The Tim Ferriss Show - #530: Sir James Dyson — Founder of Dyson and Master Inventor on How to Turn the Mundane into Magic

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Starting point is 00:03:39 and get your Gen 4 Theragun today. One more time, that's therabody.com slash Tim, T-H-E-R-A-B-O-D-Y.com slash Tim. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job every episode to interview world-class performers from different disciplines to tease out the habits, lessons, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. My guest today is none other than Sir James Dyson. Sir James Dyson is the founder and chairman of, as you guessed it, Dyson. Through investment in science and technology and working alongside Dyson's 6,000, that's 6,000, you heard

Starting point is 00:04:40 me correctly, engineers and scientists, he developed products that solve problems ignored by others. Sir James was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015 and appointed to the Order of Merit in the 2016 New Year Honors. He was awarded a CBE in 1996 and a Knight Bachelor in 2007. James is the founder of James Dyson Foundation, inspiring the next generation of engineers through scholarships, engineering workshops, university partnerships, and the annual James Dyson Award, an international student design competition. In 2017, James established the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, where undergraduate engineers pay zero tuition and earn a full salary while completing their degree studies and working on real-life projects alongside world experts in Dyson's global engineering,

Starting point is 00:05:25 research, and technology teams. James is the author of the brand new book, Invention, subtitle, A Life, the story of how he came to be an inventor himself and built Dyson, leading it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. James, welcome to the show. It's very nice to meet you, Tim. I look forward to our discussion. I have many questions, and I come to this conversation as not just a fan and admirer, but consumer and user of your products. I have a Dyson V11 Animal about 40 feet from where I'm sitting. I have hot and cool purifying fans throughout the house because my girlfriend and I otherwise

Starting point is 00:06:04 fight over the central heating. And I want to cover some familiar ground just to establish context for people, but we'll bounce around, as I mentioned before we started recording. And I thought we would start with a name and to ask for some context. And that name is Jeremy Fry. Could you tell us who Jeremy Fry was? He was a scion of the chocolate family, the Fry's chocolate family, but was an inventor. In fact, his father, who worked in the Fry's chocolate family, was also a better inventor than he was businessman. But anyway, so I don't think their shares in Fry's reversed very much by the time they sold them. But no, Jeremy was an inventor and was the chairman and founder of an engineering company.

Starting point is 00:06:46 And I went to see him to ask him for money, actually, because I'd done a theater project which used the same architectural roof system that he had used in his own factory. He'd pulled the entire factory roof up by himself with pulleys and ropes. It was a very light aluminum structure, a sort of Buckminster Fuller type structure. And I designed a theatre shaped like a mushroom for the theatrical impresario, Jane Littlewood. And I knew he was a millionaire, so I wondered if he'd be interested in funding it. He said, I'm not going to give you any money at all, but I can see you're an ambitious designer. So why don't you design some things for me?

Starting point is 00:07:23 That was while I was still at college. So I spent three further years at college, and then he offered me a job. And I went to work for him, making and selling and designing a boat that I had designed for him, his invention, but I'd engineered it for him. Over the years, I only actually worked for him for about five years. And then I branched out on my own. But I came back and we had a joint company together for a few years, developing a wheelboat, a boat that went across the water on its own wheels, propelled and floated by its own wheels. And also we did the vacuum cleaner together and a very interesting wheelchair together, electric wheelchair how old were you when you first approached him for possible financing which he rejected but what was the age i guess you would have been i was 2021 yes exactly 2021 and what did you initially go to university to study was it designed and if it was designed with within what fields were you hoping to focus? Well, that's a very interesting question. I mean, I did classics at school, Latin,

Starting point is 00:08:29 Greek, and ancient history, but I also did art. And of course, I enjoyed art much more than Latin, Greek, and ancient history. And I wondered if there was a career in art. So I went to art school as an experiment more than anything else. In my first year, I discovered that there was this subject called design. In the mid-60s, 1965, design was not something that was talked about or publicized in the press or magazines. And there was no good design in shops either. So I didn't know what it was. And when I was told what it was, it intrigued me.

Starting point is 00:09:04 And I managed to get into the Royal College of Art to study furniture design. Actually, I quickly switched to architecture because I thought it was more exciting and more intellectually challenging. That's not to put down furniture designers. It's just that it intrigued me more. So I spent two years doing architecture. That's how I came to do this Buckminster Fuller type building. And that's how I came to meet the chairman of an engineering company. And that's what really turned me into an amateur engineer. I have to stress that I am an

Starting point is 00:09:38 amateur engineer. I'm not a trained engineer. But I hope I think like an engineer. Let's dig into that last statement, because I think there's probably a lot there. What does it mean to think like an engineer to you? Whenever I look at anything, I wonder how it works. And then I wonder how it could work better. Could I make it work better? Is there a technology I could use? Is there a way I can reconfigure it? Is there a radical breakthrough I could do for lateral thinking that would make a huge difference. I just think like that all the time. I mean, it could be said to be rather irritating to analyze every single thing you look at and sort of reject it because it's horrid or

Starting point is 00:10:18 doesn't work very well. But that's how I'm built. And that's when I realized that I should have been an engineer. I should have trained as an engineer. But that's all right. built and that's when I realized that I should have been an engineer I should have trained as an engineer but that's all right I just did it wrong way around that's all you know I wasn't going to say it too early in this conversation but James just imagine what you could have done had you had a formal engineering career it's a joke I think you've done quite well it's a joke but actually it's a serious point because I have quite a number of engineers who trained as an engineer and then trained as designers. And I've got a few other like me who trained as designers and

Starting point is 00:10:50 have then become an engineer. And actually, I can't do the calculations that engineers do, but I hope that I think like an engineer and have the same sort of enthusiasms and fascination and curiosity. And that's what's really important. Were those fostered in any memorable way by your parents or by other people when you were growing up, when you were in your younger formative years? Probably not, because my father died when I was nine, and he was in hospital from when I was six to when I was nine. As I say, I did classics at school, so I didn't spend any time really in the physics labs or the chemistry labs. But I was interested in how things work, and I did take things apart

Starting point is 00:11:37 and try to put them back together again. And I did try to build lighting systems. And certainly, when I was 18, I bought an old car and had to learn how to repair that. So I don't think it was something I was really taught. And if anything, I'm an autodidact and not someone who's ever taught anything. And actually, I don't particularly like being taught things. I like to discover things rather than be taught them. Not a very cooperative person. That's probably one of your superpowers, I would imagine, in a lot of respects, at least from what I've gleaned. If there are parents listening, and I somewhat selfishly ask this because I'm planning on starting a family soon, but is the way to nurture that curiosity through discovery, through projects like offering kids the opportunity to disassemble things and reassemble or simply disassemble,

Starting point is 00:12:34 do you have any thoughts related to how to foster and nurture that? Perhaps not by direct teaching, but through other ways of approaching it? Well, yes, I think learning by discovering, by failure, by making mistakes, by being curious about things, curious the way you make things, curious about the way things work, to discover why some things work well and some things work badly. The thing I've noticed with my children is that they too don't really like being taught things.

Starting point is 00:13:04 They all learn empirically, by self-discovery. I mean, I was just astonished to find, I had lathes and mills at home in the workshop and I turned around one day and there was my 14-year-old son working the lathe. I'd never taught him. And he's gone through his life like that. And my son, who's a musician,

Starting point is 00:13:24 has taught himself to play all the instruments he plays, the flute, the piano, and the guitar, and has taught himself how to work all the systems, the recording systems. I think it's the best way to learn, and it's the most exciting way to learn. And a lot of it is failure, of course, and I did want to call my book

Starting point is 00:13:45 A Life of Failure, because failure is exciting, and you learn from failure. If you're taught something and then what you do works, you haven't really learned anything. You haven't learned what doesn't work which is usually more interesting what you have a long illustrious cv full of successes but the connective tissue would seem to be hundreds or thousands of what some people might consider failures i suspect you view them perhaps slightly differently but could you tell us the genesis story of the vacuum, if you wouldn't mind sharing the origin story? I think that would be a good jumping off point for a lot of other questions. Yes. Well, when I was young, the only machine we had at home, where it was very,

Starting point is 00:14:39 you know, I didn't really have no money when I grew up, was a vacuum cleaner. It's an old-fashioned upright vacuum cleaner with a huge pillowcase on the back, you know, this sort of thing. I just remember I was made to clean the house with it by my mother. I just remember the horrible smell of stale dog and stale dust, it not picking things up and then having to go outside and shake the bag out and then restarting the machine and it's still not working very well. So I just remember that from my childhood. And then when I was like you, starting a family and had a wife and so on,

Starting point is 00:15:14 I bought one of these, a secondhand one of these original type of vacuum cleaners with a pillowcase on the back, hanging off the back, the same experience. So I thought, well, there must be a more modern version. So we went to the shops with my wife and we bought what was allegedly the most powerful vacuum cleaner in the world. And it was a canister model that sits on the ground. You don't push it along like a lawnmower, you pull it around with a hose. And it had paper bags, it advanced from pillowcases to paper bags. And I experienced the same thing.

Starting point is 00:15:45 It wasn't picking things up. It was smelling of nasty stale dog and stale dust. It wasn't picking things up. So I couldn't find a replacement bag because I assumed the bag was full. So I went down and tipped the contents into the garbage can and gaffer taped or scotch taped it, the end, back up again. So I had an empty bag. It's not a bag full, it's an empty bag. And I put it back in the vacuum cleaner and still no suction. And I thought, wait a minute, wait a minute, what's this all about?

Starting point is 00:16:21 I was told that when the bag is full, you have to change the bag. What I'm discovering is that an empty bag has no suction. So I thought about it, being someone with an engineering bent, and the penny dropped that all the airflow had to go through the bag. The bag wasn't a depository where the dust went. The bag is a filter. And the very first dust that goes into the bag, whether it's a pillowcase or a cloth bag, clogs the bag. The dust goes straight for those holes because dust wants to get out. It's taken there by the airflow. When the holes are blocked, the airflow is blocked.

Starting point is 00:16:58 So you lose your suction. So I went down to the shops and bought a replacement bag, put it in the machine, and had very good suction to begin with. And then it rapidly tailed off as I vacuumed. So I thought, well, this is crazy. If you buy a light bulb, it's supposed to give you 100 watts. Well, that's more difficult now with LEDs, but it's supposed to give you 100 watts. And it gives you the 100 watts until it goes pop. You get 100% performance.

Starting point is 00:17:26 What you're getting with this vacuum cleaner is a heavily reducing performance. This is awful. I'm annoyed. I'm angry. Anyway, so my anger was simmering within me until I was installing a dry powder coating machinery, a huge machine, to spray my wheelbarrow frames because I was making the ballbarrow a wheelbarrow at the time. And we used a cloth filter to trap the powder that missed the frames. It was sucked away with a giant fan. But every hour, the cloth clogged and you had to shut down the whole machine, shake off the cloth and put the cloth back up again. And I asked around in the industry what intelligent people used. And they said, oh, they use a cyclone to collect the dust, not that filter thing you've got, that cloth thing you've got.

Starting point is 00:18:15 So I got a quote for one and it was a huge amount of money. Somebody couldn't afford it. So I decided to build one over a couple of weekends. It's 30 foot high and the chimney at the top stuck through the factory roof. And we collected the dust in a plastic bag at the bottom of the cyclone. And the machine ran beautifully all day long without ever clogging. And we collected the dust at the bottom and reused it. Then, of course, I connected it, this clogging filter, with the clogging bag in the vacuum

Starting point is 00:18:46 cleaner. And I wondered, why can't you use a little version of the 30-foot high one? What about a one-foot high one? What's that going to be like? So I rushed home and made a cardboard version of this huge one. It was only a foot high. And put it onto the back of my upright vacuum cleaner, because I'd kept the upright one, and pushed it around, and it appeared to work. So I always say that was the first vacuum cleaner

Starting point is 00:19:12 that doesn't lose suction. I didn't know the efficacy. I didn't know how well it collected the fine dust. All I knew was that it was collecting the dog hairs and the dust that was on the floor. That's really the genesis of it. Now, from what I've read, it was an immediate success. You licensed it to the world's largest companies and henceforth amassed this great fortune and influence. Is that how it panned out? I wish. I'm joking, of course. I wish.

Starting point is 00:19:41 No, well, first of all, I offered the idea to the ballberry company and they weren't interested what they actually said was which is something a refrain that i was to hear many many times over the next few years look if there was a better vacuum cleaner one of those big vacuum cleaner companies would have done it so we're not interested in it. So we had a parting of the ways. And I went to see Jeremy Fry, my old mentor, and he agreed to back the development of the vacuum cleaner. And so we had a 50-50 company. And I was able to devote my whole energies on my own to developing the cyclone for use in the vacuum cleaner. I went around to see, there was an expert at Porton Down, which is a very famous chemical warfare establishment in England. The head of that

Starting point is 00:20:30 had written a book on filtration devices, cyclones, electrostatic precipitators, and all that sort of thing. He said, you'll never make it work in a vacuum cleaner because cyclones are only good down to 20 microns. And as I knew, household dust is less than one micron down to half a micron or even less. So that was an interesting challenge. So I went back home, and there are some formulae for making successful cyclones. And I got my old math teacher, who happened to be the husband of my godmother, to help me with the first mass to work out the formulae. So I went through all five of the serious formulae, and I got five different answers. I thought, this is no use. I've got to do this empirically. I've got to develop this myself.

Starting point is 00:21:17 So I started the process of developing a cyclone that would work down to half a micron or less. And that took 5,126 prototypes, failures, before I got the 5,127th, which worked. It sounds tedious, but it was the complete opposite. It was absolutely fascinating, day after day, building maybe one cyclone a day and testing it. I was testing it for dust capture, the ability to capture, retain the dust, and also for the airflow through the cyclone because I didn't want it to be too restrictive. It was fascinating. I'd do an experiment and sometimes it would get better, sometimes it would get worse. But because I only made one change at a time, I knew exactly what it was that had made it better or exactly what it was that made get worse. But because I only made one change at a time, I knew exactly what it was

Starting point is 00:22:06 that had made it better or exactly what it was that made it worse. So it's a process of learning by experimentation. And it wasn't enjoyable every day because failures are not enjoyable necessarily. And I'd come home in the evening covered with dust and tell poor Deidre what had happened that day. And she tried to stay interested as we were getting more and more into debt. And it took three or four years. It was a long haul. How did you pay the bills during that time, keep the lights on at home while you were going through these many, many, many iterations? Jeremy Fry, my partner, as it were, had put up 50% of the money, and I had sold a bit of land I had, my vegetable garden, very productive vegetable garden, to build a house on it. So between us, we had about £60,000, I think it was. And that saw us through three or four years. And then I started getting into debt. Now, I had never thought to ask this, but since you said one change at a time, this begets a question for me, because I think in the minds of many, they might hear 5,000 plus

Starting point is 00:23:19 designs. Each one is totally different. And you've tried 5,000-plus different things, so to speak, sort of holistically speaking. performance. Did you in advance have, say, 100 tests or 200 or 500 that you knew you were going to run in the process of not doing multivariate testing, but sort of changing one small component at a time? Or were you testing one and then deciding on the next four or five? I'm just curious if there was a plan in advance, a schedule of some type for the things you're going to test, such that, I know this is a long question, you knew that you weren't going to do two designs and win the final outcome. It was going to take a period of time

Starting point is 00:24:16 and many, many iterations. Does that question make any sense? Yeah, I've absolutely got it. I'll answer it in a totally different way. The invention is not about being brilliant. It's about being logical and persistent. If you try and do a shortcut and say, oh, if I did it like this with a pipe this diameter and a length here and something here and a thing there, it's going to work. It's going to be brilliant. It's going to work. I know it'll

Starting point is 00:24:40 work. And you do that and it doesn't work. You don't know which of those elements that you incorporated has caused a problem. So you have to start right at the beginning with the most basic, most simple thing, and then make one change and see what effect that has. If you make two changes, you don't know which worked or which didn't work. You don't know anything about it. You only know its performance. You don't know why. So you must only do one change at a time. Now, there can be brilliance in knowing what that one change might be. But although it's tempting to say, well, you know, I wanted to try different lengths. I want to try different angles. I want to try different diameter pipes going in and out. I want to try multi-entries. You know,

Starting point is 00:25:29 there's lots of things I wanted to do, but I had to start right at the beginning and just go one step at a time. You know, every single time you try and jump to the solution, it doesn't work and you've got lost. So you have to go back to concrete, solid ground where you know the result of what you've done, that change you made. I have a question about perseverance because many people listening will hear the story and wonder how and why you continued. But I want to add a little bit of nuance to that just by observing that you have prototyped, designed, produced, and shipped

Starting point is 00:26:16 many, many different products over the years. Some have worked out, some haven't. I'm sure many behind closed doors ultimately were stopped. They were abandoned in some form or fashion because they weren't viable. In this particular case, why did you persist? Had you done some back of the envelope calculations and determined, hey, we have 60,000 pound downside here. The upside, I think, could be tremendous. Therefore, this is worth three to four years of my time. And if it gets to six, I'm going to cut my losses. How did you think about

Starting point is 00:26:53 that? What compelled you to continue? Because you're clearly a very smart guy. You wouldn't just be pounding your head against a brick wall at the end of a dead end. I'd love to hear you comment on that. Yes. I suppose at the beginning, I thought it might take me a year at the most, and not as many as 5,000 prototypes. Ever the optimist. I thought that it would be easier than it was. And that's always true with every development. It's always much, much harder. I still run, actually, do long distance running. I have this thing called, everybody knows about the pain barrier. There's a point three quarters of the way through the race where it's really starting to hurt and you can't see the end and you want to give up.

Starting point is 00:27:37 And you go through that process with every invention, with every technology breakthrough. And it looks brilliant at the end because from where you started and where you've ended up, there's such a difference. There's such a big leap and it's different to anything that's gone before. So it looks like an act of brilliance, but it wasn't.

Starting point is 00:27:57 It was just hard work and it always takes four times as long as you think it will. And it always costs more money. I mean, fortunately, most research and development, until you start using really expensive machinery, it's mostly human effort. And of course, I was putting my human effort into it,

Starting point is 00:28:17 which didn't cost very much. So over the four years, I did get into debt in the end. I mean, huge debt in the end. But what kept me going was that I was making progress. And I was convinced that it was the way vacuum cleaners should be. Vacuum cleaners shouldn't lose suction. It's deeply disappointing and unsatisfactory that they lose suction and lose efficacy. You know, I want to get the housework done quickly and get all that

Starting point is 00:28:45 pesky dust off. You don't want to leave it behind. So I was convinced that, well, I was pretty certain that if I can make it work, people would be interested in it. I didn't know. I mean, I was just assuming that, but like me, they would be annoyed that they're losing performance. It's unsatisfactory. So it was partly that I could see it would make a good product. And partly I wanted to solve the problem. How do you capture this dust? How do you separate dust from air without having a clogging filter in the way? It was a really interesting problem, not for anyone else,

Starting point is 00:29:22 but it was an interesting problem for me to solve, particularly as I'd been told it would never work. That always eggs me on. I was going to say, that seems to be the best way to motivate you. And did you have, this is a full-time occupation, or were you doing other things simultaneously? Or did you have in mind in the back of your head a plan B if this weren't to turn out? I had no plan B. It had to work. I was pinning everything on it, betting the house literally because I had to put the house up as collateral to the bank loan. And I didn't know it would work, but I just hoped that I can make it work. And I was going across the yard every day to the equivalent of my garage. It's actually a coach house, but it's the old-fashioned equivalent of a

Starting point is 00:30:12 garage, working there on my own for two or three years. So you finally, you summit Everest, I'm going to mix all sorts of metaphors here, and you have the new and improved mousetrap. Does the world beat a path to your door? What happens? What unfolds after that point? You know, I had previously run a very successful company making high-speed landing craft. And my partner had run a very successful engineering company making valve actuators. So we both decided we were inventors and designers and not commercial people. So what we decided to do was develop technology, not commercialize it.

Starting point is 00:30:57 So our intention was to go out and license it. And so I spent, well, I suppose about six years, that's slightly longer, trying to license the technology. And no one was beating a path to my door. I was beating a path to their doors, likely people. And they pretty well all turned me down. In fact, all of them. All of them turned me down.

Starting point is 00:31:21 Some started and gave up, but otherwise, total non-acceptance. It's interesting because I suppose I should have given up then. I mean, if the commercial people didn't think it was worth doing, why should I think it's worth doing? The more people who turned me down, the more excited I got because why were they turning it down? Well, they're probably turning it down because they rather like selling bags. And mine didn't have a bag and they made a lot of money. It's the razor blade syndrome, partly because of that. But also, I really noticed that they weren't interested in changing their technology. They wanted to stick with what they had. It's what I call a commodity product. It's not a very exciting product.

Starting point is 00:32:10 They're not skis or surfboards or anything interesting. Vacuum cleaners were a commodity product in which no one had any interest. So I could sort of see why they weren't bothering, because consumers weren't really bothering. It's that thing with a bag that sucks, you know. But I saw it differently. You know, you use it every day, it makes a noise. It's supposed to do an efficient job of getting rid of dust, which is nasty stuff, and keeping it inside the machine, and getting up dog hairs and all the awful things. If it doesn't do that properly, your life is not as pleasant. I saw it as a very important thing. It's a mundane product. It's an apparently boring product, but I thought we should make it interesting. It's an important product. 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 Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced

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Starting point is 00:34:05 which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash tim. The razor blade mention makes me think of one of my friends who's one of the most successful venture capital investors in Silicon Valley. And one of his guiding, I don't want to say theses, that would make it a bit too highfalutin, but one of his heuristics is looking for startups

Starting point is 00:35:01 that for every dollar of revenue they generate, take away $10 of revenue from some incumbent. And so I can see why they would not want to replace their, I suppose, continuity revenue or business model with your technology. When did you finally feel that you were at an inflection point or had gained a handhold with commercial, I suppose, confirmation in any way? I mean, I did have one or two licensees who did start to produce vacuum cleaners. Some gave up. One in Japan continued. But by, well, it was actually 10 or 11 years after I first started developing cyclonic technology, I realized I changed the business plan. Instead of trying to license people, I was fed up with license agreements,

Starting point is 00:36:00 the difficulty of licensing people. That dies becoming a lawyer dealing with license agreements, not an engineer developing technology. I thought, well, look, these competitors clearly don't want to develop new technology. They don't want to bring out a product with a difference. I'm going to do it myself. I didn't want to have to be a manufacturer and someone commercializing it, but I'm going to do it because i really believe in it so put your money where your mouth is dyson and do it we were three engineers at the time and we decided we were going to the business making vacuum cleaners we had no factory no money nothing we're just crammed together in our coach house with a machine shop

Starting point is 00:36:45 underneath. So a couple of quick questions. You believed in it. Now, one could imagine there's some, now in this case, it wasn't supposed to fallacy, but sunk cost fallacy. You're so invested in this that you really want to see it to the end. Did you also have consumer feedback or feedback from friends who had used prototypes that confirmed your belief in the product? Was there some type of market feedback that also contributed to that belief in continuing? I think my friends all thought I was mad and reducing myself and my family into penury. But no, unfortunately not. By the way, I bought out my partner by this point because he'd got fed up with all the failed licensees. And his financial advisors advised him to get out. There was no

Starting point is 00:37:38 future in it. So I bought him out. He must tell that story over some stiff drinks these days, man. Or at least he used to. It's a very friendly parting. And I quite understood out. He must tell that story over some stiff drinks these days, man. Or at least he used to. It's a very friendly parting. And I quite understood it. You know, the vacuum cleaner wasn't his life. It was my life, not his life. So I bought him out for £45,000. And I was on my own.

Starting point is 00:37:59 And in many ways, actually, I mean, he was a huge help. And he was my mentor, a great friend, and a wonderful designer and engineer. I felt a bit lonely going off without him. But on the other hand, it actually made me feel better being completely on my own. It suited me. But I had no idea that whether anyone wanted to buy this product. No idea at all. I hadn't done any market research. And you can't really go and ask someone whether they want to buy a vacuum cleaner that doesn't have a bag, but it's got a strange cyclone instead, and it's got this automatic hose that comes off the bat. You can't get a straight answer to that. It's too easy to think that you can go and ask people whether your product is going to be

Starting point is 00:38:43 successful. It makes me think of the Henry Ford quote, which I'm paraphrasing, but if you ask people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, something along those lines. Exactly. The whole point is you've got to back your own instincts. You can't get help on this. You've got to take the risk. And sometimes you're going to be okay, and sometimes you're not. That's just life's like that. And in a way, that's what makes it exciting. That's what makes it difficult. Yes, certainly, it's living on the knife edge. You don't know.

Starting point is 00:39:17 So, did you have any difficult conversations with your wife at the time? And if so, how were those navigated? How did you approach those? My wife was wonderful. There were no difficult conversations. She believed in it. And she's an artist and was wonderfully supportive, but she understands the need for a project and to create something. The need to create, they need to have a project. So she never once complained, although we were incredibly short of money. We had to grow our own vegetables and she made our clothes. And she was hardworking and wonderfully supportive. There were never any difficult conversations, even when we went along to the bank with a

Starting point is 00:40:01 lawyer to sign endless guarantee forms, putting the house on the line, every penny we had on the line. Wow. I'm very lucky. Well, I hope Sainthood is in our Wikipedia entry. Yes. The retail shop surveys and so on, as I understand, please fact check this, but showed that people didn't want to see their dirt, this dust, dog hairs, etc. That the vacuum cleaners' bins should not be see-through. So why did you decide to design in the way that you did?

Starting point is 00:40:40 When we went to see the retailers to try and sell the vacuum cleaners to retailers, of course, most of them refused to stock it because it was strange looking. You could see the dust. And who on earth is Dyson? You're not Hoover or Electrolux or a big brand. So we're not interested in you. So we, as engineers, we liked seeing the dust. It was incredibly satisfying and fun. You know, if you push the machine around on the floor, making a noise, and you could see the dust collecting in the bin. If it's going into a bag, you can't see that you're doing

Starting point is 00:41:11 anything. And of course, I would say you're not doing much, but at least you can see what you're doing. And you pick up interesting things. Although dirt is disgusting, it's also quite fascinating. So we thought seeing the result of your endeavors was an important part of the process, but nobody else did. And the retailers certainly didn't want their customers to see the dirt. However, one or two brave retailers did take it on. And curiously enough, seeing the dirt was the very thing that customers wanted to have. They wanted that fun, that excitement, that satisfaction, if you like. So again, what you're really asking about is market research.

Starting point is 00:41:54 Is it worth doing? Can you learn from it? And the answer is not much, and you certainly can't rely on it. So again, you have to back yourself. You have to back your own judgment. It's not a science. You have to believe you're right and back it. And hopefully, you're right more times than you're wrong. With those few intrepid retailers who are willing to take a risk, I'm wondering what their risk was. Did they actually buy from you at wholesale and then stock? Did they take them on consignment or some type of other arrangement?

Starting point is 00:42:32 And what was the pricing of your vacuum compared to others in the stores? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Well, I'll do it in pounds, but the comparison works for dollars. I mean, we were selling ours at just under 200 pounds, whereas most vacuum cleaners were 50 pounds. So we were three to four times the price of everybody else. I think the retailers didn't take it because it looked different and because we weren't a brand. The one or two who did take it were mail order catalog companies. They were our first customers. They're not the most highbrow of retailers. They're quite lowbrow, which is a very interesting thing, actually, because what I discovered, and life has confirmed it since, is that the richer you are, the less interested you are in

Starting point is 00:43:27 vacuuming. The poorer you are, the more important vacuuming is to you. Probably the more house proud you are because you actually do the vacuuming. So I think there's an assumption that because the vacuum cleaner is expensive, it's bought by people with money. And whilst that might be true, there's also a great deal of interest from people who don't have much money. And it's a very important purchase for them. That's fascinating. Interestingly, it's recession proof. If there's a recession, you stop having expensive holidays. And instead, you think more about your home. And of course, during the pandemic, that's been utterly true, that if you're confined at home, good filtration in your home, good vacuuming is very, very important.

Starting point is 00:44:12 Do you remember the terms of the deal with those retailers? Were you dropshipping? Were they taking inventory on and then giving you net 200 terms? Well, I decided in my own simplistic terms that they should put their money where their mouth is, so they should buy for stock. We've never, ever done consignment. Never done that. You need a retailer who believes as you believe,

Starting point is 00:44:37 who's backing your idea, and who's putting effort and money and care into it. So most people, I think, would describe Dyson, or in their mind's eye, see Dyson as a premium brand. This is, in some cases, probably in almost all cases, an expensive, relatively expensive brand. I've read a quote of yours, which is, and again, please feel free to fact check, can't trust everything you read on the internet, I don't design down to a price. So I would just love to hear how you think about finding and solving problems, picking

Starting point is 00:45:12 your problems, and then when you go into product development, how you approach it if price is not one of the determining factors or a primary determining factor. There are people who design to a price. And I absolutely see that there's probably a huge market for that. And that's a perfectly valid thing to do. But I want to design something that works really well and that lasts and uses new technology and improves the performance all the time. That's what I'm after. It's not that I don't care about cost or price. I really care about cost or price, but I want to incorporate the technology that makes it work well

Starting point is 00:45:52 or does a job more efficiently or uses less electricity, whatever it is. And often, of course, new technology, for example, we've developed new technology high-speed motors, but they cost four times as much as the old motor but they're much more efficient much lighter use less electricity and use fewer materials so it is the future but initially they cost four times the price we've now gotten down a bit so they're about twice the price so i'm not trying to do a cheap product. I'm trying to do a product that works very well and advances that genre from a technology point of view.

Starting point is 00:46:32 Who are some, actually, before I get to who are some, you already mentioned, I think, one figure who may have been influential in your thinking, Buckminster Fuller. For those who don't know that name, you can Google buckyballs, geodesic domes, tensegrity. These are some terms that'll take you down the rabbit hole of Buckminster Fuller. Who is Accio Morita? And what did you appreciate about him? The wonderful thing about Accio, just one story which really says a lot about him. The wonderful thing about Acker, just one story, which really says a lot about him. Think of the Walkman and how that has changed everybody's life. But his company didn't want to do the Walkman because it wouldn't record. I mean, up until 1982 or whatever it was,

Starting point is 00:47:20 a tape recorder was a tape recorder. It did recordings. Aki and Marisa bought out a tape recorder that didn't record. It played back only. And his own company thought it was completely mad. That's brilliance. You know, that takes balls to say, I'm going to bring out a product that doesn't do what people think it's going to do, but it's going to enlighten their lives. And has it enlightened their lives it's extraordinary the iPod almost the iPhone almost everything's come for mp3 players they've all come from that one idea that you want to play back

Starting point is 00:47:55 are there any other inventors designers engineers who stood out to you when you were developing your chops, or who really stand out to you currently? Maybe one and the same. I always admired Citroën. Not as Citroën are now, but as they used to be. When they developed new technology, hydropneumatic suspension, with a hydraulic system that did the steering, the brakes, and the suspension, or four-wheel wheel suspension interconnected suspension and an aerodynamic car i mean they they were 50 60 years

Starting point is 00:48:33 ahead of the rest of the car industry so i enormously admired them sony of course who developed one of her technology developed the first first, actually, they got the lithium-ion technology from Oxford University, but first commercialized and produced lithium-ion batteries. Sony have a whole string of technology developments to their name. Equally, I admired Mr. Honda of Honda, not because necessarily he did brilliant inventions, but because he was the master of iterative improvement he was never satisfied he was always making maybe little changes at a time but in the end all those little changes added up to a quantum leap so a honda i mean a honda lawnmower was the first lawnmower i ever had, which always started first time. Even after the

Starting point is 00:49:26 winter, with the old petrol from the previous season left in it, I could guarantee, and I used to bet people, that I'll go over there and one pull on the cord and it'll start. So I admire Honda for a slightly different reason. He makes what, they look like big inventions, but they're not. They're iterative improvements. And that's something to never forget. You must never be satisfied. Always be dissatisfied. Always be unhappy about your product. Keep on making it better and better. It's a life of unhappiness. Then I've got Frank Whittle, who developed the jet engine. And that's a great story, because no one believed in him. He wrote the theory of the jet engine in a sort of child's exercise book when he was at Cranfield University. He was an RAF fitter,

Starting point is 00:50:13 actually. He used to make models, left school when he was 15, got into Cranfield and then went to Cambridge. And while he was at Cambridge, he got a first class, his first both triposes, as well as built the world's first jet engine. And I've never seen an engineer get things right first time like he did. We've in fact got one of the very first engines he did. It's called a Welland. And I bought it off someone, an enthusiast, who had found it and had done it up. But it never worked very well. The fuel system didn't work. And my engineers discovered that the fuel system was a Rolls-Royce system, not a Whittle design system. So we rebuilt the fuel system from Whittle's drawings. And it worked perfectly. And it works perfectly every time,

Starting point is 00:51:06 whereas the Rolls-Royce one didn't. So I've got huge, huge admiration for him. I mean, that was an extraordinary development. I mean, turning an engine that had 12,000 moving parts, you know, the Spitfire engine, the air engines at the time had all these moving parts, were hugely vulnerable, had to have cooling and, you know, one bullet through the cooling pipe and planes had it, dives and the pilot has to bail out. So, he turned it into one moving part. It's just brilliance, breathtaking brilliance. It's very elegant, very, very elegant. Now, actually, it's as good a segue as any. I recall the first time I used the air blade. And please forgive me if this is simplistic, and please correct me if I'm getting

Starting point is 00:51:52 this description wrong. But where the air is acting like a blade, almost like a squeegee on a windshield, pulling the water off of your hands as opposed to trying to evaporate it. And I think everyone's had the experience of using these sort of gas station bathroom or airport bathroom drying devices that feel like a kitten farting on your hand. I mean, they do nothing. So you just end up wiping it all over your hair or your clothing or something like that. How did you pick that as a product category? Was it just one of 600 that you tried within Dyson and it was the one that happened to work? Could you walk us through the process of developing the Airblade? We were trying to use Airblaze, which is a very sharp blade of air for another project. And it wasn't quite good enough for what, I can't tell you what the project is, it's top secret, but it wasn't quite good

Starting point is 00:52:53 enough for what we were doing. But we noticed as you ran it across your hand, it rippled your skin. So we chucked water on our hands and saw that it scraped, as you said, just like a squeegee, but it's not physical. It's just air, just like a squeegee. So we thought, well, that'd make a great hand dryer. And of course, we looked at hand dryers and how they work is they have a three kilowatt heater as well as a vacuum blower, a vacuum cleaner motor blower. So they're three and a half thousand watts, very expensive to run. Whereas our blade was only costing us 700 watts. And what's more, the thing about the hot air is it chaps your hands. It's trying to, as you said, evaporate

Starting point is 00:53:40 the water, turn the water on your hands into steam, which is a very expensive process. And it takes a long time. And also, it leaves your hands chapped. It removes the oils from your skin, as do paper towels. We thought, well, this makes a really good hand dryer. So we made a hand dryer. It so happened that this was the first application of the new technology motor we're developing. So we developed a motor that went 120,000 RPM instead of the normal 30,000 RPM.

Starting point is 00:54:15 120,000 RPM, by the way, is very fast. I mean, a jet engine is 15,000 RPM. And a Formula One engine is about 19,000 at maximum. We were taking electric motors from 30,000 up to 120,000. And in a hand dryer, not a sophisticated product, in a hand dryer and a vacuum cleaner, it gave us great airflow, great pressure. And pressure was important for this air blade. Was that the first product, and I simply don't know, was that the first product and i simply don't know was that the first product that was sold to i don't know if this is the right term but industrial clients as opposed to end user individuals or had you already developed a sales channel for that type of product no not at all we didn't do a business plan

Starting point is 00:55:01 and by the way i don't think restaurant owners would like to be called industrial partners. But yes, you're quite right. I'm teasing. You're quite right. Yes, you're right. It's the first time we were not sending to people at home. And I mean, to be honest, I don't feel very comfortable about that. But I think it's a great product. Why don't you feel comfortable with that? Because I really want to be honest, I don't feel very comfortable about that, but I think it's a great product. Why don't you feel comfortable with that? Because I really want to make products for people at home that we all use at home. The good thing is that we use them in a railway station or an airport or restaurant or wherever it is.

Starting point is 00:55:37 At least ordinary people use, people like us use it. But I'm far happier when I'm dealing direct with people at home. with the device so they could justify the higher upfront price by amortizing it over a relatively short period of time and recouping that investment? Was that the basic pitch or was there more to it? Well, that wasn't the basic pitch. The basic pitch was it's a very pleasant and quick way to dry your hands without the waste of paper and without the excessive heat of hot air hand dryers, which are very slow anyway and ineffective. And the wonderful thing about our hand dryers is you never run out of paper. I mean, how many times have you gone to try and get a paper out of a paper towel holder and it's not there? And the other thing is, it's quite difficult to dry all your hands

Starting point is 00:56:45 and dry under your fingernails with a towel, whereas ours does that. So it's hygienic, it's quick, and it's reasonably pleasurable. You're not damaging your hands, you're not taking the nice oils out of your hands and you're getting under your fingernails. It's slightly noisy. We've got them a bit quieter now but actually an architectural practice said they liked the fact that it was noisy because when one of their partners went to the laboratory you could tell whether they washed their hands or not that's great the lie detection device and the hand dryer all in one hey you never know when harry's not going to wash his hands you got to keep an eye out for harry if he comes out of the literature and you

Starting point is 00:57:31 haven't heard the noise keep away from him so the airblade at least from the outside looking in seems to have been a huge success could you you share any of your favorite failures? And these are devices that actually made it out of the shop and into the real world. Do you have any favorite failures? What I mean by that is a device that was not a commercial success, but that offered many lessons or perhaps learnings that led to successes in other areas or later? Does anything come to mind? We only really have one, which is our washing machine. But I don't call it a failure because I think it's a great washing machine. But our mistake was to sell it too cheaply. We didn't charge enough for it in the first place

Starting point is 00:58:25 because it has two drums, two motors, a clutch, and very big capacity in a small, normal size of washing machine. So it's very expensive to make. I mean, more than double the cost to make of an ordinary washing machine. But it was much better. So it could take a very big load. It washed very quickly with low temperature water because it was introducing proper action.

Starting point is 00:58:51 We discovered that if you dried washing with your hands in just a few minutes, you could wash better than you could in a washing machine in an hour and a half or however long they take. We also discovered that cashmere shrinks because of the time it's in the water and the temperature of the water so if you could do a low temperature wash and do it quickly and do it thoroughly it's a better washing machine so ours was much better at washing than a conventional washing machine with its action and we should have charged a lot more for

Starting point is 00:59:24 it that's the one and only time i've ever listened to the marketing department who said a conventional washing machine with its action. And we should have charged a lot more for it. One and only time I've ever listened to the marketing department who said, if you charge less, you will sell more. Actually, we charged less and sold fewer. But we were losing so much money on each one, the board decided to stop it. And that was probably a mistake with hindsight. I mean, we should have put the price back up and carried on with it. It was a big project. I mean, a washing machine. And we were up against people who had been making washing machines for years and years with a much lower

Starting point is 00:59:56 cost base. We were starting from scratch with a high cost base. So actually, much the same thinking occurred with the car at a much later date, the development of our car. We ran into the same sort of problem, different commercial issues, but the same sort of problem as a startup in that business. Our costs were so much higher than an incumbent, than the existing competitors. I mean, I'm still using them. And everybody who bought one thinks it's a much better washing machine. It's very disappointing we've stopped making it. But we lost a lot of money on it, and it was a commercial failure, but I think an engineering success.

Starting point is 01:00:36 In the case of N526, the electric car, going into it, I would imagine you were aware that, compared to incumbents who had the infrastructure in place, distribution channels, etc., that you would be fighting an uphill battle with respect to costs and many other things, per unit prices, etc. Why did you decide to pursue it? Going back to 2013, 2014, when we started, only Tesla was bothering to produce electric cars, and they were in the very early phase. The rest of the industry was taking no notice. And all the projections by the industry and by commentators were that by 2030, only 3% of global cars would be electric. So no one was bothering to change. And the incumbents had heavily committed to diesel, petrol engines, and existing technology. We thought, well,

Starting point is 01:01:32 we're starting from scratch. We're not committed to anything. We can do what we like, rather as Tesla has done. We've got a lot of very, very clever and intelligent motor engineers. We're developing new technology batteries. We do a lot with air treatment, taking out pollution, heating it and cooling it. And that's really what a car is. It's an electric motor, it's batteries, and you've got to do a lot with air efficiently, very efficiently, because you've only got battery power,

Starting point is 01:02:04 so you don't want to waste your battery on heating or cooling the car. So we thought we were quite well-placed to do a car, although we'd never done one before. No other manufacturers were being interested in it. We knew that batteries were far more expensive. Batteries plus electric motors, plus the electronics to control them, electric motors and the battery management system. It's far more expensive than an internal combustion engine, as Tesla has proved, actually. Even with relatively small battery packs, a Tesla is a very expensive car to make.

Starting point is 01:02:37 However, we saw that the lack of interest from the incumbents, the rest of the motor industry, gave us an opportunity, as which, indeed, Tesla has taken advantage of. And we thought that we could do one that was at the top end. Quite what the top end was, we didn't know back in 2014. All that changed with Dieselgate. And Dieselgate happened in 2016, 2017. And those people making large quantities of diesel engines got into real trouble, the way out of the trouble from a PR point of view, and I suppose by that stage, they saw which way the wind was blowing, that they had to get into electric vehicles fast.

Starting point is 01:03:22 So they had to spend a lot of money, completely turn their business around upside down and produce electric vehicles fast. So they had to spend a lot of money, completely turn their business around upside down and produce electric vehicles. And that's fine. That meant we would have had competition. We weren't particularly worried. Well, one's always worried about competition, but we thought there would still be space for us. But what was happening was that the electrical vehicles they were producing, they were producing at a loss. Not happy to do that, they were able to do that because they were selling across their fleet. They have to produce certain, have certain NOx and SOx emissions. So if they had an electric car at one end producing none, they could produce gas guzzling big SUVs at the other end on which they

Starting point is 01:04:05 make a lot of money. But overall, they were able to do that without having to buy carbon credits. So I could see that we were going to have to compete against people who were making electric cars at a loss. And I don't want to get into Tesla too much, but Tesla earns quite a lot by selling its carbon credits to other car manufacturers. And they have well-heeled investors. They've been through $25 billion. I don't have $25 billion. I'm privately financed. I have to make the money I spend on product development. I can't take that sort of risk. So by about 2018, 2019, when we stopped it, it became apparent that it just simply wouldn't work commercially. Plus the fact that our costs,

Starting point is 01:04:54 coming back to that point I made earlier about the washing machine, our costs to make a car, even without the complications of the battery management system, batteries and so on, would be 50% higher than a BMW or a Mercedes car, or a Volkswagen car production costs. So it was just too risky for us. We would have to charge Aston Martin-style prices

Starting point is 01:05:18 for a very good car with a 600-mile range and quite a big car as well with good off-road capability, but it was just too much of a risk. Are there any features of the car that you're particularly proud of or that you would hope to see in the world someday at scale? Curiously, I was a friend of Alex Moulton, who did the first small wheel bicycle with suspension. You know what I mean? I don't know what you mean, if you wouldn't mind. He developed the Mini with Alex Isagonis. One of the principles of the Mini was that it had

Starting point is 01:05:57 very small wheels. The advantage of small wheels is that they don't create a big wheel arch inside the car. So you can make a very small car where the wheel arches don't protrude much into the car. So there's room for four big add-ons. And he carried on, but you have to pump the tires up harder because the wheel is very small. So he then developed a very small wheel bicycle

Starting point is 01:06:21 called the Molten Bicycle, which had very small wheels and you have to pump the tires up incredibly hard. But to overcome the harshness of the ride, he put rubber suspension on it. He was also the person who developed the suspension for the Mini. And I knew all about that and he was a friend of mine. And I actually took the opposite view, that the car should have huge wheels. And the reason for that is that a large wheel has less motion resistance. And so it's much more efficient. And that's efficiency for an electric car is all important.

Starting point is 01:06:58 So the ability to move along and have the least resistance is what you want. So I discovered the biggest wheel that you could make where you could replace a tire at a tire depot. Because obviously you can't do a wheel where you can't replace a tire at a tire depot. I discovered what that was. So our car had huge wheels. I mean, they're nearly a meter in diameter. They're huge.

Starting point is 01:07:25 That was to reduce the motion resistance, but actually it gave a lot of unexpected benefits. So it was better at road holding. It was a more comfortable car because of it. You could, relative to the size of the hub, the center of the wheel, you could actually have quite a big tyre, which made it comfortable. And because it had a relatively narrow aspect ratio, it was better in snow and mud. A fat tyre is very slippery in snow and mud, whereas a thin one has much more grip and is less likely to aquaplane. And when it came to developing the suspension and the road holding, it also turned out to be excellent as well. We had to develop a special tyre for it. And again, I mean, we were very ambitious.

Starting point is 01:08:15 We developed our own chassis. And if you know anything about making cars, the most expensive and important part of a car is the chassis. We decided that we looked around and see if there was any car company's chassis that we could buy, but none of them fitted with our big wheels and spacing apart our big wheels, putting them on the four corners of the vehicle. There wasn't a chassis like that. So we had to develop our own chassis. That was a development cost. I didn't mind that. But I mean, Tesla, for example, didn't develop their own chassis. They went and bought a Lotus one. And in fact, Lotus built their first chassis basic car initially. But we decided not to do that. I did pile on the cost of it, but I think it made back to privately held. Privately held company. This makes what you do and what you've done all the more interesting and impressive to me. I'm much more familiar with the venture-backed startup ecosystem and the roadmap for such a company that involves raising, in some cases, as you mentioned, billions of dollars

Starting point is 01:09:25 of funding, sometimes tens of billions, then going public and so on and so forth. Have you ever been tempted to become anything other than privately held? When I did the Ball Barrier Company, I borrowed money. And then because I couldn't ball barrier company, I borrowed money. And then because I couldn't pay it back, I got some investors in. So I became a company. I only had 30% of the shares. So there were other directors. And I found that an uncomfortable position.

Starting point is 01:10:02 So when I started the vacuum cleaner company, I did go out to venture capitalists. They were called then. I mean, it would now be called private equity, but they were called venture capitalists. And I discovered that I was completely useless at raising money. So I hugely admire people who can go to these people and raise money. I was hopeless at it. None of them would back me. It was during the early 90s, during the big, there was a really big recession in the early 90s, in many ways, much bigger recession, the 2008 recession. And the banks had repossessed, were repossessing houses left, right and center. I mean, it was a really terrible crash. I hadn't really approached a clearing bank, which is my normal way of borrowing money. What is a clearing bank?

Starting point is 01:10:42 A clearing bank is, we call them high street banks. So it's banks that lend to consumers predominantly. So the one you'd find in a street where you can go and deposit money and hopefully take some money out. They got me left. So in desperation, I went to the bank that I banked with. And at first they said no, because I wanted to borrow about 400,000 pounds, which is quite a lot of money back in the early 90s. And my bank manager then appealed to the ombudsman within the head office of the bank. And he managed to persuade them to lend me the money. I had to put up the house as security. But this is a time when they didn't want the houses as security

Starting point is 01:11:29 because they got themselves very unpopular for chucking people out of houses. And they had a huge number of houses on their books. In fact, my particular bank became an estate agent in order to try and sell off the houses that it had. So I was absolutely shocked and stunned when they agreed to lend me the money. When I cleared the debt and the relationship was on a more even basis with the bank, I did ask the bank manager why he lent me the money. And he said, well, I went home and asked my wife what she thought of a vacuum cleaner without a bag. And she said, I hate bags. And he said, I saw that you fought a very long lawsuit in the United States, so I could see you had determination. So those were the arguments I used within the bank. It was actually really encouraging. It's a good bank story. There are very few good bank stories, and this is one of them. Why did you find it uncomfortable to take on investors and end up with 30% of the company?

Starting point is 01:12:27 What about that made you uncomfortable? I didn't think it would make me uncomfortable, but it did. And the reason it made me uncomfortable is that you are, if someone else has put money in and if someone else has shares, you have to listen to them. Well, I felt I had to listen to them. So you're not actually running the company. You're sharing the running of the company. And a lot of decisions will be decisions that they want, quite rightly, because they've put a lot of money into it. And so you spend a lot of your time wondering about whether this latest idea you have, they'll approve of, and

Starting point is 01:13:04 you have to go and get their permission, and it has to be done through the auspices of a board meeting. I'd done that. I was director of a public company selling the high-speed landing craft, that engineering company. Then I had my own company, I had a 30% share in it. And then finally, I was in a position where I could have my own company and make my own decisions. And during the time that I'd been developing the technology before I decided to go into manufacturing and commercialize the invention in the early 90s, I actually discovered I liked relying on myself rather than having to be collegiate and share decisions with somebody else. Because it was all down to me.

Starting point is 01:13:46 And so the whole risk was mine. I'd evaluate the risk myself and work it out myself. And I just found that a much easier way for me to work. I'm not like that now, I hasten to add. I've matured a bit and now we do run the company on a collegiate basis. But in the beginning, it was really important and crucial to me that all the decisions I was making on the fly, all the decisions I was making, I was making for me because I thought it was the right thing to do. That's quite a good way to approach things anyway, I think. I hated being part of a public company, which I was in my first job. So I knew what that was like. And the shareholders are always out of tune with what

Starting point is 01:14:33 is actually happening in the company, not through any fault of their own, but they can't see into the future like we could as employees of the company. Meaning you had to, at least I'm more familiar with the US, but you were captive to the quarter by quarter expectations of shareholders who could not, did not have transparency into the five or 10 year plans of the company itself. Is that what you mean? Pretty much that. I mean, there's no reason why they should believe the gleam in our eye or the new technology, the new product we're developing. They look at what you're like at the moment, who you are and what you're like at the moment and what you're talking about in the future. But it always seemed to be out of kilter.

Starting point is 01:15:20 When we were doing well, the share price was down. When the share price was up, we were doing badly. And it just seemed to be out of kilter. Again, you know, you're not on your own. You're not making decisions because you believe they're the right decisions. You're making them for, sometimes, other reasons. What it looks like, transparently or whatever, you know, or what shareholders might think of it. It's just much better to be one track minded

Starting point is 01:15:50 and just thinking entirely about the product. We develop and make products. That's what we do. It's very, in a sense, it's a very simple thing that we do. And it's the product that's important. It's not who I am or what the company is or what it looks like that's important. It's the product going am or what the company is or what it looks like that's important. Is the product going to excite people and do the job properly? That's what matters. That's all that

Starting point is 01:16:12 matters, actually. It's not completely true because, of course, employees matter, enthusing employees matter, and looking after employees, all that matters. But for all of us who are working here, what really matters is that our product works in the marketplace. I would imagine also happy, motivated employees and so on. Talented employees are, in a sense, a byproduct of good products. And then they further help to create good products in the sense that a lot of these things cascade down from a product focus. And you have had a tremendous, just a tremendous run. And certainly you have many more things ahead of you. How did you decide to commit your energies to your new book, Invention, A Life? This is certainly a commitment of time and energy. How did you decide

Starting point is 01:17:05 to focus your energies, at least in part, on that? Partly because I just wish there were more engineers. I just wish that more young people would find engineering fascinating, interesting, and worthwhile. And I think it's particularly true now because everybody's talking about global warming. Everybody's talking about using fewer resources, recyclability, and all these sort of things, using less energy, less water. And it's engineers that can make that happen. It's the engineers that can make the world a clean world, a world using less energy,

Starting point is 01:17:40 a world using fewer resources, and a world recycling things. Engineers and scientists can solve those problems. But the pity is that schoolchildren and even people at university don't realize that. People would rather talk about it than do something about it. And I think that's a great shame. So I do think that a lot of people think engineering is hard and difficult, that science is hard and difficult. And of course, perhaps it is, but it's also very creative and is not brilliant at all, through really caring about products, caring about technology, caring about engineering, can produce products that save energy, that use fewer resources, and that work better. Hopefully to achieve what young people want to achieve now.

Starting point is 01:18:42 I mean, young people want these things. They want cures for horrible diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. They want products that use less energy, that generate electricity in a clever way. If I could show that I, as a simple person, not having done classics at school, could turn my hand to doing some of those things,

Starting point is 01:19:02 that maybe other people would think that engineering wasn't this difficult, hard thing that seemed impossible. When you look at something like the Walkman or an iPhone or, to some extent, Dyson vacuum cleaner, it's inaccessible to young people and products are becoming more and more inaccessible. As a school child, you look at an iPhone or any piece of clever technology, a jet engine or whatever it is, you don't know how it works. And you don't believe that you could ever design one of those or design a better one. But actually, you can. You really can. And that's what I wanted this book to try and show, that it is young people who will solve today's and tomorrow's problems. And we can solve them, by the way, without having to make life

Starting point is 01:19:53 miserable for all of us. It isn't just the few people who are attracted to engineering who can do it. Many more of us can do it if we can be motivated to do so. And if we can overcome this feeling that it's impossible and that we don't understand it, there's almost an inverse snobbery about technology. There's almost a pride that I don't know how to hang a picture or mend a car, whatever it is. It's almost a mark of intellectual superiority. Whereas I think the obverse, I think it's a mark of lack of intellectual curiosity, not to be able to take something to bits and mend it or not be able to perform a, you know, mend a washing machine or dishwasher, whatever it is. I think it's a shame that you're not interested in solving that problem, in repairing it.

Starting point is 01:20:46 That's really what the book is about. And the timing is because I've been bemoaning the lack of engineers for many years and continuously going to the government saying, you know, we're not producing enough engineers. Until finally, the minister in charge of education said, well, start your own university. Stop complaining and start your own university. And he was bringing through a bill through the Houses of Parliament which allowed anyone, not anyone, but someone who was able to

Starting point is 01:21:16 and with the necessary resources and so on, to start their own university. So I took on the challenge of starting our own university. And the reason I did it was that we almost exclusively recruit graduates at Dyson. And that's what I've always done because I believe in recruiting people with enthusiasm, lack of knowledge, lack of experience, people who are not afraid to make mistakes, not afraid to try a new path. So we've been recruiting all these graduates over many years. Why not recruit undergraduates?

Starting point is 01:21:54 And I only did it because, well, because of that, because we have a very young corpus anyway, but also because we cover a very broad field of engineering. I mean, everything from mechanical engineering right through to software and robotics and artificial intelligence. So we have a huge number of disciplines here. And I wouldn't have done it if we had a very narrow field. But because our field was so broad, I felt we could offer the students a good experience. Just for clarity, this is the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology? Yes, yes. Which has, by the way, just got university status. So we'll shortly be calling ourselves a university. We've won university status. I was also horrified, actually, that the amount of money young people have to borrow

Starting point is 01:22:34 in order to go to university for living expenses and the fees they have to pay. So at the very point in their life when they want to get married and buy a car and buy a house and live normally, they're sad in theory and learning from what I think are the best scientists in the world, best engineers in the world at Dyson. They would have wonderful mentors, wonderful hands, but not academic lecturers at university. They would have hands-on battery development scientists, electric motor scientists, software people, artificial intelligence and robotics people.

Starting point is 01:23:23 All these people are here. And they can talk to them and learn from them and experience all those fields and decide with much more knowledge what they want to do. And in fact, half of them are becoming software engineers because the world needs so many software engineers and they find software fascinating. And the others want to do mechanical engineering

Starting point is 01:23:44 or electrical engineering. It's actually been a very happy experiment. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. And I think students have as well. So the timing of the book is because, sorry, this is a really long story. It's our first year, it's a four-year course and our first year has just graduated and the graduation ceremony will be in September. So I wanted the book to come out at that time. And the theme of the book is really that you don't have to be an expert. And in fact, experts are often unhelpful. You have to have enthusiasm, curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, and determination. And those are the things that will solve all the world's problems. Well, I'm very excited on multiple fronts to see what you,

Starting point is 01:24:32 what the university, what this book does. And as you just said, I think it will foster all of those things you just mentioned, including the book, will foster more engineers, will encourage more people to embrace engineering. But above and beyond that, it will help people through your stories, through your lessons learned, through the principles reflected in the book to think like an engineer and to become more curious, ask better questions, even if they don't have, even if they will never have any formal engineering training. That's certainly true for me. I didn't study classics, but I majored in East Asian Studies, which has about as much application to engineering as would classics.

Starting point is 01:25:20 And still in the process of preparing for this conversation and reading more about you, looking at the book, was struck by just how cross-disciplinary and how adaptable many of the principles are in the book to include and not exclude also those people who might look at themselves as hopeless liberal arts majors or something along those lines. So I'm excited for it. I always think the best questions are naive questions, which is why I love employing students or graduates and students, because they start you off on a different train. Because the trouble with experience is you know how to do things. Well, I mean, you know how to do some things. And experience is a baggage that can get in the way.

Starting point is 01:26:07 What you need is someone saying, why? Why is it like that? Why do you have to do it like that? And it stops you dead in your tracks. And so it forces you to not follow the path that everybody else follows. And students and graduates have no fear of pioneering. They've got nothing to lose. One thing I hope that we encourage here

Starting point is 01:26:32 is that failure is not a failure. If you go on doing the same thing and making the same mistake, that's not a good idea. But failing once or twice in trying to do one thing is okay. Nothing wrong with that. We all learn from that. You know, I don't think they teach that enough at school or at university for that matter. I mean, at Cambridge, for example, they didn't have a

Starting point is 01:26:57 machine shop and an assembly shop where the students could do their own projects. They didn't have that. It was all theoretical. And actually, we gave Cambridge some money to build a workshop so that students could build their ideas. Through building things and using your hands, actually building your prototypes. I mean, our engineers at Dyson build their own prototypes. They build their own test rigs. And it's through

Starting point is 01:27:25 that building of the test rig and the prototype, don't give it to someone else to build, to an assistant to build, you go and build it yourself. And it's through the building of the prototype and the testing it yourself that, of course, you see you experience the failure, but you learn how you might change it and improve it. That's what I saw, you see, through my 5,127 prototypes. Each prototype I built myself and tested myself. And it was through that total involvement that my brain started to think, how do I solve that problem? How do I solve that problem?

Starting point is 01:28:02 And funnily enough, it's the actual making it with your own hands is terribly important. And, you know, we were given hands and a brain, and you should use both at the same time. What's wrong with that? It's not, using your hands is not a lowly activity. It's useful. Man's always done it. I can't recall the exact expression, but how our tools shape us, and that's only true. Or I suppose it's always true, but it means that perhaps you should use a tool other than a keyboard sometimes. Yes, very much so. Very much so. But we're all slaves to it, aren't we?

Starting point is 01:28:48 Well, I am extremely excited about the book everyone again the book is invention subtitle a life and i have one more question before we go before we wrap up this first conversation and sometimes this question is a dead end and i'll take the blame for that if it is but I like to ask it nonetheless. And that is, if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, on which you could put any quote, could be yours, someone else's, any phrase, word, image, question, anything at all, to impart a message to many people, what might you put on that billboard? Well, I'd probably put two messages. One is there's nothing wrong in always being dissatisfied, always look for improvement. And the other is drop your fear of failure. Don't be afraid of failure. So am I allowed two billboards? You are allowed two billboards.

Starting point is 01:29:46 I hope we haven't gone down a dead end. God forbid that we go down a dead end. Well, you know, I guess I would be on theme. We could have just asked another question. I could have changed that question and asked it again and iterated. But we happened to get it right the first time, like the jet engine, which is an incredible story. I'd never heard that before. Yes.

Starting point is 01:30:06 And what an enjoyable conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you very much. Really good questions. Enjoyable questions. And perhaps someday we'll get to see you in person across the pond. But in the meantime, I wish you tremendous luck with everything that you're engaged with, which is a lot, including the launch of the book.

Starting point is 01:30:27 Everyone should check it out. Invention, subtitle, Life. Sir James Dyson, thank you again for taking the time and being so thoughtful in your answers. I really think people will benefit from this. And to everyone listening, we will have show notes with links to all resources, all people, everything mentioned in this episode as usual at tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, get your hands dirty, experiment often, ask why, why, why, and thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

Starting point is 01:31:06 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 before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email 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.

Starting point is 01:31:28 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 before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.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 episode is brought to you by Theragun. I have two Theraguns and they're worth their weight in gold. I've been using them every single day. Whether you're an elite athlete or just a regular person trying to get through your

Starting point is 01:32:15 day, muscle pain and muscle tension are real things. That's why I use the Theragun. I use it at night. I use it after workouts. It is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. So for instance, at night, I might use it on the bottom of my feet. It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend use it up and down the middle of my back and I'll use it on her. It's an easy way for us to actually trade massages in effect and you can think of it in fact as massage reinvented on some level helps with performance helps with recovery helps with just getting your back to feel better before bed after you've been sitting for way too many hours

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Starting point is 01:34:12 and traditional financial and wealth management products. They're creating innovative products to advance the digital asset ecosystem for both individual and institutional investors, and its platform now manages more than $12 billion in assets. Full disclosure, I became excited enough about this company that I ended up becoming an investor. But moving on, BlockFi, that's B-L-O-C-K-F-I, offers a wide spectrum of services, and I'll mention just a few here. First, their BlockFi Rewards Visa Signature Credit Card provides an easy way to earn more Bitcoin because you can earn 3.5% in Bitcoin back on all purchases in your first three months and 1.5% forever after with no annual fee. Second, BlockFi also lets clients, that would be you, easily buy or sell cryptocurrencies,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #530: Sir James Dyson — Founder of Dyson and Master Inventor on How to Turn the Mundane into Magic

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #530: Sir James Dyson — Founder of Dyson and Master Inventor on How to Turn the Mundane into Magic

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