YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Leatherman

lines on the record: 80
first: 2022-01-31
most recent: 2022-01-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I do. One time in particular, it was the eve of my 30th birthday. And I've been working on this for two years already. And I went to bed that night. thinking, I have nothing to show for this. Two years of my life are was But the next morning I woke up and remembered I have a goal. I want to build a tool that works for me and if it works for me, I think other people are going to like it too. And so I went back to work and on I went.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I thought that it would be anybody and everybody, anybody that carried a pocket knife would rather carry this tool that I was creating because you not only got all the features of a pocket knife, you also got a pair of full-size full-strength pliers.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm pretty sure people were looking askins at me, but this was my day job. Every day I would go to my brother-in-law's garage and spend the whole day in the garage. And so I spent a lot of time in the library too when I was researching various aspects of materials. Or specifications on how good the tool should be.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not beyond no longer than four inches. So by the time I add the pliers taking up about two inches, I only had about two inches of handle.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first shortcoming was that I had a strict criteria in the length that it could be closed when you put it in your pocket. It added to be pocket knife length.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My initial prototypes, I was cannibalizing parts out of other tools. But then I was an end but to connect them and get it to design the way I wanted to, I was cutting the piece of sheet metal with a hacksaw or cutting them with tin snips and folding them together by putting the metal into vice and then putting the, bending it over the corner of the vice and by pounding it with a hammer. It was really pretty crude.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It had the most realistic chance of actually being able to do something with it. And I asked my wife, could I build one, just one, just for me? She said, How long will it take? And I said, maybe one month. She said, okay, so she went to work to support us. And I went to, at the time, at my parents' house, I went into the basement and picked up a file in the hacksaw and started trying to build what was in my mind”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when you think about it, it works really well because if you're in the market for cloth, you go to the place where there's the most selection.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bazaars, and within the bazaars there's sections where the whole section of the bazaars, everyone selling cloth. And you think to yourself, why would they all be in the same place? Why wouldn't they go in various places where there's less competition?”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, some of them turned out to be things that other people did, but I did not. One of them was that postage should have some kind of a barcode or something on it, some kind of a method by which if you want to send it somewhere, you would buy a decal that had the zip code on it that was readable somehow so that the post office could process the mail more easily. Another idea was to congregate service shops within one shopping center, one mall. And in particular, like repair shops. So in particular small repair shops. So if you have a TV repair, appliance repair, watch repair, locksmith, congregate all those into one place. You said you've done some traveling around the world and I'm sure you've been to places where they have these”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the ideas in essence said add pliers to a pocket knife. And the reason for that was for my own personal need, both to fix the car, but even more so to fix the bulky plumbing in the cheap hotels and pensions in which we stayed.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a, what are we going to do if the rest of our lives trip? And during the trip, I was jotting down notes of any ideas I had.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yes there were parts you could get parts one kind of humorous story is while we're in Bulgaria and driving down the highway I noticed my wife was getting shorter I looked across and yeah she was getting shorter and then I looked down and I realized that the supports holding her seat had corroded and her seat was falling through the car down towards the pavement. So Joe moved to the back seat and she was back there. She was sort of like, I'm James the chauffeur up front and chosen back telling me where to go and when to turn. And then when we got to out of Bulgaria and into Turkey, there was a kid on every corner that had an oxyacetylene tank and we stopped at one of those and he was able to weld the front seat back in and then Shoe moved front again and we continued on.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And on that trip, I was carrying a pocket knife, a multi-blade pocket knife like a Boy Scout type knife. And I was using that for everything from using the knife blade for slicing food for dinner to the can opener for opening cans and the screwdriver for turning screws. But there were oftentimes when I needed a pair of pliers. An example would be when the car had issues, but even more so when we stayed in cheap hotels and pensiones and the hotel plumbing had issues”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We wanted to experience other cultures and in particular the culture in Eastern Europe. By now we decided that maybe the best way to for us to travel would be to have our own car. And we heard that the easiest and best place to buy a car was in Amsterdam. So we headed there, bought a $300 used car. It was a fiat 600 D in 1969. If you can imagine a Volkswagen bug scaled down to two-thirds size, this was our little fiat.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we got Cho's family to Portland, so now the project was to get them settled and then Jo and I said, now what? What do we do with the rest of our lives?”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I was part of the airlift out of Vietnam. I left on an airplane. It wasn't so late that I had to leave on a helicopter, but I did cut it a little bit close.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Adopt an agency that still hadn't been able to get out yet. And so about five days before I left and brought out and helped to bring out about our remaining 20 children or so.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the country fell on April 30th, 1975. We were able to get my wife and her family out on about 10 days before We still had some children at the agency I worked for who”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It was your mode of transport, but you were driving a luxury vehicle and seen as such. And I learned a lesson from that. I learned that when you're looking for customers, you need to also know the culture within which you're living and the attitudes of the people about the products that are for sale.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they all had homes and they had maids and their maids would go out and do the shopping and bring back the groceries and the live chickens on the backs of their motor scooters.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I noticed that all of the Japanese motorbikes had luggage racks on the back. But none of the vespers had luggage racks on the back. And I thought aha and market opportunity. I'll create a luggage rack for ASPA. And with the help of my brother-in-law, I was able to design one and make 100 of them. After I finished making my batch of 100, I was able to talk a shop into taking two of them on consignment. And I hired a girl to distribute leaflets on parked vespas. When we left Vietnam, there were still 97 in the bedroom of our house.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that was a real awakening for me in Vietnam. I had a degree in mechanical engineering, but I really knew nothing practical. And a colleague of mine, when I was teaching at the hospital, one day we were sitting at lunch, and somehow the subject of motor scooters came up. And he said, The engine of a motor scooter, it's really pretty simple, you know. And I thought, if he thinks it's simple, there's something wrong with me. And there were these kids on the sidewalk that set up the sidewalk businesses who could repair motor scooters. And it was pretty much from that moment that I became very interested in the way things worked. And I would buy clocks and take them apart and try to figure out how they worked and just anything, lots of things that I pick up and try to analyze and try to understand and try to repair.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within a month after I arrived, Sho and I decided our love was real and we got married. She and I rented a room and a house. Her family was in Saigon, so we had lots of contact with them. And I was initially an English teacher, and then I had some other jobs. I repaired helicopters. And then I got a job with an adoption agency to be their logistics person to arrange for the supplies that we needed for the kids and arranging for the transport of the kids when they're ready to be sent back to America.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but I was not, I didn't have any war experiences. I could move around Saigon very well. My mode of transportation initially was a bicycle. And I would even ride out into the countryside sometimes. And I didn't feel unsafe.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the best experience of my life, the most formative experience of my life. Everything was new. Everything was different. For me, everything was exciting. In Saigon, there was chaos everywhere. I mean, organized chaos everywhere. There was plenty of evidence that there was military activity and there are soldiers and jeeps going through the streets and lots and lots of American infrastructure there. But for me, I went there. paid my own way to get there and once I got there I tried to live more of a Vietnamese life.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let's not go that far. But I was in college, I had three distinct lives. I had my academic life. I had my table tennis life, and I had my foreign friends' life. And so I was starting to come out of it a little bit. Somehow I was better able to interact with my foreign friends than with my American friends.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Her name was Cho, and I was so worried that when I called her back and wanted to follow up with her that I would mispronounce her name and she'd never speak to me again.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In college, I decided I wanted to be really good at something, and I wanted to be able to leave some evidence that I'd been there. And I decided that the way I wanted to do it was to become really good in table tennis. And to win the school championship and have my name on the list of school champions. So I've put a lot of effort into trying to become good in table tennis. And during the summer, a friend of mine and I, while we heard that there was a ping pong table in the basement of a dormitory for the students at Portland State. So he and I went there. And while we were playing a group of students came down, And one of them was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. And so I tried to play even better to try to impress her. And somehow I got the courage to approach her and talk to her a little bit and even got her phone number.”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Skeetz comes up to my table and says, What are you doing? And I said, I'm waiting for someone to stop and I'm going to want to show them the prototype of my new type of pocket knife. And Skeet says, you can't do that. The people walking by, they're like zombies. They're in a daze. They don't see anything. And you got to get up. You got to get out in the aisle. You got to grab them. You got to stop them. So I stood up. When people walked by, I'd say, you sir, have you seen my new pocket knife?”
2022-01-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Leatherman Tool Group: Tim Leatherman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT