Anti-Business Billionaires: Lessons from Steve Jobs, James Dyson, and Yvon Chouinard

0:00They're like, would you be interested in selling your company? The response was, fuck you. This is a family heirloom.

0:17Okay, so what we're talking about today is basically, I don't listen to any business podcasts other than Founders. It's the only business podcast I listen to. I listen to Founders and I listen to MMA and True Crime. That's pretty much it. And so like I view you as my friend, but I also am a fan of yours. And you tweeted out this amazing thing. It was about the anti-business person, the anti-businessman billionaire. So the first tenant of these anti-business billionaires is they have high levels of disagreeableness. This is very important because everybody around you, I just used a reference of Michael Dell.

0:55Michael Dell could be on this list too. I'm reading his autobiography, like I said earlier, and I got to the point where they're Like he's he's taking the company private and they're just it's so difficult what he's trying to do. And it was just like, why don't you just give up, Michael? You're already rich. You can start another company. He's like, I don't want to start another company. I want this. This is my first and last company. In his case, like that's very rare to have your first company, your last company. This is my last company. But he has a line. He goes, I'm going to care about this company after I'm dead.

1:20It's like, oh, that's a different level. So the disagreeableness, like if we use the three people in the clip, which is like Steve Jobs, James Dyson and Yvonne Chouinard. It's just like they are hell bent on making the they don't bend to the world, right? They make the world bend to them. And they refuse to compromise on the product quality, even when it seems absurd. And like James Dyson, I got to tell you a crazy story about James Dyson, because, you know, everybody's like, oh, yeah, Dyson, the guy that like I wash my hands and like dries my it's a hand dryer in the bathroom everywhere. And it's that cyclonic vacuum cleaner.

1:50It's like, no, the guy has built one of the most successful companies of all time. I think it's one of the largest privately owned companies in the world. You want to hear some crazy? So there's always rumors, right? And again, privately held, so you don't have to tell. And everybody's like, oh yeah, you know, he's probably worth like 10 or 20 billion. I was like, you're off by like a lot. So a friend of mine happens to know somebody that works for it. And usually you can find hints, you know, if you look at their family office, right? And a friend of mine knows somebody at the family office where they're just like, man, we have a big problem.

2:19Like they have to deploy like four to$5 billion every year, right? Okay. And so they're like, you look and he's like, James Dyson now is like the largest producer of green peas in Europe. He owns the most sheep in the entire world. Like you see all these crazy. So like, why, where's the four or five billion dollars coming from? It's like, the rumor is that he's been taking out, you know, four or five, six, seven billion dollars a year in dividends, retaining the enterprise value, obviously, because he never saw a company still is 100 percent of it. So I was just this like super fancy private investor only conference, right?

2:49There's only a handful of people there. One guy controls a ton of capital and he listens to the podcast. So we were talking and he has a problem where like the more assets or management have the bigger you have to buffy talks about this over and over again like to move the needle the opportunity has to be just so large and so they were buying like smaller family companies maybe in like the billion to two billion range and so now he's like i have too much too many assets i'm sure i have to like i have to swing bigger so they go to approach dyson okay i'm going to paraphrase the response back from dyson is going to answer your question about high levels of disagreeableness right They're like, would you be interested in selling your company?

3:25The response was, fuck you. This is a family heirloom.

3:32So it's like, again, he's not doing it for money. He's run out of the money he will ever spend. He's doing it because he loves it. He wants it. You just talked about maybe if your kids want to work in the business. You see that a lot. They're doing it because they want to pass it on to the next generation. They want to die still owning this thing. You can't go to him and be like, I'll give you two trillion. It doesn't matter. There's no amount of money that you could give James Dyson to stop working on Dyson, just like there would have been no amount of money you could have gave Steve Jobs to stop.

3:57If you go to Steve Jobs, imagine going to Steve Jobs and be like, hey, this iPhone, you created the most successful consumer product of all time. How much would I have to pay you to not do this? There's no number that you could have spit out that he'd be like, okay, yeah, I'll retire. He's like, this is what I like to do. Who's the most disagreeable person you've ever studied? oh that's a good question um i mean james dyson's gotta be up there because uh if you see the bookshelf that's in back of me it's an order by episode number starting in the upper left-hand corner so it goes all the way down and so i'm gonna hit like 400 uh biographies read of history and my number one recommendation is still his first autobiography he wrote an autobiography when he's 45 and he wrote another autobiography when he was 75 they're both great but the first one's really great.

4:43The reason I recommend that one is because it's all struggle. The 90 % of the book is just him failing over and over and over again and him refusing to give up. And what's he obsessed with? Like, because obsessing over vacuums is strange. So he would describe himself as an inventor and an engineer, definitely as an inventor. And so I think what I would say is what he's obsessed with is, is making the world bend to what he wants to happen. And so in many cases, if you look at his early career, he was inventing a bunch of other successful inventions and they were like taken from him because he didn't keep control of the company.

5:17There's like all these little things that are happening to him that caused him a lot of emotional pain that then he fixes in the new company. And so for him, it's just like he spent 14 years. Before he had the ideas, like he's kind of similar to Steve Jobs and Yvonne Gennard, they're offended at the mediocrity of most of everything around us. They always talk about like, why is every product we use suck? They talk about over and over again. And so his idea is like, I bought a vacuum cleaner from Hoover. It gets clogged after the first time I use it because it has a bag. This is stupid. Why do all vacuum cleaners have bags?

5:51And then from that thought, it's 14 years, 5 ,127 prototypes. So he has the world's first cyclonic vacuum up to his incredibly difficult standards that he owns 100 % of. When does having that trait of high disagreeableness go too far? That's a good question. I don't know. Does his family love him? Like, do they like does he have a good relationship with his children? It's like Steve Jobs did did not. And so can you be highly disagreeable and still loved by your children? Can you be highly disagreeable and still be proud of how you treat one another? So there is a devastating line in Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, because Walter was collaborating with him as he was dying.

6:32And he told Walter one of the reasons he wanted to do this biography is because he wanted his kid. he sacrificed so much of his time at Apple that he wanted his kids to know the kind of person he was and what was important to him. That's a devastating line. Dyson, from what I understand, has great relationships with, he's still married to the same wife, has great relationships with his kids. Some of them work inside the company, some don't. But yeah, again, I spent a lot of the, as you know, because you listen to the podcast, I spent a lot of time talking about their childhood, their relationship with their father.

6:58Dyson's dad passed away when Dyson was like nine. and he said, you know, he's writing a biography when he's 75 and he still cries and gets sad that his dad, he didn't get to know his dad as an adult. His dad didn't get to see him grow up, see his success, meet his grandchildren. And so I think having that experience was just like, man, I want to make sure my kids don't have that massive hole that I had in my life. Not in any fault of his own. His dad died of cancer at a young age. No, so I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but yeah, you definitely see a lot of these highly describable people.

7:29Like James Cameron is probably the best podcast I've ever done in terms of like what I like craft. And I'm really proud of that episode. I did like two or three years ago. And I start the episode kind of, you know, giving you a hint of the highly disagreeable personality where I'm like reading from this GQ article. And it's like, James Cameron has moved to New Zealand with his fifth wife. And it's like, nobody could have a fifth wife without, that should tell you if you're reading between your lines, that's a difficult person to deal with. All right, everybody. I know when you think to yourself, what is the best video series you think of us when you think of who is the best creator you think of us and the webby awards are happening right now it's like an online awards thing and we are nominated for best video series and best creator but it's stiff competition sam who are we going up against okay so we are up against i shade my vag for this which is sort of interesting i've listened to a few episodes but honestly a few a few we we're we're up against club shay shay which frankly, if you're listening to this, I think you should just vote for Club Shay Shay.

8:34I agree. So please go vote for the Webby, but don't vote for us. Vote for Club Shay Shay. All right, back to the pod. All right, number two, they have extreme self-confidence and they do what works for them. So what's an example of that? So that line that they do what works for them, there's this guy named Tim Grover who was the trainer of both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and he wrote a book all about comparing and contrasting them. It was really fascinating. And he says what they had in common was that they do what works for them regardless of what other people do. Like they were indifferent.

9:08There's another great line in that book that I think is a lot of people that you and I are gonna talk about have in common where it's like everyone wanted to be like Mike. Mike didn't wanna be like anybody else. And so in situations like that, which like they are, I would say there's this line in Dyson's book where he calls his method of invention, his method of company building, He calls it the Edisonian principle of design. He is not a big, hey, I have a master plan. He's like, I'm going to just do an experiment, get immediate feedback and do a constant set of iterations. There's this great book that I've read three times.

9:40I think every single entrepreneur on the planet should read it. It's called Creative Selection. It is written by Ken Kosienda. He was a programmer who demoed jobs. And in that book is the most detail. He helped, he was the one that programmed the initial Safari browser. And then he created Safari browser and then the keyboard for the first iPhone. What he shows in there is like, it was just all the great products that came out of Apple were just a series of iterative demos to Steve and Steve applying his personal taste. This is why I think when you talk to a lot of investors and to me, when I talk to him, like, man, you think about business way too academically.

10:14You know, like if you could sit at a whiteboard and like plan and master plan everything out, it's like, I don't see that in the books I read. It's like these little, a series of just small decisions every day, getting a bunch of feedback, and then essentially just changing course slightly every single day. And then doing that over a long period of time and constantly proven, you get to amazing products and amazing businesses. Are the people who have extreme self-confidence, were they self-confident at a young age? Or did something happen like, I guess, born versus becoming that? All three of those.

10:43So if we're, if Vaughn Chouinard, Steve Jobs, and James Dyson, excessively self-confident at a young age. And I think part of this has to do, and I'm speaking from my own personal experience, it's like you grow up with almost like you're seeking revenge for the circumstances in which you've been born in. You know, Steve Jobs was adopted. Yvonne Gennard had no, his family didn't have any money. James Dyson doesn't have a dad. And you just like, everybody's around you. He's like, oh, you're not good enough. And you're like, no, I'm pretty sure I'm better than you are. And I will show you and I'm willing to work and make sure to prove what I believe.

11:16I always say belief comes before ability. And, you know, I see this over and over again. People are like, you shouldn't be confident you should generate evidence first. I'm like, no, you have that completely backwards. They believe that they can do great things way before there's any proof in the physical world. Let me give an example. In the Michael Dell book, he hits the Fortune 500 when he's like 26 years old. And basically, for the listener, Michael Dell, I believe at the age of 16, 17, 18, in a college dorm, He was selling computer parts to help people assemble computers, right? He started Dell in as a really, the prehistory of Dell really happened when he's like 16, 17.

11:53He officially started as a freshman in his freshman dorm at University of Texas. But the Fortune 500 thing is important because it's like, yeah. He goes, could the kid that grew up reading Fortune magazine possibly predict that I'd start a company that broke into the Fortune 500? He goes, yeah, I always thought big. He doesn't try to hide. He's like, yeah, I had a lot of confidence. Like I knew I could do this. I believed I could do this. Now, did he think he'd hit a 26? Probably not, but he got there even faster. That's the point. He had the belief first and then he demonstrated the ability. You also say that the, so the third principle is they're obsessed with product quality.

12:28And I hear people say this a lot, but I've, because I've never had a job, I've never been able to like intern or apprentice at one of these folks who are obsessed with product. I've never been able to see firsthand what they're like on a day-to-day basis. Can you give me an example of what they do each day in order to actually be product obsessed? You know, I love that you frame that question like that. What do they do each day? I was thinking about this morning. I was thinking about the conversation we're gonna have today. And I think what all the entrepreneurs I admire have in common is how they wanna spend their time is working on their company.

13:09So like I get invited to a lot of things. I say no to most of them because like everything that's not working on the podcast is a giant distraction. And so if you go and actually look, Tim Cook said this after Steve Jobs died. He's like, if you took an inventory of how Steve spent his time, he was at Apple. And then when he was at Apple, he was at home with his family. He wasn't going to conferences. He wasn't trying to be on the scene. Yvon Chouinard, what is he doing? He's working on product and he's testing the product. James Dyson, 75. The guy's probably worth$100 billion if we're being honest.

13:36And where's he at? He's on the front. He's on literally the factory floor. and then he's with the design team. The important thing, and you see this, this is the problem with modern day entrepreneurship industry is they like everything except what their company actually does. So if you can find love, right, in the activity itself, you're able to do it for a long time. I got to have, this is the main thing. I had lunch with Sam Zell, who we could talk about too. That two-hour lunch changed my life, right? And his main advice to me was never relinquish the freedom on what you work on. He goes, the more successful you become, people are going to try to constantly dangle opportunities that are distractions in front of you.

14:15And they're going to do that for two reasons. They're going to try to offer you more money and more status. He's like, retain your freedom. And he said something that's fucking brilliant. He goes, go for freedom. If you have freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can choose to work on what you love. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get good at it. And money will come as a result of that. And so all of the people that I admire, it's like, they don't want to go, you know, they're not trying to go out fundraising.

14:42They're not trying to like go party all the time. They're literally like just obsessed with what they're doing. And so everything that like if you take the inventory of their time, it's like the time is just spent on the company because I like that. Let me give you my example for me, right? You know this because you have a podcast. We can log into our podcast host right now and change. You can charge. You could change the name of my first million, right, to Sam's Club, right? You can change it, whatever you want. I could change founders, whatever I want. The thing you cannot change is the RSS, the URL slug that for the first time you set up your RSS feed, right?

15:14And that URL slug will have the first name of your podcast. My podcast went through multiple names. The first one was autotelic. The definition of autotelic is an activity done for the sake of itself. I was telling you right from the rip, I don't care if no one listens. I'm going to do this. It is inside of me and I have to get it out. I'm going to do this. I would be reading these books and talking about history. and entrepreneurship and founders and crazy psychotic people because that's what I love to do. I'd be doing it if no one listened. I love hearing you talk about this. Do you think that you've gotten more crazy and more obsessed reading about these people?

15:49For sure. For sure. So first of all, you know this because we've talked about podcasting a bunch and a lot of people like try to like part-time it. And I think literally like podcasting is a miracle. The idea that anything you want to learn, right? Me and you grew up similarly. We didn't have access to a lot of money we didn't i don't think you went to an ivy league school like i couldn't go to an ivy league school anyway at all right my wife went to an ivy league school and when i met her and she told me first i she said she went to penn and i was like is that where that football rapist coach guy goes and she's like no it's like it's she's like it's like it's like a it's like a big school it's like a big shot like we're like we're part of the ivy league i was like what the fuck is ivy league is that hogwarts i don't know what that means dude i i have a rather embarrassing story like first of all, not only did my parents never great graduate college, they never graduated high school.

16:33So the entire time I was growing up, they never mentioned the word college to me one time. And so I remember being in high school and they're like, what colleges are you applying to? I'm like, what the one I can drive to? Cause I got to go to school at night. Cause I got to work full time during the day. Like, what are you talking about? I, I moved in, I went to student housing and I, uh, my roommate was from like Colorado somewhere. That was the first time I ever knew. And this is really embarrassing that people didn't work and go to school. Like he just went to classes. That's all he did. Like he had nothing else.

17:00I couldn't even fathom that. So the reason I'm so obsessed with podcasting and everything else is like, you have all any subject you want to learn about. You have somebody that is usually to spend five, 10, you know, 10 plus years studying that. And you can learn from them for free on demand anytime you want to. How could you not be absolutely obsessed with that? So here's your question. The reason I started reading this, and I didn't even understand this. A friend of mine is the one that told me this. He visited me in Miami and he's like, Like it's pretty, this is like two years ago. And he's like, it's pretty obvious what you're doing.

17:29I go, what? He goes, you didn't have any mentors or any good examples. So if you're like how you are, which is kind of like psychopathically obsessed. He's like, so you just started reading and trying to find like good examples for yourself. And so there's a line, there's this guy named Larry Gagosian who built this like multi-billion dollar art business that he controls 100 % of. And on the profile that I read to make the episode, there's a line about him. He says he got so good at selling art to the masters of the universe that he became one. He starts out literally selling art in a parking lot and he got so successful.

18:05He's now a peer. So the reason I'm doing this is like I'm trying to build the best product for the best people in the world. And so, yeah, like it is, you know, I take a lot of the ideas from the podcast and just apply it to my own business, which just happens to be the podcast where I derive the insights from to begin with. The next one is retention of total control. what are the trade-offs of owning everything and being maniacal about the details versus delegation because oftentimes for example my favorite author business author is felix dennis he wrote the book how to get rich he's not nearly as serious as these other guys he's like kind of like a mick jagger and richard branson combined he's like a rock and roll partier but he became a billionaire he says that doubt delegation is the reason why he's anything is he's like i'm a master delegator which i imagine a richard branson type of person would say a similar type of thing whereas you have elon musk or maybe uh coco chanel or a couple other folks where they are good examples of being in total control and maniacal about the details i I think Estee Lauder, I believe she was pretty nutty.

19:19What are the pros and cons and trade-offs? And which do you prefer? I love that you asked this question because this is the great thing about entrepreneurship. It's like you get to decide what's best for you. Like there is not one way. There's not one right way. I could give you examples of people I covered that delegated everything and people that delegated nothing. I just did Todd Graves. Have you ever eaten a Raisin Cane juice? You used to live in Austin. You're a fellow fat boy. well i was a former fellow yeah but i saw him talk i think i'm theo von or something like that and i was like wow you're amazing and so i went to raising canes and started eating it just because he was maniacal like you don't think of a fast food restaurant as being focused on the product but there is a a need for it for sure but he was like we only do these types of fries we only do chicken we only and like it's the simplest thing where i'm like yes how hard could this possibly me that you need 30 years to master this.

20:15Let's go figure it out. So I just did an episode on him, which I think is going to be one of the most popular episodes ever, just because I, when people would ask me like, who's, you study dead entrepreneurs. Like, what about the living ones that you like? And I'd bring up Todd Grace and like the chicken finger guy. Like, no, he's got a, he's got a really relatable demeanor. Yeah. You want to hang out with him. But also I'm, even if I was, even if he was, was a jerk, the way he built his business, you know, he owns over 90 % of a business that's worth at least$10 billion. It's growing 30 % year over year.

20:43And he's been doing the same thing, you know, for 30 years. And I just love everything. I'm obsessed with simplicity. I just love everything about him. But the funny thing is in one of the interviews I found with him, he literally says, you know, people told him when he was younger, you're, you're, you're a micromanager, you have to delegate. You can't possibly do the stuff you're doing now. And he has a great line. He goes, delegate. What kind of word is that? Like, he's just like, that, that doesn't even make sense to me. And he goes, and all the people, the experts that gave me that advice, I'm bigger than they are now.

21:09And so he's literally given this interview and they interrupt the interview because they had some event and his social media team was showing them the reel of the video reel that was about to come out. This guy's, you know, running a business. He has, uh, 50 ,000 employees, 800 stores, you know, unbelievable amount of responsibility. And he's like, it doesn't go out until I approve it. He's approving every single Steve jobs at the exact same thing. He wouldn't let Apple guys go out, uh, without approving it. He there's a, there's another thing. Um, every single location, I approve every single new location.

21:41You mentioned Elon Musk, early days of SpaceX. He personally, Elon personally interviewed the first 3 ,000 employees of SpaceX. Sam Walton, go back even further. He approved, he picked out, I think the first few thousand Walmarts. So a lot of them are, I would consider micromanagers. There are some that, you know, delegate widely. What's more important than that though, is like, it depends on your personality type. Like for me, I am a complete micromanager. I'm one of the only podcasters still like still making podcasts that actually edits his own podcast. Everybody, every other, every other podcaster tells you, you're a fucking idiot.

22:14Why are you doing that? And it's just like, I'm completely obsessed with it. And I hate it, but I love it at the same time. I it's the part about podcasting. I like the least, but it's so important for me to completely control the final product. Um, so again, I, I don't think there's one right way here. It's just like, really, you have to think about like, how do you want to run your business? another thing that you said uh was that they uh refused to make me too products is there a story that you have where standing out by having a different product was key to them winning or also nearly ruined them let's i don't know about anybody ruin them um let's use the the the pre prehistory of patagonia right which is worth a couple billion dollars privately held company you know and as you know because it's in the book in the episode it's like he didn't he was kind of like a communist he didn't want to start a business he was a he calls himself a dirtbag he was like i was a dirtbag climber i lived in a van i traveled around just trying to climb mountains and you know which by the way that is there's a dichotomy there if you are if you're a communist why do you fully own your company versus giving out equity equity because he's obsessed with exactly there's a it's almost like a paradox right uh the uh yeah because he's obsessed with control so that all ties back to control now sometimes you can maintain control public company zuck mark zuckerberg has complete control facebook public company steve jobs had complete control of apple public company dyson obviously private bloomberg private you know uh patagonia private but if you start there it's like his his whole thing was just like hey i'm my life is literally hangs in the balance of these clips that people use for mountain climbing he's like these clips are plastic they suck they break this is not good and they they would optimize for for cost because most dirtbag climbers have no money and so it would be like 75 cents each and what did he do you you ask him what his profession is he's i'm a blacksmith because that was his his trade his craft he's like hey i could do a better job in this he starts using higher end steel and now he sells what it used to cost 75 cents because it was differentiated for four dollars more than 4x what what the market is used to paying and he wind up sealing up like 80 to 90 % market share because his was so much better.