Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - How Patagonia Rewrote the Rules of Influence With David Gelles

00:00:00.000 Hey y'all, Jo here and you are listening to Under the Influence.

00:00:09.340 In my book, brands are influencers. In a lot of ways, they were influencers before social media

00:00:15.940 influencers were influencers. They often shape how we live, how we spend, and oftentimes even

00:00:23.120 how we see ourselves. And when I make a list of the top five brands that have influenced us

00:00:28.900 in the past decade, Patagonia is up on the top of my list. At the center of it all is Yvonne

00:00:35.560 Schnard. He was a former dirtbag, rock climber, and reluctant businessman who built Patagonia

00:00:42.540 and turned it into a billion-dollar company. And then he stunned the world by giving it all away.

00:00:49.500 My guest today is David Gellies. He's a longtime New York Times reporter who covers business and

00:00:54.120 sustainability. I read everything that David writes. He just gets it, and he often feels

00:00:59.940 like he is at the forefront of everything that I want to know about climate change and

00:01:04.360 sustainability and how we can save our planet from catching on fire. In his latest book,

00:01:11.600 Dirtbag Billionaire, How Yvonne Schnard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All

00:01:16.160 Away, David spent years reporting on Schnard and his family and gaining rare access to

00:01:22.180 their inner circle. Today's conversation is between David and my wonderful husband, Nick Astor,

00:01:28.740 who is a sustainability guru in his own right. This is Nick's passion. It is what he's been

00:01:35.120 building businesses around for the past 30 years. And I thought it would be really fun for him to

00:01:39.960 be the one to interview David. And even though this is a space primarily for women, we are also

00:01:47.020 very welcoming to very good men. And both of these guys are very good men. Today's episode

00:01:52.680 is about what happens when a brand becomes a movement, becomes an influencer, and how

00:01:57.960 commerce, identity, and activism actually collide every time we pull on a fleece.

00:02:07.380 David, thanks for joining me today.

00:02:09.420 Thanks for having me.

00:02:10.540 It's always a treat when Joe lets me man the podcast booth. David, you know, I come from

00:02:15.340 world where Yvon Chouinard is practically a household name. And I've been reading about him

00:02:20.420 and heard him speak for 25 years, possibly more to date myself. But a lot of the listeners of this

00:02:27.500 podcast probably don't quite know who he is. So give us the quick intro. Who is Yvon Chouinard

00:02:33.680 and why'd you write this book? Yeah. So Yvon Chouinard is the blacksmith and rock climber

00:02:40.420 who in 1973 founded the apparel company Patagonia, which many people probably know from the fleeces

00:02:48.060 and jackets and vests they might see either in the wilds or on Wall Street. And along the way,

00:02:53.960 he forged not only a durable billion-dollar revenue company, but really a whole culture

00:02:59.820 and ethos that had a lot to do with making business a better force for good in the world.

00:03:07.880 He never subscribed to this idea that the purpose of business was just to increase its profits.

00:03:14.160 He always took a much more holistic view of his and his company's responsibilities.

00:03:19.100 And for those reasons, I was drawn to him as just a fascinating character.

00:03:24.280 I've been a business reporter for 25 years now.

00:03:26.340 I've been at The Times for more than half that time.

00:03:28.960 And he really stood out as this iconoclast in a place where most people were sort of following the same playbook.

00:03:35.120 And so when I had the opportunity a couple years ago to break a big story about how he had actually given the company away, I wrote that story. It was a big one for me. But then I took that next step and wound up writing this book.

00:03:48.180 Cool. Now, I think ultimately that tale about how the company was restructured, I mean, he's getting up there in the years. He's sort of semi-retired, I think. He's preparing for his legacy. I think we'll get to that. But to jump a moment back, first of all, would you consider this book to be something of a biography or is it sort of a history of Patagonia or is it more about Yvonne? Is it more about the philosophy?

00:04:08.040 Yeah, the way I describe it is it starts as a biography of a man and it becomes a biography of a company. And I structured it that way because to really understand the company, you have to understand this man. And he had this extraordinary life that made him truly one of the 20th century's great adventurers and outdoorsman.

00:04:28.520 I mean, was just doing like truly radical stuff in terms of his expeditions, his rock climbing, the adventures he was having all over the world.

00:04:36.420 And that ethos, that sensibility and the lessons he learned through those experiences really helped shape the company that Patagonia would become.

00:04:46.460 In the second half of the book, it really transitions from a story about one man to a story about a collection of people, including his wife, including the first CEO of Patagonia, who was a woman who ran the company for 20 plus years.

00:04:59.980 And they're really like close knit group of friends and family that were able to preserve Chouinard's ideals, but sort of operationalize them into what became a very profitable and impactful company.

00:05:14.780 And then at the very end, I sort of come back to him as the man because it was ultimately his decision and his immediate family's decision to do this extraordinary thing and give the company away, which is a deeply personal choice they made.

00:05:28.400 And so we'd sort of end again with him and some sort of, you know, not quite travelogue, but some, you know, intimate time that I was able to spend at home with him, in Patagonia with him, fishing with him, hours of sort of really personal conversations in some remote and wild places around the world.

00:05:46.060 So tell me about the foundation that you just alluded to, right?

00:05:49.760 I mean, I know a little bit.

00:05:51.020 He was basically living out of a van in the famous Camp 6.

00:05:54.100 I've slept at Camp 6 in Yosemite.

00:05:56.200 It's quite a scene.

00:05:58.400 the so-called dirtbag climber scene.

00:06:01.020 I hope it still exists, by the way.

00:06:03.080 But take us back to those days and what he told you about those days.

00:06:06.880 And he certainly had no intention of setting out to be a revolutionary capitalist at that time.

00:06:12.640 That's right.

00:06:13.400 Well, I would argue the story even begins before that.

00:06:15.760 And I pick up the narrative, really, right when he was born.

00:06:19.300 He was born into a French-speaking family in rural Maine in 1938.

00:06:24.120 And if you could imagine the world he was born into, this is pre-devices, this is a family that didn't have a television. It was really an existence that in many ways resembled life from 500 years ago more than it does life today.

00:06:40.460 They largely lived off the land. His father performed simple trades in the neighborhood. And Ivan, as a result, really grew up very close to nature.

00:06:52.780 You know, some of his earliest memories and the memories of the people that knew him as

00:06:56.420 a boy who I interviewed for the book are of him sort of wandering into the woods.

00:06:59.980 That continued when he was a child and then a teenager in Southern California.

00:07:04.660 He would find himself rock climbing in the hills outside Los Angeles and trying to capture

00:07:10.980 falcons and peregrine falcons and sort of teach himself the ancient art of falconry.

00:07:16.260 And then as a young man, falconry led to rock climbing and he became one of these really

00:07:21.200 world-class rock climbers. And as you said, he dirtbagged it, man. He did not have a job. He

00:07:25.920 never graduated from college. And for many, many years, he sustained himself on dollars a day,

00:07:32.280 if that, really living out of his car, sleeping in the woods, sometimes without a tent and doing

00:07:39.560 everything he could to position himself to just spend more time close to nature. But it was

00:07:45.080 ultimately those expeditions, those big climbs of some of the big walls in Yosemites that gave

00:07:50.900 him the first steps on a journey that would make him a businessman. He needed certain specialized

00:07:56.800 climbing gear for some of these multi-day ascents that he and his buddies were doing,

00:08:00.960 and they couldn't find gear that was good enough for what they wanted to do. So he started making

00:08:05.200 it himself. He taught himself how to blacksmith. He started making pitons and carabiners and chocks

00:08:10.600 and hexes. And from that began the climbing business at first, which he called Chouinard

00:08:15.660 Equipment, and then ultimately the company Patagonia. Which is interesting, right? Because

00:08:20.100 a lot of people hear the term dirt bag climber or they see these guys now they're just a bunch 0.99

00:08:23.460 of bums who are just climbing all day but he was he might not phrase it this way but a knack for 0.91

00:08:28.800 business so as he described to you you know a dichotomy there between the climbing ethos and

00:08:35.340 the need to make ends meet completely a deep you you have honed in on on sort of his deepest source

00:08:42.820 of self-loathing. He was always uncomfortable with the fact that he was suddenly a businessman

00:08:50.300 because in his own admission, he considered businessmen grease balls. Even when I conveyed 0.86

00:08:57.060 to him and his team the title of the book, his first reaction was that he hated the title of

00:09:02.160 the book, not because of the word dirtbag. He self-identifies as a dirtbag. He was pissed off 0.90

00:09:07.440 that the book title included the word billionaire because he's so pissed off about being considered

00:09:13.480 a rich and wealthy individual, which ultimately, and we'll get to it, he no longer is. He's still,

00:09:19.640 trust me, they're all fine. But he renounced his billion plus dollar fortune. And so that

00:09:25.480 sense of self-loathing and that sense, and maybe self-loathing, I don't want to dwell on that too

00:09:31.000 much. But this conflicted relationship, as you note, between his impulse to be like a citizen

00:09:37.360 of the planet Earth and someone who's doing good in the world and the necessity to then inhabit

00:09:43.860 this role of a conventional capitalist in a system that he really rejects was the source of enormous

00:09:52.500 sort of creative tension, I believe, that has shaped not only his own journey, but really shaped

00:09:59.920 the company's journey as it took these really unprecedented moves to do things like clean up

00:10:05.060 its supply chain and take better care of its people and figure out innovative ways to spend

00:10:09.860 its profits. All of those things really flowed out of this creative tension, this dichotomy between

00:10:16.920 the impulse to do good and the recognition that by running a company, they almost inevitably

00:10:22.180 were doing some harm. For example, there's a story about the pitons, right? At some point,

00:10:27.520 there was a pushback against the marks and the damage that these things were causing to the

00:10:32.760 climbing surface, to the walls. And he made a decision to stop making pitons. That's right.

00:10:38.920 And that came early in the journey. This was even before the company Patagonia was really founded

00:10:44.540 and he had expanded into apparel. But what they noticed was that as they kept doing these more

00:10:49.940 and more aggressive, ambitious climbs, the technique that people used at the time was to

00:10:54.960 hammer a piton, which is basically, I think, like a large sewing needle into little cracks in the

00:11:00.360 wall. And then they would secure their carabiner into the piton and then their rope to the

00:11:05.020 carabiner. But what they found was as more and more people started doing this, the walls themselves,

00:11:10.980 these tens of thousand year old pieces of granite started getting desecrated and they were getting

00:11:16.320 scuffed and people with things were breaking off. And all of a sudden they realized that they were

00:11:20.580 tarnishing the rock that they loved so much. And so Chouinard and a couple other people sort of

00:11:26.880 had to, on the fly, reorient their entire product lineup. And they innovated this whole

00:11:33.820 new culture, really, that they called clean climbing. And it forced a whole bunch of product

00:11:39.060 innovation and they phased out pitons. But that sort of set the template, right? Whenever Chouinard

00:11:44.720 would identify things about the business that were actually causing some harm, those negative

00:11:50.660 externalities is what we call them in the business world, he would do his best to sort of like move

00:11:55.160 away from it. And there are many other famous examples along the way, everything from the

00:11:59.520 decision to phase out conventional cotton in the late 1980s and introduce organic cotton to more

00:12:04.980 recently their efforts to sort of rid all of their products of PFAS, these forever chemicals that

00:12:10.240 we're hearing so much about today. So Patagonia is founded. What was the founding starting point

00:12:15.320 of the company itself? Yeah. As with everything, it's a bit of an evolution, right? What happened

00:12:19.680 was Chouinard realized that the climbing business is only ever going to get so big. There's only so

00:12:26.920 many climbers, rock climbers in the country or the world who are going to buy these products.

00:12:32.220 But several of his close friends kept telling him, you know what, what people are always going to

00:12:36.440 buy is clothes. And so if you can figure out how to make some clothes that people want,

00:12:40.480 you're going to have a much bigger business. He sort of rejected this line of thinking for a long

00:12:44.360 time. But then in 1968, he went on an expedition that ultimately is sort of the origin story of

00:12:51.060 the company, where he was trapped in an ice cave in Argentina for 30 days, waiting to summit this

00:12:57.080 peak. And it's actually the peak that's still the inspiration for the little mountains on the

00:13:00.900 Patagonia logo. And during that time, his clothes just failed him, right? The layering system sucked.

00:13:06.440 cotton and wool, didn't hold heat, trap moisture. It was just a mess. And he came home resolved to 0.95

00:13:13.380 start making better clothes. And it took several years, but ultimately by 1973, they had their

00:13:18.740 first couple of products, these stand up shorts, which I'm actually having to be wearing a pair

00:13:22.460 right now, which is just like big, ugly, boxy shorts, but they're really tough. And from there,

00:13:27.720 they started expanding into certain jackets and waterproof shells. And that was really the

00:13:32.820 beginning of it and you know fast forward today they're a billion dollar plus company and almost

00:13:37.580 all of that is coming from the clothes okay we'll take a quick break and when we're back i want to

00:13:43.500 get into the the struggle between making a profit and doing good the dirtbag versus billionaire

00:13:50.900 okay we're back so you talked a little bit about how patagonia got off the ground

00:14:05.440 where some of yvonne's initial philosophy may have come from but then there's that struggle between

00:14:11.580 you know making the world a better place living your life and not wrecking the place we want to

00:14:18.380 make some money. We have to somehow make a living. We live in this society, call it a capitalist

00:14:23.320 society if you want. How did he start building this company? The company needs to grow. Well,

00:14:29.300 does it? How do you define growth? What does growth mean? I mean, he's obviously conflicted.

00:14:34.020 Yeah. I think it's always important to recognize that, you know, we can

00:14:36.980 revisionist history, sort of a clean line and a very concise narrative.

00:14:44.160 There's a lot of trial and error in this whole thing, right?

00:14:46.000 Exactly. And that's what I really tried to embrace in this book. The fact that life and relationships and building a company is not just making all the right decisions at the right times. It's a bunch of messy episodes that, if you're lucky, deliver to you a satisfying outcome. And that was the case here.

00:15:08.320 But it wasn't as if, you know, he said, I'm going to make a company and here are my five

00:15:12.900 founding principles and I'm going to execute on them perfectly.

00:15:15.700 No, it was a bunch of, as you say, trial and error.

00:15:18.480 It was a bunch of trying things, recognizing they didn't work.

00:15:22.120 It was a management overhaul.

00:15:24.800 And, you know, he himself, I think it's important to know, was never a great manager.

00:15:29.900 To the contrary, you know, by 1979, indeed, he had essentially relinquished his role as

00:15:36.020 an operations guy and handed the company over to the woman who would really run the company for the

00:15:40.760 next 20 years, a woman named Chris McDivitt, later Chris McDivitt Tompkins. A whole amazing epic

00:15:47.480 love story and romance in there between Chris and Yvonne's best friend, Doug. And Chris was

00:15:52.960 the CEO of the company and they became best friends with Yvonne and Melinda. And together

00:15:56.820 they partnered and spent hundreds of million dollars buying up land in South America. So

00:16:00.900 there are like big, epic generational sweeps and narratives in this book. But in the immediate,

00:16:07.580 back in those late 70s, early 80s, they were just trying to like get by one quarter at a time. And

00:16:13.660 they literally had door-to-door salesmen traveling the country, sort of selling clothes out of the

00:16:19.340 back of their cars, just as Yvonne had sold climbing gear out of the back of his car 20

00:16:25.400 years prior and going store to store, trying to get people to stock Patagonia and build the brand.

00:16:31.340 And so it was it was a scattershot effort. And then, you know, by the mid 80s, there really did

00:16:36.980 start to be some momentum. And that was around the time they started not only making some important

00:16:41.820 product breakthroughs and some of the synthetic fibers that they started introducing to the

00:16:46.800 market, which were way more superior than things like cotton and wool and wicking moisture and

00:16:52.760 retaining heat. But they also did some really innovative,

00:16:55.400 marketing moments, including sort of the innovation, I argue, of user-generated content.

00:17:02.140 And so that's, you know, for the influencers out there, it's an interesting history lesson

00:17:07.280 to understand how even in the 80s, a brand like this was understanding how to connect

00:17:12.160 with their consumers, how to empower them, and how to sort of democratize the storytelling here.

00:17:18.580 I like that a lot.

00:17:19.600 And of course, you know, they've even got into producing movies, short videos online

00:17:24.180 and so on sponsorship of athletes of course and so on but again there's this weird push and pull

00:17:29.860 between how much he's just out there promoting a product because it's cool and looks nice and how

00:17:35.300 much of it are you trying to educate the buyer certainly but where was the sweet spot for for

00:17:40.160 Yvonne you know I listen I'll answer the question directly in just a sec but I would I would bet

00:17:46.860 that if you asked him directly,

00:17:50.120 he would say they never found it, right?

00:17:52.780 It was always a moving target.

00:17:55.300 And there were times when the company grew way too fast.

00:17:58.700 And that led to a moment that they call Black Wednesday

00:18:02.840 in I think 1989,

00:18:04.100 where they had to fire 20% of the staff.

00:18:06.440 And it was this brutal bout of bloodletting

00:18:08.220 jeopardized the whole finances and future of the company.

00:18:11.360 And that, I think, led to a real sense of caution

00:18:15.040 in the years that followed.

00:18:16.860 and led to Patagonia actually deliberately restraining its growth, saying we don't want

00:18:22.440 to grow too fast because we never want that to happen again. But of course, you sort of

00:18:26.740 step on the brakes too long. And then all of a sudden, things like innovation start stalling.

00:18:32.280 The market around them blew up. All these competitors had room to flood the market.

00:18:37.360 And all of a sudden, they're competing against companies that just were invented a few years ago,

00:18:42.360 but now have bigger market share than they do. So I don't know that there ever is a sweet spot.

00:18:47.520 I think what I can tell you is from a margins perspective, and this is a little wonky on the

00:18:51.900 business side, but they realized that if they could maintain 10% margins, that was a good

00:18:59.440 barometer for success for Chouinard. He liked 10% margins. It gave them the capital that they

00:19:06.140 wanted to reinvest and try to keep developing products, and also gave them the profits that

00:19:12.400 they wanted to continue doing some of the conservation and supporting activism that

00:19:17.580 became so important to the Patagonia story. So the actual growth rate, of course, fluctuates

00:19:22.720 over the years. But the one thing that has remained relatively consistent is that they've

00:19:29.600 sort of homed in on that 10% margin as a goal. Fast forward to today, you know, Yvonne has 0.67

00:19:35.760 become less directly involved in the company, but he made this amazing decision to, I don't know

00:19:42.380 what the correct legal term behind it was basically 98% of the company is now owned by this, this

00:19:47.180 entity. What is the structure? Why is this so unusual? And what is this intending to accomplish?

00:19:54.600 Yeah. So what happened is it, the moment that sort of kicks off this, uh, ultimate ownership

00:20:01.880 change, which is how they like to talk about it, was when in 2017 or 18, Shannard got put on the

00:20:07.660 Forbes list of billionaires for the first time. And he describes it as one of the worst days of

00:20:11.500 his life. He absolutely threw a fit. He said, get me off this list. I don't want to be a billionaire.

00:20:16.580 Get me the fuck off this list. I mean, he was just apoplectic that day. It took several years, 0.99

00:20:21.760 but ultimately in 2022, after a lot of trial and error, he and his immediate family and his

00:20:29.020 legal team and a couple of outside advisors devised this very unusual structure. And here's

00:20:33.940 what they did. Patagonia at that point was still an entirely privately held company held by

00:20:39.080 Chouinard, his wife, Melinda, and their two children, Fletcher and Claire. Those four owned

00:20:44.980 100% of the equity, as is common in many big companies. It was a dual class share structure.

00:20:51.800 So 2% of the stock was voting stock. 98% of the stock was non-voting stock. That's typical.

00:20:57.500 I don't want to bore people to death here, but it's important to understand. And here's what they did. They took the 2% of voting shares and put it in an entity called the Patagonia Purpose Trust, a newly created legal entity in California that holds those shares. And that's sort of all it does.

00:21:13.200 And it sort of serves as an additional board of directors for the Patagonia Company, which continued as a ongoing for-profit C-Corp registered in California.

00:21:24.420 Then they took the other 98%, all those non-voting shares, and they put them in a series of 501c4 nonprofit organizations called the Holdfast Collective.

00:21:36.020 And here's what happens now. The Patagonia Purpose Trust now instructs the company Patagonia to distribute all of the profits that are not reinvested in the company to the Holdfast Collective.

00:21:51.140 And the Holdfast Collective distributes those profits on an ongoing basis to conservation, environmentalism, activism that generally follows the wishes of the Chouinard family.

00:22:05.440 And so this accomplished a bunch of important things. The Channards literally renounced their equity. They no longer own that equity. It's held by a trust and nonprofits. They paid actually $17.5 million in taxes on the donation of the 2% to the Patagonian Purpose Trust. 0.81

00:22:21.340 And they did not get a tax rebate or tax credit for their contribution of the 98% of the shares

00:22:30.800 to the Holdfast Collective because it's a 501c4 rather than a 501c3.

00:22:36.860 And so they didn't get that big tax benefit that you might expect when doing a transaction

00:22:40.460 like that.

00:22:41.360 So all of that is to say, as of 2022, the Chouinard family, no longer billionaires,

00:22:47.480 Patagonia continuing as an ongoing for-profit company.

00:22:50.920 and the profits from Patagonia

00:22:54.720 no longer going to the Chouinard family,

00:22:56.920 instead going out the door in the form of checks

00:22:59.320 to conservationists, environmental activists

00:23:01.540 through the Holdfast Collective.

00:23:04.340 And those are typically manifest as some kind of grants.

00:23:06.720 Is that what they call it?

00:23:07.740 Precisely, yeah.

00:23:08.460 I mean, it is effectively a foundation

00:23:11.460 that is writing grants to environmental causes.

00:23:14.340 And they're doing some really interesting things.

00:23:16.380 I've got a story coming out soon

00:23:18.080 about one of the projects they funded

00:23:20.540 which was the purchase of a big piece of property in Georgia that they bought purely with the

00:23:28.400 intention to block the construction of a titanium mine next to a really sensitive swamp.

00:23:36.220 And so these aren't just like random, you know, swaths of land. They're being very deliberate

00:23:40.500 and at times very political in how they're spending their money and what they're trying

00:23:45.020 to achieve with it. Is there a report of some kind that the company will be putting out that

00:23:48.820 to say this is what we've accomplished this year yeah as is typical with this company they're like

00:23:53.460 radically disorganized uh incredibly press shy uh not at all they they they straddle the sign

00:24:00.160 between being very transparent and incredibly bad at telling their own story sometimes especially

00:24:06.900 when it comes to the corporate governance stuff and so no the the hold fast collective last i

00:24:11.100 checked does not have a website there's literally one guy who runs the whole thing who writes all

00:24:15.680 these checks uh and there there was an internal report that i got my hands on as a reporter

00:24:20.620 but to my knowledge they haven't put out anything publicly well despite that the brand is beloved i

00:24:26.520 mean it's been beloved for years i mean the only time i've ever heard anyone criticize patagonia

00:24:31.580 is it's expensive generally yeah patagucci right exactly you know so clearly there's a reason that

00:24:38.440 people shop at patagonia and i'm sure the quality and the you know just having something nice is

00:24:43.240 part of it, but there's no question. Everybody I know who talks about Patagonia is at least

00:24:47.360 slightly aware of the tale of Yvonne and the mission of the company. Have you felt that he

00:24:53.720 feels good about that? Where would he stand on how he feels he has reached, has influenced the

00:24:59.820 consumer out there? I honestly think he's very dissatisfied. And just at a personal level,

00:25:08.360 You know, I was bummed at times in all my conversations with him that he didn't take more sort of pride of ownership in the fact that he really has helped create and shape a movement.

00:25:19.800 No, I would challenge the notion that he fluctuates between pessimism and optimism.

00:25:26.220 He's pretty pessimistic these days.

00:25:28.400 And listen, by some measures, he had good reason to be.

00:25:31.540 The world is in rough shape.

00:25:33.880 Climate change is not slowing down anytime soon.

00:25:36.680 The world's natural resources are being depleted. So I understand why he's sort of dour on a lot of these issues. As for the impact Patagonia has made, I think he understands that they are a beacon for sort of a different kind of capitalism and that especially founders of new companies look to them for guidance.

00:26:02.940 But when I asked him directly numerous times over the years, point blank, what is his advice for big companies? What is his advice for for-profit companies that want to be more like Patagonia? He would basically say it's too late. And there I would challenge him. I don't think he's right on that front. I think he's oversimplifying and being a little too dismissive there.

00:26:27.020 No one can recreate his life and no company can be just like Patagonia, but a lot of companies can do a lot of things a little better.

00:26:37.120 And if Patagonia is a company that can inspire that sort of even incremental change, I think it's irresponsible to lose sight of the benefit there.

00:26:46.000 And so this was one of the places we sort of kept going back and forth in our conversations.

00:26:50.580 Let's take one more break.

00:26:51.760 And when we're back, I want to get into the legacy and what we hope is a positive influence

00:26:57.540 of Patagonia.

00:27:07.180 Okay, we're back.

00:27:08.900 So David, when I went to business school, I went to a weird alternative business school

00:27:13.200 called Presidio, where Yvonne was revered as a constant example, in contrast to, let's

00:27:19.500 say Milton Friedman, who is sort of, you know, the archetype of the ideal capitalist, at least

00:27:25.300 academically speaking, for a long, long time. Despite the popularity of Patagonia,

00:27:30.980 why don't we see more Yvonne Chouinards in the world? I wish I had a great answer to this one

00:27:35.540 without sounding like, you know, like the same sort of dour tone that he strikes in a lot of

00:27:42.180 these conversations but listen the reality is um money is a powerful elixir and at the end of the

00:27:51.740 day one of the things that makes this story so remarkable is that the thing that motivates most

00:27:59.380 people in business which is money didn't motivate him and that's hard to replicate there's just no

00:28:08.280 around that. For all the stories we can tell ourselves about a higher purpose, for all the

00:28:15.660 good we can do in the world and how proud that can make people, it's very hard to convince someone

00:28:22.780 to take a lower return or to leave a bunch of money on the table or to not pursue a new product

00:28:30.880 line or a new marketing strategy because it might have some unintended negative consequence in the

00:28:38.720 world. So I think the reason we don't see more Yvon Chouinards is because it's hard to be

00:28:45.020 Yvon Chouinard, right? It's really hard. You have to go against the grain. You have to swim

00:28:50.800 upstream constantly. And at the end of the day, and this is in some ways the easiest answer to

00:28:56.820 that question, you almost can't give up equity. And this, you know, just from a business perspective

00:29:02.760 is really one of the extraordinary things about this story. They never took a dime of outside

00:29:08.420 capital. And if they had, I don't think I would have been writing this book right now. If they

00:29:15.020 had, and he was pretty cognizant of that, despite never going to business school himself, he

00:29:19.640 understood that he would be sacrificing control in a way that would make it all but impossible

00:29:24.560 to run a company that really adhered to his values.

00:29:31.640 So where does the book leave us?

00:29:32.800 What does Yvonne want us to walk away from? 0.61

00:29:34.960 What do you want us to walk away from

00:29:36.500 in terms of thinking about this man's legacy?

00:29:38.880 I was inspired while reporting this book.

00:29:41.060 I was hopeful and inspired while writing it.

00:29:44.340 And my absolute hope is that everyone who reads it

00:29:47.260 will really take from it a positive message.

00:29:50.340 That's the spirit of the text that's on the pages.

00:29:53.820 And I know we've spent a lot of time sort of talking about his somewhat dour perspective

00:29:58.700 on capitalism, but at the end of the day, it's important to recognize that Patagonia

00:30:02.960 is a lot bigger than Chouinard himself right now.

00:30:06.140 He may be pessimistic in his old age, but the thousands of people who work at Patagonia,

00:30:11.680 these are happy warriors.

00:30:13.340 I mean, they are out there fighting the fight every day, trying to wrestle with these contradictions,

00:30:18.780 with that creative tension between making a buck and doing some good in the world.

00:30:22.940 and taking those profits and putting them to work, doing things like blocking titanium mines in

00:30:29.080 Georgia. So this is a engaged, leaning forward, front of the seat narrative that I think provides

00:30:36.020 a really powerful and important contrast to so much of the business world today. And that's why

00:30:41.760 I'm really excited to be bringing this book out at this moment. It's easy to sort of roll our eyes

00:30:47.520 and throw our hands up and scoff at the way most wealthy people show up in society today.

00:30:54.480 I don't think it's hard to make the argument that it's really disgusting,

00:30:57.420 the degrees to which people flaunt their own excess and wealth at a moment when so many are

00:31:03.600 suffering and we've got so many problems in the world. This narrative bucks that trend and shows

00:31:10.380 people that there is another way to do it. And what I would hope people take from it

00:31:14.580 is at a personal level, listen, I don't want to get too prescriptive here. I never like to tell

00:31:20.780 people what to do, but I'll tell you how I've thought about changing my own behaviors in the

00:31:25.100 writing and reporting of this stuff. Number one is just trying to be really more disciplined and

00:31:29.900 mindful about what I buy and what I spend my money on. I know that can sound trite, but this is a

00:31:35.260 drum Patagonia has been banging for decades now. They did this ad 10 years ago, don't buy this

00:31:41.580 jacket. And what they were doing is try to start a conversation about how we spend our money,

00:31:46.300 what we buy. Are they quality goods that are going to last a long time? Or is it near-term

00:31:51.720 landfill? Because if it's near-term landfill, I probably shouldn't buy it. Probably not a good

00:31:56.940 investment, probably not good for the planet. So I've tried to be a little more disciplined and

00:32:01.080 focused on that. I was actually happy to know that I put on some swim trunks yesterday. And then

00:32:07.420 And later that day, one of these, you know, my iPhone said, oh, he's a pitcher from nine years ago.

00:32:12.300 Same swim trunks.

00:32:13.480 I was like, oh, right on.

00:32:14.880 I've been wearing the same trunks for nine years.

00:32:17.840 So that's one.

00:32:19.240 The other is nature.

00:32:21.600 And this is something that he communicates without words when you spend time with Chouinard.

00:32:28.900 But, you know, the narrative is right there through the entire history of his story and the company's story.

00:32:34.400 He has a spiritual connection with nature, and it's impossible not to feel it when you're out in wild places with him. I've been fortunate enough to spend some quality time with Jane Goodall over the years, and that same deep abiding calm that animates Jane after having spent years and years in the bush with chimpanzees, Chouinard has a bit of that himself.

00:33:00.860 and it's it's this innate quiet that comes when you yourself have spent a lot of time being quiet

00:33:07.380 in nature and that's something i've always cherished and it's something i'm trying to

00:33:12.540 find more of in my life after having written and reported this book and then yeah for the business

00:33:18.480 leaders out there i feel like we've covered some of it but the lesson here is that it doesn't have

00:33:23.340 to suck so much you know you don't have to follow the same shitty playbook that everyone else is

00:33:28.440 following, you can, if you want, make a series of hard decisions. That means you're going to take 0.99

00:33:34.240 better care of your people. You're going to do the work to clean up your supply chain. And you're

00:33:38.880 going to think really clearly about what impact you want to have in the world. And so all of those

00:33:44.820 lessons, I hope, are embedded in this narrative. So the book is out. Any last takeaways that you

00:33:51.180 have to tell us about? Well, number one, thrilled to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to have

00:33:56.320 this conversation. Number two, one thing we didn't talk a ton about, but I think may be relevant to

00:34:00.920 some of this audience, is just the incredible role women played in this whole story. You know, 0.99

00:34:05.420 it's Ivan's face on the cover. It's his name on the book. But his wife, Melinda Chouinard,

00:34:12.760 was this extraordinary force that really shaped the culture of the company, its priorities,

00:34:18.460 its values. I mentioned Chris Tompkins, who was the CEO for 20 years and really did so much of

00:34:26.640 the heavy lifting in scaling the business from an operational perspective, but also making sure that

00:34:32.420 as it experienced that sort of hyper-scaling moments along the way for a clothing company,

00:34:38.740 it never lost sight of its ethical compass. And then even today, recently, a previous CEO was

00:34:47.280 Rose Marcario, she was running the company until very recently, made a big impact. And many of the

00:34:52.400 senior leaders at the company are this incredible constellation of women. So I just want to note

00:34:57.540 that this is a deep and intentional, I believe, part of the story. And it comes back to another

00:35:02.740 thing, which is the childcare. From very early stage of this company's growth, they started

00:35:08.560 providing onsite childcare for working mothers. They started providing transportation. They

00:35:14.360 started providing then not just child care, but actually education. They developed their own

00:35:18.380 educational philosophy, which was a mix of Montessori and Waldorf curriculums. And they

00:35:23.300 have now raised literally thousands of kids over the years, have gone through the Patagonia schools.

00:35:28.480 And even to this day, Patagonia will pay for a nursing mother who needs to travel. They'll pay

00:35:35.400 for a companion to travel with her so the child can stay with the mother and nurse from the mother 0.97

00:35:42.140 herself while she does her meetings. And that's that sort of extraordinary above and beyond kind

00:35:48.100 of behavior that only comes from a company that has this deep ethical core. So I could go on.

00:35:53.920 There's literally hundreds of stories like this in the book. So I hope you check it out. It's

00:35:58.920 called Dirtbag Billionaire, How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All

00:36:04.560 Thank you so much, David.

00:36:06.200 Thanks for having me.

00:36:34.560 You

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - September 09, 2025

How Patagonia Rewrote the Rules of Influence With David Gelles

Episode Stats

Transcript