Lessons on Capitalism from Patagonia’s Reluctant Billionaire

When Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard first got into business, all he wanted to do was make better equipment for himself and his fellow “dirtbags.” Over 50 years, he built Patagonia into a global outdoor retailer with a sustainable mission and ensured that the company’s profits will go toward protecting the environment for years to come. In his latest book, “Dirtbag Billionaire. How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made A Fortune, and Gave it All Away,” New York Times reporter David Gelles chronicles how Chouinard set new industry standards for sustainable production and charitable giving. Kara talks with Gelles about how Chouinard’s version of conscious capitalism compares with that of tech billionaires, what to make of shifting US corporate environmental and social responsibility, and how artificial intelligence could affect the climate in the future. Want to see Kara and Scott Galloway live on the Pivot Tour November 8th-14th? Limited tickets are still available at PivotTour.com. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  He's not an effective altruist.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  No, maybe an ineffective altruist, perhaps. But he knew what he cared about.

• 0:20Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. If you listened to last week's episode with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders about fighting the oligarchy, this one may seem like a bit of whiplash. It's about a good billionaire, or at least one that's trying to use his money for good: Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. New York Times climate reporter David Gelles has been talking to and writing about Patagonia for years. His latest book, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away, is a look at the paradox of what's known as conscious capitalism and the impact that idealistic companies can have in shaping consumer demands and other businesses.

• 1:03Kara Swisher?

  Before he was a climate reporter, Gelles wrote about corporate culture, including a book about the capitalist-to-end-all-capitalist CEO Jack Welch. I wanted to talk to him about the title shifts we've seen in American corporate culture in the past decade, especially when it comes to climate change and social responsibility. I also wanted to talk to him about some future impacts on the climate, like AI, of course, and how the wealthiest Americans are leaning in or out of their professed efforts to give back. Our expert question comes from Harvard historian Sven Bechard, whose book Capitalism: A Global History is coming out next month. Stay with us.

• 1:53Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week.

• 2:10Kara Swisher?

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• 2:37Kara Swisher?

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• 3:20Speaker 03

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• 4:07Kara Swisher?

  Hi David, thanks for coming on ON.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:10Kara Swisher?

  So, I was really interested that you decided to cover Patagonia. It's been around for more than 50 years. Most people are probably familiar with its clothing. I wear it all the time, my sons love it. But you write in the intro to your book that researching Patagonia was an opportunity to test your conviction that business can be a force for good. It's something I think about a lot. Do you still hold that to be true? And if so, what are some of your favorite examples of large businesses that are forces for good outside of Patagonia?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think the operative word there is can, right? It's not as if every business is a force for good. I think every business, maybe almost every business, well, set aside cigarette makers and weapons manufacturers, has the opportunity to be a force for good in all sorts of different ways, whether it's with their people, in their communities, with the environment, by making great products and services. But what I've discovered in the course of being, you know, a business reporter for more than 20 years now, is that few and far between are the companies that actually understand that, to be a part of their mission, and make a really deliberate, consistent effort to do so. And what are the other examples besides Patagonia?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Well, I can rattle off lots of companies that I think have tried over the years, but it's a really select few that I think can claim to have succeeded for as long as Patagonia, imperfect as it is. And so that's why I wrote the book about this company in particular.

• 5:35Kara Swisher?

  Sure. Tell me some who have tried and failed, and some who, just a few, just rattle off a few, if you don't mind.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, I'm thinking of Unilever, which, under Paul Pullman, went on this big effort to make its supply chain more sustainable, make its products more sustainable. What happened there? They did a lot of good for about 10 years, and then, almost the minute Paul Pullman left, a new CEO came in, the board didn't have his back in quite the same way, an activist investor shows up, and a lot of those efforts disappear. And I think that shows just how fickle it can be. I'm also thinking of Ed Bastian. You know, Ed Bastian at Delta has done a lot of really good work with his employees, trying to Make that an airline that understands that if you take great care of its people, you're probably going to get great customer service and a great functioning airline.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  And he's largely succeeded in large part with things like profit sharing, which were unheard of in the airline industry. So I could, you know, I've got lots of examples like that, but, but very few are the companies that can claim to have been doing it with such deliberate purpose and the same set of values and caring about the same kinds of things for 50 years now.

• 6:44Kara Swisher?

  Right, which is usually from the, I mean, thinking of Costco, for example. That's another one that, that.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 6:49Kara Swisher?

  And it's because it's founder led, really, in some ways. Is that correct? I mean, is that pretty much the, in the cases you just mentioned, it's not. But in general, when that happens, it's founder led.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  And I would go a step further. I think having a founder is core to these kind of companies. But I don't think it's enough. I mean, like, let's talk about a lot of founder led companies in Silicon Valley that have lost their way.

• 7:12Kara Swisher?

  All of them.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I think even more important than being founder led is the corporate governance structure. You know, what allowed Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard to make all these iconoclastic decisions for so long is that they never had any external shareholders. They never took a dime of money from anyone else. So they had the freedom to act in accordance with their values, whereas so many other companies have a hard time doing that.

• 7:36Kara Swisher?

  And in Silicon Valley, they shift. I'm thinking of the founders of Google, for example, who are, who have changed rather drastically. And in fact, their, their entire idea of don't be evil sort of is a, is a joke in and of itself.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  And I'm thinking of Meta, right? I mean, and, and just to draw a contrast.

• 7:52Kara Swisher?

  I don't think he was ever nice, but go ahead. I don't think he thought about the good of anybody but himself, but go ahead.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Well, well, fair, fair, but, but let's, let's get, just get brass tacks. Because setting aside where someone's morals are, and all of these companies are making specific decisions about specific sets of business problems. And one of the things that I found so remarkable here is that time and again, Yvon Chouinard and the Patagonia executives were willing to sacrifice growth, sales and profits if it meant acting in accordance with their values. They understood that conventional cotton was environmentally disastrous. They stopped making T-shirts with conventional cotton. That meant a massive hit the next year, but they did it anyway. Can you imagine?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  The owner of a social network, understanding, for example, that their product was having a negative impact on teenage girls and saying, you know what, we're not going to do that anymore. That's not the world.

• 8:49Kara Swisher?

  This has been my unfortunate state in life. I mean, let me, let me ask you, stick with that just for one second, then we'll get into the Patagonia specifically in your book. I'm thinking of recently, you mentioned the tech executives, when Tim Cook handed over that statue, those moments and their excuses, when I talked, all of them off the record is, well, shareholders, most of them disdain Trump, I would say. That's a mild way of putting it and have in the past, but very few are willing to say anything publicly. I understand that part, but the effusive lengths they go to now to, to keep whatever, and their idea is shareholder value, right? I think that's where it sort of sits in that pool of shareholder value.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And listen, this is of real personal interest to me because eight years ago, you may remember, I was the guy here at the New York Times that was really tasked with covering corporate America's response to the first Trump administration. And every week in 2017, 2018, 2019, I was writing stories about how CEOs, ones we've already discussed on this call, were standing up and saying, this is not the America we believe in. I don't agree with the president. We stand for something else. And now, many of those CEOs, eight years later, are still in the same jobs. They're still running the same companies. And it's silence. It's crickets. And in fact, as you noted, many of them are showing up and, you know, genuflecting at the feet of the president.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  What a contrast. Counterpoint, Patagonia. In 2017, Patagonia sued President Trump and his administration over their efforts to reduce-

• 10:24Kara Swisher?

  That was under Rose Marcario, correct?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. Rose was the CEO at that point. And even to this day, Patagonia is still one of the few companies that's raising its voice and saying, we don't, we still don't believe in it, eight years later. So, I mean, the, what, how things have changed.

• 10:38Kara Swisher?

  So, let's talk about how we get here, because there are a few, I can't think of many businesses that are speaking up right now. So, let's talk about the founder, Yvon Chouinard. Give us a quick overview of his backstory and the Patagonia business model, and explain the title Dirtbag Billionaire.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Well, let me start there because it's a provocative title, sort of intentionally. And dirtbag in the community in which Yvon Chouinard grew up, the climbing community, the outdoors community, it's like the highest compliment. It's not at all a derogatory term. He refers to himself to this day as a dirtbag. What it means is someone who's so unenamored with materialism, with material possessions, that they are content to sleep in the dirt, in dirty clothes, if it means they're that much closer to their next climb. So when Yvon heard the title of the book, he was actually very pissed off, not because of the word dirtbag, but because of the word billionaire, because he never, ever wanted to be known as a billionaire. So that's the origins of the title.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  As for who this guy is and how you get to a worldview like that, you know, he's 86 years old today. So he was born in rural Maine in 1938, grew up not speaking English, moved to Southern California when he was 10 years old, and fell in, as a young man, as a teenager, with a group of falconers and then with a group of rock climbers. He became a self-taught rock climber, we're in like the 50s at this point, and he can't even find the gear he needs to start scaling the walls of Yosemite. So he starts making it himself with an anvil he buys from a junkyard. Lo and behold, he's got a knack for design, he's got a knack for craftsmanship, he becomes the finest maker of rock climbing equipment, carabiners, peatons, chocks, and he starts selling them to his friends and other rock climbers.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, the guy who grew up loathing business, he had this congenital aversion to commerce, even as a young man, finds himself running this scrappy little operation. He does that for 10, 15 years or so, and then in 1973, he makes the pivot away from climbing gear towards clothes. And in 1973, Patagonia is born.

• 12:41Kara Swisher?

  Stop, I keep going. Yes, so he, if he had a congenital problem with it, he obviously didn't have a congenital, obviously wanted to sell them to his friends and the climbing community, correct? That there was a big, he's running up through a hole in the, in the, in the market.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  That's right. There was climbing gear on the market, but it was not particularly well-made. Most of it was imported from Europe. And he found that if he made better gear and sold it at a higher price, he could make a living. And it was really at first a lifestyle business. He was just doing this because he needed some money to keep climbing.

• 13:12Kara Swisher?

  Right, but he had to contract with all kinds of factories, et cetera, right? Correct, he sort of moved it up the stream pretty quickly.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  He did, yeah. And in fact, he went into business with a partner of his, a guy named Tom Frost, who actually had an engineering degree from Stanford University. And all of a sudden, you're right, I mean, he starts running a business. But he did, he was never comfortable with it. And I think that's one of the things I discovered. You know, I read every interview he ever gave, back to the 60s and 70s. And even then, he was wrestling with the fact that he didn't like being a businessman, but he sort of found himself as one.

• 13:45Kara Swisher?

  Right. And so, the pivot to clothing, what was, was he didn't find enough jackets? There certainly were other companies that sold these things.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I think two things happened roughly at the same time. The first is that they started to find the limits of the markets for climbing goods. And they could only sell frankly so many carabiners a year. And the company sort of had a momentum of its own. And so, with more employees, more expectation to sort of keep growing, which he, again, was not particularly comfortable with, there was this sort of hunt for new markets. At the same time, there were jackets out there, but they weren't particularly well-made. They weren't particularly great at keeping people warm. And it was actually in 1968, he had this pivotal trip in the region known as Patagonia, in Argentina, where he and his buddies got trapped in an

• 14:35Speaker 01

  ice cave for 30 days, almost died. And in part, they had such a hard time because their clothes were failing them. And so, a few years later, he says, we got to make clothes that can stand up to the elements on these expeditions we're doing. And that's the origin of Patagonia. And in fact, that's why they called it Patagonia. And indeed, the logo that we all know so well is inspired by that mountain that they climbed in 1968.

• 15:01Kara Swisher?

  And the money initially came from sales themselves?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  He bootstrapped this the entire time. They never took funding. They didn't do a friends and family round. It was bootstrapped from the outset.

• 15:12Kara Swisher?

  Which is unusual. But his early days are reminiscent of, you know, these tech billionaires garage stories, Bill Gates and Paul Allen started in a garage, obviously, the Apple Garage tour, which Steve Wozniak says is a myth. But, you know, I was in the garage of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was Susan Wojcicki's garage, actually. Most of these tales, and a lot of them are marketing, right? You know, the idea that a Pez dispenser sharted eBay, and it's sort of vaguely accurate, but not really. Chenard's experience seems to have a lasting impact on the business model. Can you talk about that?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'll note, I mean, they even have their own version of the garage. It's this tin shed, right? In the late 60s, they actually moved to Ventura, California, from Burbank, where he was literally working out of his parents' backyard in a chicken coop, and bought that tin shed. That tin shed is still there today. And I mean, as recently as a couple of years ago. Chenard goes in there every few months and sort of hammers on the anvil, just to remember what it was like.

• 16:07Kara Swisher?

  Hammers on the anvil, okay.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  I know. But this, the origin story, what I would say is that from a very early age, there was, you know, it's something you and Brene talked about recently, which is this paradox, this creative tension, the recognition in Chenard, and then among his close friends and executives, who formed the core of this team, that there were potentially irreconcilable forces at play here. They were deeply committed to the environment, and yet they were also making products that took a toll on the environment. They were really interested in running a company that took care of their people.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  And yet, at a certain point, they had to instill a measure of discipline that sort of cramped people's lifestyles. They were really interested in conserving nature and creating money to fund large-scale conservation projects. And yet, when the environmental activists who they supported trained their gaze on the company itself and their labor practices, it sometimes got really uncomfortable.

• 17:18Kara Swisher?

  Sure, by making it. But you're saying by making anything, it didn't, it's not really a tension. If you're a business, you create brokenness somewhere in the system, correct?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Right. Chenard understood this and looked himself in the mirror, right? That self-awareness is a part of it, and it's a part of this story, too. In, I think it was 1993, the Patagonia catalogs are famous. A lot of people have seen them over the years. And they would write these sort of highfalutin essays. The first sentence of the 1993, I think, fall catalog essay said, "Everything we make pollutes."

• 17:50Speaker 01

  I mean, how about that for a mission statement from a company? That self-awareness.

• 17:53Kara Swisher?

  Right, but one could say it's virtue signaling. But you also wrote a book about a business icon on the opposite end of the spectrum, CEO Jack Welch, who you said, quote, "broke capitalism." Both men have had an influence, not just on their companies, but also on the business world at large and lots of business leaders. Compare the two and their impact on corporate culture.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Well, listen, I think in obvious ways, they exist at opposite ends of this spectrum. I'll start perhaps where there are some similarities. Both men, over the years, professed to be completely obsessed with quality. Jack Welch would say that if a division in GE wasn't number one or number two in its industry, he would let it go. He was relentlessly focused, even with things like Six Sigma, on trying to improve processes, make sure reliability, quality was paramount. I would argue in the long term, that fell apart. And that's what I do in my previous book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism. Chenard also, I think, was really obsessed with quality from the beginning and still

• 18:58Speaker 01

  is to this day. I mean, there are these moments in the book when I describe him still sort of tinkering with products when he's 85 years old, trying to make them better. But Chenard's understanding of quality evolved. And whereas at the outset, it was very much about functionality and durability, over the years, Chenard's understanding of quality came to encompass things like, are the factories where we're making these clothes taking good care of their workers? And if they're not, then it's not a quality product. Are the second-tier factories where we're making the raw materials that are ultimately in our jackets and shells, are the environmental standards good? Are they polluting the river behind them?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  And if they are, then the jacket itself is not a quality product. So those differing understandings of quality, I think, are very instructive. And then there's all the rest of it. I mean, Chenard was never obsessed with growing his market share. Indeed, Patagonia deliberately restrained its growth. Jack Welch wanted to make the most valuable company in the world, and he did. I mean, all to his credit, he did that.

• 20:05Kara Swisher?

  Welch did not have a care for the environment or other things, correct?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  No, the Hudson River can attest to that.

• 20:10Kara Swisher?

  Yes, exactly. I mean, it was sort of a different version of that. And of course, the Welchians kind of won the game, at least at this point.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Big time, big time. I'm under no illusions that we're sort of living in Yvonne's world. We're living in Jack Welch's world, and Yvonne is the exception that sort of proves the rule.

• 20:28Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 20:45Kara Swisher?

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• 21:28Kara Swisher?

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• 24:09Kara Swisher?

  The Financial Times called the book a warts and all portrayal of Chenard. You write, "While Patagonia was in so many ways an extraordinary company, independent, idealistic, successful, generous, it was still fraught with fundamentally irresolvable tensions." As you said, unsolvable paradox. Talk about the other paradoxes, you know, the work culture, for example. On one hand, they set an early example of work-life balance with let-my-people-go-surfing mentality. Everyone should be an adventurer. Patagonia was one of the first in the U.S. to give paid maternity leave and support working families with in-house childcare. On the other hand, only one Patagonia location is unionized, and Chenard has regularly ignored calls to let employees participate in the company's financial success through stock ownership. Talk a little bit about that, because the things that you would naturally, that would

• 24:52Kara Swisher?

  go along with it to create sort of a co-op mentality, didn't happen here.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the way I have come to understand this is that Chenard really cared about nature more than he cared about people, and that truth sort of informs a lot of the decisions you just alluded to, especially on the stock ownership. I mean, and this was a real point of tension among employees over the years. No one went to Patagonia to get rich, and people understood sort of the company that they were signing up for. And yet, as the company grew more successful, as Chenard and his family had tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on large-scale land conservation and environmental activism, there was a group of employees who said, like, what about us?

• 25:40Speaker 01

  You know, they are living large, they don't have private jets, but they have nice homes in Wyoming and Ventura on the ocean. Why is it that we can't just get a bit more? And to that, you know, Chenard always said, like, he was still a dirtbag in his mind. And there is some truth to that, right? I've spent time with him at home. He does not live a fancy life by the measures of most billionaires.

• 26:02Kara Swisher?

  But why, though? Why didn't he want to share that? I mean, it would seem a natural thing if you're in one of these kind of companies.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Listen, I'm not here to defend it, but my best read on why it is that happened is that he never really was in it for the money himself, and so he didn't think other people should be either. Now, that's simplistic, and I think it ignores a lot of the real-life concerns that people might have.

• 26:23Kara Swisher?

  Except he got the money, right?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  He got more than most, no doubt about it.

• 26:26Kara Swisher?

  Even if he's not in it, he got it.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 26:28Kara Swisher?

  So if he doesn't care about the money, why not give it to his employees?

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Because he cared about the damn acres in Patagonia more. There's just no other way to explain it.

• 26:38Kara Swisher?

  Because it's an unusual part of a company that's like this, not to have those kind of worker sharing, etc.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, no RSUs, no profit sharing, no ESOP. Here I will note, though, that his wife is a big character in the book, and she is even more press shy than he is. But Melinda Shinard deserves an enormous amount of credit for making Patagonia a place that takes exemplary care of its working mothers, as you noted, has done extraordinary things to elevate female leaders, including Rose, who you mentioned, and over the years has really created a culture that has become an exemplar to other companies and even governments as they try to understand how it is that corporations can support women in the workplace. And Melinda should get all the credit for that.

• 27:29Kara Swisher?

  So in terms of its legacy, Patagonia has consistently worked to improve its climate footprint, given money to environmental organizations, as you noted, and pushed other companies to do the same, like the Alliance for 1% for the Planet or unlikely collaboration with Walmart. On the other hand, it's also collaborated with the Pentagon, and Patagonia vests become part of the Midtown uniform for Wall Street hedge fund bros and many. I mean, I've seen so many Patagonia vests. And of course, there's the impact of producing, as you noted, if you have these ethical standards around climate, for example, in production, there are going to be contradictions. Give me an example of what they do on a vest or something, like just not using that company or what? How far do they go?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  I was asking the same question during the reporting, like, what does this actually mean in practice? It's great to have all these standards. And what really made it clear to me was when I came to learn that, I don't know when it was, maybe 10 or 12 years ago, they set up a new Quality standards division for their supply chain. Basically, it's a group of employees who monitor the working conditions and the environmental conditions of their first, second, and third tier factories. And what's so critical is that they are separate from the business unit division, which is to say that if the sportswear apparel says, we need to contract with this company to make 200,000 t-shirts next year.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  This other team, if it's a new factory, gets to go in and audit that factory and say, is this factory up to our standards? And if it is not, they just get to say, no. And even if the business team says, but we really need that factory for those 200,000 units, that veto power is separate and the incentive structure is separated from the business line, which creates, again, this sort of autonomy for people to not be penalized, not be swayed by the allure of trying to grow the business and cut corners in the process. And so that was one example where it was like, oh, that's actually a real mechanism to ensure quality.

• 29:37Kara Swisher?

  So give me an example. What, like, they were making, I don't know, fleece hoodies?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  I visited one of these factories that didn't make the cut and then finally did. It's a factory called TDV. They make mostly cotton gear, sweatshirts, t-shirts. And several years ago, they put in a pitch to Patagonia. They say, we want to be one of your factories. Already at that time, TDV was doing good work. Patagonia went down there. What they found was, like, you're doing good work, but your water outflow is a total mess. You're still not taking good care of the community around you. Your labor standards are pretty good, but they could be a whole lot better. Your community relations, sort of the way the factory's showing up in the community, was okay, but could be a lot better. And they were growing their own cotton. They were vertically integrated. And some of the stuff in the field was good.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  It was on the right path, but it could be a lot better. But they found them failing on a whole bunch of measures, even though they were trying to make good progress. They told T D V all this and they said, we're going to say no for the time being. T V went back to work. Two years later, they come back, they go to Patagonia, they say, we've sold X, Y, Z. We're still working on this one and Patagonia says, okay, we'll give you a shot. They put in a small order and they said, as long as you keep working on these things, we'll try to keep giving you more business and they've sort of brought T D V along on this journey. So that's an example of how they try to work with their suppliers to improve things on the ground.

• 31:03Kara Swisher?

  Why would a lot of these companies care? Like if there's plenty of work with fast fashion or people who don't have those standards?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, listen, I, I, I'm not going to sit here and sort of spout morality, but I'll note the, the most practical one is they get paid more. Patagonia pays more because it understands that it's getting a better product of higher quality, as I noted, product and they pay that fair trade premium. Patagonia has helped set up all these different groups, the regenerative organic cotton group, the sustainable apparel coalition and some of these organizations are actually designed to raise the amount of money that it actually pays its suppliers. So that's one reason and that's what T D V was after. It was a sort of low margin factory producing commodity goods for all the usual suspects.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  And several years ago, a new executive, Wanjo, came in and he said, this is a losing proposition. Let's actually up our standards so we can command the higher premiums and so far it seems to be working.

• 32:03Kara Swisher?

  And what is the reaction to other makers of goods who are trying to sort of put out this sort of nature loving image? Is there anybody who is close to them or someone who is not, for example? I'm wearing a North Face jacket right now.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Oh, boy, don't tell Yvonne.

• 32:19Kara Swisher?

  Well, I was, it's given to me. It was given to me. I, I wear whatever's given to me.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Well, just by a point of contrast, did you know that North Face just did a ski line in collaboration with Skims and the Kardashians?

• 32:31Kara Swisher?

  No, I didn't know that.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And, and I mean, that's like, it's completely anathema to what Patagonia is all about. Patagonia.

• 32:39Kara Swisher?

  Well, they make a good, you know, pubic hair thong, but go ahead. I don't know if you know about that.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, for better or worse, Gary, I do.

• 32:46Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it's sold out.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Too online, did they?

• 32:49Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, I'm gonna, we should nip that.

• 32:52Kara Swisher?

  Move along.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Move along, folks.

• 32:53Kara Swisher?

  There will not be a Patagonia pubic hair thong.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Thought we were moving along. I try to avoid saying like, there is some hierarchy and Patagonia is at the top. Because as I know in the book, like, they still have tons of problems. There's still microplastics, there's still PFAS, they're still working through all sorts of stuff. More, more interesting than like, reaching some sort of higher standard that's idealized is recognizing the work. And recognizing that it's like, it's the process. And it's asking these tough questions over and over again. And trying to, you know, orient your decision against those longstanding values. And then trying to move forward and make the next hard decision. So are there other companies? Sure. Listen, I'll note that it's easier than ever to greenwash. Like, you can tell an environmental story all day long on the internet and very few people are gonna go fact check that.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  So do they have more competition than ever? Absolutely. Is the real concern inside the company and in the Patagonia board? That they are at risk of falling behind in this kind of environment? A thousand percent. And then this raises big questions about the future of the company, right? There's the ownership change, and we can talk about sort of how it's structured and what comes next.

• 34:00Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, so, explain what greenwashing is for people who don't know.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  It's trying to tell an environmental story and saying you are, you know, super environmentally conscious and friendly and, and you're not. And green hushing is just being afraid to even talk about it at all. Even if you're doing some of the work and you sort of care about it, but you're too afraid of President Trump to even talk about it.

• 34:19Kara Swisher?

  One of my favorites is always BP, Beyond Petroleum, which makes me laugh every time I hear it.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:25Kara Swisher?

  Let's talk about the last part of the title of the book, as you said, how he gave it all away. Since Patagonia is a family-owned business, or was. Chenard succession plans have been a matter of speculation for a long time. And in, in Patagonia fashion, the exit strategy was also unprecedented. Explain what they created to do this. Because, living beyond you, I mean, there's a Rupert Murdoch living beyond you, and then there's a Chenard living beyond you.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  So. Chenard, for decades, has been thinking about what happens to Patagonia after he dies. He's eighty-six years old now. In 2017, Forbes Magazine put him on their list of billionaires for the first time, and he freaked out. Said it was one of the worst days of his life, started stomping around furious, the office, saying like, "You gotta get me off this list." It took him five years to figure it out, but they finally did. And in 2022, I broke the news that Chenard and his family had effectively given away their stock to a new set of trusts and organizations. And do you want me to just get a little wonky here for a minute?

• 35:27Kara Swisher?

  Sure, please.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  And explain exactly how it worked? Okay. So at the time, in 2022, Chenard, his wife Melinda, and their two children owned 100% of the Patagonia stock. 2% of the stock was voting shares, 98% was non-voting shares. They took the 2% and they put it in a new entity called the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which is a legal entity in California. And they paid $17.5 million for the privilege of putting that 2% into the Patagonia Purpose Trust. The Purpose Trust now sits on top of Patagonia Inc., which is still a privately-held for-profit corporation in California, as sort of an additional governance layer, an additional board layer. They took the 98% of the non-voting shares and distributed them, donated them, to a

• 36:12Speaker 01

  series of newly-created 501(c)(4) corporations called the Holdfast Collective. They did not get a tax benefit, a tax credit, for putting them into those because they were 501(c)(4)'s. And now here's how it works. The Patagonia Purpose Trust with the voting shares instructs Patagonia Inc. to donate 100% of its profits, not reinvested in the company, salary, R&D, all that, out the door to the Holdfast Collective. And the Holdfast Collective distributes those monies on an ongoing basis, and that's about $100 million in profits every year. So that's how it works now. That's the structure they came up with.

• 36:51Kara Swisher?

  And then there's this board that sits on top, made up of just the family or others?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  It's the family and their friends. And this is, you know, what that looks like in 10 and 15 years? Anyone's guess.

• 37:02Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. So what does it mean in real terms for the Chouinard and his family? His kids aren't going to be living on their Patagonia salaries, I assume. And again, nothing for employees.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Nothing for employees. And when the news broke three years ago, I was in touch with some of the employees. And there was a brief moment of elation for many of them as they sort of understood that there was this grand act of generosity that they were in some tangential way a part of. And for many of them, they were like, well, what about us? And there was a sense of being left behind for many. As for the Chouinard family itself, listen, I don't have access to their financial records. They never opened up their books. What I did do routinely over the course of three years reporting this book was keep asking on the record, off the record, to them, their associates, do they have $100 million socked away somewhere?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Do they have $50 million socked away on the record? The answer always was no. Now, do they have some money that's going to sustain this family for the foreseeable future? Yeah, I think so. I don't think their kids or their grandkids have to worry about paying for college 20 years down the road. But I can also tell you that this is not a family that lives lavishly. I spent time with them at their home. We did our own dishes. We cooked our own meals. We made our own beds. There is no help running around this house. These people live pretty simply. And so that's how it all shakes out at the end.

• 38:28Kara Swisher?

  So every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Sven Becker, and I'm a historian of capitalism, teaching at Harvard University. I'm about to publish a global history of capitalism during the past millennium, and thus I'm deeply interested in your terrific book, David. I'm curious how you see Patagonia fit into the history of capitalism. It's an outlier, to be sure. But does it in effect demonstrate capitalism's unrealized possibilities? Will we have to rewrite the history of capitalism in the light of Patagonia's story? And if so, how?

• 39:01Kara Swisher?

  So talk a little bit about this because not a lot of people are following in their wake. They're following in. A more greedy wake, I would say.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But I love that phrase, the unrealized potential. I mean, that's right where we started the conversation, which is, you know, can. It shows what capitalism can do if the people in charge make a certain set of choices. Right. And Carrie, you know that there's no law in Delaware that says you have to treat workers poorly and maximize profits and shovel dividends.

• 39:33Kara Swisher?

  There's a mentality.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  There's a mentality. Exactly. And so if the mentality changes, if the incentive structures change, then business can show up in a different way in society. We can have a different relationship with it. And I think that, I think that's the perfect phrase, the unrealized potential. But it recognizes that there is still potential.

• 39:59Kara Swisher?

  Sure, but there is a feeling, like during that first, for example, we'll get to the Trump administration in a second, we'll finish up with that, but of like, oh, I have to comment on every horrible thing he does, whether it's gay rights or racism or, you know, Charlottesville or whatever. And I think they felt that wasn't their job. And today, even when I was quite critical of their dinner at the White House, which was like embarrassing for the rest of their lives, essentially, as far as I was concerned. One of them called me and said, you know, it's easy for you to say. I said, no, it really isn't easy for me to say, it's easy for you to do. So I'm not sure. I think they're an exception more than the rule because I think most of people fold, correct?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's, that is the truth. And again, I'm not sitting here saying that Patagonia is going to change capitalism overnight. And I'm quick to acknowledge that for all sorts of reasons we've already talked about, no company can snap their fingers and magically be just like Patagonia.

• 40:55Kara Swisher?

  But why don't they? I'm curious why they don't, because I think a lot of people feel, why are they the, I mean, they are allowed to stand up because they sell stuff people want. If they didn't, they'd be kicked to the curb, right? Correct?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Also true, also true.

• 41:08Kara Swisher?

  Why, why do you think people that are covering corporate responsibility don't follow this? What's the biggest pressure?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I think fear. I think a lot of it's fear, a fear of their shareholders, fear of, you know, public blowback, fear of being on the wrong side of a tweet. But I also really encourage people to think sort of beyond the binaries and beyond the grand gestures and get out of this sort of all or nothing mentality. And if I can't be Patagonia, then I can't make any marginal change for good. What I think I show in this book is that the reason we have this idea of what Patagonia is today is because it's been a series of 50 years of little decisions. There's no one grand gesture that has defined this company. It's been all these little incremental changes along the way. And that's, I think,

• 41:56Speaker 01

  where the brand equity comes from. That's where the trust and the integrity comes from. It's not from one thing.

• 42:01Kara Swisher?

  It's also because one guy can do it, right? As opposed to many. And that's the problem here.

• 42:09Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 42:23Speaker 05

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• 44:51Kara Swisher?

  Let me switch gears, because you mentioned fear about Patagonia in the context of politics and the Trump administration. Fear is a huge factor in a lot of these behaviors that are happening now. Patagonia's financial restructuring didn't just provide a roadmap, it enabled to give more money to causes right now. In just over 15 months, the new Holdfast Collective made grants commitments totaling $71 million, including contributions to politics. Is this different from what the company's been doing before in terms of political support?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Different than what Patagonia was doing?

• 45:22Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, they were giving, were they, are they giving more to politics? Or has, have they changed since it's been the Holdfast Collective? A lot of it was environmental before.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  I would say on an absolute basis, they have given more money directly to political groups. But just because they're giving more money away overall. In terms of their political engagement, I think it was really during the Trump administration that the company got much more sharply partisan in its political posture. I mentioned earlier the lawsuit against President Trump, but that was just part of it. I mean, at one point, a designer embroidered on the back of the tags, "Vote the assholes out," which is a pretty deliberate reference to some-

• 46:03Kara Swisher?

  I'm just mentioning what this is for people who don't know. In 2017, the company filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over plans to shrink two national monuments, Utah's Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante. Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that was a turning point in terms of how overtly partisan they were willing to get. A couple of years after that, they pulled their clothing out of the largest retailer that was carrying their material in Wyoming, because the owner of the store hosted a fundraiser for Marjorie Taylor Greene. And they said, "We don't even want..." I think you said earlier in the conversation, "They can't control who buys their products." And I was like, "Well, they actually can when they say, 'You don't get to sell our products anymore,'" because they didn't want to be in business with that person. So that's continued. On an absolute basis, are they giving more to politics? Yes. But they contend that they are still largely doing this to support candidates who

• 46:58Speaker 01

  care about the environment, and that it hasn't really shifted into full-on being sort of a dark money pack for the Democratic Party.

• 47:06Kara Swisher?

  So this past February, politically speaking, after a slew of billionaires lined up behind Trump inauguration, CEO Ryan Geller wrote an op-ed in Time warning about the administration's plans to sell off for at least 640 million acres of public lands to oil, coal, and other mining companies. Are they preparing to sue again, given the increased attacks on national lands during Trump 2.0? It's even worse, correct?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, they haven't yet. And I can't tell you what they are or aren't going to do. But so far, they haven't. And I think, you know, it's been nine months. And so if there was a case to have been filed that they were going to do, it seems to me that they had the opportunity to do it by this point, but we haven't seen it yet. So again, I'm not inside the company. I can't tell you if they're about to. But so far, they're taking a different tack.

• 47:49Kara Swisher?

  Are they scared at all? Are they scareder, I guess, since they were pretty aggressive during the barriers and Grand Staircase lawsuit?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I asked Ryan Geller this onstage two weeks ago at the Masters of Scale conference. I was up there with him and Hamdi from Chobani. And we had a conversation about sort of leadership in politically divisive times. And I asked Ryan, I was like, are you scared? Do you think twice? And again, I don't want to put words in his mouth. But he acknowledged that, yeah, of course, he's thinking twice before he speaks out. Any individual, any corporate leader, anyone representing an organization or a company can't help but nod in this climate. And so, again, I can't say that's why they have or haven't filed a lawsuit. But yes, even Patagonia is keenly aware of this political environment.

• 48:39Kara Swisher?

  Although it does certainly give them a step up with consumers, right? I mean, in terms of both the environmental and the political support, probably help them keep in their audience. A lot of people criticized them at the time. And I was like, no, no, they're serving, what's wrong with them serving their audience? That's their audience is interested in those things, too.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  I think among a core group, perhaps. But listen, I can't tell you how many people I know who I wind up talking to about this book who don't know anything about Patagonia's political activities. They just like the stuff because it's well made and it's cool. It's Patagonia.

• 49:12Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm, Patagonia, I like it. It's very well made. You can also, for people that don't know, bring back Patagonia stuff to them and they fix it or take it back or different things, which is interesting. Back in the early 2000s and 2010s, there was a lot of talk about corporate responsibility and a lot of pledges and promises were made. Where do we stand now? The strides have obviously shifted. They don't talk about it. They're eliminating DEI, they're eliminating everything. Is it just rebranding? They have new names for things. You know, Disney had a new name for DEI. It's the same name, really, pretty much. But talk a little bit about that. Where do we stand now? And do you see a shift back to it? Or it just depends on the political winds, presumably?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, I I I'm loathe to forecast like how CEOs are going to be positioning themselves six months from now. I think I would note a couple of things. Number one, you said earlier, and I think you're spot on, CEOs don't want to be commenting on every news cycle. I mean, that's a losing proposition, and you're gonna piss one side off and then piss the next side off. And so the companies that I've seen, and I've written a lot about this over the last 10 years, that have done the best job are those that are very clear about what they care about. They're a couple of issues and chime in when it's relevant and stay out of the rest of it. That may not satisfy every consumer, may not satisfy every employee

• 50:38Speaker 01

  resource group that wants the company to take a stand, but it seems to be the best way for CEOs and leadership teams to sort of find their way through these really hyper-partisan.

• 50:49Kara Swisher?

  Pickup thing.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  You just gotta, you gotta know what you care about and stick to that. But the default in this environment becomes not at all. And it's that amorality, I think, is really dangerous.

• 51:01Kara Swisher?

  Agree.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  You know, Barbara Walter, who wrote How Civil Wars Start, you know, she talks about the importance of the business community speaking up.

• 51:11Kara Swisher?

  Completely.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  In moments of creeping authoritarianism. And she contrasts what happened in Brazil, where the business community stood up and said, it's not okay, and what happened in Hungary, where the business community went silent. And those are studies in contrast that I think are very instructive at this moment. And so when business leaders find themselves afraid to speak out right now, I refer them to to those examples and ask which path they want to go down.

• 51:36Kara Swisher?

  No question. I just interviewed Kamala Harris, and she said the one thing that surprised me is all the business leaders who have said nothing, like not not even slight pushback. And in fact, giving money, this ballroom, they just destroyed part of the White House in order to build, which, of course, they weren't going to touch it. Of course, he did, of course. Twenty five million dollar gifts from some of these companies. It's really, it's astonishing to build this monstrosity. They may need a bigger ballroom, I don't know. But it's really, they're beyond not commenting or not involving themselves. It's it's something quite different.

• 52:11Kara Swisher?

  Going back to the environment, and some of the biggest perpetrators are these tech companies, and they had been touting for years that they want to get net zero emissions. You recently interviewed the chief sustainability officers at Microsoft and Google, and they said they were still committed to that goal. But to be clear, they were set before the AI boom and huge data centers that have massively increased energy needs, which is, Sam Alton's sake, talking about taking the energy of all of the planet for AI. I was like, oh, well, I kind of like my light bulbs. But in January, you called AI a climate conundrum, and you wrote that you thought in the long run it could be good for clean energy. Of course, they're all investing in fusion and hydrogen and nuclear, et cetera. They are doing that in order, but that's largely for the bottom line, not because they love trees.

• 52:54Kara Swisher?

  Explain what you meant by that and how you're looking at AI's effects on climate change right now.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, it's a moment where we can see without question that AI is having real implications for the emissions trajectories of the big hyperscaling tech companies, where we can see that they are quite literally willing to keep gas plants and even coal plants online if it means securing reliable power for their data center. And that, you could argue, is like absolutely hypocritical with all the climate commitments that they have made. And yet, if we take away anything, it's that they are still companies, right? They are still businesses who believe that they are in an existential race to gain market share on a future technology that's going to be absolutely critical.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  So, again, if we understand why companies don't speak out against the president, in the same way, just from a business perspective, I can understand why a company like Google or Meta or Amazon is setting aside for, perhaps temporarily, perhaps for longer term, their climate commitments to go try to win the AI arms race.

• 54:04Kara Swisher?

  When they started doing this, I'm like, can you just shut up because you're not going to keep it if you don't? I was like, I don't believe that you'll keep it. Like, to me, it didn't matter at all, their commitments, because they weren't real.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think you're absolutely right to say that like commitments are a dangerous game. I think it's also fair to note, as you did, these are companies that have really invested in early-stage clean technologies. You could say that's for the bottom line, but a lot of these initial power purchase agreements, a lot of these efforts to fund low-carbon alternatives and carbon capture, that's not accretive in the short term. They're sort of placing bets that they're helping create a future energy system that is going to be lower emissions.

• 54:45Kara Swisher?

  They see the need. I don't think it's because they want the planet to be better. I think it's like, oh, we're going to need more energy.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  You're so cynical, Cara.

• 54:51Kara Swisher?

  I'm sorry, but I've heard them. You know, they tried to get me, Google guys, to write the don't be evil thing when I was covering them. They're like, can you write our emissions? I was like, no, I'm covering you. And I remember when they said, don't be evil, I said, that leaves a lot on the left of that. Don't be evil's way down. So you could do a lot of bad things.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Evil is in the eye of the beholder.

• 55:10Kara Swisher?

  I know. I was like, how about just like, not things that hurt this? And they just didn't. They wanted it to be evil so they could do all the terrible things. I am cynical. Because I've sat in these stupid cocktail parties where they go on and on about people and then they, it was exhausting. They're exhausting people.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:29Kara Swisher?

  So when you think about the future, Patagonia did not just change its ownership structure. The company is shifting into the food business, including pushing for a new grain called Kernza. That's a way to fix environmentally damaging farming. Shannard has always been an innovator. Getting into food seems a departure. Talk about, it's also a market opportunity. Talk about the potential risks and benefits of shifting gears and what it says. I mean, I need Kernza. Sure, why not? Like, why not?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  It's fine. But listen, this is a tiny experiment. Let's be clear. It is part of their sort of philosophical efforts to understand how business can and can't show up in the world. Shannard told me, he hopes that 50 years from now, Patagonia is best known as a food company, not an apparel company. I'm not going to take the over on that actually happening. I think that's an absolute long shot for all sorts of reasons. Food system is wildly complex. Way more complex in many ways than the apparel business. And so, listen, they are, they are out there, they are experimenting. The food business is growing, it's twenty million dollars or so roughly, and it's growing fast. But that's not going to change, uh, factory farming in the United States anytime soon.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Uh, but it does represent his belief, to go all the way back to some of the things we talked about at the start of the show. Uh, this question of whether business can be a force for good. At the highest level, he thinks that no matter how well you make a piece of clothing, it's still extractive, you're still taking things out of the earth. Whereas in food, he sees the path to be regenerative, right? To see food systems, whether they're fish and mussels that clean the water, whether it's crops like curzonza that sequester carbon. He sees the potential to actually try to make the world, the environment, a little better, a little cleaner.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  And so that's a sort of philosophical, uh, project that's animated the food business right now.

• 57:27Kara Swisher?

  So, last question, uh, Sienard is, is not one of the signatories, the famous giving pledge. But may be not such a bad thing. According to a review, fifteen years later, the wealth of those billionaires is growing faster than they're giving. A few are still working on it, and May Bill Gates, probably the biggest philanthropist, I would say, announced he wanted to turn up virtually all his wealth over the next twenty years. Mackenzie Scott, who's just sort of lapping all of them, has given away nineteen billion dollars over the past five years, uh, and reportedly cut her shares of Ammon's stock by over forty percent. But a lot of the money has gone into billionaire philanthropies, give them tax breaks. I'm thinking of Mark Zuckerberg, reducing government tax income and making them richer. I'm thinking again of Mark Zuckerberg. Um, do you think Patagonia's giving model is one that more founders will or could follow?

• 58:11Kara Swisher?

  Or will it remain different from everybody else? And how does he think of his legacy going forward?

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think it absolutely is a model that more founders could follow because it's just about making choices if they have that equity. I think it's a model that a few founders will follow. And I know this because I'm talking to founders who are trying to figure out how they're going to do this. And I also am not at all going to sit here and I tell you, it's the most effective way to donate large sums. This is one of the things that was really perplexing about Chenard's decisions over the years and to this day, is that he never maximized for impact. This was never a guy who was sort of looking at the spreadsheets and understanding, well, if I sold the company for $6 billion

• 59:00Speaker 01

  at that moment when I had that offer on the table, I could set up an endowment that could spit off $300 million every two years and use that. And that would be more impactful than the solution. He just never thought about things.

• 59:14Kara Swisher?

  He's not an effective altruist.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  No, maybe an ineffective altruist, perhaps. But, but he knew what he cared about. And those same concerns that he had at the very outset, right? When we were talking about who this guy was in 1973, when Patagonia started, he cared about land conservation, he cared about environmental activism. Those are the things that still animate his decision making today. And so that's why, you know, Patagonia is an experiment. And others may take some parts of it and be inspired and try to mimic it. But I am not sitting here and saying every company and every executive should try to follow in Chenard's footsteps with high fidelity.

• 59:55Kara Swisher?

  It seems like he wants Patagonia to be a model for other companies.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  He does. And he has always said that even more so than the clothes, even more so than the charity, he believes that the company's greatest contribution is just being a model to show what's possible. You know, an example, to go back to our caller, of the unrealized potential of capitalism.

• 1:00:21Kara Swisher?

  And what does he do day to day right now?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  All he does is fish.

• 1:00:25Kara Swisher?

  Fish.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  I chased him all over the world to report this book. And every single day I was with him, we went fishing. That's all he wants to do. Fish.

• 1:00:33Kara Swisher?

  All right. Well, there you have it. David, thank you so much. It's a really fascinating book.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:00:47Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemarie Ho. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, go fishing. If not, go put on your pubic hair thong. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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