David Gelles joins guest host Jimmy Soni to discuss his career covering business for The New York Times. They talk about his books - Mindful Work, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, and Dirtbag Billionaire - and the reporting behind major stories on Bernie Madoff, Jack Welch, Boeing's 737 Max crashes, and Patagonia's Yvon Chouinard.
David explains how he broke a front-page story five weeks into journalism school, how he convinced Bernie Madoff to grant him a prison interview, and his process for writing books while working full-time. They also discuss raising kids who read for hours every day and why meditation helps him stay sane.
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Links
Highlights
Interviewing Bernie Madoff
Jimmy Soni: Good timing. Yeah. So fast forward, you know, I have to ask about it and then we’ll get back to books. But you interviewed Bernie Madoff in jail. Tell us the run up to that and how all that happened. So that’s year three of your career.
David Gelles: Yeah, that’s probably year three. So it’s 2011. I remember it was, the story, though, begins my very first week at the FT. So in late 2008, Bernie Madoff gets arrested. And when that happens, I’m in the financial newsroom in London and everyone’s watching the TV and like, oh, my gosh, what is this story? What’s happening? As it’s all going down, I’m literally in my orientation, I get a text from someone I’m close to who says, you’ll never believe who so and so’s uncle is. It’s Bernie Madoff. Which is to say, I had a personal connection, a couple steps removed to the family. And on instinct and with no grounding in credibility, I said, tell them to send him the message that if he ever talks to a reporter, he has to talk to me.
Jimmy Soni: That is audacious. That’s quite bold.
David Gelles: Nothing happened. Fast forward two years. I wake up one morning. I was still in San Francisco at the time. Yes. And I get an email. So it’s 2010 now. And I wake up and there’s an email in my inbox from Butner Correctional Facility, Federal inmate number 123456, Bernard L. Madoff. And he had sent me an email. Wow. And thus began months of correspondence with him where I sort of had to win his trust without compromising myself as a reporter or ceding to his wishes as he asked me to suss things out for him. So I played this very delicate dance. And after a couple attempts, the first of which was denied, to go visit him, I finally got the okay, and myself and Gillian Tett went down to North Carolina and spent these couple hours with him, where initially, I think both of us were on our back feet because it was such a shock to meet him. And he just started telling us his story. And after what felt like an hour, but was probably really only 15 or 20 minutes, we sort of kicked each other under the table and were like, wait, he’s spinning us. And we had to snap out of it and go on offense. And then we had this remarkable conversation.
Jimmy Soni: Wow. So when you got that email from him, did you believe it?
David Gelles: I mean, yeah, because it wasn’t without some basis. I had put in this request via family, and here were the results.
Jimmy Soni: And then the correspondence before you meet him, is it just slice of life stuff? I mean, what are you corresponding about?
David Gelles: He was asking me about how coverage of his case was being portrayed, and he was asking me what I thought of other stories. And so before I replied, I mean, I tried to be not accommodating, but I tried to be conversational and not dismissive or brusque because I wanted to win his trust. But I also checked every word I sent with the lawyers at the Financial Times before I sent it. And so we tried to stay in bounds, and I think we got there.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah. Did you ever find out why he didn’t talk to another reporter?
David Gelles: Well, he did. So I was not the only one. A few months before Gillian and I went in, Diana Henriques from the New York Times went in and had her interview with him, which was on the front page. So she scooped us. It was great. But we got the second one. We’re still proud of it.
Jimmy Soni: Yeah, fast follower is good on the Bernie Madoff in prison interview especially.
David Gelles: I was 30 at the time, so it was a coup.
David’s First Front Page Story
Jimmy Soni: Do you remember the first time you saw your name in print? Is that a moment that you can think back on?
David Gelles: I mean, it would have been those early ones in Student Underground and then the Voice of the Hill, those kind of ones. And I mean, sure, but I don’t think it gave me that rush. The one that gave me the rush came five weeks into J School when literally five weeks after starting graduate school at Berkeley, I had a story on the front page of the New York Times. And that was the one that was like, oh, here we go. And that gave me the full adrenaline rush of breaking big news and understanding what it meant to set the agenda on a big story.
Jimmy Soni: So let’s give listeners context for that story and for the path that led you to it. So tell us about the story and how you managed your way onto the front page of the Times.
David Gelles: Literally, I remember showing up five weeks before this all happened. My editor, my instructor, a woman named Lydia Chavez, pulled me aside and she sort of had to explain to me what a lead was. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know. I’d never heard of the inverted pyramid. I didn’t know what a nut graph was. I was pretty green. And nevertheless, she took a chance on me and was like, we’ll turn you into a reporter. So fast forward a few weeks. It is October of 2006. I’m in Berkeley, California. I’m up late at night. YouTube has just come out. YouTube’s a thing for the first time. It hasn’t even been acquired by Google yet. That would happen a month or so later. And I’m surfing YouTube just in the scroll, for the first time, letting the algorithm serve me videos, as we all still do today, in ways that have, I think, evolved past what we could have imagined at the time. And I remember the sequence. I remember it was Mavericks, the big wave surfing competition was going off, so there were videos of big wave surfers. I was like, well, that’s cool. And then there was a video of a big wave with a helicopter in the background filming. I was like, oh, that’s cool. Clicked on that. And then there was a military helicopter. And I’m a guy, so I’m like, all right, military helicopter. Click. Top Gun’s my favorite movie. Click. And then it went to fighter jets. I was like, click. And then all of a sudden, there was an Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgent video showing American soldiers getting IED’d and sniped set to jihadist music.
Jimmy Soni: Wow.
David Gelles: And I sobered up really quickly because I was probably a little high. I was in Berkeley. I sobered up really quickly. And my news radar went off. And I was like, what am I looking at? And it was just what I said. And from that, the algorithm started suggesting more and more. And I instinctively, that night, late at night, started cataloging them. I started copying URLs, I started a spreadsheet, and I was like, I’m going to keep track of all this. And I stayed up all night and I found hundreds over the course of the night. I had the usernames of who was uploading them. And I ran to Berkeley J School the next morning. I went to Lydia Chavez, who used to be a bureau chief at the New York Times, and I said, I think I have a real story. I think this is not a journalism school story. I think this is a proper story. A real, real story. And she said, oh, my gosh, yes. Fortuitously, another student in my class, in my little cohort of 12 students, was a man named Omar Fekeiki. Omar had arrived in the United States just five weeks earlier for the first time after having been a fixer for the Washington Post in Baghdad.
Jimmy Soni: Whoa.
David Gelles: Was an Iraqi national. We showed all this to him. He’s like, this is exactly what this is. These are recruiting videos. They sell them at roadside stands on DVDs. The Marines or the army guys probably bought them, brought them home. I then contacted one of the kids who had uploaded them, some kid in Minnesota who found it, uploaded it, and we reported this whole story. Lydia calls the national desk of the New York Times. She explains what we have here. They pair us with another Times reporter who essentially reports all of our work and the story goes on the front page.
Jimmy Soni: Wow. Wow. That’s an unbelievable story.
David Gelles: It was a wild story. And that night, that was still, I mean, the Times can still set the agenda in a big way. But if you think back to this is literally 20 years ago at that moment, whatever led the Times often led the national news television broadcast. I remember turning on CNN that night. And I forget if it was Anderson Cooper, whoever it was, leading with it. And you turn on CBS and they were leading with it. And it was a moment that set the agenda for that moment. And it was this confluence of the war and tech and Google and YouTube. And that was my signal. That was the story where I was like, oh, it feels good to have my name in print on a story like that.
Transcript
Jimmy Soni
I am here with one of my favorite people, David Gelles. Thank you for coming on Infinite Loops.
David Gelles
Thanks for having me.
Jimmy Soni
So you’ve done a lot of different kinds of work, but you are principally a reporter at the New York Times, as well as an author of three wonderful books. We’re going to talk about them today. But I want to turn back the clock a bit and start with how did it become clear to you that you wanted to be in the world of words? This is a very specific kind of world that attracts a certain person with a particular kind of neuroses. How did this become your path?
David Gelles
We have to go all the way back.
Jimmy Soni
All the way back. Rewind all the way back.
David Gelles
We’re talking about middle school or high school here. And I remember the first teacher I had who lit me up with a book. And I remember her name.
Jimmy Soni
What’s her name? Let’s make her famous.
David Gelles
Her name was Laurie Shantis. I’ve even been in touch with her sometime in the last 10 or 15 years. And she was the English teacher at Maybach High School. And I must have been a sophomore. I remember the room this class happened in, and I remember the book. And it was Crime and Punishment.
Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow. That is heady stuff.
David Gelles
It was a great, weird high school I went to, and she was an incredible teacher, and she was the one that made me love the word and what it could do. And so that was my entry into being a deep reader and lover of words. And also a writer. She pushed us to write. And I didn’t have any illusions as a sophomore and a junior in high school that I would somehow be a writer one day. But at least it got the wheels moving. It got the gears turning. And I mean, it’s vivid. I remember when it began, and that was then.
Jimmy Soni
That’s amazing. And did you dabble as a student in newspaper?
David Gelles
Not at all. Not until college. So I went to Boston University. And while at Boston University, they had actually a great student newspaper there, the Free Press. But I think, yeah, Boston University Free Press. I think that’s right. And I had nothing to do with it. Never wrote for it once. Didn’t try. Was oblivious and uninterested. I did, however, work for what was known as the student underground, which was the anarchist newspaper on campus. And in a very formative, I didn’t know, very formative trip. I think I was a sophomore. Yeah, it must have been. As a sophomore, I went on a Students Against Sweatshops junket of sorts to Nicaragua during spring break. And reported on maquiladora factories and lived with sweatshop workers in really brutal conditions in Nicaragua and saw some really tough stuff and came back and wrote about it for the student underground, our radical newspaper at the time. And I’m sure the copy was terrible. I had no idea what I was doing, but it was my first real experience reporting and it made an impact.
Jimmy Soni
That’s amazing. Take me back even before this. Were you an avid reader as a kid? What was your reading life like when you were younger?
David Gelles
I can’t say I was an avid reader. My kids, who are 10 and 12 right now, are truly avid readers. I mean, they read for four to seven hours a day. We have to beg them to stop reading in order to brush their teeth. They’re sort of freaks about it. So I was nothing close to that at that point. They have, literally, I’m thinking, I think they’ve probably read more books already in their lives than I have in the last many years.
Jimmy Soni
Well, hold on. We have to go down the tangent. This doesn’t happen by accident, I mean presumably.
David Gelles
It doesn’t.
Jimmy Soni
How have you engineered this?
David Gelles
We’ll do the parenting section later. But no, I was not an avid reader, but I did grow up in a family, well, in two homes because my parents were split, where there was a lot of writing and reading around. So again, I wasn’t an avid reader like my kids are, but I was always exposed to words. Both my parents were writers themselves. My mother has written several books. My dad was a dance and music critic, including for the New York Times.
Jimmy Soni
So you inherited the family business, sort of.
David Gelles
Yeah. No that’s the Sulzbergers.
Jimmy Soni
That’s true. Fair enough.
David Gelles
But yeah, when I actually go into the New York Times CMS and enter my byline, my father’s name comes up too, as a suggestion.
Jimmy Soni
That’s cool.
David Gelles
Yeah. So I was always around words.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. I remember when I was really young, not when I was reading serious books, but when I was young and just fooling around, it was, for me, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, the Encyclopedia Brown series, which I would just tear through, and then the Mossflower and Redwall series by Brian Jacques. And I had this experience of the librarian knew I liked that series so much that when the new copies came in, she would hold them back from other kids and secretly give them to me. And that’s when I knew that reading could be totally engrossing. Did you have those books for yourself at a very young age?
David Gelles
I did at a very young age. I’m trying to remember. I mean, Hatchet is there. And in fact, I was literally looking at Hatchet in my apartment last night with my kids because they have read it at this point. Where the Red Fern Grows, All Quiet on the Western Front was the first one that I remember even before Crime and Punishment, pushing me as a reader and a thinker. I mean, I had blown through all the Hardy Boys, I’d read all the kids’ lit and the Choose Your Own Adventure or whatever it might have been that was age appropriate at the time. But I think the first real memories as a reader, I guess I remember the Lord of the Rings trilogy reading that with my father. But we didn’t have Harry Potter at the time. So I’m just trying to think back to those immersive worlds. And the one that really, even before Crime and Punishment, gives me that visceral sense of being lost was All Quiet. And then fast forward a little bit, just after Crime and Punishment, it was Moby Dick.
Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow. You were really reading some serious stuff in high school. These are the big leagues.
David Gelles
Well, I think there are doctoral dissertations, the shelves groaning under the weight of them. For both those books. And on the Moby Dick front, I had a really unique edition of the book that was the paperback produced by a printing press called Arion Press in San Francisco. Great printing press, run by a family friend. But the thing is this big. I mean, it’s probably a six pound book. And I took it backpacking through Guatemala, Honduras and Belize for three weeks. And everyone thought I was a crazy person because I had this tome that I was trekking around next to my folded up underwear in Ziploc bags. But that was another one. I think so for me, the experience is going really deep in these worlds rather than burning through books at a fast clip.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. You know, there’s, I wrote columns for the student newspaper. And I remember that at one point a friend of mine was asking, why do this? You’re not compensated for it. And I said, because it’s more thrilling for me to see how people react to that than it is to do my homework. I’ll put more time into a column that’s 750 words for a handful of Duke students than I will into a serious paper that’s determining a grade in a class. Did you have a similar experience writing for the underground newspaper?
David Gelles
I think that at that point that was sort of a one off. And in truth, I probably took the assignment to justify the trip. Again, I wasn’t serious about reporting at the time, didn’t quite know what I was doing. What you’re describing, though, kicked in for me in my early 20s. So a few years after college, I was living in Washington D.C. It was my first real job out of college. I was designing museum exhibitions in Washington D.C. and I sort of got the journalism bug and I started freelancing for really small community newspapers. I am not talking about the Washington City Paper. I remember cold emailing, pitching the City Paper and they sort of laughed me out of the building. They said, go home kid. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t have any clips. And so I was writing for true community news. Yeah, it was called the Hill Rag because I lived on Capitol Hill and Voice of the Hill. And I mean, I think we’re talking circulation 2,000. These were pamphlets that they would hand out to support local advertising. But that was where I had that experience of, oh, I’m doing this because I can’t help but do it. And that was a signal to me that I should probably be doing this full time.
Jimmy Soni
Did you, how long did you do that? That’s a very particular kind of...
David Gelles
A year and a half, two years. And again, it wasn’t a full time job. I had my day job, but I was leaving work early to go report on things in the neighborhood because I had the bug. And then during that time I applied to graduate school and went to Berkeley J school starting in 2006.
Jimmy Soni
Got it. Okay. Do you remember the first time you saw your name in print? Is that a moment that you can think back on?
David Gelles
I mean, it would have been those early ones in Student Underground and then the Voice of the Hill, those kind of ones. And I mean, sure, but I don’t think it gave me that rush. The one that gave me the rush came five weeks into J School when literally five weeks after starting graduate school at Berkeley, I had a story on the front page of the New York Times. And that was the one that was like, oh, here we go. And that gave me the full adrenaline rush of breaking big news and understanding what it meant to set the agenda on a big story.
Jimmy Soni
So let’s give listeners context for that story and for the path that led you to it. So tell us about the story and how you managed your way onto the front page of the Times.
David Gelles
Literally, I remember showing up five weeks before this all happened. My editor, my instructor, a woman named Lydia Chavez, pulled me aside and she sort of had to explain to me what a lead was. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know. I’d never heard of the inverted pyramid. I didn’t know what a nut graph was. I was pretty green. And nevertheless, she took a chance on me and was like, we’ll turn you into a reporter. So fast forward a few weeks. It is October of 2006. I’m in Berkeley, California. I’m up late at night. YouTube has just come out. It’s YouTube’s a thing for the first time. It hasn’t even been acquired by Google yet. That would happen a month or so later. And I’m surfing YouTube just in the scroll, for the first time, letting the algorithm serve me videos, as we all still do today, in ways that have, I think, evolved past what we could have imagined at the time. And I remember the sequence. I remember it was Mavericks, the big wave surfing competition was going off, so there were videos of big wave surfers. I was like, well, that’s cool. And I’m a guy, so I was like, that’s cool. And then there was a video of a big wave with a helicopter in the background filming. I was like, oh, that’s cool. Clicked on that. And then there was a military helicopter. And I’m a guy, so I’m like, all right, military helicopter. Click. Top Gun’s my favorite movie. Click. And then it went to fighter jets. I was like, click. And then all of a sudden, there was an Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgent video showing American soldiers getting IED’d and sniped set to jihadist music.
Jimmy Soni
Wow.
David Gelles
And I sobered up really quickly because I was probably a little high. I was in Berkeley. I sobered up really quickly. And my news radar went off. And I was like, what am I looking at? And it was just what I said. And from that, the algorithm started suggesting more and more. And I instinctively, that night, late at night, started cataloging them. I started copying URLs, I started a spreadsheet, and I was like, I’m going to keep track of all this. And I stayed up all night and I found hundreds over the course of the night. I had the usernames of who was uploading them. And I ran to Berkeley J School the next morning. I went to Lydia Chavez, who used to be a bureau chief at the New York Times, and I said, I think I have a real story. I think this is not a journalism school story. I think this is a proper story. A real, real story. And she said, oh, my gosh, yes. Fortuitously, another student in my class, in my little cohort of 12 students, was a man named Omar Fekeiki. Omar had arrived in the United States just five weeks earlier for the first time after having been a fixer for the Washington Post in Baghdad.
Jimmy Soni
Whoa.
David Gelles
Was an Iraqi national. We showed all this to him. He’s like, this is exactly what this is. These are recruiting videos. They sell them at roadside stands on DVDs. The Marines or the army guys probably bought them, brought them home. I then contacted one of the kids who had uploaded them, some kid in Minnesota who found it, uploaded it, and we reported this whole story. Lydia calls the national desk of the New York Times. She explains what we have here. They pair us with another Times reporter who essentially reports all of our work and the story goes on the front page.
Jimmy Soni
Wow. Wow. That’s an unbelievable story.
David Gelles
It was a wild story. And that night, that was still, I mean, the Times can still set the agenda in a big way. But if you think back to this is literally 20 years ago at that moment, whatever led the Times often led the national news television broadcast. I remember turning on CNN that night. And I forget if it was Anderson Cooper, whoever it was, leading with it. And you turn on CBS and they were leading with it. And it was a moment that set the agenda for that moment. And it was this confluence of the war and tech and Google and YouTube. And that was my signal. That was the story where I was like, oh, it feels good to have my name in print on a story like that.
Jimmy Soni
I mean, that’s, I have so many questions. You’re a student at that point of the craft, and so how do you deal with, I mean, how does regular homework compare to doing that story?
David Gelles
I don’t remember doing homework in J school, but I really just considered myself a freelancer. This is the advice I still give students is just do as much real work as you can. And so when I got to J school, the Times was the big one, but I was freelancing for anyone who would take me. And it was $50 a story, 200 bucks a story, whatever I could get. I wrote for magazines, I wrote for small business journals. I wrote for the Berkeley Daily Planet about trees getting cut down. I was like, whatever practical experience I can get, I’m going to get it. And so that’s how I got through those couple of years.
Jimmy Soni
In the immediate aftermath of that story, you know, it’s sort of like you got up to bat and you had a home run your first time out. How did you, what was your follow up act? Did you stick with that particular story?
David Gelles
No, there was no follow up. I mean, I did probably have homework and other assignments, but I did try to maintain a relationship with the Times and I did keep freelancing. So during my years at J school, I subsequently wrote for the House and Home section when it was still going, for the magazine, for the sports section. I tried to be as good of a freelancer as I could. And then I applied for the New York Times internship in 2007, figuring that with a page one byline that had gone most emailed, I probably had some good shots. I got back a form letter from Sheila Rule that said, “Thank you for your application. We’re going in a different direction.” Yeah, I still have that form letter framed on my desk to this day.
Jimmy Soni
I mean, that’s when you got to keep, yeah, it’s like, that’s amazing. So you get out of J school and what happens after that?
David Gelles
Career wise, get out of J school. I began, I decided to focus on business reporting. While I was in J school, no one else in my class was interested in it. I found it very interesting. I figured if it was about people, not numbers, then there were going to be great stories there. And I sort of had the field to myself. So I did my first summer internship at Forbes magazine and wrote real Forbes stories and also Forbes lists. And then did my second year at Berkeley J school because it was a two year program. Studied long form magazine writing at the time, which was great experience to learn a narrative craft. And then graduated, went to the Miami Herald, joined the business desk and was in Miami for the fall of 2008 for the presidential election. So was doing small business coverage, but also helping with the election coverage, which is an incredible weird thing to be a part of. And also just a last glimpse of a real big daily metro newsroom operating. So that was wonderful. And then very quickly, by December of 2008, had accepted a job in San Francisco with the Financial Times. Initially, as I think I was a digital media correspondent, which meant I was supposed to be doing video and audio stuff, which I had no idea how to do. But I sort of bluffed my way in. They, I got there, they realized I didn’t know what I was doing. They’re like, well, what can you do? And I was like, I can write stories. And they said, well, no one’s covering these things called Twitter and Facebook. Why don’t you be the social media guy? So I started covering social media for the FT in December of 2008, which was again, good timing.
Jimmy Soni
Good timing. Yeah. So fast forward, you know, I have to ask about it and then we’ll get back to books. But you interviewed Bernie Madoff in jail. Tell us the run up to that and how all that happened. So that’s year three of your career.
David Gelles
Yeah, that’s probably year three. So it’s 2011. I remember it was, the story, though, begins my very first week at the FT. So in late 2008, Bernie Madoff gets arrested. And when that happens, I’m in the financial newsroom in London and everyone’s watching the TV and like, oh, my gosh, what is this story? What’s happening? As it’s all going down, I’m literally in my orientation, I get a text from someone I’m close to who says, you’ll never believe who so and so’s uncle is. It’s Bernie Madoff. Which is to say, I had a personal connection, a couple steps removed to the family. And on instinct and with no grounding in credibility, I said, tell them to send him the message that if he ever talks to a reporter, he has to talk to me.
Jimmy Soni
That is audacious. That’s quite bold.
David Gelles
Nothing happened. Fast forward two years. I wake up one morning. I was still in San Francisco at the time. Yes. And I get an email. So it’s 2010 now. And I wake up and there’s an email in my inbox from Butner Correctional Facility, Federal inmate number 123456, Bernard L. Madoff. And he had sent me an email. Wow. And thus began months of correspondence with him where I sort of had to win his trust without compromising myself as a reporter or ceding to his wishes as he asked me to suss things out for him. So I played this very delicate dance. And after a couple attempts, the first of which was denied, to go visit him, I finally got the okay, and myself and Gillian Tett went down to North Carolina and spent these couple hours with him, where initially, I think both of us were on our back feet because it was such a shock to meet him. And he just started telling us his story. And after what felt like an hour, but was probably really only 15 or 20 minutes, we sort of kicked each other under the table and were like, wait, he’s spinning us. And we had to snap out of it and go on offense. And then we had this remarkable conversation.
Jimmy Soni
Wow. So when you got that email from him, did you believe it?
David Gelles
I mean, yeah, because it wasn’t without some basis. I had put in this request via family, and here were the results.
Jimmy Soni
And then the correspondence before you meet him, is it just slice of life stuff? I mean, what are you corresponding about?
David Gelles
He was asking me about how coverage of his case was being portrayed, and he was asking me what I thought of other stories. And so before I replied, I mean, I tried to be not accommodating, but I tried to be conversational and not dismissive or brusque because I wanted to win his trust. But I also checked every word I sent with the lawyers at the Financial Times before I sent it. And so we tried to stay in bounds, and I think we got there.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Did you ever find out why he didn’t talk to another reporter?
David Gelles
Well, he did. So I was not the only one. A few months before Gillian and I went in, Diana Henriques from the New York Times went in and had her interview with him, which was on the front page. So she scooped us. It was great. But we got the second one. We’re still proud of it.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, fast follower is good on the Bernie Madoff in prison interview especially.
David Gelles
I was 30 at the time, so it was a coup.
Jimmy Soni
So at this time in your life, are you thinking in book length form? I mean, one thing about being in newsrooms, you’re always surrounded by words and word people. People are kind of side hustling on books. Did you have designs on writing books back then, or was it really just cutting your teeth in journalism?
David Gelles
Maybe notionally, but I was mostly focused on cutting my teeth. I mean, I came to it pretty late again. It wasn’t on the student newspaper, so I was just trying to find my way in the profession. But what happened was when I met the woman who had become my agent, Binky Urban, who was legendary, she was Gillian Tett’s agent. She was agent of other friends and mentors of mine. I met her at a party and she said, “One day you’re going to have an idea for a book. Call me first.”
Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow. This is your version of the Madoff note.
David Gelles
Not far off. And so fast forward a year or so, right around the time I think I did the Madoff story, I wrote a magazine article for the FT Weekend magazine about companies that were starting to offer meditation in the workplace. And I emailed her that Monday and said, hey, did you see that story? Wonder if there’s a book here. She wrote right back and she said, I saw it. I agree. Let’s go. And that was my first book.
Jimmy Soni
And that became Mindful Work.
David Gelles
That became Mindful Work, which is 11 years old now.
Jimmy Soni
Wow. All right, so take me back, because this is, you know, at Infinite Books, this is our stock and trade, and we spend all this time obsessing about books and ideas. It is one thing to go from to do an article about companies that are out there that are embracing these practices, to graduate that to a book. So you’ve got the agent, you’ve got a thread of an idea, but there’s still a lot of miles to go between that and this book. So what was that like? And spare no detail, because we’ve got a lot of people listening who actually are in this process or might be thinking about this process for themselves. How do you go from, you sent the email to her, did you have in your head that there was a book there? Or is it really just a flyer? You were like, let me try this out.
David Gelles
Oh, no, I think I thought there was a book, something. The voice inside was like, this is something you need to go do. I don’t know that I knew the entirety of it, but probably in the reporting, and this is, I mean, this is probably 13 years ago, because the book came out 11 years ago, so it took me a couple years to get it done. So it was a long time ago. But in the reporting for the magazine article, I think I realized that there was enough. There was a lot more that I was not going to get in the article, which suggested to me, all right, there’s probably other characters, other chapters here. And then I honestly don’t remember a ton about the proposal or how it was structured or what was in it, but it was definitely the case that I sort of used that magazine article as the peg, probably broadened it out. And one thing that’s unusual about Mindful Work, which I don’t necessarily recommend, is that it’s almost like three, I almost inhabit three different voices in the book. There’s a narrative nonfiction sort of conventional reportorial voice. There is a personal autobiographical voice where I tell my own story of my relationship with Buddhism and meditation and mindfulness. And then there’s almost, at times, almost a meditation teacher voice that I inhabit, where I offer some loose instructions on how other people might go about these practices. That’s madness. I don’t recommend it at all. Figuring out how to thread those together was really difficult. And listen, I think we all make mistakes on any big project and hopefully don’t repeat them on our next project. Looking back, that is one of the things I think that makes, listen, I’m proud of the book. It was the right book for me at the right time, but I think it was one of the things that made it a very difficult book to write in some ways for me. And if I’m being honest, probably also may have limited some of the reach or potential because it was like, what kind of a book is this? It was a little hard to say, but that was the first book.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Did you enjoy doing it, though? I mean, really take us back. You signed the deal. Did you find your kind of dream editor? How did all that go down?
David Gelles
Yeah. So went out and we had interest from a few different editors. And I vividly remember this. We actually had three different offers on the line. And then Hurricane Sandy hit, and then the entire book publishing industry essentially shut down for six weeks. And when everyone came back, we had one offer, which was great because it was the right author, right editor, and it was Eamon Dolan, who was then at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And Eamon was great. And he would go on, he’s been the editor for all three of my books, and he took a real interest, and he did a great job holding my hand through the process of writing this first book. I remember the reporting for this book vividly. And it was really fun to figure out how to report for a book rather than a newspaper article. When I’m reporting for a newspaper article, I am very tactically and almost in a mercenary way looking for those perfect quotes, perfect details because you have so little space. So you get attuned to finding, oh, that’s it. That’s in there. Whereas the canvas is so much larger with a book that I found myself having to recognize that a lot of stuff that in newspaper or even magazine reporting might just end up on the cutting room floor, I was like, no, you need to hold on to that. You need to remember it. And so I actually found that you need to slow down when you’re reporting for books and sort of have a wider aperture and notice things that you might not otherwise notice in a different reporting style. So that was, I remember that. And I did some great reporting trips. I remember the writing being difficult, I think, because I was trying to thread these three different parts and listen, the reception was great. It was not a bestseller. That’s fine. But I still, no lie, I still to this day get notes about it. And I think for anyone who’s written a book that in some ways, beyond the lists, beyond the money, beyond the accolades, that’s the most satisfying. And when I still, to this day, 11 years later, someone reads it for the first time, they’re like, that really helped me. Yeah, well, amen. That’s incredible.
Jimmy Soni
Very brass tacks. You have a full time job doing reporting. How did you balance that with the book work? Especially given that it’s a different style of writing? I mean, this is, all my books have been side hustles. I love that. I actually think it’s important to be engaged in the world in some way and then have things that you’re doing that are longer form projects. I mean, I’m sure there are people, I know there are people who do just the long form stuff all the time. I think I’d go a little stir crazy. What was that like for you, balancing those two commitments?
David Gelles
I remember the reporting, the writing, reporting and writing for the first book, almost all of it happened before we had children. And so I had a little more time then.
Jimmy Soni
You’re like “Pro-tip people: do the first book before…”
David Gelles
I do remember having a bit more free time. I would say two things. Number one, I have a pretty high work metabolism and I also have learned how to be pretty efficient. I’m a fast writer, which really helps when you’re writing books. So I don’t have to rewrite things over and over. Not to say that every sentence that comes out is the final draft, but I write pretty clean, pretty fast copy. Was it a side hustle? Yes. Did I find it insurmountable? Not at all.
Jimmy Soni
Okay. Do you tend to write, do you chunk up your writing when you do it in the day? Do you write in the mornings? What’s your process like?
David Gelles
Before children, I was a night owl, and I would write at night. That’s definitely shifted. It’s harder to write at night. I think for this more recent book, I did most of my writing on vacation or on weekends.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, got it. So not during the week?
David Gelles
Well, I mean, inevitably, if I could squeeze a little in here and there, but for those dedicated chunks where, and I do find if you’re going to really settle into the prose and into the extended thought processes that I think make great books work, you need extended time without distraction to do that. And so I found that mostly happened not with 90 minutes on lunch break, but with three or four hours with no interruptions.
Jimmy Soni
For each of the books I’ve done, there’s a kind of model book, a book where, whether in the category or just in my head, it kind of sets the standard for what I’m trying to do. And I very consciously make careful studies of these books. I mean, to the point of knowing how many words are in a chapter or figuring out how did the author do this? Because it does, you feel like it’s somewhat impenetrable if you haven’t done it before. This is your first book. So there is a process of learning. You also don’t want to necessarily admit your ignorance to your editor. Not all the time. But did you have templates, models, books you were reading that served as a template for this book?
David Gelles
No. And again, I think, because it was an unusual book for the reasons I already mentioned, I was not prescient enough to sort of look for models or identify them. I think the same was true with my second book as well. There wasn’t an obvious comp because it was such a polemic. Which, in both cases, I probably made things hard for myself.
Jimmy Soni
Right, right. There have been polemics before.
David Gelles
Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
But so then when you’re, take me back to the revision and editorial process for a book at the very end is very different than the metabolism of journalism, than the pace. What was that like for you? Because I, you know, I have to believe that part of what’s nice about the work you do day to day is you put something out in the world, it’s put out quickly. You get feedback quickly, you move on to the next target. Books have five false deadlines. And that’s being conservative. How did you deal with that as a, given you’d grown up in the world of journalism?
David Gelles
I definitely, and I’ve told my team this over the years, when I send an email, I expect a reply back within 24 hours. Even if it’s just them saying, thanks, I’ll give you feedback in two weeks. Fine. But I can’t wait two weeks to get the read receipt. So I had to get better about telling them what I need as an author. And I think that’s something all authors should do is understand what you need to keep your own sanity. Yeah, so that was a part of it. Listen, I like being edited. There’s little I enjoy more than the experience of feeling like someone I trust really got in there with my copy and is actively investing their time and energy and trying to make it better and stress test the arguments and elevate the prose. And so whenever that happens, whether it’s Eamon or some of the other folks who have helped get eyes on my manuscripts over the years, I love it. And the more the better. I am not one of those people who bristles when I get edits. I don’t always agree with all them. I’ll push back.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, but you want the...
David Gelles
On balance, I will take that all day because I think it’s going to make me better.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, that’s great. You’re like an editor’s dream. I mean, yeah, because ultimately you do have to. I would say it’s a productive process to have a fight over a sentence or a paragraph or a word. It’s people with conviction coming to something and saying, I care about this and I think it’s this way. No, I care about it. I think it’s this way. I do think there’s value in that friction. But it sounds like you’re much more accommodating of the people who are editing you.
David Gelles
Yes, and I hold a grudge. You know, I remember specific sentences where I was overruled by an editor. And they were wrong. And I know those sentences. I can pull those URLs up right now.
Jimmy Soni
Let me ask you a more personal question about doing the book writing, because I don’t know if this is true for you. You are, you know, obviously you were a meditator. You’ve had, you know, you described this kind of on again, off again relationship with meditation. But did you find the book at any point consuming you? Were there stages where you felt like the only other people that are going to understand me are people who are doing book projects? Or were you able to turn that off and turn it on again when you needed?
David Gelles
Yeah. And probably because I have a relationship with meditation, definitely feel like it’s the case that my meditation mindfulness practice over the years has made me less neurotic with work stuff on balance.
Jimmy Soni
And so there’s a little bit of this. I mean, there’s a lot of it in the book. But just to go on the detour, the kind of segway about the mindfulness practice, this started for you pretty young. It sounds like.
David Gelles
I was a teenager.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And sort of explain to this audience what was the introduction?
David Gelles
I mean, I was a kid in Berkeley, California, who had been exposed to all different paths for opening and expanding the mind and consciousness and found most of them unfulfilling until I learned about Buddhism. And Buddhism just from an almost academic sense, when I first read about it when I was a freshman in college, it just made some intuitive sense, more so than anything else I had read or been exposed to at the time. And so I began, I literally opened up the Yellow Pages and looked up Buddhism and I happened to live in the Bay Area and I found Green Gulch Zen Center, really famous Buddhist meditation center in Marin County. And I went there on January 1st or January 2nd of 1999, and I started sitting and that began a personal relationship with Buddhist practice that led me to then go to India for my junior year of college. And I studied Buddhism in India. Zen, yes. Also Tibetan meditation and then also Southeast Asian Buddhist meditation, which has been secularized as mindfulness. So American mindfulness mostly has its roots in the Thai and Burmese forest monk traditions. And it’s been adapted and made palatable for Westerners through folks like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, who have done a really elegant job of translating some of these traditions for a Western audience.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. And you feel like it’s intimately bound up with your ability to do creative work? You know, there’s a reason why creatives have these difficult life circumstances where they can’t, you do deal with neuroticism, you deal with addiction, you deal with all these things. You have always struck me like you have a wonderful life. You’re very well balanced. You take care of your physical health. Do you trace a lot of that to the meditative practices?
David Gelles
Not directly. I know. I feel like it’s bonus, like the fact that I’m able to. I mean, maybe a little. But no, I don’t. I think it’s sort of an additional layer of sanity that I can bring to myself. But I don’t at all suppose that, I mean, the only way to live a balanced life is to meditate. Nonsense. But it brings balance to your work life.
Jimmy Soni
You said it allows you to not be as neurotic about your work.
David Gelles
Sometimes. But I’m still pretty neurotic about my work. Imagine if I didn’t have the practice, how neurotic I would be. I think my wife would have had something to say about that.
Jimmy Soni
That’s really funny. When the book, so, you know, there’s always that moment of you’ve finished the book and you get that first box. The first box moment. Do you remember that for Mindful Work? I mean, it’s your first book. It’s a big...
David Gelles
I don’t remember the box for the first one. For the first book. No.
Jimmy Soni
Then which moment stood out where you finally realized it was real? You’re like, it’s a real thing. And I’ve created this from whole cloth.
David Gelles
I don’t know. I mean, you know, it was just work. I mean, I don’t make too much of that first book. I mean, I was proud of it. Got it out there. I mean, I did a talk at Google. I did a TED talk. It was excerpted, I forget in the, yeah, in the FT or I forget all the places where we had serials. But it was, yeah. I guess I don’t make too much of it.
Jimmy Soni
Right. So it didn’t, it sounds like it was actually a pretty seamless process for you, putting it together and putting it out into the world.
David Gelles
Sure. I, you know, my hair went a little gray in the process.
Jimmy Soni
Interviewing your wife, maybe she’d have something different to say.
David Gelles
Yeah, but, you know, it was one thing among many that was happening in our lives at the time. You know, we were having our children at the same time. We were in New York City and probably moving apartments somewhere in there. I had a really busy day job. I changed, actually, day jobs. I think I sold the book when I was at the FT and when it came out, yeah, now I remember. I was actually at the Times by that point. And so now I do remember. I think the first serial actually appeared in the New York Times. It was a Sunday business section story about Mark Bertolini, then the CEO of Aetna, who was a character in the book.
Jimmy Soni
If I go back, just one quick moment. It was a book that you pulled from the shelf, if I remember right, that actually got you down the Buddhism path. Can you talk about that specific moment? It was very vivid.
David Gelles
I still remember it. It was New Year’s Eve on 1998, going into 1999, and I was home in Sausalito at my mother’s apartment. And she had a great library, including lots of books on religion. She was a museum director and done a lot of work on Asian arts. And for whatever reason, I was sort of restless. I knew that in my next semester at Boston University, I would be studying world religions. I knew it was coming on the syllabus. And so I saw this book, a basic introduction to Buddhism. I don’t remember exactly which ISBN number, but it was a pretty standard intro book. And I just started reading, and I remember I didn’t go out that night. I just stayed home. And I was so consumed by it that I didn’t go out. I just finished the book. My mom was like, are you okay? I was fine. Just more interested in that than whatever was happening in the world. And then the next morning, and this is, you know, this is simplified, but there’s truth to it. I checked in with all my friends who had been inviting me out. And one friend was still hungover. Another had watched his sister relapse and do cocaine. Another had gotten in a fight or seen a fight. And at this super simplified level, the basic equation of desire leading to suffering was there for me. And I was like, huh, maybe these guys are onto something. And so then I opened the Yellow Pages.
Jimmy Soni
Have you revisited that book ever since?
David Gelles
No. No, I don’t go back and read my book.
Jimmy Soni
You don’t go, oh, not this book. I mean...
David Gelles
Oh that, no, I don’t know which one it was.
Jimmy Soni
Okay, so why don’t you go back and reread? I mean, I’m guilty of the same, by the way. I can’t go back and read it. I think it would make me, it would tempt me too much as an editor to want to change everything.
David Gelles
I should be clear. I haven’t looked at Mindful Work in years and years. I have revisited probably, well, certainly Dirtbag Billionaire, because I’m still essentially promoting it and out on the road sharing it these days. The Jack Welch book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism. I think I feel like I’ve gone back and looked at the introduction once or twice because there’s some things I think I did right there just as a reminder to sort of, oh, what was the flavor? What was the tenor there? No, I mean, I think that’s natural.
Jimmy Soni
One of the things that I always, when I’m with my author friends, we sit around, we talk process. You have a job that because of deadlines, you’ve learned the ability to write fast and to hit deadlines and to produce words against a word count total or some rough amount of words with steadiness. You’ve had to do this for a long period of time. But a book, let’s say it’s 65,000 words, maybe 70,000 words. Did you have an approach that you used for this work in terms of how you broke up the work itself?
David Gelles
Let’s set aside Mindful Work because I think that was a long time ago and I don’t honestly remember the details of the craft on that one. But for the more recent books, definitely have a craft and sort of a process and a method. And also to say for both of them, I pretty much understood what the outline was going to be because both of them, The Man Who Broke Capitalism and Dirtbag Billionaire are roughly chronological. And so if you have a chronological narrative, that makes it really nice and easy. I also knew sort of the target length, what you said. I mean, mine are a bit longer. Mine are closer to 85, 93, somewhere in there, I think, both of them. And so then you figure, okay, I’m not a 20 short chapter kind of guy. I’m a 10 sort of longer chapters. All right, so we’ve got 8,000 word chapters with an introduction, maybe a conclusion. And so then, all right, so I roughly know that. And then what I’ve also realized about my writing, I think you’ll see it in the last two books is there tend to be three to four sections per chapter. And so then, okay, break those up. And then we’re talking somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 word chunks. And that’s a long newspaper article. And to your point, I can do that in a day.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah.
David Gelles
I don’t write 3,000 words a day for a book. But that sort of atomization of the manuscript makes it really approachable to me.
Jimmy Soni
Right. And is that conscious? Like, are you... Okay. And then you just sort of track against the chronology and you keep at it.
David Gelles
Yeah. And the way, I mean, we can talk about how I actually do the research and get things on the page, but that approach of, okay, I need a chronology. Here’s roughly what I want in it. Here are roughly themes of the moments. Then let’s start, you know, breaking it down into, and I use, I use Microsoft Word. I’m a proud Microsoft Word user with the outline function.
Jimmy Soni
That’s old school. Yeah.
David Gelles
And I go down and, you know, I use headings one and I tend to go down to somewhere in the four to six range for the outline function, and then I adhere to the outline.
Jimmy Soni
Why Microsoft Word? That’s, you know, as an aside...
David Gelles
It’s how I started.
Jimmy Soni
Okay.
David Gelles
Are you a Google Docs fan?
Jimmy Soni
I’m a Google Docs person. And then for books, I use Scrivener for some of the raw material. I like Scrivener, because there’s something about it that, I don’t know, it’s like Microsoft Word went to the gym for a couple of years. But it’s interesting to me that, you know, the tools do shape the outcome. And Google Docs has helped me edit on mobile. Edit when I’m elsewhere. I don’t have to make, I can’t make the excuse of having my laptop. I can’t work because I have my phone. I can always do something. But I’m curious. You’ve stuck with just because that’s how you were trained. That’s what you’re sticking with. And it works for you. There you go. You go from the first book to the second, The Man Who Broke Capitalism. What was the process of kind of selling and pitching and working on the second idea? And when did it come to you that there was a story here that needed to be told?
David Gelles
Yeah, I remember where I was sitting when it came to me. It was April of 2020, so we were all in lockdown at the time. I had thought about different books and different projects in the years before that, but nothing had even quite clicked. I’d even thought about a book that had to do with Patagonia, but wasn’t able to get it off the ground, so that one had to come later. But then in April of 2020, I was in my kitchen and I was sort of stirred up at night, looking for something to do because couldn’t go out, couldn’t go to the bar, couldn’t go to a sports game with my kids, couldn’t do all the things we usually do. And so my brain was sort of racing around looking for a target. And really the entire argument of that book came to me in a flash. And the foundation was already there. And it had come through my reporting over the last several years at the Times because I had been the Corner Office columnist where I had interviewed hundreds of CEOs. And then for the year, right up until Covid hit, I was the reporter investigating Boeing and what had happened inside Boeing after the crashes of the 737 Max jets. And those two storylines both led back to Jack Welch. Of all the people I talked to for all the Corner Office interviews I did, the one name that kept coming up was Jack Welch. Even though he had been retired for almost 20 years at the time, even though he wasn’t Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, he was the one that was still rent free in the minds of all the CEOs. And that just was weird. So I filed that away. And then in reporting what had gone wrong at Boeing, yeah, all roads led back to GE and specifically Jack Welch’s GE, because a succession of Jack Welch proteges had taken that company over starting in the 1990s and radically transformed it into, be in the image of the Jack Welch GE. And they had ruined the company. And I was sitting, I was again, it was probably 1:30 at night and I was just antsy in the kitchen. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, that’s the story. It’s just a story about how Jack Welch messed it up and so off to the races.
Jimmy Soni
And so what happens from there? You reach out to your agent.
David Gelles
Probably put together a rough proposal, because I sort of knew, I knew what to do at that point. It had been a long time. I mean, it had been five years.
Jimmy Soni
There was a big gap between that book and your prior one...
David Gelles
Five years, I don’t know if that’s huge, but I hope it’s not as long next time.
Jimmy Soni
Next time.
David Gelles
But yeah, it had been five years. I didn’t have another project in the works. And so, yeah, I put together a pitch, took it to my agent, Binky, took it to Eamon. Eamon liked it, and we were off to the races. So it wasn’t competitive. We didn’t take it out and shop it. I knew my team and went, you know, we were off to the races and we did it really fast. So that book, I had the idea in April 2020, and that book came out, if I have it right, in May of 2022. Really fast.
Jimmy Soni
Wow, that is really fast.
David Gelles
Crazy. Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
What was that like, getting that done under such a tight timeline?
David Gelles
On the one hand, it was insane. On the other hand, listen, Jack Welch had just died, so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to interview him. It was locked down.
Jimmy Soni
Right. So you’re not going to be able to travel that much.
David Gelles
There wasn’t going to be a lot of on the ground reporting to do. And even if it hadn’t been locked down, it wasn’t clear. I mean, I could have done some. I could have gone to Schenectady or I could have gone to GE factories and seen that kind of thing, but that wasn’t quite what the book needed. So, listen, I did 100 Zoom and phone calls over the course of a year, read everything I could find about the guy, refined my argument and wrote a manuscript and turned it in, and they turned it around.
Jimmy Soni
That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s amazing. How did it feel different than Mindful Work? What was the, how did the process feel different to you?
David Gelles
Yeah, I didn’t love it because it was an angry book. And so it was an angry book. It’s sort of an angry moment, you know, written during lockdown. And it really is a book with a perspective. And it’s, you know, it’s not a kind one. I’m sort of angry on behalf of the proletariat. So I didn’t love that when the actual writing process, I would have to channel anger, which is not who I am naturally. So I didn’t love that. Nevertheless, I think I got it right and did it appropriately. The one thing I will say is my editor, Eamon Dolan, insisted on a how to fix it chapter at the end, and I regret doing that.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah.
David Gelles
And I’ve told him as much. I wish I hadn’t. And in fact, in some of the reviews they I think rightly pointed out that the solutions we came up were a little facile. That was...
Jimmy Soni
And understandably, it’s, you know, you get a chapter to...
David Gelles
Right. Who am I to fix all of modern capitalism?
Jimmy Soni
There are whole books…
David Gelles
But I bring that up because for any authors or aspiring authors, know when to stand your ground. And it’s your book and at the end of the day, the title, cover, the words in it, your name is the one on the spine. And I think back to a couple moments like that. And there are other times when I think I should have taken advice that I didn’t. But there are also, you won’t forget those times where you roll over when you wish you hadn’t.
Jimmy Soni
This is David’s list.
David Gelles
Like I said, I keep grudges.
Jimmy Soni
I have my own. I was going to ask about titling. The Mindful Work title, you know, somewhat self explanatory. Did you sell your subsequent two books as The Man Who Broke Capitalism and Dirtbag Billionaire or did you come to those titles later?
David Gelles
No. Working title for the Jack Welch book was Neutron Jack, which was his nickname, which I still really like. The argument was made that it was too unfamiliar. People wouldn’t know what it was about. I don’t fully, the book was a success. I think that doesn’t give readers enough credit. I like to trust that they could figure it out. So listen, looking back, I think that would have been a great title for that book. For Dirtbag Billionaire, that was the title I went out with and then it got rejected for almost the entirety of the development of the book. And I reinstated it very late in the process and I’m mostly happy about it. The other alternatives, especially that the publisher and editors came up with, I didn’t like. In retrospect, part of me wishes I could have done something more generic and more accessible, something like The Climb or The Climber. I don’t know if that really would have worked. But I say that because Dirtbag Billionaire, it’s an edgy title, gets people’s attention. But I also have learned that it has confused some people where they think it’s going to be an unflattering portrait of him. And I don’t think it’s a hagiography, but it’s a nuanced portrait. But people, some people have thought that it’s in the same mold as The Man Who Broke Capitalism or I must really not like the guy.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, yeah, well, and you explain right from the jump in that book that the term dirtbag is a very specific. Can you explain that just so people understand that you’re not slamming the founder of Patagonia?
David Gelles
Yeah. So the term dirtbag in the rock climbing outdoors community from which Yvon Chouinard came is really the highest form of compliment. It refers to someone who is so unenamored with materialism, so disconnected from material needs, that they are literally content to sleep in the dirt if it means they’re that much closer to their next climb. And Yvon Chouinard himself refers to himself as a dirtbag. I mean, to this day, in his late 80s, he says I’m a dirtbag. And so the tension then is, how did this dirtbag ultimately become a billionaire?
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, so let’s get to that. I want to be mindful of time. You know, how did you go from the angry book to the happy book to the David of yesteryear?
David Gelles
I know. Now I need to figure out, is my next book going to be another happy book or does the pendulum have to swing back to be an angry book? So again, this came directly from my reporting, and this is why I’m so fortunate to have the job I do at the New York Times is I get exposed to these amazing stories. So in September of 2022, I broke the news that Yvon Chouinard and his family had given away the company and restructured the entity and various holding companies and trusts in a way that would allow all future profits to be directed toward environmental charity. That was a huge story. The, I think third most read URL at the Times that year after the live blog of Queen Elizabeth’s death and the Trump taxes story. So for a, you know, little story about Patagonia, it just went gonzo. And that was a signal to me that, oh, people are interested here.
Jimmy Soni
Why do you think it went so crazy?
David Gelles
I think it was a number of things. One, we were still in Covid time period. And so I think this was a real story that people could connect to in a positive way. I mean, there is really a hunger for good news out there. I think it was a brand people knew well enough, but here was a big turn about a place and an organization and a family that was still somewhat well known, but also somewhat mysterious. So here was a window into that, their thinking. And then, listen, it just went viral. Because it went viral and sometimes you can’t explain it, but celebrities were sharing it and morning news, and it just popped. And that was super exciting.
Jimmy Soni
And that was the signal for you that there was something here that was longer than just a story in form.
David Gelles
Exactly. And as I had mentioned, I had even thought about a Patagonia book five years earlier, before the Jack Welch book. The way I had initially conceived it was actually as a story about the friendship between Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins. And I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to write a story about them as a pair? Doug Tompkins, his best friend, founded the North Face and Esprit and was also a great environmental conservationist. Yvon Chouinard founded Patagonia and Black Diamond and is a great conservationist himself. So this pair who had pushed each other and, you know, were together until the end. But when I floated that project with the families back in 2020, just before I started on the Jack Welch book, I basically got the thanks, but no thanks. A movie by Jimmy Chin was just coming out. Another writer was working on a biography of Doug Tompkins. And those projects were both really well done and successful. I wasn’t aware of them when I started thinking about this idea, so I just sort of set it aside. But after this article, I suddenly understood that the Patagonia story now had a third act. Up until that point, you could write a great story about the man and the company, but it wasn’t really clear how it ended because he was still alive. And Patagonia, the fate of that company was sort of unresolved. But now he had answered those questions even if he was still alive. And so then I could write that third act.
Jimmy Soni
It’s still a hop, given a jump from that article and everything else to getting the kind of access you had with him and to, I mean, one of the things about the book is that you’re with him and you’re in remote places doing outdoorsy things. How did that process go? What was it like to get that kind of trust?
David Gelles
It was a journey. I had actually known Yvon Chouinard for 10 years before I wrote that article. So I had interviewed him over the years, just as a business reporter a little. We were not close, but we had some touch points. I think I had earned the company’s trust because I had written a series of stories about the company and they felt like I had done a fair and good job with them. But when after that article, I went to the company and said, hey, I’m going to write a book about Patagonia and Chouinard. The response was, we would rather that you not. Thanks, but no thanks. And I was like, okay. And then I sort of had to take a deep breath and go back to them and say, let me be clear, I am writing this book. I hope you ultimately participate. But we are blessed to live in a country with the First Amendment and you are a public entity. I’m going for it. And so they said, okay. So I then began my work mostly without any participation from the company or the family for the first year. And so I made, I was in touch with a few people, and they would do a little here and there, but for the most part, I was reporting around the story, if you will. And so I made a list of 200 people I wanted to talk to and started going down the list and checking them off and reaching out and making phone calls and emails. And what happened over that first year is I think I know that the Chouinards and the company started hearing from employee number four at the company and said, hey, some guy’s writing a book. And then Yvon heard from a childhood friend and said, hey, this guy contacted me and wants me to talk. And I think after enough of those, they understood that I was serious about the project. And ultimately it was then, it was more than a year after I had begun the project. I get a call, I think, on a Tuesday, from someone close to Chouinard, and they said, hey, what are you doing this weekend? I was like, I don’t know. What am I doing this weekend? They said, get on a plane. You’re coming to Wyoming. And that was when I spent my first sort of extended time with Chouinard and his wife at their home in Wyoming.
Jimmy Soni
Wow. And so it was the kind of, you wore him down, basically.
David Gelles
Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, I was trying to respectfully sort of check in and look for opportunities, but I wasn’t badgering at that point. I was sort of trusting the process.
Jimmy Soni
And they just heard from enough people in the...
David Gelles
I think so.
Jimmy Soni
Okay.
David Gelles
And I made the case that, listen, this book will be better, and it will be more reflective of the truth and his truth if he participates.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. That reminds me of the story that Walter Isaacson told me where he, for his Kissinger book, he did not have Kissinger’s participation, but he went out and did exactly basically what you did. Hundreds of people, everybody in sort of that land, Kissinger Incorporated. And he got to everybody. And at the 11th hour, Kissinger granted him an interview. And I think the line, I mean, maybe he said this. I don’t know if he did or not, but he was like, yep. And then he proceeded to spend hours just sort of spinning yarns, completely evading, you know, all the things. But it goes to show that, you know, you did something. Did you sell the book before you went out and did that? Like those hundreds or so interviews?
David Gelles
Yeah.
Jimmy Soni
So you had kind of taken a bet on yourself saying, I can, I think I’ll eventually be able to get to a book even if I can’t get intimate access to the family.
David Gelles
Yeah. Because there was enough in the public record.
Jimmy Soni
Okay, got it. About the company, but not the man necessarily.
David Gelles
Both. Yeah, there was a lot about, I mean, I went back and read everything written about the guy for more than 40 years and you can piece together a sketch. I mean, the book wouldn’t be the same without the time I spent with him. But no, you can tell a story about him through what’s out there and through all the subsequent interviews I did with other people who knew him.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. I want to shift gears a bit just because there’s a part of this that I want to come back to because you made this remarkable thing at the beginning of our conversation about how your kids read four to seven hours a day. And I am, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, very curious about how you managed to do this, among other parenting writing questions I have. But how did you manage to make your kids into readers of that volume?
David Gelles
Starting from the moment they were born, we read to them for hours a day. I think it’s that simple.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah.
David Gelles
And I remember…
Jimmy Soni
Is this at night, during the day?
David Gelles
It’s just all the time. All the time. I mean, we have always had books at their fingertips and we, my wife and I both just spent hours and hours reading to them. And I, you know, I remember my method was I, as I read, I would trace the words, underline the words with my finger. And so both of them were reading on their own at very young ages.
Jimmy Soni
Oh, wow. Okay. And then do you steer the kind of reading they do?
David Gelles
Not at this point, no, they’re in charge.
Jimmy Soni
Got it. But did you do it earlier?
David Gelles
I mean, we still give them books and they’re reading amazing things now. I mean, they’re, you know, my 12 year old daughter is reading, she’s plowing her way through Agatha Christie. And my 10 year old boy just read The Outsiders on a trip and they have elevated tastes.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Do you find, how does that world, their world of reading, because I struggle with this. I have a 10 year old and she’s a great reader and she’s a devoted reader. She’s an obsessive. Once she gets into a book, she’ll read the entire series in a flash. But there is always that question of, you know, that mixes in an interesting way with technology and the interruptions that technology creates. So I’m curious, how do you manage that in your own, if you’re willing to share in your own household, how do you deal with the digital distraction against the kind of long, you know, the longer form reading and time spent in that way?
David Gelles
I mean, listen, we try. We are not zealots about no screen times, but we try not to spend a ton of time on screens. We love a good movie, but the TV’s usually off in our home. And, you know, we have a Nintendo Switch, but it gets turned on a couple times a month. So, and listen, it was, it’s Monday today. Yesterday, we started the morning all reading books as a family just piled up on top of each other on a couch. And we ended the day piled up on top of the couch reading books.
Jimmy Soni
Oh, that’s great.
David Gelles
And I think if you model it and talk about it and are able to engage in those conversations, you know, kids respond.
Jimmy Soni
Do your kids make anything of your own life as an author, with the book specifically?
David Gelles
I don’t think they take me too seriously.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, that’s true. I have a very similar experience. The sad part is my daughter thinks it’s easy because I do it. She’s like, oh, he’s kind of a clown. If he can do this, any schmo can do this. And so that ends up being kind of funny. I don’t think she, I don’t think kids actually appreciate what it takes.
David Gelles
Of course not. Ungrateful.
Jimmy Soni
To the end. How do you, when you, so you have young kids and I have a young kid. How do you balance the range of things you do? What’s the way that you do all this without going stir crazy?
David Gelles
I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s crazy. I mean, I find it, who says, number one, who says I don’t go crazy? I feel constantly crazed. It’s a lot. It’s the, you know, and I’ve got elderly parents in my life who have needs. I have young kids who have needs. I’ve got a busy job. Try to have a relationship, try to have friends. It’s a lot.
Jimmy Soni
Right, right. Do you, for your book length work, when you were in it, especially with the Patagonia book, did you find yourself, how did that one, just to talk process on that one for a second. How did that one get done? Was it vacations? Was it, and then kind of speeding through when you...
David Gelles
Vacations and weekends and, I, you know, last, or whatever summer that was, the summer of 2024, I guess. Book came out in fall of ‘25. So the summer of ‘24 when I was writing it, I missed a lot. I didn’t go to the water parks with my kids that summer and that was an active choice that I had to make.
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Are you proudest of one of the three projects? Is one of them, you’re like the one, you’re like, okay, this is where I really gave it?
David Gelles
I’d like to believe that I’m getting better as a writer and a reporter and author. So I feel like the most recent book, Dirtbag Billionaire, really works at a lot of levels and I feel like I avoided, I do feel like I didn’t repeat the mistakes in my previous books. I think I probably made some mistakes in Dirtbag Billionaire, but I feel like I landed that one pretty cleanly.
Jimmy Soni
One of the things that we do, just as a matter of thinking about the books we do is think about formats. Do you find that for you, are you an audiobook guy?
David Gelles
I do listen to audiobooks.
Jimmy Soni
Are you, is there a certain kind of book you’ll prefer for audio versus, what’s your reading diet like?
David Gelles
I don’t do literary fiction on audio.
Jimmy Soni
Don’t do literary fiction on audio.
David Gelles
Yeah. Literary fiction I have to read. Yeah. I love biography and history on audio. I love sweeping sci fi fantasy on audio. And I think if I’m being honest for both of those, it’s because if I tune out or fall asleep, I find it easy to come back. And if I’ve missed a few minutes...
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Is there a book that you’ve read recently that, you know, you actually, it really blew your hair back? Something that really stood out to you.
David Gelles
Yeah. The Wild Trees by Richard Preston, which is not a new book. Maybe it came out 2015 or so, but sensational. Sensational read. Nonfiction. And it’s about the community of men and women who made it their work to find and climb the tallest trees in the world. And it’s, I have goosebumps thinking about it right now. It’s a sensational book.
Jimmy Soni
How did you find your way to it? That’s always one of the things that I’m curious about with books, if you can remember.
David Gelles
I don’t remember how I found that book, but I remember, I mean, the minute I was into it, I was all in.
Jimmy Soni
Wow, that’s amazing. Final question we ask every guest on Infinite Loops is you’re declared emperor for a day. You get a magical microphone and you get to incept two ideas into everybody’s heads. And they will believe those ideas were theirs, not yours. So they wake up and they’ve got a sense of this, of an idea, and it’s from you, and you get two of them. What are your, off the cuff, what are your two ideas? You want to incept into everybody’s mind, of anything. Of anything.
David Gelles
I mean, that people shouldn’t be hungry and without shelter. That we need to take care of the most vulnerable. And that we should organize society in a way that makes that happen without question. And that it is our number one collective priority to take care of planet Earth.
Jimmy Soni
That’s amazing. Well said. Those are both great and it’s a great way for us to bring it to a close.
David Gelles
Amazing.
Jimmy Soni
Amazing.
David Gelles
That’s such a good conversation.
Jimmy Soni
That was fun. That was awesome.
