Wealth, Integrity and Family: A Conversation with Canadian Billionaire Dennis J. "Chip" Wilson And Joe Polish - Genius Network Episode #163

Essentially it talked about not letting the mediocre people bring you down. And that to be great at anything requires a certain mind frame of passion, desire, perfection, quality, treating people right, having, having a template and a process for business where everything works from. Because if your people aren't happy, you cannot make a quality product.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com this is Joe Polish and I'm here at Hold it all in Vancouver with Chip Wilson, who is the founder of Lululemon amongst many other companies. And I want to say that it's really a pleasure to sit down with a person who I, I'm not exaggerating. 80% of the clothing that I have worn for the last 10 years came from a company that you actually created or companies that you've created. And so for people that may not know you, Chip, how would you describe yourself?

First and foremost, I'm going to say I'm a father, five boys. I mean, I think that's what that drives me in life. And I'm actually one of those people that's very happily married, you know, 18 years now. So I think without that then I would, you know, life wouldn't be worth it for me. I'd say next, I'm an athlete, which is hard to say at 64, because you know, what I think of myself as an athlete is really like an 17 year old as a competitive swimmer. And that's many years ago. I have a, what do I would call a vision in life. And that is to elevate the world from a place of mediocrity to greatness through transformational development of 20 to 30 year olds in the technical apparel market. So that would say that I love technical apparel, I love people, I love retail, I love global.

Yeah. So we're sitting here in your headquarters. What is this place? How would you describe it? What do you do here?

Well, yes, so I have, I Guess Starting in 2005, I started divesting out of Lululemon because, you know, brilliant financial people would have said, you know, you've got too much in one basket. You know, this is too valuable. You know, if things go badly, you've got to, you know, you got to take care of yourself. So I started divesting probably then from 100% Lululem and probably now I have about 10% and I've shifted that money into real estate. And then I also, I bought into a company called Amer Sports with my partner Anta, who are out of China. They're 51%, I'm 20%. And we bought some big brands, outdoor brands and sporting goods brands. Arc', Teryx, Peak Performance, Salomon, Atomic Skis, Wilson Sports out of Chicago. Really massive and such a great opportunity to take technical apparel to the world, which is how I think I elevate it.

Right?

Right.

Well, I like using the term industry transformer, which I first heard from Dan.

Sullivan, who's a good friend of mine.

And do you connect with just how influential you've actually been? And when I say, do you connect? Of course you see it. I mean, you walk down the street and you see this. But how do you actually feel internally when, you know, millions and millions of people have changed the way they live, the way they operate, what they wear. It's not just clothing. It's the way that they do their life. I mean, how do you think about this? How does your brain process all this?

Well, I think I'm happy for the world. And I say that from a point of view of, I guess I'm a very finicky person. And I was, you know, I did, you know, I was one of the first people to do the Ironman. And of course, as a competitive swimmer, it was thousands and thousands of meters. And I say that because little things would bother me, and especially over a long period, then little things become very, very big. But I take it to an exponential level. And I keep thinking about how to solve things through apparel. So I had to solve it for me, because it just drives me crazy. And then by solving that, I got to recognize where people now can walk around the world and get up in the morning, go to the office, can cycle the walk to work, can go for a workout, can go to dinner, wear the same clothing, and it feels effortless and it feels naked. And I think that people feel they can put their mind share towards things that are more important in life.

I like that. It made me again remind me of Dan Sullivan, that what you just said. He has the line where irritated oysters make pearls in a lot of ways. Do you think a lot of what you've developed and created successes just came out of not necessarily inspiration, but like pain and angst and annoyance?

I think that created my ability to see that there was an opportunity. I think I would have been in the apparel business at any rate, and probably would have been very mediocre at it. But I think the combination of being an athlete at the time when, I mean, you really have to get that Nike was a shoe company that was the only people doing things. And back in 1979. And so for me to kind of move into apparel and think of it from, how do I take care of these massive seams that Nike had in between the two. In between the legs? Like, you know, like when the fabric comes out, it would, you know, they sew it and it would be like that. And you run any more than a 10K and you're in pain and you kind of go, well, this is a shoe company, not an apparel company. And so how do I think about apparel? The same way they'd think about shoes. Yeah.

Yeah. So I considered you a teacher. I mean, you have. I've been in so many of your stores. I've literally spent. Invested opportunities spent. Because your clothes are infinitely higher price than many other companies, but the quality is just at high levels. And you've created vertical retail. Right, right. And I'd like you to describe that, what vertical retail is for people that may not know what that is. I do consider you a teacher, though, because you have empowered so many of your team members and your employees. And when you go into your stores, they are happy, they are engaged, they are connected, they are helpful. And that is really hard for many entrepreneurs to do. And so I want to kind of dig into this during our conversation. How do you do that? How do you empower people? How do you create a cause, a mission around a company, around an idea, and enroll people into caring at such a deep level and attracting those right types of people? And so I want to kind of go into those sort of conversations with him. So when I say the word teacher, does that resonate with you? Do you think of yourself that way? Or how do you think of yourself as an entrepreneur, a businessman, a leader? Who do you think you are?

I think the teaching part is correct. My dad was a teacher. I enjoy teaching people. I love to see people grow. What I really discovered, though, in technical peril, and I think Apple and Tesla also figured this out. You can't sell it through Best Buy. You can't sell it through a dealer network. If you've got a car and certainly clothing, you can't sell through Dick's Sporting Goods or somebody else, because most of value is in what people can't see. So then the real connection then is like, how does a customer come in? And then how do they see the value that they can't see? But then inside of that was like, at the time, like people that worked in retail stores, like, that was the lowest paying job there ever was. And mostly it was all females and mostly because at 23 and this kind of before the pill type of thing, women were married and pregnant at 23, so it wasn't worth the company to invest in them. And also that women were, I think were more people driven and probably more fashion and clothing driven. So that all kind of made sense. But to then see that 98 in 1998 I read where 60% of the graduates at a university were women. And I knew there was going to be a brand new market that had never existed before as an employee and as a customer.

So you actually identified your female Target market, the 32 year old and you envisioned this person who would be an up and coming leader in many ways. And you actually created a platform with your team on creating them into leaders and paying them better than what any other company had done before. Describe what you did and how you thought of them as educators.

Well, what I noticed is that they came out of university and they were no longer in the mode of like I'm going to get married, I'm going to have children. So they were in the mode for the first time ever, like I am going to have a career. And I think that they didn't really know when they'd meet their future husband and when they'd have children. But I could extrapolate out and I did extrapolate out. So I knew they were hungry, they were hungry for self development. Meaning like what, what is really driving a person and. And they want to know what was driving them and how to maximize who they were as a person. Men in 1998 did not want to know that.

Yeah.

And so it was like wonderful for me because then I had all this development from my dad as a teacher and being in the Esalen Institute down in Big Sur, California and then going to the landmark course down in San Francisco. My dad did it and then I did it and then just reading Things like the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the Psychology of Achievement, the book Good to Great and putting these things together in a form weeks that I could give to a 23 year old and I could send them to Kenya to open up a lululemon store and they would be phenomenal. Integrity, responsibility, no complaining, making things happen, action. They were phenomenal.

So you got exposed to a lot of, I guess personal development, awareness sort of things from your parents and from your experiences early on. And there's a lot of people that will watch this that have not had that sort of exposure. What would you say to A young person out there that is in transition. And I think a lot of people are in transition looking for their roots. Where are they going to place their roots? How are they going to build a life? What's important to them? How do they become more powerful, higher integrity? So knowing what you know now, at 64 years old at the time we're doing this, what advice would you give to young people today? It's probably the same thing that you still do with all of your teams and the companies that you still have influence over. What would you say to a young person that's watching us right now and getting their life into a great place?

Well, I can talk about what worked for me when I was 18 again at 42, after I'd sold my surfskate snowboard company and started Lululemon. And actually this year, the last year and a half, my goal is to listen to 100 books. So when I was 18, it was the top 100 books of all time, fiction. When I was 42, it was every business book, every self help book, everything I could do that way, which reinvented, I got to reinvent myself. And now this year it's 100 biography books. I want to know how other great people have lived their life and how they've. In this era of audio and podcasts, I think it's just so easy. And I always like to maximize my life. So like this morning I would walk my hour and a half to work and I'd be listening to the podcast, or I go do the grouse, grind a mountain here and it takes me about three hours to drive over there, go to the top mountain, come back down, and then drive home. So my ability to absorb art, our ability to absorb information is infinite now. And it really is like, do I, I think everyone has to ask themselves, do I really want to change who I am? Do I want a different context for my life? Do I want to find out what's blocking me from being great that I can't see? I think people have to be in that conversation, want the desire to be great.

You know, in my own life, I've done a lot of. I've read over a thousand books, I've been to more seminars and than most people I know. I lead lots of very high level entrepreneurs and run groups and whatnot. And I've pursued learning my whole life. What I learned in the field of recovery though, addiction recovery, because I'm openly. I talk about that and spend about half my time now helping people that struggle with addictions and it's currently something I don't make money off of. It's just a passion project for me to reduce human suffering. And I found that unlearning in many cases is more important than learning. So I wanted to ask you about that because I've been the landmark also, I've sent a lot of my employees to landmark events. And I think unlearning the things that are blocking us and the patterns that we have that we may think are strengths but are really our weaknesses, or to use landmark language rackets and whatnot, how do you think about that? I mean, how do you go into the subconscious programming of early childhood and things that may on an intellectual level you're not aware of, but could be derailing your life? I mean, I'll get your thoughts on how you think about that.

Well, it was sure an opening for me in my life when I took the landmark course. And life seemed perfect, but I could see where my past was giving me my future. And so I always tell this purple shirt story about how When I was 13, I had my first date and I had this. Jimmy went and bought this Jimi Hendrix kind of long collared purple shirt and picked this girl up and you know, I could, you know, on her face, my interpretation of it, you know, that shirt was ugly. And we went to the party, so to speak, and everyone laughed at me. So I came. My brain, my 13 year old brain says I will never wear another purple shirt again. And of course as life went on for me, there'd be multiple colored shirts or patterns or things and you wear something that's a little bit out there and then people would laugh at it or have a comment on it. And so there I am at the age of 42 or whatever and I've got like white and baby blue shirts in my closet, right? So what happened to me is that experiences slowly started whittling down my choices in life. So the reality of it is I get up in the morning and I have choice. And that is like white, which is not a choice. And what I really got is I did the same thing with girls, cars, shoes, business processes. Any kind of idea I had had been whittled down. And you can see how when people get to be grandparents and they're old, how rigid they are because of the life that they've lived. I mean especially you can see it in great depression, people and their inability to spend and they're wanting to hoard. And so to be able to have choice in life, like I was in a car accident. I Wake up in the morning with amnesia and someone tells me to go, here's $100, go buy a color, a shirt. And now suddenly 30 colors are open to me. And that's really power in life.

Yeah, yeah. So I want to ask you about the most difficult times in your life and the best times in your life. Let's start with difficult. I mean, I think of this myself. I don't know how you would relate to it. Any opportunity I've had in my life, I've clawed my way to. And I've also clawed my way out of a lot of messes that I've created. And now I'm at the point where, had I known then what I know now, it would have been different in your life. What are the things that were the most difficult, challenging things, but looking back, they ended up being gifts.

I always think like I was a competitive swimmer, so I mean like in a pretty high level one. So I always equated pain with results. So I had kind of a different context of it. But I do remember coming home at the age of 12 and my parents had divorced and they were fighting. And it's a teacher's salary. So now you split a bad salary among two households. There's really nothing. And so it was like coming home, getting in Canada, they had a family allowance check that came from the government and I took it and I forged my mom's name on it and bought some food. So my 12 year old brain says, well, I can't really rely on anybody, especially those that love me, to feed me. And I'm in a perceived position of survival. And I got through by saying I can do it on my own. So then I take that through my whole life and I think that whenever I got into a stressful situation, I'd push people away and go, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it. Which is interesting because my wife is the, you know, when she gets in that position, she goes, she gets quiet and doesn't communicate. So I push her away and she doesn't communicate. And that of course would lead to divorce unless you're aware of what actually occurs. So going back to your original question, that formula, winning formula of I can do it on my own, I don't need anybody else, was highly successful and I could build like my west beach snowboard, which was my, you know, I got to $15 million, which seemed huge at the time, but it was ultimately going to fail because I couldn't delegate, I couldn't mentor, I Couldn't train people. I didn't trust people. And so one person can't do it all. So the company, the max the company could grow to would be $50 million, and then everything would fall apart. So my learning of that was then again, going back to that thing about choices. I can choose the different way of being a leader and a different process in which I chose that. Now I'm going to be a trainer, developer, mentor of people. And that, I think, is the thing that led me to the success that I have.

Well, let's do a couple things. How would you define success?

Well, the latter has to be health, because I don't think anything's behind that. My vision that I have for 75 is I'm sitting around at Thanksgiving dinner and my children and grandchildren are laughing at me and making jokes about me, because if that time happens, then it tells me that I have a great relationship with everybody where they feel they can laugh at me and that my family is together. And so that is ultimately what I'm looking for.

Yeah. What about leadership? How do you define leadership?

To me, a leader is someone that creates a future that would otherwise not have occurred. And so that means that a leader has to provide context to what the future is and inside of that, how it benefits each person who works for the leader.

Okay, so you have spoken a lot in the past, especially in your book about integrity. I would love to have you speak to how would. Maybe another definition of. How would you define integrity? And to have people really look at what it is in their life and what it means, because I think we have a lot of integrity issues. And I'll talk.

Boy, do we ever even. I do lots of it.

And I want to share something about that, but I want to hear your thoughts on it because I think you're.

Really phenomenal at explaining it. Well, there's no top of the mountain to integrity. And even if I look through my day, I bet you I am out of integrity two or three times, for sure. Those little white lies, those things that aren't quite right, showing up the one minute late for a meeting, those types of things. And. And I recognize that, that failure in myself. But what I noticed inside a company is that if you were to hire someone, you ask them if they have integrity, everyone's going to say yes. And you ask them what their definition of it is, and they kind of like, they don't really know. So what I really got is that every person in a company has a different definition of integrity. Therefore, there's no Integrity. So what was critical inside my family and inside the business then was like, what's one definition? That when we say it, that's what we mean. And it's called part of something I call a linguistic abstraction. So for me, it's integrity is doing what I say I will do when I say I will do it. And if I can't get it done, then it's up to me to clean up the mess of not being in the integrity and go back and set new conditions of satisfaction with new buy when dates to get it done.

I like that. So in a lot of ways, if you can't do something at a certain time, you renegotiate a timeline with someone, you just don't blow it off.

Right. Because a lot of people think integrity is that, oh, if I don't do that, then I have no integrity. No, it's impossible to do everything perfectly. But it really is interesting that when I go back and I say, I promised you I would do this on this date or I would deliver these many things, I said, I can't do that anymore, but I understand it creates problems with you. Here's what I will do in order to clean up the mess that this has caused you, and I will deliver this by the state. And people go, oh, my God. You know, like. Because everyone knows that they mess up in life, there's somebody I can count on to at least give me the information so that I can run the rest of my life or my business based on what that person says. And actually, it increases the integrity that I have with other people when I go back and clean up when I can't be in integrity. Fascinating.

Very. I actually, it reminds me of making amends to someone messed up. And again, to go back to addiction recovery, you know, saying, I'm really genuinely sorry. I'm surprised having not only in my own life, but witnessed it with literally hundreds of people, that you would think the relationship is ruined. But when some person puts down the sword or says, you know, I really.

Screwed up and I want to clear.

My side of the street, it's amazing, the whole.

Or you want to help them out, huh? Oh, I know. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

I have a friend named Chris Widener who I had met, you know, about a year and a half ago from my buddy Harvey McKay. He's the guy who's now 86 years old. He wrote a book years ago called Swim with the Sharks. And so he was having a small meeting and there was a, you know, a handful of people there, and this guy Chris was speaking to everyone, and he said, how many of you think we have an integrity problem in the country right now? And bunch of people, you know, raise their head. He's like, how many of you have been screwed by other people?

You know?

So he goes, how many of you have an integrity problem or screwed other people? Like, no one raised their head. You think that's interesting? He goes, you think it's the other person, but no one here has an integrity issue. And this is what he said. He goes, the reason why is because we judge others on. We judge ourselves on our intentions, and we judge others on their actions. And I was like, that's very interesting, because people that are ripping someone off, most of them actually think they're not doing anything wrong. Now, you would, you know, depending on if they're a total narcissist or a sociopath or something, then don't have the ability to feel empathy. Maybe they're oblivious to it. But I've thought about that quite a bit as there's, you know, most people wake up, even people you think you have issues with, they are judging themselves based on their intentions, not their actions. And I think when someone has to really look at their actions and how that's affecting someone, I don't believe a lot of people spend that much time really looking at how they're occurring to the world because of how they occur to themselves.

Well, this is like a fascinating conversation again out of this book, the Psychology Achievement by Brian Tracy, a good friend of mine. Yeah. Oh, amazing, right? And he talks about the law of attraction. So it's very easy. You just have to look at who you're surrounding yourself with. I mean, if I know I have a bunch of friends who can't, who are going to show up late, then it's probably because I show up late all the time. If I fudge things, or how much I lie, how much the white lie occurs, or more so, how much I will say in order to protect my image, which I call looking good. If I'm an Instagram person, it's all about looking good, then I'm only going to attract other people in my life that are, like, fake and false and pretending. Then it's a choice. Is that the type of life I want to live, or do I want to live with people that do what they say they're going to do? Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Well, you know, even before we started, we're talking about. I mean, you've had incredible financial success, you're a billionaire, and even you know here that I'd be curious to hear. When people are like, chip Wilson, billionaire, how do you think about that? Because you struggled so much financially growing up, so you've been on both spectrums of having financial wealth and whatnot. In terms of. I asked you earlier, before we were recording different business things that you're looking on, and you said, I've got kids, I'm really happy.

I love spending my family.

And I'll tell you, that's actually really rare for most people I know that have had extreme financial success. Many of them are still mired in business. Not that you're not running companies and doing things, but this is such. Your wife, your children. From everything I've seen about you, heard about you, and just feeling it. I mean, this is so important. So I'd love to get some family relationship and parenting, call it advice or suggestions or things that you've learned. And why is it so important to you? I mean, I. All the things that could get your attention. How does Chip Wilson determine. This is really what makes me happy. This is really what's important to me, and this is what's going to get my attention. Because I think as an entrepreneur, one of the most important things to protect is your attention and what you give it to.

I think there's never enough because there's that era of like the Great Depression thing or entrepreneurs growing up in a poor family, and you never think you have enough. Something is going to happen. Some disaster is going to happen. It could be the 2008 crisis. It could be the 2001.com thing. It could be, you know, cancer happens in the family, and there's all of that fear that I don't have enough. And I think people are driven that way. And I think, again, it's a matter of choice. Like people looking at how long they think they're going to live their life. And on the deathbed, what's really important, you can read billions and billions and billions of things, and everyone will say, it didn't matter. I made another business meeting or didn't go to another dollar, made another dollar. It was, did I have a relationship with my family? It seems to all come. So if that part is what gives the whole life meaning at the end of the day, then that's where we should be putting our intention. And certainly what I did, does it mean that I have a perfect relationship with my kids? No. You know, like, they're their own people. And you can pick your friends and you can pick your business associates, but you can't pick your family. And so, you know, a parent's dream or thoughts or whatever they're gonna be is they're their own individuals and you kind of have to work with that. And I think it's unconditional love. And you know, I think everybody comes around at the end of the day.

Yeah. So does your whole family have kind of like, for lack of a better word, a personal development program in the same way that you've done in your companies or how does your wife Shannon and your kids, I mean, how do they engage with reading and development and learning in the way that you have?

Yeah, I mean they're phenomenal. And I think we had so much success in Lululemon and we probably put like, you know, 25, 30, maybe even 100,000 people through that, you know, or two, three week course that we had that I think the children grew up within that and then they just automatically kind of fell into it like that was normal. So it wasn't something that had to be talked into. So again, through that we've developed the linguistic abstraction so we understand the definition of responsibility. Rackets complaints by win dates. You know, I've got like a series of about 30 of them. So we have a basis for communication which makes it very easy for us to get through stressful issues.

You're just a kind, friendly person. I'd love to get your perspective on navigating this world of not only financial success, but I mean you do have tremendous influence, but you've also, from everything I can tell, the positivity that you've put throughout the world and how much you change it is pretty spectacular.

It's very difficult for me to. I say I have this American like loud marketing side to me and I have this very reserved Canadian side to me. And the Canadian side I think overtakes. I would never self promote myself in any kind of way. I think that it's all about the company or the people or the product that I think I've always been in the tried to be in the background of all of that. Now there's times when things happen and I wouldn't know what was happening to me. And what I learned in the business part of it is that there's the business of making a product and being with people and supplying solves for people and really being happy with all that and how the business works and the mechanics of it. And right from one creativity right to the customer, right. And then there's also then the business of business which is governance, finance, public and private equity. And all that type of thing, and other people wanting control but putting a facade up in front, like, they're really out for the best of the company as a marketing tool for them to get what they want to get personally in life. And I'd say my demeanor is one, is I trust everybody. And so my life has been one where I'd rather leave my keys in the car and trust everybody. And every now and again, my car gets stolen, and that's fine with it because I can't spend my brain power not trusting people. But there are 4% of the people in the world that are sociopaths, and then there's a whole group of people that they've got a winning formula on how to make money. And it's very different than I'd call what I'd call a very west coast peace, love dove, Hare Krishna, all you groovy cats, loving everybody and being out for the best for everybody. And so what am I getting at there? I'm getting at that. I would find myself at times when I was, like, upset. I was mad. I didn't know what was going on, what was happening, and it just was too hard for me to believe that people had an agenda that was different than what they said it was. And so once I really got the context that everyone's an entrepreneur, and these people aren't bad. They've just got a business formula, and now I have to go, oh, I have to deal with that business formula. Right, right. And I think that had me be super calm about business. That's very good. That's interesting.

How would you define an entrepreneur?

My definition is an entrepreneur is someone who's too incompetent to work for anyone else. And really, you know, I was. I had, like, big ideas. I had things I wanted to do, and I'd get into a company and start working. I'd just go like, I can't work in this minutia. I have to like, no, I want to do this. And so I became somebody that wasn't a very good employee. And so, okay, it's kind of chip, if you don't like the way we're doing things here, why don't you go do it yourself? And finally, I had no other option. It wasn't even a choice. It was like, if I want to feed myself, I got to figure something out.

No, honestly, I was in the same boat when I started my own company. I was 22 years old. I could not work for other people. I just had this thing in me, even to the Point where I, you know, was in debt for, you know, two years, credit cards, just, you know, clean carpets, doing hard manual labor. And I was even going broke doing it. And I was like, you know, there's so many ways to go broke. You know, sitting on a couch watching TV is an easier way to go broke than doing hard manual labor, clean carpets. But it was in me. I was wired and I wanted to do it.

And you learned probably something there.

Oh, my God. Yeah. And I think entrepreneurs, they say solve problems for a profit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's very good.

Yeah. And like Dan Sullivan says, you just make it up and make it real. So you came up with all these things and you actually made them real. I remember saying this years ago in a seminar. If I would have known how difficult being successful in business was, I would have stuck with being a loser.

If you have a passion. Exactly.

So again, it's another version of advice you would give to the person out there that hasn't quite nailed it yet. And I say this because even the people that really have reached the top, most of them don't think they have, right?

There's never any top. Yeah, exactly.

And so the world's highest achievers live with the highest levels of dissatisfaction.

I mean, I agree with you. Yeah. I mean, not me, any. I chills and. But I could see my mind moving into that realm if I wanted it to.

Well, that's something I want to highlight, too. Then. I'd love to speak to that mindset that you've had about that. Because, look, if you're going to play the game, you might as well enjoy it as best you can, because a lot of times you could be winning but feel like you're losing totally based on how you frame it, how you look at it. And so when I ask questions like, what would you say to a young person? The truth is, I'm really talking about everybody because this is all available to anyone that's willing to do it. So if someone is wanting to just become better and they're not hitting it, what advice would you give them? Or what do they need to do? They need to change their attitude? Do they need to look at a different business model? What are some of the factors? I know there's not just one answer, so I wanted to get some of your perspective.

Well, I go back, I can only say about me, but there was that time when I was like 18, when I just decided that I wanted to learn everything I could. And I think there has to be. Knowledge is based on the Knowledge you already have. So the more you know, the more you know, I find that some people just aren't. They say this is. They say they want to be successful, they say they want to do it, but then they play their video games or they watch football games on Sunday or they, you know, they're not really driven. I think mostly because they haven't found their passion. And I think they haven't found their passion because either when they were in university, they didn't take a myriad of courses to find out what was really easy for them, which is where their passion is, or they haven't read enough to actually find something they're passionate about. And it almost seems lame, like talking to people like, find your passion. But I think I would have made athletic clothing for no money my whole life. Just enough to pay my, to feed my family, just enough to pay the mortgage would have been fine because that's what I was put on the earth to do, right? You know, and so I think it's up for people to get out there and find that. And as we've talked about before with the landmark is like figuring out what the blocks in my life were that had me view the world from a place of ultimate possibility rather than being constrained from my past.

What scares you, if anything?

Well, I think the normal things, like one of my kids dying would be number one. I'm actually not concerned about climate change at all. I think the world is moving at such a rapid pace, technology wise that we're going to, we've got to solve for everything it's coming. The knowledge that's on the web and the way people are able to crowdsource information and solve things at such a rapid rate I think is far faster than climate changes occurring.

What was the first dominoes in your life, be it a person or a book or something, that, that was what started it all.

I know the first one is when I was 12 years old again and I was at the end of the swimming pool and going on a 100 meter backstroke and my dad came up and he said, do something, you gotta get. Like this is 1965. The different context for athletics at the time was all about sprinting at the end and looking good in the race, right? And he said, why don't you just try going full out right from the very start, like just full out sprint and if you drown, I'll come and get you, no problem. So you know. No, no. I was 10 years old actually. So anyway, you do what your dad tells you to do, right? So I went out and I dropped my time 8 seconds and I broke a Canadian record, which is at the time the number two time in the world for a 10 year old. And. And I went, oh my God. You know, like. And so I think what I got out of that for the rest of my life was I'm going to give 100% in everything I do. And actually I became fearful of doing something and only giving 8, 98% and then getting to my end of my life and going, if I'd failed at that and I didn't give that extra 2%, I'm going to regret it all my life. Right. So my context then is to give 100% and not hold anything back. Where I think most of the world that I encounter is always hold something back in reserve. So when I fail, I will still be able to operate two entirely different mindsets.

Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about criticism. How do you handle criticism? And it's funny, before I was coming to interview you, I'd read your book, Little Stretchy Black Pants. And it's great. And I highly recommend everyone that wears clothing. And that would probably be almost 100% of everyone watches. You have to read this book. Not only is it filled with great business lessons and perspectives and tells a story of how you built the company. People don't realize how much you have actually transformed the clothing industry. I mean, it's unbelievable the impact that you've actually had in the world. And when I tell people, when I was telling people I was coming out to do an interview with you, I remember like this one woman, she's like, oh, didn't he say something on the news? And of course, you've heard this a million times. So I want to get your perspective on really the question is, how do you handle criticism? But tell the story of what happened and how that went sideways, why you think that happened the way that it did, and how, when you're such a public figure at that point, how do you psychologically process all of that?

There are definitely people that have an aptitude to be able to talk in the public realm and can have a sense of what I say and how it's going to be interpreted by other people. And definitely I am responsible for the way that people hear things. We had had a situation at Lululemon where the board and the CEO were maximizing quarterly numbers so they weren't reinvesting in quality, innovation, et cetera. And so I was having quite a difficult time, you know, myself against nine people on the board. And so, sure enough, we had a massive quality control issue. And immediately after that, I was on. I forget, was it Bloomberg something? It was Bloomberg. And the woman asked me about the quality control issue with the pants. And I knew that there was something wrong with the pants, but I couldn't quite put my thumb on it at the time. Some women were buying the pants two to four sizes too small. And it's like anything you take in a elastic band and you pull it too tight, it's going to break. And I didn't have enough information at the time. So when I was asked a question about the quality control, I mean, I guess I could have. I sometimes fantasize about going back and throwing the board and the CEO under the bus, but I wasn't in that mode. That's a fantasy kind of thing, which maybe is what I. So anyway, I said, well, you know, some women just don't fit into the pants or don't wear them properly. I forget my actual wordage. And so a couple things happened, I think is it was just the start of social media, and so suddenly there was the ability for anybody to make a comment and to say something about it. And the interpretation from what I first thought was probably women that probably weren't the Lululemon customer, because you got to get like. The Lululemon customer was a highly educated, media savvy, athletic woman, and she would have known that whatever kind of came out in social media was probably from people that a couldn't afford. Lululemon, didn't want the quality, couldn't fit into it, were probably judgmental about their own bodies and consequently were judgmental about anybody who they thought were judgmental about their bodies. But the board of directors, of course, in my. My fight with him at the time, saw that as being a way to kind of like, remove me as chairman of the board and not being ahead. And that's fine. You know, probably time was happening. But I kind of look back at and I go, that was so overblown, like, to the extreme. And I know for the media, especially like Bloomberg, it was like really easy for them to go, like, to splice and dice the tape how they wanted to. To make it look a certain way. Because they were not in the news business anymore. They were in the entertainment business, but nobody had really defined that at the time. And if you look at news now, it's mostly an entertainment business, but the uneducated people think it's actually news. Right, Right. I think the other thing is, because I'd made. I'd say probably pretty good enemies of Coke and Pepsi, as I was a stand in 1998, that. That. That was making America fat. And I thought it was a drug, and I thought it was one of the worst things I could imagine. And it was just easy for me to look at people that were drinking, like, four or five cans a day and look at their fat. People that aren't drinking it are not fat. It was like, that was easy to see. So I could imagine at the time that Coke and Pepsi and maybe even McDonald's, because I was very anti McDonald's for the Olympic sponsorship, I didn't think any of that kind of worked. That, you know, they've got big PR machines that may have been waiting for the right time. Yeah. And then the Lululemon PR machine backed by the board of directors and a very insecure CEO who was just on survival for her job. That would have also been part of the mandate of, like, let's distance ourselves from this person. So. So it was. I. I don't think it was so much me. I think it was. It was a confluence of. Of timing in what was happening, what was happening in social media, how the news was redefining itself. And I probably said a line about that hit the most sensitive nerve of the most insecure people in the world.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's. On one level, people are, oh, be transparent, be real. But then if you say anything that someone has any objection with, you just get attacked. And so at what point do you play to win versus play not to lose? And if you run around playing not to lose, which I think you describe in your book quite a bit about different individuals and through the growth of Lululemon, through the growth of your company, it's just having that winning attitude, being as high integrity as humanly possible and knowing that you're human. I mean, there's not a single person out there in the world. World that has not said things that are. Can obviously be interpreted or interpreted like you said there. I mean, because I really watch. And I was like, going, okay, yeah, you know, I understand. But I don't see anything in your, you know, body language, anything where you're trying to attack anyone. I mean, you're. I mean, you have a clothing line. It's your own company. I mean, if someone says, this is who I make the clothing for, I mean, it's. That's who you make the clothing for. I didn't see. I didn't perceive it as you criticizing or saying anything that they did not sound Bite and take out of context.

I mean, really, Lululemon was all about women and it was all about elevating like a class of women to management and CEO and directorship level. That had never occurred before. Right, right. And so I think these, the people that were like attacking me because I'd never done any marketing for myself or for Lou Lemon around that type of, of thing. It was easy for the media, the press, the social media to create a story because there was no story at the time.

So one thing I want to actually point out too, whatever someone may think of you or perception or try to be the spectator saying he could have played this a different way, could have said things a different way. I would challenge anyone to look at their own life, what they have done and said, how they handle it, and also go out and build a company that has employed hundreds of thousands of women and has empowered them to not only have better careers, but to make more money, to become better parents, put them through tons of leadership and personal development and try to improve their lives all the way around. Because I think your track record in life, everything that a person does in terms of the deposits into the positive parts of world and humanity versus the withdrawals, I mean, I think it would be really hard for anyone to really look at what you've done and say you have not been a massive advocate for women and for health and for good eating and for challenging people that have. That really exploit people in a lot of ways.

Thanks, Joe. I think there was, it was interesting at a time though when we brought all these amazing women up who were 23 to 30 years old and brought them through this system and then suddenly Lululemon got to be so big that we had to bring people in from the outside. And I'd say that they were those 45 year old women who really had to like fight in life. And they were in companies where probably they weren't treated right or you know, they had to fight through the whole men system. And they probably had a. I think they came into Lululemon with a perception of men, which was way different. And. And I definitely talked to the woman in our company like equals. Like I didn't separate men or women. And you know, like we've totally blunt, totally authentic, like we're getting something, we gotta get it done here. There's no playing nice in the sandbox. And yet I think that the older woman had, when they listened to me talk like that, were not able to grasp that I was talking to them as an equal. But I think they saw as this dominant man telling them what to do. And so it was really this. There's definitely a tier system in the hierarchy of women and where they came from.

Yeah. Yes. So how do you handle criticism today as a result of just having built a company?

I think I have the choice. And that is not to say anything. But my mind being an entrepreneur and somebody who I think my natural inclination is to be seven years in the future. And a lot of things that I think of and what I say do not meet the societal norm of how people think today because it's just not where my mind goes. And so I'm trying to set up my family and my life and my businesses for what we call in Canada where the puck's going to go, not where it is. And so when I talk about how I see things change and where they're going to be, it really upsets people that don't like change and they don't want to make it. They don't want to make a change in their life. They don't want to be different themselves. They don't want to have to move their own personality to where the world's going. They want the world to move to them. And so they're going to take the lowest form of trying to make the change. And that is criticism. I have this theory I think is really neat and that is, you know, our number one instinct is survival and our number two is reproduction. So ultimately we want as many people as a possibility to reproduce with as we can. So I think that's. If you look at the. At one side of it is that we always want to cheer for the underdog and we want to bring them up. It seems natural, doesn't it? And that seems okay. And we don't think anything of it. But on the other hand, why is it that we want to bring the tall poppy down? And I think it's a natural instinct for the mediocre group in the middle to have more people to reproduce with.

Yes.

And that in itself is a survival technique.

I think when you look at criticism, there's from a friend who's going to give you feedback and say, hey, you could have done this better. But they're coming at you with a good intention. They want to kind of help.

Help.

They don't want to attack, that's one thing. But people that want to attack, like a lot of criticism I think is a self hatred turned outward. And if you have someone that is looking at an individual that built an athletic company as an example, your Clothing were designed for people that are exercising and are active and are outside. Starting with skateboarders.

Right.

And going into the yoga community. It's kind of like if you sell armor to a soldier, they're not probably not going to take that to a restaurant and wear armor.

Exactly.

Appropriate attire. And so then you build a company that becomes. The clothing is so well made, so well thought out. I mean, you did it in order to solve problems that other clothing work were creating. Right. With friction and everything. If everyone looks at. Read your book and gets the origin of understanding how you started with little stretchy black pants, they will understand that you created this. And so you have this, and then all of a sudden you have a large segment of the population buying your clothing for purposes other than what it was the company was originally designed for. And then they attack you and say, oh, you shouldn't have said it that way. It's kind of like, well, I mean, is. Is it really that part of you say, well, maybe I'm not working out because you're. You're an advocate for eating well, you're an advocate for an active lifestyle because you know how much it's helped you. I mean, you use your own experience in a lot of ways. And, you know, I mean, and if someone, and here's my thing, if someone doesn't like what's going on in the world, you can either complain about it, you can attack people that do, or you can actually get off your ass and do something about it. I mean, and everyone has that opportunity.

And so, yeah, you know, I think it's also part of my love for athletics and my love for authenticity. I've never wanted people to buy, like, the athletic clothing I make in my multiple companies because they want to look good. First off, it's got to work for them. So I think that my mind, when I was developing the Lululemon pants for women at the time, wasn't thinking about like tummy control and fat control, like a bra. I wasn't thinking that way, but women were thinking that way and buying it to look good. And then I could get where clothing had to look good. But first off, it had to function first. I just hate a fake world, and it's just not where I was. And I think that's. I was meeting that intersection at that time.

Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Well, and look. So you are certainly someone that sees the future in ways that others have not. And you've actually not only created the products, created the experience, but you've built a team of people that can help carry that out. So let's talk about the future of apparel because you're now with your current focuses. Let's talk about what your current companies are doing, where you see the future going and what are things that people would be. It would be very interesting for them to be aware of. I mean there are things that you know, that many people don't know. I'd love to have you share some of your future perspectives on the future.

Well, I live in a world of technology, but you know, my technology is all fabric and apparel based. So it's a. But it's the same thing as you'd see in what people see as technology. You know, the digital technology.

Why do you call it technology? Explain that. Just because, I mean I have an understanding because I've really researched it. I want someone hearing that though when they hear technology, they may think of computers or wearables or something. Encyclopedia. What do you mean by technology?

Well, technology in apparel would be like solving problems for people. So I'll give you kind of my idea where I see 15 years out. And a lot of it comes from really looking at octopi and their 137 brains they have in their body and their ability to instantly camouflage themselves with color and their surroundings, even change the texture of their skin. The whole works. If I go back to 1930 and I look back to 2030, I would say that you can see the continuum of the people wearing very inappropriate clothing, non technical, no stretch, probably people keeping warm because there was no heating, very little air conditioning. Clothing had a different purpose technology at that time for what our services were. But now with everything being controlled, we needed like different solves for how we were moving around in the world. So I kind of see that Star Trek outfit from the 1960s where it's all lycra. You wear one outfit for all the time. It doesn't stink, it's antimicrobial, it has UV protection and yet it's connected. But I think we're going to have an implant in our wrist. It's going to be something like an iPhone. And we'll just talk to it because we'll have two little implants in our ear and but there'll be app for how we want to look that day. So it'll be, you know, oh, I want to look like this. So you'll go to a designer who will design an outfit on an app. You'll click, you'll just hit it or just say what you want it and the outfit will change To. Exactly. To look like a tuxedo, to look like, I don't know, a lizard, whatever you want it to look like. And I think that, you know, so I think that's ultimately where we're headed because you got to look at the most functional clothing in the world is probably what gymnasts wear or skiers wear. It's totally lycra, it's totally tight. And I think that we're going to be so in tune with 3D printed food and what to eat and how we're moving around and our health is going to be judged against big data with great medical, that I think people's bodies are generally going to all look very, very good.

Yeah. You know, that's interesting you even say that about 3D printed food. I envision in the same way that many people will have like a, you know, Vitamix or they'll have a microwave or they'll have, you know, whatever, you know, an instant pot or some of the current devices that people use in the kitchen, I think will have, you know, 3D printed containers where food gets shipped to them. They pick the flavorings that they like, and you just literally print out the type of food. So you're looking at clothing very much same way.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

How far out do you think we are from that? 15 years, 10 years?

Well, if you look at how much tighter people's clothing is now than even 25 years ago, you could probably extrapolate. 15 years. I think we're probably there. I think even for men, I think we're just going to be giving up the societal norm that, that we can't, you know, you know, sexual, like nipples on women or testicles on men. I mean, men in Europe have been wearing Speedos and tight shorts for, you know, for 40 years. You know what I mean? It's kind of like religion in middle America. Like, they think that that's how all the world is, but that's not how all the world is. You know, things are changing. So I think probably 2033, we're going to be seeing that as probably starting to be the norm.

Do you employ, like, scientists or do you have a research labs or anything based on how you think things will change, that you're preparing for or love to get an idea of how you look at talent that you bring on that have skills and things to help facilitate getting to that bigger future?

Yeah, and it's a bottleneck. It always has been. Because most designers that come out of school were doing wedding dresses or streetwear because Schools weren't really set up to talk about technical. So my wife and I and Lou Lemon and The province of B.C. built a school here in Vancouver, the Wilson School of Technical Apparel Design. And so, and then we give scholarships to that. So that was the single biggest bottleneck in changing that. So we've done that with, we've created the possibility in the school to make that happen. But what I really find is that there's people like in Italy making like machines for like fabric, either putting the fabric together or I mean weft and weave when you're fibers or actually or what the fabric does, the thickness, everything else. And then there's the another part which is, pardon me, there's the machine people and then there's the fabric people and the thread people. So they're both working on different technologies and they come together in manufacturers mostly over in Asia and they bring things together and they gotta go, oh, this year because I've got this new machine or we've got this new fabric, we can do something entirely different. That's really where the magic happens. And so it's really being embedding myself in that conversation there where it's occurring that I see technology changing the fastest.

Great. What's one piece of advice you never got but you would have loved to have?

Early on it kind of goes back to my winning formula. I never asked for advice and that was my problem. It worked for me because I made a lot of mistakes and I was always making just enough money to get through my mistakes. So in some respect like that was really good learning and so. But ultimately as I kind of went on in life, it's finding, getting advice from people that are non conflicted. So when my first board at west beach, when it was a private company, I had a board that was, they didn't make any money out of giving me advice. They were just like older gentlemen that were really thoughtful and I wanted to help some young kids out. When I went to the Lululemon board, I took that same context, but it wasn't like that. Private equity have to get out in five years. They're going to prostitute the company. You got CEOs on three year options. They know they're only good for four or five years. They want to get in and you know, make the numbers look good, cash out and go. So there's a. What I needed really and what I continue to have now is great advisors who can help me see where it is. I'm going within my growth that are non conflicted in a way That I can take their advice and go, man, that's something I could do something with.

Yeah, that's great. Let's see. One of the things I heard early on in my life is be nice to the people you meet on the way up. They're the same people we do. And I've always tried to live that way because you do run into people. It's amazing.

It is unbelievable. And people talk behind your back all the time.

They do, they do, they do. And so when it comes to what is the best piece of advice that you actually think you could give somebody?

Well, I go back to integrity. That what comes out of my mouth, I've got to back up. I'm not saying like Muhammad Ali, but it comes back to, like, if I'm going to say something, then I'm going to do it, because then I want people to believe in what I say.

So, Chip, let's talk about Amir Sports. And what is this organization? What are some of the different companies that you have, as is investments or ownership in, and what's the goal?

I was going to say that Amer comes out of the American Tobacco company because the Finnish Student Union, back, I don't know, in the 40s or 50s, was importing American tobacco into Finland. And anyway, that ended up morphing into about 20 years ago, into getting rid of tobacco and buying sports companies. So they amassed over a period of time, one of my favorite brands of all time, which is Arc', Teryx, which is actually here in Vancouver. And when I had Lululemon, ever since 2005, I wanted to buy it, but Lululemon was just too much of a rocket ship and I couldn't take on anything more. It ended up getting sold to Adidas and then to Salomon and then one thing, and then into the Samar. But they also own Wilson Sports out of Chicago. Like 100-year-old brands. Beautiful Salomon, which is probably the. They have about 27% of the ski market in the world. And Atomic Skis is another thing that's owned underneath that. And Peak Performance ski brand out of Stockholm. So it's a very global brand. And I bought it with my Chinese partners, Anta, which is kind of. They're the Nike of China. They're the biggest sporting goods company in China. 11,000 stores, if you can imagine that, just for Anta, and they have another 1500 stores. They own the Fila brand in China. So we're combining one to create a global company, but also to bring these brands into China. They have the platform to do it. And of course I love technical apparel and for probably 15 years of my life I did snowboard apparel. So my ability to understand outerwear is quite strong. So it's a lot of fun.

So you're certainly an achievement oriented entrepreneur, not a lifestyle entrepreneur because you've, you've got enough financial success to where I'm sure you can live any way you want. And that's the thing that most people don't get. How much of what it is that you do is motivated by building net worth or money versus the other things that you're trying to accomplish. I'd like to actually speak to what are in all of your business endeavors. What are the things that, for lack of a better word, blow your skirt up? I mean, what do you really enjoy? What is the business in growing and building these companies? What does it actually do for you and what does it do for the world?

On a kind of an egotistical validity model, I have this concept about how apparel should be delivered to the customer in a way that they get full value out of it. And I know things have changed from 1998 when I started Lululemon to the e commerce business now. But I mean that all kind of started in 2008, 2009. So I've been in it quite a while. So what's the drive? The drive continues to go back to my vision about who I am as a business person. And that is again, elevating the world from a place of mediocrity to greatness through transformational development of people of 20 to 30 year olds. Because I find that that's the, you know, if you can get them at that age, then they become, their ability to become phenomenal in life is exponential. So that's. And I want to be best in the world at something. So I could have said everybody but part of being best in the world from the book Good the Great is like really focusing in on something. So I find that is what gets me up in the morning, that's what gets me excited. And I'm 64, but I have two 14 year old boys and a 16 year old boy who are still at home. And so I'm cognizant of being somebody that can mentor them but also not do too much yet until they're in university. So I'm just taking on enough with a couple board of directors jobs and this investment in order to keep my mind busy while they're at school. And then I like to pick them up after school and I like to drop them off in the morning.

Have you ever thought about how old do you think you're going to be when you die?

Yeah. 120.

120.

It was interesting because it was 90 at one time. And then I realized that most goals are self fulfilling. And I thought that if I let my mind think that 90 is what I'm going to live to, then my body will actually respond to that. So then by changing my goal to 120, I believe my body will respond to that.

Let me play sort of like an interesting. It's not necessarily a game because it's not a trick. It's more like a thought process. So my friend Dan Sullivan, who I mentioned, he's one of my best friends, the founder of a company called Strategic coach and he's 76 right now and he believes he's going to live to 156 years old. And of course he says similar. If you think you're going to die at a certain age, the parts will start. You'll start sending the parts back to the factory is the way that he described it. Right. And then he asked the question, what do you think you'll be doing the year before you die? Say you're 119 years old. What do you envision that Chip Wilson will be doing during that time?

Well, I feel sure my calendar will be full because I can even tell as I'm getting older that I'm booking things out three or four or five years in the future. I think there's going to be a lot of art in my life, a lot of painting. I think you just did something on that recently. An addict that you had. Yeah.

Black stars the film artistforaddicts.com we want to use art as a force for good, to help people that struggle with addiction. Because so many artists are sensitive and it's very healing for many people.

So yeah, so I think art, I think being totally available for my grandchildren or children for any kind of mentorship, for babysitting would be critical. And I think the third thing is what's the big things I'm going to be doing? Giving back to the world. And I say that in a way that I've really got this down now. It's like I think charity and philanthropy is. I look at it from a totally self motivated point of view. Like I'm not doing anything to be like altruistic because I go, why are people doing this? And I go, why do I want to do it? And quite frankly, I want to make the world a Better place for my children or grandchildren. Right, that's very. And I just want to be totally honest about that. But then I get to it and I go, the only way to make it great for them is I got to make it great for everybody. But I really want to get to the bottom of my self interest in it and not pretend.

Yeah, no, I agree because there's so much non profit and so much philanthropy that is cosmetic that presents itself as trying to do good when in reality it's just a PR campaign.

Right, but it's essential now, isn't it? Because everything we've talked about with the media being entertainment, with social media, anyone be able to say anything? I mean in my book I said it that, that woman who said, you know, like Nike's using child labor, you know, that was at the beginning of that whole social media thing too. And it really brought Nike wasn't doing child labor. I've been in the factories, you know, it could have been some 14 year old that didn't, you know, that didn't fit into the school system and was going to starve. And what else do you do with a 14 year old who's working in the factory? So big deal, you know, but, but we're living in a world where you have to market now your do good stuff in order to offset the 100% chance that some nutball is going to accuse you of doing something which you didn't do. And there are lots of nut balls out of there.

No, there are and I think there's a lot of. Here's what I would say and this is. I'll probably get even criticism for saying this.

Sure you will. Sure you will.

There's a lot of do gooders that parasitically guilt good doers into feeling bad about their success because they themselves are incapable of producing. So there's a lot of producers that have to be the victims in dealing with the parasites that try to guilt them into oh, you should give money. Like the term give back. I did a whole podcast episode with Dan Sullivan, three part series about social entrepreneurship and about our views on it. And so the term give back back, it's a weird term and I've tried to stop using it. From this standpoint, I'm a big believer in giving giving back. If I take your shoes, I should give them back. But if I haven't taken anything, there's nothing to give back. I love giving though. And so if you provide jobs, if you create value, I mean, I think money earned ethically is a byproduct. Of value creation and if someone is willing to just pay you money for it and there's, there's just this, there's a lot of people that are being guilted into. You should give back. It's like, well what have they taken? You know. Now if you really have taken something, certainly you should give back. But it's become this whole thing like oh, because you're successful, you somehow were obligated to do things. And you know, I, I have certain issues with that and I'm a guy who's raised a tremendous amount of money for non profits and for causes and I mean even. And what I do with the recovery right now, I mean I won't take money from rehab centers. I have funded several hundred thousand dollars out of my own pocket in the last three years just building the educational platform for genius recovery. But I want something too. It's self serving for me. It helps me with my own recovery. It makes me feel good when I reduce human suffering. But man, I don't like when people try to guilt people that have had success into thinking that they are somehow obligated to just take care of the world just because. And the people that just do it because they want to, I admire them. I think it's wonderful. I mean, and I'm doing my best to do that and you certainly are. So from that frame of reference, talk about your foundation and talk about some of the ways that, of what you're doing and what you're hoping because I think it's important to know that.

Well, thanks. And again, I think my wife come from. If we had our choice, we wouldn't, we'd just do it and not have to say anything about it, you know, and we, we're very conflicted about how we have to, you know, who we have to be in in order to kind of offset the world we're in. But I mean when we went public, my wife said, you know, we want to give something to children education. So we went to Ethiopia because the government was putting 50% of their budget into, into education. And it was where we could get the best return on it from a business point of view. And we ran it like a business. We ran it the same way we ran Lululemon. You know, responsibility, no complaining, et cetera. And of course we were doing what a lot of people are doing, building out schools, you know. And then I sat back and I went, God, you know, the population's gone from like 40 to like 70 million in like 20 years. There's just no way we can build schools fast enough. So like Lululemon. Then we decided to start developing leaders that would create leaders or leaders that would create teachers so that. Or people that would build so we could exponentially do it that way. And definitely that book by Steve Pinkerton. But you can see because of technology and the way the world's changing, there's going to be no poverty by 2030. I mean, I've seen it like for 15 years now. It is unbelievable how fast the world is changing with cell phones and technology. So then we kind of woke up, okay, we've done our job. You know, we're really starters of things. We're not like. Like, now let's give it to somebody that can really take it from this level and do something. So we merged it with the WE organization out of Toronto. They had lots of other countries in Africa, and it made sense. And then we kind of. Our advisors said, do you want to be a little fish in a big pond? Which would be like going over to Ethiopia and putting millions and millions of dollars over there, or do you want to become a bigger fish in a smaller pond? So, so now that we've done that in Africa for so long, we're back in Vancouver going like, what can we do here? And because Vancouver, B.C. is the last civilized place in the world, probably northwest Australia might be the same because of just how long it took to get here in the mountains and the difficulties. We think there's a great opportunity to buy massive swaths of park. And so that's kind of what we're up to now, creating park to create movement.

So if there's anything that we could say here that would enroll people into what you're doing and help doing what you want to do in that area, what would it be if there was an ask?

Well, we don't want to ask. You know, we really found out, and this is an interesting thing about being successful is we set up our charity, like, imagine one day for Ethiopia, we put our money into it, and that ended up being like, what it is with every other charity. You kind of have events, you try to raise money, you try to enroll people. But we found is that every time we went to ask somebody to donate to our charity, about six months later, we'd have to go around and hand the check right back to their charity. That makes no sense to me, especially if I want to, like, prioritize being with my family. So then we just said, no, we're going to do it all on our own. And so I don't ask anybody for anything.

Okay, so all of this is just you taking your own resources and your own ingenuity and just putting it together. And how would you define that you've won or are winning the goal? What would it look like? Meaning what does success look like?

Well, in Ethiopia, it was really coming to poverty, well end by 2030 and that our goal of bringing quality education to every child in Ethiopia by 2030, free of foreign aid, was actually going to occur. So then, even though it's like 12 years out, 10 years out, we've done our job, you know, it's going to happen. So then where do we want to focus next? So I would say if whatever we did lowered obesity rates, that would in B.C. that would be my goal. So how do we set up parks? How do we set up how the parks are structured, how people get to them, how they use them in order so people are moving. Interesting. That's what we're up to.

You know, I guess that almost makes me think about a couple of things related to health that I think are worth mentioning. You had talked about sugar earlier and you talked about Coca Cola and Pepsi and I mean, certainly soda is like liquid Satan.

It really is. Sure.

And I, you know, from an addiction standpoint, which most people don't know, the number one killer in America of substances is sugar first, tobacco second, alcohol third and opiates fourth. Those are the, you know, now caffeine. It's almost impossible to do that study because almost everyone, you know, not everyone.

But it's a norm. Yeah, it's huge.

But there are, there's a lot of that stuff related to health. And then I wish I could off the top of my head know the exact study, but it's like 50. There's been some research done that if you have your best friend that's obese, there's a 56 or 57% chance that you're going to be obese.

Sure.

And they have made the claim that obesity is contagious.

Law of attraction.

Yeah, exactly. And so if you're around successful people, you're going to do that. And I think in a lot of ways with your apparel company, you know, Athleisure as you refer to it, you not only built a giant clothing brand, but I think you've created massive communities that would never had existed had you not done what you've done. And so bringing communities and bringing like mindedness together in order to, you know, influence the way people, you know, behave, operate, live, entertain, you know, all the different aspects of a Human life is, is powerful. So there's many areas of the world that you know and everyone has kind of their thing. I mean, me, it's addiction recovery. If I had all the money in the world, I would put it into treating addiction recovery because I think wars and lifestyle problems and diseases, so much of it stems from the untreated trauma, which is addiction. But that's me. That doesn't mean that you or anyone else, that doesn't resonate with it. So what are some areas that, if there were some entrepreneurs out there that you, if you could have just say, I really wish someone would tackle this or I wish someone would take a look at this. What are some of the areas that kind of float around and in your head as being some issues that aren't being addressed that you would love to see someone you know in the same way that you've put all this into what you've done, that they could put in other areas? If there are any.

Well, as opposed to giving, I think they could invest. And I am so impressed with what Peter Diamandis is doing around Singularity university and the abundance 360 and really looking at how technology can save what other people are like, fearful of. And this is why I have no fear of the future and where we're going to be, because I see the technology and the innovations that are occurring in the world and the speed of which they're occurring is way faster than climate change, for instance, which I don't want to discount climate change to any. I think it's here, 100% real, no doubt about it. But. But our ability to do something in this world we live in with digital information is beyond exponential. And so if people really want to make a difference, you don't even have to go to a charity, go make money off of it. Go to Abundance, go to Peter Diamantis, go to, you know, get on his newsletter, see these things that are starting to that where people are inventing the first stage of it and invest in it. Yeah, yeah.

You know what I have to say since you brought it up, because Peter was. Has been in Genius Network since 2011 and we created Abundance360, the first one.

Oh, good for you, good for you, good for you.

And we put Abundance with a team of Genius Network members. We got Abundance's first book to New York Times. So you have, I think you read Atlas Shrugged when you were 19 years old and then again at 50.

Yeah, and I didn't realize at 50 how much of an influence it had on me. My God.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is that that is one book that many successful entrepreneurs has said has been the most influential book in their life. And it's a long book, 1300 something pages. The audio versions, there's different versions, range from 52 hours to 62 hours. It's an investment of time. I believe. Ayn Rand spent 13 years writing it. And then the late Nathaniel Brandon, who, you know, was, you know, he had a long relationship with Ayn Rand, he became a dear friend of mine before he passed away.

Interesting. Interesting.

Yeah. And so I'd love to. A lot of young people may have never. May have heard of it, but may have not heard of it. What did that book do for your thinking?

Well, I'd like to say what it did for me and then I think what it did for young woman when I started Lululemon, essentially it talked about not letting the mediocre people bring you down. And that to be great at anything requires a certain mind frame of passion, desire, perfection, quality, treating people right, having a template and a process for business where everything works from. Because if your people aren't happy, you cannot make a quality product. If you've got a quality product, then your customers don't complain or more. They're excited about you and they will talk about you and they will. That's the best form of advertising that there is. So it's kind of a. A business process based, I'd say, ultimately on integrity. Yeah, that's great.

No, and I really wanted to do a shout out for that.

But I just wanted to say that one more thing about the woman part of it, though, that in 1998, there really was no woman that you could hold up. Maybe the Avon lady or Mary Kay, you know, it would be like as close as I could get to Utopia for a businesswoman. Right. But that was one. Maybe there's four or five. But anyway, to be able to have a book where it's a woman protagonist who's at the forefront of business and has absolutely zero men issues in 1998, because that was the philosophy of Lululemon, is that men and women are completely equal. There are no issues. And the only thing that's an issue is that women think there's an issue. I think. And you know, there's gotta be women's awards and women's meetings and women's this. That's what makes them unequal. Dagny, who's the protagonist in the book, is what I'd call the perfect business person. And that was a Template. I wanted women who were 23, 24 years old to have the template for.

I do want to ask you about your exercise, your fitness. How do you. Because seriously, that's the world you've been in for so long. And I think it's great that you call yourself an athlete. I think if you say, I'm going to work out, there's a different way that you view yourself, if you think of yourself as an athlete. And I think of entrepreneurs as corporate athletes. Right. So how do you take care of yourself physically?

Well, I think inside that word athlete, it's. It's being able to take the body beyond what it thinks it's capable of. And I think that's where it's mind over matter. And so it's the love of pain. You know, my dad, all of a sudden, you know, the whole there's no pain, you know, no gain without pain type of thing. But that's pretty common. But I think it's really. It's wanting to have the exploration about what is possible. And I think an athlete is in the inquiry about just how high is high.

Yeah.

Yeah. Great.

And, you know, I didn't ask you this question because you've probably been. I know the answer to it already. You've answered it a bazillion times. But certainly if I don't, someone's probably going to be annoyed. The name Lululemon came up with it. Do you get sick of getting that question?

Well, I did. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book, you know, little black, stretchy pants. But I don't mind. But, you know, sometimes I was doing it two or three times a day. Again, it's very. It's fascinating in the role, the realm of how people view life through the lens that they view life. And again, social media and then people that are trying to create hits for their own blog or their own digital platform and how they will take a part or one line out of something, create controversy out of it, only as a marketing tool. So that's the context that you have to listen this through. So when I had West Beach Snowboard, which was my first company, part of it, I bought a skateboard company called Homeless, and it was doing very well. I sold it to the Japanese and in Europe, I was probably one of the first people in the surfskate snowboarding business. But it was when skateboarding was in a decline, just right after that, and snowboarding was going straight up. So there was only limited resources. So I told everybody, distributors around the world that I'M not doing homeless anymore. I'm just going to do snowboarding. So I'm showing the Japanese our snowboard line later that year. And after I show it to them and go, Mr. Chipsan, we're homeless. I said, told you guys, I'm not doing it. I sent the email out and I thought it was very clear about that. And they go, next year, same thing. Show them the snowboard line. They go, Mr. Chipsan, we really want, want homeless. I said, I'm not doing it. And in my mind I know because hom is French for mail and you can't register. There's too many homes in the language. And I wasn't. So I couldn't own the name. So it wasn't worth it to me on any level. Anyway, they came back in February that year. The Japanese yen is at its very highest. They're buying pebble beach and all of New York City and kind of what the Chinese are doing now in 2020. Anyway, they phoned me up, Mr. Chipsan, we want to buy name homeless from you. And I going, okay. So I'm selling complete error here. I don't own the name, I'm not using it. I gave them a number I thought was absolutely ridiculous and they went, okay. And I went, oh, that's the easiest money I made in my whole life. So I started to think about after that, I said, why did they love the name so much? And the fact of the matter is that there were Japanese. The big five Japanese trading firms were making their own clothing brands and giving American names to them because they knew that's what the Japanese customer wanted. But homeless was only the teenagers and young people knew it was authentic because it had an L in it. And that made it very authentic, non Japanese manufactured. So because L doesn't belong in the Japanese language. And I went, oh, that's interesting. So I thought, well, if I ever start another name brand, I'm going to put some L's in it. And so I came up with Lululemon on the thought that it had three Ls in it and I could get three times as much if I ever sold it to the Japanese. So that was my rationale. And it came from nowhere, like absolutely nowhere. I was just working with alliterations.

That is awesome. That is awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Oh, yeah, thanks, Joe.

And share this wisdom with me. And it's also, I cannot understate. It's sort of weird if I think about it this way, is that I'm talking to a guy who for at least maybe 15 years of my life, definitely in the last 10 more. Predominantly, I have probably worn, you know, clothing that you have created that came out of your mind. Clothing. My body for literally 80% of the clothing I wear are clothes that you started, company that created it. And I wear it all the time, and it's enormously comfortable. And you are an industry transformer, and I think it's really powerful. And you just said the bags, and I love Lulu Levitt bags. I mean, I just think they're great. I mean, for the quotes and everything. And that's why, you know, I think you've created something so ingenious with the way that you thought it out, and you've created an experience. And so what I hope is that one thing that people take away from our time together is that you have great standards. You have really high standards, and you sell quality products and you make great margins and you lead people, and it's different. I mean, you take so many things that are commodities and you turn them into great experiences, and you simply make them better. So I appreciate what you've done for the world because I think you have just. You are truly one of the people that has changed the world. A lot of people talk about it, but you have genuinely done that. And a thousand years from now, your influence will still be incredibly impactful because you have just planted a flag. And so I encourage everyone to read your book. I think you may come out with an updated version of it at some point. And anyone that wears clothes, you will realize just how impactful Chip Wilson has been to the world. If you actually read that book. And it's filled with leadership lessons and life lessons and overcoming adversity and dealing with all kinds of things. And so it's a wonderful story, and it's been a pleasure spending this time with you.

So thank you. I mean, it's about as nice a thing anyone could ever say about me. Thanks, Joe. And I can sense that even in conversation with you, the connections or the people that we know together and how we've kind of looked at life, you're well on that road, too. So thank you. Thank you.

Don't miss another episode of Genius Network. Subscribe today@gieniusnetwork.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show, notes or resources, please visit geniusnetwork. Com. 163.