Mel Ziegler

Mel Ziegler is the co-founder of Banana Republic and The Republic of Tea. In 1978, with $1,500 in savings and no prior business experience, he and his wife, Patricia Ziegler, launched Banana Republic, reimagining military surplus as stylish safari and expedition wear. After leaving the company, the duo went on to co-found tea company The Republic of Tea with Bill Rosenzweig. Ziegler is also the co-author of the memoir Wild Company: The Untold Story of Banana Republic, chronicling their unconventional entrepreneurial journey. Before his business ventures, he worked as a journalist for the Miami Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he wrote for New York Magazine. A multi-faceted creative, Ziegler has also been an abstract painter for nearly 30 years. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  One day, I was in a lot, I was in the bookstore, a library or something else, and I see this book that says, "Think and Grow Rich," by Napoleon Hill. It was just one of these very simple books, but I thought, "There's some magic in me passing this thing, and I should look at this." And they gave formulas. It says, "Think of how much money you want to make. Think of how long it's going to take you to make that money, and get started." Is basically what it was saying. So, in other words, come up with something, do something.

• 0:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  And at that time, I was on an assignment, actually, in Australia. I was sent to Australia, was paying the rent by freelancing. We wanted to travel so badly, that Patricia and I both quit The Chronicle on the same day without an idea of what we were going to do. Somehow, we were going to do this. And then all this happened later. This, those, these are how the times were so different. You could be this impetuous. Things weren't this expensive. It wasn't this hard, it wasn't so stratified, it was just easier. And so, I was in Australia. I went into a disposal store, which is their version of a surplus store. And that's all I ever dressed in was Army surplus.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Only Navy P coats or these jackets or whatever. I just went to the Army surplus. I never wore anything but Army surplus. I loved the idea of this, "Here, I'm going to go into a new place with new surplus." And I walked into the disposal store, and I found this, like, old khaki jacket. I picked it up, it was an old British Burma jacket, made surplus by the... The UK, somewhere in the late 1940s, and somehow found itself into this thing. And when I got off the plane and Patricia picked me up at SFO, she saw the jacket, said, "Where did you get that jacket? Where'd you get that?" And then I wore it to work, I wore it to play. "Where'd you get that jacket? Where'd you get that jacket?" Patricia started changing the buttons,

• 2:27Speaker 01

  putting patches on the sleeves, leather behind the counter. I said, "Wait a minute. This is how much you want to make? This is how long it's gonna take you make it? This is what we're gonna do. We're gonna sell surplus clothes as fashion."

• 2:43Rick Rubin?

  It started as essentially army surplus.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's all it was. That's all it was. And all I had was $1,500. We had $1,500 between the two of us, not any more, that we had saved. You could do that in those days. And I had this failsafe system that if I ever go below whatever it was at that point, like $1,000, I wasn't gonna spend any money.

• 3:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  This is my part of me that says, "Sorry, you starve now. Well, you have $1,000 in the bank and figure it out." So we were down that low. I was down to $1,500 jackets.

• 3:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, how did you start the business?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a reporter. I started researching it. I started looking at this. Well, this is how army surplus is sold. Well, in the United States, it was sold by the government in huge lots. They would just sell a huge lot and then take it off to places like Travis Air Force Base and lot number one, lot number two, lot number three. Used airplane propellers, excess toothpaste, shorts. You'd have to buy the whole lot and then sell it off. These were the jobbers who were the wholesale version.

• 3:53Rick Rubin?

  Did you ever go to one of those?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  I went, we went there and tried to buy something. We just needed to get the jackets. And we didn't need the toothpaste or the propellers or whatever it else it was. We didn't know what to do with them. We didn't have the money for them. So we had to go to the jobber. And he was in Oakland. And we realized that there were only about six or seven of these guys who were really bidding these things up all across the country. They were all, they all knew each other. It was a little club. They were these Jewish guys, you know, really who understood how to make the schmatta business and everything else. They had it, they had it in their blood to make it work. So we found one of these guys in Oakland. And we came to, we went over to his warehouse and started to look around.

• 4:35Rick Rubin?

  Describe the whole warehouse for me. I'm interested in that.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Dunk.

• 4:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  It was full of mold and sweaty clothes that had never been washed and greasy stuff. But it was.

• 4:49Rick Rubin?

  Was it orderly or no?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  They sorted it out. They did sort it out. And so over here was some shirts, old polished shirts.

• 4:57Rick Rubin?

  Was it all military stuff or not necessarily?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  All excess, they were buying from the military. That's where they were buying it. And they were buying it from all these auctions. They would go around the country and bid against each other. And then they would trade afterwards. From my lot, I'll trade you this and I'll trade you that. That was too, we didn't have the money to do that and we didn't have the wherewithal to do that. That wasn't what we wanted. We wanted to find clothes.

• 5:21Rick Rubin?

  And that was a bigger scale than what you were doing.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  We wanted to just sell, find clothes. Other people, well, if you can buy a surplus jacket. These were the polyester clothing years.

• 5:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So these were the natural fibers, the only way you could find natural fibers. And so, and these were the days when designers were just, weren't really designing anything particularly great, but throwing their names all over them. My sense of fashion is, you know, the next available thing to pull off the rack in the closet. I didn't have it, I didn't think about fashion. But Patricia, she did.

• 5:53Rick Rubin?

  Were most of the things that you saw either khaki or olive green?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Almost everything was khaki or olive green. Some version of both. It was a textile if it was a garment.

• 6:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  But what we found in this warehouse was a whole pile of shirts with epaulettes on them that looked fantastic. There were these epaulettes, these were the seventies, we wore epaulettes, beautiful safari kind of shirts. We asked, where did these come from? Spanish, yeah, the Spanish army shirts. They were paratrooper shirts. Spanish paratrooper shirts. Oh, interesting. How much? Five dollars apiece.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  So Patricia nudges me and we just walk away. She's good at this.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  He says, "Well, what?"

• 6:44Rick Rubin?

  How many did they have?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  There were about 500 of them because that's what we bought them all. And that's what there were, 500 Spanish paratrooper shirts.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  I don't know how or why, I was driving a Pinto in those days. But we had a Pinto and we drove up to the warehouse and loaded the whole back of the Pinto with these 500. By the way, it was five dollars, no, how about a dollar? Ending up at two dollars, whatever it was, per shirt. That's right, because it was a thousand dollars and we had 500 dollars left. There it was. So we drove them back to our house in Mill Valley at that time. We were renting a house. And started washing them, one at a time, one at a time, one at a time, one at a time. And we had a dinner party. Some friends were over and one of our friends was one of my best friends over the years, Herbert Gold, who was a novelist.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Who, if you haven't read his book Fathers, is one of the greatest books of all time in the 1950s. He wrote that book. He was sort of mentored by Saul Bellow and he was of that same. He's written many books. He just died at 99 recently, dear friend. He was at the dinner and he's kind of a, by it at Goodwill, he does, no spend no money. He's just the bohemian. He was a beatnik of the beatnik era in San Francisco. He walked downstairs, he brought, then he brought one of the shirts up. And he looked at you all, "What is this?" And Patricia said, "Well, it's a Spanish paratroop shirt." He said, "I want one." I said, "Take one, Herb." And she said, "Six fifty."

• 8:27Speaker 01

  How can you charge my friend money for sure? Anyway, so yeah, he prays on his checkbook, he writes six times.

• 8:32Rick Rubin?

  Was that your first sale?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  That was our first sale.

• 8:34Rick Rubin?

  Oh, great.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  His first sale. Then he puts it on. This is hilarious. Then he puts it on. And the sleeves came to here. They were short.

• 8:43Rick Rubin?

  Three quarter sleeve.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Three quarter, but it was, I don't think it was meant to be that. It was, it was, it was surplus because it was too short. Cause he went down and found five more and they were all the same. Now we knew why it was surplus.

• 8:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, cause they didn't fit.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Didn't fit. We thought, this is crazy. What are we gonna do? I said, well, we're gonna sell a short armed Spanish paratrooper shirt.

• 9:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  That's what we own.

• 9:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  And we told, this is probably because Franco had this crazy idea that he didn't want any long armed people around or whatever. We just, we made up some fun stuff and wrote some copy about it.

• 9:18Rick Rubin?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  At that point, there was a flea market in Marin City. They had a big, dirty, open lot there that every Saturday they had a flea market in. It was huge flea market. So I said, let's, we'll go to the flea market and sell our short armed Spanish paratrooper shirts. So we go there the first day, we have a sign, short armed Spanish paratrooper shirt.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Six ninety five or whatever it was, six fifty. And people are fascinated with it. They're just fascinated with it and they're coming by and looking at it. By the end of the day, we sold like three of them.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  I said, what are we doing wrong? Patricia said, they're too cheap. So the next week, we went back and doubled the price and sold out. And then we began to realize, well, we're in like the strangest of strange businesses. We're buying surplus. There can be incredible margins.

• 10:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  In this business.

• 10:15Rick Rubin?

  Most people in business school would tell you, if you raise the prices, you'll sell less.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yes, of course. This was the first reason that we knew that you do, the best asset we had is having no experience whatsoever.

• 10:27Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  It was absolutely, it was just, we were professional amateurs and I've been one ever since. Because of that.

• 10:36Rick Rubin?

  How did she get the idea to double the price?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  She was interested in fashion. She worked at Macy's when it was a real store in the 1960s and down on Union Square in San Francisco. She worked as a, under some people in the fashion department, helping to buy. So she was very, she was very aware of the fashion world. I had zero visibility to it, but she could see it. I would never have known that, but she.

• 11:02Rick Rubin?

  No, it's fascinating.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Well, look at today, look at the price of some of these, of some of the clothing that's out there. With certain label names on it.

• 11:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Do you really think that's not a 90% margin? It's absolutely a 90%, I mean, this is public theory, but look at how many happy people who have been stolen from. I mean, it's just crazy, it's crazy this, it's because this whole world we live in now is that, is about, you know, manufactured scarcity.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Anyway, so that became it. We got enough money to open a little store on a side street in Mill Valley, $250 a month. The only thing is we couldn't lock the door. Because there was an Ikyoto studio upstairs and we had to let people come in for evening classes. So we had a store with all our merchandise in it. Well, we couldn't lock the door and people had to walk in and out all night, even though we weren't there. But it was 1970s.

• 11:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What did you name the first store?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  The name was Banana Republic.

• 12:03Rick Rubin?

  So Banana Republic, the first $250 a month store was Banana Republic, that was the beginning.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  That was it. And the reason I named it Banana Republic is I knew it would get noticed. Because, you know, you just didn't name stores Banana Republic in those days. That was not what you did.

• 12:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And it was making a political statement on top of everything else, which I wasn't going to leave the rest of me behind to go into the. Fashion business. I mean, and Patricia wasn't gonna leave the rest of her body. So we went into it as a writer and an artist. And when we look back now from where we are and look at it, in the early years before it was destroyed by The Gap, there was nothing quite like it. It was, it was all about creativity. Just do anything, just make it fun and make it true. Make it honest, just no limits. If you can imagine it, you can do it.

• 12:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, think and grow rich.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  And we, because we were who we were, we were, we were drawn to other unemployable people.

• 13:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Who were just amazing when you hired them.

• 13:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  And so the whole thing became wacky and creative. And the catalogs were just, I don't know if you ever remember them, but in the 1980s, they were, each one of them was lovingly created. We never ran a photograph. Patricia, in the beginning, is an artist. We couldn't afford a photographer, so the first catalog, she would draw.

• 13:31Rick Rubin?

  Illustrated clothing with a description.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  With a, with a literary description.

• 13:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  I was a writer, this is what I did. So this is the only place we felt comfortable.

• 13:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  We didn't know anything else, but we did know how to write the copy and we did know how to draw, do the drawings.

• 13:46Rick Rubin?

  How much do you think the combination of the illustrations and the copy sold versus the item itself? Do you know what I'm saying?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Well, it was a unique experience because some of the items were a Swedish Army gas mask bag without the gas mask. Now, would you buy that because it was written about? Or would you, would you say, I have to own one of these things? But everything had its story. There was a story for everything.

• 14:19Rick Rubin?

  And everything, it sounds like, was limited because you bought...

• 14:22Speaker 01

  It was genuinely limited because it was surplus. It was, when it was gone, it was, it was gone.

• 14:26Rick Rubin?

  Five hundred or a thousand, and when those were gone?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Gone.

• 14:28Rick Rubin?

  You didn't have that anymore.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Gone.

• 14:30Rick Rubin?

  So it was always turning over what you, so that would be another reason for people to either check out the catalog or come to the shop is because everything was gonna be different next time.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Everything was new. And they were unique things we were finding. The way we were doing, we were sort of, well, okay, there was a British Army sleeping bags, but they had sheepskin liners. So we stripped the sheepskin out of them and made sheepskin vests.

• 14:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Would you ever dye them or do anything to them?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Late around, we dyed everything. We had all kinds of colors. We dyed everything. Not in the early years, because we didn't have the money to do it. But when we had the resources to do it, we would have done all that earlier. We were working with what we had. And we were basically the two of us, doing everything in the beginning. Stapling the catalogs at the kitchen table. Hand-printing them out of the fit.

• 15:21Rick Rubin?

  First catalog, how many print?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Five hundred.

• 15:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and where would you distribute them?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Well, come from media, so I knew the only way I was gonna make this thing work is to get attention. So I sent it to every city desk, to every newspaper, to every magazine, to everywhere I possibly could, hoping somebody would open it and realize, "Banana Republic, look at this crazy thing. Look at this copy." And it so happened, it landed one day on the desk of John Gambling, WOR Radio, New York. Tri-state area broadcasting.

• 15:59Rick Rubin?

  Huge listener.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Broadcasting. Patricia, one day, we're desperately, it's raining, nobody's coming in the store in Mill Valley. She goes in to open the store. She picks up the phone. We were so desperate that she would try to take wrong numbers and turn them into sales.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And this happened to be, "Hello, who am I talking to?" Patricia. "And who is this?" "John Gambling, and you're on the air. WOR, New York."

• 16:30Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  That's how it happened.

• 16:32Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  It was amazing. So, she's funny, and she's great, and she told wonderful stories, and she described some of the crazy merchandise. And he said at the end, he said, "Well, how does somebody get one of these things?" And because we manufactured 500 of them, and they were expensive, we decided we were gonna sell them for a dollar. We sold the catalog for a dollar. It was a literary, beautiful catalog. So Patricia said, "Send a dollar to Post Office Box 745, Mill Valley, California, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And we were right across from the post office. Four days later, the postman walks over with two sacks of meal. Every one of them had a dollar in it.

• 17:13Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And that was it. And from that, we never raised any other money. It was our $1,500. We were working on cash flow, although I wouldn't even know what it was then. But it was just, let's open 25 envelopes and go to dinner.

• 17:35Rick Rubin?

  Tell me more about the name. About how much thought went into the name?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Well, I knew it was naughty.

• 17:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  I just knew it was naughty. I didn't know what. I just knew I was not gonna. It was gonna get attention.

• 17:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And I had to get attention because I had no other money. And I was still in business and I had to get attention.

• 17:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I realized later on that I'm a marketing guy. This is what I do. I mean, I knew how to do it. It was innate to me.

• 17:59Rick Rubin?

  Yes. Walk me through the growth of the company. The next step, people are ordering catalogs.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Ordering catalogs.

• 18:06Rick Rubin?

  What happens next?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Well, we need help. We're doing this all ourselves. So a beautiful woman walked in, just shopping, and just said, oh, are you hiring? And Patricia said, yeah, but I could only pay you $5 an hour. So it's okay. And she came in and then we had an employee. We had a store manager. It was happening.

• 18:29Rick Rubin?

  Did you have a lot of repeat customers?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were really people who were devoted to it. A lot of creative people. Mostly creative.

• 18:36Rick Rubin?

  Did you put a Banana Republic label in the clothing?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Banana Republic.

• 18:39Rick Rubin?

  From the beginning?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  From the beginning. It said Banana Republic. And not only that, but the original logo were two bananas and a star, a red star. Because I remember that particularly because after a while I realized we could probably get a bank loan. So we went to the local place that had our checking account. And we met Fred, the loan officer. And he looked at this. He said, well, do you have a business card? He looked at the business card with this red star in the middle of it. I said, oh, no, no, no. We're just making up this name. We had to explain it to him. And we talked to him. We talked to him. We talked to him. He says, well, look, you know,

• 19:16Speaker 01

  here's how you get credit. You gotta have capacity, which is basically collateral. There were three Cs. I'm forgetting what the third C was. You have to have character. He said, well, you don't have those other Cs, but you are sure two characters. He said, well, I'll tell you. Have you thought about Net 30? Asking your suppliers for Net 30? I said, what's that?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  And that's what happened.

• 19:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  We financed through Net 30, which then became Net 60 and Net 90. We always paid early.

• 19:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  And, you know, years later, when we walked around before the company really evolved into more broadly, we would show up at the surplus conventions in place in Las Vegas. And these were other people with Army Navy stores. How the hell you guys do this? Because we were just selling it as fashion. We were just selling it as fun.

• 20:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Because this is what we wore. This is what we did. We didn't even, we don't live in boxes.

• 20:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. You framed it as a different thing than Army Surplus.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:20Rick Rubin?

  Because there are plenty of Army Surplus stores, but Banana Republic wasn't an Army Surplus store, even though you sold Army Surplus.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:28Rick Rubin?

  So it starts with just the clothing. And then over time, you would start dyeing it. What other modifications would you do? You said you would take something apart.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Well, we knew we were selling a lot of khaki. So we couldn't manufacture. We didn't have any money, enough money to really even manufacture at that point. We were getting all the surplus we could. And we were running low on some things. So we would go and find a company that was making natural fabrics and making things in khaki. And we would say, well, could you just take that shirt and change these buttons and make a few of these for us? Or could you just do this and put a label on that pant?

• 21:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  And that's how we sort of expanded. And that's how we began to do more. But we still weren't, didn't have the money to dye. I'll never forget the moment when we got that idea. I was in Lower Broadway in New York. I was there visiting. Patricia was back in Mill Valley at the store. And there was a store, I forget the name of it. It was a wonderful store that was on Lower Broadway, something clothing. But what they did is they took everything and they dyed it in these outrageous colors. And I walked into that store. I said, this is what we should be doing. I went out to a phone booth.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  A noisy Lower Broadway. I called Patricia. She said, hey, what's up? I said, dye it, dye it, dye it, dye it. She said, are you saying I'm fat?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  She was joking, but she got it because we had more than khaki.

• 22:05Rick Rubin?

  What was the first thing that you manufactured yourself? Or did you ever get to that stage?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Well, here's what happened. The deficit began to show. I had no interest in business. I had no education in business. And Patricia, neither. We were just two creative people bumbling along through this whole thing. And we had a, some customers who just loved what we were doing. And there was a fellow by the name of Merritt Schur, who lived in Marin County, who was a shopping center developer. And he came in often and he said, "I want to put one of these in my shopping center. This is great." And I couldn't even imagine how I was gonna do that. Nobody loaned money to, I mean, people today could not possibly understand what it was like

• 22:52Speaker 01

  in the 1970s. Venture capital, if anything, was for a few little companies making chips in Silicon Valley. The very idea of financing a brand or a clothing, nobody would do anything. That was just ridiculous. And then particularly one named Banana Republic. I mean, it was just, this was too dissonant, even for those times. And Merritt would come in, I said, "Merritt, I can't. We don't have the capacity to do it. We don't have the money. We don't have, I just can't do it. We can't even, we're not sleeping. We're filling orders at night, we're just in the store. We're trying to make this thing happen. We're writing the catalog. I mean, those days you had to set the catalog in Linotype.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  It was crazy. Patricia was so tired one night, she was driving past, after three nights of no sleep, over the Golden Gate Bridge and swerved into the other lane.

• 23:45Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  I mean, we were just, we were just, we were.

• 23:49Rick Rubin?

  How many years in were you now?

• 23:51Speaker 01

  We were now four years in. And we were doing it for us. We could travel, we could, we had, I mean, what, but we weren't really making any money. We had two stores. I said, "Take a day off, just go walk in the mountain, just walk in the mountain." And I went and I meditated. I didn't know I was meditating, but I was actually letting my mind just go free. And I thought, you know, the only solution here is not to, not to close the catalog, or not to close the store, but to grow. Pretty obvious, but for an intelligent person, I was pretty stupid. I didn't see that. But then when I saw that, I said, okay. So she said, what do you, so I came back and I said, here's the solution. We're gonna open a second store. She said, what? We're gonna get another store in San

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Francisco. So we did. We went, we opened the store in San Francisco, and it was gangbusters. It was, people lofted. It was on Polk Street between Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. And we did, we did really well in there. And

• 24:47Rick Rubin?

  Is the store still there?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  No, it's long gone. It's long gone. So we still, all we wanted to do was travel. And we were bone tired, bone tired. And so our friend Meredith said, well, come to my shopping center and put this in. I said, not only can I do it, but I'd sell this company tomorrow if I could. He said, well, you ought to meet Don Fisher. Well, Don Fisher is the guy who started The Gap. He started The Gap maybe 10 years earlier in San Francisco by selling Levi's and records. And The Gap was the thing from the 1960s, the generation gap.

• 25:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Remember that?

• 25:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that's what The Gap was.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  That's what, yeah, it was named after the, don't trust anybody over 30. By that point, The Gap had 500 stores. It was a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 25:41Rick Rubin?

  Were they still only selling Levi's?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  They, no, by that point, they were

• 25:44Rick Rubin?

  They had switched to Gap.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  They were, they were in malls.

• 25:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  They were manufacturing clothes with a lot of different self, with a lot of different labels in it, none of which said Gap. And they were putting them on these rounders, and nothing was on, on the wall and on shelves. And it was just clothes in a white space called a store in a mall.

• 26:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  He walks into this thing, store, and he's, Don Fisher, he, he was an exceptional person, I will say. He really was an exceptional person. Very bright, very smart. Real estate was his background. But he got, found his way into the clothing business through real estate.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  And he started walking around the store and picking up things and he says, what's this? And the salesperson would say, well, that's a Falkland Islands bathing suit from the British surplus from the Falkland Islands. What? He would look at this and he would look at, he started looking at every item and reading the tab and reading the letters. We used to post all the letters people sent us in the dressing rooms. They were all posted over the walls because people were just, they would love the company and they just sent us love letters all the time and we just posted them.

• 26:53Rick Rubin?

  That's a nice idea.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  He said, yeah, yeah. He was interested. He actually wanted to buy the company. And he said, let's have lunch. Let's go around the block. There was a place to have lunch. He brought his CFO with him. Then he got into drilling down questions. He said, well, where are you incorporated? He said, well, I don't know. I incorporated myself. I figured out how to incorporate. Are you even an accountant? No, I'm the accountant. I did everything. I was the lawyer, I was the accountant. I did everything. I couldn't owe money for this stuff.

• 27:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, do it yourself.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  It was mom and pop. It was a mom and pop business. He said, well, what do you do for markdowns? Patricia said, we don't. We mark them up. He said, what are your margins? He said, it's about 80%, 90%. You're lying. This was the CFO. He was like, you're lying. The truth is, we didn't really know our margins because we didn't even have, we couldn't even keep inventory. We didn't have the capacity to even keep inventory. We were just buying surplus. This is probably what we should charge selling it. It was just all on the, we were just going. We were in motion.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  There was no way out of this thing, but except through it and we were, it wasn't getting us anywhere yet yet because we, everything was going wrong all the time and we had to be there to fix it. And so anyway, out of that somehow or another, we ended up selling the company to The Gap.

• 28:24Rick Rubin?

  Was it a good thing to do? Was it a bad thing to do? Tell me more about that.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  That question, from where I am today,

• 28:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  It was a great thing to do because my life took the best turn ever. The best turn. It was the great thing to do from a business perspective.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  It was insane. We did everything wrong. Everything wrong. From protecting our asset, from getting the value that we really created. Everything wrong. I thought, well, I'm gonna get a lawyer to help us. So how do I go find a lawyer? I asked my friend Herb Gold for a lawyer. And who does he pick? He has this friend Bernard Petrie, who's just this wonderful human being. But he's the strangest human being. I put him up against the gap. And he tries to do the best he can. But he knows about as much about business as we do.

• 29:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Even though he's 10 years older than we are. And even though his father was a Cleveland tailor who started a chain called Petrie Stores, which is a massive chain.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  He's the son of this man who once sat next to dinner at, who knew the sales in every one of his 1,213 stores the day before when he was 85 years old.

• 29:43Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  So you can imagine what his son, who didn't want to be that man.

• 29:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  He was our lawyer.

• 29:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Lovely. We loved him.

• 29:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  So we just, whenever we negotiated, we negotiated and it was okay. We were gonna take, it was enough money. I forget. We're gonna go. We had enough to travel. We're gonna do it. The last minute, Don Fisher shrewd. Says, I can't do this. Why can't you do this? He says, you can't do this because I wouldn't know what to do with this company. I said, well, we're not looking for a job. I'm not talking about a job. I said, you know, you just show me how this company can be profitable. I'll give you whatever you need to make it be profitable. And I'll give you a percentage of the sales, gross margin, whatever it was, down the line. So we looked at each other at that point. You know, we, although Bernard wasn't very expensive, we hired a CPA from Arthur Andersen,

• 30:37Speaker 01

  who was going, and we had owed about $50,000 in fees, which we didn't have. And I didn't know whether to sell or whether or not. But he said, I promise you.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  I won't interfere. This is your company. You do whatever you want. I don't care. It's yours, just slugs is profitable. So Patricia and I talked about it. And ultimately, I was like, well, maybe. And she was, let's do it. So, we did it. And then we began to basically, with funds, we began to really start to have fun. Of course, Don would walk in and he says, well, why don't you make jeans and khaki? We said, no, Don, we don't do that. You know, in other words, we test, there was a test or two. And then he really did retreat. He didn't do anything except support us in every single way. And we grew the company for years doing that.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  And, but we weren't fitting into a regiment.

• 31:39Rick Rubin?

  How much longer did you stay at the company after?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  We were there for another, basically, it was almost five years owning it and five years, four years with the gap. And he was true to his word until he wasn't. And it was a good experience. It was a good experience.

• 31:55Rick Rubin?

  How much did the company grow over that four years?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  In those four years, we opened 50 stores, I think. And we, and we had a circulation of 30 million catalogs, which was a lot in those days. Something, something a lot, I think. I forget exactly what the number, I can't recall. 50, 50 or 60 stores.

• 32:12Rick Rubin?

  Were you still writing the copy for the catalogs?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  By that point, we had a creative department. And they were amazing. They were just amazing. We hired people who, as I said, could never get a job anywhere else. But they were in that playpen. They had so much fun. And so they took the way Patricia drew and they took the way I wrote and they just.

• 32:32Rick Rubin?

  Amplified it.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Much better than we ever could. I mean, they're just beautiful. They did a beautiful job. And that went on for, for a while. And, and it was, it was fun. And we traveled and found things and we did unusual things at that point. We became, well, we would go to Italy. We would find our, we would pass by something that was a restaurant trade show. What's in there? And we'd go into the restaurant trade show and we'd say, look at those jackets, Italian waiter jackets. Wow, those are really cool, Italian waiter jackets. So we would buy 10,000 Italian waiter jackets and dye them all different colors. The vendor would say, how many restaurants do you have?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  But we would do things like that. We would fly to Israel and find Israeli Army Paratrooper bags, or something like that. And we would get a prototype of it, send it back, and make more of those things. We would go to England.

• 33:34Rick Rubin?

  But you would manufacture to match the surplus as well?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  As much as we could.

• 33:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Or we went, for instance, in England. We went, we found a man by the name of Mr. Brady. Mr. Brady would make these beautiful bags, these khaki leather bags that fishermen used. And they never broke, no matter how many years later. If you send it back to Mr. Brady, he would fix it. And we would ask Mr. Brady if he would make some bags for us and change this and change that. And Mr. Brady would make some bags for us, and we would sell those bags as part of the catalog and things like that. We did that, a lot of that, everywhere we could.

• 34:12Rick Rubin?

  Would you say it still felt like your company for those four years?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Oh, entirely our company. He was not, it was entirely, it wasn't kicking out enough money for them to worry about the analysts. It wasn't really kicking out earnings yet.

• 34:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Because their volume was so big and we were, it's only when it began to get that way that...

• 34:35Rick Rubin?

  Were they helpful in terms of opening stores or other things?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  The real estate, they had a real estate department. Yes, that we relied, and they built, they helped us build the stores. They were, that was machine. They knew how to do that. And yeah, but we, again, there was a little bit of conflict.

• 34:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Because what Don liked was mall stores. I said, I don't really shop in malls. I like street stores, you know? And so, we got as many street stores as we could. There weren't that many, but we would find street locations that we really loved and thought, this is the right place to put a store. And build a store there, but no two stores were alike. That was the rule, no two stores were alike. This one's gonna be a safari camp. This one's gonna be an embassy. We were always playing with the metaphor. We were always inside this apocryphal country.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Called Banana Republic, and everything was about that. The gift boxes were renoceruses. The gift paper was the Banana Republican newspaper. And it was, it was every single thing. If you, we had a climate desk and you could call the climate desk and hear what the climate was going to be, where you were gonna go. I don't know, people today listening to this and thinking, how could there have been a life without internet? There was no internet.

• 35:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  In the initial days, those catalogs, we had to get an order form in there, put an 800 number. And if you wanted to order from us, you had to either call the 800 number and give us your credit card, or you went out and got a stamp, found a postbox, and dropped it in the mail. That's how you ordered.

• 36:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  We're dinosaurs today.

• 36:21Rick Rubin?

  It's a great story.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  It was, it was fun.

• 36:24Rick Rubin?

  And then what happened at the end of the four years?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  At the end of the four years, a stock market event called Black Monday.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  The Gap had reported earnings maybe a month earlier. And they missed earnings and the stock fell a lot. And then on Black Monday, it fell 50%.

• 36:47Rick Rubin?

  And did that happen just to the Gap or to the market in general?

• 36:50Speaker 01

  It happened while we were having a conference somewhere at the Claremont Hotel with all our store managers. And I went out and saw this Black Monday headline. I had no idea.

• 36:57Rick Rubin?

  But I'm saying, did Black Monday only impact the Gap or did, was it across the board?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Across the board.

• 37:03Rick Rubin?

  The market?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  The market, it was, it was one of the biggest crashes of all times. Black Monday 1980.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Seven.

• 37:11Rick Rubin?

  Right, so the market changed. It wasn't that the Gap failed in that moment.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  No, no, the market, it wasn't the Gap.

• 37:17Rick Rubin?

  The market failed.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  It was the market, but the Gap, but everything went down with the sinking ship.

• 37:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And they had already gone down.

• 37:22Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  So they were down once, and now down again.

• 37:25Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  And they panicked. And the analysts, at that point, they were trying to say, "Look, we have Banana Republic. It's coming up. It's looking really great, blah, blah." And the analysts were saying, "This safari thing can be nothing more than a trend." And to us, it was the most ridiculous thing ever, that we weren't safari any longer. We were travel clothing. And we were really functional travel clothing, buttons that buttoned to something, zippers that worked. Everything was functional and beautiful and exquisite fabrics, natural fabrics. We really were, but at that point, they decided, "Well, things like this, this is the kind of things that would happen."

• 38:09Speaker 01

  We'd have a shirt, a beautiful Indian cotton shirt, and we'd sell it, season after season, and we would change the colors. It would be great. And Patricia, at one point, said, "You know, this is getting old. We gotta change it."

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Well, the data monsters at the Gap said, "How do you throw out an item that is selling this kind of tonnage? You can't really..." And she would have to argue. They were suddenly now in an argument.

• 38:42Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  We would still throw the thing out of the catalog. It didn't matter.

• 38:46Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  But now there was an argument, and that didn't work for us. This isn't what we bought into. The good fortune was that, for many years, we were trying to have a baby, and we did. And my son was born, and I was already 43 years old. We had just signed a huge contract for lots of money. And I said, "I'm not doing this. I don't care. We have enough."

• 39:15Speaker 01

  And we left.

• 39:17Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  And that's what happened. And it was strange to all of a sudden your progeny was gone. They killed everything. They killed the catalog, they killed the magazine that was going up to change the clothes. For years, customers were furious. Then they hired creative people, people who posed to know what they were doing and they made it even worse.

• 39:40Rick Rubin?

  Professionals.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Professionals, right.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  That's what happened. And it took them many, many years. In fact, I would say because of the way it all happened, it wasn't really, it wasn't classy. And I didn't like that, the way that the exit happened. I just never really looked back.

• 40:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  At it. But finally, now I can see, I've been noticing that they're coming back to the roots of the company, but more from a 21st century standpoint. They're trying to regenerate the products that were there. And I think there's some pretty nice things that they have. I haven't really looked at it, but people have brought my attention to it. Interesting to relive all that.

• 40:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Rick Rubin?

  Then you started your life of meditation and being a father.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  And fatherhood. I love, still do love being a father. You know, I'm a writer and I have been working on a book forever that someday I'll publish is called Bringing Up Dad.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  They raised me.

• 40:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  They really did. They're still raising me.

• 40:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Even in the 30s, they're raising me.

• 40:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  But it's, this is it. And I started to study Taoism and I was fascinated. I would fly to England just to get into the British Museum to read these texts that I couldn't find. I was really into it. And I was trying to crack my mind.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  I wanted to think in a completely different way or not think at all. And it took a long time. I've been, I'm a writer at the core. I've wandered into other paths in life. But I found my way into eastern philosophy after I sold my company. I decided to go to a retreat.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  I had never done it, and it was one of the Vipassana retreats. Somewhere up in Santa Rosa. And when I went there, I didn't know anything about it. So I took a whole pile of books and I took sketch pads. And I was just gonna pour out everything on those pages. And the teacher said, "Well, here's the rules." No talking, no reading, no anything. Just sit for 45 minutes and walk for 45 minutes. I said, "What?" I'm like, "Okay." I was game. I stayed for it. It was odd. I was unsettled for the first day or two.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  And then I got this excruciating headache. And it wouldn't go away. And I said, "I'm never gonna let this happen to me before. It's because there's no coffee here.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  I'm gonna start a tea company." Which is exactly what I shouldn't have been doing in a meditation retreat. So for the first, next several days, I was dreaming up the Republic of Tea. And then I finally fell into the meditative state. And I could hear further than I could. I didn't realize I could hear so far.

• 43:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  I was stunned at what I was hearing. And hearing, I would say, is my strongest sense. It always has been.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  And so after that, I came back and told my wife and she just... And of course, we had just sold a successful company. We were very visible and we were getting all kinds of offers. Let's do this, let's do that, let's do this. I said, "I'm gonna do nothing. I'm gonna just do nothing." Because I just realized that I was like a wound-up toy. Succeed, achieve, succeed, achieve, succeed. It was in my DNA.

• 43:39Rick Rubin?

  Could it been like that your whole life? From childhood, would you say?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  In an intense way. Melvin, maybe you'll be a doctor. Maybe you'll be... I mean, I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There was a lovely part of town that was called the Hill Section, which was a Jewish community.

• 43:56Rick Rubin?

  Suburban?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  No, it was in the town. Scranton's about 100,000 people. It's an old coal-mining town, about two and a half hours from New York as you go through New Jersey. And somehow Jews had found their way there and set up a little community there. And it was middle-class, 1950s. You know, everybody had come home from the war. Everything was so comforting. What a difference. When I even talk about the 1950s, what a difference it was to today. But it was a very sweet place. It was a very sweet way to grow up. Later, many years later, when I brought my wife back, she said to me, "Nobody's mean here." It was a high school reunion, the 50th high school reunion. The sweetest people ever.

• 44:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  So I grew up in that. But my grandparents were first generation and my parents were second generation. They didn't go to college. And a lot was expected. I was gonna go to college and I was gonna do that. And my dad said, "Dude, you should be a pharmacist." "What's a pharmacist?" He said, "He was in the war in Germany." He was a very simple, sweet man. I loved him so much. He was a Bodhisattva. I realized long after he was gone, he died at 59. Anyway, I found my way out of there.

• 45:19Rick Rubin?

  You think of yourself as a writer. You started as a writer. Do you think of yourself as a writer or a journalist? I think of them as different.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  They are. And I should say, actually, even though I said that, neither. I'm an observer. I've tried for many years

• 45:37Speaker 01

  to shed the amazing amount of judgment and screams I had in order to see the world. And what I have tried to do is reach that objective space. I'm hardly ever there, but it's my goal to be in that objective space. I am a student of ancient Chinese philosophies, particularly Taoism. And I read a Taoism book where the statement was, "Forget yourself. Follow objective circumstances." And that's pretty much what I try to do. I don't think of myself as anything fixed.

• 46:13Rick Rubin?

  When did you first come in contact with the Tao?

• 46:16Speaker 01

  After the retreat. I swallowed every Krishnamurti book first because I'm a thinker. I think obsessively. I'm full of concepts. I'm full of ideas. And I found him. He gave me a path to just make me realize that I'm just living in a swarm of thought and seeing nothing.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  And I read every single book. And I listened to the lectures. And then, somehow or another, I picked up Lao Tzu.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  But the one that really did it to me was Chung Su. I don't know how you pronounce his name. He's the one.

• 46:59Rick Rubin?

  Chuan Su, I think. Chuan Su.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  He's the rogue. I really related to this guy. He was just making fun of everything and having fun and having a good time. And at the same time, through him, I began to realize that...

• 47:16Speaker 01

  The Tao that can be told is not the Tao. You can't so, how am I ever gonna describe it to you? But it was, it was this total vision of observing in tune with nature. Everything was part of nature, including human beings. In fact, I remember having this conversation years ago with Jack Kornfield. I said, you know, he was, "Oh, you Taoist frustrating beings." I just, well, I'm just the same thing as that, you know? I'm the storm, the weather, it's the same thing. So it really spoke to me. It spoke to me and it got me to a place where I really tasted emptiness. Tasted it.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Is there anything more delicious, when you think about it, than emptiness?

• 48:04Rick Rubin?

  That's it, peace.

• 48:07Rick Rubin?

  I love the Tao, I love, um...

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Oh, I bet. I could see from your book that you, that you live it and I, and I admire you. I just, it's, it's something you don't really wanna talk about because it's...

• 48:21Rick Rubin?

  It's hard to talk about.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, the Five is that.

• 48:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me about your writing days.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Well, I was a journalist. The way I was gonna get out of Scranton was to write my way out of Scranton. Scranton was wonderful in many ways. What it didn't introduce me to, I regret to say, was music and art, which became my passions, particularly art, as the time went on, years later, and is currently, really. Now I, I paint, but I was a journalist. And I wrote for my high school magazine and I enjoyed it. I was just writing little stories, actually, short stories at that point. But then I got a job at the Scranton Tribune, writing a front page column called "The Weather." That's all it was, cloudy with a chance of rain.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  But I was so excited.

• 49:15Rick Rubin?

  How would you know?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  There was a weather bureau, I guess you called, and they told you.

• 49:24Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  And the temperature range and everything else. And then I became a copy boy, and then it was time to go to college. And I went to Penn State. It's all we really could afford at that time, and it was a state school. And it was a wonderful school, it was in State College, Pennsylvania. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it's beautiful, wonderful school.

• 49:47Rick Rubin?

  And did you study journalism?

• 49:48Speaker 01

  I studied journalism. And then I heard that the place to study journalism was really Columbia. And so I applied to and went to Columbia. And I happened to be there in the vintage year 1968, when everything exploded. It's very similar to what happened this last year. This was the year of Berkeley and Columbia. And there were protests on campus about the university's expansion into Morningside Heights, taking away the neighborhood. I mean, it's very prescient, all of that happening.

• 50:22Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know about that.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was in the 60s, and they occupied the buildings. There were total occupations of buildings.

• 50:28Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  So here I was, a journalist in the journalism school. And two buildings over was Low Library, which is where the president was. And I'm walking out one day, and the whole campus is full of protesters. I'd never seen anything like this in my entire life.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  And when I went to Penn State, there were hootenannies.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  That dates me. When I was leaving, it was protest songs. It was the beginning.

• 50:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  And so I caught up in this, and I was a journalist. And so I saw this. The students had occupied the president's office, Grayson Kirk. They were all over the campus, but the big thing is they were occupying his office. And it was remarkable, as I remember, because... The women had set up a kitchen in the office. I mean, think about that. The women were setting up the kitchen in the office. And the guys were whatever they were doing. There's a ledge that goes around low library. It's about maybe eight, 10 feet tall. And if you get to that ledge, you can go into the office.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  And I wanted to go into the office as a reporter. I wanted to find a story here. And I wasn't sure whether I was a reporter or I didn't know. I wasn't sure who I was. What this was all about. I was just learning about it myself.

• 51:51Rick Rubin?

  Was it exciting?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  It was extraordinary. It was exhilarating. I mean, they shut down the school. We never had a graduation. It was like last year. It was the precursor and probably the only time to the unfortunate protest last year. And much more justified, I would say. Anyway, so I didn't know if I was a reporter. I didn't know if I was it. And I came out and it was time to go and graduate. And I wrote a story and the story was published in the Miami Herald. It just interviewed me for a job. I'd sent them the story. They published the story and offered me a job. And I also was, I think I also wrote a story for New York Magazine at the time, which was just starting up again.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  It used to be the, earlier was the Sunday Supplement of a paper called, it was a fusion paper, Herald Tribune, the one that became the International. And it was sort of a really elegant newspaper. But Clay Felker, who was the editor of New York when it was in that paper, bought the rights to it when the paper folded and then regenerated New York Magazine. And that's how it came to be. And one of my teachers at the time was Dick Shap, the sportscaster. We became very good friends. He introduced me to Clay and then I started writing for New York Magazine. But I got very tired of New York after a couple of years. And found my way west.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  But I was still a journalist. And at that time, I came to San Francisco and I was gonna write a novel.

• 53:32Rick Rubin?

  How did you choose San Francisco?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  I chose it in Colorado. We were driving across the country. I was either going to go to Mexico, point south, and I had a girlfriend. We were driving an old French Simka that we had bought the year before and shipped over. We didn't know what it was, but what it certainly was going to be was not New York.

• 53:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Because the 1970s in New York was hell. I mean, garbage strikes, dog shit all over the sidewalks, nobody picking up after themselves, no regard. It was just, it was, what am I doing here? And I had a friend who was in Hastings Law School in San Francisco earlier, and I'd flown out to see him. It was a beautiful February day, and San Francisco was really enchanting after that. And I said, I sort of feel like I belong here.

• 54:25Rick Rubin?

  What year was this?

• 54:27Speaker 01

  This was 1972, I think. 1972.

• 54:33Rick Rubin?

  So Summer Love had already happened.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  It had already happened. What I didn't know is that four years earlier, my wife was happening with it. She grew up in San Francisco.

• 54:42Rick Rubin?

  Oh, great.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  So there's an interesting story there. But I did what I do. There were two papers at that time, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner. I got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle, and I had a great time. It was fun. I was on the city desk. It was a room that was, you know, a huge room with reporters sitting here, the art department there, the photography studio there, the Sunday section there. It was huge. It was like a little city, city room. And there was a, it was almost out of the movie, the front page, there was an editor by the name of Abe Melinkoff, who read a monocle.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And he would stand up and he would say, you know, Ziegler, 474 Hyde, baby in a trash bin. Get a photographer. And you'd get a photographer and you would just basically go find the abandoned baby in the trap. I mean, this is the, this was it. And it was wild. These were the years of the zebra killings.

• 55:45Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  And the zebra killings were happening and I was there on the night beat, writing the story about what just happened in the streets.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  And at 2 o'clock in the morning, going down to catch a bus at 5:00 in the mission to take me to Mill Valley where I lived completely by myself. But anyway, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed working. I enjoyed being part of the city. I enjoyed learning everything.

• 56:15Rick Rubin?

  Do you think the fact that you came from a different place added to it? Like, part of your job was,

• 56:23Rick Rubin?

  you're like a fish out of water in this new environment and your job is to observe it and report on it?

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Drink it in. Take it all. Yes, it was, it was absolutely. I didn't, the West Coast was totally new to me. It was a completely different, it was a completely different mentality. One that I summarize this way, Clay Felker, who was the editor of New York Magazine at that time, later went out to be, come teach at Berkeley. And I ran into him at a party maybe 15 years later and he said, "Didn't you used to be Mel Ziegler?"

• 56:57Rick Rubin?

  Funny.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  That's New York.

• 57:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  And so I was very happy not to be there.

• 57:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  I was very happy not to be there. I was learning a whole new way of life. You could do anything.

• 57:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  It was free. Freedom is wealth. It's not money. It's not, it's freedom. And I felt that freedom.

• 57:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  It just, it was exhilarating being there. And these were good years. They were crazy years because it was also, I was also there when the Patty Hearst kidnapping took place, which was really crazy. I mean, it was just crazy.

• 57:33Rick Rubin?

  Did you cover that story?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was part, I was part of covering, I was part, everybody covered that story. If you were on the shift and you were down there, you were in front of the Hearst mansion in, where Atherton, and somebody would say, "Hey, Ziegler, your tree is ringing." They'd have a phone hooked up to the tree.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  It was wild being in the newspaper business. It was wonderful. I loved it. I loved it. Journalism was different in those days as well. I mean, these were the days of Walter Cronkite. You know, I mean, these were the days when at least there was an effort to be objective. I mean, the world hadn't seen Rupert Murdoch yet. It was going to brand news and a brand point of view and create this situation where everything became contrary to everything. I mean, it was just, then it was just, here's the story. You couldn't even use the word "I," a reporter said, a reporter saw. You know, you wrote about yourself in the third person.

• 58:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  And so I loved it.

• 58:39Rick Rubin?

  But the only point of view was what you saw. You weren't given an agenda to try to make the story mean something.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Yes, or to put it through the filter.

• 58:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Put it through any kind of...

• 58:49Rick Rubin?

  There was no filter.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  No filter. It was just objectivity.

• 58:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  Your job is to be objective. What really happened?

• 58:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Give us both sides of the story.

• 58:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Quote them both, you know, just lay it out.

• 59:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  And...

• 59:02Rick Rubin?

  It's nice hearing both sides of the story.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Yes, isn't it?

• 59:05Rick Rubin?

  I love it.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  I mean, this is what's wrong. This is really, this would fix everything if people would just, hey, you know, why do you feel that way?

• 59:19Rick Rubin?

  It's funny you talk about going back to Scranton and the people being nice. You'd think that the people in San Francisco would be really nice. There was a time when they were.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Why aren't they were? Do you remember those days?

• 59:33Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  They were.

• 59:34Rick Rubin?

  Well, everybody was nice.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  I mean, my wife will tell me stories about she hitchhiked here and they, somebody said, "Come to dinner," and she'd stay three weeks with somebody who, beautiful people who were working in Stanford and this, I mean, it was that kind of a city. Yeah. I don't even know when it happened. Did it happen? I don't know how it happened. I guess the answer is always day by day.

• 1:00:00Rick Rubin?

  ¿Cuántos años llevaste siendo periodista?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yo fui periodista hasta que conocí a mi esposa. Ella es ilustradora. ¿Te dije sobre esta gran habitación de la ciudad? Bueno, un día esta mujer muy hermosa estaba caminando y cambiando para el departamento de arte, que estaba justo detrás de la máquina Xerox y por el otro lado de la habitación. De alguna manera o otra, cuando la vi, vi a mi otra mitad.

• 1:00:32Rick Rubin?

  ¡Guau!

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Pero estaba bastante tímido.

• 1:00:35Rick Rubin?

  Sí.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Creo que esa es una de las razones por las que me gusta ser un reportero, porque no podía ser tímido. Debía salir y hacer lo que hacía. Me sacó de eso.

• 1:00:44Rick Rubin?

  Sí.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Pero no podía... Así que durante la fiesta de navidad, dos de mis otros amigos, que ambos eran periodistas, decidimos caminar y averiguar quién era esta nueva chica. Así que los tres nos pasamos. Algo sucedió en ese momento donde ambos desaparecieron de alguna manera y Patricia y yo empezamos una conversación que todavía estamos en.

• 1:01:05Rick Rubin?

  Increíble.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  La amo más de lo que jamás he amado a nadie. Ella es mi esposa. Hace casi 50 años.

• 1:01:12Rick Rubin?

  Sí, hermosa.

• 1:01:15Rick Rubin?

  Felicidades.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Bueno, hemos tenido nuestros problemas. Quiero decir, no llegamos aquí...

• 1:01:19Rick Rubin?

  Ustedes son humanos.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  No fue una ruta clara.

• 1:01:21Rick Rubin?

  Sí, sí, sí.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Quiero decir, realmente tuvimos problemas. Pero sabíamos que estábamos conectados en el núcleo. Y así ella estaba allí, yo estaba allí. Estábamos teniendo un gran tiempo. Estaba en mis veintes. Quería viajar. Sabes, quería ver el mundo. Y El Chronicle era simplemente un papel muy barato. Era conocido como un papel barato. No te enviaban a ninguna parte para hacer nada. No había otro lugar en la ciudad. No era como hoy con la media. Vas aquí, vas allá. Había tres estaciones de televisión si eras periodista. Había dos periódicos. Luego el KPK había un periódico. No había ningún otro lugar para ir. Podía hacer el libre aliento, lo que comencé a hacer, escribiendo artículos para diferentes revistas y haciendo ese tipo de cosas.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Pero quería viajar y no teníamos dinero. No teníamos nada. Quiero decir, básicamente sobrevivimos de nuestros salarios, que eran cuatro o cincocientos dólares al día entonces. Ni siquiera puedo recordar cuáles eran. No eran mucho.

• 1:02:23Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Republic of Tea.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  I wanted to learn about tea. I mean, I'm that kind of person. If I want to learn about something, I just jump in. My path into tea was flavored black teas were magical for me for a while. And then I just sort of got more into the quimons, the more Chinese, deep tasting Chinese teas. But I saw a hole in the market that was sort of unbelievable.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  This was the early 90s. Didn't matter what restaurant you went to, if you ordered a tea, they would bring you out a Lipton's tea bag.

• 1:03:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  How could this be?

• 1:03:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  I saw that. And on the other hand, there was a hippie brand book called Celestial Seasonings from a guy named Mos Siegel, who lived in Colorado. It was beautiful, had all these different herbal things. And other than that, there was a sprinkling in there, maybe a brand called Twining's and a few other things. But nothing, nobody was really revering tea. And so I thought, this is this.

• 1:03:29Rick Rubin?

  And historically, tea has been revered.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the, I call it the second oldest product in the world, you know? And the nuances are fantastic, just like wine. It did never really, it still hasn't come fully realized. But at that point, that's, again, I didn't realize what we were doing.

• 1:03:49Rick Rubin?

  How did it start?

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  We were creating a category, we weren't creating a company. Because now if you go into a store, it's all there. So I went to a, this is a year or so after, two years after Banana Republic, of my doing nothing years,

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  which was dance with study and writing and travel and things. But I went to a conference of a group called the Social Venture Network that was just starting up, somewhere in New Jersey. It was the first time I really left my son, who was maybe then two years old, and. I left the conference early and I started flying back. And a young guy there saw me at the conference, sort of chased me down and found me on the plane and started talking to me. He knew that I had started Banana Republic. And for some reason, I mentioned to him, if I were to ever start another company, it would be a tea company. And he was all over it.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  He was all over it. He really thought this was the greatest idea ever. And I said, "Okay." But I wasn't sure about him. I wasn't sure whether... I didn't know. Having gone through the... It was, I would say, it wasn't a pleasant experience at the end of Banana Republic. So I didn't... I didn't need this. Look, I... My goal is never to be rich or wealthy. I'm just not... I just want to be independent. And I had enough to be independent. And so I wasn't really looking, at this point, to do anything. But he was very engaging and smart. And I just happened to say, I just get these things, these names just come to me.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  I said, "If there's another company, I'm gonna call it the Republic of Tea. And I'm gonna be the Minister of Leaves."

• 1:05:42Rick Rubin?

  Was that the first time you said it?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Yes. "I'm gonna be the Minister of Leaves," which I kind of loved because, you know, I'm not only leaving, but I'm the Minister of Leaves. You know, it's like, it's okay. So I did. I appointed myself ministers. He said, "Well, I'll be the Minister of Progress." And he really started banging together. And this was, these were the years when there were the fax machines. So I go home the next morning and my fax machine is chattering in my study. And he's saying, "The Minister of Progress, we could do this, we could do..." And I would answer him. And I'd go back and forth with faxes, back and forth with faxes. And I had another friend who came over one day and he saw this pile of faxes. I didn't know whether I was gonna start it with this guy or wasn't gonna start it with... I didn't know what I was doing. I was just... I was playing out the idea of what should a tea company be?

• 1:06:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  I was imagining it.

• 1:06:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  And a friend of mine came over, a friend by the name of Bruce Katz, who started Rockport. He unfortunately recently died, fell from his roof. Miss him dearly.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Came to my house one day and I had these things naturally came printed out. So he saw this pile of stuff, he started reading through it, he said, "This is great, you should publish this." So he knew somebody who knew somebody and there was the next thing I knew, I had an editor from Double Day was visiting and she read it and she wanted to publish it. So she published the complete exchange of how to start a business. "Republica Tea, Letters to a Young Zen Entrepreneur," or something. I forget what the subtitle was, it was changed along the way. And I just didn't want to tear myself away from my son.

• 1:07:21Rick Rubin?

  You sound like someone who, when you dive in, you're all consumed.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Rick Rubin?

  So you're wary of becoming all consumed again.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 1:07:33Rick Rubin?

  I understand.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  But I waited for my minister of progress to sort of see what he was gonna do and make it happen. He was not quite making it happen until they gave us a book advance. And so, since we were both writing these faxes back and forth together, it was really our book, it wasn't my book, it was our book. So I said, "The only way I'm gonna do this company is if you start it with the book advance." I thought, "That'd be great, just take the book advance and start the company." And he did. He basically started a company with the book advance and a little help from another friend of ours. And we were able to build that up a couple of years. And again, I was operating, but it wasn't the same, and I didn't want to operate.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  So we ended up selling it a couple of years later to a lovely family.

• 1:08:26Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the years of doing it. What was the process?

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  The process was creating different brands of tea. And working with the herbs or working with the dark teas and creating flavored teas. And then somehow creating a way of packaging that was going to be different. It had to be different because it couldn't be just another tea company. So we came up with the idea that, and nobody had ever done this before, that tea bags were square, let's make them round.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Okay, and what about the can? The can has to be round for that to go into. And what would be on the can would be these exceptional names and stories and witticisms from the Minister of Leaves or anybody else. And so we use the cans, basically, to advertise a life of sip by sip as opposed to gulp by gulp.

• 1:09:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it's always fun to create a villain, and the villain here was the gulpers. You know, you really can get your teeth into something if you have something to work off of.

• 1:09:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  And it was this, you know, like people just-

• 1:09:43Rick Rubin?

  We're not like them.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we're not gonna gulp and mislife. We're just gonna gulp our way through life. We're gonna sip our way, sip by sip by sip by sip by sip.

• 1:09:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  And so we created just really lovely teas and learned a lot and tried to make them more. Earl Grey was Earl Greyer, for instance. I mean, that was the name of that tea. I forget a lot of the other names, but I think we probably should have opened stores, but we had another partner-

• 1:10:10Rick Rubin?

  I was gonna ask if you ever considered-

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  I, we wanted to.

• 1:10:16Rick Rubin?

  And if you would have opened shops, would it have been a store to buy the tea? Or would it have been more like the Starbucks of tea?

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  It would have been the Starbucks of tea.

• 1:10:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, still no one's done it.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  In fact, Howard Schultz found us early on, and he had already thrown tea out of the Starbucks in those years and was trying to find a way back in. And there was a time when I thought he might buy the company. We flew up to see him, and one of my partners is a good talker, but not a great listener. And at that point, my dear friend at that point was, there were some sparks that were wrong between Howard and him, and it never really worked. And I said, eh, let's sell this thing to somebody who can really make something out of it. And there was this fellow in St. Louis by the name of Ron Rubin, and he was in the beverage business.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  His family was in the beverage business, bottle beverage business, and he read the book. And he flew out to meet us. And he said, I want, I'd love to buy this company. And I just really liked him. And to this day, they run that company from the book. He'll say on page 276. And we were just wild ideas that we threw out.

• 1:11:31Rick Rubin?

  It's a beautiful story. I've never heard a story like that before.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:11:35Rick Rubin?

  No, where the idea phase is documented and ending up becoming exposed in advance of the actual product. There was no Republic of Tea.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:50Rick Rubin?

  We always hear the story after. We've never heard the wild ideas of what this thing could be in print and then have that thing actually come into existence. That's a very unusual story.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Interesting, yeah. It was fully imagined. Of course, 25, 30 years later, it's still evolving. But the core of it, the culture of it.

• 1:12:15Rick Rubin?

  The philosophy of it was in the book.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  It was there. I mean, if The Gap had done this with Banana Republic, they would have a wildly successful company. If they had just done this.

• 1:12:24Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  They didn't have the courage to do this.

• 1:12:27Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  But if they did this, it was so classic. I mean, we owned khaki. But we weren't all about khaki. But we earned khaki and we owned the practicality and functional clothing that stood apart from all the design. The opposite experience happened with the Republic of Tea. And there's good evidence. Now, it's not, Republic of Tea is not amalgamated gigantic like The Gap. But, you know, when is enough enough? In this world, I don't think people ask that question enough.

• 1:13:05Rick Rubin?

  Tell me more about your spiritual life.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  I paint. I can't start a painting until I accept and enter the emptiness. The blank canvas, the silence.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  And when I do that, then I'm always excited to start. And I, something draws me to a color, something draws me to a brush, something draws me to a stroke, and everything, once it starts, becomes resolution. It's all just resolving.

• 1:13:43Rick Rubin?

  You're reacting to something that you see?

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  I'm responding to the materials. I'm responding to the choices that I made earlier. I'm always in response. I'm not really generating. I'm responding and I'm listening. To me, that's what empties me out. And in the end, sometimes when I, when I finish a work, I look at it. It's abstract work. Very colorful, because I, there's so much vividness in what happens. I see something that's familiar. It's some kind of a structure that it, that existed, and it came out and it showed itself to me.

• 1:14:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  I didn't do that. It showed itself to me.

• 1:14:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  It's so energizing. Love to paint. Love to paint. And my son is a painter. My wife is a painter. My daughter is a fashion designer. When they were kids, we, we bought the house across the driveway from us that was being sold by a, a Marin County judge, a very sweet man, and it became our art house. So we would go over there just to create art.

• 1:14:59Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic. Family studio.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  It was so great.

• 1:15:03Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  It was so beautiful. I mean, we'd have these art, we'd be sitting there and each one of us would be doing our own thing. And I was playing like they was learning like they were learning. And I've been doing it ever since. And in the last several years, it's really kind of matured. But I don't even, I didn't try to make a career out of it.

• 1:15:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. How do you know when a painting is done? And do you know for sure when it's done?

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  It's never done. I've gone back and repainted paintings I've done. It's they're framed. I tear them out of the frames and do them all over again. It's like, yeah, it's never done. Because that painting was in that time, in that place, and that it's. But sometimes I like the fact it's like a photograph.

• 1:15:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  It is done. I can accept it. I could change it. And the ones that I'm most proud of are the ones I just leave alone. I'm gonna leave them alone. But I could change them. And some of the best work I've done is basically repainting, not just painting. And I try to always find out if I'm following some kind of rule I didn't know existed. You wrote about that in your book. I was fascinated about that. I'm always looking for that. And because I am a self-taught painter, I watch my wife. I watch my. She's very respectful. She knows I'm an autodidact and I wanna. I don't want noise. I wanna discover.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  And my son, who's prolific and has never. He's fast and he's deterred on the faucet and he's. Something comes out and he never makes a mistake. Because there are no mistakes. He just keeps going. And somehow then he resolves and it's over. So every once in a while, I get a tip from one of them or the other. But my wife years ago gave me one tip to start with, when I first tip when I paint. She said, "Don't use black.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Don't use black."

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  So for years, I would not use black. I would do everything I could. And one day I discovered, hey, I don't have to follow this rule anymore.

• 1:17:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  But I learned so much.

• 1:17:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  By not using black.

• 1:17:16Rick Rubin?

  Yes. Are you precious about the first stroke?

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  It's a commitment. And I can't think about it. If I think about it, I won't do it right. You'll look at my paintings. No, you were thinking there, Mel. I don't want you to look at my paintings and think that I was thinking.

• 1:17:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  This is my way of not thinking. And I'm a great fan of not thinking.

• 1:17:44Rick Rubin?

  Did you say you've lived most of your life in your head?

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  I did. That, yeah. And I realize it just, basically, it's just noise that tunes out everything. So, I mean, the joy of growing older is really accepting how little I know.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  And enjoying it. I mean, I know how to do a thing or not, but no, in the big sense, I'm constantly surprised. I could never explain. And I was a great explainer. But I basically trapped myself.

• 1:18:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  And I'm an appreciator of things that are really finely done. I love things that are beautiful and well-done or well-thought or authentic.

• 1:18:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  And come from the same place. You can see when somebody, it doesn't matter what they're creating. It doesn't matter. What matters is where it's coming from. You can see the source in almost every work. And often, it's a thought. You know, you can go flick through the television show and it's one thing after another. It's one concept after another. You can listen to music, it's one concept after another. There we go, here we go. But everyone's, when you hit the one that's not,

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  that's life. That's what we're here for.

• 1:19:03Rick Rubin?

  Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  I don't believe in belief.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

• 1:19:54Speaker 03

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin? Counterculture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamics? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin. Ancient wisdom for a new age.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.