049 Unveiling the Illusions: Why “Regenerative Business” Falls Short
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In a world where recommendations hold weight and expectations run high, I embarked on a journey through the pages of a book that promised abundance, fulfillment, and impact. Little did I know that this seemingly inspiring read would soon transform into a hate project. As I turned each page, I found myself grappling with unexpected contradictions and glaring issues that demanded critical engagement. From the dangers of white saviorism to the haunting specter of gentrification, this book took me on a rollercoaster ride through the tokenization of an entire culture. Brace yourself, for this tale of discovery and disillusionment is far from over...
In this episode, you will be able to:
Gain a critical analysis of a thought-provoking book through our podcast episode review, providing insights that will challenge your perspectives and expand your understanding.
Discover the flaws in the lack of citations found in a prominent business book, empowering you to question the accuracy of information and demand evidence-backed claims.
Uncover the unfortunate practice of whitewashing and spiritual bypassing within various forms of media, raising awareness of the need for diverse and authentic representations in order to create a more inclusive society.
Understand the significance of skepticism in consuming content, encouraging you to approach information with a critical eye and not simply accept what is presented as fact.
Explore the intersection of media literacy and social justice, fostering a deeper understanding of how the media can perpetuate systemic injustices and empowering you to take action for positive change.
Improving impoverished communities is not by pushing the current residents out and moving wealthy people in and attracting business that way and improving housing. [Gentrification is] not a good thing. - Regan Bashara
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00:00:00
Welcome to money through ease. Buckle up, y'all. It is a new week, we've got a new episode, and this is gonna be a book review. I don't ever do book reviews, or I haven't done those yet on this podcast. And I just couldn't help myself.
00:00:17
I was in the middle of reading this book and I mean, I had started to like DNF it, which means did not finish. I had started to think like, oh yeah, I'm just not going to finish this book because it's trash. But then I was like, no, now I'm going to hate read this book. I'm going to finish it, and then I'm going to go talk about it on my podcast and my other platforms because it is a hate project at this point. So let me just warn you that if you're somebody that doesn't like to critically engage with media such as books, you are not going to like this episode.
00:00:52
If you at all get easily offended by call outs, this isn't the one for you. And in no way am I trying to cancel anybody or really even call out anybody. I'm going to talk to you about what my issues are with this book and why I even decided to record this episode in a little bit. It's really not about canceling anybody. I really don't give a shit about cancel culture and all that.
00:01:20
I'm here to talk about my thoughts about this book because I found myself really urged to critically engage with this work. So here's a little background about the book. It is called Regenerative Business how to align your business with nature for more abundance, fulfillment and impact. And the author is Samantha Garcia, or Sam Garcia. She goes by the Dirty Alchemy on Instagram.
00:01:52
I'm not going to link to her platforms and stuff. If you really want to, you can go seek her out and find her. I'm not trying to get her free publicity or anything. We'll talk about that in a little bit. I was recommended this book by someone who wrote the foreword to the book or the recommendation for the book, who is Simone Soul.
00:02:14
And I do follow Simone, and I participate in some of Simone's offerings. I watch her webinars and stuff. I really like her approach to marketing. And I like to just really listen in, know, be present for the conversations that Simone has online about business, but really just about world events, know, bigger, larger conversations that are happening in our world today. So I enjoy listening to Simone.
00:02:49
And she strongly recommended this book, so much so that she wrote, I believe, like the introduction or the foreword to the book. So that made me want to read it. Also, it was like on sale at the time that they were promoting it. And so I went and bought it for like maybe a dollar 99 on Kindle. I don't really know, doesn't matter.
00:03:11
And I'm actually not even finished reading the book, but I don't think that that's super important. I imagine that by the time I am finished reading this book, it will be clear that I was correct about my assessment of the writing, the content within, and the message that the book is trying to give us. And I'm just confident that I know that it's not going to do a whole 180 and kind of change its message or have any sort of critical thought in it. That's really harsh anyways. So let's talk about a couple of terms that I want to define before we jump into my talking points about the book, what I want to go over.
00:04:05
Let's define these terms together. First of all, white saviorism. And by the way, these terms are not in any specific order. It's really just like the notes that I was taking as I went through it. So white saviorism is a concept that is derived from the idea of a white savior industrial complex.
00:04:25
This term, these terms were coined by Teju Cole, who is a Nigerian American writer, and back in 2012, he tweeted, quote, the white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. So this concept of white saviorism really comes from the idea that white people are superior and therefore the heroes and the saviors for everybody else who is inferior and needs saving. The second term is going to be eugenics. You guys are probably thinking like, wow, where is this book going? Eugenics is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.
00:05:27
Eugenics is basically the practice of saying that certain characteristics in humans are not desirable, so we should breed them out. And eugenics is not a good thing, y'all? Definitely not. The next term was colonialism. According to the Oxford Dictionary, colonialism is the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.
00:05:57
The next term is neocolonialism different from colonialism, and according to the Oxford Dictionary, this is the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former dependencies. This is often indirect methods of control versus colonialism, which usually involves some sort of military occupation. And then we have indigeneity. According to the Oxford Dictionary, this is the fact of originating or occurring naturally in a particular place. So we know that indigenous people are usually the people that when the colonizers come in to settle and exploit a place, the indigenous population is the people that were there.
00:06:48
And there's no discovery happening when you're colonizing a place. If there's already people there, it wasn't somewhere that was discovered, right? Columbus Day, aka Indigenous People's Day, is gone and passed, but still very relevant. I mean, I'm recording this episode after Columbus Day and indigenous people's Day, then we have Eurocentrism. And the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines this as reflecting a tendency to interpret the world in terms of European or Anglo American values and experiences.
00:07:24
And finally, the last term I want to define is gentrification, the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses typically displacing current inhabitants in the process. That's the definition of gentrification. So going back to white saviorism, if you think that gentrification is a good thing and it's a way to improve an impoverished community, how do we improve an impoverished community? Well, we do that through better access to health care, housing, nutritious foods, childcare jobs that pay a livable wage, et cetera. Improving impoverished communities is not by pushing the current residents out and moving wealthy people in and attracting business that way and improving housing.
00:08:20
It's not a good thing. Okay, so now that we've defined those terms, I want to address probably a comment that maybe some people have thought of or a question that they've thought of. Am I just giving this author free publicity by talking about her book? Why am I talking about this? Why am I drawing attention to it?
00:08:41
Maybe you would have never heard of this book if not for listening to this episode. Do I want people to go read her book? No, not necessarily. I mean, if you want to go read it, go ahead. I'm not stopping you.
00:08:52
If you want to give her money and buy her book I mean, I bought her book, I paid her money, but I'm not just giving her free publicity. And of course, anybody could say that about anybody else talking about a particular person or topic. The whole adage, like any press is good press, even if it's bad press. This is not about giving anybody free publicity. This is not encouraging you to read or not to read the book.
00:09:24
This is more about calling myself in and exercising my ability to notice contradictions and these themes that come up even when I'm talking about something. So sometimes if we want to practice something, especially when it comes to internal work, like antiracism work and decolonizing, it's easier to do it to somebody else because there's no defensiveness that comes up. And by do it to somebody else, I mean just like critically think about and engage with something or someone else. Because it doesn't matter if they get defensive or not, especially if I'm doing this work and they are probably never going to listen to this podcast or couldn't give two shits if someone gave a critical review of their book. So even though I don't normally discuss media literacy on my platforms, I think this is a good exercise for me to be in conversation with someone's work that was published and recommended to me by people that I like to follow and learn from.
00:10:36
So let me get into my issues with the book. Basically, this book is about, of course, the subtitle, aligning your business with nature, having more abundance, fulfillment and impact by creating a regenerative business. So the author really spends a lot of time, like the first, I don't know, 40% of the book talking about nature and how she lives in Hawaii with her husband and they practice regenerative farming or holistic land management or like there's just all these buzzwords happening in the book. And she talks about wanting everybody else to align their business practices with nature and to recognize that just like we have cycles and we have seasons in our lives, that our businesses have cycles and seasons and blah, blah, blah. Okay, so that's just like the general premise of the book, my issues with this.
00:11:38
First of all, she's a white woman living in Hawaii. Native Hawaiians have been very outspoken about this. Gentrification, that is the term that we defined in the beginning. That's why I defined it, because we need to talk about it. White people moving to Hawaii to live there, set up businesses there, buy land there, start farms there, that's gentrification.
00:12:03
And the native Hawaiians that I have seen put out content about this have been saying and been very outspoken about do not even come here as a tourist. They talk about how the travel industry and tourism do not, in fact, benefit the local population, as you maybe have been told. We often think that tourism and travel as an industry is like us bringing our money over there to go to restaurants and stay in their airbnb and pay for experiences over there and that we're giving to the local economy. But first of all, if you feel that you need to save somewhere, go somewhere and spend your money so that you can support the local population with your money, that brings us back to the white saviorism thing. But native Hawaiians have been telling people to just stop coming, like, altogether, don't even come as a tourist, don't travel there and especially don't move there and buy land.
00:13:12
And it doesn't, in fact, benefit the local population. It just continues to build wealth for corporations and the ultra wealthy people. And so what happens is the price for land gets driven up and that pushes out the local population. They can't afford to live there, to work, to play, to eat, like all of that. It's gentrification.
00:13:37
In a nutshell, it's white saviorism. I have a big problem with the fact that she uses her living in Hawaii, her life in Hawaii, as basically a know, a nice little tropical, beautiful paradise backdrop to her life. And she sets that up so that you can read her book and consume content that she puts out about her life so that you can appreciate it and you can see that dreams really do come true and you too can live in a paradise. But what this is doing is absolutely tokenizing Hawaii, its history, its culture, and its people. And she does that in the book.
00:14:22
She talks about taking like hula classes and she talks about buying the little dashboard hula girls statues that people will sit on their car dashboards and taking it back home to people who live in the contiguous United States, the continental United States, bringing those back as gifts for her family. And they all just have a laugh about like it is weird. When I was reading that part, I was like, whoa, what is like, even if she had left that part out, I would have been like, yeah, it's a problem that you are a white woman who moved to Hawaii. That is something that native Hawaiians have said. Don't fucking do that.
00:15:05
But then she went on to tell the story about how she buys the little hula dashboard girls for her as like a joke gift for the people that live back in the continental United States. So that was weird. Also, this whole living in paradise thing is basically code for neocolonialism and gentrification. Kind of as I've talked about, there's people that she quotes in the book who have done this as well, right? They built businesses.
00:15:35
And then I looked on her website, it's actually like people that are her clients, they packed up their families when they hit it big and struck it rich in business and moved to a paradise location and they sit there and rub their chakras or whatever, I don't know. But that's basically code for neocolonialism and gentrification. And it's weird, just weird. So almost always the destinations for these people who strike it rich are communities and locations where the local population is being pushed out by this gentrification. It's always the case that the local population struggles to live and survive there because of housing prices going up and cost of living going up from all these rich people coming in to vacation there.
00:16:29
And then the thing is that whenever you grow your business and you scale your business and become a millionaire and blah, blah, blah, you can just pack up your family and move to one of these paradise locations. And it's just really OD to be talking about that whole phenomenon in a book about like, we need to align our businesses with the way nature intended. Nature did not intend for you to get on a fucking airplane and fly halfway across the globe with your shitty kids and your golden doodle and colonize other people. That's not what nature intended, I'm pretty sure. But she also has a husband who leads or at least works for a nonprofit.
00:17:19
And when I went to look at his Instagram, we've had recently, of course, the devastating wildfires in Maui, which is actually where this couple lives. And he's on Instagram in the comments with people who are saying they're native Hawaiians and they don't want him there doing his little regenerative farming business, and he's telling them that they're ignorant and that they should research him before leaving comments like that and he's not a millionaire and blah, blah, blah. And I just find that really gross behavior coming from quite literally a colonizer. It's weird. It's really weird.
00:18:00
There's something that my math professors used to say when I was in college. They called it hand waving. They're like, you're doing a lot of hand waving right here. And what hand waving is, according to what they would say, is that you basically dumped a lot of info on us without any citations. You just made some pretty big mental leaps to a conclusion.
00:18:23
So, yeah, the hand waving thing is you info dump a bunch of information without any citations. You make these huge mental leaps between points without really showing the proof of how you get from A to B, and you basically just say, yeah, it's all connected. But you don't actually take the time to draw those conclusions out and illustrate those connections for us. You really just have a little nod to it, and then you're like, Just trust me whenever I say this. I'm sorry, but I'm not trusting you with shit.
00:18:58
You wrote a fucking book. Include some goddamn citations. There was one point, because I'm reading this on my Kindle ereader that I was writing citation needed, or I was really abbreviating CN, like the letters CN as a note when I would go in and highlight stuff. Because while she does have some citations in the book, she says a lot of shit that I'm just like, you really need to have a citation for this. You're not a fucking scientist.
00:19:26
Don't talk to me about the phosphorus in the soil without including where you got that information from. And so there was a point where I just highlighted something, and I said, at this point in my note on my Kindle, at this point, I could just highlight the entire book and say, citation needed. That is how much hand waving she is doing. She is jumping around, making a bunch of points, not including citations, about where she gets this information, whether or not it's correct, and then making all these connections. But really just stating how the information is connected instead of leading us through the process to conclude those connections, it is not laying it out for us.
00:20:11
It's just saying, yes, this is connected here, and we're not going to go into the time it takes to make the connection. I'm good. I don't like the hand waving. And I hadn't thought about the whole hand waving thing since I was in college. So that's really funny that I just remembered that my math professors would be like, yeah, you did a lot of hand waving over here in your proof.
00:20:34
Like, you need to put step by step citing the theorems that you're using for this proof. So another thing that this book is doing is kind of like in a broad sense telling us that she has all the secrets because she lives in a fucking yurt or something. And I'm not about that. Like people who live off the grid or who are farmers or who work or run in nonprofit or who have hacked their industry and gotten people to pay them money and had big revenue numbers in their business. Those people don't have all the secrets to life just because they've checked off those boxes.
00:21:22
I'm hoping that if you're listening to this, that you agree with me that the people that are, like, living off the grid and stuff or have all these conspiracy theories that they believe in or they're preppers, you know what I'm talking about? They're like, prepping for the apocalypse constantly. It's not like they have access to some secret information that you don't have access to or that would somehow improve your life or make you agree with them. But that is really what this book is trying to tell us. She's got it all figured out.
00:21:55
She has all the secrets about being aligned with nature, and I'm not believing it. Sorry, there really aren't any secrets in this book. And I've already said that I haven't at the time. I'm recording this, finished this book yet, but I will. I promise that I will.
00:22:14
It tells you basically that you need to meditate and do, quote unquote, shadow work. And the thing about shadow work, especially the way that she talks about it, shadow work is basically a stand in and a nice way of saying that you need to decolonize your thinking. And obviously the author has not done that that should be clear up to this point, that she has all these nods. She mentions racism, she mentions misogyny in the book, but then she just kind of rolls it all together into, like, you need to do your shadow work, and you need to face the parts of yourself that aren't nice. And aren't pretty and sure, but I don't know, you barely call it what it is, but then you still give us the kind of new age pretty language and words to roll it all together so that we can all feel like our freaking shocker in our butthole is aligned properly.
00:23:15
She wants you to let your business exist in cycles. And at this point I'm like, well, duh. Anyone who runs a business has burnt themselves out at some point. We all know this. You're not telling me anything.
00:23:32
That a dollar 99 ago. I didn't know. Every business owner knows that their business exists in cycles. You cannot do everything all day, every day as a business owner. You cannot do it every month or every year.
00:23:47
There are going to be cycles and ups and down in business, and even people who aren't business owners know that. So I don't know. Are we just talking about what color the sky is or do you have any actual knowledge or expertise to impart on us? I don't know, but like I said before, we get the tiniest of Laquois nods to racism, misogyny, classism. But there's one point in the book where she talks it's actually an entire chapter where we're explicitly told to just reshuffle the deck from which the cards we were dealt came.
00:24:28
She uses this card analogy, and I highlighted this one section, and I was like, has anybody ever fucking played poker before? If you don't like the hand that you get dealt in a poker game, you can't demand to reshuffle the deck unless you're the dealer. But even the dealer can't just decide to reshuffle the deck in the middle of the game because nobody played poker. Please don't use a fucking analogy that you don't even know how. That makes no sense.
00:25:04
But okay, whatever. Anyways, yeah, so she talks about, like, oh, racism exists. Oh, misogyny exists. I don't think she ever explicitly says classism, but it's kind of, like, alluded to. And yeah, she talks about how women and people of color and minorities or whatever experience life in a different way than people who have some sort of privilege based in the culture of white supremacy.
00:25:36
But then she has this quote in there that's like, yeah, if you don't like the hand that you got dealt, just reshuffle the deck. And I'm like, I can't just reshuffle my gender and my race, and class has a little bit of mobility, but for the most part, classes, you kind of end up in the same class that you arrived in and all that. So there's no reshuffling the deck. That happens. Okay, moving on.
00:26:09
And then at the same time, she has these quotes about the aspects of nature that are abundant resources, like air. And she was like, people fight over something. Like they would be fighting over air, which is abundant. And I'm like, have you never heard of pollution? Do you not know that natural resources in already impoverished communities made up of people of color corporations are just allowed to pollute those natural resources, which leads to further health issues and further subjugation?
00:26:55
Like, come on, SIS, you did go to college. I do believe you talk about going to college in the book. Anyways, overall, we just basically get a bunch of whitewashing and spiritual bypassing that doesn't at all address these systemic issues that cause businesses to fail and that cause business owners to burn out. We get a lot of white saviorism. The spiritual bypassing thing is like, just meditate and all your problems will be solved because you can tap into Source Power, blah, blah, blah.
00:27:35
I don't know about you all, but if my water is poison, meditation ain't going to solve it. There's a lot of systemic issues that she brings up, but her solutions to this are, quote, unquote, align your business with nature and don't really talk about the fact that nature has basically been polluted almost to beyond the point of repair. She barely brings up these issues, but she's obviously self aware enough because she is bringing them up. But her solutions are always individualistic, which is, like, a big problem, right? It feeds back into the narrative of the oppressive systems.
00:28:20
If we have a system like racism that is oppressing certain people because of the color of their skin or whatever type of phenotypic traits they have, like what their bodies look like, if the system of oppression is the narrative that is oppressing, the system is oppressing certain people. And then those people are told that it's just because they, as an individual, aren't meditating enough, that feeds back into that oppressive narrative, right, that's doing the work of the oppressive systems. And so that's really fucked up. And that is why I have a huge problem with this book that I haven't even finished reading yet. I intended to finish reading it before I went to record this episode, but then I didn't get to finish it.
00:29:15
I will, and maybe after I finish it, I'll come back and do a little follow up. I don't know. I really don't think it's necessary or I don't really care at this point. So here's what my call to action is for you listening to this. Be a big fucking skeptic about what you read and the content that you consume.
00:29:34
And I want you to ask yourself three questions who wrote it? If it's something that you're reading, who wrote it? Or if it's something that you're watching, like a video or some content, who created it? Right. That's the first question.
00:29:47
Who is the person to create this content that you're consuming or reading? Number two, what do they want from you? Obviously, she is someone who is helping other people market their businesses to be successful and reach revenue goals and stuff. And obviously she's good at marketing because we have me, who was influenced to buy the book. There's nothing wrong with that.
00:30:14
I'm not regretful about it or shamed about it at all. Like, it was a dollar 99, I'll be okay. But asking ourselves, if we're consuming content, we're reading something, what does the person that put this content out there, what do they want from me? And then the third question is what or who did they leave out? And this can be inadvertently or on purpose, so what did they leave out of the conversation?
00:30:43
What kind of context did we not get from the message that they were giving us? Often it is who is being left out of the conversation. You kind of see her well, I mean, she has a lot of citations, and I looked up a couple of them in her references, and it's just like white dudes out the ass, and there's a few women in there, but for the most part, it's white dudes. And so we're leaving out a lot of voices from people who are being oppressed by the systems that she brings up, but doesn't actually give us a real systemic solution for. So those voices are being left out.
00:31:26
Whether this was on purpose or unintentional, I can't really be the person to say that I would like to think that it wasn't on purpose, but it kind of seems crazy to me that you would be aware of all these kinds of systemic issues. You would bring them up, but then you would still just continue to play into those narratives. So that is like, I have a problem with. So I want you again, my call to action is to ask those three questions when you're consuming something content, who wrote it or created it, what do they want from you? And what or who did they leave out?
00:32:06
Did they leave out information? Did they leave out context? Did they leave out somebody's voice who would have been really good to have be a part of the conversation? So I want you to evaluate where you are on your journey to decolonize. This is a very personal journey that is internal work to be doing.
00:32:26
And when I was reading this book, I found myself very much called to speak about what I was reading because that's part of the work that I am doing. So if you're not sure where to start on that antiracism or decolonizing journey, there are a ton of resources out there, and I would urge you to critically research those yourself. Critically means applying critical thinking and critical thought, asking critical questions like critiquing what sources you're looking at, using those questions that I mentioned earlier. So I've actually shared some of the folks that I follow who make content about these sorts of topics in a previous episode. If you haven't already, go back in the podcast feed and listen to episode 33 of Money Through Ease, where I talk about intersexual, intersectional, feminism, and money.
00:33:22
So spoiler alert, none of the people whose platforms I share in that episode are white women. But by no means is that an exhaustive list of folks to follow and learn from. So instead of aligning our businesses with quote unquote nature, as the author tells us to do, maybe we should align our business values with the teachings of indigenous, anti capitalist decolonized thought leaders instead. Because I really think that's what she was trying to get at in this book, but she used kind of an ethereal and intangible concept such as quote unquote nature with capital N. The way she uses it in her book is a convenient stand in for folks that have already been historically silenced.
00:34:13
That's all from me this week. Don't care if you go read this book or not. Thanks for listening for this long. If you like this, leave a review and a rating and share it. And if you didn't like it, too bad.
00:34:25
You just wasted like 35 minutes of your. Life. So sorry for that. All right, I'll talk to you all next week. Bye.