The body sets conditions.

The rest flows from there.

Businesses exist on a continuum. Some businesses, like those that sell unhealthy and unsustainable food, consumer brands that rely on status-based marketing, and outrage-based media products, actively diminish their customers' regenerative resources as a core product feature. Other businesses are almost entirely regenerative. For instance, farmer's markets promote physical and mental health, community, and a deeper relationship with the earth.

And then many businesses seem net neutral in their actual product but exist within an extractive system, meaning that their operations incur costs that neither the company nor the customer pays.

At a macro level, modern businesses tend to make profits at least in part by deferring the cost of depleting the four key resources that make human lives worth living. A big reason for this disconnect is scale. Modern financial capitalism concentrates economic benefits while breaking the feedback loop between profits and the costs of producing them.

If you want to evaluate a business's extractive and regenerative qualities, ask two questions:

1. Does the business either enhance or diminish a regenerative resource as its core product? Said another way, do the marketed benefits of its products directly deplete customers' own regenerative resources (e.g. unhealthy food, outrage-based media) or enhance them (e.g. wellness products not tied to vanity or status)?

2. Is the full impact of the business's operations on regenerative resources accounted for in the price of its end products (e.g. are negative supply chain effects on the earth and community factored in)?

If we value the core resources that have led to meaningful, flourishing human lives throughout history — a healthy body and mind, strong communities, a deep relationship with the earth, and a vibrant sense of shared purpose — then businesses that inherently undermine these resources will eventually become a problem for our wellbeing.

And yet, our current economic paradigm likely became dominant because it was particularly good at certain things: it generated wealth, fostered innovation, and raised living standards in ways that have been genuinely valuable.

Humans are unique in achieving complete supremacy over our environment, so it is impossible to say what another species so blessed might do.

However, it seems that our unconstrained ability to take has run past its useful boundary. The costs extraction deferred are now coming due, and the things it has depleted are becoming scarce enough to matter.

Regeneration isn't a moral stance against how we have conducted business. It is a recognition that a different form of value creation is required if we actually want our wealth and capabilities to exist in service of experience, and not the other way around. Effectively harnessing that mode of value creation looks like an historic economic opportunity.

All of these frameworks are primarily additive, and none of them model state as the root-level enabling and explanatory variable.

Regenerative businesses:

1. Shift the mechanism of value creation, not just the scope of impacts. The core competitive advantage of a regenerative business is the way its product or service restores at least one axis that has been depleted. This advantage must be felt at the point of purchase.

2. Define both customer preference and the ability to see and execute opportunity as dependent on the state of the humans involved.

In contrast, B-Corps, Conscious Capitalism, and Impact Investing are all additive frameworks. They layer consideration, certification, or measurement on top of existing business models, while treating both performance and preference as state-independent variables.

B-Corps compare existing behaviors to a rubric of how a responsible company should operate. They encourage less extractive behavior, but do not explicitly organize value creation around restorative axes.

Conscious Capitalism argues that businesses should consider more stakeholders in the costs and benefits of their operations. This would no doubt help the world become less extractive, but it does not change a business's underlying mechanism of value creation.

Impact Investing encourages capital to pursue profitable products with measurable social or environmental returns. However, these non-financial returns are generally not core product differentiators or sources of competitive advantage. Impact Investing is also completely silent on the matter of state.

It is well-understood by modern medicine that the configuration of our nervous system and hormones substantially alters what we value, how we act, and what we perceive.

If you start to pay attention to this, you'll likely see how it plays out in your own life. No science required.

In other words, the impact of state is not a controversial fact. However, when it comes to the way in which we make sense of the modern world, including and especially its economics, state is nowhere to be found.

As long as we are in a reactive state, our behaviors and beliefs are constrained. We will act within minimal long-term focus, and we will struggle mightily to create peace and ease. Extraction and decline will seem inevitable.

It is only when we shift to a regulated state that a different type of possibility emerges. Unlocking this possibility as an economic engine must start with the state of the entrepreneurs and innovators nurturing its emergence.

They do not.

And the reason they do not is that they still exist within a largely reactive and extractive system.

It is also worth noting that state is not static. We might start from a regulated and integrated place, but become more reactive under pressure.

What we can say is that the characteristics of regulated states — longer time horizons, less zero sum thinking, motivation that is collective and optimistic rather than egocentric and cynical — are necessary to build a regenerative business, especially if it is to survive under pressure.

See it differently? We'd love to talk about it.

We're still figuring out the answer to this question.

What we can say is that state has both a current value and a baseline over time.

In any given moment, our state is either reactive or regulated. Therefore, when we act, we are either doing so reactively, or out of a more expansive ability to choose.

To engage in regenerative creation, our baseline state needs to generally be more regulated than reactive. At a more discrete level, our major decisions and actions must also originate from a regulated state, especially when we are under pressure.

Living and building from a regulated foundation requires a high degree of awareness and the intentional cultivation of containers that are resilient to many modern stressors.

Like many aspects of regeneration, the tooling and capabilities for managing state will likely increase as the field matures.

In theory, yes.

While the field of regenerative business should grow quickly as the costs of our current paradigm drive demand for something else, certain opportunities are easier to execute on in the short term than others.

Generally speaking, the more a given purchase affects a customer's state, the more leverage there is to differentiate around a regenerative alternative. If an industry succeeds because it either relies on or creates a reactive state (e.g. unhealthy food and drink, outrage- or insecurity-based social media, status-based buying), it is a strong near-term regenerative opportunity.

The same is true for industries that explicitly target improved state, like health and wellness businesses that build genuine capacity (as opposed to those targeting vanity, insecurity, or escape). Any community, which improves both state and customer lifetime value, can exist in any industry.

When the extractive effects are further from the consumer, such as supply chain externalities or many business-to-business sales, it may be harder to differentiate around regeneration in the short term. However, as customer preference continues to shift, and state hopefully becomes more regulated as a result, the surface area of opportunity should increase.

An AI company, a plumbing company, or a big box retailer could all be designed regeneratively. In some ways, passion and state are better filters than the specific industry.

One of the great innovations of modern financial capitalism has been to divorce capital from the impacts of how this capital generates a return. In fact, the first IPO ever occurred over four hundred years ago, when the Dutch East India Company issued shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange to fund its colonial exploration.

While disconnecting return from consequence enables a much quicker accumulation of "wealth" than a more holistic definition of profitability, it also has the effect of cannibalizing the four primary regenerative resources (our bodies, our communities, our planet, and our shared sense of purpose) that have made our lives worth living.

One great challenge of modernity is to reunify what we're creating with the inputs and expectations that make creation possible.

So long as we live in a scarcity mindset, which is a direct consequence of reactive state, the vast amounts of resource we have accumulated will only accelerate the degradation of our individual and collective states.

Certain capital is more aligned to regeneration, for instance family office capital that functions on a longer time horizon with a greater value for legacy.

We are actively working on a number of innovative structures that create durable regenerative impacts for long-term-oriented, return-seeking capital. These are primarily focused on principal protection, blended return structures, and patient capital.

One of the challenges with critiquing capitalism is that the term functions as a broad umbrella that includes many good things, like resilience, innovation, coordination, progress, and self-expression, and many bad ones, such as environmental degradation, inequality, materialism, egotism, and dehumanization.

Most businesses that compromise their initially noble aims, such as Google's notorious "Don't be evil," do so because they have not set up sufficient guardrails to avoid the pull of reactive states and extraction under pressure.

Today, we have the benefit of witnessing many cases where idealism was consumed by what appears to be the insatiable force of "the free market."

With this knowledge, we can design against these known failure modes, all of which share a common characteristic: they inadequately modeled, if not completely ignored, state as a root-level variable.

To get started with this question, we should take a step back and first ask, "What is the current trajectory that we are on?"

This trajectory question has a nuanced answer.

On the one hand, it is objectively true that the consumption of finite resources without replenishing them cannot last forever. So, if our economic system consumes our physical and mental health, our communities, our planet, and our sense of something greater than ourselves, we are on a trajectory to losing the things that we care the most about. If we look at the world around us, it seems we are approaching undesirable thresholds with a rapid and increasing pace.

Yet if we look closer, we can see something else emerging. Across humanity, there is a dawning and unmistakable realization that the way we're living needs a reset. The question isn't "if," it's "how." And in the midst of that "how," pockets of coherence have begun to form.

500 million years ago, the first complex organisms might have looked like a drop in the bucket. But inflection points don't announce themselves, they just seem obvious in retrospect.

If we are indeed at an inflection point, some version of regeneration (or whatever you feel like calling it) will be at its core.

We did not set out to create a series of frameworks or vocabulary by which purity could be judged.

In fact, the seed of our inspiration was not an answer, but a persistent, nagging question: "Why is it that people get stuck?"

And to zoom out a level, why is it that humanity writ large, despite unparalleled levels of technological power and wealth, and being without a single meaningful threat from the surrounding environment, can't seem to get out of our own damn way?

At first, this inquiry highlighted only a conspicuous absence. But an absence both large enough and specific enough that we could begin to comprehend its general shape. With the rough dimensions in mind, we set out in search of missing puzzle pieces, until one day we stumbled upon two in particular that had cascading effects on our clarity.

The first insight was that humans are state-dependent creatures. We will act, coordinate, decide, believe, and even see reality completely differently based on our body's state. We arrived at this awareness through our own lived experience, though it is also unequivocally corroborated by modern neuroscience.

From there, the second insight emerged rather obviously: the way in which we define, store, and exchange value — i.e. our economic system — is both emergent from and causative of our states.

So no, we don't think you're a bad person if you reject this framework. And you are certainly not a bad person if you simply exist inside a broken system. In fact, it's quite likely that the contributions you are most proud of stem from a place of regenerative joy.

We are merely offering this framework because we think it might clear a lot of things up. It did for us, anyways.

Our thesis has two parts. One covers demand, the other covers supply. Either one could be wrong.

On the demand side, there is clearly growing frustration with the current paradigm. However, it is not a given that mere frustration and exhaustion translates to behavioral change at an economic scale, especially since preference and action are both state-dependent.

It could turn out that humans continue to harm ourselves and our planet, even though we don't "want to," because we have become so trapped in reactive states and their associated habit loops that we are unable to change course.

We're confident the demand is real and growing, not only in terms of its size and trends, but its actual ability to affect purchase decisions.

Demand is a prerequisite to supply mattering at all, but even assuming sufficient demand, regeneration could fail if scale reliably collapses back into extraction. This collapse is a plausible scenario, because scale (at least traditionally) has increased the distance between action and consequence.

Navigating scale challenges is non-trivial. Essentially, you're asking at least pockets of humans to exist and coordinate under a different physiological threat and habit paradigm that sustains itself even in the face of stress. This shift is well-documented at the level of individuals or smaller communities (for instance, most indigenous societies operated this way), but it has struggled to take hold in the modern world.

In essence, we're making a bet that we can start alternative feedback loops that are first locally profitable, then perhaps active at a much larger scale.

We think this is a fun challenge to work on, and we enjoy finding others who feel the same.