My Answer to Hope
There is a question I cannot stop turning over: what do I have in my power to actually do? It wakes me up in the morning.
There is a question I cannot stop turning over: what do I have in my power to actually do?
It wakes me up in the morning. It keeps me up at night. I have a perspective, a set of convictions about how human beings could live if we chose to build differently, and the feeling that those convictions are asking something of me.
I finished reading Hope recently. Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams. If you have not read it, I want to recommend it to you before I say anything else. The audiobook is on Spotify and it is extraordinary. There is a moment in that book where Jane draws a distinction that I keep returning to. Hope, she says, is not idealism. Idealism observes what is broken and wishes it were different. Hope observes what is broken and acts. It is a human trait, she argues, one that is unique to us, and it is the only reasonable response to understanding how much we have to lose and how much we have to gain.
When I read that, something in me settled.
I have never wanted to lose faith in humanity. I have seen too much of what we are capable of, in the way a crowd of strangers can become something else entirely when the right sound finds them, in the faces of people hearing music that reaches them somewhere they did not know they were carrying, to believe that we are beyond recovery. But I have also felt the weight of what we are doing to this world, to each other, to the quality of our attention. And so the question became: where do I focus everything I have? What does it look like to act on hope?
Todos Santos is one of my answers.
There is a place on the Baja California Peninsula where the desert runs all the way to the Pacific and neither one apologizes for what it is. The sunsets there are unlike anything else I have witnessed in a life spent watching sunsets from every kind of extraordinary place.
The ocean lights up as the sky begins to move, colors with no names, deep and shifting. Then the sky above it explodes. Then the stars roll in. The temperature drops a few degrees off the ocean and you feel it arrive on your skin and something in you that has been braced for a long time simply lets go.
There is an infinite expanse in every direction. Desert and sea. The Sierra mountains rising behind you. The Sea of Cortez minutes away. On certain mornings humpbacks breach in the distance. The community that has quietly gathered in Todos Santos over the years came because this landscape asked something of them and they were paying enough attention to answer. Architects. Artists. Surfers. Farmers. Families. People who decided that depth matters more than speed and built their lives around that conviction.
This is one of the last places in North America that still feels genuinely untouched. And it is deeply, practically accessible to the world. Those two things rarely coexist. When they do, you pay attention.
Kfir and I have acquired 12.5 hectares there.
We are conducting an experiment in how human beings should live. We are asking what a community looks like when sustainability is not a marketing angle but the foundation. When regeneration is not the aspiration but the baseline. When the people around you are there because of values, not status.
We are designing this place with solar energy and atmospheric water extraction as our north star. These technologies are evolving rapidly and becoming more accessible every year. We are building this as a laboratory, committed to testing and refining the best solutions as they become viable. The intention is serious, the research is underway, and our commitment to solving for sustainability is at the foundation of every decision we make.
I am sharing this with you because this community, the people who read these words, contains the exact people this experiment needs. Some of you have the resources to build a home in a place that will only become more significant as the world changes. Some of you want to be part of something that is trying to answer the right questions. Some of you simply need to know that this kind of thinking is happening, that people are building toward something better and that you can witness it and eventually be part of it. All of those reasons belong here equally.
Jane Goodall spent her life in service of a vision with full knowledge of how difficult it was. Hope demanded action. Her life is proof that acting on hope, building toward something better even when the odds feel impossible, is not idealism. It is the most pragmatic thing a person can do.
( Driving the road to the land )
Todos Santos is one of the ways I am acting on mine.
If it calls to you, reach out. There is nothing to pitch. We will talk about the vision, the land, the technology, the community we are building, and yes, the sunsets.
UPCOMING SHOWS
April 24
Timeless DJ Set aboard Summit at Sea
May 9th
Living Room Session at La Reserva Tulum
June 5-7
June 20th
THRESHOLD at Primal Moves Venice