If we all discount our own power, then we forget that if we all act together, things can change. It is now on us to alter ourselves to recognize the interdependent web that we are a part of, engaging with all of those people to ask the question: what are we going to do? How are we going to be different? Who do we know who can make an even bigger difference? How can we collectively make a bigger difference? This is all about using your power, my power, our power- for good.

Recorded September 19, 2022.

I am craving rain. and Puerto Rico and Pakistan are

drowning. There's something wrong here. And it's not just

the climate, although the climate cannot be discounted.

But the problem is more than that more than the imbalance, it

is the utter disregard for the collective awareness of our

collective existence. We cannot not be aware, that is not

possible our human brains don't do that. We can, however, choose

not to engage, not to interact, not to be part of that

awareness. Not to allow that awareness to creep into the

backs of our brains not to allow that awareness to keep us awake

at night not to allow that awareness to affect our

investing choices, our business choices, our building choices,

we can't allow that. And it seems that people are, it seems

that people do it seems that we might have a problem. Because

people are doing that a lot. People are making space for

themselves at the expense of others an awful lot. There's

this rush of investment in Puerto Rico right now. People

want to invest, but they don't want to invest in like giving

Puerto Rico an independent, but government run infrastructure

for their electrical grid, so it won't all go down at once.

Instead, what they want to do is snap up land or property at a

low price, so that then when Puerto Rico is rebuilt, they own

wealth, at the expense of the people who have lived there this

whole time. That's not good business practice that's not

using your power for good. It puts a foul taste in my mouth.

It disgusts me. And I wish it disgusted more people than that.

Puerto Rico and Pakistan are drowning. And it's going to take

months if not years, to bring them back even to the state that

they were in before the flooding started. And we know that we are

entering an era of more flood and more drought at the same

time. I myself sat in my comfortable home and watched

thick rain clouds whiz right by. Microclimates are a blessing.

Sometimes microclimates are a curse, we need the rain, we need

the water, we need the thing that connects us all. That

center, that base of life, we need it. But we do not need it

in the ways that it drowns places, we do not need it in a

way that it impacts poor and marginalized areas more than

wealthy areas. We do not need the thing that it does, where it

augments the imbalance of power. And the only people who can

change how that works are the people who have power. Now most

of the people that I know who own businesses own tiny

businesses own small businesses, and apparently, we are in the

majority. The vast majority of businesses have very few

employees. Have very few contractors, are mostly a

bootstrap, and a shoestring and an idea and a passion. But if we

all discount our own power, then we forget that if we all act

together, things can change.

We can change how the world is as these tiny little pieces of

the world. I am not the first person to point this out. But

one mosquito in your bedroom at night can ruin an entire eight

hours of sleep. It doesn't take much. But it does take engaging.

We have to engage. We have to engage and engaging at that

level begins with engaging with our people. It begins with

engaging with each other. It begins with having these

conversations out loud as though they are normal because if they

are not yet they need to be. It begins with engaging with the

people over whom we have the most direct influence. Some of

those people are our contractors and our employees. Some of those

people are our customers. Some of those people are our

families. Some of those people are our neighbors, all of those

people engaging with all of those people to ask the

question, what are we going to do? How are we going to be

different? Who do we know who can make an even bigger

difference? How can we collectively make a bigger

difference? Because the thing that's keeping me up at night is

the way that everything feels like it's sliding downhill at

once. Mudslides are also the effect of water. Where I come

from in New England, we have fewer of those because

underneath the mud, underneath the pile of dirt, is rock. And

rock requires a different timescale to be altered by

water. But here in this part of the West Coast. The hills are

just piles of dirt, there's nothing under them. There's no

structure, there's nothing keeping them there. They're like

slightly damp sand dunes. And a lot of water can send them

sliding off, reconfiguring, rearranging. That's fine. That

is the world we live in that is this terrain. That is the living

landscape. And also, and also, how are we going to live in

concert with this living landscape that we have partially

made? How are we going to be leaders in that change? Instead

of taking it as a dominion that we are supposed to alter? It is

now on us to alter ourselves to recognize the interdependent web

that we are a part of. And to engage with that web in a

sustainable way. Sustainable for all of us. I'm not saying we

should sacrifice massive numbers of human lives just because the

way that we're living now doesn't work. But what are we

going to do? What are we going to do? We have to begin by

recognizing that as a leader of a business, we influence all of

the lives of the people who work with and for us, who buy our

product or our services. And figure out how to make that even

more humane even more just.

I saw a TkTok

Yes, I'm on TikTok, and no, I don't make videos, I just watch.

I saw a TikTok about an autistic-friendly city that was

being kind of crowd imagined by this person and all of their

followers. And the person just rattled off a list of features.

And by the end, both I and one of my partners, were crying. To

imagine living in a city with that kind of environment with

that kind of culture with that kind of support. We can imagine

what could be better than what we are doing now imagine first

and then work backwards to how we're going to do it. That's our

strength as intensives. And that's our strength as founders.

We know how to start with a vision and work backwards to the

mechanics instead of starting with what we already know and

believe and think is possible and working forward to what we

think we can do from here. That old way just gets you breeding

better horses the new way, gets you cars. Now, I know cars are

not the fantastic 100% perfect thing that we all wish they

were.

But we have to

imagine first. So we need to be imagining first, what kind of a

work environment would be so good. What kind of a life would

be so good, what kind of people would be so good, what kind of

international relations would be so good that we would be

delighted that we would be joyful that we would feel like

we had all the extra mental and emotional capacity we needed to

imagine something even even more delightful, even more caring,

even more interconnected.

What do we need to do

you to take care of all the people on the planet? And how do

we start with our own organizations, our own

microcosms? California, California is moving towards

socialized medicine. We keep expanding the state paid health

care system, and involving inviting more people into it. I

am so excited about this, not because I live in California,

although also that, but because I want the places that I live to

use the resources that we have. And this state has tremendous

resources to model what is possible. We are so large, our

economy is bigger than some countries' economies. We have

the means and the tools and the structure to model what

socialized medicine could look like in the United States. And

so we're doing it. That's what I want each of our companies to do

figure out what we can model what we can show off. Is it a

four day work week? Is it better pay? Is it better working

environment? Is it something even bigger? What can we do that

will ripple outwards and show what is possible and

collectively put pressure on larger organizations, companies

and governments to

behave differently so that nobody is drowning?