If you pay $85,000 and hire guides to take you up Everest, and all the fixed ropes are in place, and there's 28 ladders across all the crevasses, and you don't even have to carry a pack, the camps are set up for you, there's a little chocolate mint on your sleeping bag. You know, you've got computers with the weather forecast, you've got oxygen bottles, you've got a Sherpa in front with a three-foot rope. One in the back pushing. You're going to come down from that mountain the same person you were when you started out. I've done a lot of different sports. One of the great lessons I learned, kayaking, whitewater kayaking. One day I did a very difficult whitewater river, and I left my paddle at home purposely. So I did the whole river without a paddle. And I learned more that day than I've ever learned kayaking.

[01:01]

Because I learned to look much further ahead than normal. Because a kayak, I mean, a paddle is a very powerful tool. You can wait until the last second and just do a big sweep and go around the rock. Or you can look far ahead and start reading the water. And I never fell over. I did this difficult river by myself, very... efficiently, much more efficiently than otherwise. It really taught me a lot. I'm a fly fisherman also. If you really want to catch fish, you use worms. Trout are suckers for worms. But, you know, the art of fly fishing is a matter of learning about entomology, reading the water, It's all about the process of catching the fish. It's not about focusing on killing as many fish as you can. One of the things I think that's really important is to have good teachers, but at some point you have to lose the guide.

[02:08]

You know, if you're climbing Everest with a guide, your mind is shut off. Your mind is about as active as when you're watching television. You know, it's kind of like you can have somebody drive you, a chauffeur drive you to a place 10 days in a row, but you won't know how to get there on your own until you actually drive there yourself. And some of the accidents that have happened on Everest are from people that are guided, and the guide gets into trouble, and suddenly they're up there, and they don't know how they got up there. They don't know how to get down. Whereas when you're doing it yourself, you're very aware, you're looking... all the time for an escape route, okay, well, if a storm comes here, I'm going to bail out this way. In this day and age, when time is the most valuable thing you have, a lot of people want to take the shortcuts. They don't want, they don't have the time to learn how to do anything, so they hire guides. And I think that's wrong. I think it's a really good idea to just lose that guide at some point, or lose the teacher.

[03:16]

After a while, my business, my little business that making hardware was very successful. And we started redesigning every single piece of climbing equipment there was. In the 70s, climbing got really popular, and it got to be a lot more climbers. And I started going around to doing some climbs that I had done years before, and I started seeing big holes in the cracks. And it turned out that putting in these hard steel pitons and taking them out repeatedly was destroying the very rock that we were climbing on. And we got pretty upset about that. And I realized that here we thought we were doing a great thing by not leaving any trace, and in fact, we were leaving permanent traces. So we decided right away to phase out of making these pitons. Thankfully, we adopted a different way of making these little aluminum chocks that you could just put in with your fingers into a crack, a constriction in the rock, and take them out with your fingers.

[04:27]

So it didn't hurt anything. But, you know, it wasn't easy to convince the climbing community who'd been pounding these big pitons in with a 20-ounce hammer to suddenly put this little piece of aluminum in and trust their lives to it. But... So, you know, we had to write the book on how to use them, and it worked. We finally convinced the climbing world to do that, and it was kind of the advent of clean climbing, and that's the way a lot of people climb these days. So that was my first kind of lesson in responsibility and the fact that we were the problem, so therefore we were the solution. It didn't take long before... We had 80% of the climbing market in America. We developed ice climbing gear, even boots, shoes, I mean, all kinds of stuff. But we weren't making any money.

[05:29]

And that's because we were too idealistic. We were basically making stuff for ourselves. We didn't consider ourselves businessmen. We were craftsmen, and who just happened to be making products that people needed. But it was hard to make a buck. But I took a trip to Scotland in the winter one year, and when I was there, I bought a rugby shirt. Now, this is mid-60s, I guess, and at that time, active sportswear for men was basically gray sweatshirts and sweatpants. Men did not wear colorful sportswear like they do now. But I had this rugby shirt that was blue and red and yellow stripes and I thought I made a great climbing shirt because it had a collar and so your hardware slings didn't cut into your neck. And it was made out of real tough material and so I started wearing it climbing and everybody would come up to me and say, wow, where'd you get that cool shirt?

[06:34]

So, you know, the entrepreneurial light bulb came off in my head. So I imported a few from England and tried to sell them and they sold straight off. And so I got more and pretty soon, you know, I started making shorts and so I got into the rag business that way. One day I saw my friend Doug Tompkins wearing a fila wool pullover and it was brushed wool. And I thought, wow, that's pretty cool. If that could be made out of a synthetic, so it'd be more practical in the outdoors, it'd be a great product. So my wife went down to the Cal Mart in L.A. where you buy fabrics looking for synthetic fleece, and she found some imitation-looking fur stuff that they were selling for people to use for toilet seat covers.

[07:39]

In Kansas, that is. It was this awful looking stuff. But we made a jacket out of it, and it worked. It really worked great. You know, you could fall into a river in the winter and take it off and shake it, and all this water would run out and put it back on. It would save your life. So that was the beginning of the whole fleece thing. And we gradually improved the product until the mid-'80s, when we came out with a really nice-looking product. It wasn't just functional, it actually looked good, too. We called it Cinchilla. And that's what, you know, this polar fleece is now and everything. But we started that whole thing. Well, what happened then is that suddenly our business took off because everybody wanted to buy the Cinchilla. So we were selling the stuff to Everybody.

[08:39]

And we were growing the business 50% a year. We were opening up lots of wholesale accounts. We were opening up our own retail stores. We were sending catalogs to mailing lists to people who didn't request it, but we were sending them a catalog anyway. We got caught in this trap of growth, never really thinking what we were doing. This growth was coming to us, and we were accepting it. 1989, we had planned to do another 50% increase in business. We had hired 100 new people to support that growth. We bought all the inventory. And a recession hit. We only grew 20%. So, you know, it doesn't sound like bad growth, 20%. But when you're rammed up to do 50, it's a disaster. And at the same time, our bank... was in financial trouble, so they were calling in their loans.

[09:40]

So as you can imagine, with 50% growth every year, we had some real cash flow problems in the beginning. I was desperate for loans. My accountant even introduced me to some mafia connections who wanted to loan me some money for 28% interest, which is ironically what you have to pay with credit cards these days. Anyway, it was a real crisis for us. I mean, we almost lost the company. And I realized that my company was unsustainable. Right in the middle of the crisis, I took 10 of our most important people, and we took a walkabout down into Patagonia, the real Patagonian in South America. And we'd walk around for a half hour or so in the wilderness, and then we'd all sit down in a circle, and we'd talk about okay, what are we doing here anyway? Why are we in business?

[10:43]

None of us had wanted to be business people. Not one of us had a degree in business. And yet we were. And so we started talking about what our values were. And, you know, the first one that came up was quality. We were really... took pride in making the best climbing equipment in the world. Not among the best, but the very best. And so it was important for us to also do that with clothing. So we really were committed to making the absolute best. And we were committed to all the principles of industrial design into designing those clothes. We wanted to make really functional, hard-wearing, yet good-looking clothing. designer at the time said, oh, you know, we can't make the best clothes in the world. I said, well, why not? He said, well, you know, the best shirt is a, you know, hand-woven Italian fabric.

[11:50]

The buttons are hand-sewn. I mean, you know, it's a Giorgio Armani one-of-a-kind shirt, and it costs $300. I said, well, what happens if you take that shirt and you throw it in a washing machine? Oh, you can't do that. It'll shrink. I said, well, that's not good quality. You know, we were our own customers, and I knew that we wanted to wash that shirt in a bucket or a sink or an edge of a stream and have it dry in a couple hours and put it on and get on the airplane. So we had to identify what we meant by quality. And there were no books on what is quality in clothing. We had to figure out our own criteria for quality.

[12:36]

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