Hey friends, you're listening to Liberatory Business, and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

You know, lately I've been thinking deeply about work, business, money, social change — and here's where I've landed. We should build infinitely scalable online businesses to fund vital work in the world that is inherently unscalable.

Let me unpack this a little bit.

Think about what it actually takes to grow food that we all need to eat in order to survive. Picture someone kneeling in soil, pulling a turnip from the ground and brushing it off and knowing — because I know when I planted it, I know when I watered it, I've been watching this for weeks — this one is ready, and that other one over there needs another few days. This is the kind of knowledge that lives in one person's hands. Their felt experience, in their relationship with that one specific piece of land across one specific season.

Now, think about a toddler and a parent who has this toddler who won't sleep at night. It's like midnight. The parent is exhausted, they're walking slow circles in the dark in the living room with this little person draped over their shoulder. They're humming a song their own parents sang them when they were little. Bleary-eyed, right? There's no way to optimize or hack this experience. This child doesn't need more efficient systems. They need that person, that voice, the warmth of that body.

Or think about sitting with an elder. Listening to a story that you've heard 12 times before. And you're staying anyway and you're pretending like it's your first time listening. You're there and you're saying with your body and with the time that you're giving — hey, you matter. And I'm here.

There's no technology that replaces that. There's nothing that scales it. And the moment we try, something so essential to humanity dies.

This is the work that holds the world together. It's quiet, it's slow, it's "inefficient."

What if the friction is the point?

Now notice what's happening to this kind of work. Someone is looking at each of these moments and asking — how do we make this go faster? How do we make this cheaper? How do we make this more efficient and remove all the friction points?

But what if the friction is the point? The slowness of growing the food, the dependence on the weather, and the coming and going of seasons — that's what connects the farmer to the land. The inefficiency of carrying the toddler and walking circles in the dark of midnight — that's exactly what teaches a parent who their kid is. That's exactly what builds the child-parent relationship.

But the logic of optimization and efficiency doesn't distinguish between friction that's wasteful and friction that's sacred. It just sees cost. It sees bottom line. It sees something that could be done faster, or preferably without a human in the room at all — that's the fastest and the most efficient of all.

This logic is creeping into our classrooms, our kitchens, our hospital rooms. And every time we let that logic into rooms without asking what we're giving away, the circle of what we consider human work gets smaller and smaller. And at the end, we all pay with our humanity.

What online scale makes possible — and what it threatens

The traditional economy that we think of before the internet, outside the internet — it's bound by the material, physical world. A bakery, for example, can only serve so many people. There's only so much wheat to go around. There's only so many ovens that can bake. There's only so many hours in a day that a baker can work, only so many hands. Those constraints are what keep it grounded.

But an online business slips right past those constraints. One person or a small team can reach millions of people and generate enormous wealth with almost none of that friction of being bound to the material world.

And most of the conversations around growing online businesses and generating wealth revolve around what it means for the individual — what it means for you, your freedom, your income, your impact, your lifestyle. But what about what it means for everyone else?

Because if you have the ability to scale something that impacts people, that's not morally neutral. It's a form of power that you carry, that you wanna be responsible for. And so the question that I'm asking is not should we have scalable online businesses, but — what is it for? What does it serve?

Because there's so many things that can go wrong with that kind of power. When someone builds a business that scales past all physical constraints, they can accumulate enormous capital without any of the natural checks and balances that come with operating in a traditional economy. There's no neighbors next door who are depending on you for their jobs. There's no community that's holding you accountable because they see you every day, their kids go to school with your kids, right? They cross the same streets that you cross.

That's how you get people with extraordinary wealth and zero responsibility to anyone else.

And when wealth is earned entirely digitally — with no dirt clinging to your hands, no weather affecting anything you do, you don't have to sweat for anything, you don't have to come face to face with anybody — work starts to feel abstract. You can see the numbers go up or down, but they stop meaning something material. And that abstraction doesn't just stay in your bank account. It leaks into your very being. It leaks into how you see the world, how you relate to people, how you think about your life, how you think about your place, your belonging in the wider community.

When your entire business is abstract, you yourself start to experience life as if it were an abstraction.

Stay tethered to the ground

So if you couldn't tell, I don't think the answer is to not build online. It's not to not scale businesses. It's to stay tethered to the physical, grounded work even while you operate in the internet space — a space with no built-in reason to keep you grounded.

Which again brings me to what I believe, which is that the purpose of a scalable online business is to fund and resource vital work in the world that will never scale.

Here's what that could look like. First, you create online products, services that contribute genuine value. Not something fluffy. Not something that can sell but doesn't inherently improve life. Something that actually changes how people think or how people behave. Something that builds a skill that people are gonna carry for the rest of their lives. Something that solves a real problem that other people have difficulty solving on their own.

That kind of product or service in the market is capable of creating meaningful capital at scale. And when you do create meaningful capital at scale, that capital can get put to work — not reinvested into more scale for the sake of more scale, but channeled toward the work that can only happen at the pace of one life, one place, one relationship at a time.

Remember — the farmer, the parent, the doctor, the teacher, the person sitting with the person who's dying.

What I've been doing — and what I'm learning

I have been putting this into practice for years. My online business has funded scholarships for vocational training, humanitarian relief in war zones, genocide zones, disaster recovery, land back efforts, medical debt relief, elder care. My business has funded these things not as an afterthought, not as a charity, not as a tax write-off, but as a structural commitment — a core reason that the business exists in the first place.

And that's been very meaningful, and I've learned a lot. But I also know that there's more to learn, more to figure out, more to do. Because writing checks is important. It's needed. But it's only one form of support.

So lately I've been wondering — what's more impactful, what's more sustainable? And I've been putting in work to develop deeper and more strategic partnerships with organizations that are doing work that I believe in. Not just funding them — which, again, is great — but also asking, what do you need in the long haul? How can I be genuinely useful to you beyond just money?

And I think this is something that tragically gets overlooked in almost every conversation about entrepreneurs giving back or doing good. Which is that if you have built a scaled online business of any size, you have more to offer than just money. You have so much more, actually.

You have time. A scaled online business frees up time — the kind of time that most people in traditional nine-to-six work structures don't have. You have time to think. You have time to research. You have time to sit with a problem. You have time to be able to show up consistently over months, over years, not just when you can get days off from work.

You have skills. If you've built something that reaches hundreds of people, thousands of people, millions of people — you know how to communicate. You have learned some really important skills of communication and persuasion. You know how to move people to action. And those skills are enormously valuable to organizations that are doing critical work but struggling to get attention or resources.

And third, you have community. A value-aligned customer base — that's a group of people who already trust you, who already care about similar things as you, who are ready to move when you point them somewhere worth going. When you say, hey, let's go there — they're ready to move with you.

What becomes possible

Money, time, skill, community. Most online business owners are sitting on all of these things. And are we really deploying them to the best of our ability?

Imagine what becomes possible when we actually use all of this — funneling all these skills and time and resources into things that are, again, inherently unscalable. Building schools and homes. Restoring land and food sovereignty. Strengthening community centers, mutual aid networks. Funding public infrastructure. Funding the slow, unglamorous work of local organizing.

We can get capital together and dig wells. We can supply rural clinics. We can resource farmers. We can sustain healers and artists and people who hold communities together with nothing but their labor and their love and their presence and their bodies.

And guess what? This isn't a far-off "oh, one day, wouldn't that be nice?" kind of dream. It's already happening. It's happening right now. It's just not happening at the scale that it could.

I'm talking about the kind of scale that puts private equity out of business. I'm talking about the kind of scale that eliminates the billionaire economy. I'm talking about the kind of scale that changes what the next generation grows up with and what they think is normal.

And that's the bar. Nothing less than that is good enough for my children and your children.

And it's possible. It's actually concretely, totally, realistically possible. But only if the people with scaled online businesses — and people who are on the road to scaling their own online businesses — decide that this is what we need to work towards.

This is a decision that I've made, and I'm inviting you to make it with me.

I'm gonna be unpacking what it looks like in practice for me and you throughout the rest of this year and beyond. The frameworks, the partnerships, the specifics, the trial and error. This is what this podcast is for. And so if you're in this with me, I'm so glad — because I'm building this, and I can't build it without you.

I'll talk to you next time. Bye.