 Okay. Very good morning. I am joined by my colleague Steven because there's been some breaking news this morning and billionaire Patagonia founder has given away his company to fight the climate crisis. It's trending at the moment. Steven, you've got your Patagonia top on. I do. I do. I know they're not cheap, but they come with a lifetime guarantee. So, you know, I'm happy. So explain to me what is going on here. Yeah. I mean, this is a brilliant, brilliant story. And it's something that, you know, it's a it's a ray of sunshine amidst the kind of sea of greenwashing that we're getting at the moment. So maybe I should go back to kind of basics. Yvonne Chinard, this bloke West Coast United States, he lived at the back of his car, you know, from the age of about 15 going around trying to climb mountains. He funded this by making these little petons that he sold to other climbers. It didn't really have a business but just kind of got by. He went to Scotland to climb, as you do, and found that and found that rugby shirts, the Scottish rugby shirt was a really, really appropriate material for climbing. So he started importing rugby shirts in about 1973 and made a company called Patagonia. In 1973, the company has just been focused on this combination of providing really high quality climbing an outdoor apparel, but also trying to look after the planet. So in 1983, these guys are just so ahead of their time. In 1983, they get they decided to give away 1% of all sales, not profit sales to help fight climate change. They have done some amazing initiatives like free childcare for everyone. They've got they were the first company to sign up to being a B Corp over in the West Coast, a benefit corporation is a kind of stamp of approval that you are ethically inclined and you are kind of reporting your environmental footprint. They've really, really committed to this, and it all kind of came to a head. I think in the mid 2000s with this amazing I don't know if you've seen this, this amazing don't buy this jacket advertising campaign came out on Black Friday mid 2000s big splash page in the New York Times saying don't buy this jacket, you know, buy this jacket, obviously only by what you need. If you've got a jacket, fix it. Don't buy a new jacket, which obviously to the Patagonia faithful, you know, you know you're preaching to the converted what an amazing message. But then the rumblings came in that you know is this a little bit of greenwashing, why are you advertising not to buy a jacket, and then sales spike 30% the next week. What is going on here is the kind of green eyed monster kind of getting in the way. So, you know, Patagonia grew and grew, and it got to, I think, 2019, where even the founder and 100% owner with his family they've never raised external funds. He saw himself featured in the Forbes list of billionaires. And he was, he was so upset by this. This was the trigger for him to say, look, this is not right, you know, I don't have a billion dollars in my pocket. I drive a you know a beat up Subaru. I've got a single house, you know, I'm not a billionaire this is this is not the way that I want to be remembered. So he's getting on a bit he's in his early 80s, and he starts putting together a plan, a succession plan. And they had a bunch of options right. So the first option was to sell the company. Lots of, you know, lots of buyers would would be interested in a company like Patagonia over a billion of revenue, etc. And then give all the proceeds away to charity. And he liked that because, you know, the proceeds you could, you know, you could give to fight and climate change, but there was no assurance that the Patagonia brand would continue to do the right thing. So he was a little bit scared that he's created this thing that then gets bought by private equity and gets turned into a money making machine. The second option was to take the company public. In his own words, what a disaster that would have been. That's been thinking about protecting, you know, millennia of planetary, you know, and he did not want to be kind of caught by the cycles of quarterly earnings reports and maximizing profitability and things like that. And then the third option was to give it to the kids as two kids in their 40s who both worked for Patagonia, but they didn't want it. They didn't, you know, just put yourself in this position, you're about to get given a company worth about $3 billion, and they didn't want it, because they didn't want to be seen to be the financial beneficiaries of this organization that wants to stay true to its spirit. Pretty cool. Yeah, so all of these investment bankers that are used to kind of sitting down and maximizing kind of shareholder returns sat down and tried to come up with a structure that would work. What they came up with was they've created a thing called the Patagonia Purpose Trust, where 100% Patagonia's voting stock is given to this trust, and this is an irrevocable commitment to protect the company's value. Patagonia has got five or six people sitting on the board, including the family members, and their goal is to irrevocably protect the mission and the vision of the company, set in stone, no going back. And then 100% of the non voting stock has been given to a new a charity called the Holdfast Collective. The 100% of the profits from Patagonia was only $100 million last year goes to this charity and the charity is responsible for giving to causes that help overcome climate change. So it's a really, it's never been seen before this structure in terms of succession, when no one's benefiting financially. Perhaps the family took a $17.5 million tax hit on their giving, you know, so they haven't tried to do any clever tax work around here. It's just, you know, it's not often you can say this but it is just good. And this has caused obviously a massive stir because it's just not normal. When you say that it's not normal. Does this put pressure on anyone else to follow or is this literally like this is an anomaly? Or does this add to the pressure now for corporates to kind of, I mean, I guess economically, given the situation we're in now with the cost of living crisis and everything that's going on. So I guess the pressures that many companies are facing do things like climate change and just generally ESG come a little bit off the forefront of topics at the forefront of the corporate agenda. Yeah, it's a great point and I think Patagonia is an outlier, you know, so Yvonne never wanted to start a company. His purpose was not to make money. His purpose was not to build a global retail empire. So, you know, it's only natural that he doesn't want to see kind of a succession of dynasty created out of this. So I think this is a bit of an outlier and so much of ESG is retrospective. So you create a company that does a bunch of bad stuff. Okay. And then you think, oh gosh, we've done a bunch of bad stuff. Let's talk ESG and let's layer on a nice 50 page research report. Right. So, you know, that that mentality is never going to lend itself to giving away the whole company, right. And one of the advantages of being Patagonia is it was 100% owned by the family. You know, once you've got external shareholders that were, you know, that are thinking about the upside at some way down the line. It's going to take a lot of convincing for the whole company to be kind of gifted to charity. Yeah, well look, a fantastic explanation Stephen much appreciated and I'm going to leave the conversation with a quote from the man himself, who said that despite its density, the earth's resources are not infinite. And it's clear we've exceeded its limits, but it's also resilient. And we can save our planet if we commit to it. What a champion. There you go. Good news Thursdays. All right, thank you, Steven. Thank you. Take care.