Leadership Notes #57
Interview: David Gelles
David Gelles is a bestselling author and a climate correspondent for The New York Times. At the Times, he leads the Climate Forward newsletter and event series, and is a regular contributor to coverage about business, the environment, politics and more. His new book, "Dirtbag Billionaire", reveals how Yvon Chouinard turned Patagonia into one of the world's most remarkable companies. His previous book, "The Man Who Broke Capitalism", uncovered how Jack Welch ushered in the era of shareholder primacy, and was an instant New York Times bestseller. His first book, "Mindful Work", explored the growing influence of meditation in the workplace. He has won EMMY, Gerald Loeb and SABEW awards for his work, and is based in New York City.
A condensed transcript of David Gelles’ appearance at PGLF at CIED Georgetown’s Virtual Author Series
Potolicchio: Can you tell us what “Dirtbag Billionaire” means and why this was the title of your book?
Gelles: Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be with you all. Sam, you're the greatest.
It's awesome to be in an environment like this, you always bring just the most energetic, well-informed crowd, it's an honor. The title of the book, “Dirtbag”, some people think it's an insult. In fact, in the community from which Yvon Chouinard comes, the man at the center of the story, the word "dirtbag" is actually like the ultimate compliment. He refers to himself as a dirtbag even today, at the age of 86. What it means to be a dirtbag, as a rock climber, a surfer or a skier is to be so un-enamored with materialism, so un-enthralled with creature comforts, that you are literally content to sleep in the dirt if it means you are that much closer to the mountains, the next climb, surf, wave, or hike. When he first heard about the title of the book about him, his life, “Dirtbag Billionaire”, he didn't like it at all. Not because of the word “dirtbag”, he was fine with that, but because of the word “billionaire”. He detests billionaires, even though he became one.
Potolicchio: How did you get him to give you this much time? This is going to be a two-part question because he is notoriously evasive. You talk unsparingly about some of the warts that he has in this book. You didn't just get him to say yes, but you elicited information from him that I don't think other people can elicit. What was that process to persuade him like and what was that process to build trust with him like? And what can we learn from your ability to do that?
Gelles: I've known Yvon Chouinard for more than a decade now. I first interviewed him back in 2013 and we've stayed in touch a little since then. I'm not in touch with him directly because this man has never owned a cell phone, has never had his own email address, and has never owned a computer for himself, so I am in touch with him via proxies. I’ve interviewed him over the years, then we got to rewind to three years ago, in 2022. He and his family gave away the company Patagonia, but after I wrote that story, it struck me like lightning. I needed to write a book about this company and this man. I went to Patagonia and I said, “I am writing a book about the company.” I didn't ask for permission, I told them I was doing it, and I said, I hope the company and Yvon participates. " They sort of grudgingly said “Thanks for informing us!”, but it was a full year after that, before he actually agreed to talk to me. I think they were waiting to see if I was doing the work. Once they started getting calls from his childhood friends saying things like “I've got a reporter calling me.” and started hearing from longtime Patagonia employees, people who had been out of the company for a long time, they started to see that I was serious about this project. Ultimately, I ended up spending a good bit of time with him at home, multiple zoom interviews, and traveling in South America.
Potolicchio: I'm going to ask you for your favorite passage, but let me read mine because you already made a reference to it. “Financial magazines that kept track of that sort of thing estimated his net worth to be $1.6 billion. A ludicrous sum to a man who still cooked off the same cast iron skillet he had acquired 50 years ago, lived in a log cabin cluttered with secondhand furniture, and had never owned a cell phone or a computer. Labeling him a billionaire was blasphemous. An affront to everything he was all about. And he wouldn't be able to relax until he remedied the Cosmic Clerical Error.” What is that Cosmic Clerical Error and how did he remedy it?
Gelles: The Cosmic Clerical Error is the fact that he was ever a billionaire in the first place. This is a man who from the time he was young detested the whole enterprise of business and capitalism. He thought businessmen were grease balls, and made fun of them. All of a sudden, he's going about his life and he looks in the mirror one day and realizes that he is one, that he has become one, the very thing he detested. That tension, this paradox, is really at the heart of the book and of this narrative and it shows up in so many different ways. It's the tension between environmentalism, conservation and consumerism. It's the tension between a man who loathed business but found himself at the head of a big for-profit company. Tension between making clothes that have an undeniable negative impact on the planet and using the money from those profits to try and save the planet. This is a riddle that has no real resolution, but it's the tension that really is the through line of the whole book and it's the engine that has propelled Patagonia and Chouinard and all the other executives to make all the counterintuitive choices that they have over the years.
Potolicchio: Before we get to your passage, we have a question coming from Cluj, Romania. I'm going to ask Mara to step in before she gets on her flight to Beijing, of all places. Mara, what question do you have for David?
Monoșes: Thank you, David, for agreeing to do this event. Do you believe that Chouinard’s model, meaning giving away ownership for the sake of the planet, can realistically be replicated by other billionaires or is Patagonia an outlier?
Gelles: Yes and yes. Of course, Patagonia is an outlier, which is one of the things that makes it so exceptional. But it's not irreplicable. One of the things that's extraordinary about the narrative is that at the end of the day, we're talking about a series of individuals who made a set of very deliberate choices. That force is deeply human, right? We all make choices every single day about how we spend our time and money. What's so unique here is that you have this consistency in values. You have a consistency in their orientation towards business, their belief in how they should spend their profits, and their commitment to trying to see that through in a really ethical and consistent way. Anyone can do this. If you're a billionaire, you have more freedom than just about anyone on earth. What I think is harder for a big for-profit corporation is snapping your fingers and giving all your money away to charity, I fully acknowledge that's much harder. For the individual owner who has large control of a company or a set of assets, they can do whatever they want, it's up to them how they want to show up in the world.
Potolicchio: I'm curious what your passage that you have chosen is going to be. That's the only one you can read today, what is it?
Gelles: It might be a little longer than yours, so forgive me. It's honestly the very last passage of the book. This is coming off a road trip that I took with him, we've been in the woods, fishing in Argentina for five, six days at this point, and this is how the book ends. “After a six hour drive, we arrived in Bariloche, Argentina, where we were inspecting the newest Patagonia outpost. The company had recently purchased a verdant estate overlooking Nahuel Huapi Lake and was in the process of turning the property into a store, bunkhouse, an all-purpose home base for the Patagonia team in the region. The centerpiece was an exquisite historic home built in 1916 by Emilio Frey, an Argentinian explorer who helped draw the country's border with Chile. Now the house, clad in Alerce shingles, was being turned into a Patagonia store. A nearby building would serve as a hostel for employees and athletes passing through town. All around, there were gardens, forests, and hiking trails. Chouinard spent a half hour poking around the house, marveling at the joinery and the craftsmanship, appreciating the quality of a building that had been constructed before he was born and that was now finding a new life. He then walked outside and strolled around the orchards. It was early afternoon and we hadn't eaten much, so Chouinard picked an apple off a tree, took a few bites, then threw it in the dirt. We stood in the garden, looking out at the lake. The adventure was just beginning. He was switching out some gear, maybe taking a shower. After that, he headed off to walk around another mountain, to fish another river, to find himself, somewhere in Patagonia.”
Potolicchio: What lessons can we learn from Chouinard on how to build such an effective brand? And what do you attribute this belovedness to?
Gelles: This is one of the great mysteries, how they have engendered so much loyalty, not only from their staff but from the general public. It cuts across political divisions in the United States, which is very rare. A lot of brands are viewed as red brands or blue brands, especially if they do any sort of political content.
Delivering every time is going to win your fans. I think that's true with Apple, it's true with Coca-Cola, if you make a consistently great product, people are going to notice.
It's almost everything besides the clothes that I think makes the brand so exceptional. I say that in the book and what I'm referring to there is the fact that this is a company that was a pioneer in providing on-site child care and real extraordinary benefits to working mothers. This is a company that started donating its profits to environmental activists in 1973 and has never stopped and today is donating more money than ever to environmental activists and conservation, $100 million/ year. What I mean when I talk about the values is that they inspire loyalty. That I think is what people recognize, they see it. They may not be able to define, describe it like me, I just spent years writing a book about it. But for those who are passionate about the brand, yes, it's the product, but it's really everything else that they're responding to.
Potolicchio: You made reference to what I found most surprising in your book and I want to ask you what you think people will be most surprised by, those that have had a cursory understanding of Patagonia or Chouinard himself. But for me, it was this work-life balance focus, the schools that they're running on their campuses and the 2,000 kids that have gone through that, none of them have ever served any jail time. Travel with nannies is also paid for in a really generous way. What is the most surprising element of the book?
Gelles: It was honestly the independence of the quality control teams. By quality control here I'm referring to the people inspecting the tier 1 and 2 and 3 factories. And what I mean by independence is this: Before a new factory is allowed to make clothes for Patagonia, they do a full audit of that factory. They send their own employees to the factory, wherever it is in the world, and they spend days making sure that not only the quality of the products is good, but more importantly, that the working conditions for the employees are up to par, that the environmental story of that company is in good shape, that they are using renewable energy, not polluting the local environment. That team that goes out and does that, does not report to the business side, so there are no cross incentives, no conflict of interest. The business team that might want that factory to come online and start making clothes very quickly so they can get the fall line up to stuff and have enough inventory, they don't control the people that give the thumbs up or the thumbs down on that factory. It's that independence, that sort of purity in mission that I think is so reflective of the fact that this company actually takes it seriously. In a conventional company, you might have the business side of the line being like “That factory looks good enough!”
Potolicchio: What is the question that we should ask you about this book as you are about to embark on this book tour? What is the question we should not only ask you to understand the work that you've put into this, but the question that you might be most anxious about receiving.
Gelles: I think the deeper question is, "What can we do?” There's no easy and pithy answer, no one can replicate Chouinard's life. I fished with him, but I'm never going to be Yvon Chouinard. Other companies can do great work trying to take care of their communities, of their employees, but they're never going to be Patagonia.
Potolicchio: What about allegations of hypocrisy? How does he respond to those attacks?
Gelles: We were cleaning the fish we caught one day. We're there with a knife and we're just cleaning the scales off some fish that we were then going to put in the smoker. I started asking him about this: “How do you reconcile the fact that you're an environmentalist with the fact that you are literally on a plane every other week, traveling somewhere exotic to go fishing?” He said: “Whatever circle of hell they put the people with the biggest carbon footprints on, that's the one I'm going to.” He's fully aware.
The real answer to your question is, it's unresolvable. You're absolutely right that there's hypocrisy, that it's a paradox. There is this tension that is fundamentally irresolvable. But that's the source of the motivation to try to get better rather than recognize that there's a paradox, rather than recognize that there's hypocrisy and throw your hands up and say, “Well, then,
fine, I'm one of the bad guys and there's nothing we can do about it.” Chouinard and the team have used that recognition, that awareness of their own imperfections as motivation to get better and that's something we can all do.
Potolicchio: Ted Lamade wrote a really good article, “Why It Takes a Funeral?”, about eulogy virtues and the earlier question about legacy. How much for Chouinard is he thinking about being a good ancestor? Is this something that is driving these values that have been so core? Has there been any evolution over his life? What have you seen with these eulogy virtues?
Gelles: The consistency was shocking and frankly it was almost maddening, as a biographer. I went back and I read every single interview I could find with Chouinard over the past 50+ years, every article about him I could find. He was using the same phrases in profiles from the 1970s that he used with me on Zooms last year. I have never seen anything like his absolutely unwavering consistency. I got frustrated as a biographer because I couldn’t use the quotes because he said them to the New Yorker, in 1979. It was insane, and so, evolution was very little... The first part of the question.
Potolicchio: How much is it really this core fundamental “Here's who I am, what I stand for”?
Gelles: You talked about “does he think about being a good ancestor”? I don't think that's a frame he uses. In all my conversations, that sense of multi-generational legacy didn't come up. He is extraordinarily focused on the present and the near future. I don't get the sense that he's doing the things he does in the service of a future generation. He's just trying to do the right thing right now. To him, that means not wasting your money on yachts and helicopters if you happen to have access to billions of dollars in assets. It means trying to protect the things that are in jeopardy that you care about most in the world. For him, that's the natural world.
Potolicchio: What is the book for our cerebellum, for our palate, that we're pairing with “Dirtbag Billionaire”?
Gelles: You pair it with “The Wild trees” by Richard Preston.
Potolicchio: Last words about Dirtbag Billionaire, as we wish you luck with this book out in the wild and give you gratitude for giving us one of the first opportunities to talk about this book. Your support has meant to the world, but what are the last words you want to say about the book? Before you go on this tour?
Gelles: At the end of the day, I feel like this is a book that is not just for a business community, not just for an outdoor community, but this is a story of humanity. That or at least that everyone, whatever our path, whatever our journey, is going to read this and see these deeply universal moments, where an individual with a real unique perspective on the world is trying to understand their place in it and having to make complicated decisions about how they want to show up in the world. That's something we can all relate to. I really hope you enjoy it. Please pick up a copy, spread the word. I'm grateful for all your time.