Himalayan Odyssey with Hyatt Chairman Tom Pritzker
The Himalayas are a massive mountain range in Central Asia that inspire awe and respect in anyone who visits. Humans have been living in their shadows for centuries, and the region is rich in culture and history. As well as being Chairman of Hyatt Hotels and The Pritzker Organization, Sandy and Sandra’s guest today, Tom Pritzker, is also a recognized archaeological expert on a particular section of the western Himalayas and Tibetan art and culture. He’s here today to discuss the remarkable work he’s done and continues to do in the remote areas of the Himalayas to discover and expose the traditions and heritage of this region.
Tom opens the episode by sharing how he got interested in archaeology as a subject and the Himalayas specifically. He recalls a childhood memory of tracing his future adventures on a map of the world and how he later went searching for a cultural adventure with his wife Margot, winding up living with the Tibetans in Trans-Himalaya for two months in 1978. He then describes becoming interested in Rinchen Zangpo, the priest who brought Buddhism to Tibet, and following the places named in his biography for the next forty years, including discovering a historically significant bronze commissioned by Zangpo himself. Tom also discusses how the philosophy of Buddhism has positively influenced his life, including in the business world, helping him to develop a healthy mind and an agile mindset.
Next, Tom describes a typical journey in the Himalayas and the differences between the regions they straddle (India, Nepal, and the Tibetan part of China), explaining that the best strategy is to hang out with kids, who know the whole area better than anyone. For Tom, these journeys act as a kind of retreat and a physical and psychological reset of proportions and priorities. However, there are less pleasant aspects, including the evidence of climate change that Tom has observed in recent years and some risky situations he’s found himself in during his adventures. Tom shares the details of a couple of these close calls, including a run-in with a group of soldiers on horseback and the subsequent rescue by a bunch of ex-guerilla brigands! And after that dramatic tale, Tom closes the episode by discussing how his youngest son David is continuing the family business, having obtained his PhD in the textual history of Tibet at Oxford University, and his joy in sharing this interest in researching history and having adventures with his family.
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Transcript:
Dr. Sandra Magnus: It lies somewhere between the pit of your stomach, your racing heart, and your brain, somehow trying to keep it all together.
It's an area we call, The Adrenaline Zone.
I'm retired astronaut Dr. Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm retired Navy fighter pilot, Admiral Sandy Winnefeld.
We're two adrenaline junkies who love spending time with people who are really passionate about pushing their boundaries as far as possible.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: The Himalayas are a massive mountain range in Central Asia that inspires awe and respect for anyone who visits. Humans have been living in their shadow for centuries, and the region is rich in culture and history.
Sandy Winnefeld: Our guest today, Tom Pritzker, Chairman of Hyatt Hotels and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is remarkably also an expert on the history and culture of the Western Himalayas.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Today, we explore with Tom the remarkable work he's done and continues to do in the remote areas of the Himalayas to discover and expose the traditions and heritage of this region.
Sandy Winnefeld: Many thanks to our sponsor for this episode - Culligan Water.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Culligan's drinking water systems deliver the superior filtration and refreshing hydration you need to fuel your high-performance lifestyle. Learn more at: culligan.com.
Sandy Winnefeld: We caught up with Tom in between his many activities at his office in Chicago.
All right. Tom Pritzker, thanks for being a guest on The Adrenaline Zone.
You are the Chairman of the Pritzker Organization of Hyatt Hotels and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, among a whole host of other activities. So, you're incredibly busy, but you're also a recognized archeological expert on a particular section of the Western Himalayas and on Tibetan art and culture.
So, I have to ask you, when did you get interested in archeology as a subject, and why that particular region?
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 archeology. 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. And so, just a fair warning that we may go to a number of different places.
Sandy Winnefeld: That's what we like.
Tom Pritzker: 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, we 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. And 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.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: 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. And it sounds like you focused kind of around the Tibetan area.
Tom Pritzker: 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 archeology. It really started with I wanted a cultural adventure that nobody or very few people had ever done or experienced.
So, Margot 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 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 for 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 it's Tibetan community, and we lived with the Tibetans for more than two months. And this was all walking, no communication, lots of adventure, lots of discovery. We think we were in the first 10 outsiders to ever penetrate this area.
And so, that opened up a whole window into a world that was just very, very different. Both, it was rugged, it was high altitude; we probably crossed 10 passes over 16,000 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.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow. That sounds spectacular. That really does.
Sandy Winnefeld: You know, that region is-- never having been there, I know it's spectacular in terms of terrain, in terms of culture, in terms of art, and the like. But it also can be at least a fairly politically turbulent region. Have you seen that change? Has it impacted over the last, you know, 40 years or so that you've done this? Has that overlaid on anything? Or have you managed to escape most of that political turbulence?
Tom Pritzker: In the Buddhist and Hindu part of the Himalayas, yes, there can be some political sensitivities, but usually, we're able to navigate that with what I would call 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.
Sandy Winnefeld: You know, I think you could have had a career as a diplomat.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah. So, was there a theme to your wonder? You were trying to trace the Silk Road, or were you just sort of looking at different pieces randomly?
Tom Pritzker: So, we had that great adventure in Dobo and Nepal that was in '78. And then, in '84, we were allowed to visit a very restricted, militarily restricted area of India-- where the Indians and the Chinese, we've seen them fighting more recently. But it was on the Indian side, and we went up with the military, and we went into this phenomenal monastery. So, think of wall paintings that are exquisite; color, beautiful, fantastic Buddhist paintings. And there's an inscription-- and the nice thing about Tibetan is, if you can read it today, you can read what they were writing in the 11th century. And the inscription described a king called Yeshe-Ö and his chief priest, a guy called Rinchen Zangpo, and that they had brought Buddhism to Tibet.
So, we did that. When we got home, we got a hold of Rinchen Zangpo's biography, and basically, he was a seminal figure in the 11th century. And I'll tell the story in a minute, but basically, we circled every place, name in that biography, and that became our map. We created a map that became-- what we did for the next 40 years was trying to find every name, every place that was named in Rinchen Zangpo's biography in the hope that we might find inscriptions, or treasures, or libraries that would give us more insights in Tibet history.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Okay.
Sandy Winnefeld: Amazing.
Tom Pritzker: That's sort of what led to this journey.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, along that journey, you've obviously run across some amazing art; sculpture, paintings. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and what they indicate about the civilization from which they evolved and the like?
Tom Pritzker: Yeah. So, let me give brief history. So, 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. So, he had to master Buddhism in a different language. He was there for 17 years, and he brought back artists, teachers, books. 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 are on foot. So, we're on the Tibetan side of the border, the Chinese side, and they'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 anyways. And we take our photos, and one of them is very large, and the Tibetan's dress their bronzes, so you can see the face, but you can't see most of the body. So, we walked back the three hours to our campsite, and I'm lying in our sleeping bags with Margot 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 reread the story-- and the story was, his father had died, he went to Kashmir, he had a bronze made of a bodhisatva, 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 got to go back there." And he says, "You can't. Our permit is up at eight in the morning, we have to get out of here, and you can't." I said, "You don't understand. I'm going to go. Now the question is, how are we going to 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 going to yell and scream at you." And he said, but don't worry about it.
So, I take off in the dead of the night, and we walk the three or four hours to this temple, and we go to the temple keeper and say, "We need you to take the clothes off the bronzes." This would be like at a dinner party saying to your dinner partner, "Would you mind taking off all your clothes?" 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 the history books, and sort of, 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.
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 the 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 path marks are in the landscape?" And this is a huge scree 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 was 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 goal to import Buddhism. And Buddhism has to be a very expensive religion because you got to have bronzes, monasteries, and all of that. He then renounced his throne and became the head lama. So, in effect, he used the church as his strategy for power, as opposed to kingship.
So, you can see this journey has taken us on a fantastic sort of both, intellectual discovery and physical discovery. Margot and I do this together. She's part and parcel of all of this, and it's just enriched our life enormously.
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I have to ask, Tom, whether the monks at the monastery were aware of what you had discovered in that bronze, you know, the missing ring finger. Or did you sort of, you know, like, "Hey, do you realize what this is?"
Tom Pritzker: The answer is I've thought about that. 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've 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.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, as you're going through this journey and validating or not, I guess, some of the history, are you planning on writing, or have you written publications that share that knowledge with the rest of the scholarly community? Or are you still working on that final output, I guess?
Tom Pritzker: Sandra, here's my problem. I have this day job that gets in the way of what's really important.
Sandy Winnefeld: Or maybe, 10-day jobs?
Tom Pritzker: And I'm 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 so old, they don't want you anymore in the office, you can just assemble those, 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 into 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.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, as you've gone through this discovery and spent so much time in the region, has anything in the culture influenced you personally? I tend to be very Buddhist in thought. I find it a very elegant belief system, and you are immersed in it for years, decades.
Tom Pritzker: It is a perfect and profound question. You're absolutely right. So, I'm not religious; I don't consider myself a Buddhist. And Buddhism, in some senses, is a philosophy more than a religion.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yep, absolutely.
Tom Pritzker: 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 10-year run of being under attack. And then in that situation, having lived in the Buddhist Himalayas for quite a long time, their view, as you know, is 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 one thing all of us can control is our attitude.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Absolutely.
Tom Pritzker: We get to 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 a healthy mind and taught me this agile mindset that's just been super helpful in every aspect of my life.
Sandy Winnefeld: You know, Tom, I can relate to that. In my early 20s, I came across a reminder from Buddha that said, "The source of man's misery is his desire." And that has really affected me my whole life. I've always tried to remind myself of that simple, you know, very crisp saying.
Tom Pritzker: Yeah. It frees you, right? It frees you to think about a situation, to deal with it, to depersonalize it, that sort of thing. And so, that aspect of it has been-- when I said it's more of a tapestry, that led into everything in my life, business, and everything else, and was really fun, powerful, interesting to develop the attitude, that sort of thing.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, a question for you. Tell us about sort of a typical journey. I know it's changed over time, as the region has evolved, as you've evolved, but what kind of altitudes are you working at? Do you have guides? You talked about walking great distances. Are you still doing that? What does it feel like up there?
Tom Pritzker: 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 a 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-- it's a U-shaped Himal 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, 12,000, 13,000. So, you'll go to a village, you're living in a tent, you interact with people in the village, in the monastery, and you look for discoveries. And one of the techniques we 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, across 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's sort of-- our days are founded by daylight; get up when the sun rises, go to bed when the sun goes down. We carry-- it's 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.
That's sort of a very healthy life where I come back in tremendous shape, and three months later, everything has gone to hell, back to my normal weight, but I think it's like a retreat, is how I think about it. You know how there's certain people, Bill Gates, is said to go off for a week, or a month, or something, and read and refresh 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 right-sets proportions and priorities, and when I come back, it's a wonderful experience to be able to do that. Generally, we're gone for about a month.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Wow. That's a long time. You know, when I hiked up Langtang Valley, we were hiking on a trail that was basically where the mule packs were going back up into the valley because there was no other way to get up there. So, I'm assuming you were on some of these village-to-village, they’re commerce trails, really. And that's how you guys would get around?
Tom Pritzker: Yeah, exactly. Well, although the commerce is generally North, South, and our inside of this valley, we're sort of constrained by the Himalayas. We're in that valley. Valley means 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.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: So, would you stay in some of the village houses, or you were definitely camping the whole time?
Tom Pritzker: 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 the house, and are comfortable doing that. It's not as clean, frankly. And so, we'd rather be in the tent, but we will do both.
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Here's a question for you. You're up in some pretty snowy, cold, glaciery parts of the world, I would think. Have you seen any evidence of climate change over the last 40 years you've been doing this or more? I guess.
Tom Pritzker: 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 sleeping bags between 6:30 and 7 at night because it was so cold. So, we would've dinner in order to be able to get in, and yes, you know, you pull the string, so the only thing that was getting cold was your nose.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I've done that.
Tom Pritzker: That was all that was exposed. And we now have 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 thick-down jacket.
So, my view is you're talking about 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. None of those are left. So, it's actually a bit of a frightening experience.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah. How do you feel the villages are adapting? That's changing their way of life significantly.
Tom Pritzker: Everything has changed in this area that we go to because there's now commerce out of China, and so, all of a sudden, you can get a beer, you can get YY noodles. All of those things are coming down, and they're now in the process of building roads. So, I think, as I say, I think we hit a window that won't exist in 10 years from now. It'll be over it in 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.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah, it's both good and bad, I guess, huh?
Tom Pritzker: Yeah.
Sandy Winnefeld: So, Tom, you described earlier one sort of hairy moment you had up there in a younger day. Any other sort of close calls you've had during some of these adventures?
Tom Pritzker: Yeah, we've had some interesting time. We had one, this was on the Nepal side; that one was in Kashmir, in India, and not so far from 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, and 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 $100 a person, or we're going to 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 $100 a person." And I said, "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. Guy comes back the next day he says, "Okay, we're going to exclude anybody over 65, but you have to give us $100 for everybody else."
I said, "Okay. Great idea, but we have people under 12. Same thing. You got to--" scratches his head, runs back to his headquarters, comes back.
Sandy Winnefeld: This is like a far-side cartoon.
Tom Pritzker: Yeah. It really is. Finally, it took two days to negotiate this thing, but we finally negotiated it to a happy landing of 200 and something dollars. 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 Maoist in those villages knew that we had paid the price, done what we needed to do, and were quite calm about it.
I'll give you one other that was a bit spicy. So, this place we went, Dobo, 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 guerilla movement, and they moved South of the border, and that was safe haven; they'd go North of the border, shoot up the Chinese, and then run South. These were called the Compass. 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 an ornithologist. He was sort of our insurance policy in case we got in trouble for being in a place we weren't supposed to be.
So, we get through this whole journey, and Margot gets very sick, 104 fever, and 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're 34 guys on horseback, and they're here to arrest you guys--" there were three of us; Margot, me and one other friend. "They're here to arrest you, and they're going to be here tomorrow."
So, Margot has got 104 fever, we break camp, we send our entire camp out into the hills, and had the ornithologist go into the tent, and talk to the advance group, and they basically said, "Okay, we're not going to arrest you, but tomorrow morning, they're going to be coming after you." As it happened, we were actually across the river from a group of 0:33:44.2 [inaudible]; 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 got to get out of dodge."
The next morning, at, I don't know, five in the morning, you know, where it's gray. And the embers of the fire are just being put out, we put Margot on the back of a yak, and we go hide behind a hill, let the main army go down below us, and then we went into a very secondary road out because we had these ex-gorillas, so they knew the turf. So, we went and traveled at 16,000 feet for probably three days, maybe four days, really long valley in order to escape the police, and then we got to the legal side, Sandra, of near where you were in the Kali Gandaki, and then it was legal.
So, yeah, in our younger days, we had 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 accuracy, but I think all of these experiences are really about life, not about just the Himalayan experience.
Sandy Winnefeld: I'd say it sounds like the little hutzpah went a long way on some of those trips. But you know, I sort of have a saying that incredibly bright adults will work unbelievably long hours, perfecting fundamentally flawed concepts. And that speaks to the judgment that you're talking about, where, you know, unless you've lived out there and seen how things can be done, and you've done that in spades, it's a remarkable juxtaposition of business and adventure that really has helped you, I think.
So, you know, this is a family business, right?
Tom Pritzker: Yep.
Sandy Winnefeld: Your son, David, got his PhD from Oxford, following in the footsteps. How did that passion evolve?
Tom Pritzker: So, David is, we have three boys; he's the youngest of the three. 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 Margot 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 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.
Sandy Winnefeld: Come on. More than that.
Tom Pritzker: Okay. We might expand it to 23. I think that's about it. So, what's fun is David, Margot, 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 archaic stuff. And so, that's ended up, he's a serious scholar, and he has the sort of personality of a scholar. And he's now sort of more of the senior person of our team of three now because he knows what he is talking about, and he can make references to literature and this sort of thing.
Sandy Winnefeld: Maybe he's the one who puts all this together instead of you?
Dr. Sandra Magnus: They say he's the person who can write it all up.
Tom Pritzker: Exactly, exactly. I'm trying to outsource, you know, delegate.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Well, you have, apparently, a large collection of ancient Tibetan art up there in Chicago with you. So, do you use any of that for outreach, or use that as a way to teach people about the history and culture of the area?
Tom Pritzker: 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 an East-West axis, along the Silk Road.
And so, for Margot 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, " I think we end up in this incredibly wonderful situation." Because this intersection of collecting our research in 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.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: Yeah. That's so amazing. I could talk to you for hours about this. And by the way, if you ever need a volunteer for one of your trips, I'm all over that.
Tom Pritzker: You're ready to go?
Dr. Sandra Magnus: I love that part of the world, and you know, we talked earlier about the spiritual piece, but what I want is that Annapurna Base Camp. You know, standing in that bowl of those mountains and just circling. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the area, and the people that I met over there were spectacular and really super nice. So, I'm all in with you on your next trip.
Tom Pritzker: We will sign you up. Sandy, you only fly over these places? You're not into the walking mode.
Sandy Winnefeld: No, no. I actually take a group hiking in the Rocky Mountains every year, backpacking for four days. But I was reflecting that we camp at 12,000 feet, and you're probably camping a little bit higher than that in the Himalayas.
Tom Pritzker: Sometimes.
Sandy Winnefeld: Well, Tom, this has been a fantastic discussion. I think we could just go on forever on this because it's so interesting, and I have actually visited your home and seen some of this remarkable work you have. It's fascinating, although I never have had the personal tour, so I look forward to that.
Tom Pritzker: All right. You're both welcome.
Sandy Winnefeld: But thanks so much for joining us. It's really been a cool addition to our cataloging people who take and manage risk. And you're so thoughtful in how you express how that's influenced your life. So, thanks very much, and I look forward to seeing you soon.
Tom Pritzker: Terrific. Thanks for having me, guys.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: That was Tom Pritzker, the Chairman of the Pritzker Organization and of Hyatt Hotels and a recognized expert on Western Himalayan history and culture.
I'm Sandra Magnus.
Sandy Winnefeld: And I'm Sandy Winnefeld.
Thanks again to Culligan Water for sponsoring this episode. Get the superior water you deserve. Learn more at: culligan.com.
Dr. Sandra Magnus: And check us out on social media, including a short video of our interview with Tom on TikTok. Our handle is very simple: @theadrenalinezone.
