YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Hale

lines on the record: 76
first: 2025-11-10
most recent: 2025-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Was slow going at first, Stephen estimates he sold about 50 during the first few months, mostly to friends and family, but his big break came after he posted a video of himself at the airport showing the takeoff suitcase in action. That got $700,000 on TikTok in his first real sale.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stephen got to thinking what if there was a carry on roller suitcase big enough to hold all you need for a trip but could also shrink down just a little to be the size of a free personal item all you'd have to do is press a button and pop you could take off the wheels take off and he thought that would make a pretty cool name for a luggage company too so despite no background in product design and while working a full-time sales job Stephen gathered up some seed money and found a manufacturer on Alibaba to build out a prototype after five months of back and forth the first run of suitcases was ready to be sent to his house all five hundred of them”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just looked at the size of the personal item and the carry on size of it, and I just was like, well, it's not too much smaller. I wonder if my suitcase could fit. I put it under sizer and I look like, well, if it didn't have these wheels, it probably would fit inside this sizer.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how budget airlines get you, right? The ticket is cheap, but they'll charge extra for things like bottled water or printing your ticket at the airport or carrying on a roller suitcase. But one of the things that are still free, a small personal item like a backpack or a purse. And that's when Stephen noticed something at the airport.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have found a flight for like $40 round trip on one of the budget airlines. It's a great deal, but you add your carry-on fee. It was about $50 each away. So I was like, wait, for me to carry my own bag onto the plane and put it in overhead, I got to pay twice as much as the actual fight itself. That just bothered me.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's Tom Hale, the founder and CEO of Backrose. By the way, a while back, the company started offering e-bike options on their trips, and it quickly became a really popular choice, so much so that last year, in response to guest feedback, they started offering bike trips only for people who want to do it the old-fashioned way, with no electricity and just legs.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making the decision to do this initially in Las Vegas, waking up in the middle of the night, I attribute that to luck and just a fortuitous moment. But I got to say that in general, the grind has been consistent, nonstop, embraced, and has meant everything. And I don't resent it. I embrace it and my original short-term partner who said this is just a lot of work. You know, she really hit it on the nail. It's a lot of work. And I don't think people that start this as a hobby and keep their day job. I can't even imagine. Good luck.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a lot of opportunity that we will. I know there's opportunity and we will take advantage of much of it. And I know at the same time that we are going to be hyper vigilant about where it hits a boundary that we don't want to mess with. We want to have our voice be our voice, but I think there's a lot of ways to make life more efficient also. Having to do travel copy from scratch all the time may not be the best way to do it.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's true with every city. That's what I do. I take a run in the city at five in the morning, maybe six. And it's so right. And you can do it. You can take a walk, but yeah, you want to get out there before the crowds arise. And it's an entirely different place.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's an interesting point because I think that as social media has kind of become a just a reality of life, if you go to Venice, the only time to see Venice, and by the way, if anybody listening is going to Venice, get up at 5 in the morning and walk around Venice between 5 and 7 in the morning. That is the time to see Venice because that's when the delivery people are out and the people working in Venice are opening the shops and the streets are amazing. It's beautiful, quiet. You can really get a sense of that city. But really, after 10 a.m.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're biking by the way, we're not, there's not 25 of us going down the road as a pack. You are 100% riding at your own pace. And so you can never see another guest on the trip, but you're out there interacting. Little towns we go through in these beautiful European villages, there's a little sidewalk cafe. It's not an Instagram heavy environment. I'm not saying that there aren't those places that we have. And even on our hiking trips, we're out hiking. And so I agree. It's an unfortunate thing. But we do our best to avoid those kinds of places. Sometimes we're able to go in the morning and miss something, that negative aspect of a place. And sometimes we just don't go there anymore.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'll back up just a little bit, which is to say that I will avoid those kinds of places that you just referenced to the nth degree. I hope that most of our guests will avoid those kinds of places. I don't care”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no one there. And now you go to places that nothing is hidden anymore. There's no secrets. There's no, oh, only the insiders know this because it's all on Instagram. There's somebody. Who has set up a tripod and is posing for photos for seven hours in one spot because they want to get the right social media photo. I'm astonished that people would travel around the world to wait three hours for gelato and skip seeing a masterpiece in the museum that nobody is going to. I experienced that in many cities in Europe. The museums are empty in many of these cities unless it's the Prado or the Louvre or the David statue, but the other ones are empty. But people are waiting for two hours for gelato, waiting to get the perfect selfie to put on Instagram.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Follow, and you know, everybody was in the same boat, but we came out of COVID faster than anybody purposefully. There was some, I think our guests were incredibly generous with us. You know, we always survey our guests how to go and they were, quite honestly, well, I think they were overly generous because, you know, the National Park restaurants aren't exactly known for their fine cuisine to begin with, but it went from that to boxed lunches because of COVID. And so really, I think our guests were just so darn happy to be outside and doing something with people that we shot up in business in 2022 like you can't even believe.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was just disastrous. And the only reason we had any signups that year is because we had sign-ups before February and March. But yeah, we basically stopped all the revenue more or less stopped for about a year. And we laid off people. We did temporary layoffs, full-time layout. reduced pay and then we made a lot of that up after we came out of COVID but we did everything we could think of and the one thing that I've gotten pretty good at is you know we're going to come out of this stronger than when we went into it and I attribute my belief in our ability to do that to the experience we had with 9-11 and Great Recession because we, as tough as COVID was, it was just hellacious. I mean, all of the rules we had to...”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, all of the folks that are working more or less in the outside of the leader ranks or full-time, many of the leaders are full-time, as full-time as they want to be. It's a lifestyle job and it can be really demanding. So there's plenty of leaders that are happy to take the winter off, but others want to work all the time. So, yeah.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And instead of having two leaders, we had three leaders. Instead of having one van, we had two vans and went on and on and on. And we went from really low profit margins to much higher profit margins because we were talking about what we do and how well we do it. And more than anything else we do, we have the best leaders out there. And we treat them well. They're not independent contractors. We house them between trips and just We just don't subcontract.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that had a much bigger impact. We had a 43% drop in business that year. So that, you're kidding, a 43% drop in business, that's going to kill us. We laid a lot of people off. It was really hard. But we were able to look at our business very differently. And so I asked the question of what are we doing that's better than what the competition is doing? What are we doing that we're really doing a great job? If the answer was this is something that we're doing a really great job on, then the next question was, are we doing enough of it to be able to talk about it? Because one thing we noticed was that, you know, all the companies kind of look alike. They all put out a nice catalog, blah, blah. But we were better. And I knew we were, but we weren't doing enough of these things to talk about it. So we retooled the company.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“9 11 was just so shocking. And one thing I've learned in this rather seasonal business is that if you have something happen, bad happen in the world, please have it happen late in the fall. So this wasn't late enough in the fall on September 11th, but it was still late enough to where we'd run most of our trips. But September is our biggest, most busy month. And so that was crazy. We basically said if you're on your way to the trip, feel free to go to the designated meeting place. We said the same to our leaders. And we had some amazingly great trips run that week. Even that week. And then, of course, we had to kind of figure out the next few weeks. And so we lost a lot of business there.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have a very high repeat and referral rate. That's also about Winter, one-third, one-third repeat referral in new business. But word of mouth is everything in this business. You can't do it without word of mouth.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. It was our name's bicycle touring for the first 15 years or so. We didn't officially change it until after that. So great name decision because we could split off backwards if we wanted to, but we held on to that longer than we probably should have. We were known as the biking company long after we were much more than that. And now we're one-third biking, one-third hiking, and one-third multi-adventure.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then started asking people, well, how were the restaurants? How are the hotels? How are the local guides? And a handful of other things. And we track all that and try to improve the trips.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trial and error, for instance, we used to have a combined hiring and training event. And it was a three-day event. And at the end of that, we would choose our leaders out of that. But it took us way too long to realize, well, that's a stupid way to do it. You're spending all of this time and money training people, and you're only going to hire half of them or whatever it might be. So anyway, we now have All of our leaders go through 10 days of training that is really pretty intense. And then we have performance management happening for everybody all the time. And we're heavily metric driven company. We survey to the nth degree. We started out by surveying our guests, for instance. And what we came to see is, well, that would say something about the overall experience. Great, but with you.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, you know, he figured out how to ship bikes. I don't know if they had rules back then in all of these places that we should have been adhering to. My guess is they probably did have rules and we probably weren't adhering to them. So we basically did things as close to how we do them in the States as we possibly could. We used our national leaders, which were US and Canadian at that point for the most part. And then we also used some local guides in places like Bali. But we really wanted our own leaders to be leading our trips because they were really heavily trained and we could trust them and they knew what they were doing, et cetera. We do the trip.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spring to fall, yes. And so it was totally spring to fall then. And so he didn't take much to think that we should branch out. And New Zealand in pretty short order, as well as Bali, I think it was.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pulled into the driveway. And I kid you not, one of the tires went flat right then and there and we pulled open the sliding door of the van and it fell off the hinges. It was like it was an omen from somewhere, but it was a hell of a summer, I'll say that.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the hospital, and we actually walked out of the hospital. It was amazing. I had broken ribs and they had neck braces on. And we were really beat up. We made it to the, I think the Salvation Army to get some clothes. We didn't have a thing on our person. And we walked out of there with these puffy slippers. And Kathy, one of the leaders, she could only walk about, I don't know, 50 yards with that before she had to like kind of sit down. But Bill and Kathy went on to lead the next two trips. I went back to get another van to meet them. And we finished. It was a pretty rigorous because we had to keep moving the seats in the van in and out. And they were heavy and we had to move big heavy picnic tables around. So my ribs never got well. We were sleeping on the ground and got back to Oakland.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were driving crossing the Nevada desert just east of Elko, Nevada, and the driver reached down to Swada Bugoffer Lake or something. Anyway, she went off the embankment and we rolled the van a couple times. I felt like we were in a rock tumbler and it was all steel tool chests, propane containers. Just imagine all that was going around as we're spider manning through the air. And anyway, we came to a rest and made it over to the edge of the freeway. And I was, we're laying there side by side. And Bill, one of the leaders, said, well, I guess that's it for the summer and didn't miss a blink. It's like, my response to that. Well, I don't think so. We'll figure it out. So we took the ammo.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So you got, it was like a pre order almost for a product. You basically get the deposit. So you've got some cash to work with. Then you get the full amount within a few days of the trip starting. Then you do the trip, and then the hotels don't have to be paid until after the trip is over.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or more on average, we are paying the hotel sometimes. The balance due is paid after we have already finished the trip. So I didn't know that that would become so important, but it made us able to do this.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't have any investors never remained 100% closely held family business for 46 years. And my dad and my uncle and my best friend from graduate school, they all, for some reason, I had this $30,000 amount in my head that that's what they provided as a loan. And it was always a loan to get a very short-term loan to get through the winter. We are a very strong cash flow company. I read this little book when I was thinking about starting this company up. It was a really small book called Buy Low, Sell High, Collector Early, and Pay Late. And you didn't even have to read the book. You just read the heading. And if that's the kind of business you have, it's a really good thing. Or our guests, first of all, are paying their deposit maybe 90 days in advance.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, the best example I can think of is when this is very early on, when we only had one office person and she quit in the middle of me leading a trip. And so I had to come back and man the office. And, you know, that was just kind of stupid to only have one person maybe. Certainly didn't do that again. And we, I, built up a very strong structure around supporting everything we have to do.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I mean, given how intensely cadence was, right, you are leading trips or you're back at the office trying to prepare for the next one, and it seems like at times it was a house of cards because you're on a trip and somebody manning the store, I don't know, quits or there's a problem, like you don't have cell phones. It's like it could all just kind of collapse maybe temporarily. But did that happen? Were there situations or times where you're out on a trip and you got to go back because there's like a fire that you have to put out at the office?”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was no, I would say that the demographic was probably a lot of folks in their 40s and 50s and certainly younger and older. We've had some amazingly fit people in their 80s on our trips that probably rode the younger folks out of them like crazy. But we weren't really targeting gung-ho cyclists. We were really interested in this as being a much more holistic experience. And I would say that We've always been experts at accommodating mixed abilities.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, it's not rocket science. And secondly, I love logistics and I'm good at that sort of thing. And thirdly, I never was without a notepad in my pocket and a pen. And so I was constantly improving and thinking. And it's actually a very complicated business now. We're spending tens of million dollars on technology to harness everything we have and how we communicate, blah, blah, blah. But back then it was just figuring it out as we went.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you, I mean, I'm just thinking of the logistics of doing this. And again, this is like early 80s, pre-internet, you know, it's like mailing letters, phone calls. Hopefully people will pick up. How did you figure out how to plan all the logistics for each of these trips? I mean, you had an office in San Leandro. You had to figure out enough food for each trip. You had to figure out the right bikes to bring because there were different sizes for people. You had to bring water. And how did you start to figure that out?”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still a prosecutable event. So if you don't want that to happen, get your bikes right now. I want to know where the bikes are. So he went up into the attic and started dropping bikes down. Wow. Anyway, I got my bikes back.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The bikes were in our warehouse in San Leandro. We got burglarized and they stole half of our bikes. That was a problem. I reported to police and we put out a reward for information and this young fella came by and said, hey, I know who stole your bikes. And I said, well, okay. And it was in the neighborhood. I said, well, let's walk over. And it was at night time at that point. Walked over to the corner, he said, that's the house, like two, three houses away. So I was like, oh my God, I hope that this is right. And I hope they don't come to the door with a gun. But I went to the door and this young fella answered the door. And so I just took it upon myself, say, well, by the way, I think you've got about 12 of my bikes. And I think, oh, and I also added, and what was his name, the police guy, Detective Ritter says this is.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was kind of a long story on how we came to an agreement on that. But yeah, she was smarter than I was as far as seeing the writing on the wall that this is always going to be a lot of work. So, you know, 24-7 for ever.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Linda Linda Petty. I shook up a conversation with her or her with me. I don't remember. And we had a really nice chat about what I was embarking on as far as this business. And she was just like really interested in it. So we said, well, let's keep in touch, but she had expressed enough interest to where she was pretty pumped on it. So she became a 50-50 partner for about two and a half, I want to say two and a half years. I'm not sure how long it was. And then she kind of woke up and said, wow, this is really a lot of work. And we're not making any money and decided to get out of it. And so then we dissolve the partnership.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. We would, I mean, the canyons, I always went there on my birthday. I remember because I was leading the trip on September 20th and it was a beautiful time to be there. The aspen are changing, but we went from Cedar Brakes to Bryce Canyon to the North Rim and to Zion. We did all of that. It was a seven-night trip. We ran longer trips back then.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it actually was probably a two month loop. That was the almost the extent of our offer we also did run a higher percentage of trips in the Northern California area.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You organize like five or six different trips, but it would be on this loop path. And so you would. You would take the bikes, you'd meet people in the first trip, which was, say, New Mexico, then they would say goodbye when they were done. Then you'd pack the bikes up and drive to the next place, which was only a couple hours away. Maybe in Utah, Arizona do the same thing and then keep going until you get back to Berkeley.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“San Leander, also in the Bay Area, sort of south of Oakland. And so, in terms of just when you would have a trip in those first few years, all the bicycles were kept in a warehouse in the Bay Area, and then what you would load a van and then drive that van to Yellowstone and meet people there.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In what we called the, well, it was a very dark basement, but yeah, we sort of there. It was a nice neighborhood and we probably overstayed our visit there and then we moved down to San Leandro to the world's most decrepit strip mall.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't understand a word. I loved him all. But anyway, I'm still in touch with several of them. Anyway, but Back Rose was one of the roommates. I was a roommate. And the rent for Backrose was $135. That included the office that I was in, in the garage. And I lived on nothing pretty much. You know, peanut butter sandwich, et cetera. And that's just the way it went for the first few years.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five of them in Berkeley? Yeah, I'd come into the kitchen in the morning and Norwegian is a very sing-songy language and it's”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were, I shared a house with six roommates, most of them spoke Norwegian. And it was in a nice neighborhood up in foothills of Oakland.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so you're doing these bike trips in different places around the southwest in the US. And I guess the first several years are these are just bike trips, right? Later on, it would become hiking and other things. But at this point, there are bike trips. And I guess from the beginning, You were providing the bikes, you were like holding them and then storing those bikes somewhere to be used on these trips.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we continue to do camping for 38 years, I think, but it had flat lined towards the end of that period and everything else was growing rapidly. So in our, I think it was our second year pivoted to hotel trips and quickly that became the majority of what we did.”
2025-11-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Backroads: Tom Hale. How a desk worker became a trailblazer in active travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT