years, that's fundamentally a problem inside of the company

Starting point is 01:10:23 because the PE firm wants short-term profits. They want to pump everything up and get out. And the owner is trying to put the money where it'll be good for 20 years from now. It's really fascinating. Yes. The study of humans, also the study of conflict, alas. I want to ask, maybe not directly about conflict, but I want to come back to free speech, social media, things like that. But first, I want to ask about some

Starting point is 01:10:54 really micro details. This might be getting into the weeds, but I'm very, very interested because I believe that you consider store design a crucial endeavor, area of focus. I could be mistaken, but what are some strategies or approaches that you used for increasing retail sales? So the number of products in the store, change rooms, mirrors, color of walls. What were some of the elements that you experimented with? Fundamentally, I think the first big difference for Lululemon that was so different than any other clothing brand was that we weren't

Starting point is 01:11:31 run by merchandisers. So people that were like in Saks, we were trying to put 10 different brands together, make all the purses and the shoes and everything looked good together. So rather than do that, Lululemon was, is first a functional company. And actually all my companies are, I work at the same level. So function is number one. So not only is the apparel functional, but then you make it beautiful. So the store had to be functional. So rather than have a wall where pants and jackets and tops, you know, t-shirts and accessories all work together in one color way and we're pretty. I'm going to use this word pretty, so to speak, so that when people went in, they would go, wow, you know, type of thing. But the problem is, is that within like even seven days, one or two sizes would be sold out and probably the most popular sizes. So we did do that.

Starting point is 01:12:27 We'd set things up for seven days like that. But then the store was set up to put pants would be in one area, tanks in another, shorts in another. And you would actually go to look at a mannequin. That's the short that I want. You'd be educated on why that short was being made. You'd go down to size six. There's your colors. And then you could pick that. And then you could go to a tank top or whatever. And you could look at all the sixes and all the different styles and go, okay, I like that design of tank. Here's my size six. Here's the color I want and go with it.

Starting point is 01:12:59 Basically, I was setting it up because I wanted, I understood clearly from listening to women that they were time constrained. And if they could get in and out of a store in under 10 minutes with exactly what they wanted, then I was actually saving them a hundred or $200 because I always came from that our customers were making a hundred dollars an hour coming in the store. So then we set up the right amount of change rooms so they never had to wait for a change room. We did the hang tags all on the same side. We had the price that was big, the size that was big. You didn't have to search for anything. The store was set up functionally so you could get what you wanted into the change room. There was three-way mirrors

Starting point is 01:13:41 so a girl didn't have to come out and have someone ask. They could actually check their own sides out if they wanted to do that. Our cash register had the fastest checkout by the time you scanned it and got the price out and you were out the door. So I think women really appreciated that. Well, it seems also to emerge a lot of these decisions from having a very clear picture of who your customer is, which you alluded to based on the assumption or archetype that as one factor has the income of $100 per hour. If you set that as your base assumption slash target, it allows you to make many, many other decisions very quickly. Very well said. Very well said. Yeah, exactly. Let's revisit the linguistic abstractions since we just took a very gratifying bathroom break

Starting point is 01:14:39 and we're back in action. I feel so much better. I'm in the process of rehydrating. And you've printed out, as the overachiever you are, the linguistic abstractions. So please share. So being present, we've talked about. Clearing the past. We haven't really talked about, but it's the same thing. I noticed that if I was to talk to you, but you had your mind on your business or your girlfriend, or you wanted to go skateboarding or whatever, you really wouldn't be listening to me. And this idea that there's no point in me talking until

Starting point is 01:15:22 I've cleared what it is that's going on with you. You may have another meeting to go to that something's more pressing. So I've got to make sure I clear you, the listener, before I can actually talk. I've wasted a lot of time forcing what I have to say down somebody who's not listening. We've talked about creating the present from the future. So committed listening is another one. So on the opposite end of that, so when you're talking, I've got to consistently clear myself so that I can actually hear what it is that you're saying. Often I find somebody starts talking and my mind goes. I'm really interested

Starting point is 01:16:07 in this mirror neurons and how I really get now when I'm talking and somebody isn't listening, I can tell that they're not listening. Fascinating, really. So we know on a subconscious level that somebody isn't listening. Looking good, we've talked about winning formulas is an interesting one. Winning formulas. Winning formula. So when I was 12, my parents were divorced. I was a competitive summer. I came home from lunch and nobody was there and there was no food. So I forged my mom's check, went down to Safeway, bought some food. And my 12-year-old self told me that I couldn't trust even those who love me to take care of me. And so I then have to, if it's to be, it's up to me. And I can't depend on anyone else. I've got to make it work for

Starting point is 01:17:02 myself. So consequently, I take that winning formula anytime I'm in a stressful situation and I go immediately to everyone, get out of my way, I'll do it myself. And that works really well. I think when I started a company or I, in certain situations, but in order to be an effective leader, I had to do the next linguistic abstraction, that is choose freely. Choose freely in any position to be the type of leader that's required in that moment. So I really became powerful at Lululemon when I understood that I could delegate, I could ask for help, I could ask for opinions. It didn't have to be all me. And the more I find that this word busy is more that tells me that I haven't delegated or trained and developed people

Starting point is 01:17:54 to take over jobs that I needed to do. Time is precious. In other words, every second of everyone's life is critical. And it's not up to me to waste anybody's time and i really am highly cognizant of tim if you only want to go for 20 minutes i'm here for 20 minutes and i don't want to go 21 if you got something else to do you know that's fine with me so i find that's probably where the word complaining comes in complaining is again a linguistic abstraction to actually define complaining and not waste people's time and again choose to take action which is another linguistic abstraction as opposed to complaining playing on the court not living in the stands so actually not observing life not complaining about life but actually getting into life and

Starting point is 01:18:45 doing something with it. I could go on, but I think you get the general gist. It's a good sampling. Are those in your bathroom as commandments or reminders of principles for yourself? Is it to refresh your memory of these terms for communicating with others? What is the primary purpose of having those in your bathroom? Well, to be authentic about my inauthenticities, I'd say I'm so weak on integrity. I find myself complaining. I put them up because I'm so weak and I need to keep reminding myself about how much my life has changed, even garnering 70% of what I say other people should do 100%. I guess it's a little bit like that smoker who's quit and then goes around evangelizing how everyone should quit smoking or drinking or something. Do you know what I mean? I'm kind of like a born-again self-development person.

Starting point is 01:19:51 So let's tie two pieces together, which we've covered in the last 20 minutes or so. The importance of authenticity, the value of being yourself, not what other people want you to be and this is what we'll add sort of reconciling that or combining that with being a public facing ceo or leader of a company so you have been more than willing to share your thoughts and opinions and speak very openly in public, in the press. And it's not always been extremely well-received. Do you have any regrets? I'm not

Starting point is 01:20:33 trying to imply that you should. I'm just wondering, do you wish you had done anything differently? Would you have done anything differently? Or was it really just who you are and acting in integrity or authentically was speaking really candidly and publicly in the ways that you have over the years? It's very tough to have an opinion, especially I think my area of expertise in life is looking five years in the future and putting together what the world is going to look like, especially in the realm of athletics and apparel and that type of thing. But in order to be great at that, you have to see how all things in society are changing. Now, I have a big failure in that. And the big failure is I didn't understand in 2013,

Starting point is 01:21:22 because it was just the advent of social media just that start of it and it was a time when I can probably say I was the first to get taken down in what I'd call the cancel culture I didn't even really know what had happened to me could you for people who don't have any of the backstory explain what happened? Yeah, sure. So I was going on Bloomberg to talk about this new concept that my wife and I had had around one-minute meditation. So again, the ability to choose in the moment how my brain wanted to be rather than having

Starting point is 01:21:58 to do something longer. Anyway, it shifted into Blue Lemon, and it had a massive quality issue. I wasn't the CEO at the time. I was the chairman living in Australia, actually. But that doesn't matter. If I'm responsible, then I get to do something about it. That's the way I look at it. Anyway, she pivoted and asked me about the quality of the fabric.

Starting point is 01:22:21 And I went, well, I knew in my mind that something was wrong with the Lulim fabric, or something was going on because we were getting returns, we were getting complaints like we'd never had before. And all I could really say at the time was that some of our pants don't work for some woman. And anyway, the interpretation of vast majority of people that they heard it from the point of view, oh, I was judging woman in some sort of way, which given that the business that I'd built all about women and all the women inside of it, nothing could be further from the truth, but I can understand where their interpretation of that was. The reality of it is that women were buying two to three sizes too small in order to use it as compression, like Spanx.

Starting point is 01:23:12 And like any fabric or any material, if you stretch it too far, it's not going to work. And that's kind of what was happening. But I didn't have that context at the time, so I was just trying to be as truthful as I could. But it came across for, again, listening through the lens of, oh, you know, you're judging me. So I didn't know women very well, did I? As much as I say I was in a woman's business and I was working with thousands of women, you know, I didn't really get that this kind of was occurring. And maybe Lululemon had just exploded from being something that was very athletic to

Starting point is 01:23:48 something that was now being bought by everybody in society. And so I made a mistake for sure. Now, what was interesting about it, though, is just the, you know, coming back to Lululemon and the employees all supporting me, they understood where I was coming from, but the board of directors didn't. But nobody knew how the ends of the bell curve that complain and complain very loudly on social media can sound so big. Nobody knew the size of it, really. What I say is that our customer was that 32 year old professional woman, single, owned her own condo, athletic, very media savvy, understood how all this worked and they weren't concerned with it. But it was really hard explaining that to, I think a world which was

Starting point is 01:24:42 now moving into a commodity media business. Media went from like five or six big newspapers to suddenly you're digital and now you have infinite number of media outlets. And then the only way that you can attract people to your TV show article or whatever is headlines and then sensationalism. So I found that people that said they were news outlets were now becoming kind of national inquirer, people magazine, sensationalism, but they were saying they were news outlets, which really does fool people who don't have

Starting point is 01:25:21 a context to what is news and what isn't news. And we've gone so far in that direction of this media being a commodity product. It's like beer and cigarettes where it's all done on marketing now, not really content. And then the real news is, I believe, is what you're doing, Tim, is this podcast. Or then let's be more specific, anything in the world that's working and working really well now has eliminated the middleman. You've eliminated the middleman, so you can come right to the source, rather than getting a headline or a 144-word whatever. It's helpful to hear. I mean, it's been fascinating to see also just in my experience

Starting point is 01:26:07 the evolution or de-evolution the entropy of capturing reality and anger and rage and everything else in 144 characters or less and it's a very polarizing experience, I think, and also seductive experience for people to consume media now. Because as you indicated, if you want to compete effectively for attention, which is what these companies are doing, or their advertisers are doing vis-a-vis their platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, etc., then shock sells, right? Out right outrage cells as does sex and vanity and these other things of course agreed but it's a funhouse mirror of sorts that is adaptive to each individual so it's kind of i don't want to go too far but it's sort of dystopian in its ability to individualize without the individual realizing what is happening. And of course,

Starting point is 01:27:07 this has been discussed kind of ad nauseum in documentaries like The Social Dilemma and so forth. I wonder, you mentioned earlier, this is going to be a bit of a sideways step, but I would love to hear you describe what makes you, aside from extensive subject matter expertise in your world, right, in apparel and so on, how do you develop the ability to really see what things might look like in five years? Because you seem to have done that over and over and over again. And I'm curious if it's intuitive, if it's from a lot of analysis and reading, if it's a combination, if it's something else, what does it look like to develop that skill? Well, I probably didn't know I had it until I'd gone through a few iterations. But I think it

Starting point is 01:27:59 really started off when I was 12 or 13 years old. And again, I'm a reader. I was a reader from a very, very young age. And when I was reading and then I would observe, I would formulate an idea in my mind about what the future was going to be. And then I think I just started noticing that whatever I thought about actually was coming true. And it's not like I'm a Robert Heinlein or something, you know, some science fiction writer, but maybe that was my area of expertise. And then because I was right so often, I probably just started recognizing it's something that I enjoyed doing and then going, okay, now let's kind of put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I have these ideas. If I lay down a business to do that, will the world

Starting point is 01:28:46 actually line up around what I'm thinking? And it just so happened that that kept occurring. Now I'm 65 years old and I recognize I'm not in the world of knowing the minutia of social media and e-com and there's parts of that I'm not living because I don't have to live it. It's not important to me because of what other things are more important. So now I feel I'm moving more to understanding how companies are working and how they become mediocre, how they become great. I'm really looking a lot about countries and how fascinated with how China is, obviously seems to me to be the next empire of the world, and how America is becoming more like Europe, over-regulated, over-taxed, moving further to the left. And it's actually funny to me to look at China now as the bastion of free enterprise.

Starting point is 01:29:40 Yeah, yeah. Having lived in China for a period of time and studied at universities and to have seen from visits there, and I'm sure you've spent quite a bit of time there as well, the change from bicycles everywhere in Beijing and People's Liberation Army green jackets to the bikes disappearing to the Audi Ferrari dealerships to now, I mean, really what looks like science fiction in many of these megacities. I mean, it is almost unfathomable how rapidly things are evolving and developing in China. So that's certainly going to be an interesting X factor from this point forward. I'd love to ask you a couple of complete non-sequitur questions about hiring. So I'm reading here just a note that I have, which says that you've written about hiring

Starting point is 01:30:38 people by asking if they want families. I would love to hear you elaborate on that. Yet in contrast, there are times in Little Black Stretchy Pants when you share stories of rolling down your window while sitting in your car and offering someone a job you've talked to for one minute. So what is it that you see in that person that allows you, prompts you to make such a fast offer? So do you want families and then the fast job offer. Could you elaborate on both of those? Sure, they probably overlap. What I noticed, notwithstanding, there's always going to be

Starting point is 01:31:13 people that wouldn't want children. But through the landmark course, I noticed that almost 90, let's say almost 80, 90% of people had some sort of issues with their parents. And really, it came down to children not forgiving their parents for the lousy job their parents did of raising them. These are parents that loved their children to death, but it was just an interpretation and a story that the children would have. I really got where people that really wanted children, well, one, I think it's the number two instinct after survival. I think it's a great indication. If you want children, well, one, I think it's the number two instinct after survival. I think it's a great indication. If you want children, you want a family. I really wanted to hire women who wanted

Starting point is 01:31:52 a family. And I was a little bit scared of those that didn't. And then the part about me rolling down the window, it wasn't really like I'd met the person for a minute. These were all people in my neighborhood. I was starting Lululemon. I'd watched them out running. I'd have watched them with their families. We were all young at the time and we all had like three, four, five-year-olds type of thing. And I could tell they were good people because I've watched clothing all my life. I could tell they had fashion sense or not. I'm going to use the word style. I don't really like the word fashion, but more like a style. And so when I kind of put the family and the style together, I went, this is going to be a person I'd like working for me. And because I didn't want anybody

Starting point is 01:32:35 who understood the wholesale clothing business, that really I was open to hiring anybody because there was nobody that knew the vertical business. So it was like I got to take good people, train them in a new way of doing business, and that's what worked. So you didn't want to hire anyone with kind of legacy, calcified thinking around how this business should or could be built? Correct. Huh. How did those hires turn out overall?

Starting point is 01:33:07 Did they tend to work out well? I mean, were they for sales positions? Were they for other positions? How did that experiment go? The first person I hired was Deanne Schweitzer. She was a single mother living in the alley behind me with two kids. So I hired her to run our first store. And then she ended up being the head

Starting point is 01:33:25 of product for Lululemon. So Roque probably ended up being the number three or four person inside the company. I hired Delaney to run the store after her sister left and then Delaney ended up being the number two person at Lululemon under the CEO who, and I personally have always pushed for Delaney to be CEO of Lululemon, but I think the board of directors couldn't see anyone, but kind of an Ivy league type person kind of moving in there. And I, anyway, I don't think they could have been more wrong. And I think that's been proved out. And then probably the third person is Eric Peterson, who was running marketing for electronic arts here in Vancouver. I knew that I had the Olympics coming and I wanted to grow the

Starting point is 01:34:05 marketing. I wanted, cause I didn't have any money to sponsor. So we, uh, we grilled the hell out of it. And he was, uh, he understood long-term word of mouth, community marketing, and just again, giving all three of these people really understood giving without expectation of return looking for you know make a quality product and in the long run just have people talk about us i think that's worked out rather well over time let me ask just a few more questions and this one sometimes is extremely difficult and unfruitful, but I'll try it anyway. Sometimes it works out. So we can always fix it in post if it doesn't. If you could put a message, could be a quote, a word, a question, an image, anything on

Starting point is 01:34:58 metaphorically speaking, a huge billboard just to get a message or anything out to billions of people. Let's just imagine they all understand English. What might you put on that billboard? Coming from my most gifted book, which would be Catch-22, which is a Pulitzer Prize winner from the 1960s, about a bunch of pilots who flying over Northern Italy and with an egotistical kernel that kept making them do more bombing missions till the time when they realized that either they were going to die next week or next month or two months from now, like every minute was critical to the next story of my dad and always searching for the meaning of life and

Starting point is 01:35:42 never finding it. And if he did find it, then he'd be disappointed because he had no purpose in life other than looking for it. When I was 60 years old, I went to my dad and I went, dad, you know, if you had to give your 60 year old self any advice, what would it be? And he went away for a day and he had the whole family around the table the next day. And he goes, so I've thought about it. and here's the advice i'd give my 60 year old self do it now do it right fucking now so that's what i'd put on a billboard do it now do it right fucking now uh what does that mean to you does it mean is it principally just valuing time and every second and if you you really mean what you say or value something truly that you're going to just get after it right away or does it have a different different meaning for you life is just so short and what is the term that winner our heart has

Starting point is 01:36:42 there's no performance without action so So people think, think, think, think, and they have an idea, they have an idea, they'd like to do something, da-da-da, and it all comes down to action. And there's just not a moment to waste, there's not a second to waste in life. Or you can choose to waste time, which is a highly creative process. So I don't want to say that that's not important. I'd say a lot of people have really great ideas and maybe even they can see the future and they, if they started their product or whatever they're doing or their concept right now, the first time they thought about it, then by the time they got their act together,

Starting point is 01:37:20 the world would probably line up and they'd be highly successful. Can you wait that extra minute? Can you wait that extra minute? Can you wait that extra month? Can you wait that extra two years until everything's right? Well, my kids are a little bit better. My wife loves me a little bit more. I've got a little bit more money in the bank. I got more equity in my house I can borrow. I just don't think there's time. Catch-22. That is one of your most gifted books. Why is that? There I am, 18 years old, reading it, and I've read it 17 times now, so it's really

Starting point is 01:37:51 my Bible in life. It was really a wake-up call. Again, most people don't get it until they're 43, like I talked about. I got it when I was 18. Here it's talking about all these 18-year-olds, and they're going to die. And so they start to create, well, maybe even like winning formulas, because a winning formula is what you do in a survival situation. So they create different ways of surviving with the short amount of time they have left with them. comedy books of all time because you have one of the characters, Dunbar, that decides that time goes too quickly when life is fascinating. So he checks into a hospital and stares at the ceiling, or we'll go in the back of a movie theater and we'll stand in line, go to the front,

Starting point is 01:38:38 and then as soon as he gets to the front, he'll go to the back again. And he refuses to talk to interesting people because time goes too quickly. So it's a series of mechanisms to make life go slowly. I've often wanted to be in my physics 20 class for the rest of my life just because I know I could live forever. What other books have you gifted often to other people? I know we've mentioned a number of books throughout this episode. Are there any that we haven't mentioned yet? US politics and I could care less about the Tea Party and all the way that people, because I had no context that it was a philosophy. I just thought it was a book. And, you know, when I read through the book and I really got about how to make a quality product, how to treat people really well, how not to let the naysayers say you can't do it or that if you do make your money that you know give me part of that money because why should you have it all type of thing i didn't really get it till i was

Starting point is 01:39:52 about 52 or 53 and i read the book again and i recognized what an incredible impact it had on my life and i think it falls part and parcel with that good to great, what is good and what is great. And did I possibly want to live a life of being good at something? No, I want to be great because on my deathbed, why would I want to know what good look like? I want to know what great looks like. I've two very important questions left.

Starting point is 01:40:22 The first is, do you have any favorite restaurants in Vancouver or the surrounding areas that you can recommend since as soon as I am vaccinated, which I'm waiting patiently for, I am going to be traveling after my extremely strict quarantine. Do you have any favorite spots or recommendations for food? You know, unfortunately, I live in probably the nicest house in the world with the greatest view with a great wine cabinet and a wife that is second to none when it comes to cuisine. So we don't go out a lot, but I'd say- So your house is the answer.

Starting point is 01:41:02 That's where I need to go. Let me put it this way. When you're here, you're invited. Where's Tim? I don't know. I think I saw him going down to the wine cellar. Uh-oh. You know, I have a – my favorite breakfast place is a place called Nelson the Seagull. And they roast their own beans and they make their own bread.

Starting point is 01:41:26 And when you put that combination of those two smells together, it's phenomenal. I know I'm not supposed to eat any bread, but the smell of that bread's great. And, you know, it's one of these places that it's in a 100-year-old building with the big high ceilings, and they've put about $5 into tenant improvements. So, you know what i mean they're just going to get gone to every alley sale they could and bought chairs and tables nothing mixes but the quality of the product is second to none it's such a stunning part of the world and there's such cultural richness there there's such a bounty of natural beauty and excellent crabs among many, many other things. that you've updated your book. This is the 2021 edition now of The Story of Lululemon. And my understanding is you're making it available to download as EPUB or PDF for free on your website.

Starting point is 01:42:35 Is that accurate? And the URL, as I have it here for folks, is chipwilson.com forward slash book. So I want to make sure that we make note of that. Chip, is there anything else that you would like to say, any ask, request of the audience, closing comments, complaints to the editor that you'd like to file with me or otherwise before we wrap up? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:43:01 It maybe goes back to what we're saying, but I'd like to make the request that people reframe what the word news means. And I think, as I was saying by the people we hang out with and the media we consume. This is not just a plug for you, but I just can't say enough about walking with audio and listening to podcasts and biographies, books, fiction, it doesn't matter. The combination of these two things is so powerful. Keeping in great shape and learning at the same time. It's fantastic so anyway reframe the term news here here I am on as much of a low information diet as possible these days it's a lot of garbage calories out there you got it you got to be careful do you have any favorite audiobooks or audiobooks you've really enjoyed that that come to mind could be bi. Do you have any favorite audio books or audio books you've really enjoyed

Starting point is 01:44:05 that come to mind? Could be biographies, could be any category. Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course, you've had Dan Harris on 10% Happier. I laughed all the way through that learning about meditation. And I know you had Guy Raz on. I listened to every one of them. It doesn't matter how many businesses I listened to. They're all different and they're all fascinating. And thanks for, I like that little exchange of podcasts. You guys said it was good. You know, for people starting out, the E-Myth was really a rival for me. You know, being able to put myself five years in the future, train and develop people to take care of the business so I could lead it. Michael Gerber, highly recommended.

Starting point is 01:44:51 Another one, Guns, Germs, and Steel. I loved. Old Pulitzer Prize winning book about how the world developed. And another one that's kind of an updated one on that is Disunited Nations. I really liked. Disunited Nations. Disunited Nations I really liked. Disunited Nations. Disunited Nations. I think my favorite author of all time is John LeCair.

Starting point is 01:45:09 You know, did all the spy novels. And probably isn't relevant to anyone young nowadays. But I love the British understatement. And his ability to tell a story and not tell me anything. But it's all those small little innuendos. And the way the British talk, it's the very opposite from the american marketing machine if i can put it that way i like the i like the way he makes me think and how he uses words you know i have english as a third language so you know and that with no first two so i'm really i really that's how i feel it's like a kurt vonnegut said paraphrasing here but he said you know when i

Starting point is 01:45:50 write i feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth that's how i that's how i feel most days and like you're going for a lot longer but if you want me to, but I think one of the most fun ones I listened to lately was the Magic Strings of Frankie Presto. Not familiar with it. He brings in musicians from all over the world actually to give him approval to talk about them and for him to rate the story. But by audio was great. Wonderful. The Potato Factory, Middlesex. I could go on and on. It's about trees and each vignette kind of ties together a person or a family line with a particular tree or a particular old growth forest.

Starting point is 01:46:52 And it's beautifully written, very dark at points, which has been challenging. But the prose and the storytelling is just so compelling that it's pulling me through. So that's another fantastic book. And I'll plug it again. The Story of Lululemon, updated 2021, can be found for free at chipwilson.com forward slash book. So that's as good a starting place as any. And Chip, this has been so much fun. I really enjoyed our conversation and I appreciate you

Starting point is 01:47:25 making the time. So thank you. Well, thanks for what you bring to the world. And I know it probably at some point comes from a selfish point of view because you get to do all these great things, but isn't it nice when you can combine the two? It is, it is. Oh yeah, I have the best job in the world. I get to have these types of conversations for a so-called job. So until, until they yank me out of here or figure out that that I'm an imposter, I'll keep doing it. And so thank you again,

Starting point is 01:47:56 ship and to everybody listening, we will have everything we discussed in the show notes, links to everything at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, do it, do it fucking right now. Get after it, folks. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email

Starting point is 01:48:31 where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness

Starting point is 01:48:58 before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me in the last few years. I've come to conclude it is the end all be all that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the

Starting point is 01:49:37 last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side and like a super soft bed, no problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress

Starting point is 01:50:14 pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Tim, take their two minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders

Starting point is 01:50:38 and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. These are not cheap pillows either. So getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. That's helixsleep.com slash Tim for up to $200 off. So check it out one more time. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, which is part of my morning routine, also part of my afternoon routine. Routine saves me. So there are a number of ways that I use Four Sigmatic. In the mornings, I regularly start with their mushroom coffee instead of regular coffee. And it doesn't taste like mushroom. Let me explain this. First of all,

Starting point is 01:51:30 zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my stomach, tastes amazing. And all you have to do is add hot water. I use travel packets. I've been to probably a dozen countries with various products from Four Sigmatic, and their mushroom coffee is top of the list. That's number one. I travel with it. I recommend it. I give it to my employees. I give it to house guests. So if you're one of the 60% of Americans or more who drink coffee daily, consider switching it up. This stuff is amazing. That's part one. That is the cognitive enhancement side, easy on the system side, energizing side. The next is actually their chaga tea, which tastes delicious. It is decaf, completely decaf. And some may recognize chaga. It is nicknamed the king of the mushrooms. It is excellent for immune system support. So needless to say, I focused on that right now myself. And so I will often have that in the afternoons. They make all sorts of different mushroom blends. If you are doing exercises, I am on a daily basis to keep myself sane. Cordyceps, excellent for endurance.

Starting point is 01:52:44 They have a whole slew of options that you can check out. Every single batch is third-party lab tested for heavy metals, allergens, all the bad stuff to make sure that what gets into your hands is what you want to put in your mouth. And they always offer a 100% money back guarantee. So you can try it risk-free. Why not? I've worked out an exclusive offer with Four Sigmatic on their best-selling Lion's Mane coffee. I literally have a mug full of it in front of me right now. And this is just for you, my dear podcast listeners. Receive up to 39% off. I don't know how we arrived at 39%, but 39% off. It's a lot. Their best-selling Lion's Mane coffee bundles. To claim this deal, you must go to foursigmatic.com slash Tim. This offer is only for you and is not available on their regular website.

Starting point is 01:53:28 Go to foursigmatic, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash Tim to get yourself some awesome and delicious mushroom coffee. Full discount is applied at checkout. Checkout.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #514: Chip Wilson — Building Lululemon, The Art of Setting Goals, and The 10 Great Decisions of Your Life

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