David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…We should say, for anybody who doesn't know, everything that you hear of now, the Air Max, the Air Jordan, the Air Force 1, it is a literal airbag. Actually, it's a nitrogen bag that sits in the midsole. Think about the thing between the lower sole, the rubber on the bottom, and inside of the insole, basically the part of the shoe that you can't get to that's underneath your heel. Sometimes that runs all the way across all the way up to the toe that replaces foam cushioning, instead using a little airbag that magically doesn't pop. Yeah. Rudy really was a genius. Phil's like, all right, let's do it. He tasks who else? Rob Strasser with going and doing a deal with Rudy. They do a deal. Rudy gets between 10¢–20¢ royalty for each pair of air sole technology shoes that Nike sells. Eventually Nike would just buy Rudy's company, and Rudy would become an employee of Nike. Still here in 1977, Strasser is just on fire. I don't know the full context around this. Scott Reames has a great LinkedIn post. But as best as we can tell, Ben, as you said the company was growing hugely. There are all these new employees there who are just taken for granted that Nike is winning. Strasser gets pissed off one day. He goes to his typewriter, and he fires off a memo. He xeroxes, copies this memo and pastes it up on the walls all around the office of Nike, 10 Principles. This document is just amazing. We've tweeted it before. It's going around the Internet. Yeah. It's going around the Internet, but it's going around the Internet described in the following way. Here is the document that Phil Knight wrote, articulating Nikes principles. Here are the things that are wrong with that statement. (1) Phil Knight did not write it, Rob Strasser did. (2) Nike's principles, also incorrect. When this was written, it was actually still Blue Ribbon sports. It was not yet the Nike Corporation. (3) The top of the document has this thin wispy swoosh. That was never the Nike swoosh. This is someone's attempt to doctor this at some point to make it look like some old version of the swoosh. There is an old version of the swoosh, which we will link to in our sources. It is still in the USPTO for the swoosh trademark. It is Carolyn's hand-drawn version of the swoosh that looks nothing like this weird, thin, wispy thing that was doctored and added to the document. Not Nike Inc, not the swoosh. There was never a swoosh on the document. It was done on a typewriter. How are you going to do that? And not Phil Knight, but yes. Oh, my God, these principles are amazing. Okay, David, what are these principles?…

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