What up y'all? This TD bank is at the corner of second avenue in first street in the East Village. Five years ago, this is where Mars Bar, a legendary New York dive, went stood, but a real estate developer bought this property, Jack Thornt, Mars Bar moved out, TD bank moved in. This is happening across all of Manhattan. There are 1,800 bank branches in Manhattan, up 60% over the past 10 years. And most of the places where these are appearing are where areas where there were local businesses before, but they've been priced out by real estate developers trying to turn a buck, turn a profit on them. This is also happening in the suburbs, of course. Downtowns are being hollowed out in strip malls or full of chains. Culture is moving from the center of town now to the outskirts and is being produced by massive corporations. And we feel like this is a natural order of things, this is just what happens. But actually, this is a strategy on behalf of money to turn the world into an investment portfolio upon which they can make more money. This money monoculture we see across all of society. It's happening in major way in politics. This is from the New York Times last year, 158 families have funded most of the presidential election. It's happening as well in the world of music, where 80% of the concert industry is owned by ticket master, where a very diverse ecosystem of record labels is slowly whittling down to just three. And where most pop songs are written by four baldings Scandinavian men. This is also happening in the world of film, as we all know, where everything that comes out is based on existing IP, now in IMAX and 3D. And it's also happening across other areas of media, like magazines, where every cover of every magazine is featuring Taylor Swift. Nobody got fired for buying IBM, as they say. And so this is playing out across all areas of culture, and also this is playing out in an even bigger way in business, where this drive of money to make even more money takes on a more violent tone. Look at the language, out for blood, go to work for talent, own the world. The world is something to be harvested, extracted. Businesses are celebrated for how many jobs they disrupt, rather than how many jobs they create. And when this plays out, you get graphs that are up and to the right for all the wrong reasons. The end game of this is a lot of people having very little, and a few people having a lot. And again, it's unclear what to do about this. It feels like the natural order of things. Like we have been subscribed to a newsletter that we cannot opt out of. So what do you do? Do you opt in and you try to be one of the lucky ones that gets rich and you give money away to charity, but reinforce the same system? Or do you opt out and try to think of another way to exist? And opting out is quite fun. You imagine home-steading. Maybe I'll delete my Facebook account, go back to the razor phone, let's just retreat from everything. I think about it all the time, but the challenge is then you're leaving society to the greedy people to ruin it. So what do you do? Well, I think that we need a new model. One of the hardest things to do is to recognize the world you're in. A big fish says to a little fish house the water today and the little fish says, what's water? Recognizing the world you're in is quite difficult. So we need a new model. We need new choices. And it starts with, don't sell out. I come from the Kurt Cobain, Corporate Rock sucks world where the worst thing you've ever do is sell out. We've entered a time where that's celebrated. You exited for how much? Awesome. Let's get rid of that. It's something that you do it for as long as you can and preserve it. You also preserve the ideals that motivated you to start that and to begin with. You don't fall prey to the pressures of competition, of potential failure, deviate from your core. You stay true to those things. You don't lose sight of them. You bake those in into everything that you do. You also support other people who choose this path. This is a less lucrative path. It is a longer road. It's the people that have the courage to do it. You support them. You back their Kickstarter. You subscribe to their Patreon. Buy their album on Bandcamp. You support the people that choose this direction. Because when they do, these people can be real. They can be honest about what they think. There's not a moral conflict over speaking their mind. This can only happen if you are financially sustainable. If you get paid for your work, then you can truly be your own bitch. You can call the shots that you want. These are the things that motivated us to become a public benefit corporation. This is a very new legal type. There's about 1,000 of these that exist one here in this room from uncommon goods. This requires business to not only be a for-profit company, but also produce a positive good for society. Patagonia is another one. Their charter says that they will share proprietary information with competitors if it will help the environment. This is the attitude we need. Here at Kickstarter, when a new employee joins, they get our mission and philosophy handbook written by our founder, Perry Chen. And the final page says this. We champion and celebrate the creation of art and culture. Fuck the monoculture. Thank you.