Kyle Thiermann recently reflected on a pretty special run. Photo: The Inertia
On December 30, 2007, I rode my rusty bike home after surfing Steamer Lane, the Santa Cruz, Calif. centerpiece where I surfed almost every day. Still in my wetsuit with one hand gripping my handlebar and the other my surfboard, I pedaled against the chilly wind as it burned my fingertips and the dark sky slowly ate the twilight. I was 17 years old.
At home I took a hot shower, got dressed, and walked into the kitchen to meet my mom and older sister for dinner. Probably lasagna. I sat down and checked a voicemail on my phone:
“Hey Kyle, this is Yvon Chouinard. I’m going to be at my house at the Hollister Ranch for the next few days and was wondering if you’d like to come down for New Years and tell me more about this banking thing.”
An invitation to the hallowed Hollister Ranch from the founder of Patagonia, a man I didn’t know and a company I had no prior relationship with, was surprising, to put it mildly. But it all came to fruition by simply betting on myself. Oh, and a Hail Mary email that would change my life forever.
Let me explain.
Growing up in Santa Cruz, I started surfing seriously at 11. My idols were a rough group of guys known for innovative aerials, big-wave progression, and a bitter attitude towards outsiders. Many of them were making six figures to stay planted in Santa Cruz and surf. That was the dream I wanted to chase. A few years into my obsession I got sponsored. At the time, though, I didn’t grasp the fact that sponsorship is a two-way street. It didn’t occur to me that these companies saw me mainly as a marketing vehicle — a prepubescent billboard for their brands. I honestly just thought they were being nice.
One night, when I was about 16, while having a conversation with my mom in our kitchen I had the stinging insight that sponsorship was a quid-pro-quo arrangement. This brain-busting epiphany brought me to the next logical question, one that would change my trajectory: Did these companies stand for anything real?
Most don’t. For a sport that is literally submerged in the natural environment, a large chunk of the industry produces poorly built, plastic-wrapped products that crumble when hit by a breeze. The ocean is both the arena of surfing and the trash can for its afterparty. So, with an earnest resolve to work with a company only if I genuinely aligned with them, I peeled the stickers off my board and the faucet of free swag went dry. Although peeling stickers off a surfboard is a comically privileged form of activism, it was pivotal for me nonetheless. It was my first real stance on anything. Up until that point, I had no sense of civic duty — unless it was at the behest of a teacher or parent. This was the moment I realized that everything I did, good or bad, was contributing to the world in some fashion. It was a powerful shift in perception.
I think my hippy, Beatles-loving Mom was proud of my new anti-establishment attitude, but was equally as peeved that she now had to pay for my clothes. Couldn’t you have been an anti-war activist instead? My new appetite for activism wasn’t anti-war, but close to it. I focused my ire at the corporatocracy. I listened to Neomi Klein, Amy Goodwin, Annie Leonard, and Noam Chomsky. I started volunteering at Rainforest Action Network, an organization with the tagline, environmentalism with teeth. And when I showed up at high school keggers from then on out, I successfully repelled females with terms like “carbon footprint” and “externalized costs.”
This shift from disengaged surfer dude to ardent activist wasn’t immediate; it took place between my sophomore and junior year in high school. Throughout public school I had a B average. Nothing special. But sophomore year my grades began to slip from B’s to C’s to a couple D’s. Most of my friends were a couple years older than me and had graduated that year so perhaps apathy was the reason my grades were entering a free fall. Common Kyle phrases around that time included “I hate school,” “That teacher’s stupid,” and my personal favorite broad stroke, “Life sucks.”
I moved from public school to a homeschool program called Alternative Family Education (AFE), made for students who “prefer an individualized approach to education.” In my experience, kids decide how smart they are pretty early on. They group themselves into different intelligence quadrants and let the self-fulfilling prophecy play out. Simple statements like, “I’m good at math,” or “I’m bad at english,” are prisons of their own design, and once these self-identifying phrases are codified along the neural pathways, they can be very difficult to change. But as soon as I moved to AFE, a switch flipped, and I fell in love with learning. I’ve since come to believe that buried just beneath our desire to learn is often a yearning to embody a new identity—learning is just how you get there. I was also watching a lot of Vice around that time. These young journalists would report on the oil-coated shores caused by some environmental rape and talk about what it smelled like, felt like, and was like. It was a language I could understand.
Pro surfers were no longer my pinnacle of cool. Journalists were.
I need to give a lot of credit to my mom and dad. They saw the spark of curiosity and kindled the fire. Although they had been divorced since I was six, they kept a cordial relationship and got behind the move from public school to AFE. My dad was a filmmaker. He taught me the power of story arcs, humor, and how to conduct an interview. My mom taught me how to map out a project in its entirety, prioritize steps, and execute. She would come home after work to help me “sleuth out” my projects. She loved that phrase. Together we would “sleuth out” (Google) anything we needed to learn.
One day, my mom and I set up a whiteboard and wrote down all the skills I wanted to learn, companies I liked, and people I respected. By the end of the brainstorm session “documentary filmmaker,” “Rainforest Action Network,” “Patagonia,” and “Yvon Chouinard,” were circled.
The more I researched surf brands, the more curious I became about Patagonia. When An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006, every surf company started preaching about how “green” they were. They would donate to some non-profit or put recycling cans in their offices or whatever, then market it like they were Captain Planet’s new sidekick. But Patagonia had environmentalism baked into its culture since it started in 1972. From resource extraction to supply chain to grants programs, the impact on the natural world was considered in every business decision. Of course, they are a for-profit corporation, but pound for pound, Patagonia is one of a few corporate giants that tread lightly through nature.
Rainforest Action Network had been running Patagonia’s Global Finance Campaign, targeting Bank of America for financing coal power plants. This struck me as an interesting form of activism because banks, in part, use customers’ deposits to lend to corporations. These corporations rely on the banks, and thus those customers’ deposits, to finance projects. But not all banks are created equally: Local banks and credit unions also lend out their customers’ money, but they keep it within the community rather than delivering it halfway around the world to build some expensive, coughing machine. For the average customer, moving money from a big bank to a local one takes about an hour. It’s a simple way to stop funding the problem and start funding the solution, all in one move. It’s also a leveraged form of activism, because of what’s known as fractional reserve lending: a bank can legally lend at least nine times as much money as its customers have on deposit. I learned that Bank of America was one of the largest financiers of coal power. I started foregoing evening surf sessions to sit at the computer with my mom, sleuthing through the annual reports of coal corporations to find which projects were being financed by Bank of America.
Sometimes ideas take shape slowly, other times they come through you all at once, like the universe is making a phone call to Earth and you’re just the fiber optic cable. I don’t remember the moment I decided that I wanted to get sponsored by Patagonia. I don’t remember when I decided that I wanted to make a documentary about a proposed coal power plant on the southern coast of Chile and detail how it was being financed by B of A. I’m sure it happened over the course of weeks on the computer with my mom. But I do remember feeling a clear energy around that time. It was like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over my head, and my teenage apathy had been washed down the drain.
I was able to get Yvon Chouinard’s assistant’s contact info through a friend of a friend and sent an email to him detailing my banking project. I kept it short. And then, on December 30, 2007, the night before New Year’s eve, Yvon Chouinard called me back and invited me to his house at the Hollister Ranch.
The Ranch, as surfers call it, is an exclusive stretch of coast west of Santa Barbara that is privately owned and largely closed to the public. The next night, I drove four hours south with a packet of Rainforest Action Network pamphlets laying out Bank of America’s coal-financing agenda and a rehearsed speech pitching my documentary. I knocked on Yvon’s door, and the gruff little man opened it. His house was understated, blending into the hills. It was in a gorgeous location, of course, but it was not the palace one expects when they think of a billionaire. It was late when I arrived, and Yvon showed me to the guest room. The next morning I gave him my little presentation. I was, to put it lightly, shitting myself.
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Patagonia ended up sponsoring me. They started supporting my work both through quality gear as well as a financial component. I went to Chile and made my documentary. This documentary landed me on the stage of TedX and got a lot of people and businesses to move around 360 million dollars out of Bank of America and into local banks around the world. I spent most of my twenties making documentaries about environmental issues and got to give speeches at universities around the country. Now, 13 years later, I still surf for Patagonia, work as a writer, and host a podcast. I am so grateful for my career: I get paid to be curious.
I sometimes wonder how my life would have turned out if I hadn’t peeled the stickers off my board that night. If I hadn’t changed schools or earnestly scribbled my goals on a whiteboard with my mom. What if I hadn’t volunteered at Rainforest Action Network or gone to Yvon’s house on New Year’s eve all those years ago?
Before I went down to Yvon’s house my mom gave me a quote on a piece of paper to keep in my pocket. It’s by the poet Audre Lorde and I still have it till this day:
“When I dare to be powerful — to use my strength in the service of my vision — then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
I believe that when we dream big, it hits a kind of cosmic note. I believe that the universe likes this melody and if you keep playing long enough, she will start leaving big tips. Too often, we make ourselves smaller than we really are because we’re afraid of coming across as egotistical or we don’t believe that we deserve success. But when we slouch our shoulders and mumble through life, the universe stops coming to our shows. And I’m not talking about fame or money or even being the center of attention. You can be totally behind the scenes while tuning into this cosmic melody. I also don’t think it’s about squinting your eyes really hard and “manifesting.” I think the easiest way to get the universe to support your work is by leaning into fear like you’re biking into a chilly headwind, and sending that fucking email.
