Building Organizations That Matter

Jose Leal (00:09):

Well, hello and welcome to Radical World of Podcast. My name is Jose Leal, and today we have a wonderful conversation lined up for two wonderful people, Josh Dykstra and Kali Love. Welcome to you both. Awesome to have a conversation in public with you two. We've, we've had the opportunity to talk a couple of times and just catch up on each other's work, learn a little bit about what you folks are doing, give you an opportunity to do that. Keep that brief. But I'd really love to spend most of our conversation on our topic today, which I think is juicy because that's really the thing that I am thinking about work, is not just how we fix work or help organizations do better or help people do better in work, but really, how do we heal the world is a good place to start because I think work takes so much of our lives and, and how do we actually improve the whole world by improving what most of our time is spent on. So, welcome. Again, want you guys give me a little brief intro about yourselves and what you're doing, and then we'll jump onto the topic. Josh, do you want to start?

Josh Dykstra (01:43):

Sure. Hi everybody. Josh Dykstra. And I am a change maker and keynote speaker and tech founder and a whole bunch of other things, all in the service of creating organizations that don't suck and, which is fun to say, but I really mean it literally, right? Like organizations they, they do a lot of, a lot of sucking, right? They suck the energy from people. They suck the resources from the planet. They don't do enough giving. And so my work has for, for a long time now 15 plus years has been focused on trying to help life create life giving places for people to.

Jose Leal (02:19):

Work. When did you start? Were you 10?

Josh Dykstra (02:22):

I was, I was 12.

Jose Leal (02:23):

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, because that, you look young enough to, to think that.

Josh Dykstra (02:27):

Thank you.

Jose Leal (02:28):

What about you, Kali?

Kali Love (02:33):

I have been interested in the world of the future for a very long time. And in the world of holistic health. So I've done, I don't want to say how many years of coaching now, and all based on the concept that work can heal the world. And we need to heal the world of work so that work can heal the world. We need to heal our inner world so we can heal the outer world.

Jose Leal (02:59):

Beautiful. That's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you guys is because of how aligned we are, obviously in our work with that we are doing at radical, but also the work that you guys are doing within your different efforts. So tell us a little bit about the two brands you've got and the work you're doing and as far as podcast coming soon as well.

Josh Dykstra (03:28):

Yeah. Which one do you want to talk about? Kali

Kali Love (03:35):

As in love work or the podcast? Yeah. That's a tough one.

Josh Dykstra (03:40):

You, you choose. You choose.

Kali Love (03:42):

Ooh. Okay. I'll, oh, geez. I'll talk about love work back. So Josh and I, along with another co-founder started Love Work. Josh actually started at a, in, I want to say 2019 is about when, when the first a little. Launch happened. And then I came in a little bit later. And love Work is program designed to help you recognize what energizes and drains you as well as your teammates, as well as your leaders at work. And then simply do more of what energizes you and less of what drains you. Right? I actually think that it's a, a funny thing, the idea of work life balance or like I remember when I was young, when my parents telling me I don't live to work. I work to live, right? Like, work isn't life giving. It's, it's what you get from work, the money that gives you the ability to live your life. And that always really confused me 'cause it seemed like I was living while I was at work. So I feel like it's all your life.

Jose Leal (04:55):

Turns out you're alive there. Yeah.

Kali Love (04:57):

Yeah. You need to, you need to pay attention to your energy there. Even, even there <laugh> even at work.

Jose Leal (05:04):

Well, I'll listen to Josh, but I, I want to talk about the top the definition of work. Maybe we can ask the question back.

Jose Leal (05:13):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we, we'd worked on this tech thing for, for a while, you know, this love work thing. And we, we've been working on that for the last few years. That's been a really interesting project and yeah, we could certainly get into more of that too. cause I think, I think there's some, we've learned a lot of things, you know, as we've been trying to, to build the technology. And, and we, I think we've learned a lot about why the current kind of interventions at work don't really work that well. Like, why, why? 'cause We, we've kind of been, I think, largely aware, we humans have been largely aware that organizations really aren't life giving places, right? Right. They, the organizations spend $400 billion a year on, on this problem. So they kind of know it, but we can't seem to like structurally fix it. So that, that could be, we do have some ideas about that, I think that we've learned through building the tech. But then yeah, our, our next adventure together is going to be doing a, a podcast of our own called The Work Revolution. And so we've got a really exciting season two planned. I actually did a solo season one back in 2020 in the pandemic summer of 2020. And I just did like short little rants, like 22 episodes of, of ranting about like what in the world is happening. Some of it's still relevant though but anyway, we're going to do season two hopefully launching next month or the month after. We've got a really exciting season planned for. The theme is that the end of X is the beginning of Y, right? So something is ending, but that means it's the beginning of something,

Jose Leal (06:46):

Of something else.

Josh Dykstra (06:47):

Yeah. And it should be a really, it should be a really fun season.

Jose Leal (06:50):

So for me, like the idea of work over the last few years as we've been working on this Matt and, and I and his son, co-wrote radical companies and going through all that work was a couple years of, of weekly sometimes daily conversations and work together. And it started to make sense to me like that there is work as a natural thing, and then there's the work we call work, because work is a natural thing. It's, it's what every animal does in order to survive. You know, I need to eat well, I'm going to work for my food, whether working for food, meaning harvesting, collecting, whatever it is, right? And that's as natural as can be. And then we created this thing a job and that we call work, but it's not regular work, right? Like, it's not the way we are designed to work. We're designed to work from a different place than, than being employees, right?

Josh Dykstra (08:02):

Yeah. It's almost like we've abstracted the, like, whenever we like, create too many, like abstract layers of things on top of things, like we seem to, to start getting further away from what's actually valuable to humans. Right? So it's like we abstract, we abstract levels of things away from actual money, and we end up in a financial crisis, right? And we abstract things levels away from like actual meaningful, like, I need to acquire things to stay alive and to like enjoy my existence. We Right. We put layers of, of money in, in between those things. Right. And then we end up in trouble too. So it seems like we keep doing this to ourselves.

Jose Leal (08:38):

Yeah. So, so what have you learned about how we heal ourselves at work so that then work can heal the world? Like what, where do you start?

Kali Love (08:52):

One thing that pops up for me is one of the things that, that, that became missing when we went from, let's call it natural work to let's call it unnatural work, <laugh>, is, is that we lost the wisdom of constraints. Is that when we are working on a natural pace, when we are working on the farm, we wake up. When we wake up, which is a natural time. We, we go to bed at a natural time, and in between we rest when we need to, right? So we go and we, we do all the plowing, and we do all the harvesting, and then we rest. And I think that there's so much wisdom in the space in between that's not getting paid attention to that has, there's no time to process that and to bring that into fruition when we're at the breakneck speed that the, the unnatural work is requiring of us.

Josh Dykstra (09:48):

Yeah. Yeah. It's like we just keep getting further away from like the biological kind of like reality of, of what's happening, right. The further away we get that,

Jose Leal (09:59):

It's so funny that you guys picked on that first because we Matt and, and Kim Wright and I started society 2045 a few years ago, and it's been an effort to learn what's the future looking like, as you've mentioned Callie, but from, not just from a work perspective, but from a a bunch of different domains, legal, accounting, finance, you know, the, the whole thing, right? And we did 40 interviews, and from those 40 interviews we got with, with the movement leaders we got eight patterns of what's transforming. Guess what the first pattern was? I'll read it to you. From rigid systems to organic rhythms of life.

Josh Dykstra (10:55):

Yes. Sounds by the way, it's caulie. It's caulie like cauliflower.

Jose Leal (11:01):

I'm, and you know, I practiced it and still I didn't get it right.

Kali Love (11:07):

Like the goddess of destruction of illusion, which is exactly what needs to happen,

Jose Leal (11:13):

And, but, but that's interesting that you guys started with that because that resonated. That one was out of the 40, every single person said, this is what needs to change. This is what is changing.

Josh Dykstra (11:31):

Yeah. And it, that this is the thing that's just kind of like boggled by my mind over and over from being in the work, the workplace, you know, for whatever, 20 years or something now just how unnatural it feels so often, right? It's like, and there's this, there's this weird, weird that happens inside the workplace that we don't, we don't put up with anywhere else, right? Like, the way that that bosses can talk to their people. Like, we would look at, like, if a parent was doing that to their kid, we'd be like, that's not okay. You shouldn't be doing like, but for some, for some reason, like these, these strange, like aberrant behaviors get explained and like, or like justified or rationalized inside, inside the work context. So it's just like we've created this kind of unnatural system that exists on top of a, a very natural, organic biological system. And yeah. These, these things are very much direct, I think conflict here in, in the coming decades.

Jose Leal (12:25):

Well, we've, I mean, we've built a system to create that work, right? Yeah. Like we have, the first question people ask when a kid goes to school is like, what do you want to do? What kind of job do you want to do when you grow up? Right? Like, it, it's, we are already priming kids at the youngest age that you are going to be a worker. Right?

Josh Dykstra (12:51):

That's how you, that's the, the reason you exist, Like, that's what we're trying to Right. It's just like really, really.

Jose Leal (13:00):

And, and politicians will often say you know, we're doing this because of jobs. We've created the most jobs like that, that is, we are, you know, puppets on a string, and the string is jobs, right? Yeah. Is Work as if the economy was some sort of like living, being to be working.

Kali Love (13:22):

We are all here to support the economy, not each other. Not each other. Which would be lovely. It'd be nice if we were here to support each other, but instead we're here to support the economy and, and all of our systems really like, hold up the value of more, faster, harder, stronger, better, blah, blah. Right? Like, new, new, new, new, new, new. And I think oftentimes that ignores the fact that the solution to a problem could be removing its causes, not creating a new solution. It doesn't have to always be something new, new, new, new, new. But I think that we are so incentivized to create something new and to be, to be something new <laugh> all the time to, to be giving the newest ideas and to just be creating new products to address things instead of simply removing the root cause of the problem.

Jose Leal (14:17):

In, in our radical world, we, we talk about this, all of this stuff that we've just described as the fiat system. Yeah. And that the way we look at each other, the way we look at work and the companies and everything else as the fiat lens, because it really is, we've trained ourselves and each other to look at the world from this idea that, that we need to control people. Because if we don't control them, it will be chaos. And so we control kids and we control employees, and we control the whole process. And, and our radical lens for us is going back to nature and understanding what our needs are. We have life needs, and those needs are drive our behavior, right. They drive our feelings, they drive our behavior. So creating organizations that are life centric. That actually work with, again, the pace of life as we said earlier, but so many other things that are, there's a disconnect between this fiat and radical view of, of what we should be. What to you guys looks like this new radical view of work. Like what's different? What would you describe as a, like, we call it a radical company, but what, what does that mean to you?

Josh Dykstra (15:51):

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think for us, like the, the, the biggest difference is that it puts human energy at the center of everything, right? So, so right now the idea of, of human energy is largely, largely utilized as a battery, right? It's like a scene from the Matrix, right? Where we, like the organization plugs into the human extracts, all the energy from the human to output for shareholders. And it's just like that. Like that's the best we can do, right? And so everyone leaves work and they're exhausted, and they're drained and they're depressed.

Jose Leal (16:20):

Not just your energy, your IP as well. Like we take all your ip, everything.

Josh Dykstra (16:25):

Yeah. Thanks for that. Yep. Appreciate it. No compensation, but you know, <laugh>, here's I, here's a thank you card. Right? Like, so what organizations the future do much better right? Is they actually put human energy at the center of the operating model. And so the system is designed to give humans energy instead of suck it out. And everything works better when you do this because surprise, when humans are energized, they come up with better ideas, they serve your customers better, they actually, you know, have fewer conflicts, right? All of the crap that organizations spend boatloads of money trying to fix and can't, right? Right. They can't gets kind of fixed when you flip that. But you have to do it at the system, right? It has to be an operating system fix, right? So that's, that's the core of it. We can dig into that more if you want to, Jose, but like, that's, that's the core of the idea, right? It's got to be optimized for human energy.

Jose Leal (17:20):

We can't agree more, except that what we've come to the realization, and I, I hate keep bringing back the book, but at the end of the day, what we realized was that we can't really have that human energy when there's a still a separation between who owns the organization and who works in the organization. And, and that to us, you know, the, the way we started thinking about it was we need an organization that doesn't have employees or bosses, right? It's, it's, we are flattening it in that sense that there isn't the separation because the second you put an individual in an environment where somebody else has power over them, that energy, as you put it, Josh, is diminished. It's corrupted. Yeah. Instantaneously. Yeah. Instantaneously. So how do we deal with that? How do you guys think about that?

Kali Love (18:27):

Well, we've always had a non-hierarchical model at Love work specifically. And I think that one of the most amazing parts of that is inclusion, really. Like, there's, there's so, so much that's possible when we include everyone's voice. And like, we have a culture book that we're thinking of publishing even because it's, it's a living, breathing document. It is, everyone that comes in can say they want to change it. Anyone that comes in can say they want to change it. And we've, we've created such, such beautiful systems for belonging. And I think that really this idea, this notion that work can heal the world, and that therefore we have to be healing ourselves, is the workplace is such a beautiful place for that. It's such a beautiful place for belonging. It is our major institution once we graduate college, right? It is the place we gather. We're not all going to church. So it is the place we gather. It has to be the place for belonging. And it that's been so ignored that we have this rich interpersonal life that can happen and should be supported. Cause that's what's going to keep us feeling energized, is when we can go, is when we can exchange energy with someone else when we need to.

Jose Leal (19:42):

Right. And that, that energy comes from, as you said, belonging and meaning.

Kali Love (19:49):

Oh, absolutely. Meaning too. Yes.

Jose Leal (19:51):

Because if, if it isn't meaningful, if we're divorced from the very thing we're doing, then of course we're disconnected and disengaged, and we know about the disengagement numbers, right?

Josh Dykstra (20:01):

And like Kali was saying, that work, like your job is the perfect place to kind of like start healing some of those things, right? Because it's like, great work is filled with belonging and meaning, right? Like, that's when we actually love what we do. Right? I say I get to do it with people I like, and I get to work on something that matters to me. Right. So it's not that complicated. But yeah, like to your point, Jose, the, the systems right now aren't designed to do that which is the big challenge.

Jose Leal (20:30):

And, and there we could talk lots about what happens inside, but I, I'd really like to talk about actually the role of the healing of work healing society as a whole. Because for me, that actually is what's resonating more and more each day. Because when we talk to people about fixing work, very often the answer is it's a better organization. People are happier people, there will be more money, there will be more this, there'll be more, you know, all of the normal stuff. But my sense is that we would not have the catastrophe that we have today, economically, politically, and most of all from a, a climate crisis perspective. None of those things would exist in the way that they do if people were actually working from what they felt about the world. Because right now, my sense is, you know, a young man dating one of my stepdaughters gets a job a couple weeks ago. It's like, Andrew, what, what do you what do you think about the job? This new job? Congratulations. This is great. And he is like, it's a job. What's the best thing about it? I get paid. This is a software developer working on AI. What's the best thing about it? I get paid. Right?

Kali Love (22:15):

Man. That's not how we want our AI trained. We need, we need work. We need work to transcend economic activity. Right? It has to be, I mean, it already is, it is, it is the crucible like between individual, individual purpose and collective wellness, like collective growth. Like this is the place where nurturing and empathy can, can, can actually make a difference. And those are like, no, no words, right?

Jose Leal (22:47):

Right, right.

Josh Dykstra (22:49):

Yeah. The irony of that, right.

Jose Leal (22:52):

But do you guys agree with that? Does that make sense to you? Is that, is that the scope of what you guys are seeing as far as what the impact of fixing work, if you will does to the world?

Josh Dykstra (23:05):

Yeah. I, I would say I used to be, I always, always used to be kind of like, apologetic about this, right? I would be like, you know, we work, work can't, like we, even back when I did the TED talk in like 2018, I, you know, this idea of work can heal the world. And I was a little bit like treading lightly about it because I felt like I had to justify it to your point, right? It's like I have to like, come with a lot of stats and show organizational leaders like, why this is going to be be tter for your company if we did it this way. And over the last five years, I think what, what I have seen, and I think many of us are seeing is that work might be the only thing that can heal the world like business is to college's point this. Like, it's, it's the, the, the meeting point for so many things. It's the intersectionality of almost everything happens inside the world of business. Like businesses are almost like in, they're almost like untangle from politics, that they're like, you can't understand the way the world functions if you don't understand business, because it's the organizing story of the way humans, like, of the way our humans live. Right now, work is the organizing story. So I anymore, it's like I don't, I don't think we have a shot at healing the world if we don't figure this thing called work out, right? If we don't get a different story organizing the way that we work together, I, I don't know if, I don't know if we can kind of work our way out of this, this crisis.

Jose Leal (24:42):

What's the story?

Josh Dykstra (24:45):

Well, right now, right now, the story is, is one of like greed and profit, profit centricity and power, consumerism and power, right? It's just like, it's more, it's more for me mostly more for me and you know.

Jose Leal (24:59):

A little bit more.

Josh Dykstra (25:02):

And it's right. Like, but that is the, that is kind of what, what drives, and then we take the people who do that, that story really well, and we put them on the cover of Forbes. And so what we need is we need a different kind of organizing story, right? We need something that's, that's more Star Trek in nature, right? It's more exploratory, it's more disco about discovery based. It's more about learning, it's more about the.

Kali Love (25:25):

More about community.

Josh Dykstra (25:27):

The, the humans actually like to do, like, there's a lot of things that we like to do rather than just make money for, you know, people who are already rich. So yeah, I think we've got to find a way to flip that story,

Jose Leal (25:41):

Man. So I'm going to put my corporate hat on. I'm going to go what like people are going to like work and just do it because they like it, and then like, they're not going to be doing the right things because they need, we need to incent them and we need to direct them, and we need to tell them what to do. How, how is this going to be a viable economy if people get to do what they want to do, rather than what we, the smart ones think they should do? How do, how do you answer that question. There's been a lot of, there's been a lot of I that most people are thinking that.

Kali Love (26:24):

Yeah. There's been a lot of studies on things like universal basic income. People don't stop working, right? People, people keep work. People want to be useful, people want to be helpful. And as a matter of fact, I think that, that there's more productivity and purpose. There's more productivity in wanting to do better because you care about the person sitting next to you or the person across the zoom meeting from you. If, if you don't care about things, you're going to be like, like that kid. And, and go, oh, it's a job. One of the, one of my proudest achievements at love work is one of the things we measured was how do people feel when they wake up in the morning and they know they have to go to work? How heavy or light does that feel? And we would, through, through the program, be able to increase the feeling of lightness and enjoyment and excitement going to work. And God, we really all deserve that, right? We deserve to wake up happy.

Jose Leal (27:24):

Yeah. Waking up on Monday mornings, being excited about the week ahead rather than,

Kali Love (27:30):

Yeah. Thank God it's Monday.

Jose Leal (27:33):

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Because it, it seems to me that we've, we've actually created a culture of work is evil, right? Mm. Like, I don't want to work, work is bad. I don't, I'll only do it because I'm going to get paid. Yeah. Right? And it's, it's a fallacy because as you said, when people have enough money, they still want to do things right. It's just life. It's reality. They just want to do, do things they want to do. We don't work just because. So how do we tell a new story? Where do you think we start? Because it seems to me that what you've both have said is like, it's about life, life energy. It's about bringing that energy to places where we sense we need to work, not just what is going to make us money or what people tell us is important. What else?

Kali Love (28:40):

I want to say we remove the, the root cause of the problem. Right? But what am I saying when I say that ? Am I, am I saying we fire all CEOs? I'm not, not saying that. I do think that there has to be a component of removing those who are most power hungry and or at least finding a way to open them up to something other than power, right? Like the way that we work together needs to be symbiotic, needs to be, needs to be cooperative and, and communicative, and take everyone into consideration, not just the top. And I think that really the capitalistic system, the whole being beholden to shareholders is so strange. You have customers is that not who you are beholden to, but it's not, that's not, that's not the case. You have this earth that's going to go to pieces if we don't do something about it. Are you not beholden to the earth? Nope. That's not the case. So I think fundamentally we have to shift from the top and the bottom, and like, what, what are we caring about? And who is deciding what we're allowed to care about? But how to do that? That's, that's a tough one.

Jose Leal (30:00):

Yeah. I, I think of work as a technology, right? Like the way we've designed work is a technology in of itself, right? It's just the, the structure. And so I think about it as like, well, if I was going to change this technology and introduce a new technology, how do I introduce a new technology to replace this one? And it takes me back to Clayton Christensen. I don't know if you guys have read Clayton Clayton's work about innovation. And, and Clayton says, you, you never hit the mainstream, right? Like go, go either the, the low end or the high end Yeah. And start there, because I don't think we can replace the CEOs, as you said, Kali.

Kali Love (30:46):

Yet.

Jose Leal (30:48):

But I think that we can replace startups, right? Because startups are getting started every single day by the millions. And, and those guys have no other model. Have no other story. Yeah. How do, how do we give them a new story and a new model that they can start? Because I can tell you in 10 or 15 or 20 years, that kid that I was just talking about would be going, I don't work for anyone. Yeah. I do my own thing. Because that's how we do things. That's the story.

Josh Dykstra (31:28):

Yeah. We, we talked a lot about that when we started the work revolution project you know, about a decade ago is yeah. This idea of, you know, starting, starting startups differently and growing them better from the very beginning. And I, and I think there's a lot of truth in that. I think that the difficulty in that is that so many of those startups are, are, are still existing inside the ecosystem of venture capital. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, which is, you know, just fundamentally beholden to this profit centric model, right? Like it is, it is like almost a poster child of this, this kind of old story. So I think that's the challenge there is we would also have to, we have to create an eco, a different kind of, you know, ecosystem, fundraising eco around these, these startups in their founders. But it could be totally

Jose Leal (32:12):

Agree with that.

Josh Dykstra (32:13):

And, but even if, like, even if we take it a layer back from there, like I still think we, we need a different story. We Right. We need a different end game, right? We need to, like, this is, this is something good that like the good parts of religion do, right? The good parts of religion give us a communal sense of a, of a story together that we work towards, right? We're, we're moving in this direction together. And I, I think that's probably along the lines of what we need here is we need a different kind of mission. Right. We need a, we need to start painting better stories of, okay, what, what could we, should we be doing with our human lives? Yeah. And how do these things called organizations and this thing called work fit into that? So yeah, this is a, it's a multifactorial kind of like intersectional problem, but it's the right one to work on, I think.

Jose Leal (33:10):

Yeah. I totally agree. And I think all of us have been doing that. What, what I think though is that life, you know, thinking about our lives might still be a little bit higher up, but thinking about life itself right? And how life has emerged and evolved and continues to evolve through these ideas like work and these ideas like government and so forth. How can we make the very thing of life be part of that story rather than this concept of my life? Yeah. Because that's just one manifestation of this thing that is, that drives everything we do, and we never pay attention to it. We never give life itself. It's due focus. And I wonder if that makes, resonates to you guys.

Kali Love (34:21):

Absolutely. And you know, it makes me think about like, if we were on, on the farm, if we were doing our natural work, let's say we'd have all this time in nature. And while I don't consider myself religious, even as a child, I always let, like loved the concept of intelligent design. Like I would, I would look, I was, I was in a tiny town in North Carolina. I'd be in the woods and I'd just be fascinated with all the fauna and flora that I could see and just the beauty of it and going, there has to be something here. And I think that that feeling of interconnectedness with nature, because we're never in nature, is so missing. And there has to be, I almost want to call it a spiritual component to this, to, to, the, the shift has to start with us recognizing our interconnectedness and truly caring about our interconnect connectedness. I can say that word.

Jose Leal (35:18):

And, and I like to say not just connectedness. Sorry, Josh. I was just going to say also interdependence. Yes. Because connectedness is obviously true, but dependence is often not recognized. Yeah. Even when we talk about being connected, we're like, I'm connected, but independent. And it's like, yeah, well, it doesn't work that way. Connection by default means interdependence. Absolutely. And, and I think that's an interesting aspect that we should think about.

Josh Dykstra (35:53):

Yeah. I would, I was going to build on what both of you're saying here. 'cause I think there's an inherent value in the beauty of life, right? Whether we're talking about nature, we're talking about other humans or Right. What this tree outside my window, like there's, there's an inherent value to the tending and the caring for life. And I do think that's where we, we start to get closer to what, what I'm thinking about when I say a new organizing story, right? It's like, it's the tending and the caring of this really beautiful thing that we don't really even understand the, the mystery of it. And that's kind of part of the beauty of it, but we can help tend and care for it. Yeah. I, a friend of mine just posted on a LinkedIn post and he was, he was working with some, I think it was like fifth generation farmers or something like this, and he said, their motto is, it's our turn. Like right now it's our turn, right? We're tending and caring for this, but it's our turn to do that. Right. And there's just such an inherent like, understanding of the temporary but powerful nature of, okay, it's my turn to care intend for this now and then, but I, I want to pass along, right? I want to leave something good behind, not, not this kind of mess that we've been creating at, at the macro level.

Jose Leal (37:24):

Yeah. I was reading an article this weekend about DNA and how our perception of DNA and our story about DNA is actually very much tied to this vie lens that we have about the world. And that a new story, even in the science community, a new story is being birthed to describe that DNA is not really this mechanical linear process that, that we've described it as, but it's actually this emerging layers of properties that with each new layer, new properties, new emergence happens, and new capabilities. And I think that rather than think about value like that, life has value here, there, and li a tree has value, I think it has a capability and that, that capability is to serve life itself. It's, so for me, the, the concept of value starts to think to lean more towards the, the existing story, whereas capability.

Kali Love (38:37):

Got to be careful with that word.

Jose Leal (38:39):

Whereas capability, kind of what capability towards what serving life itself. Yeah. Right. Because that's what we most of our work should be. If not it, it, I think all of our work should be towards serving life. And today most of our work is not. In fact, most of our work today is actually hurting life,

Kali Love (39:09):

Sadly. Yeah. Yeah.

Jose Leal (39:12):

Now it's getting close to the end here. Do you guys, is there anything you wanted to say that hasn't been said? Anything that strikes you as like, if we're going to heal the world, I want to say this, and that's okay.

Kali Love (39:36):

I feel like what you just said was so, such a great, so succinct that work can heal the world when it's in service of life itself.

Josh Dykstra (39:43):

Yeah. I think, I think I would, I would want to encourage everyone listening to keep deconstructing your own stories, right? Like, you keep deconstructing your own, like your, your perception of what's happening. There's, there's so much there's, it's so easy to not see the system that's actually creating the disease. It's so easy to, to like spend your life in service of putting band-aids on symptoms instead of looking at, okay, where, what, what's the operating system here that's actually the disease? Like, how do I work on that? So if, if, if anyone can, can keep working on that, I think that's, I think we need a lot more people doing

Jose Leal (40:40):

That. Yeah. That's beautifully said. I like to say that work is an idea and it's a bad one. So, right. So let's, let's rethink that idea and that's okay. All of our systems are just ideas.

Josh Dykstra (40:58):

Yeah.

Jose Leal (40:59):

Right. And some have come and served us and time for a better one, and it's time for a better one. It's been a pleasure. I really, really liked our conversation. I liked how casual it was and how wonderful you guys are to talk to you. I'm going to introduce our guest next week. We're going to be talking to Gloria Eron, founder of Lean Time. I can't remember if Matt or I will be talking to Gloria, but either way, I think it will be an interesting conversation, hopefully as interesting as it was today with Josh and Kali. Thank you again guys, for your time, for the work you're doing because I think it's special. It needs to be done. We need a lot more people out there doing this work. And really anytime I get to talk to folks that are doing this work at the level that you guys are doing it, where you're really digging deep and touching the things that are critical and not simply dealing with the surface issues I think it needs to be recognized as both special and that what you're doing is taking what a new approach to, to seeing what this issue of work is and healing yourselves, healing work, and hopefully healing the world. Thank you again.

Kali Love (42:39):

Thank you so much.

Jose Leal (42:41):

Ciao guys.