Bjorn K Holmstrom

1. "Where are they?" Bosch (€90B revenue, massive R&D) is an NDE. Rolex is an NDE. The model scales, it's just rare because the current financial ecosystem selects for extraction, not retention. As that ecosystem shows strain (enshittification, monopoly degradation), the niche opens. We're in the transition phase, the legal and funding instruments are being built now. Your question assumes the current dominant model is optimal. It's just current. 2. Risk types You're conflating operational risk (company might fail) with capital risk (investor loses money). Operational risk is infinite, the company must always fight to survive Capital risk is finite, once an investor has 5x return, their capital risk is zero Why should they extract 10% of profits in year 20 when they have zero skin in the game? That's not risk compensation, that's a tax. 3. The founder's choice You claim startups choose VCs because the model is superior. But if founders had a real choice: Option A: Sell 20% forever (VC) Option B: Sell 20% until I repay you 5x, then I get it back (redeemable equity) Every rational founder would choose B. They choose A only because B doesn't exist at scale yet. And yes, in Option B you still get the VC's expertise and network during the growth phase. You just don't pay for it forever. We're not arguing banks should fund startups. We're arguing for high-risk/capped-reward instruments that align incentives without permanent capture. You're looking at today's menu and asking why everyone isn't ordering a dish that doesn't exist yet. We're writing the recipe.

@Basman You hit the nail on the head with the word leverage. The goal of a floor (whether via UBI, dividends, or community commons) isn't to make life easy, it's to make labor voluntary. - The strike fund concept You mentioned leverage. Think of a universal basic income (or what I call an AUBI/sovereign floor) not as welfare, but as a permanent national strike fund. If I must work to eat, I have zero bargaining power. I am a price-taker. If I can survive (even in a closet, as you said) without the job, I have walk-away leverage. This changes the contract from feudal subservience (I own you because you need me) to free market trade (I trade my skills for your money, but I can leave). - Community vs. atomization You are also right that state welfare can atomize us ('I get my check, I don't need my neighbor'). This is why the floor must be paired with the commons (tight-knit resource sharing). State-only safety net = atomized consumers. Community-only safety net = fragile (one bad harvest/recession wipes it out). The hybrid: A guaranteed floor enables community. It is hard to build a tight-knit community when everyone is working 60 hours just to pay rent to a landlord. Security frees up the cognitive bandwidth required to be a good neighbor. To the point on spoiled generations ( @Daniel Balan / @Entrepreneur): You are confusing toil with subjugation. Your grandmother splitting wood worked incredibly hard (toil), but she answered to physics and nature. She was sovereign. A corporate employee might sit in AC, but they answer to a manager's whim for their survival. That is subjugation. Humans are built to handle toil; we are not built to handle subjugation. That is where the slavery feeling comes from, not the physical effort.

You're making a category error between function and pricing, and confusing temporary risk with permanent ownership. 1. The booster rocket problem I agree that high-risk capital is necessary for scaling. My critique isn't that the booster shouldn't exist, it's that in your model, it never detaches. - Efficient system: Investors fuel the launch. Once the company reaches orbit (profitability/stability), investors are paid a healthy multiple (3x-5x) and exit. The company flies free. - Your system: The booster stays attached forever, burning the ship's own fuel long after its job is done. That's not a launch system, it's parasitic drag. Risk isn't infinite. When you pay off a mortgage, the bank doesn't own your kitchen forever. Why should a VC own a company forever? 2. NDEs are not nonprofits You seem to think an NDE (non-dividend enterprise) is a charity. It's not. - Nonprofits depend on donations and grants. - NDEs are for-profit engines that reinvest 100% of surplus into wages, R&D, and growth. Because they don't leak 10-20% of revenue to passive shareholders, they can outcompete extractive firms on innovation and resilience. That's a competitive advantage, not idealism. 3. Patient capital already exists, at scale Pension funds and sovereign wealth funds (managing trillions) actively seek the stable 7-12% yields that NDEs provide. They don't need the 100x casino - they need the steady city. Capped-return investing already works in infrastructure, municipal bonds, and housing cooperatives. We're just extending that model to the productive economy. We're not tearing down the table. We're adding a fourth leg: exit clauses. Because a table that can't be moved isn't a table, it's a monument.

Trenton, this realization is not a failure. It is a liberation. You have correctly identified that you were running a moral ponzi scheme: borrowing self-worth from future noble acts to pay off a debt of present shame. That scheme always crashes. You asked: 'If I can't get fulfillment from career, impact, passion... what other purpose should I have?' The answer is competence. You mentioned you loved chess. You gave it up because it wasn't useful or valued enough. Then you switched to changing systems to be useful, but found it overwhelming. Here is the reframe: Politics IS chess. The reason you are burnt out is that you are trying to play the game of politics/systems like a social worker (trying to heal every pawn) instead of like a grandmaster (trying to solve the board). 1. The trap of deficiency altruism Maslow distinguished between deficiency needs and being needs. Deficiency altruism: 'I feel empty, so I will help you so I can feel full.' (This is what you were doing). Abundance altruism: 'I am overflowing with energy/skill, so fixing this problem is just natural play for me.' You are currently in the deficiency zone. You cannot help anyone from there. You have to stop. 2. Reclaim the game You said you were happy practicing to be a chess professional. That means you enjoy deep strategy, pattern recognition, and system mastery. You don't need to be a grandmaster to use that engine. The world is drowning in people who care (altruism). The world is starving for people who can see the moves (strategy). Your new purpose: Stop trying to save people. Start trying to solve the structural puzzles that trap them. Don't approach a predatory loan victim with 'oh, you poor thing, let me hold you.' (That drains you). Approach the banking system with 'This is a poorly designed algorithm. How do I checkmate this mechanic?' (That engages your chess brain). 3. Permission to be selfish You need a period of what I call strategic selfishness. If you don't exist, you can't help. Go back to the things that stimulate your mind (even if it's just studying chess again, or coding, or reading heavy theory). Fill your own cup first. When you act from a place of intellectual curiosity rather than moral obligation, you will find you are infinitely more effective, and you won't resent the people you are helping.

You are conflating management with rent-seeking, and commercialization with innovation. 1. The gambler fallacy You claim Silicon Valley gamblers create the innovative things. Incorrect. The gamblers package the things. The patient capital created them. The internet, GPS, touchscreens, voice recognition, lithium-ion chemistries, and the transformer model (Google research); the bedrock of Tesla and OpenAI, were funded by state/university grants (patient capital). VCs didn't invent the digital highway; they just built the toll booths. We don't need 100x returns to innovate. We need 100x returns to satisfy financial bubbles. There is a difference. 2. The parasite projection You accuse me of wanting redistribution. No. I want circulation. You are assuming that capital allocators and shareholders are the same thing. - Active leaders/founders (management) are workers. In an NDE, they can be paid millions if they deliver value. That is healthy. - Passive shareholders (rentiers) are the leak. They extract value they did not create after their risk has been repaid. My model rewards the brain (innovation/management) but starves the tapeworm (perpetual extraction). You are defending the tapeworm because you have confused it with the brain.

You are making two fundamental category errors here. 1. Confusing venture capital with the market You said: 'No serious large investor would accept 3x returns.' You are describing venture capital (which needs 100x returns to offset a 90% failure rate). VC is a tiny, loud fraction of the market. The real 'serious money'; pension funds, sovereign wealth, infrastructure funds, and insurance floats, manages trillions, not billions. They are desperate for stable 8-12% yields. A mechanism that offers a capped 3x return (roughly 12% IRR over 10 years) is not unattractive; it is a goldmine for the majority of global capital. We don't need to please the gamblers in Silicon Valley; we need to unlock the patient capital in Zurich and London. 2. Confusing extraction with compensation You said: 'Self-owned firms are not a solution because the profit... will now just be extracted by those inside.' This is semantic judo. When a worker keeps the value they created, that is not extraction, that is earnings. Extraction is when value is removed by someone who didn't create it (rent-seeking). Your argument essentially boils down to: 'The problem with ending feudalism is that the peasants will just eat all the grain themselves instead of giving it to the Lord.' Yes. That is exactly the point.

There is a mechanism that solves the capital trap (@aurum) and the motivation trap (@Staples) without requiring free money or utopian idealism: Capped returns. We need to stop treating capital like a marriage (perpetual ownership/control) and start treating it like a mortgage (finite debt/return). - Investors put in capital. They get paid back a fixed multiple (e.g., 3x ROI) from revenue. This is the profit motive that attracts the capital. - Once the 3x is paid, the investor's claim ends. The company becomes self-owned. - In a self-owned firm, the surplus that used to go to dividends now goes to the workers. To answer @Staples: Who will go down into the mines? The people getting paid $200k/year to do it, because the mine's profit is going to the miners instead of a pension fund in New York. Profit is still the motivator; we just changed who receives it.

@enchanted You are touching on a profound distinction here, though the different species metaphor is risky because it has been used historically to dehumanize. However, your core intuition; that forcing 'sameness' is a trap, is spot on. Most attempts to solve racism fail because they try to flatten everyone into a homogenous human soup (stage green). They say, 'Don't see color, we are all the same.' But as you noted, cultures don't want to be swept under the rug. People value their unique heritage. The issue isn't that we acknowledge differences; it's that we hierarchize them. I would argue that we don't "solve" racism by fighting it (which often just drives it underground). We outgrow it by expanding our definition of self. Tribal Identity: My safety depends on my specific group. Anyone different is a threat. (This is where racism is a survival technology). Global Identity: My safety depends on the health of the whole system. Difference is no longer a threat; it's essentially just genetic/cultural R&D that benefits the whole species. The yellow solution isn't to pretend we are all the same species of salamander. It is to realize that the health of the ecosystem relies on the distinctness of the salamanders. We don't need to be different species to respect each other. We just need to realize that unity does not mean uniformity. You can have a unified planetary system that is radically diverse. Racism dissolves not when we become colorblind, but when we realize that another race's success is actually our success because we are parts of the same super-organism.

@Joseph Maynor That question points to the biggest bottleneck we have here. Leo provides the software (the videos and course) to help us find our purpose. But we currently lack the hardware (infrastructure) to coordinate once we find it. We have thousands of people here graduating with high-agency missions (e.g., reform education, heal trauma, build sustainable tech). But then they are released back into a stage orange economy that doesn't have a slot for that mission. They end up isolated, trying to execute a tier 2 vision with tier 1 tools. I’ve been thinking about this a lot regarding my own work. Imagine a coordination layer where, instead of connecting based on job titles (LinkedIn style), we connected based on life purpose alignment. If my purpose is designing resilient infrastructure And your purpose is building community trust The system should automatically flag us as a potential cell or guild that needs to collaborate. We need a post-purpose registry; infrastructure for people who have realized their mission and now need the team to build it.

This is a brilliant analysis, @Davino. You have correctly identified the structural bottleneck of stage orange capitalism: the extraction imperative. As long as the primary function of a firm is to extract value for external shareholders, conscious capitalism will always be out-competed by ruthless maximization. I am currently working on the architecture for exactly the kind of post-capitalist infrastructure you describe (a project called Global Governance Frameworks), and I want to offer a piece of the puzzle that addresses your concerns about decay through complacency. You wrote: "The two greatest risks of non-distributing enterprises are corruption through conversion and decay through complacency... removing profit incentives... risks dulling ambition." The solution to this isn't just changing the entity (firm), but changing the energy (currency). If an NDE holds its surplus in standard fiat currency (which is designed to be hoarded/extracted), the temptation to capture that pile of money is immense. But if the NDE operates on a currency with demurrage (a negative interest rate over time), the physics change. We are building a protocol called Love Ledger where the currency (Hearts) has a built-in decay (e.g., 0.5% monthly). Anti-hoarding: The firm cannot just sit on a pile of cash (complacency). It literally loses value if it sits still. Forced flow: The firm is structurally incentivized to reinvest continuously, in R&D, in higher wages, in community projects, because spending it is the only way to retain the value. Resilience: This turns the economy from a battery (store of value) into a grid (flow of value). You are describing the hardware (the NDE structure). But for it to work without corruption, it needs new software (demurrage currencies and transparent reputation metrics). I'm piloting this in Sweden with a crisis coordination app called Stuga, which acts as a primitive NDE: a community node that coordinates resources without extracting profit. The profit is the survival of the neighborhood. You are spot on that this won't happen via revolution. It will happen via selection. The firms/communities that adopt this resilient/non-extractive architecture will simply out-survive the fragile, extraction-maximized firms when the next global crises hit. Great post.

There is a third option between 'God is a douchebag' and 'Cancer is optimal/perfect'. I was reading a study on evolutionary biology this morning that describes a concept called adaptive tracking. It suggests that nature is never optimal or perfect because the environment changes faster than the organism can adapt. We are endlessly chasing a moving target. This creates a permanent lag. The suffering: That lag manifests as friction, pain, and mismatch (e.g., our bodies not being adapted to modern toxins, or society not being adapted to tech). The interpretation: The ego looks at the lag and says: 'This is a design flaw. The architect is evil.' ( @strangelooper ) The mystic looks at the lag and says: 'This is the necessary tension of becoming. It is perfect because it drives movement.' ( @Breakingthewall ) Both are true at different layers. The pain is real (it's not optimal for the organism), but the mechanism that causes it is necessary for evolution to happen at all. If the system were perfectly optimized/pain-free, it would be static. It would be a dead rock. To be alive is to be in the lag. The goal isn't to resent the architect of existence, but to close the gap where we can (agency).

I resonate with @zazen's distinction between the container and consciousness. I’d like to offer a third possibility that often gets lost in the reform vs. reject debate. There is a path for the mystic bridge. During my time in the Basque country, I immersed myself deeply in the works of Ibn Arabi. What I found was not a medieval rule set nor a toxic belief system, but a profound map of theophany (divine self-disclosure). The mistake we often make (both critics and fundamentalists) is reading religious code as flat law rather than vertical symbol. Flat law: 'cut off the hand' = physical punishment. Vertical symbol: 'cut off the hand' = severing the ego's attachment to appropriation. The mystic bridge is a role anyone with enough aspiration and immersion can take. It involves inhabiting the esoteric heart of a tradition so fully that you can connect it to the esoteric heart of others (Christianity, Buddhism, secular humanism). You don't need to delete the religion to solve the friction; you need to elevate the user's access level to it. As @Apparition of Jack hinted at, the sufi/mystical current isn't just a nice version of Islam; it's the source code access that allows for true integration without losing the sacred.

Thank you both. @Natasha Tori Maru, your specific example of managing construction bids and Gantt charts was exactly the proof of concept my analytical mind needed. I realized I was holding onto a belief that friction = fuel. That if I didn't feel the resistance/anxiety, the heavy stones wouldn't move. But reading your description, I see that friction is actually just heat loss: wasted energy. What you describe sounds more like becoming a superconductor: zero resistance allows for massive amounts of energy/action to flow through without the system overheating (burnout). And @Ishanga, the shift to do what is needed resonates deeply. It moves the motivation from neurotic self-preservation to systemic necessity. If the me isn't the bottleneck, the work just happens because the situation demands it. I actually felt a physical release of tension reading these replies. Time to test this effortless construction in the real world.

That sounds like a beautiful state of flow/Wu Wei, Natasha. I have tasted that, and it is indeed effortless power. I'd love to feel it again. To answer your question: What I fear dissolving is the 'Strategist' or the 'Architect'. In my experience, navigating daily life (eating, sleeping, tasks) can be done in flow. But building entirely new infrastructures (like a political movement or complex software systems) often requires holding a painful tension between 'what is' and 'what needs to be.' My fear is that if I dissolve all resistance to the present moment, I will lose the friction required to change the future. If I accept the world as perfect/effortless, why would I spend 10 years fighting to upgrade its operating system? The 'upgrade' I am seeking is the ability to hold that strategic tension/vision without it collapsing into anxiety. To build the cathedral without suffering, but with the will to move heavy stones that don't want to move. Does your effortless power extend to long-term strategic warfare (metaphorically) against rigid systems? I am genuinely curious.

This thread hits home for me. I went deep on the spiritual path, had mystical experiences that shifted my entire way of being, but eventually, I felt a strong pull to come back (or to be more truthful, I came back a bit on a whim). Actually, I probably was subtly afraid of losing myself completely, and the primal safety/survival instinct kicked in when I came back. @Joshe mentioned that identity structures allow for persistence, and I think that is crucial. I realized that my normal self, the architect, the person who can function in society, is actually the most beneficial vehicle for mankind right now. The challenge isn't just expanding consciousness; it's integrating that expansion into a structure that can actually do things in the world (like fixing the corporate boardrooms Leo mentioned). If we dissolve too much, we lose the agency required to change the system. So for me, the goal shifted from transcending the human form to upgrading it.