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all right here we are well hello everyone and welcome to another uh session or insulting of uh dog talk today we have i'm very pleased to have ron all in joining us uh today to talk all things about boat and his career uh in the voting world uh just finished reading uh ron holland's book phenomenal by the way um book that you wrote wrong all the oceans i think the book could have had many titles audacious being another one um i was reading your book uh cover to cover and uh there's so many life lessons in that book and not only the storytelling you do but uh it's something i don't have children but there's a lot of lessons here that if i had kids or nieces and nephews i would instill a lot of the things that i think you learn the hard way or instinctively throughout your career and i'm happy to have you here today to share your story with all the rest of us so thanks for joining us well thanks for the opportunity jeff yeah and always fun to share the stories yeah it is actually and it's funny storytelling is a great way for us to uh remember and learn so much right there's a lot in stories in life it sounds to me starting back um and i wonder i was wondering about this um you seem to have a fascination with the sea and sailing from a very young age uh you were reading books as a child about the sea um tell me how far back did you realize that you had that sort of passion for the ocean and sailing it was pretty early um now my parents oh first of all growing up in new zealand that was like that was luck because it's really rugby in the winter and selling in the summer so my parents weren't involved with salem but they they knew about it because just growing up in new zealand um and on my seventh birthday i'd pleaded with my parents to get me a boat and they got a little selling boat seven foot sailing boat and so i'm turning seven and i remember standing in the middle of the kitchen crying my eyes out because they got a sailboat not a rowboat because i knew sailboats tipped over us i guess so now my mother's father was a fisherman so that would be the only connection with boating other than growing up in auckland so it was a pretty early start now i think another big influence was when i started going to school you know when you're five or something i was i was uh really having difficulty reading my mother was very concerned i went to all kinds of child psychologists and and and with luck she found someone who became quite a famous um teacher the first woman on auckland university's faculty and they had been in the states on a full break scholarship i don't know whether that makes whether the ulysses will be familiar with that but it's i guess it's an american sponsored system that oversees teachers can come to the stage and learn a specialty so this lady maori clay had just got back to new zealand when my mother tracked her down for help my kid learned to read at a pretty late age 10 or 11 or something and so that was yeah that was an influence also because the way she figured out to teach you to read has a boat nautical theme to it her husband was in the royal new zealand navy and i remember my first interview with her he's you know sort of a kid a bit of a dummy had to go and get special reading lessons and i remember her being totally confident that i was gonna be able to read and i was thinking god you know what a very ambitious lady you know everyone knows i can't read and the the way she got me to read was she said i'd joke just the book to start you reading with she went out of the room came back with one of her husband's royal new zealand navy nautical kind of almanac type thing so it's a thing like you know six inches thick giant book well i couldn't read the first primer how the hell am i gonna read this well i opened the page and there was a there was a story about anchors i'm right into it so you know she got i was then i became a bookworm so that's those are getting the boat when i was seven and having her take you to read were big influences yeah and i think just new zealand was the biggest boat connection influence and uh it sounds like also what both your parents were really supportive i remember when the first time you were selling your mother was on the beach and she said always come home be safe even though you were taking big risks she didn't stop you she just wanted you to be sounds like you know considerate to not take crazy chances but she was willing to have you take certainly gambles at a very young age and she was supporting you with that it looks like yeah that's true i don't even remember fighting with parents about when i wanted to do something and they were against it i don't even remember that happening i it was more like i just was i didn't i figured they'd never say no so i just accepted every opportunity that came up now a particularly special incident was when i was 15 i had the opportunity to be invited on a 36-foot catch to sell from new zealand to australia and i was pretty excited about the invitation and i remember going home and my parents telling my parents at the dining table i've been invited to go on this yacht to sydney and uh they just don't no questions they they didn't put up any red flags or that i didn't know these people just just met the guy that owned it so i was given a lot of freedom but i i think that was mostly another new zealand influence you know i think i said what i didn't feel i was unique in any way you know the same as all the other kids my age yeah it seems like and that also the the way that your dad was volunteering for the the tour bay i'm not sure i've never heard how it's pronounced that how you pronounce it that's right that's that's also huge to be you know part of it at a young to give you that sort of environment is that where you got the love for competition yes is that and it turned out that that sailing club produced some gold medalists later on you know so there was a a very keen and talented group of guys in that club so again just like i grew up with that in tour bay we were on the beach every day after school the uh the the one thing about your book which i think is interesting is you're you certainly seem to be competitive on the race you seem to be competitive to get their designs to win but at the same time the way i was reading your book you're also you give a lot of reverency to other designers or competitors it seems like you're always you look up to a lot of people like you constantly praise others or respect others in your field and yet are willing to compete it seems like almost like a very gentleman sort of arrangement i mean i've thought a lot about this subject jeff um and the way i look back at it because i was so hopeless at school i had no trouble asking for help no no i was asking for help all the time so this is one of the biggest um freedom is a word i would use that i had because i had absolutely no worry about asking for help what i see is that kids that are quite bright and do what it's called hate asking for help you know they figure they should be able to figure it out themselves so when you mentioned giving credit it was a bit like the health thing i had no trouble acknowledging my team or getting help and so i was lucky there was a lucky thing dude there's a lesson there too yeah it is and it sounds like you were able to be surrounded probably because you gave credit or was willing you were surrounded with a lot of influential people that came in your life and stayed you know like it wasn't transactional people would come back and back and back so it wasn't just the promise it sounds like the journey was also rewarding for everyone because not only were you guys meeting crazy timelines it was insane on the production but it sounds like you were everyone was keep coming back to what you were doing as a group meaning involved like evolving racing sailboats always constantly pushing the envelope is that something that was that that drive for innovation was that a drive for innovation for innovation's sake or was that something more that you did for just because you you wanted to win the races or have your design win the races i i think that it was influenced by me being hopeless at school [Laughter] i mean i was really a bad student when i was starting school yeah five to fifteen and lucky i learned early on to ask for help as we talked about and then the the the other thing was i actually searched out connections to get help like i remember knocking on the door of the amazon new zealand yacht designers that were successful at the time so i consciously went out searching all i think it's because i was hoping to school i was but i wasn't not interested in learning stuff so i had to do it my own way yeah i think that's really an inspiring lesson about the book because a lot of people nowadays think oh i don't have a degree in this or i'm not at formula educating that therefore i can't do it um that never stopped you clearly um i mean the whole i mean you took the whole thing you self-educate yourself in the field clearly um the i want to talk about improbable as a start and you dreaming big on those journeys how did that that seems to have been a big breakaway vote for you for your team and yourself how was is that one of your significant is that a milestone in terms of it's definitely a milestone yeah and so i i've been invited a san francisco yacht yacht owner called joshua skadden commissions a new zealand designer builder to build a big racing schooner called new world and i i'm i know spencer i come sweeping up shavings in his shed during the building of this big schooner the boat was so radical the the john spencer designer builder in george casketton decided to build a sailing model so they built a 24-foot model of this 70-foot schunem i'd been homeless at school i'm winning yacht races on the weekend at the tour bay boating club so i never had a self-esteem problem i was you know on the weekend of a hero okay i'm a duns and i got the record with the most canes in the hand and behind but so we worked out again the reason i got involved with this george schuster project which was a huge influence on the rest of my life um was because of my success dingy racing and when spencer was launching this 24 foot model uh he had a visit from kiskaden from san francisco and he wanted the boat to perform well so he invited me to sail it so i arrived to show off this model of the big schooner with georgie sweden so after we were out selling for the for a couple of hours it's ken invited me to go on the cargo ship with the 24-foot schooner and live with him and and his family in zadero street in san francisco so that was a huge lucky opportunity but like what what are reflecting i just said yes i'm going i didn't ask permission to go i went home and told my parents this is what i'm doing they didn't say no so the that it was another example of not feeling constrained by my parents or by the social norms if you like i just was i was 15. and i was going to cross the tasman sea to sydney now so the models sailing story was a few months after that so i'm pretty proficient sailing diggies and across the ocean and cascadin invited me to join his family and he had another very famous book called spirit and spirit was a a 34-foot truckload of stevens we're going to get to a rubble eventually stay with me i'm i'm all here um so i'm in san francisco living with the cascadas just up from the yacht club of the marina there street now when the cargo ship arrived in california from new zealand it had been diverted from san francisco to san pedro and here's another lucky break so cascadin hired condor tompkins to take his souling trailer down to san pedro and pick up 24 foot schooner so i was lucky to have her all day in the car with condor driving up from san pedro to san francisco and i was invited to do an acapulco race with commodore and his crew hey now tonkins and skip allen had just won the fasted race and with dick carter on red rooster so this is i'm in the top echelon of world ocean racing sailing well i guess that's no good but so i hugging with them so but then the the what i tell students is be aware of the opportunities because there's opportunities that are so easy to miss they're actually we're taught to miss them we're taught to miss them by our parents who want safety in a certain direction now they they imagine us as lawyers or doctors so our parents are to blame for us missing opportunities the priests are to blame the radio tv is to blame you know what i mean we're kind of we are taught to not grab the opportunities now i don't know why i was different but i just said yes to every opportunity i did that all through my career right up to designing mirabella 5 which is you know a giant impossible project and just say yeah then you figure it out later so so now i come back to a problem so i'm on commodore tolkien's kind of permanent crew with skip allen dave wally tom wiley but really world-class sailors and they after winning the fasted race tompkins is dreaming about putting together his own kind of project and the focus was the jamaica race which they this team had won the year before and through commodore and his dream of this improbable project i met gary val who gave me a job in his uh studio above oakland in clermont um so i'm getting my other way there i'm at mhe artisan i've got two or three boats to fly afloat in new zealand um 21 years of age when i arrived to california so working for mole at the time commodore tompkins was discussing with mull his dream improbable project for the jamaica race so that was how my connection with that i work with gary on that and i actually was influential in as much as i promoted building it in new zealand much more much less expensive than in california and i suggested they build it where i did my bird building apprenticeship so it was quite connected with the whole design build process and because the boat came to florida and won the jamaica race so and i'm still on the condo tompkins crew list um so the improv was unconventional it was a boat not designed to the rule and the rule was in transition because prior to this period racing arts in the states were designed to the cca rule boats in europe and new zealand we designed the roic rule and there's some fundamental differences at this time the the two rooms merged to create the international ocean racing rule but anyway commodore and mull envisioned a boat that was not so rule oriented as just a damn fast downwind california topiar but it was particularly educational period because we were dealing with analyzing the two rules to create improbable it gave me a very big lesson in yacht design so that was a big influence and then of course dave allen and tim brown who owned improv then went on to do him yeah that's the next one on my i mean there's so many in your book you only you know highlight all your designs you you give certain attention to some of them but not all of this is too much the it sounds to me that your willingness to take uh opportunities for yourself also extended with your design it almost seems like it's it's one and the same it's a willingness to take chances with your own life in terms of when you went to ireland you know all these different steps but then you were probably it looks to me reading your book you're also doing that at a technical label with the designs always pushing the envelope seeing so it's almost reading the book you're like it's almost part of your ethos it's like the willingness to try new things not just yourself but also the boats and then the materials and all the i guess how the industry is pushing the boundaries of construction like the the mass was a big thing you were talking about the rudders uh being carbon all the lessons that you learned through that process it seems like a lot of pushing of boundaries constantly and i think that's a huge new zealand influence so when i was growing up in new zealand if you wanted a boat you actually built it yourself you know guys building boats in their back garden all over new zealand so there is you know if you if you were growing up in the states you went to macy's to to get something in new zealand you just built the thing yourself so there was that uh kind of pioneering well actually you think about america should be a pioneering influence anyway i was saying this was the pioneering new zealand influence on if you wanted something you just figured out how to do it build it yourself properly and that quarter thunder competition that's also interesting the way that you guys would show up at the race not knowing who the competition would be or even what the designs would look like i mean that's that's like competing in a vacuum you're you're competing against what you think your limitations are and then you show up on race day and you have all these all this innovation happening from it sounded like from so many different places that some that sounded like a great environment yeah and an important influence in commenting on that jeff is you know we were designing to the rule so it's not purely designed it's yacht design to trick the handicap so there was a kind of academic aspect as well as the art and beauty of the boat design aspect i'm thinking after doing a few years of selling improbable around the world i'm thinking i really should not give up on this yacht design idea oh a very important story on this one i wish i i think i wrote in the book about but you've got to hear this all right so joyce can said told me okay we've got we'll take this little skewness sailing but the main reason i got you here is to help me get spirit ready for the la tahiti race great it's right up my street so i'm in sausalito with fixing spirit up to go in this race and the trends pack introduce some new rules which georges ken felt was a personal attack on his yachting style first new rule you gotta have an engine oh yeah natural spirit sailed across the honolulu race fast and raised across the atlantic with no engine putting an engine in through it was a total sacrilege so that's my job put an engine in the spirit oh god okay we put a lawnmower engine and then we didn't need exhaust and through whole fittings and but there was a minimum speed requirement that we just passed so that was that restriction on spirit during the tahiti race we got it but if taking kishken's you know they were against me type thing the yacht club they offered another rule minimum crew six well they didn't destroy all these races with five so now you gotta take another person on the vote to tahiti because he was pretty convinced they're just picking on me so he's scared to count with a classic we're going to take johnny our nine nine-year-old kid with this is the sixth crew member just for a week just to meet the minimum and poor johnny you know years later i asked him do you remember you know but he said i can't remember a bloody thing about it i just blacked it out it was the most boring 23 days a nine-year-old kid could spend so anyway we you know there was a reason i went back to talking about spirit which i can't remember remember why but oh yeah because doug peterson was one of our crew so because ken had often invited doug peterson to sail on spirit and he was one of the crew for the tahiti race well you know obviously well not obviously doug was a student of yacht design he's a couple of years older than me so he would he did peterson yeah 20 he was 23 and i was 21. um so you put us two on spirit for 23 days do you think we're going to talk about yacht design no kidding so perfect perfect yeah so after the spirit tahiti race experience and actually before the improbable experience which happened a couple years later i i was thinking if if you're going to be a yachty sadder this is my discussion with doug on spirit you got to build design and build yourself a boat and show the vocal wood races well we both did that i did the quarter tunnel because it was the smallest cheapest boat that i thought would gain some international recognition if it was successful that was a crazy production in the book it's unbelievable the timeline your budget building it like yeah with friends and family investing your own money to do it you know jeff one thing i when i'm when i'm talking about this in public i quite often i introduce elon musk now now and i say don't let the facts spoil a good story so i don't know how good my how accurate my elon musk story is but who cares we get the idea so i when i did my boat i'd saved six thousand dollars and i'm working at this time in florida the morgan yacht corporation and the way i was gonna do this build this boat was put every penny of my savings on this little boat oh then like elon musk did after he sold paypal yeah with uh you're talking about tesla what do you do with tesla you know if you had to helped him out he he wasn't gonna make it but it's it's a bit like no fear see i didn't i never contemplated what would happen if we didn't win and i wasn't going to be a yachty's honor i never kind of worried about i never thought it might not happen so i do my elon musk and put my six thousand not 200 million six hours yeah back then though i mean that's a lot of money so honestly so anyway it worked out great won the one the chance to go to england for the quarter turn cup and similarly doug did a one tonner at the same time and that won the chance to get his sardinia so coincidentally being on spirit talking boats for 23 days panned out successfully for both of you yeah yeah it's uh it's interesting that that story was real and i i thought what was interesting is that when you're racing it seems almost collegial the competition between various people it doesn't seem to be certainly the book didn't seem to have any sort of negative animosity towards one another it's almost like each one of you are pushing the envelope and then everyone's raising the bar it's constantly a little bit like what elon and it's funny you brought that up because i was thinking rapid design and the willingness to fail and i was thinking about what was happening with the carbon uh the rudders this willingness to take chances is almost instrumental to lead to future greatness otherwise if you're too cautious you know it's gonna take forever to get to where you could be unless you're willing to take chances i mean that's an interesting angle you raised which i wouldn't have gone there in my own thought process but i think it's valid what you're saying analyzing looking out into this yeah but what's conscious to me now is how either failing wasn't a big deal i don't remember worrying about it i had no idea whether the shape i was doing with my new quarter channel was going to be better or not i just kind of it was more intuitive and artistic than it was arithmetic because remember i'd fouled arithmetic big job yeah and and full circle that's exactly what happened i think when you were doing uh the larger yacht was it mirabella i can't remember the one where you had all these different design and it like you were saying in the book your first initial design that was chosen by the family that was a a story about uh was that bill joy's ethereal oh yeah and and how the first version was after doing all the discovery all the analysis the 10 all the modeling in the end your intuition of the first design actually was that actually gives me chills and that's that's that's being in the flow um to be able to nail it and then and then get the confirmation bias that it actually was the first one was the right one yeah that's pretty neat and and the way to explain this jeff is you know you can't design the perfect boat because the wind speed changes and you're wrong so you're you've got to design to encompass a wide range of different conditions so you you can never hit the perfectly zone because it's going to be hopeless when the wind changes so and that came now that would be done by multiple analysis of computer studies that wasn't a possibility when i did ethereal it was still pretty intuitive and that was crazy tech challenges it sounds to me that at one point not only were you challenged for the racing which obviously mattered a lot in speed on the water and you know meeting but also then at one point it became an tech challenge was to build understanding the requirements and then meeting those requirements seemed to be another layer on top of what you were doing with the sailboats it's almost like a layer on a layer because then the materials became a challenge the construction the build the quality of the build um so it's almost like layers upon layers of complexity as the the racing world was pushing that envelope forward that seemed like the complexity seemed to be crazy at that point crazy and it was that was influenced quite a lot by the transition from wood and metal by building to composites so at this period in my career and most importantly influenced by imp the san francisco boat where we were building lightweight fibreglass boats that were not very stiff you know they would kind of move around a bit under the racing loads and a swedish friend of mine who is a kind of a techy and an inventor proposed putting a tubular space frame inside these flexible fiberglass boats so we could make the hull a bit lighter and prevent the flexibility by putting in a structure that you can calculate how much you needed to prevent the bending um but master fuller was doing this in his architectural stuff years before i was playing with this so yeah certainly i was i would follow for instance formula one race car stuff and i remember having the chance uh with lotus colin chapman to be in the monaco pit area during the monaco grand prix because i i'm the formula one cars were starting to use composites and so there was a huge learning there they had the money to learn to budget youtube we had no r d money so we had to kind of watch what the other guys were doing aerospace or automotive um so yes i i was trying to make the boats lighter and stiffer so i needed to follow these technologies um because we we knew from digging racing boats stiffness and lightweight was when you have one designs if you can make a 1d zone lighter and stiffer it's going to be faster than the other guy so i was taking that lesson into my ocean racing design world it worked pretty good you