(Proofreading still pending)

Thanks. Good morning, you guys seem super lively. This is gonna be awesome. Um, yeah, my son Jack made the pants, and they were before this is sofa, which just makes me really happy and slightly uncomfortable. So, um, eight years ago, I lived in this house. It's on northeast 45th Street in the Beaumont neighborhood. On a random Tuesday after work, I pulled into the driveway and I hollered to my wife and our three kids they're playing on the front lawn. "Hey, hop in the car. We're gonna go on a little field trip." The kids are in middle school and elementary school, so they're like, "Yay, field trip!" Jump in, we roll down the Alameda Ridge, turn right on Sandy Boulevard, 20 blocks later, we pull into this random parking lot. "Okay, guys, get out. There's the building on the right. Their doors are unlocked. I'll meet you inside."

Walked in, surprise! "This is our new home. Let me explain." So, we're in the middle of a recession. I've lost everything. I have to sell everything, including our house. This crappy building's all we have left. We have to live here. I'm so sorry. It's gonna be an adventure." The kids are at that amazing age where all they hear is the word adventure, so they're running around on the greasy floor just screaming, "Awesome!" My wife, meanwhile, she stands perfectly still, and she screams a different word. But it's okay. There's a happy ending. We had four walls and a roof. We had heat, electricity, running water. We had enough. It wasn't the home of our dreams. It wasn't the home that we just were forced to leave, but it was home enough. And ever since then, I've been obsessed with this work.

In 1958, an economist named Milton Friedman burst onto the scene in America. He ultimately wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the father of modern-day American capitalism. He's the "greed is good" guy. Here's one of his quotes: "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits." Not the fiscal responsibility, but the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. For the past six decades, young men and young women have been drinking from the chalice of Milton Friedman, graduating from college, learning that greed is indeed good. I'm not a fan of the word greed. I have my new favorite word: enough. I found a different quote. It's from the Indonesian poet Toba Beta: "Greed is a little bit more than enough." So, I found myself wondering what a parallel universe would look like, a universe where Toba Beta wins the Nobel Prize in Economics instead of Milton Friedman.

What would happen if, for the past six decades, we all just said "enough" a little more? For example, how much is enough wealth? We invented the American dream. Today, as I stand before you, 16 countries do it better than us. Today, if you're born rich, you could be a fool, you'll likely die rich. If you're born poor, sadly, you'd be a genius and still die poor. In 1958, when Milton Friedman was first bursting onto the scene, the average CEO made eight times his or her average employee. The next slide shows you today's number. Any guesses? It's gonna be a gross number. It's gonna be a disgusting number, a big-ass number. And that's pre-tax reform, so I don't even know what it is, but that's an embarrassing number. I'm not okay with that number.

When someone justifies that number, they say, "Well, it's okay to pay obscene salaries to CEOs because they can make obscene profits for the company." I kind of say, really? Is that really okay? I show them this slide: Why is it that every country that we respect in the world, why are they closer to our 1958 selves? Canada's at 20 to 1. England's at 22 to 1. Germany's at 12 to 1. No one's near us at 475 to 1. There are a couple of countries near us at 475 to 1. We don't want to be standing next to those countries.

So this is what I do for a living. I am a commercial real estate developer. I'm the bad guy in the movies. But I was trained as an architect, and I make buildings like this and like this and like this. [Applause] I was not expecting that. Thank you very much. I can't do this alone, though. These are

big endeavors for me. I have a small company. I have five employees, and I pay them a wage. I, in theory, am the CEO. I get paid too, but I keep... I get to own chunks of these buildings for the long haul.

A friend of mine reminded me that no one gets wealthy in America on a wage or in a salary. You say, "How much do you make?" "More than your employees?" "Well, not much, and any given year, not a whole hell of a lot more." He said, "No, no, you make... you make money. You create wealth through long-term passive investments, just like your buildings, Kevin, just like this. Look at out 15, 20 years. What does that look like?" I did the math. Holy crap. It's about four hundred and seventy-five. Disgusted with that information, now, every year, anyone of my employees works for me, they get a little sliver of all of my buildings. Well, all of our buildings.

It's not life-changing money. In the case of the Farad Dumbbell, you work for me for one year, you get one quarter of one percent of that building. If you're sitting in that desk, though, for ten years, that's worth over a half a million dollars. And this is one of 18 buildings that we made together. And if you're sitting at that desk for a decade, we'll make 18 more. As I'm sitting here feeling really proud, feeling all generous, feeling boastful, feeling self-congratulatory, my friend then asked me to rerun the numbers. "Mike, I'm doing fine. I'm a socialist. This is awesome."

Turns out I'm about 12 to 1, like the Socialists in me today is still 50% greedier than the 1958 capitalist. Who knew? Second experiment in my laboratory of enough: how much is enough rent? We have a housing crisis in Portland, Oregon. Most cities in the nation have similar problems. Around the globe as well, this is the scariest number I'll show you. Rents have increased 20 times faster than wages over the past couple of years in Portland. Not 20%, not 20% faster, 20 times. That's a deeply unsustainable number. That number is why we have 4,000 homeless.

Hundreds of them, because of this number, have their wits about them, have jobs, and still tonight will sleep in their cars. That's not okay. So, I make buildings for a living. Maybe I can fix this. I bought a piece of land over on southeast Gladstone Street, not far from Reed College, and last month, I broke ground on this. It's a modern-day version of an SRO, which stands for single residence occupancy. It's bare-bones housing. It's a room with a twin bed, a washbasin in the corner. Down the hall to the left are the toilets. Down the hall to the right are the showers. Downstairs, a communal kitchen area. It's monastic housing. And it's so much better than a tent in the park. I haven't gotten to the good part yet. Stop. Happy about shushing you. The good part's yet to come.

So the building will look like this at the end of the year. It'll be completed, and my renters are current street routes vendors. [Applause] Anna, still not the good part. It's a pretty good part. So, what I do with my normal buildings is I have investors. I stop my investors on this building down, and I said, "Okay, normally we add up all the rent, and then I tell you what profit could be. My question to you was, what should profit be? You decide that. I don't care, but let's figure out. Let's inject 'enough' into this equation." I then ran the math backwards. Turns out, rents 290 bucks a month. That's the cool part. [Applause] And there is not $1 of public subsidy in that. That is just private citizens gathering around the table, injecting... I didn't even let you clap on that one... gathering around the table, injecting the word 'enough' into the everyday business transaction. Why can we do more of that?

My third and final experiment in my laboratory of enough is, how much is enough equality? You tell me. We have a gender wage gap in America. Can anybody in the audience explain to me why the image on one side of this slide is worth 80 cents and the image on the other's worth $1? Anybody? You get... you can put your head... it's a trick question. There's literally no answer to that question.

So, this is my company. It's a small company. At least it was a year ago. This is what it looked like. Like a traditional American company. It's a pyramid. I'm at the top. I make the most. Middle management. The folk in the trenches make the least. Yes, these are driver's license photos. It's on our website. That's what we chose.

I was wrestling with the gender wage gap in my company, and this is a small company, and I'm not a very bright guy, and I know that whenever I give somebody a raise or a hired a new employee, I was always having to recalibrate, and it just hurt my... my wee brain. But I knew I wanted to be on the right side of the equation. So, on January 1st of this year, this is now my company. Thanks. I still write the paychecks, but we all get paid the same thing. I like the who's in the house on that one. That was fun.

I have no idea if this is gonna work. No idea at all. If it does, if it doesn't, I'll fix it. I know three things, though. One, I know that companies that figure this out will have access to the best talent in the world. Fact. Two, under that, as I stand before you today, there's no gender pay gap in my company. And three, there's only one wrong answer, and that's doing nothing. So, I want you to talk to your bosses, or if you're a boss, shrink in your seat a little bit more. Talk to your bosses on Monday, and I want you to ask your boss to do something. Don't do this. This is silly. This is a blunt instrument. But do something to close that gap.

Your boss, my guess, is your boss is gonna say something like, "It's the fiduciary responsibility of this company to increase profits for shareholders and stakeholders." He or she will be right and wrong all at the same time. The statement itself is valid. I understand that. But the assumptions behind the statement and then what he or she has to do with payroll and how they treat the employees and dealing with the wage gap is all wrong. You can, in turn, mention the companies that treat their employees better have better long-term stock valuations. Not companies that treat half their employees better. Not companies that treat their employees with penises better. Companies that treat their employees better have better long-term stock valuations. And the cost of what I just did in my company as an expense compared to the long-term valuation of attracting the best talent, it can't even compare. Your boss, by saying no to your request on Monday morning, is stepping over dollars to pick up dimes.

Or just mention someone like Johan Lundgren. He's the CEO of EasyJet. When he found out that his predecessor, a woman, made five percent less than him, he voluntarily took a pay cut. In America, we call Johan Lundgren an outlier. Do you know what they call Johan Lundgren in Iceland? It's another trick question. They just called him Johan Lundgren because he's not a big deal in Iceland. Iceland is the nation on the planet that has the smallest gender wage gap. They're also happier than we are, and they live longer than us. But that's just a coincidence.

Or you can mention Julia Weiss and Jeff Kaufman. They're a Massachusetts couple, and they found out that someone making a million dollars a year is no happier than someone making $70,000 a year. Flatline. Below seventy, it starts to tail off. And depending on where you live in the nation, that number might go up or down a little bit. So what they do is they give every dollar above seventy grand that they make every year away. "It's not gonna help me. Might as well help somebody else." They're like the king and queen of enough.

You could also mention Portland's very own Pastor Mary Overstreet Smith, God rest her soul. She ran the Powerhouse Temple Church on North Williams, and in 2005, she was watching TV. She was watching Hurricane Katrina ravage New Orleans, and she was frustrated. She wasn't seeing enough. There wasn't enough compassion. There wasn't enough government. There wasn't enough response. There was enough FEMA. There wasn't enough empathy. So, she sold her vacation home, took the proceeds, gathered her friends, rented a bunch of 15-passenger vans, and drove to New Orleans. Rolled into the most ravaged parts of the city, opened the doors, and said, "Who wants to start life afresh in Portland, Oregon?" Forty families took her up on the offer. Pastor Smith was frustrated enough to do enough.

Eight years ago, I was shoved

into enough, and I haven't stopped thinking about the word ever since. I haven't stopped contemplating a parallel universe where Toba Beta wins the Nobel Prize for economics instead of Milton Friedman, and what that would look like if we all just used the word enough a little bit more. So, I've talked to you about enough and what it means to me. My three topics are wealth, rent, and equality. There are hundreds of topics that you could choose. So, my question to you is, what will you do with the power of enough? How will you choose to change your life or your family with the power of the word enough? How will you choose to change your block or your city with the power of the word enough? How will you choose to change, no pressure, the world with the power of the word enough?

Thank you very much.