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

15:04Dan Harris: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 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 501c4 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 501c4s, the Holdfast Collective.

15:55Dan Harris: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 Chouinards 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.

16:20David Gelles:What motivated that decision on his part and the family's part?

16:24Dan Harris: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 Chouinard 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?

17:06Dan Harris:Chouinard is now 86 years old. 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 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.

18:02Dan Harris: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.

18:16David Gelles:Has he been an influence in this regard on other reluctant billionaires?

18:21Dan Harris: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.

19:00Dan Harris:It might not be exactly the same structure, But they've definitely gotten people's attention. And there's a movement afoot to try to at least capture some of what they've done and perpetuate it.

19:10David Gelles:To get back to this word motivation, what do you think is motivating that quote-unquote movement?

19:15Dan Harris: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's 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 making some empty corporate pledges that you like put on Instagram and then go back to business as usual.

20:02David Gelles: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.

20:24David Gelles: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, where's your head at with all of this these days?

20:57Dan Harris:Yeah, I'm 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 wanted to say something like that, and I almost started. And I could just feel it was disingenuous. That's not entirely true. 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 and is setting humanity on a multi-decade course for a really profoundly different planet with a whole lot of suffering.

21:53Dan Harris:That's the reality 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. Personally, I have security, I have family, I have love, I have meaningful work, but I get why people are dissatisfied. 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 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.

22:35Dan Harris: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 at all pretend that that dissatisfaction is without good reason. But I also, to come back to that, like, all right, We got to 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. I write about the bad stuff, but I also really make an intentional effort to write about the good stuff, too. 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.

23:29Dan Harris:And that's what I believe Chouinard 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.

23:41David Gelles:So you retain a sense that business can be a source for good, notwithstanding all the many, many problems with capitalism. That's right. I do. How do you think about this as a Buddhist? 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?

24:25Dan Harris: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 evoke 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, what can have the veneer of a sort of fun, youthful company often has a real dark side.

25:15Dan Harris: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 Chouinard and his team understood that some of the products they were making were causing harm, they embarked on these extensive, often expensive 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.

26:03Dan Harris:When Patagonia found that kind of stuff, they would put up a blog post about it, shut down the factory, and proudly announce 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, I think is A, unique, but also very Buddhist in a way. 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.

26:48Dan Harris: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, but in my sort of business Buddhist mind, there's some meaningful parallels there to me.

27:08David Gelles: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. That's right. 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. 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?

27:43Dan Harris: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.

28:27Dan Harris: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 going to 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 going to do this, they're going to have to slash their SKUs, their number of products by like 30%. And it's probably going to mean a reduction in sales of, I don't know, 20%.

29:01Dan Harris: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. 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 and 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.

29:40Dan Harris:And these are complicated questions without neat and tidy answers.

29:44David Gelles: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?

29:56Dan Harris: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 Chouinard 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.

30:35Dan Harris:They've never sold on Amazon. They've never sold in department stores. And so you look at a company like this and it just stands in radical contrast to most other corporations, especially consumer products companies that are about growth no matter what, right? They'll take growth wherever they can get it. It's just not the case with this one.

30:55David Gelles:Just getting back to you for a second, and 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, etc., etc.?

31:10Dan Harris:That's a good one. I haven'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.

31:56Dan Harris:But 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 to travel with Chouinard 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 of my life, even having spent a lot of time in nature.

32:39Dan Harris:And it's frankly something I'm still working through and understanding and processing and trying to figure out how, if at all, my life will change because of it.

32:50David Gelles: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.

32:57Dan Harris: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 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.

33:37David Gelles:If I recall correctly, this was a privately held company, and they were doing, Chouinard 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?

34:04Dan Harris:I don't think so. Yeah. And I don't think Chouinard would say they could. That's really the secret ingredient that made all this work over the years. And it's why when I would ask Chouinard what his advice was for other companies, he said, for most companies, it's too late. If you're beholden to shareholders, if you're at the mercy of quarterly earnings reports, good luck being ethical. Good luck telling your investors that like, sorry, we're in a throttle growth because we don't like how a factory in Vietnam is treating its laborers. Like, great, we'll find a new CEO. Like, fuck off. It's just not the way most companies work.

34:51Dan Harris: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. 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.

35:24David Gelles:Do you see that happening? Do you see a new generation of companies emerging?

35:27Dan Harris:There's some, right? There's like there are always green shoots. And I think certainly 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.

36:06David Gelles: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.

36:27David Gelles: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 and 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 goo-goos. And there's a lot of people who are interested in good capitalism and, you know, both on the, on the nonprofit side and the for-profit side. But we are, you know, as you know, because you spent a lot of time thinking about the climate, like we don't have an unlimited time to get our shit together on the climate front.

37:00And I'm just curious, like, what level of optimism you have?

37:05Dan Harris: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 it's 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. 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.

37:59Dan Harris: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. There are going to be certain low-lying areas that may be uninhabitable.

38:38Dan Harris:And there's going to be a lot of suffering as 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 a hundred years from now, like people are going to be having conversations. I still believe a hundred 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. And those are big thorny questions that we just don't know the answer to.

39:22Dan Harris: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, a lot of communities along the way.

40:04Dan Harris:And that's life, right? This is the world we're in right now.

40:07David Gelles:I think the Buddha had a few things to say about both change and suffering.

40:12Dan Harris:Yeah.

40:14David Gelles: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?

40:32Dan Harris:Sure, but, you know, I'm no self-help guru like you are, Dan.

40:38David Gelles: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 i knew you before you were a guru that's true you know my little thing is some people teach from the mountaintop i teach from the fetal

40:55Dan Harris:position so like um here's what i'd say it 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? Right. Livelihood doesn't mean you're fulfilling your higher purpose, but I think at some level it does mean trying to avoid trades that create additional suffering in the world. That's pretty basic stuff. As a consumer, I would offer that people go back to that 2015 Patagonia ad in the New York Times.

41:44Dan Harris:Don't buy this jacket, right? 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. 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?

42:30Dan Harris:Like some of my most profound dharmic 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.

43:01David Gelles: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. 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. How do you think about all that? And what will you say to your kids when the time is right?

43:35Dan Harris: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 inured and insensitive to the suffering in the world, or we can show up like bodhisattvas and try to help. And it's as simple as that to me. and there's always plenty of work to do.

44:19Dan Harris: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 cogs of the machine is. And then God willing, you have to go do it.

44:33David Gelles: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 for whatever karma we may have.

45:20David Gelles: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?

45:48Dan Harris: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 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 Marimpoche, who was my original Tibetan teacher. and I'm studying with him in India and I've been on retreat and doing intensive practice. And a lot of young people at this time were like staying in India, right?

46:31Dan Harris: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 10 ,000 recitations of a certain mudra and they would do 10 ,000 circumambulations of the body. I forget what that's called, They would really commit and go deep. And I sort of went to Rinpoche one day and I said, should I do this? Should I stay in India and just keep doing intensive practice? And Rinpoche looked at me and was like, where were you born? I was born in New York City. He's like, you're an American. Go home. And what I took from it was like, that's not my work in the world, right?

47:16Dan Harris: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 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 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, 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.

48:10Dan Harris: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.

48:18David Gelles: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?

48:29Dan Harris:I could talk to you all day, my friend. Like, whatever. It's always fun.

48:34David Gelles:Right back at you.

48:35Dan Harris:No, nothing specific. Nothing specific.

48:38David Gelles:And finally, then, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and anything else that we should be checking out from you?

48:46Dan Harris: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.

49:01David Gelles:Awesome. Thank you, my friend, for making time for this. Great to talk to you as always.

49:06Dan Harris:Thank you for doing it. Really appreciate it. Always a pleasure.

49:13David Gelles: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 &A sessions. The next one's coming up on October 7th. That will be Semine Selassie in conversation with DJ Kashmir, 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 worked so hard on the show.

49:45David Gelles:Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasily. 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. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our feed. Thank you.