Power, Ownership, and the Path Beyond Protest

00:00
Austin Hadley
The people in power profit while the poor perish. They do deportations without due process while they cut social aid to the most vulnerable and helpless, all described in a nation whose own soldiers have protested by self immolation. An enraged population watched a man die from burning alive as the people we call leaders simply turned a blind eye. Their use of silence is essential as they fund a genocide. And there is not a goddamn thing that we can do about it until we understand one simple concept. Power. 

00:38
Dylan Stone-Miller
Welcome to the Commonwealth Revolution Episode 2 Today we're going to take a step back and talk about power and ownership. So Austin, underlying the concepts of power and ownership are systems. 

00:52
Austin Hadley
Totally. So the very first thing that comes into the structure of a society that comes place when we think about progress and everything that we are proud of achieving, it comes from systems. It comes from structure. 

01:09
Dylan Stone-Miller
I know from an entrepreneurial perspective, I use systems thinking all the time. It's this term that's thrown around for basically coming up with a way to think about something or a way to organize information. And there's a million different templates for these systems to be used towards very productive ends. You know, the entrepreneurial experience, particularly the social entrepreneur, their goals are often to make the world a better place using a business that is financially self propelling. So they'll put all sorts of different systems. I mean, you should see my task management spreadsheet that I've made. It's color coded, it has three dimensions because I get to put comments on these little things and if something doesn't get done in one day, I move it over to the next column into Thursday. 

01:55
Dylan Stone-Miller
I've had multiple people come up to me and tell me in the airport, hey, what app is that? I really want to use that for my own task management. I'm like, yes, it's just a spreadsheet that I figured out that works for me. I've tried to use a million different task management systems and none of them work except for something that I built custom for me. And as soon as I figured this out, things stopped slipping through the cracks, you know, so like I love systems. We're here talking about this really important concept to me. And yet what we see all over our society are these systems that have questionable motives or questionable ends. Sometimes the systems are set up poorly. All that to say systems are everywhere and it depends largely on what the system is aiming to do. 

02:40
Austin Hadley
I think that's an incredible point of who is taking on the ownership of the system, the one who's giving the roles, the person pulling the strings. Because every system comes from a certain desired outcome. That's the only reason that you would put a system in place is if you genuinely wanted to achieve something that needed a system to happen. Because you're not generally going to hold a system in place that doesn't have some benefit to you. And so if we as the people, as a population are finding ourselves confronted with systems that are not working, this has brought about this idea that generally if you want to fight for freedom or you want to advocate for your own personal rights, you need to fight the system. Or you need to not comply to these systems because they're set up not in your benefit. 

03:38
Austin Hadley
But at the same time, nobody can seem to get that done. No matter what people try, these systems remain in place regardless of how much effort is put into disrupting them. Behind that is the concept that anarchists get road rage. Anarchists are famously known for putting their own choice, their own freedom to decide what's best for them over structures and systems that are trying to keep them in places that they feel they don't want to be. But at the same time, when anarchist that holds these beliefs is driving and stuck in the left lane behind someone going 65, they get furious. Because the system, the road, the traffic laws that we depend on, demand that if you're going to go slow, you should not be in the left lane. And because of that, they get mad. They depend on a system. 

04:33
Austin Hadley
We all depend on traffic laws. If you go up to a four way stop and people go out of order, there's car accidents because they've gone outside of the bounds of the system that we rely on. Even if you don't believe in these systems and you think that there's an alternative way to get some of these things done, if you disagree with the banking industry, if you disagree with the insurance industry, if you disagree with the food industry, if you disagree with anything that you're seeing around you have to know that without being able to replace what those systems are currently providing for people, nothing that we say or do will ever disrupt them. 

05:15
Dylan Stone-Miller
You have this concept of the anarchist getting road rage. And until you said that, I didn't know that I had this sort of bias of, oh, I hate all of these systems, but I love this one. You know, everybody that hits the road in theory is educated about what that system is, what the rules of the road are. I had to take driver's ed in my home state of Georgia in order to get my license. So there was a whole system of education in place, giving people what they need to participate in this system. And I think that's what's happening right now with our education system. Something that I have a lot of experience in. It's where I worked in my 20s, was trying to innovate on this system. 

06:01
Dylan Stone-Miller
And when I was trying to bring web development skills into lower income neighborhoods, I realized just how many barriers there were in the structure of this monolithic public education system that kept us from being able to train the teachers in a way that they could bring these skills to the students. There was too much turnover in teachers. We would train them and then they would leave to go to another school or they would change careers entirely. There's too much burnout. Their jobs are just too difficult for us to come in and say, hey, we also want you to learn and then teach this additional skill. 

06:38
Dylan Stone-Miller
So no matter what the idea that we may have, we do have to be aware that whatever we want to change this system into, we have to have a deep understanding of what the current systems are in order to actually change them. And that's why I'm so glad I'm working with you, Austin, because you have been in the food system for seven years or an expert in all of the intricacies and nuances of this old food system that we're stepping away from, and it's helped us to build the new one that we're building at Commonwealth Grocers 100. 

07:11
Austin Hadley
Well, and to even focus in on education a little bit there. What we call education has actually become a systematic form of what rights you give up, right? What you learned in drivers ed was what you can do, what you shouldn't do, and what you absolutely cannot do, right? And if you think of any other form of education, it's kind of the same thing. That's why so many people have pushed against educational systems, because what they do is they'll. They'll take a young mind, bring them in, and basically tell them this is how the world operates. Just like the road, right? So if were to scale this image of how does the system while you're driving work? How does the system of employment work? Right? When you go to school, you're learning how that system works. 

08:08
Austin Hadley
You need to show up on time, you need to do what your teacher tells you, right? Without questioning, you need to perform the tasks, you need to turn them in, and then you get graded, right? Judged on how you perform in this system, those who perform better in the system will be basically given more money, is what we're told. You'll get more comfort if you do what you're told. More so for some systems, like the road, that works really well, right? Because you're not getting rewarded by money, you're getting rewarded by living longer. Right? Not getting in a car accident that could cause death, dismemberment, or even imprisonment if you're blatantly violating the traffic laws, which everyone agrees with, is something that should happen to someone who doesn't care about the traffic laws because we all drive. However, there is a difference. 

09:05
Austin Hadley
The best way that I have ever heard theory of anarchism described was by Noam Chomsky, and he basically said, anarchy is about having the authority, who you give that authority to. And so in this example, we're giving that authority to the people who have directed the traffic system, right? We're saying, you guys choose what's best, we'll follow your rules. That way everyone stays safer. And most people, most of us, even those who hate systems and authority, can generally say, well, yeah, you know, I don't want to take that on. There's bigger problems in the world. I've got other things to fight against. It's not, you know, I'm not going to push against that system. I'll give them the authority and just stay in my lane. However, there are some systems that take that, right? 

09:58
Austin Hadley
So there are systems like the food system that say, this is what you're going to get to eat. It's what's on the shelf. That's not all that exists. It's all that we're willing to offer. Right? And we say, why do you have that authority over how much we pay for food or how much we pay for insurance or how much we get paid when we work for your companies? Why is that something that we're okay with not getting any decision in? Right. And that's where you need to question, is this a system that I should continue to support? Right. But the education models that we've had don't provide those belief systems, Right? They don't give children the freedom to say, hey, if you're not into this or if you don't think the teacher's authority is appropriate, you can push back against it. Right? 

10:51
Austin Hadley
That's not allowed. And so as we go through schooling, into secondary schooling, we go into the labor market, we're constantly being told, show up on time, work as hard as you can. You will get more. If you do as you're told, work harder, do more, get more money. Pennies. Even if it's pennies, we're happy with it. Right. Because of how we see our place in these systems. 

11:20
Dylan Stone-Miller
And there's really no escape from the public education system. I remember some of my first times experiencing the beige halls and having to ask for permission to use the bathroom and these typical experiences that many of us share, most of us share, that are just dehumanizing. I know. I've thought about the more communal model where the people in your community educate you and you don't sit in a room all day. Something more along the lines of the Finnish model. In Finland, where they have no homework for many years of their education, they have much shorter days, 15 minutes of recess every hour, and they're performing much better than every other country, especially ours. 

12:08
Austin Hadley
I don't know if they are doing the right thing. Systems like math and accounting, I mean, those, they're necessary, you know, science, I mean, these things are necessary. But when you're talking public education, what you really need people to understand coming out of that system is that they are there to work. They are not there to say, hey, this is what I want my grade to be. They don't get that. Right. The teacher dictates that, you know, the kind of job that they can get is dictated by a system. Their role in this society is dictated by a system from the minute they've entered school. I mean, think about what you get scored on. Is it really being intelligent or is it turning in all the paperwork and all the assignments? What's with the attendance? 

12:57
Austin Hadley
Is it that you're healthy, that you've never been in an accident or gotten sick? Or is it that you've been the most willing to conform? These things that we get graded on, these things that they say, great job, you've done the best at this. These companies will see that and say, this person is going to show up every day, whether they get sick. Whatever happens with their kids going to show up. And when we hand them shit to do, they are going to get it done because that's what they've done for the last 12 to 20 years. In that sense, the model in Finland would actually be a terrible model if you owned a big corporation. 

13:34
Dylan Stone-Miller
Wow. Yeah. And it's funny, looking back at my efforts to innovate the American public education system, it seems wildly naive now from that perspective. I simply didn't know what the end goal of public education was, or rather I did, but I was attempting to change that goal. And the whole point of the system, you're right, is conformity. They weren't going to allow somebody to Come in and give young people who have been systematically oppressed the ability to build a technology that could change the world. Coding is immense power. You can make something that scales like that. And to put that power into young people's hands is completely counter the goal of conformity for that system. 

14:27
Austin Hadley
If you think of those underprivileged communities in the context of a system, are these people basically really being oppressed by having limited knowledge? And then you've got to think of a lot of them are black, African descent, and they came here on our ships as slaves. When a lot of these people got here, what did we do with their education? They were not allowed to read our language. They were not allowed to write. We understood very well that if we gave them the ability to understand the things that were writing in our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence, if they were able to understand the things that we espoused to people that were not slaves as slave owners, then they would use that against us. They could organize, they could network around a legal framework. Obviously, if that's continuing, right? 

15:17
Austin Hadley
If underprivileged people, if the descendants of those people in their communities are having limited access to these types of learning opportunities, then that actually fits in line with the system that's been in place for over a hundred years. 

15:33
Dylan Stone-Miller
Shifting a little bit into how these systems get power, right? We are given a role within that system. How does that impact our beliefs? 

15:46
Austin Hadley
As far as the road goes, we all know that's not a belief system. We don't believe that we shouldn't go through a red light. We know that it's just paint on the ground. We know that it's just lights. We follow it not because we believe we have to, but because we all understand mutually that's the best thing for all of us. Now, when you get to a system where we don't believe that, right, where you have CEOs that are being assassinated on the street in broad daylight, right? When you've got systems that people do not believe are mutually beneficial and yet they're still in place, then we need to question the belief system behind what we're doing right now. Of course we don't support any kind of violent vigilante action. 

16:39
Austin Hadley
However, there is definitely a lot of context behind the event that can be looked at. I mean, and I think we saw this in apartheid South Africa. I think we're seeing it in the Middle east today. I think generally, when people are at a point where they don't know what to do, where every option that they can think of has been tried. They get to a point where they do irrational, violent, chaotic stuff. And that's happening more and more. And it's going to continue to grow. As more social programs get cut, more people get desperate, More politicians don't pick up their telephones to talk to people. People feel like they're not being heard and that they're not being cared about. And yet they still believe that their place in society can't be changed. 

17:30
Austin Hadley
When without that belief, without being able to say, hey, I can see a completely different picture going on right now. Nothing will happen. So one example of a belief system that we have is that we are subject to economic output. Basically saying our job is to go into a company and use our best negotiation skills to get a good deal as far as how much we can get paid for our work. And then we have to do the same thing with where we buy things we depend on like food, cars, gas, everything. We have to find the one that's selling the lowest price. That's why some people will go to three or four different grocery stores in one day, because they're looking for the best price on specific products. 

18:27
Austin Hadley
We're caught between not having any control over how much money we're bringing in and then caught on the other end by not being able to control how much money we're spending on the things that we depend on. This means that we're always going to get squeezed from both angles. And the belief system behind that is that when we see economic flow happening, we're below it. Meaning that when you're driving to work and you see these big trucks and you think, now I've got to swerve around it, right? Because it's just this big slow moving truck. The reality is that's not a big slow moving truck. That's economic output. That truck could pay off your entire house. The contents of that truck could pay off any debt that you have. That's like winning the lottery. 

19:19
Austin Hadley
Every time you drive to work, you're seeing millions of dollars on the freeway and you're just passing it by, thinking that you're subject to an economy that will not do anything for you. When in reality it's your social class that's driving the truck. It's your social class that's unloading the truck. It's your social class that's selling the products inside of the truck, and it's your social class that's buying them. The only social class that's benefiting from all of this is the elite. Why? Because they believe that they have the power to own everything. And we believe that our role is to just make it all happen and then accept whatever we get out of it. 

20:00
Dylan Stone-Miller
And I'm thinking about how interwoven these beliefs are and how insidious they can because I've been in the dating world for a little while here, and you have to make enough money in order to even be a viable dating option, a viable mate. You know, it. It's so ingrained in our existence, in our way of being, in our social identity, that it would literally end your bloodline if you can't at least achieve a certain amount of economic output. I love the idea of the truck paying off your house. It's hidden in plain sight. I drive by these trucks all the time. I do a lot of road tripping and. And I get really frustrated with these trucks when what I should be doing is hijacking them and selling all of their goods for my own personal gain and my community's game. 

20:57
Dylan Stone-Miller
No, of course I'm not advocating for that. But it's such a different perspective to think of it as ours and not, oh, that belongs to some rich person. Another thing it brings up for me is when I was getting a divorce, I went and stayed with my grandmother, right? I was venting to her one day about it. My then wife's boyfriend was at the house that her and I had bought together and I was irate. I was venting to my grandmother and my grandmother looks at me straight faced, she just says, it doesn't matter. And I thought it was incredibly dismissive of my experience. And I felt really unsupported at the time. But sure enough, within a couple of weeks, I got to the understanding of, oh, it doesn't matter. I was giving it power, I was giving it attention. 

21:50
Dylan Stone-Miller
It was a conscious choice for me to say, this situation deserves my anger and my pain. And as soon as I shifted my attention away from this thing that I could not control, I was able to focus more intently on therapy work that I was doing, do what I needed to do to actually make some progress instead of kind of ruminating and feeling stuck in this. 

22:14
Austin Hadley
That's a very positive outlook and that's not what we have. This context of choice can apply to things like addiction, behavioral patterns, different things where you're putting your own conscious energy into something that may be harmful or negative to you. But that's not what we're talking about here. Because in this sense, the power that we're giving through our labor and our consumption we cannot make a conscious choice. Let's say that you are using alcohol every day, right? You do have the choice to step away from that. There is no one that says your only choice is to drink this much every day. 

22:57
Austin Hadley
With our situation as a society, we are stuck in these systems where we believe that it's okay to say, I am going to go to work every day and I can't make a conscious choice on where I get paid or if I get paid more. Right? I have to go and beg some other employer to give me more money. I cannot make a conscious choice to make food prices lower. Right? If I could do anything to bring down the price of fuel, the price of energy, the price of food, the price of insurance, the price of my banking fees, any of these things, I would make that choice. But we can't. We're not even given the option. 

23:41
Dylan Stone-Miller
Why can't we? 

23:42
Austin Hadley
Because we do not have one specific option that all of the powerful people have. And that option is the option of ownership. Ownership over a system gives you the ability to dictate how that system runs, why it runs, the way it runs, who it benefits from running the way it runs, and what is done with the things that it's benefiting, usually capital. If you're living in a system where you're seeing a lot of people struggling more and more with money, and yet at the same time you're seeing the profit margins of the CEOs and the top executives continually rise, then we can clearly understand that if capital or money was the motivation for this system, it's working for the people who own that system. 

24:33
Austin Hadley
And if we live in a capitalistic economy, then the only way that these systems could be run democratically and managed in a way that benefits everybody was if everyone had the ability to own part of that system equally. And if you're never given that option, then you will never believe that you have that option. 

24:58
Dylan Stone-Miller
Yeah. To tie it back to the experience with my grandmother there, you're right. I took ownership of this thing that I ultimately had control over, which was my mind and my attention. Now, I do still believe that if were to shift our beliefs away from saying, hey, this political system that is designed to accept money from corporate interests and move all votes towards centrism, if were to stop believing that has any power, that would be one of the steps towards getting us to the new system where perhaps we have an app that people can vote directly, some technology that we could use to build a true democracy. The building of that tech is A process. The educating the people about how to use that tech is part of the process. But first and foremost, we have to stop giving the political system power. 

25:56
Dylan Stone-Miller
So I do still believe that a shift in belief is an important prerequisite for social change. But I do see what you're saying now that there's no way to choose to no longer believe in money when money is the only thing that buys food for your family. If your kids are hungry, then, yeah, you're gonna make the choice to continue participating in the only system that's available for you to make sure that they are fed. 

26:22
Austin Hadley
So, and this is where a lot of people will often get caught because it's kind of a chick or an egg situation, the idea comes that beliefs need to be shifted prior to an actual change in the metaphysical reality around you. And then, of course, the other notion to conflict with that is that you can't believe something that's not going to happen. Right? And I think that both are true simultaneously and that they kind of need to work in lockstep with one another. So one example would be, like me personally, I don't believe that I could golf in a professional golfing championship. I don't golf. I've never golfed in my entire life. So I really have no right to believe that I should ever golf in a championship where I don't even know how to play the game. 

27:17
Austin Hadley
In the same way, for us to not believe that we should have ownership is also relevant because we have never been trained to have ownership. We've never been able to think about what we would do with ownership without ever being able to actually build a structure for ourselves always being part of someone else's. It's totally relevant for people to believe that there is no way they could own these giant systems that they rely on. For me to want to golf in a championship game, I would have to first start out and learn to golf, right? I would have to start learning what the game is, and then I'd have to get out and take that club and hit the balls and, I don't know, try and aim them. I'd have to wear funny shoes. 

28:10
Austin Hadley
Whatever you do for golf, I would have to start doing that. And in the same way, we would have to start doing things that promote ownership for ourselves, which means if we start to see a problem that people are unable to fix themselves and going to politicians for while clearly understanding the politicians don't care about their concerns, then instead of going into despair, the last option is we need to take ownership in the system that we think needs reform. And if we can do that on some small scales, the beginning is usually community action. Think of like the Black Panther Party or Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. In this country. All three of those examples started very small in churches usually, right? And they would preach to the congressions, they would talk to as many people as they could. 

29:13
Austin Hadley
And word spread, and this is word without any social media. People weren't getting on Facebook or Twitter or anything and posting. You'll never guess what Malcolm X just said, right? This spread through communities because there was so much power in it that it was informing people there was an ability for change. So starting out, grassroots, starting out with a community action, usually builds up enough ownership that you start to get entangled with the systems that already exist. And that is where they get crushed, generally. Because if those communal systems get larger and connect with one another, then it's very hard for the existing systems to counter it. When we're the ones that provide all the labor and all the consumption, we provide the power, and we actively give it away. 

30:07
Austin Hadley
If we are now at a point of technology where those communal actions can all be organized under one platform, under one banner, then the systems that are in place can be extended indefinitely. The word of mouth can go at a much faster rate than it ever has before. And we're using tools that the elites don't actually know how to compete with. Therefore, if our belief starts small enough to say that we can get together with the people that are close to us, start organizing and start networking, and we see that happen with our own eyes, then of course we'll know that if it can happen here, the belief can extend to, can we go from just our community to maybe our whole states that are getting in on this. 

30:56
Austin Hadley
And if that's possible, then it's not a stretch to believe that we could just connect the nation. And if that can happen, we can do something that's never actually been done. And so believing is seeing is believing. But progress comes from both of those happening on an interchangeable level. 

31:14
Dylan Stone-Miller
So if we present the system, then people don't have to shift their beliefs. They just have to see what this new possibility is. We don't have to rely on changing people's minds, which is a very difficult thing to do. 

31:29
Austin Hadley
What you see, what you get. If every time our kids went to a job interview, they said, I will not work a day for you, despite what you'll pay me if I do not get some ownership, I want to be able to see the numbers I Want to be able to see our expenses, to see what we've profited. And I want to have some say in what happens with those profits. If especially going in to the future, which we're rapidly heading into, we do not make these solid standard values for everyone, then you're walking into something that's actively trying to replace you. If you think all the way back to the beginning when were starting to do farms, we had to make tools because it was too hard to dig the holes for the seeds with our hands, we made metal tools. 

32:22
Austin Hadley
After that we made steam engines. After that we made combustion engines. After that we made factories. After that we made automated robots. Currently we're making AI. Every single one of these steps has put machinery over humanity. And to some extent that's fine. But when all of the benefits from those machineries are going up to a select few, when every benefit from the advancement of all of our efforts are going up to the people who own everything, which is about 3% of our population, it's not a sustainable system. And if we continue to believe that all advancements should go to the highest bidders and those bidders should be able to use them in any way that we want, we are going to lose the power of the labor force. All we'll have is the power of consumption. 

33:18
Austin Hadley
And if we don't have ownership in the systems that we depend on, we will not be able to dictate price. The only thing that we'll be able to do, in the sense of like the food system, is go on a hunger strike. It's not productive. If we don't immediately start changing our beliefs and fighting for ownership right now, we're going to lose the chance to do it. 

33:39
Dylan Stone-Miller
It sort of brings to mind the stewardship of our environment. If we don't do something quickly, then we are not going to have ecosystems that sustain us anymore. You can scale that stewardship down to even our apartments or our immediate environments. Right. If we don't own our apartment, then why wouldn't we pour that oil down the drain? You know, somebody will just come and fix it. But if we own the apartment, we're going to take much better care of it. So where did that agency go within us? 

34:12
Austin Hadley
Well, that's the only option that we've been afforded, to be honest. So we run on a full capitalism, free market, which of course that's not true. But the idea behind that is that corporations who provide the best products and services will of course get the most people coming in and spending money. They will grow they will get the largest market shares. And if they're selling good products, the people will buy them. That's why they'll be successful. If they're treating their workers correctly, the people will work there now adversely if they decide they're going to sell terrible products. They can do that, but the people will not buy them, and they will go out of business. If they decide they're going to treat their workers poorly, people will not work for them and they will go out of business. The market will regulate itself. 

35:05
Austin Hadley
And then we found out that doesn't actually happen. We know that system doesn't work in our best interests, and yet it's allowed to continue because we're not going to dismantle the entire free market system. It's working perfectly for the people that set it up. And so we've turned to politicians as the policemen of the market to say, hey, you've got the power of laws, the power of courts, the power of Congress, the power of executive decisions. You're here for the people because we elected you and we're asking you, we're begging you for relief. You've got to come in and regulate these companies. You've got to get them to pay us more money so that we can afford to live. You've got to come in and tell them that they can't be charging these crazy prices just to profit. 

35:54
Austin Hadley
And the government is saying, we're going to try and come in and help everyone with this, but at the same time, we've been paid by these corporations already. That was how we did our campaign. You wouldn't even know our name if they didn't pay for the sign with our name on it. Right? The exact people that were saying, hey, you need to stop. These guys are putting the politicians in place to come and tell us why they can't actually stop them. They'll give us a lot of good rhetoric. They'll stand up and say, this is wrong. The people are sick of it's an injustice. We want it to stop. Then they'll sit down, they yield. The day goes on. Nothing changes tomorrow. Nothing changes next week. Nothing changes next year. Administrations change. 

36:41
Austin Hadley
Nothing changes with the policy of economics because we have no ownership means we have no power, means that every action we take gives power to a corporation that owns us. Therefore, we look to people to save us. And they never do. The system repeats, and it's because the system has perfectly been set up to repeat that way. 

37:05
Dylan Stone-Miller
And when protesters protest, then they sit down and nothing happens. If they were to do that in a system in which they owned and had a real vote in, then when they stood up and they voiced their opinion, when they sat back down, there would be a chance of change. There would be a real shift. There would be a vote cast to push the discourse in the direction that they want it to be pushed. Whereas I know when I've protested in the past, I'm laying down under a cop car thinking we're really changing the world here. And then I watch the news afterwards and it just says people marched, people shut down traffic. And it doesn't say why. It doesn't list all of the wonderful policy decisions that the person with the megaphone chanting above our heads was listing. 

37:51
Dylan Stone-Miller
It's not designed to actually make a shift. Whereas if we had the ownership, the people would be able to directly cast their vote, in the case of Commonwealth grocers, on what things are stocked on the shelves in their area, on how the dividends are distributed to shareholders, that is the shoppers, the producers of food and the employees of Commonwealth grocers. They would have a legitimate decision making capability instead of being treated like a. Like a toddler throwing a tantrum. We're not asking, we are contributing our opinions to the thing that we share together. 

38:29
Austin Hadley
Protests are part of the system, right? That's why politicians are like, yeah, we support free speech, we support protesting. We just want it to be peaceful. Like, go out on Saturday, let the streets know how you feel, hold up your signs. That's totally a right. We love when you do it. That's part of our country, you know, it's part of a system that is designed for no change to happen, no real systematic improvement for the people that are living under it. If the people that you're protesting against are saying, we love when you guys go out, right? That's your right. We're totally fine with that. You wouldn't be totally fine with it if it threatened the power of the people that own you. Why would the corporations be thrilled to line up the streets with these police guys and their helmets and their sticks? 

39:23
Austin Hadley
It's a circus, right? Why would all of this happen over and over and over again with no change? Because they know that if you don't control any systems, if you don't control the banking industry, the financial institutions, the insurance companies, the food system, the gas industry, if you don't have any power in tech or communications, who cares what you think? Who cares what your opinion is? What are you gonna do? Not pay your taxes? Boycott us until what you need to eat or wear clothes or use money or get a loan or buy a car. How long are you really gonna hold out against us? We own you because we own the systems you rely on. Please protest and then shop at our stores, bank with our banks, get loans from our insurance companies, and go to rent a center to get your couch. 

40:21
Dylan Stone-Miller
And boycotting, therefore, is not a viable solution, because who still owns those things that are actually of value at the end of the day? You move your money somewhere else or you choose to not give them your money, but they still have complete and total ownership of their entire supply chain of, say, Target, right? They have every useful item that you need to live still owned by small group of people in their store. So boycotting has certainly helped what it was at $12 billion of financial damage that they took. They're still a multi billion dollar company. They're doing just fine in part because they have all of the stuff and they own the means of production. 

41:08
Dylan Stone-Miller
The only real way to protest Target would be to seize ownership of that in some way or produce a supply chain of your own that you own and watch them dwindle out of business, as all of the shareholders say, under the same model of Commonwealth grocers owned the entire supply chain of all these goods and then therefore had a voting option to make sure that all of those goods were sourced more ethically and put less plastic out into the oceans. And all of the good things that you could do with actual ownership of the entire supply chain. 

41:43
Austin Hadley
Yeah, boycotting definitely has an effect. Boycotting can send kind of that public message of we don't like something that you did. We're not really thrilled about you right now, and that will pass. We will eventually come back in, we will shop. Nothing really bad is going to happen to you. But this specific decision for the next six months, one year, basically what we're saying to you is you're going to have to find another market for a minute as you work on your pr. That's what you need to do and you will do it just fine. It's just like when we tariff China, right? It's just like when we put sanctions on Russia. It's just like when we boycott Israel. Did those countries just say, oh, well, golly darn it, you know, I guess we'll just have to cease to do our wars? 

42:33
Austin Hadley
Of course not. Right? They found different markets, different trade partners, different people that they could do business with, and they kept growing. So the only real way that you could actually make something like a boycott Work is if the reason you were not buying products with that specific company or corporation was because you were able to get them from another company or corporation that you owned. That's the only actual threat to a system that doesn't work is a system that replaces it. How long can you boycott these companies before they just find a different market? Before our kids are buying things from them? 

43:19
Dylan Stone-Miller
You just mentioned the children thing. It makes me think of what will it look like for our kids to grow up in a world where the people expect subscriptions to give them ownership of the company, where subscriptions buy stock in the company. What will it look like for them to grow up in a world where more companies like Commonwealth Grocers emerge that are mass owned legally and how will their expectations shift away from the current models of ownership by the few? It's really beautiful to think of how a young brain might develop and all of the potential ideas and world changing things they could come up with if they had this certain philosophical foundation. 

44:00
Austin Hadley
I think that's a beautiful place to take it. We have spent a lot of time covering the systems that we are currently living underneath, that we are currently experiencing, that we're currently fighting against and working out solutions to. I see this the same as cigarettes. So many of my generation has seen their grandparents die from smoking. They remember going to grandma and grandpa's and having that smoke filled house and it's a little bit taboo to the youth. Whereas 60 years ago it was so common to smoke in your house. It wasn't thought of as a smoke. Huge health risk. It was even kind of sexy. There wasn't a negative stigma on cigarettes. Today you're not going to be 23, just hop into someone's car and light up a cigarette and have that be cool. That's not how the world works anymore. 

44:54
Austin Hadley
They will not accept it. It smells bad, it causes incredible damage to your body. But most importantly, there's an easier way to get that nicotine that tastes better and is a little bit more healthy. And that's what the kids have moved on to right now. When a kid goes into a tobacco shop, they walk past a giant row of vaporizers that all have fruity flavors, that all taste good, that offer better health. And then they have to walk past those and get to the little counter where they've got the Camel and the Marbalo. They're not going to take that choice to go into a job interview in the next 20 years and have the option between a system that you've seen, hey, you exploited My grandparents, my great grandparents, they suffered from it, they complained about it. 

45:40
Austin Hadley
I saw the effects as they aged without the right kind of medication, the right kind of health care, the right kind of social stability. And I'm not going to choose that system. I'm now going to do a system where when I'm that old, I better have ownership of 17 different companies, because I've worked for different companies, I've bought from different companies, I've supported different empires that without me would have never gotten to the point they're at. If I'm not benefiting from all of those, when I'm the age of my grandparents, I am not doing it. Never. I will never participate in a system that exploits my labor and consumption rather than gives me benefit from it. 

46:19
Dylan Stone-Miller
I have worked in the startup space for years and I have worked at some successful companies that have given me ownership of it. And I'm just now realizing I went in expecting equity in that company because that's what the startup culture does. They give equity to early employees. When I'm a founding software engineer building the tech for something, I expect ownership of it. It's just a part of that culture, and it's going to be a part of our wider, broader culture. And 17 companies and counting, I mean, that's not negligible stuff there. That's a really nice Christmas at the end of the year and then some. So much comes from that ownership. I have experienced it myself, and I want the rest of this society to have that same kind of experience and have those same expectations of ownership. 

47:12
Dylan Stone-Miller
Make sure that you all are signing up@commonwealthgrocers.com for this revolution in ownership, starting with the food system.