Thank you for having me and for the very kind introduction.

It's interesting because, one of the advantages of Yale is that there's a lot of connection among the graduate schools. My wife has actually been on the Dean's council of the Divinity School for almost 20 years. My connection to Yale began when she talked to some folks at Yale, and we did the launch of The Responsible Company as a joint project. The launch was a joint project of the SOM, the Environmental School, the Divinity School, and it was held at the law school. My introduction to SOM was at this launch. And then a man named Stuart DeCew, who's a graduate of SOM, runs a group called the Yale Center for Business and Environment, which is interesting to me because it was founded not by the administration but by the students, joint students between the two schools, and they wanted to strengthen that connection. They wanted an independent entity that would help to bring in outsiders to hold events. And so, I spent 3 or 4 days there, talking to different groups. And I've been there ever since. It's been 12 years. I've run a seminar there for 10 years. My seminar also concentrates on people from the different graduate schools, primarily SOM and the school of the environment, but also from public health and law and the divinity school. I get very interesting interactions when I get people from the architecture school to talk about how human beings should live and we've got divinity students and business students and environmental students.

It's a long response to your connection. But it's one of the great sources of satisfaction in my life to have that connection with the students.

I don't remember writing that. And I thought, "Oh that sounds good."

But I do think that's key to the dilemma we face, it is that we are a part of nature and our own health depends on spiritual, mental, physical health depends on the health of natural systems. The health of our economy, of all of our industrial systems, also relies, it's underpinned by the health of the natural world.

There's a wonderful quote from Aldo Leopold, who was the first great American land conservationist in "A Sand County Almanac" that I often go back to. And he said, "A thing is right, when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community," and by biotic community, of course, he meant all of nature, including human life and human communities. When I think about the dilemma of doing business in a way that serves the common good, almost everything we do to make a living, it disrupts that integrity, stability and beauty. And, it may have been that nature itself may have had the capacity to heal itself and to regulate itself around the disruptions that we contributed for thousands of years since the beginning of agriculture and accelerated with the Industrial Revolution and super accelerated with the last 50 years. But I think we've reached the point where that's no longer possible. We can't count on having our errors redeemed by the health of the natural world, because it's so weakened in terms of the amount of water we have, the quality of the water, the soil that has thinned down to 5 or 6 inches, the carbon in the air that should belong in the ground.

So, we now have both the burden and the opportunity to align our work. The way we make our living with the needs of the natural world, as well as human communities to get past this view that we are somehow apart from nature. It's almost like you need a new Copernican revolution. I mean, when human beings believe that the universe revolves around the Earth, we have to understand that the universe of life on this planet does not revolve around human beings. Leopold used the great phrase, as simple citizens of the community.

Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting when I think about it now because I haven't read a lot of Leopold, but those quotes floored me when I read them. The only word I would change after, because it struck me as so instinctively true, particularly this idea that, integrity, stability and beauty. That choice of those three words. One word I would change now is he said, to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty. And I would change that to the words support, because I think that nature is in a constant state of creation. It is in a constant state of change. It's just much slower than the one that we're imposing on it. I think we have to have that sense that we're not trying to keep things the same. We're trying to bring things back to health, perhaps to a different kind of health than we've been able to imagine before.

I think that it's true. There's several traditions, including Alfred North Whitehead, including in the Catholic tradition Teilhard de Chardin and other traditions that would argue along the same lines, that the spirit is inherent in the physical, and there is David Bohm who's a physicist, used the term implicate order. I can't read physics, but the phrase appeals to me.

Yes, and I also think that this connects back directly to the idea of learning how to make our living without disrupting that integrity, stability and beauty. One of the things I've noticed at Patagonia, because I was one of the original employees, I've been there on and off, but mostly on since 1973, doing lots of different things is that we're most successful when we let people exercise their deepest values.

For one thing, we provide a place where nobody gets fired for exercising the deepest values that also coincide with those of the company. It's that spirit embodied in the person that is a much greater motivator than any kind of extrinsic motivation for promotion or for pay. I think you had Dean Carter on at one time.

So, Dean had a line. I've never heard it from him, but I read it somewhere. He says, "If you want to get promoted at Patagonia, get caught doing the work." And I think that was true of almost every project that I was involved with at Patagonia that was successful. It was almost like an after school or an intermission project in which we would start with almost no resources, an idea that nobody thought was really feasible, but a lot of people really dedicated to bringing it about.

Yeah, he was interesting because we always had a challenge as a company, particularly in the earlier days, in the first 20 or 30 years of bringing in people from the outside in a couple of important ways. One is that those people would not be able to use the skills they had learned elsewhere. And so they would wonder, "Do I really belong here?" And then what would happen is we would bring those people in when we had gone through some kind of growth that required a systems change. And the people who already worked at Patagonia didn't have the skills to do that. So the people who are there, the old timers are going, "Am I still relevant?" And the newcomers are going, "Am I going to screw this place up?" But Dean came in from Sears, and it was like he had been waiting to work at Patagonia all his life. He said that almost nothing he learned was useful to him. But I don't think that's really true. I think that he had learned what worked at Sears and also deeply learned what hadn't worked, and he was eager to kind of apply to fill that gap when he came into the company.

Yes, I think that's absolutely true. What you find is the best expression of human nature is that every tradition tells us that when we're in a way selfless, when we're working with others toward a purpose that is not solely concentrated around power or advantage when you're really working for the common good.

There's another lovely quote that we use to introduce both books, from a Haisla leader in British Columbia named Gerald Amos, who said the most important right we have is the right to be responsible. What I loved about that is that it connects responsibility with the basic human freedom, rather than as a burden, or rather than as something that we do when we're not having fun or when we're not having a good time. It connects agency, the deep desire to be able to affect the world you live in and to do good in it with the sense of what has to be done. People suffer at work, I think all the time when they're forced to leave their values at the door. When they come to work, they're working for quite secondary or tertiary goals. We have an opportunity now, today to take advantage of that, we all need to have a big purpose. And so there's an opportunity for people in working life to exercise that.

Yes it does. And I think one of the things we need to do is also to preserve the original sense of business, because I think there's a form of capitalism driven by the financial sector that everybody is talking about that tends to be pretty harmful because of the level of abstraction.

So say I'm a capitalist because I have a 401K. That 401K is invested and I have an abstract relation to it. It's managed by someone else. And I have some basic guidelines about where it can be invested, but they're not very strong. And since this is going to be the money I need to live on for the rest of my life, I want a high return on it. Well, once you start to move in that direction, you create problems, which means that those huge amounts of money can only be invested in things that are going to return huge amounts of money and things that return huge amounts of money tend not to be the best things that we all need. That's the problem with finance capitalism. It's also centrally controlled by a very small group of people. This is the kind of capitalism that nobody likes, right? But, business itself is something that goes back, is deep in human life, which is simply making things and selling them or trading. It's commerce. I think that there's always an honorable role for that. And I think one of the problems that the socialist ideal ran into was if you tried to centralize all of that, you took it out of the sphere of making things that people want to make for people who want to buy them.

Let me just go back. You mentioned the role of business versus civil society versus the government. Just a quick story. We started a food company about 10 years ago called Patagonia Provisions. It was intended to be the kind of food you can take along with you on a trip and keep in a packet. We got started and we were making various things and tiptoeing our way into the food business. We talked to this man named Wes Jackson, who's an agronomist. He's now in his mid- 80s, and his life project has been to restore the Great Plains to health. The great plains that ran across the large swath of the middle of the United States was the world's granary for 75 years. It had top soil that ran several feet deep. And now it's an exhausted resource. It's been growing monocultures of soy, corn, and wheat forever since the 1930s. And so we're talking to Wes and he says, "I developed this perennial wheatgrass 20 years ago called Kernza. It has roots that go almost ten feet deep into the ground." When you have a plant with roots that go that deep, it disturbs the microbes and the fungi, and it actually creates topsoil much faster than nature can. And when you do that, you need much less water, you need fewer even organic inputs, and you sequester carbon, we don't know how much yet, but there's a good indication that you draw carbon out of the air and back into the ground. So he was telling us this and we said, "Oh, this is fantastic, Wes, where can we buy some?" He said, "Oh, you can't buy Kernza." And we said, "Why not?" He says, "Well, I can't get anyone to grow it." "Why can't you get anyone to grow it?" He says, "I can't get a farmer to plant what they can't sell." So what we did is we contracted with a brewery in Portland, Oregon, to use Kernza as an ingredient in an ale. And then we got the first 200 acres of Kernza planted in Minnesota. And then that, that has grown. So now there are several. I don't know what the actual acreage is, but it's substantial.

This taught us something because that is like the best the business can do. What we did is we made the business model. We transformed the business model for provisions so that every new product we introduce has to solve a problem in the food system or in agriculture. And that kind of leads us into this idea of regeneration. This was really the first taste of regenerative business for us because the apparel business, everything we do is to reduce the harm we do. It's not a circular business. It's problematic. Apparel and textiles are the oldest of industries and really problematic. So I think that's the best the business can do is you say that everything you do is going to make a positive change. The minimum, I think, level of responsibility for business in our time is to clean up after yourself.

Yes. I think it's interesting because I think it is undying and I think it is an expansive view, but it's also built specifically on the experience that expands your capacity to imagine what's possible. So particularly, if you had asked me in the 1990s, whether I thought Patagonia would ever be capable of acting outside its own walls, the way we have for the past 30 years, in the sense that we don't own any assembly factories, we don't own mills. So we've been influential in the practices of those businesses that don't belong to us. If you'd asked me, can you do that? No, I would have said, no, this is not realistic. And what happened is, if there's a gradual increase in accumulation of experience and accumulation of cultural confidence. But it's also important to understand that this isn't just an expanded horizon. It's also running up against the reality of the world. And you get more humble as you go along because you keep figuring out. And every time you think you've got it down, we're good guys, you uncover something else that reveals some institutional or systemic problem that also needs to be addressed. I think that's been critical for us. I'll give you another quick example.

In 2017, I think we were getting more and more information on our actual environmental impact, and we knew that 95% of it is in the supply chain and 90% of it is in fabrics. So we looked at this and we said, "Okay, what can we do?" There are two things. We use a lot of cotton. We've been organic since 1996, but let's go to regenerative organic. So we started developing a lot of experimental farming, particularly in India. Then we looked at polyester and nylon, which represents half the line that comes out of an oil well. And we had a lot of products that used 40% recycled content, and that was the best we could do without sacrificing quality and without sacrificing performance. So, we went to work with our suppliers and we developed 100% recycled polyester nylon. That's been the case for a couple of years. But then we discovered, we're not entering the territory of carbon neutrality here just because we're not using new oil, because these fabrics are made in mills that are fired by coal. Then the next step is to start to work with the mills. How do we help imagine a way to finance the shift from using coal as the primary fuel to renewables? So that's just an illustration. It's just a constant with us. Every time we think we've addressed a major problem and we have, we're still dealing with the disruption of the integrity, stability and beauty of the world.

It's interesting, whenever I would see a business that was using sustainability as a marketing tool and sustainability department would be located within marketing, I would think, oh boy, are they in for it because it's too hard. The work is too hard to not be serious about it. Because, I remember making these sorts of arguments myself about 10 years ago and saying, okay, we'll make the business case for sustainability. And there are legitimate things to say about it. Reducing costs, certainly, if you generate less waste, you use less water, electricity, etc. But, I think one of the problems with ESG especially, is because it was used by the finance industry and because it had to be tied to a big return. It was very limited where you could actually invest ESG funds.

A really brilliant guy that we had working at Patagonia for a while, created for our 401K contributions in Vanguard, created a Patagonia Fund. But, you know, it was loaded with tech stocks and solar panels. And so it doesn't really identify what's needed. It doesn't show obvious harm. It's not tobacco, it's not firearms, it's not alcohol, etc. There's another thing that I hesitate to talk about, but I think it's critical to address. And that is, when we have a global economy, and Patagonia is a company. We're not all over the globe, but we're sourcing from many different countries. We're selling in different countries. And in many ways, I love that we do that. I love the local permutations or adaptations of Patagonia that are really cool. But I think when we make decisions in a corporate headquarters in Los Angeles or New York or London or Beijing, we don't feel the effect. The effects are felt in particular places. This is something I think that there needs to be some kind of fundamental shift. It's almost that the global economy left a vacuum in terms of the health of local economies and the necessary connection of people to the place where they live and the way in which they make their living.

You mentioned that there was this sense of Patagonia, this connection to nature. And I think it was easier for us than most people because so many of our early employees were climbers and surfers and had this distinct connection that when you go out, when you get a mile from the road, you have both the higher sense of agency and also a sense of humility that you're not the master of your fate when you don't have all of the human resources of safety and connection behind you. And well before we got involved in the supply chain or thought we could do anything about it or felt any responsibility for that, because of that connection to wild places, we started to give 1% of sales to grassroots environmental organizations. But one of the things we learned is that we didn't give to the big greens, we didn't give to Nature Conservancy, we didn't give to Greenpeace. We gave to these places that were trying to save or preserve a particular patch of land or stretch of water. They were run by local people, and they usually had almost no budget. The budget of a corner church, less than $1 million and 3 or 4 volunteers and a couple of staff. But these people had the respect of their communities. They were tied into the place they lived, and every effort was connected to the love of the local community for that particular forest or that particular stretch of water. And I do think we need a revival of that all around the world and that it's a problem with centrally decided decisions, whether it's economic or what the effects of the community are when you don't belong to the community.

There's a Catholic social justice tenet called subsidiarity, which means that you drive decisions down as far as you can to include the people they're affected by. And that's one of the big things we've lost, I think, in the last 50 or 60 years.

I think the storytelling capacity of the company also goes back to the fact that we were a climbing equipment company. When you're making climbing equipment, you don't make good, better, best. You make the best you can because your customers are trusting their lives to the gear. It was such a small community of climbers. And we were kind of a global business from the beginning because it was a small community of climbers, but they were all around the world. All throughout the year, you'd have people camping in our parking lot from Scotland or from Japan on their way to Yosemite. The way we communicated to those people was as friends and equals. We also didn't have a kind of marketing savvy, we didn't say, okay, what's the best way to sell this to the most people. Because you're not going to sell climbing gear to anybody who isn't a climber. And I think when we started the clothing company, we kept that style of communication. That was critical to us because I think people responded to that. The customers responded to that. We would describe our products fairly neutrally or journalistically, rather than to make outrageous claims. You didn't have to put that filter in when you read our stuff. For the employees, for the company and for the leadership of the company, it created a kind of strategic discipline that if you're not creating a false image of yourself that has to be perpetuated, but you're actually communicating in a way that reflects who you are and who you aspire to be. Then people put your feet to the fire if you divert from that. So that's one side of it. It is how we communicate with the customer and how we communicate with the employee or how we communicate with the world are all pretty much the same.

I've seen businesses that reach out to the customer saying we're your pals and we're doing the right thing and we're great people. And then I see what they say to the investors that we're going to make you 20% every year, and don't you worry about a thing.

We were in a fortunate position that we didn't have to do that. We had a single owner who was quite connected to the purpose of the company and knew what it was. But one example that's kind of we've talked about quite a bit was the switch to organic cotton because we discovered accidentally that cotton we had thought of as a benign natural fiber as opposed to oil based nylon and polyester was actually quite harmful. We opened up a store in Boston proudly using recycled materials to create the walls and low VOC paints and all that. And after three days had to shut it down because the employees were calling in sick, called in an environmental engineer to say, okay, what's the problem here? He says, "Well, I've cleaned it up. Here's my bill." We said, "Wait a minute, what was the agent that was making people sick?" "Oh, that was formaldehyde off gassing from the cotton clothes stored in your basement." First indication we had, we commissioned an independent study of the environmental effects of the four major fibers we use. Cotton turns out to be the worst. Worse than polyester and nylon. Yvon looks at this and says, I don't like this. Is there an alternative? And we knew that organic cotton at that time was still being grown in California, still being grown in Turkey and China. There's a cooperative we still buy from in Texas that lost a family member to cancer. They attributed it to spraying. So since the 70s they've been organic. So, we started to look at that and think, how can we just switch? Let's just switch our entire production to organic cotton. At one point, Yvon I were going, "I don't even want to be in the sportswear business anymore if we can't solve this, if we fail."

So here's the problem. We did our homework and we bought the cotton directly from the farmers. We helped them out to get some financial guarantees. We patted ourselves on the back and thought we were great. But when we did that, the farmers had no connection to assembly factories or the mills. And so we broke our connection to the global supply chain, which meant we had to rebuild it. And when we went to spinners, which is the next step in production, because it's turning the fiber into yarn, they're going, "Oh, we hate this stuff, it gums up on machines. It's sort of like seeds and stems and we don't want to touch it." And so our own people are going, "Okay, wait a minute here. I've got to do everything I did last season. I've got to design everything. I've got to color everything and do the specs, show it to the major customers, and at the same time, find an entire new infrastructure for selling cotton sportswear." So, it was a gentle revolt, but it was a revolt on the employees' part in figuring out how to tell the story? How do we persuade people that what we're doing is wrong, and we've got to figure out a way out of it.

So, we ended up taking employees and buses 40 at a time to the cotton fields in California. And when you go into a conventional field, you don't even have to open the door to the bus. You start to smell the chemicals. Organophosphates that are used to prepare the plants were developed as nerve gases in World War II. And then you go to the fields. There's no birds around. There's nothing in there. If you put your hand in the soil, there's no life in it, because it takes five years for the worms to come back. There's no vegetation. In fact, in a conventional cotton field, the plants are held mechanically in place. And so you feed them chemicals in water. If you don't, there's no capacity for that dirt to actually grow anything.

At the end of the day, we take people to an organic farm where there would be real black soil and there would be birds around. And it didn't smell like a factory that the EPA hadn't shut down, and people would come back from that trip and say, this is a pain, but the company is doing the right thing and we're going to make it work. And so we did, and we had to cut the sportswear line by about little more than half. We had to cut our margins for the first couple of years, suffered loss of sales, all of that. But if we had viewed that as an investment, we might have done all of that. We didn't. We just thought we were making a big bet. But it turned out not to be such a big bet because it strengthened our relationship with our customers. It certainly changed the company, and it gave us the capacity to address future environmental challenges to say, "Okay, how do we get the neoprene out of wetsuits, how do we address the issue of circularity?"

Anyway, that was kind of our major story for us. And by the way, the solution for the problem of spinning, we finally found somebody in Bangkok who's one of the largest spinners in the world who looked at it and said, "Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to try something." So we worked on an experimental basis and basically he cooled the factory floor and he solved the problem of gumming-up of the cotton. And years later we asked him, why did you even talk to us? We were so small and you were so big. And he said, "I guess you can call me a closet environmentalist."

And in my experience, there's a lot of this. You talk about the business case, but in fact, I think more often than not, the intrinsic motivation works to overcome the business restrictions.

I think that the movement of the spinning wheels is also a beautiful example of the right to be responsible in a way that you said, "Okay, we're not going to be reliant on the British textile industry. We can pursue an alternative that's going to allow us to prosper in a way that we couldn't before."

Well, at a certain point in the mid-2000s, we were very interested in the idea of cradle to cradle business. William McDonough. I think that idea, by the way, has been expanded by Kate Raworth, and the whole idea of a circular economy rather than just circular products is which also connects to place. Because you're in a specific place, you're trying to find one business that generates waste that can become another business' feedstock. I think this is a very promising area. What we were doing as we said, "Okay, we're going to take everything back and recycle it into something of equal value. That's our goal." And it took us five years of work. We developed it with a supplier in Japan, a pretty good way to recycle anything that was oil based. But, along the way we thought, this is not the end all and be all. There's a reason when you talk about recycling in the four Rs of reduce, reuse, and repair, recycle comes last because you shouldn't have to recycle the product that never should have been made in the first place because it wasn't well made or it wasn't useful. What we discovered about our own practices is we looked at it and we said, the zipper is the most vulnerable element in a jacket or a sweater. And we were taking six months to repair something because we just didn't have the capacity to do that, and if a customer came in with a broken zipper, we'd give them a new jacket because it would take too long. We didn't want to deprive them of that. Everybody has items in their closet, most people do that they haven't worn for a year, either because they don't like the color or they've outgrown it. All of those things affect the use of a product, the potential life of a product well before you get to the end stage. And so we wanted to address that. We created something called the Common Threads program that kind of graduated into our worn wear program. But the final element of that, we upped the repair capacity. We kept doubling it. And every time we doubled it, we'd get double the returns to the point where we were running the largest clothing repair facility in North America. We created this initial program with eBay, which we now do on our own. So if you look for the sweater you're wearing on the Patagonia website, it will say you can also buy this used if there's some used available.

So we did all that but we thought how do we address reduce when we're a company that makes things. That's when we got the idea to run the ad. A version of this had been done by Doug Tompkins with Esprit in a very small publication about 20 years before. We had done something in our own catalog 20 years before. But I think the moment was ripe and we took out a full page ad in the New York Times on Black Friday. Some people thought, "Oh, we're brilliant marketers." We got accused of that. The backstory is that I was the coauthor of the ad and Rick Ridgway was the other author. We had to take that before the board about five times because we were worried about killing our Christmas business. It was a big deal. An employee came to me afterwards. She says, "Well, what's our metric for success for this ad?" And I just burst into laughter. I said, "You know, telling people not to buy." And I said, "Okay, let's do this." Three weeks after this ad comes out, if the sales of this product have gone down, we've failed because we're being martyrs. And that's not our intention here. If they go up, we've failed because we're greenwashing. But if they stay the same, it's like the Goldilocks solution. We're okay." And the sales of that product did stay the same. Patagonia was doing well that year.

Upper West Side.

That's wonderful.

Yeah. I think that's one of the things that have really gained the trust of customers, that we really do guarantee things for life.

I think not in business. The heroes would have come from the world of climbers. From the Transcendentalists, actually for me. John Muir. The early travel writers and explorers who were writing about the world. I think that those were the heroes. I think there was a fundamental connection that was quite influential in our history between Yvon and Doug Tompkins. Doug Tompkins was his best friend who actually started The North Face, but he sold it when it was very small. And then he built quite a big business called Esprit, where his wife was a designer. The deep friendship and the competition, in a way between Doug and Yvon persisted for years and years. And, at a certain point, Doug sold everything and he took all his money. He sold his paintings, he sold his Ferrari. He sold his house in San Francisco. He plowed all of his money into saving land in Chile and Argentina and eventually donated that to create a park. And he always put pressure on Yvon to sell Patagonia. Stop being in the business, we're just trashing the Earth. You've got to get out of this.

At a certain point, there was another independent verification Yvon went to see at one point. In the early 90s, we'd gone through a stretch of being a little bit lost or expanding into too many different things. And he went to this guy who lived on a yacht who's a business expert. The guy said, "Why are you in business?" And Yvon said, "Well, I'm in business to give away 1% of sales to environmental causes." The guy says, "Oh, that's bullshit." He says, "If you sold your business for $100 million, you would create a foundation and you'd give away a lot more money." Yvon said that really put him aback. He says he had to think about why he was in business, and one of the reasons he was in business, which was key, was to create an example that other people could learn from to make it. It's not to be the example, it's to create a sense of possibility for other people that they can do this. So that was critical.

Then Doug died in a kayaking accident about nine years ago. And then two years ago, I think we did the final. Yvon, his wife and their two adult children donated. They owned 100% of the stock, and they donated it all to a trust. That trust has the voting rights, but the stock is controlled by a group that gives to large scale environmental projects. Doug's widow was telling Yvon, "Your way was a good way." And I think what we finally have is a structure that's also in line with the purpose and the values. It's the first of that type in the United States.

Absolutely. The B-Corp movement, the very important, 1% for the planet is a group we co-founded of businesses that give 1% of their sales. There are a lot of people who say, "Oh, Patagonia is a one-off. You know, it's a privately held company. It was owned by a visionary leader." All of that is true, but I know my colleagues and I know my own limitations. We were not rocket scientists. We were pretty ordinary people who had an increasing sense of purpose and an increasing sense of confidence that we could act on that.

I put this in the first book, that 99% of Patagonia's DNA is no different from any other business. I mean, you buy, you sell, and you keep a little bit to reinvest into, give to your employees at the end of the year pocket. We now give it to the pockets of Mother Earth. But, the idea of running a business with a specific purpose, and I like the idea of keeping to a strategic discipline rather than this whole idea of the past 50 years of getting unrelated companies under one financial and structural roof in order to achieve efficiencies of scale without really a sense of how those businesses work together. I think it has been a mistake. Any of those is a mistake. I think one business has a purpose for some kind of common good. The second is how does it go about doing that business? And the third is how does it treat its stakeholders, its employees, the communities that operate in its customers, all of those? All of those things are really important.

But the whole idea of stakeholder capitalism, I think, has to be bound by a sense of purpose. Otherwise you're just creating a hodgepodge of, "Okay, I'm going to be good to my customers one day and good to my employees the next." It has to be bound by some sense of common direction that's shared by the people in the organization.

I think in going along with that is the sense of communicating to everybody pretty much in the same way. So you don't create surprises. The worst thing you can do is go back to your investors after five years and say, "Okay, now we're going to be good guys."

But yeah, I would, I would there are a few companies we could look at. I don't, I don't know that I have the broadest perspective.

Just to bear out a little bit. We think that the financial health of the business is absolutely important. We almost lost the company in the early 90s by being too deeply in debt. Financial independence and also close attention to the business, profit is not an aim, but it's the means in which we can do things and it can't pay your bills. It's just like a household. If you can't pay your bills, you can't honor your commitments.

In terms of companies, Dr. Bronner's dropped out of the B-Corp movement because it felt that it was too broad and that there were too many companies who didn't have a deep supply chain or didn't have a strong enough commitment to making serious changes. B-Corp is changing the way that they evaluate companies, but they used to have for the first 18 years a numerical score. 200 was the highest number and in Patagonia, I think there were 150 something. So we were pretty good. But Dr. Bronner's, the soap company, had 175. It's a much narrower product line than Patagonia. But I really respect the thoroughness with which they approach all of the labor and the procurement practices for their raw materials and how they think about everything.

There's a women's clothing company that's now run by a Patagonia alumna, Eileen Fisher. I have a lot of regard for what they do. There are probably a handful of natural foods companies that we would also respect. But I'd also look at some big organizations. If you look at the totality of what they do, it's not that impressive. But Nike, for instance, is really terrific compared to where they were a few years ago. I haven't really looked into it lately, but they were terrific on resource efficiency, and using the minimum amount of material makes a huge difference. We collaborated with Walmart 18 years ago on creating metrics by which apparel companies and footwear companies could evaluate their environmental and social practices. Walmart adopted in 2007/08 some really ambitious environmental goals that they backed off of. But every 10 years or so they get a new CEO and they recommit.

Lorna Davis who led the effort for Danone, which is a big French company, to have its US subsidiary made a B-Corp said, "Once this gets into the culture, it doesn't go. I mean it may encounter defeats." She wasn't referring to Danone specifically, but this was after their CEO was fired. But I think it's a wise thing to note that once a culture understands that something is possible. It's very difficult to remove that sense of possibility.

And I think that's even more powerful. It's actually something I think that business schools should develop the capacity to look at. It's even more powerful when it's a group. I still think even at Patagonia, all of our compensation is based on individual performance the way we think about it. But in fact, it's groups that do things.

I'm vocationally a writer. My tendency is to think about what I bring to the work at a kind of lonely job of writing on a computer or a typewriter before that. But, in effect, when I look at my work at Patagonia, the best work has all been with other people in which I was just a part of it, and I never thought of myself that, I never identified that way. Yeah, but that's the truth of it and good work is done by groups.

When you look at movements, you talk about Gandhi and Lincoln. If I look at movements for art, like Abstract Expressionism or the Impressionists in Paris. It's all in a specific locality. They were all neighbors. They were all talking to each other. They gave each other a sense of possibility. I had a tour of the civil rights district in Atlanta by Martin Luther King's driver. And they were all living near each other. They were working on the same blocks. Two blocks away from each other in one sort of commercial district, teaching each other, increasing that sense of the possible. We really need that now.

Well, thanks for asking. I grew up in the 60s in the Bay area. I came of age there, and at a certain point, I refused to go to high school, and I wanted to go to an experimental high school that my parents were kind enough to scrape up the money to send me there. I ended up being the assistant director on the board and then involved in a newsletter about alternative education. I think growing up in the late 60s in the Bay area, early 70s, it was anti-authoritarian. It was communitarian in some ways, a strong sense of possibilities that things would change. And then all of that sort of came crashing down in my life. Personally, there was a big recession and I had no more than a year of college. I was not sure where to go. I got a job working for Yvon. He's my uncle. He was my hero when I was growing up because he was a climber. He was the poorest member of the family, by the way, in those days. He lived a life. My mother also had tremendous respect for him because he lived a life of his choosing in a way that no one else in the family quite did. So I got a postcard from my grandmother, for whom English was her second language, and she says, "I hear you're hard up working in a car wash in the winter? So why don't you ask your uncle for a job? I hear he pays his men $3 an hour." Oh, my God, that's a fortune. So I did, intending to stay six months.

That was when I came to work at the climbing equipment company. And even though I was more interested in sort of intellectual pursuits, and I was a writer. My mentors were writers. I loved the culture and this little climbing. I love the informal, communitarian quality, the fact that we were making good quality equipment at that time. And so, 53 years later, here I am. We created Patagonia that year, and that was tremendous fun. I had never thought about going into business, but I loved enterprise, I had helped to create a newsletter, and I helped to run a school. I liked working with others in an enterprise. That's kind of the beginning.

For where I am now, I love the work I do at Yale. I love the work I do with the employees at Patagonia. I'm deeply and happily committed to doing a third book. This would be kind of extending what Patagonia work? How would that work in an economy as a whole?

Then, I'm happy to be writing poems for the rest of my life.

Well, that would be lovely. Thank you.

Well, thank you so much. I would just like to add one little point because you were mentioning Yvon. A lot of people, particularly in these times, ask, how do you keep hopeful?

What I often point to is that Yvon is the most pessimistic person I know. He refers to himself as a doomer. I think this is based on his connection to the natural world, where until he was 40, he spent 200 nights a year under the stars and didn't even have a tent. And he's seen the degradation of the streams that were heaving, the glaciers melting where he climbed. But that sense of despair about the health of the natural world never interfered with his sense of agency. It never stopped him from acting.

I think for listeners who are thinking about business and thinking about the kinds of things we need to do in this time, which hasn't changed just because we have a different administration in Washington. To remember that sense and it also connects human nature to actual nature, to remember that what makes us fully human is that when we act on how we respond with affection and love for the world in the way we make our living and the way we are with our friends and communities.

Thanks so much for having me on and for our conversation. I really appreciate it.