The Adrenaline Zone, Ep. 24: Himalayan Odyssey with Hyatt Chairman Tom Pritzker

Sandy and Sandra, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation. What I'd warn you is that this really isn't a thread about archaeology. This is a bit more like a tapestry, because it leads us into a whole variety of adventures of discovery, of scholarship. It even bleeds into my business life. So just a fair warning that we may go to a number of different places.

What I'd say is the beginning of it that I can recall was I had a map of the world on my wall as a little kid, as long as I can remember. And I remember in seventh or eighth grade tracing for my best friend, who stayed overnight, where I wanted to go one day on an adventure. And it was basically kind of the underbelly of China and Tibet, running from Pakistan all the way through Burma and Vietnam and that sort of thing. And that always stuck with me because of the map. I would say a couple of themes to it: one is maps were always fascinating to me. I just loved maps for whatever reason. And the other was risk. Now, you guys had risk associated with your jobs; it came with the job that each of you had. I didn't have that, but I saw managed risk as a way to find white spaces. People generally are risk averse. It means if you can take managed risks, you can find spaces that others haven't been in. So as I think about it, I think those two things were certainly an important part of how I grew up and how I began thinking about this. But why exactly the Himalayas? There's lots of really interesting places all over the world, and the Himalayas are actually a massive range as well. It seems you folks are in the Tibetan area. I've always loved the mountains, and so of course the Himalayas are the great mountains in the world. But I also was really interested in having a cultural adventure. So if I sort of dive in, I would say it didn't start with archaeology. It really started with I wanted a cultural adventure that nobody or very few people had ever done or experienced. So Margo and I, my wife and I, in 1978 go to Kathmandu, and I'd been there before, and we basically were in search of something that was highly unusual. We referred to it as cultural adventure. We spent three months learning about the Himalayas and history and language and that sort of thing, and then we set off on a remarkable adventure. We flew to Western Nepal, got out of the airplane, walked north over the Himalayas, and then we walked for 500 miles along the northern slopes of the Himalayas. So this is trans-Himalaya. This is literally on the northern side of the Himalaya, sort of sandwiched in between the Tibetan border and the Himalayas. And we lived with the Tibetans for nearly more than two months. And this was all walking, no communication, lots of adventure, lots of discovery. We think we were in the first ten outsiders to ever penetrate this area. And so that opened up a whole window into a world that was just very, very different. It was rugged, it was high altitude. We probably crossed ten passes over 18,000 feet. It was Buddhist, so there was deep interesting learnings there. And that was the adventure that sort of set us on what became a life's journey.

Yes, there can be some political sensitivities, but usually we're able to navigate that with what I would call reasonable, reasonable risk, very well managed risk. In China, we're with the military, we're with the PLA because we're right on the border, so they're watching every move we make. In India, similarly. In Nepal, we're on our own, and so sometimes we have to navigate that a bit.

Yeah, so I was there. A theme to your wonder: you're trying to trace the Silk Road, or were you just sort of looking in different pieces randomly?

Yeah, so let me give a brief history. Rinchen Zangpo's dates are 958 to 1055. And he was this brilliant kid who was sent by the king of West Tibet into India to master Sanskrit and Buddhism. He had to master Buddhism in a different language. He was there for 17 years, and he brought back artists, teachers, books. He basically, he and this king, imported Buddhism from India into Tibet, and it's the basis of today's Tibetan Buddhism. So we have this biography, and when we travel, we carry a library with us, and most of our travels on foot. So we're on the Tibetan side of the border, the Chinese side, and we're in an area that in that case no Westerners have been to. And we go to this monastery. To give you a sense, to get to the place we really want to be, you drive for 70 hours in an SUV, dead reckoning, no roads, and then you get out and you walk for four or five hours, and then you're where we really want to be. So we go into this monastery. It's about a three or four hour walk from where our camp is, and it's got amazing bronzes, really deeply remarkable, probably the most important collection that I've seen and analyzed. And we take our photos, and one of them is very large, and the Tibetans dress their bronzes, so you can see the face but you can't see most of the body. So we walk back the three hours to our campsite, and I'm lying in our sleeping bags with Margo in a tent, and I pop up. It's like nine o'clock at night, like the cartoon of the person with the light bulb going on over his head. And I said, 'That bronze we saw is the bronze that Rinchen Zangpo brought back from Kashmir for his father.' And we stop, we break out the library, we re-read the story. And the story was: his father had died, he went to Kashmir, he had a bronze made of a bodhisattva and brought it back, and it fell off the cart at a certain bridge and broke the ring finger on his right hand. So I go to our Chinese colleague and I say, 'I gotta go back there.' And he says, 'You can't. That permit is up. At eight in the morning we have to get out of here, and you can't.' I said, 'You'd understand. I'm gonna go now. The question is how are we gonna go about doing this?' And he was wonderful. He's a very close friend, he's a professor of history, and he said, 'Okay, four in the morning, five in the morning, you go. Take one Tibetan with you. When you come back, I'm gonna yell and scream at you, but don't worry about it.' So I take off in the dead of night, and we walk the three or four hours to this temple, and we go into the temple keeper and say, 'We need you to take the clothes off your bronzes.' It would be like at a dinner party saying to your dinner party, 'Would you mind taking off all your clothes?' The guy thought we were completely nuts. Convinced him to do it, and sure enough, the ring finger on his right hand was missing. And so we had discovered this bronze that's written about in history and in the history books. And that's important because it both validates the biography itself, because you now have facts that you've proven up, but it also gives us, let's say, a foundational bronze against which we can compare other bronzes. So just to continue the story for a moment, I'm a business guy, so the answer is follow the money if you want to know. It's the Willie Sutton theory of history: follow the money. So I could never understand exactly why this king was so compelled to bring Buddhism to Tibet. So in the same area where the temple was, one day we're standing up on a most magical, powerful bluff overlooking the confluence of two rivers, and there's a big monument there. It's actually a burial site. And one of the kids says to me, 'Do you know what those pack marks are in the landscape?' And this is a huge screen area. I said, 'No.' He said, 'Yes.' I said, 'I can't guess. What are they?' He said, 'Those are our gold fields.' And all of a sudden the whole thing came together. This king did not have a big population. And in those days, of course, we know real men would fight, but real men can't fight if they don't have big armies. So the question was, how is he going to establish power? How did he develop a strategy to develop power if he didn't have an army to fight? And what he did is he used his gold to import Buddhism. And Buddhism happens to be a very expensive religion because you've got bronzes, monasteries, and all of that. He then renounced his throne and became the head lama, showing effectively he used the church as his strategy for power as opposed to kingship. So you can see this journey has taken us on fantastic both intellectual discovery and physical discovery. That's really added. Margo and I do this together. She's part and parcel of all of this, and it's just enriched our life enormously.

Yeah, I think the answer is I believe they knew. Because they would have to have hidden it during the Cultural Revolution. Nothing in Tibet was untouched by the Cultural Revolution, so they would have had to have hidden it. And the other thing is they had a name for it that suggests they understood it was a powerfully important bronze.

Yeah, Andrew, here is my problem. I have this day job that gets in the way of what's really important. Or maybe ten day jobs. And trying to figure out how to deal with this, I have published in magazines. A friend of mine who's a serious scholar said, 'Here's what you do: you publish bits and pieces in magazine articles, and then when you get old and they don't want you anymore in the office, you can just assemble those and call it a book.' So I have published some articles, but I'm not a scholar. I'm not trained. I don't have the educational background. I don't read the language. So in that sense, our job strangely has been the tip of the spear. We're the ones who go out in the middle of nowhere and bring back information for the professional scholars. And that's sort of been our role. And going back to one of Sandy's questions, I think we've sort of run the string. In other words, I think we've discovered 80% of what's discoverable. And so I think we were just incredibly fortunate to live during the window of time when it was still virgin territory but you could be safe and those sorts of things.

It is a perfect and profound question. You're absolutely right. So I'm not religious. I don't consider myself a Buddhist, but I find Buddhism in some senses is a philosophy more than a religion. And I find aspects of their philosophy have been super important to my life. So I've ended up in situations of pretty extreme stress and adversity in the business world. And in one such situation, it basically was a ten-year run of being under attack. And then in that situation, having lived in the Buddhist Himalayas for quite a long time, there is, as you know, everything is transitory. So don't hang on for dear life. And in this case, that philosophy of being able to manipulate your attitude—the only one thing all of us can control is our attitude. Absolutely, completely own it, and nobody has any rights to it. And if you can make that malleable to a situation or to some adversity, if you can begin to look at that in a certain way and have it make sense to you, all of a sudden you get up in the morning and say, 'You know what, this is interesting. This is a time under assault. This is going to be really interesting to see how they do it, how I do it, how we navigate it.' So I actually think that that saved my health and my life and basically gave me an avenue of healthy mind and taught me this agile mindset that's just been super helpful in every aspect of my life.

It frees you, right? It frees you to think about a situation, to deal with it, to de-personalize it, that sort of thing. And so that aspect of it has been... when I said it's more of a tapestry, that bled into everything in my life, business and everything else. And it was really fun, powerful, interesting to develop that attitude.

The kingdom we study straddles China, India, and Nepal. And when I say China, it's the Tibetan part. And there you're in SUVs and you have a gaggle of watchers making sure you're not going outside of the boundaries of what you're supposed to be doing. Similarly in India. In Nepal, it's fantastic. So you basically take a plane or helicopter to the closest strip, you get out, and you walk for probably nine days to get to where we want to be. So you're walking over the Himalayas. And there, the answer is yes, my body is still able to do it. We went in June to test that very question. So there we walked over 16,000 to get into this U-shaped valley that points north. You go over 16,000 to get in, we went over 17,500 to get out. And you're living basically at 13,000. You live in a tent. 13,000 is where the villages are, 12, 13,000. So you'll go to a village, you're living in a tent, you interact with people in the village and the monastery, and you look for discoveries. And one of the techniques we've found is kids. What we do is hang out with kids who are say 12 years old. They know everything. They know where every cave is, they know where every single thing in the whole area is. And so they've become the tool to say, 'Oh wait a minute, go down the river, cross the river, go up to that cave and you'll find paintings.' So we do that in the villages, and then basically have to walk over another mountain in order to get to the next river valley, and then you do the same, repeat. And that sort of our days are bounded by daylight. Get up when the sun rises, go to bed when the sun goes down. We carry a mix of local food and imported food that we carry with us. We will typically have a yak train carrying our material. It's now converted to mules. That's become one of the changes. And that sort of... it's a very healthy life where I come back in tremendous shape, and three months later everything has gone to hell and I'm back to my normal weight. But it's really, I think it's like a retreat, is how I think about it. You know how there are certain people, Bill Gates goes off for a week or a month or something and reads and refreshes his mind. I think that's what this does for me. I think it's like a retreat. And I had someone asking me about the spiritual part of it, and I don't think of myself as spiritual. I have a lot of friends who say that's not correct. I think what it is is it's helpful in setting proportions and priorities. It rights those proportions and priorities. And when I come back, it's just a wonderful experience to be able to do that. Generally we're gone for about a month.

Yeah, yep, exactly. Although the commerce is generally north-south, and inside of this valley we're sort of constrained by the Himalayas. We're in that valley. The bottom of it is 12,000 feet for that period of time, and then it takes us sort of a week and a half to get out.

We definitely camped the whole time. We generally have camped the whole time, but there have been times when we needed to stay in a house. There was a torrential rain, we were afraid of flash floods, so we moved up into a house. We're comfortable doing that. It's not as clean, frankly, and so we'd rather be in the tent, but we will do both.

Enormous. And you don't have to be a scientist, you don't have to have data. When we went that first time in '78, we basically had to be in our sleeping bags between 6:30 and 7 at night because it was so cold. So we would have dinner in order to be able to get in. And yes, you know, you pulled the string so the only thing that was getting pulled was your nose. That's all that was exposed. And the same area, we have now been back to the same area, and basically you're fine if you've got a sweater or one of these down jackets, not even a sit-down jacket. So in my view, you're talking about a significant number of degrees of climate change. The other thing we see is we frequently would use a snow bridge to get across a river. Those are completely gone. These are glaciers, so they're permanent snow bridges, and the river carves a little tunnel underneath, and so you could just walk over the river that way. And none of those are left. So it's actually a bit of a frightening experience.

Everything's changed in this area that we go to because there's all sorts of stuff coming out of China. And so all of a sudden you can get a beer, you can get YY noodles, you can get all of those things coming down. And they're now in the process of building roads. So I think, as I say, we hit a window that won't exist in ten years. It'll be over that way. So they're modernized. They're getting cell phones. They're really much more aware of the outside world than they were when we were there. That's both good and bad, I guess.

Yes, we've had some interesting times. We had one on the Nepal side. This one was in Kashmir in India, not so far from the Pakistan border. There was a Maoist movement in Nepal for maybe 10 or 15 years, and we had always assumed that it was south of the Himalayas. And so as we were traveling, we would have guards at night, we'd have one of our team just watching. Once we got over the Himalayas, we figured we were free of that. We get into the first village, and at that point we probably had 20 porters, we had two families, there were probably 10 of us including little kids. And a guy shows up and he says, 'I'm a Maoist. You have to pay us a hundred dollars a person or we're gonna force you to leave.' And I looked at him and I said, 'Are you crazy? I got 20 guys. How many guys you got?' And he looks at me, he says, 'Well, I only got six, but I got guns. You got guns?' I said, 'No, we got no guns.' He says, 'Okay, you have to give me a hundred dollars a person.' And I said, 'You can't. You don't want to do that. That's bad for your reputation. We've got older people here over 65, and you shouldn't be doing it. Bad for your reputation.' He scratches his head, runs back to his headquarters, the house they were staying in. And of course, you might imagine, my wife did not have the same sense of humor about this that I did. The guy comes back the next day. He says, 'Okay, we're gonna exclude anybody over 65, but you have to give us a hundred dollars for a video.' I said, 'Okay, great idea. But we have people under 12. Same thing.' He scratches his head, runs back to his headquarters, comes back. This is like a Far Side cartoon. It really is. We finally, it took two days to negotiate this thing, but we finally negotiated it to a happy landing of $200 and something. And interestingly, I said, 'You got to give me a receipt.' And it turned out that they had very efficient communications. We then hiked for close to a month in that area, and everywhere we would go, the Maoists in those villages knew that we had paid the price, done what we needed to do, and were quite calm about it. So we've had... I'll give you one other that was a bit spicy. This place we went, Dolpo, in '78. It turned out that it was illegal to be there. And so we carried with us... we had 10 Tibetans. So when the Chinese went into Tibet, the Tibetans formed a guerrilla movement, and they moved south of the border. And that was a safe haven. They'd go north of the border, shoot up the Chinese, and then run south. These were called the Khampas. So we took 10 of them with us during that trip in '78 when we were on this great adventure for 500 miles. But we also took one Nepali, and he was sort of our insurance policy in case we got in trouble for being in a place we weren't supposed to be. We get through this whole journey, and Margot gets very sick, 104 fever. So we stop, and all of a sudden an advanced group of the army, six of them, come into our camp, and they said, 'There are 34 guys on horseback, and they're here to arrest you guys.' There were three of us: Margo, me, and one other friend. 'And they're here to arrest you, and they're going to be here tomorrow.' So Margo's got 104 fever. We break camp. We send our entire encampment out into the hills. And I had the ornithologist go into the tent and talk to the advanced group, and they basically said, 'Okay, we're not going to arrest you, but tomorrow morning they're gonna be coming after you.' As it happened, we were actually across the river from a group of brigands, think of Pancho Villa style encampments, and we had made friends with them, and we were going to have a big dinner. So we sent word to them, 'You gotta get out of Dodge.' The next morning, I don't know, five in the morning, where it's gray and the embers of the fire just being put out, we put Margo on the back of a yak, and we go hide behind the hill. Let the main army go down below us, and then we went into a very secondary road out, because we had these ex-guerillas, so they knew the turf. So we went and traveled at 16,000 feet for probably three days, maybe four days, a really long valley, in order to escape the police. And then we got to the legal side, Sandra, near where you were, in the Khumbu and Dolpo, and then it was legal. So yeah, we've had in our younger days a few interesting experiences. Although I'll tell you, in the business world, to me the scarce resource is not IQ, it's judgment. And I've always tried to figure out how do you train for judgment? What are the correlations for judgment? And my hypothesis, I have no idea if it's accurate or not, is that experience is the breeding ground for judgment. And I always tell my kids, if you can just have zillions of experiences, that's going to improve your judgment. And I don't know whether this is a theory of convenience or accurate, but I think all of these experiences are really about life, not just about the Himalayan experience.

David is the youngest of our three boys. We had a house in Kathmandu for probably 20 years, and we would take the kids there for Christmas, and then we began to take them on treks with us. And David, from the age of five, was always the one that the monks and the lamas and the monasteries were like a magnet for him. He was always the kid who loved it. And he began, as Margo and I would go on these journeys or expeditions, he was always the one who said, 'I want to go, I want to go, I want to go.' And the others would say, 'This is stupid stuff. I want to hang with my friends.' So David grew up with it, and that sort of became his journey. And it sort of shocks me because it's wonderful in the sense that 11th century Buddhist history is super important to about 14 people in the entire world.

Okay, we might expand it to 23. I think that's about it. So what's fun is David, Margo, and I can spend hours talking about, 'Do you think this happened in the year 1042, or was it really in 1007?' And for three hours we could talk about this arcane stuff. So that's ended up... he's now sort of a serious scholar, and he has the personality of a scholar. And he's now sort of the more senior person of our team of three now, because he actually knows what he's talking about and he can make references to literature and such. So maybe he's the one who puts all this together instead of you.

Exactly. I'm trying to outsource. You delegate.

So if you come over to our house, I can give you a really interesting historical tour of what happened from about the second or third century AD all the way through about the 13th or 14th century on a north-south axis: India, Nepal, Tibet, as well as on an east-west axis along the Silk Road. And so for Margo and I, we lived in the midst of this history and beauty. And I can't tell you how many times we sort of look at each other and say that we ended up in this incredibly wonderful situation because this intersection of collecting, researching, history, adventure, discovery, all of that, has just been a super way to share something in our marriage. And now we have a kid who also shares it with us.

All right, we will sign you up, Sandy. You only fly over these places too, yeah?

Yeah, yeah.

Terrific. Thanks for having me, guys.