We All Need To Make Money and Interact With Capitalism. Is There a Non-Icky Way To Do It? | David Gelles

A playbook for finding financial success without compromising your values. David Gelles is a bestselling author and a climate correspondent for The New York Times. His new book, "Dirtbag Billionaire https://www.amazon.com/Dirtbag-Billionaire-Chouinard-Patagonia-Fortune/dp/1668032260/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. ODWHWUHiCNV60hsy1OT1Zrh2wwu_k69k97qCnHC5J1Ok0et8XMR9ke_T6zaP9KWpVxoP5nf6sFWlDcvwKMbv8mr1at4n9yB8N8_I0YyklN8_5apQjQorwf_g6wMyHEqlQdMMhPEKHaE_97Y2XRuZ6wY31z7wozQMG6o0AdCz7e9Ob8ux32msCiXi_I22-r76897phZg3IO5-3t7aXpHDDltGq8uLKalK0twh4ts18bo.q07YOUZ4IlKTWKeRKL5Rn2IJXI36OgHlsHAIPrbUZEw&dib_tag=se&hvadid=677030155814&hvdev=c&hvexpln=0&hvlocphy=9004403&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=6182782077314196331--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=6182782077314196331&hvtargid=kwd-2404491507000&hydadcr=22189_13517498&keywords=dirtbag+billionaire&mcid=56bf9d79c10b3fb7bf9ce26a5136d413&qid=1759235975&sr=8-1," reveals how Yvon Chouinard turned Patagonia into one of the world's most remarkable companies. In this episode we talk about: What a 'dirtbag' means The innovative ways in which Chouinard ran his company The question of whether or not capitalism can be "done right" How to talk to your kids about about capitalism Whether or not capitalism and the Dharma can co-exist Advice on how to live in a capitalist system How much time the species has left before we need to get our shit together on climate And more Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: David's first 10% Happier interview https://www.danharris.com/p/david-gelles-779?utm_source=publication-search Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here http://eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025! To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris. Thanks to today's sponsors: Stitch Fix: Get started today with stitchfix.com/happier http://stitchfix.com/happier and get 20% off your first order when you buy five or more items. Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host http://airbnb.com/host.

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, we are going back to a subject that I find inexhaustibly interesting and urgent and a little confusing. Can you get paid and do good? Put another way, how do you make money without being knocked off the Buddhist path? Can Buddhism and capitalism coexist? My guest is an old Dharma buddy of mine, David Gelles. David is a reporter for The New York Times, where he's covered business and climate for many years. He's also written a bunch of books, including one called Mindful Work, which is about how companies are increasingly incorporating meditation into the workplace. His most recent book is called Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away.

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  In this conversation, we talk about how David met Yvon Chouinard, who's the founder of the brand Patagonia, what a dirtbag is, the innovative ways in which Chouinard ran his company, including taking care of his employees well, offering robust maternity benefits, staying environmentally conscious, and then, in the end, as you'll hear, giving away the business. We'll talk about the question of whether or not capitalism can be done right, how to talk to your children about capitalism, whether or not capitalism and the Dharma can coexist, advice how to live well in a capitalist system, and how much time the species has left before we need to really get our shit together on climate. Before we dive in, just to say, don't forget to check out what we're doing over on danharris.com.

• 1:45Dan Harris?

  Paid subscribers now get guided meditations with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. This is a Friday episode, so there's no guided meditation today, but I'm really psyched about the fact that we're doing them every Monday and Wednesday. Paid subscribers also get weekly live meditation and Q&A sessions on video. We do these every Tuesday at 4:00 Eastern. The next one will feature our Teacher of the Month, Sebene Selassie. That's this Tuesday at 4:00. Sign up at danharris.com. Speaking of Seb, by the way, if you want to meditate with me and her in person, we'll be back at the Omega Institute for another installment of meditation party. That's coming up on October 24th. It will run straight through that weekend. Okay, we'll get started with David Gellis, right after this.

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• 3:23Dan Harris?

  David Yellis, welcome back to the show, bud.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:26Dan Harris?

  Congratulations on your new book. I'm gonna mangle the pronunciation of his name. Is it Yevshwinard?

• 3:34Speaker 03

  You did indeed mangle it. It's Yvonne Shinard. Yvonne Shinard.

• 3:40Dan Harris?

  Yvonne Shinard, okay.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  There you go. Unmangled.

• 3:44Dan Harris?

  That's not the first mess you'll have to clean up of mine. How did you get interested in Yvonne Shinard?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  I first met Yvonne Shinard writing my very first book 10 years ago, which we've spoken about on this pod, I think, which was called Mindful Work, which was about how meditation and Buddhism was showing up in corporate America. I'm one of the weird people who has both a life as a Buddhist and also a life as a business reporter. And in looking for business leaders who had some relationship with some kind of Dharma, Shinard came onto my radar. And now, he's not a Buddhist. He's never practiced formal meditation. However, he has drawn deep inspiration from Zen Buddhism. And in particular, Zen's focus on simplicity and sort of getting to the essence of things.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  And he's used that over the course of his career to inspire his product design. And so I spoke with him about that 10 years ago and then just kept covering the company because, as I found out about, it's a really remarkable company for all sorts of reasons.

• 4:53Dan Harris?

  Didn't Steve Jobs have a very similar interest in Zen? Like, he wasn't a practitioner, but it inspired some of the designs of Apple products?

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and my understanding of Steve is that he actually went a bit deeper down the formal practice and study route than Chenard ever did. Jobs, if I recall, had a personal relationship, perhaps even with Suzuki Roshi. So there were some real touchpoints with people who were part of Dharma lineages on the Jobs story. Chenard never had that. You know, this is a guy who was sort of reading random Zen books he could find along the way and drawing inspiration as he interpreted it.

• 5:28Dan Harris?

  Got it, got it. So what's his basic story?

• 5:32Speaker 03

  The basic story is that Yves Chenard was born in the woods of Maine in 1938 to a Quebecois, French-speaking family. Didn't speak English until he was 10 years old, but from a very early age was completely enthralled by the outdoors. When he was about 10 years old, his family moved to California, where he had to learn English very quickly. And also, as he sort of tried to integrate into Southern California life, very clearly discovered that he didn't fit the mold of sort of a traditional American kid. He was cut in class, chasing frogs in the Los Angeles River, had real no patience for traditional academic life. And as he became a teenager and a young man, really went deep into the life of an outdoorsman.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Never went to college, but sort of became a self-taught, real badass rock climber. You know, one of the people who, this is late 50s, early 60s now, was putting up like first ascents on some of the biggest granite walls in Yosemite Valley and in the Grand Tetons. And through that, started making his own rock climbing equipment because he needed to, because they were doing these crazy climbs and he couldn't find the right equipment he needed. And then, from his time as a manufacturer of rock climbing gear, ultimately started the clothing company that would become Patagonia.

• 6:47Dan Harris?

  In this context, what is a dirtbag?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the word dirtbag, I get a lot of sort of raised eyebrows like, so you don't like the guy. But in Yvon Chouinard's conception of the word, he's a self identified dirtbag. A dirtbag in the outdoors community refers to someone who is so unenamored with material possessions that they are content to sleep in the dirt because they would rather be closer to nature, closer to their next adventure, and really have found no valuable cause for all the luxuries that we associate with modernity. And so Yvon Chouinard's proudly a dirtbag. The label that he really bristles at is billionaire.

• 7:36Dan Harris?

  But he is a billionaire nonetheless.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Well, he was, but he gave it away and we can get to that.

• 7:41Dan Harris?

  Right. Okay, so let's, before we get to the giving away part, let's talk about some of the ways in which he ran his company that were noteworthy. I mean, I have on here on my list, like his attention to taking care of his employees, his like exacting environmental standards when it comes to the supply chain, political activism. Can you just hold forth on the many ways in which he was a sort of unique corporate citizen?

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, happy to, but important to note at the outset, it's not as if these things sort of emerged fully formed. Patagonia is a company that's been around for a half century now, and a lot of these things were evolutions that took place over many decades. That's it. A lot of the seeds of the real impactful ways in which Patagonia would show up as a unique corporate citizen were there from the very beginning. And so just to rattle off some of the most famous ones, you mentioned taking good care of his employees. You know, he famously titled his memoir, Let My People Go Surfing, and that refers to his conviction, which was mostly true, that if the waves were good, people ought to be surfing rather than sitting at their desks.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  And there's a kernel of truth to that at the company even today. I think more meaningfully was the company's commitment to women and to working mothers in particular. From the very outset, the company began offering really generous maternity benefits, going so far as to set up its own school system at the campuses. And even to this day, you've seen it evolve. And the company now, when it has a mother who's a new mom, who's nursing, who needs to take a work trip, Patagonia will pay for what it calls a companion. So if they need a wet nurse or a nanny to travel with them on a work trip, Patagonia just pays that and doesn't think twice about it. And that's

• 9:34Speaker 03

  the sort of like remarkable stuff that goes well above and beyond what most companies offer. Moving on to some of their political activism and conservation work, from a very early moment in the company's history, Yvon Chouinard was using some of the profits generated from the company to support local grassroots environmental activists. At first, it was peanut stuff, right? Trying to protect the local river in Ventura, California, where the company is headquartered. But you fast forward over the decades, they started giving more, they started giving to more impactful projects. And we're now at a stage where the company has literally donated hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to

• 10:14Speaker 03

  support conservation of wild lands in remote places all over the country. And then finally, the third I would add is the company's attention to its own supply chain. Over the course of the company's evolution, Chouinard began paying more and more attention to not only the functionality of his products, but to what those products were made of and how they were made. And that began this deep interrogation of the company's own supply chain. And it got to a place where Patagonia was really going not only to its tier one factories, which is to say the factories that sew the garments that actually say

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Patagonia on it, but going to its tier two and tier three suppliers, which are the companies that make the fabric or the dyes in the fabric and saying, what are the working conditions like in those factories? And if we're not comfortable with it, we're not going to use products from those companies. And so those are just some of the ways in which Patagonia has distinguished itself as a really remarkable corporate citizen over the years.

• 11:23Dan Harris?

  You are very careful, though, not to deify this dude or the company. And so let's just start with him. You describe him as, as micro, he can be micromanagerial, he can be aloof. Just tell you a little bit more about his character. Not that he's a bad guy at all, but that he's not just purely good.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's important to note here that this is not a book about any great scandal. You know, this isn't a book about the real underbelly of business. I've written those books, I've written those stories, but this is not one of them. Instead, Yvon Chouinard is human, much like the rest of us. On the one hand, he could be a sort of brilliant product visionary. And in the same moment, he could be a completely aloof and frankly irresponsible manager and operator of the company. He could be charismatic and inspirational to his employees.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  And he could also be a micromanager who was quick to lash out at the people who worked for him and ultimately not trust them. And while he was incredibly generous in many ways and ultimately did renounce his fortune and commit the bulk of the company's profits to conservation and grassroots activism. He was never someone who cared a lot about rewarding the people that worked for him monetarily. Which is to say, you know, he's like the rest of us, right? He's a jumble of contradictions. He's oftentimes working at cross purposes with himself. And at times seems to contradict the things that he says he stands for.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  That's life.

• 13:10Dan Harris?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I, I love that. And it's easy, though, in journalism.

• 13:17Dan Harris?

  To put people in good buckets or bad buckets. You know, this is another word I'll probably mangle, but to have like a Manichean, I think, is the term, like a Manichean view of the world, because that's what makes good copy. The last time you were on the show is to talk about Jack Welch, who you wrote a book about, and you know, I think he's a little bit closer to the bad bucket. And none of, you know, those buckets don't exist. Everybody's, as you said, a jumble. I remember one time I was talking to Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher, who you know, is at a point in my life where I had gotten some tough feedback about my comportment in the world. And I asked him, seriously, I said, like, am I just inherently rotten?

• 13:57Dan Harris?

  And he laughed at me and said, no, only halfway, like the rest of us. And so, you know, I applaud you for bringing some nuance to what could have been, here's another word I might mangle, hagiography, hagiography, the...

• 14:14Speaker 03

  You got that one right. Yeah.

• 14:15Dan Harris?

  On the first try or the second try?

• 14:17Speaker 03

  First try.

• 14:17Dan Harris?

  Okay, good. All right.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't second guess yourself.

• 14:24Dan Harris?

  Actually, do second guess yourself. That's the point. Like, sometimes we should check our instinct to put people in a bucket or a box.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Big time. And that was something that I tried to do throughout the writing process. And I really, really worked on, especially in the later stages of the edits of this book, I really tried to be comfortable dwelling in that complexity and the contradictions and the nuance. And, you know, I say in the introduction, many business books sort of offer pat lessons on how to get ahead in life. And this isn't one of them. I think I say in the introduction, this is not a self-help manual. It's more like a Zen koan. Because it's a question that doesn't have one easy answer. So I appreciate you noting that.

• 15:13Dan Harris?

  So, speaking of that, so back in the sort of more admirable side of Chenard's behavioral repertoire, you mentioned he gave the company away. Can you put some meat on that particular bone?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm always cautious here not to get too in the weeds of sort of corporate governance and equity structures, but just to do it as quickly and as simply as I can. Three years ago, it was the situation where Patagonia was still a privately held corporation, and all of the equity, all of the stock in the company was owned by Chenard and his immediate family, his wife and two children. There were two classes to that stock, voting stock and non-voting stock. That's typical in the way many companies are structured, but they owned all of it. And so what they did was they took the 2% of voting shares, which is all the voting shares, but 2% of the overall stock, and they put it in a newly formed entity called a Purpose Trust. That's a legal entity that you can set up in California that essentially just holds

• 16:11Speaker 03

  a bucket of stock or money and is instructed on what to do with it. Pause there. They took the 98% of the other equity, the rest of the equity, the non-voting shares, and put all of that in a series of new 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations. And then they had a structure that works like this. The Purpose Trust, which has the voting shares, instructs Patagonia, Inc., the Ongoing Concern, a for-profit C corp incorporated in California. The Purpose Trust instructs the C corp to donate 100% of the profits not reinvested in the company to the 501(c)(4)'s, the Holdfast Collective.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  And the Holdfast Collective gives away those monies on an ongoing basis. And that money amounts to like $100 million a year. And in doing so, the Chenards really did renounce their claim to the fortune. They no longer own the equity. It's locked up in these new legal entities, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

• 17:17Dan Harris?

  What motivated that decision on his part and the family's part?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  I think motivation is an incredibly important word in this conversation. And I would even just take us back to try to examine the motivations of Chenard and his family for the 50 years that led up to this decision. And the way I'd sum it up is that they've never been motivated by money. It's just not what got them out of bed in the morning. It's not what inspired them to create the company. And when it came time to figure out what a succession plan looked like at Patagonia, it was not going to be the thing that they were personally trying to hold on to. So what ultimately motivated them to do this was a mortality, right? Chenard is now 86 years old.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  He understood that he was getting old and that something needed to happen. But in particular, the real motivation came when in 2017 or 18, Forbes magazine put him on their list of annual billionaires. And when that happened, he freaked out. He called it one of the worst days of his life. He was huffing and screaming in the office and he told people, get me off this list. Figure out how to get me off this list. Or he threatened, he would start calling other billionaires and offering to sell the company. That then began a multi-year process where they had to figure out what a structure would

• 18:45Speaker 03

  look like that would allow them to give away the company, retain Patagonia in some sort of a form that it already was, and ultimately give away many more of the profits. Those were some of the criteria that they had. Took them a couple of years, but then they did it. And in 2022, I broke the news in the New York Times and it was one of the biggest stories I've ever written in my life, just tremendous interest in how this company had managed to pull it off.

• 19:14Dan Harris?

  Has he been an influence in this regard on other reluctant billionaires?

• 19:19Speaker 03

  I think we can give a qualified yes at this point. It's still early. These processes take many years. But what I can say is that I've personally had outreach from many, many founders and companies who have asked me my own take on how they can do something similar. I'm not an estate planner, so I refer them to other people very quickly. And other people I've talked to, including folks in Patagonia and at other sort of related organizations, all report that there is a real influx of family-led concerns, private companies that have been asking them for guidance on how they can think about succession planning differently. It might not be exactly the same structure, but they've definitely gotten people's attention.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  And there's a movement afoot to try to at least capture some of what they've done and perpetuate it.

• 20:08Dan Harris?

  To get back to this word motivation, what do you think is motivating that quote unquote movement?

• 20:13Speaker 03

  There's a lot of dissatisfaction with capitalism as it is right now. As we discussed last time I was on the show with my previous book, we live in an extremely unequal society, in a world in which executives and businesses are prioritizing short-term profits, often at the cost of the well-being of greater society, individuals, workers, the planet. And I think Shinar is not alone in recognizing that and feeling it. And what's encouraging perhaps is that he's not alone now in actually trying to do something about it beyond, you know, making some empty corporate pledges that you like put on Instagram and then go back to business as usual.

• 21:00Dan Harris?

  Coming up, David talks about a different way to do capitalism, the Buddha's cookbook for enlightenment, how reporting on his new book changed his life, and much more.

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• 22:21Dan Harris?

  I know we talked about this last time, but I think I really want to go back into it now because it feels like, and this is unscientific, but my sense of the culture is that, especially among young people, just a really rising level of dissatisfaction about capitalism. But you're like right there at the spear covering capitalism as it relates to the environment. And you started this conversation by describing yourself as a Buddhist. And so I'm just curious, like, what's your, where's your head at with all of this these days?

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm thinking, thinking without speaking. But I think it's deliberate because it's such a thorny question. And the thing that was coming to my mind, and I guess I'll just think out loud for a moment here. Is that I sort of reject this claim that some people make like, well, I'm an optimist. So ultimately, I'm optimistic about it all. I got, I wanted to say something like that and I almost started and I could just feel it was disingenuous. That's not entirely true. You know, I'm very clear eyed about the fact that the world and the economy are in really rough shape. And that business as we know it, and really society as we know it, is enormously extractive

• 23:40Speaker 03

  and is setting humanity on a multi-decade course for a really profoundly different planet with a whole lot of suffering. You know, that's the reality of, of what's happening out there. Some of my optimism, as it were, is derived from the fact that I happen to live a very blessed life in many ways, you know, personally, I've, I've security, I have family, I have love, I have meaningful work. But I get why people are dissatisfied, you know, I talk to them and they have every right to be. The sort of bargain that I think many people feel like they strike between themselves and their employer

• 24:20Speaker 03

  and their country and their society, a lot of those are not holding up their end of the bargain. Companies do not care for people in the same way that they did just a couple of generations ago. The federal government is not there in the way that I think a lot of people hope it would be in their times of need. So I don't, I don't at all pretend that that dissatisfaction is, you know, without good reason. But I also, to come back to that, like, all right, we, you know, we gotta focus on the good stories too. I also try to be clear eyed about the fact that there's a lot of good work happening in the world. And my job is to cover all of it.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  I write about the bad stuff, but I also really make an intentional effort to write about the good stuff too. You know, in the introduction, again, I have a line, I forget it verbatim. But I basically say, you know, if we don't write stories about. People who are doing good work in the world, we sort of forfeit the opportunity to have positive role models. And that's what I believe Chenard and Patagonia ultimately can be with all their imperfections. They show that there is a different way to do capitalism that doesn't have to suck so bad.

• 25:39Dan Harris?

  So you retain a sense that business can be a source for good, notwithstanding all the many, many problems with capitalism?

• 25:48Speaker 03

  That's right. I do.

• 25:50Dan Harris?

  How do you think about this as a Buddhist? Like, because I think about this a lot. I mean, I run my own business. And if I had to whittle down our goal, it's really about the dissemination of the Dharma plus modern science, you know, but ways to do life better. Right there in the Eightfold Path, the Buddha's cookbook for enlightenment, there's an entry on right livelihood, you know, like correct or wise livelihood. So I'd just be curious as all of these words flow out of my face, like what comes to mind for you?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, right livelihood was in my mind as you were, as the words were coming out of your face. I mean, I was going to invoke that too. And I think it starts right there. That, you know, just goes to the precept of like not doing harm. So certainly I think there are businesses that are out there actively doing bad things in the world. So like, that's not good. Try not to hold them up as arbiters of great and elevated business. And I think you can see that in like the social media giants, right? You look at the way the public narrative has changed around social media. And as we learn more about what some of these companies knew, about how their products were affecting especially young people, especially young girls, you start to understand that, you know,

• 27:05Speaker 03

  what can have the veneer of a sort of fun youthful company often has a real dark side. I think when it comes to a company like Patagonia, what was so intriguing to me is that as they discovered their own imperfections and as they understood, as Chenard and his team understood that some of the products they were making were causing harm, they embarked on these extensive, often expensive.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Efforts to remedy the situation. And that is just really unusual in the course of modern American business. I mean, I've covered business for 20 plus years now. And when most companies realize that they're like mucking up a river in Portugal, they like sweep it under the rug, like pay a PR firm to like make the problem go away and hope no one notices. Like when Patagonia found that kind of stuff, they would put up a blog post about it, shut down the factory and proudly announced that their sales were going to dip by 5% because they weren't going to use them anymore. And that kind of self inquiry and willingness to confront their own problems,

• 28:20Speaker 03

  I think is A, unique, but also very Buddhist in a way, right? And throughout this conversation, I've been thinking about the sort of some parallels between the way this company showed up and some of just like the basic meditation practices that we all go through in the tradition that we're both familiar with, which is, you know, being aware of what's happening, understanding the causes and conditions that allow certain stimulus to arise. And in the cases where those causes and conditions are creating suffering, trying to do the work in a responsible way to allow for less of that stuff to come up. I mean, that's like, Patagonia wouldn't say it quite like this,

• 29:01Speaker 03

  but in my sort of business Buddhist mind, there's some meaningful parallels there to me.

• 29:06Dan Harris?

  Another parallel would be just begin again. In meditation, we start over every time we get distracted. And at Patagonia, if you're fucking up a river, you announce it and find somebody else.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 29:19Dan Harris?

  The other thing I'm curious about with Patagonia is we talk about the things they're doing that are laudable, like self disclosure, taking care of your employees. They also do a lot of political activism. Listeners may have varying, uh, your mileage may vary on that. But is doing good always good for the bottom line? Or do they pay a price for this stuff?

• 29:41Speaker 03

  This is a great question. There's lots of scholarship around this. You know, I think Chouinard's sort of canned answer is that it always works out in the end. I'm not sure that's true. You know, like, maybe if you quantify the brand equity and all that kind of stuff, it's true. But at the end of the day, like, no, Chouinard often would deliberately throttle sales in order to use more responsible products, more responsible ingredients, as it were, in the clothing. I think the most famous instance comes in the late 80s when Chouinard and the team recognized that conventional cotton, which they were using in a ton of their products, is super toxic at the time.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  It had formaldehyde. The people in their stores were actually getting sick from the off-gassing from the new cotton products. They go out and look at the conventional cotton farm, and it's just a desolate wasteland. There's tons of industrial chemicals, and they're like, this stuff sucks. Like, we're gonna move to all organic cotton. This is back in the 80s. There's no organic cotton supply chain. And so what they realize is if they're gonna do this, they're gonna have to slash their SKUs, their number of products, by like 30%, and it's probably gonna mean a reduction in sales of, I don't know, 20%. I'm not looking at the numbers right now, but, you know, big, meaningful hit. And Chouinard says, "I don't care. We're not using that stuff anymore.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  I don't care if we lose money. We're going for it." And they do it. And so in that sort of instance, I don't think you can say that doing the right thing was ultimately good for business, right? They took a real hit. Now, again, at the end of the day, and the final accounting is the fact that they transitioned to organic a net plus? Like, maybe, but I'm always a little cautious about trying to draw too tidy of boxes around some of this. I mean, as we discussed earlier, it's a complicated story, and these are complicated questions without neat and tidy answers.

• 31:41Dan Harris?

  Couldn't you argue, though, that they paid a price in the short term on some of these things by throttling sales or reducing what you're calling SKUs? But the reputational benefit was enough to drive more customers to them in the long run?

• 31:54Speaker 03

  I think you could, and I tried to leave room for that possibility, but I think it's super hard to know. What you can also say, what I know from my reporting, and it just makes the final accounting for Patagonia that much harder, is that this is a company that has deliberately throttled its growth repeatedly over the years, simply because Chenard was uncomfortable with growing too fast. And so even when things were going good and the supply chain was all working out okay, they would limit the number of retailers where they were selling their gear. They would sometimes close retail channels because they didn't want to get too big. They've never sold on Amazon. They've never sold in department stores. And so you look at a company like this,

• 32:39Speaker 03

  and it just stands in radical contrast to most other corporations, especially consumer products companies, that are about, you know, growth no matter what, right? They'll take growth wherever they can get it. It's just not the case with this one.

• 32:52Dan Harris?

  Just getting back to you for a second, having, you know, marinated in the Patagonia world for quite a while, did it change the way you think about your own, right livelihood? Like, would you throttle your own growth for your beliefs, et cetera, et cetera?

• 33:08Speaker 03

  That's a good one. I hadn't thought about it right like that. You know, I don't think it's changed my views on my livelihood. I feel really blessed to be a reporter at the New York Times, which is a really extraordinary institution where we're still allowed to do independent journalism. And I just never take that for granted. And I'm fortunate to still love the craft, still love the work. What reporting this book did change was two things, I'd say. One was my own relationship with material goods and my thinking about how much stuff I need. And I think for many of us who sort of have any iota of self-reflection, that's probably an ongoing conversation we have with ourselves.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  But this, this was a moment that accelerated some of my own reflections. And the other, and I would say most profound, part of my personal journey over the last few years as I wrote this book, was my relationship with nature. For the reporting of this book, I had the opportunity. Opportunity to travel with Shinar to some wild places, you know, deep in the back country of Argentina, in some beautiful spots in Wyoming. And I took other trips with other folks in the book that led me to just some of the most spectacular, untouched, remote corners of this planet. And those experiences really had a profound effect on me, even at this stage in my life, even having spent a lot of time in nature.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  And it's frankly something I'm still like working through and understanding and processing and trying to figure out how, if at all, my life will change because of it.

• 34:48Dan Harris?

  How could your life change? I mean, I guess you could do your job from anywhere and raise your kids on an organic farm in upstate Vermont.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  I don't think it's like that. To me, it's like when I have blocks of time where I can be really deliberate with how I'm spending my time. Am I going to a city to see the sights? Or am I like going deep into the wilderness with my children to be closer to mountains and away from people? And of course, it doesn't have to be either or. But I will say that the reporting for this book, and especially a trip I took to Patagonia in South America last year, really kindled in me an even deeper hunger to be very close to nature.

• 35:35Dan Harris?

  If I recall correctly, this was a privately held company and they were doing, Shinar and his team were doing things that were contrary to many of the basic instincts in capitalism, like unlimited growth and you need an exit strategy, you know, meaning sell it to somebody else and make a shit ton of money. Could they have gotten away with this if they were a public company and were, you know, subject to the whims of Wall Street?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 36:03Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  And I don't think Chenard would say they could. That's really the secret ingredient that made all this work over the years. And it's why, you know, when I would ask Chenard what his advice was for other companies, he said, for most companies, it's too late. You know, if you're beholden to shareholders, if you're at the mercy of quarterly earnings reports, like, good luck being ethical. Good luck telling your investors that, like, sorry, we're going to throttle growth because we don't like, you know, how a factory in Vietnam is treating its laborers. Like, great, we'll find a new CEO. Like, fuck off. It's just not, not the way most companies work.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  And so what he would say the very next beat, however, is that's why he really tries to spend his time thinking about the next generation of companies.

• 36:59Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Can there be a new class of companies that draw some lessons from this and understand that once you start giving up control, once you start allowing faceless investors to sort of decide what is and isn't right or wrong, it can be very hard to sort of keep your values intact.

• 37:21Dan Harris?

  Do you see that happening? Do you see a new generation of companies emerging?

• 37:25Speaker 03

  There's some, right? There's like, there are always green shoots. And I think certainly there is a, there's more of that dialogue and more of this awareness in the business world and in business schools than there was, say, 20 years ago. But we're still talking about, you know, like, iota in terms of revenues or in terms of number of companies compared to the vast majority of the business world. You can point to some larger ethical corporations. They're out there that sort of try to do this, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule.

• 38:03Dan Harris?

  Coming up, David talks about how much runway we have to get our shit together on climate, how to talk to your children about capitalism, advice on how to live well in a capitalist world, and much more.

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• 39:24Dan Harris?

  I'm curious about like how much runway we have to get our shit together. I'm thinking about, you know, when I was, I used to cover politics when I was in my twenties. A friend of mine was in the legislature and they used to talk about good government people. Like there were like all these NGOs who were interested in good governance. They used to call them gugus. And there's a lot of people who are interested in good capitalism and, you know, both on the nonprofit side and the for-profit side. But we are, you know, as you know, because you've spent a lot of time thinking about the climate, like we don't have unlimited time to get our shit together on the climate front. And I'm just curious, like, what level of optimism you have?

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Again, I sort of resist neat and tidy answers to these big existential questions. So here's how I often think about it. It's undeniable that the modern world as we know it and human activity is driving really intense global warming, warming that recent studies suggest is not only moving quickly, but is actually accelerating. That is already making weather events more severe, making precipitation more intense, making droughts, floods, fires, storms worse. Sea levels are rising. That's also incontrovertible.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  And the pace of change, which is to say the pace at which we're replacing fossil fuels, which are the primary driver of this warming, with clean energy is super slow. The pace at which we're reforming agricultural practices, which are also responsible for a huge amount of planet warming emissions, that's moving super slow. So we're not moving at a pace that's going to allow us to rapidly change our trajectory. And what that means is we're moving into a world where it's going to be a much hotter planet. And we don't know exactly what that's going to look like. In many respects, I think some people believe that the world can go on much as it does today. There are going to be a lot of challenges.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  There are going to be certain low-lying areas that may be uninhabitable. And there's going to be a lot of suffering as, you know, 175 million people in a country like Bangladesh need to adapt to a world in which the majority of their agricultural lands are no longer suitable for growing food, right? There's big thorny challenges ahead of us. And all that said, I still believe that 100 years from now, like, people are going to be having conversations. I still believe 100 years from now, there's going to be education and entertainment and commerce. The world's going to be a vastly different place, and we may experience tipping points along the way.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  And those are big thorny questions that we just don't know the answer to. What happens if the Gulf Stream collapses? What happens if certain Antarctic ice sheets collapse? We don't know the answers to those questions. But I try not to view the changing climate as a truly existential threat, which is to say threat to the very survival of human civilization. Instead, I try to be really clear eyed about the fact that things are changing fast. Our ability to counteract those changes is not nearly keeping up with the pace of change. And that there's a lot of suffering. There's just going to be a lot of suffering for a lot of people, a lot of animals,

• 42:59Speaker 03

  a lot of communities along the way. And that's life, right? This is the world we're in right now.

• 43:04Dan Harris?

  Think the Buddha had a few things to say about both change and suffering.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:11Dan Harris?

  I know you said that in the book, you say that this is not a business self-help tome. But do you have any advice for us as individual widgets within the larger capitalistic system? That you can deliver after having written this book?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Sure, but you know, I'm no self-help guru like you are, Dan.

• 43:35Dan Harris?

  The fact that you know me is enough for you and anybody to cast, to shed a lot of skeptical light on the notion of self-help gurus.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  I knew you before you were a guru.

• 43:46Dan Harris?

  Yeah, that's true. You know, my little thing is some people teach from the mountaintop. I teach from the fetal position, so like.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Here's what I'd say. Gets right back to right livelihood. If you're able to do work that you care about, it's a blessing to be able to be really invested and passionate about the work. Not everyone has that luxury. And so for those that don't, I would say try to do no harm, right? Like right livelihood doesn't mean you're like fulfilling your higher purpose. But it, I think it at some level does mean trying to avoid trades that create additional suffering in the world. That's pretty basic stuff on the, as a. Sumer, I would offer that people go back to that 2015 Patagonia ad in the New York Times. Don't buy this jacket, right?

• 44:42Speaker 03

  That was a prompt for reflection about what we actually need, right? What material goods that we so compulsively surround ourselves with are actually essential? And being really clear eyed and deliberate about how we spend our money and the things we bring into our lives and into our homes. That's a good discipline, a good exercise, right? And it's not binary and I am on a journey, my friend. Like I buy all sorts of stuff I don't need, let me tell you. But I think being mindful of those choices is reasonable and important. And finally, I would say get into nature. I mean, I can't tell you what a profound effect it's had on me before I was writing this book. In my meditation practice, right?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Like some of my most profound Dharma experiences have been when I've been really close to nature. And even out of the context of Buddhism or the Dharma, I never regret being in the woods. I never regret being in the mountains and sort of being really present with the wind in the trees and the sensation of the sun on my skin. Those are all really priceless experiences to me.

• 45:58Dan Harris?

  I'm curious what you tell your children. Your children may be too young to have this conversation, but I've got a lot of young people who work for me. And the vibe very much is capitalism is rigged. If we fuck the planet, we, the younger generations, we've been screwed by your generation and your parents. And it's very hard to argue with that. I don't want to argue with it, but I do want to do my best to recontextualize, give some perspective, give some empowering advice like, how do you think about all that? And what will you say to your kids when the time is right?

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they're not wrong. So let's just honor the validity of their perspective. And then my next question is like, all right, so what are we going to do today? And like, if the answer is we're just going to throw our hands up. Well, like, that's pretty passive and fatalistic. And I don't want to repeat what I just said, but it's like, how do you want to show up in the world? And we can show up and we can be.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Inured and insensitive to the suffering in the world, or we can show up like Bodhisattvas and try to help. And that's, it's as simple as that to me. And there's always plenty of work to do. There's always plenty of people to help. And everyone's got to find their own karma. Everyone's got to figure out what their little role as cog of the machine is. And then, God willing, you have to go do it.

• 47:31Dan Harris?

  I remember reading an essay by Jonathan Franzen, I believe, in The New Yorker about climate change. If it wasn't Franzen, it was some other Jewish novelist. And he basically said something like, you know, climate change is really fucking scary. But if there's good news, it's that way. It's going to provide plenty of opportunities for us to help out and create common cause with one another. And so if I, if I, to sum up, if we take as a foundational question lurking above and throughout this conversation, you know, can capitalism and the Dharma coexist? I think what I'm hearing from you, and I'm saying all this for you to tell me if I'm correct or to expand upon it, is look, this is the system we were born into.

• 48:15Dan Harris?

  For whatever karma we may have, this is, we came out of wombs into a capitalistic system. And we all have a choice, like, how are we going to behave within it? And yes, business can be a source for good. So you don't necessarily need to avoid all interactions with commerce. And yes, you have agency and you have some influence, depending on, you know, your position in the world. And do what you can where you are with what you've got. Is that a decent summation?

• 48:45Speaker 03

  Sure. And everyone's got to find their own way through it. And I'm not sitting here trying to tell people what to do. But listen, this is definitely the system we're born into, no doubt about that. And then again, I just come back to this notion that we have a choice. And you know, I don't know if this is perfectly relevant, but it's what comes to mind. So I'll share it. I'm going to take you back to the year 2000. It was 2000 and I was with Chokini Maripashay, who was my original Tibetan teacher. And I'm studying with him in India and I've been on retreat and, you know, doing intensive practice. And a lot of young people at this time were like staying in India, right?

• 49:28Speaker 03

  They would go, they would do some of these retreats and they're like, I'm going to go on this big journey. And I forget the term, but they would do, you know, 10,000 recitations of a certain mudra and they would do 10,000 circumambulations of the Bodhisattva. I forget what that's called, but right, they would really commit and go deep. And I sort of went to Rinpoche one day and I said, should I do this? Like, should I, should I stay in India and just keep doing intensive practice? And Rinpoche looked at me, he's like, where were you born? I was like, I was, I was born in New York City. He's like, you're an American, go home. And, and what I took from it, right? What I took from it was like, that's not my work in the world, right?

• 50:13Speaker 03

  If I was supposed to be born as a Tibetan monk, I would have been born as a Tibetan monk. But what he was telling me, or at least what I heard was that like, I was born where I was for a reason and not in the sort of deist, like God has a plan for me, but in the sense that like, you are born into the world you are born into. And if you are fortunate to have optionality and energy and resources, then his invitation to me, as I understood it, was to figure out what right livelihood looked like in that context and in an organic way. And that's the way I sort of try to talk to my kids about their role in the world,

• 50:57Speaker 03

  which is I'm not trying to tell them exactly what to do, but I try to remind them that we are very blessed and a lot of other people are not as blessed. And when and if we have the opportunity to help, whether that's through our day jobs or through charitable acts, we should take that opportunity.

• 51:15Dan Harris?

  Well said, or as we say in a Buddhist context, sadhu. David, two just quick questions as we wrap up here. First, anything that you were hoping to get to that we didn't get to?

• 51:27Speaker 03

  I could talk to you all day, my friend, like, whatever. It's always fun.

• 51:31Dan Harris?

  Right back at you.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  No, nothing specific, nothing specific.

• 51:36Dan Harris?

  Finally, then, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book? And anything else that we should be checking out from you?

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Well, I'm thrilled to have had this conversation. The book is Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away. It's out now, and I hope you check it out.

• 51:58Dan Harris?

  Awesome. Thank you, my friend, for making time for this. Great to talk to you, as always.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Thank you for doing it. Really appreciate it. Always a pleasure.

• 52:10Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to David. Always great to talk to him. Don't forget to check out what we're doing over on DanHarris.com. Guided meditations that come with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes, plus weekly live video meditation and Q and A sessions. The next one's coming up on October 7th. That will be Sebene Selassie in conversation with DJ Cashmere, the executive producer of this show. And of course, Seb and I will be at the Omega Institute the weekend of October 24th for another edition of Meditation Party. Link in the show notes. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

• 52:54Dan Harris?

  DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.