I write about a life, business, politics, and whatever won’t leave my mind. I leave these notes to capture moments, places, and feelings before they fade. Builders-Row is my most honest attempt to bring my whole self into the open. Enjoy.

Not monsters. Drifters. I’m a Dominican kid from the Bronx. Raised on welfare, put myself through college and built something. The further I got from that apartment on the 4th floor, the easier it became to look away. “Success” is good insulator, comfortable and quiet.

But I still know where I come from. At this moment, I know my privilege is greater than the same person that now lives in that apartment. Someone living my childhood with fewer exits. It’s a weight I can’t put down, I’ll never be able to.

What Arendt is saying is that evil rarely announces itself. It shows up as people who never decided. Who saw something wrong, called it “complicated” and kept it moving. The drift is the danger.

So fucking decide. Vote with everything, your ballot, your attention, your dollars, and your willingness to say what you believe in rooms where it costs something.

Our role, indefinitely, is simply to not be evil. It sounds like the floor but for most people it’s actually the ceiling. Because not being evil is active. It requires showing up, going back to the place and the people that made you.

When Spotify doubled down on ICE ads without flinching, a lot of us decided. These cancellations are small moves but deliberate ones. Votes cast quietly in the direction of my values.

The fight for your attention and capital is already on the main stage, most of us have not looked up enough to see it. Every platform, brand, every algorithm and LLM model is in the ring. They are not neutral and they are choosing sides faster than we are.

The least we can do is choose ours.

Don’t drift. Decide.

And if deciding starts anywhere, it starts with where you put your money

Not being evil scales. Nothing scales human behavior faster than a business. A well-run company is a multiplier. Every dollar earned, every employee, every supply chain decision made is a vote cast at volume no individual can match.

Which makes the businesses that actually give a fuck genuinely powerful.

Patagonia repairs your gear so you buy less. Costco pays their people a living wage without being forced to. Ben & Jerry's has been loud on social justice since before it was a brand strategy. They’re not perfect companies just decided ones. They know who they are and who they're for.

When you spend there, it compounds. Their supply chains get cleaner. Their models pressure competitors to move. Other CEO’s look at their numbers and realize doing good and doing well aren't opposites.

Now if we flip it.

Domino Sugar is made by workers earning $125 a month in Dominican cane fields, living in company shacks without electricity, under armed guard. Over 68,000 Haitian and Dominican workers funneled into a supply chain so a Florida family could build a billion-dollar empire with US government subsidies. Caterpillar sold bulldozers to Israel knowing they'd be used to demolish Palestinian homes; human rights groups had been notifying them since 1989. They kept selling. Amazon built data centers for ICE. Google signed Pentagon AI contracts, walked it back when employees revolted, then signed again when nobody was watching.

The pattern is never the exception. It's always the business model.

Every contract signed, every lobby dollar spent, every supply chain decision made is a ballot cast. They are not neutral. They are not passive. They pick sides with their actions every single day, loudly, at scale, with more capital behind it than any individual ever will.

So let's treat them exactly the same way we treat anyone else who votes against us.

Don't spend there. Don't work there if you can help it. And to the people who show up every day to separate families, to process human beings like paperwork, to enforce a machine that was built on the premise that some people matter less, I am looking at you. You are not following orders. You are making a choice. Every single morning you make it again.

Don't let the convenience of $$$ erase the cost of extracting from your own roots.

You wouldn't hand your money to someone who told you directly they don't give a fuck about you or yours and corporations tell you through their actions. The least we can do is listen.

Your dollar is a vote. So is your labor. Cast both like you fucking mean it.

Someone said it to me simply. "Be where your feet are."

I wrote it down. Told a few people and put it in my phone.

I drift. My mind leaves the room before my body does. Mid-conversation, mid-meal, mid-moment and I'm already somewhere else. Replaying yesterday. Rehearsing tomorrow. Missing the thing that's right in front of me.

I live in the gap between where my feet are and where my mind went.

When I feel it creeping I come back to the phrase. Not a meditation practice or a whole thing. Just a quiet reframe.

Where are your feet right now?

In this room. At this table. With these people. In this moment that will not come back.

We are so wired to optimize, to plan, to do shit in the future but life doesn't happen in the planning it happens in the room, In the execution. You can spend so much time architecting the future that you miss what’s already playing out.

I'm a couple mistakes ahead of you, not miles. One of them ones I keep making is being physically present but mentally somewhere else entirely. Showing up in body but not in spirit. It's a specific kind of absence that's easy to miss because it looks like presence.

I’ve been using this phrase to come back to myself.

Be where your feet are.

Things I read, watched, or heard that chemically rewired how I see the world. Not my opinions.Just shifts.

01 — The Trouble with Optionality Mihir Desai · The Harvard Crimson · 2017 A Harvard Business School professor quietly dismantles the entire playbook of a generation. The smartest people in the room have become addicted to keeping their options open, and in doing so, never actually live.

02 — The Banality of Evil Hannah Arendt · Eichmann in Jerusalem · 1963 Arendt goes to cover a Nazi war criminal's trial expecting a monster and finds a boring bureaucrat who simply never thought about what he was doing. The most unsettling reframe of evil you'll encounter.

03 — There Is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism The Trinitonian · 2023 The phrase the internet turned into a hall pass read what it actually means, and why it's a call to aim your anger upward, not an excuse to stop trying.

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