Mel Ziegler

25:20Wow. I mean, we were just... We were just... I mean, years in, we know. We were now four years in. And we were doing it for us. We could travel. We could... I mean, what... We weren't really making any money. We had two stores. I said, take a day off. Just go walk in the mountain. Just walk in the mountain. And I went and I meditated. I didn't know it was meditating, but I was actually... Letting my mind just go free. And I thought, you know, the only solution here is not to... Not to close the catalog. Not to close the store, but to grow. Pretty obvious. But... An intelligent person, I was pretty stupid.

25:58I didn't see that. But then when I saw that, it's okay. So I came back and I said, here's the solution. We're going to open a second store. What? We're going to get another store. It's ever just go. So we did. We went, we opened the store in San Francisco. And it was gangbusters. It was people lofted. It was on Polk Street between Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. And we did really well in there. And... Is the store still there? No, it's long gone. It's long gone. So we still all we wanted to do was travel. And we were bone -tired. Bone -tired. And so our friend Merritt said, well, come to my shopping center and put this in.

26:39I said, not only, can I do it, but I'd sell this company in a morif. I could. He said, well, you want to meet Don Fisher? Well, Don Fisher is the guy who started the gap. He started the gap maybe 10 years earlier in San Francisco by selling Levi's. And records. And the gap was the thing from the 1960s, the generation gap. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah, yeah. And so... I didn't know that's what the gap was. Yeah, it was bamed after the dint. And don't trust anybody over 30. By that point, the gap had 500 stores. It was a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. Would they still only selling Levi's?

27:18No, by that point, they were in malls. Yeah. They were manufacturing clothes with a lot of different... With that different labels in it, none of which said gap. And they were putting them on those rounders. And nothing was on the wall and on shelves. And there was this clothes in a white space called a store in a mall. Yeah. He walks into this thing store and he's Don Fisher. He was an exceptional person. I will say, he really was an exceptional person. Very bright, very smart. Real estate was his background. But he got found his way into the clothing business through real estate. And he started walking around the store and picking up things and just thinking, what's this?

28:03And the salesperson would say, well, that's a Falkland Islands bathing suit from the British surplus from the Falkland Islands. What? He would look at this and he would look at it. He started looking at every item and reading the tab and reading the letters. We used to post all the letters. People sent this in the dressing rooms. They were all posted over the walls because people were just thinking they would love the company and they just sent this love letters all the time. And we just posted them. That's the nice idea. He said, yeah, yeah. He was interested. He actually wanted to buy the company.

28:37And he said, let's have lunch. It's going around the block. There was a place to have lunch. He brought his CFO with him. Then he got in drilling down questions. He said, well, where are you incorporating? He said, well, I don't know. I incorporated myself. I figured I had it incorporated. You didn't have an account? No, I'm the accountant. I did everything. I was the lawyer. I was the accountant. I did everything. I couldn't own money for this stuff. Do it yourself. It was Mom and Pop. It was his Mom and Pop business. He said, well, what do you do for Mark Downs? Patricia said, we don't. We mark him up.

29:12He said, what are your margins? He said, not 80%, 90%. You're lying. This was the CFO. He was like, you're lying. The truth is, we didn't really know our margins. Because we didn't even have it. We couldn't even keep inventory. We didn't have the capacity to even keep inventory. We were just buying surplus. This is probably what we should charge, sell it. It was just all on them. We were just going. We were in motion. There was no way out of this thing, but except through it. It wasn't getting us anywhere yet, because everything was going wrong all the time. We had to be there to fix it. Anyway, out of that, somehow or another, we ended up selling the company to the gap.

29:59Was it a good thing to do? Was it a bad thing to do? Tell me more about that. That question from where I am today. It was a great thing to do, because my life took the best turn ever. The best turn ever. It was the great thing to do. From a business perspective, it was insane. We did everything wrong. Everything wrong. From protecting our asset. From getting the value that we really created. Everything wrong. I thought, well, I'm going to get a lawyer to help us. How do I go find a lawyer? I asked my friend, Herb Gold, for a lawyer. Who does he pick? He has this friend, Bernard Petrie, who is just this wonderful human being.

30:46But he's the strangest human being. I put him up against the gap. He tries to do the best he can. He knows about as much about business as we do. Even though he's 10 years older than we are. Even though his father was a Cleveland Taylor, who started a chain called Petrie Stores, which was a massive chain, he's the son of this man. Once that next to dinner had, who knew the sales in every one of his 1213 stores the day before when he was 85 years old. You can imagine what his son didn't want to be that man. He was our lawyer. Lovely. We loved him. Whenever we negotiated, we negotiated, and it was okay.

31:31We were going to take, it was enough money. We're going to go, we had enough to travel. We're going to do it. The last minute Don Fisher shrewd. I can't do this. Why can't you do this? This is a can't do this because I wouldn't know what to do with this company. I said, well, we're not looking for a job. I'm not talking about a job. They said, you know, you just show me how this company could be profitable, I'll give you whatever you need, to make it be profitable, and I'll give you a percentage of the sales. So gross margin, whatever it was down the line. So we looked at each other at that point.

32:07You know, we, although Bernard wasn't very expensive, we hired a CPA for Martha Anderson who was going, and we had owed about $50 ,000 in fees, which we didn't have. And I didn't know whether to sell or whether or not. But he said, I promise you, I won't interfere. This is your company. You do whatever you want. I don't care. It's yours. Just slugged as profitable. So Patricia and I talked about it. And ultimately, I was like, well, maybe. And she was, let's do it. So we did it. And then we began to, basically, with funds, we began to really start to have fun. Of course, Don would walk in and he says, well, why don't you make jeans and khaki?

32:57We said, no, Don, we don't do that. You know, in other words, we test, there was a test or two. And then he really did retreat. He didn't do anything except support us in every single way. And we grew the company for years doing that. But we weren't fitting into a regiment. How much money did you stay at the company after this? Basically, it was almost five years owning it and five years, four years with the gap. And he was true to his word until he was it. And it was a good experience. It was a good experience. So I would see the company grow over that four years. In those four years, we opened 50 stores, I think.

33:37And we had a circulation of 30 million catalogs. So it was just a lot in those days. Something a lot. I forget exactly with the number. I can't recall 50 or 60 stores. Were you still writing the copy for the catalogs? By that point, we had a creative department. And they were amazing. We hired people who, as I said, could never get a job anywhere else. But they were in that play pan. They had so much fun. And so they took the way Patricia drew and they took the way I wrote. And they just amplified it. Much better than we ever could. I mean, they did a beautiful job. And that went off for a while.

34:17And it was fun. And we traveled and found things. And we did unusual things at that point. And we became, well, we would go to Italy. We would find us. We would pass by something that was a restaurant trade show. Well, I was in there. And we'd go into the restaurant trade show and say, look at those jackets. Italian waiter jackets. Wow, those are really cool. A value in red jacket. So we would buy 10 ,000 Italian waiter jackets and dye them all different colors. The vendor would say, how many restaurants do you have?

34:53But we would do things like that. We would fly to Israel and find Israeli Army Paratrooper bags or something like that. And we would get a prototype of it and send it back and send it back. And we would make more of those things. We would go to England and make a manufacturer to match the surplus as well. As much as we could. Or we went, for instance, in England. We went, we found them by the name of Mr. Brady. Mr. Brady would make these beautiful bags, these cacky leather bags that fishermen used. And they never broke no matter how many years later. If you send it back to Mr. Brady, he would fix it.

35:33And we would ask Mr. Brady if he would make some bags for us and change this and change that. Mr. Brady would make some bags for us. And we would sell those bags as part of the catalog. And things like that. We did that a lot of that everywhere we could. Would you say it still felt like your company for those four years? Oh, it's entirely our company. He was not in any, it was entirely, it wasn't, it wasn't kicking out enough money for them to worry about the analysts. It wasn't really kicking out earnings yet. Because their volume was so big. And we were, it's only when it began to get that way.

36:09Yeah. Would they help full in terms of opening stores or other things? They really stayed more in the state department. Yes, that we relied. And they built, they helped us build the stores. That was machine. They knew how to do that. And yeah. But we, again, there was a little bit of conflict. Yeah. Because what Donald liked was mall stores. I said, I don't really shop in malls. I like street stores. And so we got as many street stores as we could. If there weren't that many, but we would find street locations that we really loved. And thought, this is the right place to put a store. And build a store there, but no two stores were alike.

36:49That was the rule. No two stores were alike. This one's going to be a Safari camp. This one's going to be an embassy. We were always playing with the metaphor. Yeah. It was a powerful country called Banana Republic. And everything was about that. The gift boxes were renounced or renounced orruses. The gift paper was the Banana Republic and newspaper. And it was, it was every single thing. If you, we had a climate desk and you could call the climate desk and hear what the climate was going to be where you were going to go. I don't know people today listening to this thinking, how could there have been a life without internet?

37:29There was no internet. Yeah. In the initial days, those catalogs, we had to get an order form in there, put an 800 number. And if you wanted to order from us, you had to either call the 800 number and give us your credit card or you went out and got a stamp, found a postbox, it dropped it in the mail. That's how you ordered. Yeah. Yeah. We're dinosaurs today. It's a great story. It was, it was fun. And then what happened at the end of the four years? At the end of the four years, a stock market event called Black Monday. The gap had reported earnings maybe a month earlier. And they missed earnings and the stock fell a lot.

38:16And then on Black Monday, it fell 50%. And did that happen just to the gap or to the market in general? It happened when we were in a conference somewhere at the Claremont Hotel with all our store managers and I went out and saw this Black Monday headline. I had no idea. It just... I'm saying, did Black Monday only impact the gap or did it was across the board? Across the board. The market. It was one of the biggest crashes of all times. Black Monday, 1987. Right. So the market changed. It wasn't that the gap failed in that moment. The market... It wasn't the gap. It was the market. But the gap, but everything went down with the sinking ship.

38:55And they had already gone down. So they were down once and now down again. And they panicked. And the analysts, at that point, they were trying to say, look, we have banana republicans coming up. It's looking really great, blah, blah. And the analysts were saying, this safari thing can be nothing more than a trend. And with what we... To us, it was... The most ridiculous thing ever, that we weren't safari any longer. We were traveling clothing. And we were really functional travel clothing. Button is that button to something, zippers that worked. Everything was functional and beautiful and exquisite fabrics, natural fabrics.

39:35We really were. But at that point, they decided, well, things like this. This is the kind of things that would happen. We have a shirt, a beautiful Indian cotton shirt. And we'd sell it season after seasonally, we'd change the colors. It would be great. And Patricia, at one point, said, you know, this is getting old. We got to change it. Well, the data monsters at the gaps... How do you throw out an item that is selling this kind of tonnage? You can't really... And she would have to argue. There was suddenly now an argument. We were still throwing the thing out of the catalog. It didn't matter.

40:21But now there was an argument. And that didn't work for us. This isn't what we bought into. The good fortune was that for many years, we were trying to have a baby and we did. And my son was born. And I was already 43 years old. We had just signed a huge contract for lots of money. And I said, I'm not doing this. I don't care. We have enough. And we left. And that's what happened. And it was strange that all of a sudden your progeny was gone. They killed everything. They killed the catalog. They killed the magazine that was going up to change the clothes. For years, customers were furious. Then they hired creative people.

41:11People who posed to know what they were doing and they made it even worse. Professionals. Professionals, right. That's what happened. And it took them many, many years. In fact, I would say because of the way it all happened. It wasn't really, it wasn't classy. And I didn't like that. The way that the exit happened. I just never really looked back. Yeah. But finally, now, I can see, I've been noticing that they're coming back to the roots of the company. But more from a 21st century standpoint. They're trying to regenerate the products that were there. And I think just pretty nice things that they have.

41:59I haven't really looked at it. But people have brought my attention to it. Interesting to relive all that. Yeah. Then you started your, your life of meditation and being a father. I love, I still do love being a father. You know, I'm a writer and I have been working on a book forever that someday I'll publish is called Bringing Up Dad. They raised me. They really did. They still raising me. Even in the 30s, they're raising me. But it's, this is it. And I started the study Taoism. And I was fascinated. I would fly to the England just to get into the British Museum to read these texts that I couldn't find.

42:44I was really into it. And I was trying to crack my mind. I wanted to think in a completely different way or not think at all. And it took a long time. I mean, I've been a writer at the core. I've never, I've never, never wandered into other paths in life. But I found my way into Eastern philosophy after I sold my company. I decided to go to a retreat. I had never done it. And it was one of the, the Boston retreats. Somewhere up in Santa Rosa. And when I went there, I didn't know anything about it. So I took a pole pile of books. And I took sketchpads and I was just going to pour out everything on those pages.

43:31And the teacher said, well, here's pearls. No talking, no reading, no anything. Just sit for 45 minutes and walk for 45 minutes. I said, what? I'm like, okay, I was game. I stayed for it. It was odd. I was on settle for the first day or two. And then I got this excruciating headache. And it wouldn't go away. And I said, I'm never going to let this happen to me before. It's because there's no coffee here. I'm going to start a tea company. Which is exactly what I shouldn't have been doing in a meditation retreat. So for the first next several days, I was dreaming up the Republic of Tea. And then I finally fell into the meditative state.

44:31And I could hear further than I could. I didn't realize I could hear so far. I was stunned at what I was hearing. And hearing, I would say, is my strongest sense it always has been. And so after that, I came back into my wife. And of course, we had just sold a successful company. We were very visible and we were getting all kinds of offers. Let's do this. Let's do that. Let's do this. I said, I'm going to do nothing. I'm going to just do nothing. Because I just realized that I was like a wind up toy. A chief succeed. A chief succeed. It was in my DNA. Could it have been like that your whole life?

45:15Well, I can't really do that. In the intense way, Melvin, maybe you'll be a doctor. Maybe you'll be a, I mean, I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There was a lovely part of town that was called the Hill section, which was the Jewish community. Suburban? No. It was in the town. Scranton's about 100 ,000 people, it's an old coal mining town, about 2 and a half hours from New York, as you go through New Jersey. And somehow Jews had found their way there and set up a little community there. And it was middle class, 1950s. You know, everybody had come home from the war. Everything was so comforting.

45:54What a difference. When I even talk about the 1950s, what a difference. It was to today. But it was a very sweet place. It was a very sweet way to grow up. Later, many years later, when I brought my wife back, she said to me, nobody's mean here. I was a high school reunion, the 50th high school reunion. The sweetest people ever. Yeah. So I grew up in that. Yeah. But my grandparents were first generation and my parents were second generation. They didn't go to college. And a lot was expected. I was going to go to college and I was going to do that. And my dad said, these should be a pharmacist.

46:33I mean, what's a pharmacist? He said, he was in the war in Germany. He was a very simple sweet man. I loved him so much. He was a bodhisattva. I realized long after he was gone, he died at 59. Anyway, I found my way out of there.

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48:23You think of yourself as a writer, you start as a writer, you think of yourself as a writer or a journalist. I think of them as different. They are. And I should say, actually, even though I said that neither, I'm an observer. I've tried for many years to shed the amazing amount of judgment and screens I had. In order to see the world and what I have tried to do is reach that objective space. I'm hardly ever there, but it's my goal to be in that objective space. I am a student of ancient Chinese philosophies, particularly Taoism. I read a Taoism book where the statement was, forget yourself, follow objective circumstances.

49:12And that's pretty much what I try to do. I don't think of myself as anything fixed. When did you first come in contact with the Tao? After the retreat, I swallowed every Christian a Murdy book first, because I'm a thinker. I think obsessively, I'm full of concepts, I'm full of ideas. And I found him, he gave me a path to just make me realize that I'm just living in a swarm of thought and seeing nothing. And I read every single book, and I listened to the lectures, and then somehow or another I picked up, allowed to. But the one that really did it to me was Chong Su. I don't know how you pronounce this name.

50:02He's the one. It's Chong Su. It's Chong Su. It's Chong Su. He's the rogue. I'm really related to this guy. He was making fun of everything and having fun and having a good time. And at the same time, through him, I began to realize that the Tao that can be told is not the Tao. You can't see how I'm ever going to describe it to you. But it was this total vision of observing and tune with nature. Everything was part of nature, including human beings. In fact, I remember having this conversation years ago with Jack Cornfield, I said, you know, he was, oh, you doused frustrating me because I just, well, I'm just the same thing as that.

50:47You know, I'm the storm, the wet. It's the same thing. So it really spoke to me. It spoke to me. And it got me to a place where I really tasted emptiness. Taste it. Yeah. Is there anything more delicious when you think about it than emptiness? That's it. Peace. I love the Tao. I love... Oh, I bet. I could see from your book that you live it. And I admire you. It's something you don't really want to talk about because... It's hard to talk about. Yeah, it's the fives that. Tell me about your writing days. Well, I was a journalist. The way I was going to get out of Scranton was to write my way out of Scranton.

51:37Scranton was wonderful in many ways. What it didn't introduce me to, I regret to say, was music and art, which became my passions as particularly art as the time went on. Years later, and this in his currently, really. Now I paint, but I was a journalist. And I wrote for my high school magazine. And I enjoyed it. That was just finding little stories, actually. Short stories at that point. But then I got a job at the Scranton Tribune writing a front page column called The Weather. That's all it was. Cloudy, for the chance of rain. But I was so excited. How would you know?

52:25There was a weather viewer, I guess you called, and they told you. And the temperature range and everything else. And then it became a copy boy. And then it was time to go to college. And I went to Penn State. It's all we really could afford at that time. And it was a state school. And it was a wonderful school. It was in state college Pennsylvania. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it's beautiful, wonderful school. And did you study journalism? I studied journalism. And then I heard that the place to study journalism was really Columbia. And so I applied to and went to Columbia. And I happened to be there in the vintage year 1968 when everything exploded.

53:09It's very similar to what happened last year. This was the year of Berkeley and Columbia. And there was a protest on campus about the University's expansion into Morningside Heights, taking away the neighbor. I mean, it's very prescient to all of that. I didn't know about that. It was in the 60s. And they occupied the buildings. There were total occupations of the buildings. Wow. So here as a journalist in the journalism school, and two buildings over was Low Library, which is where the president was. And I'm walking out one day in the whole campus, this full of protesters. I had never seen anything like this in my entire life.

53:48And when I went to Penn State, they were hoot mayonnaise. That dates me. But I was leaving. It was protest songs. It was the beginning. Yeah. And so I caught up in this and I was a journalist. And so I saw this. The students had occupied the president's office, racing Kirk. They were all over the campus. But the big thing is they were occupying his office. And it was remarkable, as I remember, because the women had set up a kitchen in the office. I mean, thinking about that, the women were setting up the kitchen in the office. And the guys were whatever they were doing. There's a ledge that goes around Low Library.

54:34It's about maybe eight, ten feet tall. And if you get through that ledge, you can go into the office. And I wanted to go into the office as a reporter. I wanted to find a story here. And I wasn't sure whether I was a reporter or a role. I didn't know. I wasn't sure who I was. What this was all about. I was just learning about it myself. Was it exciting? It was extraordinary. It was exhilarating. I mean, they shut down the school. We never had a graduation. It was like last year. It was the first, it was the precursor. And probably the only time to the unfortunate protest last year. And much more justified, I would say.

55:16Anyway, so I didn't know if that was a reporter. I didn't know if I was it. And I came out and it was time to go and graduate. And I wrote a story. And the story was published in the Miami Herald. It just interviewed me for a job. I'd set them the story. They published the story and offered me a job. And I also think I also wrote a story from New York magazine at the time, which was just starting up again. It used to be the earlier was the Sunday supplement of a paper called, it was a fusion paper, Herald Tribune, the one that became the international. And it was sort of a really elegant newspaper, but playfellaker who was the editor of New York when it was in that paper bought the rights to it when the paper folded and then regenerated New York magazine.

56:03And that's how it came to be. And one of my teachers at the time was Dick Shapp, he sportscaster and became very good friends. And he introduced me to play and then I started writing for New York magazine. But I got very tired of New York after a couple of years. And I found my way west. But I was still a journalist. And at that time I came to San Francisco and I was going to write a novel. How did you choose San Francisco? I chose it in Colorado. We were driving across the country. And I was either going to Mexico, point south, and I had a girlfriend. We were driving an old French Simca that we had bought the year before and shipped over.

56:54We didn't know what it was, but what certainly was going to be was not New York. Because the 1970s in New York was hell. I mean, garbage strikes, dog shit, all over the sidewalks. Nobody picking up after themselves. No regard. It was just, it was what am I doing here? And I had a friend who was in Hastings Law School in San Francisco earlier and had flown out to see him. It was a beautiful February day. And San Francisco was really enchanting after that. And I said, I sort of feel like I belong here. What you were supposed to say? This was 1972, I think, 1972. So some of our love had already happened?

57:40It hadn't already happened. What I didn't know is that four years earlier my wife was happening with it. She grew up in San Francisco. Oh, great. So there's an interesting story there. But I did what I do. There were two papers at that time, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner. I got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle. And I had a great time. It was fun. I was on the city desk. It was a room that was, you know, the huge room with reporter sitting here, the art department there, the photography studio there, the Sunday section there. It was huge. It was like a little city, city room.

58:17And there was a, it was almost out of the movie, The Front Page. There was an editor by the name of Ed Melanchol, a moniker. And he would stand up and he would say, you know, Zegler, 474 high, baby in a trash bin, get a photographer. And you get a photographer and you would just basically go find the abandoned baby in the track. I mean, this is the, this was it. And it was a wild. These were the years of the zebra killings. Wow. And the zebra killings were happening. And I was there on the night beat, writing the story about what just happened in the streets. And at two o 'clock in the morning going down to catch a bus at fifth and mission to take me to Mill Valley where I lived completely by myself.

59:10But anyway, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed working. I enjoyed being part of the city. I enjoyed learning everything. Do you think the fact that you came from a different place, added to it? Like part of your job was, you're like a fish out of water in this new environment and your job is to observe it and report on it. Yeah. Yeah. Drink it in. Take it all. Yes, it was it was absolutely. I didn't, the West Coast was totally new to me. It was a completely different, it was a completely different mentality. One that I summarized this way, Claude Felker, who was the editor of New York Magazine at that time later went out to be come teach it Berkeley.

59:52And I ran into him a party maybe 15 years later and he said, didn't you used to be Mill Ziggler?

1:00:01It's funny. That's New York. Yeah. And so I was very happy not to be there. Yeah. I was very happy not to be there. I was learning a home new way of life. You could do anything. Yeah. It was free. Freedom is wealth. It's not money. It's not it's freedom. And I felt that freedom. Yeah. And just it was exhilarating being there. And these were good years. They were crazy years. Because it was also, I was also there when the Patty Hearst kidnapping took place, which was really crazy. I mean, it was just crazy. Did you cover that story? Yeah. I was part of cover. I was part of everybody cover that story.

1:00:43If you are the shifting, you were down there. You were in front of the Hearst mansion and we're Atherton and somebody would say, Hey, Ziggler, your tree is ringing. They have a phone hooked up to the tree. It was wild being in the newspaper business. It was wonderful. I loved it. I loved it. It was journalism was different in those days as well. I mean, these were the days of Walter Cronkite. You know, I mean, these were, these were the days when, at least there was an effort to be objective. I mean, the world hadn't seen Rupert Murdoch yet. It was going to brand news. And at brand point of view and create this situation where everything became contrary to everything.

1:01:29I mean, it was just, then it was just, here's the story. You couldn't even use the word, I, a reporter said, a reporter saw, you know, you wrote about yourself in the third person. Yeah. And I saw, I loved it. But the only point to be was what you saw. You weren't given an agenda to try to make the story mean something. Yes, or to come, put us through the filter. Yeah. Put us through it. It was no filter. It was just objectivity. Your job is to be objective. What really happened? What can give us both sides of the story? Yeah. Quote them both, you know, just lay it out. Yeah. And it's nice hearing both sides of the story.

1:02:08Yes, isn't it? I love it. I mean, this is what's wrong. This is really, this would fix everything if people would just, hey, you know, why do you feel that way? It's funny. You talk about going back to Scranton and the people being nice. You think that the people in San Francisco would be really nice. There was a time when they were. That's why, are they were? Do you remember those days? Yes. They were. Well, everybody was nice. I mean, my wife will tell me stories about she hitchhiked here and they, somebody said, come to dinner and she would stay three weeks with somebody who, beautiful people who were working in Stanford and this, I mean, it was that kind of a city.

1:02:53Yeah. I don't even know when it happened. Did it happen? I don't know how it happened. I guess the answer is always day by day.

1:03:04How many years did you continue being a journalist? I was a journalist until I met my wife there. She is an illustrator. I told you about this big city room. Well, one day this very beautiful woman was walking in and turning into the art department, which was right behind the Xerox machine and all the way to the other side of the room. Somehow or another, when I saw her, I saw my other half. But I'm pretty shy. Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons I liked me, reporter, is I need, couldn't be shy. I had to get out there and do what I did. It brought me out of that. So during the Christmas party, two of my other two other buddies of mine who were both reporters, we all decided to walk over and find out who this new girl was.

1:03:59And so the three of us walked over, something happened in that moment where the two of them somehow disappeared. And Patricia and I got into a conversation that we're still in. Amazing. I love her now more than I've ever loved anyone. She's my wife, which was almost 50 years. Yeah, beautiful. Congratulations. Well, we've had our troubles. I mean, we didn't get here. We wasn't the clear road. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we really had trouble. But we knew we were connected at the core. And so she was there. I was there. We were having a great time. I was my late 20s. I wanted to travel. You know, I wanted to see the world.

1:04:45And the Chronicle was just a very cheap paper. It was known as being a cheap paper. They wouldn't send you anywhere to do anything. And there was no other game in town. It wasn't like today with meaty. You go, here you go. There were three television stations. If you were a journalism, there was two newspapers. Then they keep you, one newspaper. There was nowhere else to go. I could freelance, which I began to do, writing magazine articles for different magazines and doing that kind of thing. But I wanted to travel. And we didn't have any money. We had nothing. I mean, I basically lived our far -saltries, which were $400, $500 a week then.

1:05:20I can't even remember what they were. They weren't much.

1:05:26Tell me about Republic of T. I wanted to learn about T. I mean, I'm that kind of person. I want to learn about something I just jump in. My path into T was flavored black teas. They were magical for me for a while. And then I just sort of got more into the key moments, the more deep tasting Chinese teas. But I saw a hole in the market that was sort of unbelievable. This was the early 90s. It didn't matter what restaurant you went to if you ordered a tea, they would bring you out of Lipton's tea bag. How could this be? I saw that. And on the other hand, there was a hippie brand called Celestial Seasnings from a guy named Mosigl and lived in Colorado.

1:06:19It was beautiful at all these different, herbal things. And other than that, there was a sprinkling in there, maybe a brand called Twinies, and a few other things. But nothing, nobody was really revering tea. And so I thought this is... And historically, tea has been revered. Yes, it's the, I call it, the second oldest product in the world. You know? And the nuance, those are fantastic. Just like wine. It never really, it still hasn't come fully realized. But at that point, that's why, again, I didn't realize what we were doing. How did it start? We were creating a category. We weren't creating a company.

1:06:56Because now if you go into a store, it's all there. So I went to a... It's a year or so after... Two years after Banana Republic of my doing nothing years, which was dense with study and writing and traveling and things. But I went to a conference of a group called the Social Venture Network that was just starting up somewhere in New Jersey. It was the first time I really left my son, who was maybe then two years old. And I left the conference early and I started flying back. And a young guy there saw me at the conference, sort of chased me down and found me on the plane and started talking to me.

1:07:45He knew that I had started Banana Republic. And for some reason, I mentioned to him if I were to ever start another company, it would be a tea company. And he was all over it. He was all over it. He really thought this was the greatest idea ever. And I said, yeah, okay. But I wasn't sure about him. I wasn't sure whether... I didn't know. Having gone through the... I would say it wasn't a pleasant experience at the end of Banana Republic. So I didn't... I didn't need this. Look, my goal is never to be rich or wealthy. It's not... I just want to be independent. And I had enough to be independent.

1:08:30And so I wasn't really looking at this point to do anything. But he was very engaging in smart. And I just happened to say, just getting these things, these names just come to me. I said, there's another company I'm going to call the repot. Look at tea. And I'm going to be the minister of leaves. Was that the first time you said it? Yes. I'm going to be the minister of leaves, which I cut a lot because, you know, I'm not only leaving, but I'm the minister of leaves. You know, it's like it's okay. So I did, I appointed myself a minister. So I'll be the minister of progress.

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1:09:51Refreshing flavors include grapefruit, citrus, watermelon, and chocolate salt. Formulated with the perfect balance of sodium, potassium and magnesium to keep you hydrated and energized throughout the day. These minerals help conduct the electricity that powers your nervous system so you can perform it your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar -free, keto -friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmant .com slash tetra and stay salty with Element electrolyte. L -M -N -T And he really started banging together. And this with these with the years when there were the facts machines.

1:10:44So I go home the next morning and my facts machines shattering in my study. And he's saying, the minister probably could do this with him. And I would answer him. And I could, and we would go back and forth with facts and back and forth with facts. And I had another friend who came over one day and saw this pile of facts. And I didn't know what they were. I was going to start it with this guy. I wasn't going to start it with this guy. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just playing on the idea of what should a T company be. I was imagining it. And a friend of mine came over, a friend by the name of Bruce Katz, who started rock port.

1:11:18He unfortunately recently died, fell from his roof, missing dearly. Came to my house one day. And I had these things naturally came printed out. So he saw this pile of stuff. He started reading through it. He said, this is great. You should publish this. So he knew somebody who knew somebody. And there was the next thing I knew I had an editor from double day. It was visiting. And she read it. And she wanted to publish it. So she published the complete exchange of how to start a business. The Republic of T. Letters do a young centripenure or something. I'd forget what the subtitle was. It was changed along the way.

1:11:58And I just didn't want to tear myself away from my son. You sound like someone who, when you dive in, you're all consumed. So you're wary of becoming all consumed again. That's exactly right. I understand. But I waited for my minister of progress to sort of see what he was going to do and make it happen. He was not quite making it happen until they gave us a book advance. And so, since we were both writing these facts back and forth together, it was really our book. It was a my book. It was our book. So I said, the only way I'm going to do this company is if you start it with the book advance.

1:12:43I thought, be great. Just take the book advance and start the company. And he did. He basically started the company with the book advance and a little help from another friend of ours. And we were able to build that up to a couple of years and again, I was operating, but it wasn't the same. And I didn't want to operate. So we ended up selling it a couple of years later to a lovely family. Tell me about the years I'm doing it. What was the process? The process was creating different brands of tea. And working with the herbs or working with the dark teas and creating flavored teas. And then somehow creating a way of packaging that was going to be different.

1:13:30It had to be different because it couldn't be just another tea company. So we came up with the idea that, and nobody had ever done this before, that tea bags were square. Let's make them round. Okay. And what about the can? The can has to be round for that to go into. And what would be on the can would be these exceptional names and stories and widthicisms from the Minister of Leaves or anybody else. And so we use the cans basically to advertise a life of sip by sip as opposed to gulp by gulp. I mean, it's always fun to create a villain in the villain here with the gulpers. You really can get your teeth into something if you have something to work off of.

1:14:22And it was this, you know, people just... They're not like them. Yeah, well, we're not going to gulp and mislight. We're just going to gulp our way through life. We're going to sip our way, sip by sip by sip by sip by sip. And so we created just really lovely teas and learned a lot and tried to make them more. Earl Grey was the Earl Greyer, for instance. I mean, that was the name of that tea. I forget a lot of the other names, but I think we probably should have opened stores. But we have another part. Ask if you ever considered... We wanted to. And if you would have opened shops, would it have been a store to buy the tea or would it have been more like the Starbucks of tea?

1:15:03It would have been the Starbucks of tea. Yeah. It still looks good. In fact, we... Howard Schultz found this early on. And he had already thrown tea out of the Starbucks in those years. And was trying to find a way back in. And there was a time when I thought he might buy the company. We flew up to see him. And one of my partners is a good talker, but not a great listener. And at that point, my dear friend at that point was... There were some sparks that were wrong between Howard and him. And it never really worked. And I said, uh, let's sell this thing to somebody who can really make something out of it.

1:15:42And there was this fellow in St. Louis by the name of Ron Rubin. And he was in the beverage business. His family was in the beverage business, bottle beverage business. And he read the book. And he flew out to meet us. And he said, I want... I'd love to buy this company. And I just really liked him. And to this day, they run that company from the book. He'll say on page 276. And we were just wild ideas that we threw out. It's a beautiful story. And his son... I've never heard a story like that before. Really? No, where the idea phase is documented and ending up becoming exposed in advance of the actual product.

1:16:28There was no Republic of T. Right. We always hear the story after. We've never heard the wild ideas of what... This thing could be in print. And then have that thing actually come into existence. That's a very unusual story. I'll understand. Yeah. It was fully imagined. Of course, 25, 30 years later, it's still evolving. But the core of it, the culture of... The philosophy of it was in the book. It was there. I mean, if the gap had done this with Banana Republic, they would have a wildly successful company. If they had just done this... Yes. They didn't have the courage to do this. Yes. But if they did this, it was so classic.

1:17:12I mean, we owned Kackie. But we weren't all about Kackie. But we owned Kackie and we owned the practicality and functional clothing that stood apart from all the design. The opposite experience happened with the Republic of T. And there's good evidence. No, it's not Republic of T. It's not a malgommated gigantic like the gap. But, you know, when is enough enough? Yeah. In this world, I don't think people ask that question enough. Tell me more about your spiritual life. I paint. I can't start painting until I accept and enter the emptiness. The blank canvas, the silence. And when I do that, then I'm always excited to start.

1:18:08And I... Something draws me to a color. Something draws me to a brush. Something draws me to a stroke. And everything, once it starts, becomes resolution. It's all just resolving. Are you reacting to something that you see? I'm responding to the materials. I'm responding to the choices that I made earlier. I'm always in response. I'm not really generating. I'm responding. And I'm listening. To me, that's what empties me out. And in the end, sometimes when I finish a work, I look at it. It's abstract work. Very colorful. Because there's so much vividness in what happens. I see something that's familiar.

1:19:01It's some kind of a structure that existed. And it came out and it showed itself to me. I didn't do that. It showed itself to me. It's so energizing. Loved to paint. Loved to paint. And my son is a painter. My wife is a painter. My daughter is a fashion designer. When there were kids, we bought the house across the driveway from us that was being sold by a Murray County judge, a very sweet man, and it became our art house. So we would go over there just to create art together. It was so great. It was so beautiful. I mean, we have these art sitting there. And each one of us would be doing our own thing.

1:19:50And I was playing like they were learning, like they were learning. And I've been doing it ever since. And in the last several years, it's really kind of matured. But I didn't even try to make a career out of it. Yeah. How do you know when a painting is done? And do you know for sure when it's done? It's never done. I've gone back and repainted paintings I've done. They're framed. I tear them out of the frames and do them all over again. It's like, yeah, it's never done. Because that painting was in that time, in that place, but sometimes I like the fact it's like a photograph. It is done. I can accept it.

1:20:30I can change it. And the ones that I'm most proud of are the ones I just leave alone. I'm going to leave them alone. But I could change them. And some of the best work I've done is basically repainting, not just painting. And I try to always find out if I'm following some kind of rule I didn't know existed. You wrote about that. Your book was fascinating about that. I'm always looking for that. And because I am a self -taught painter, I watch my wife. I watch my... She's very respectful. She knows I'm an auto -diadagged. And I don't want noise. I want to discover... And my son who's prolific. He's fast.

1:21:16And he's determined on the faucet. And something comes out and he never makes a mistake. Because there are no mistakes. He just keeps going. And somehow, then he resolves and it's over. So, everyone, so I get a tip from one of them and the other. But my wife years ago gave me one tip. To start with, when I first tip when I paint, she said, don't use black. Don't use black. So for years, I would not use black. I would do everything I could. And one day I discovered, hey, I don't have to follow this rule anymore. But I learned so much. Yeah. But I'm not using black. Yes. Are you precious about the first stroke?

1:22:03It's a commitment. And I can't think about it. If I think about it, I won't do it right. You look at my paintings. No, you were thinking there, Mel. I don't want you to look at my paintings and think that I was thinking. Yeah. This is my way of not thinking. And I'm a great fan of not thinking. I think a lot of... Do you say you've lived most of your life in your head? I do. That, yeah. And I realize it just basically. It's just noise that tunes out everything. So, I mean, the joy of throwing older is really accepting how little I know. And enjoying it. I mean, I know how to do a thing or not, but know in the big sense.

1:22:53I'm constantly surprised. I could never explain. And I was a great explainer. But I basically trapped myself. And I'm an appreciator of things that are really finely done. I love things that are beautiful and well done and well thought are authentic. And come from the same place. You can see when somebody... It doesn't matter what they're creating. It doesn't matter what matters is where it's coming from. You can see the source at almost every work. And often it's a thought. You can go flick through the television show and it's one thing. After another, it's one concept after another. You can listen to music.

1:23:33It's one concept after another. And we go, we go, we go, we go. But everyone's, when you hit the one that's not, that's life. That's what we're here for. Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young. I don't believe in belief.

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