Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Yancey Strickler: Bentoism For a Better World | Human Behavior | E81

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

Ready for a better world?   Today on the show we are chatting with Yancey Strickler. Yancey is the co-founder of Kickstarter, father of the philosophy of Bentoism, and author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World.    Yancey has a lot of ideas on improving the world by realigning motives and how we value success so that it’s not just purely profit based.    In this episode we’ll discuss Yancey’s career background including his work with Kickstarter. We’ll also find out the meaning of financial maximization, how it came to run the world as we know it today, and how Bentoism can redefine our future.   🎉 YAP is recruiting our Fall 2020 interns❗   If you're interested, fill out an internship application below!    Research Team Internship:  https://forms.gle/m5AJtLFzAGFRKi3N6    Guest Outreach Team Internship: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDGhr8Ps5_kNz9NQA91pqPElgm7-JfsgjMp3YeR4MNMqlM2A/viewform?usp=sf_link   Social Media Team Internship: https://forms.gle/N8XvNSbtF2YYqKpV8   Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com   Guest Links Website: https://www.ystrickler.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yancey-strickler-486b4557/ Instagram: https://twitter.com/ystrickler?lang=en Twitter: https://twitter.com/ystrickler?lang=en Facebook: NA Medium: https://medium.com/@ystrickler Books: https://www.amazon.com/This-Could-Our-Future-Manifesto/dp/0525560823

Hey everyone, before we get started, I want to make a quick announcement. Yap is recruiting our fall 2020 interns. Internships are awesome. In fact, I interned at a radio station Hot 97 for free for almost three years. I'm so thankful for that experience. Without it, I would not be who I am or where I am today. Do you want exposure to podcasting, social media, or marketing? Do you want to get mentored by me? Then this could be the internship for you. But don't just take it from me here at first hand from my current interns, Caitlin Saw, Isabella Vow, and Catherine Ponzi, who can't recommend this program enough. Hi, my name is Caitlin. I am a Yap intern. I focused on building the Instagram and YouTube platforms. If you want to be a Yap intern, you're going to love it here. Hala gives so much room for creativity and growth. So if you're interested in applying, we're excited to meet you.

Hi, my name is Isabella Vaux, and I'm a social media intern for the young and professional. marketing podcast. The experience has been so amazing and has really improved my copywriting skills and has given me hands-on experience working for a podcast. I'm so excited for you guys to join the team as fall interns. Hi, my name is Kate and I'm a social media and guest outreach intern on the app team. I'd say my biggest learning so far is how to write great copy as well as communicate my ideas in a really succinct manner. Really excited to have fall interns join our team soon. Please note this is an unpaid and remote internship, but most interns graduate to become paid part-time team members. If you're interested to apply, we have the application links to all open

positions in our show notes and on my LinkedIn page. Hope to see your application. You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halitaha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession, or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast, and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of ex-FBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires,

CEOs, and best-selling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, how to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're still, smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at Young and Profiting Podcast. Today on the show, we're chatting with Yancey Strickler. Yancey is the co-founder of Kickstarter, father of the philosophy of bentoism, and author of This Could Be Our Future, a manifesto for a more generous world. Yancy has a lot of ideas on improving the world by realigning motives and how we value success so that it's not just purely profit-based. In this episode, we'll discuss Yancy's career background, including his work with Kickstarter, and we'll find out the meaning

of financial maximization, how it came to run the world as we know it today, and how bentoism can redefine our future. Hey, Yancey, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. What's up? Thanks for having me. Of course. I'm super, super stoked about this interview. So Yancey, just to introduce you to my listeners, you are the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter. You are the founder of the philosophy of bentoism, and you're the author of This Could Be Our Future, A Manifesto for a More Generous World. And before we dig into Kickstarter and bentoism, which is such an interesting topic, I really want to talk about your career journey and your childhood. So based on my research, you actually didn't really fit in growing up. Your family was even Christians. And even though your community was also a very Christian, you still didn't really

fit in. You got bullied. You were called homophobic slurs in your own words, so much that you thought that you may be gay and you just didn't even know it. So how did this experience of being an outcast as a child really impact who you are today and some of the moves that you've made in your life? Yeah, let's just start right at the deepest. the deepest, most vulnerable spot. Why not? Yeah. I think those kind of experiences

shape your self-perception. Whether they're true or not, they help create a narrative about yourself. So for me, that's create a narrative of like not belonging, you know, and even if I'm like being invited to belong, I distrust it, right?

Because I just don't see that value. So there's just like, these things just echo. You know, they form your anxieties and your drive. You know, for me, growing up in the country, on a farm, no neighbors, you know, I just read books all the time. And that's what I love to do. And that's still what I love to do. And so one way of think about it is just during the times where other people were, yeah, socializing, which, of course, I still had. But, you know, I would just, I would be reading.

And so I just had a real curiosity for the world that always, drove me and that even when I would have these really tough moments in life, like I just sort of was always called by just an interest in the world, a curiosity in the world. You know, it really didn't beat me down in a way that it like, you know, stopped me from moving. It's more that I was just like, I got to get out of here. I've got to, I have to succeed. And so it played out that way. Well, that's really cool. And I bring it up not to like put you on the spot or make you feel uncomfortable. It's more because I have a lot of listeners that are young and probably are getting

bullied. And I want them to understand that like you can come out of that and you can be super successful just like you, Yancey. Like you have, Kickstarter is one of the most impressive companies of the last decade, you know, and for you to have been a part of that and to have had a childhood where you weren't like the most popular, you know, football player in school. You don't need to be that to be successful. And actually, most people who are the most popular in school are not the most successful after school, you know. And so I just think that's important for people.

No, it's so important to recognize. You know, I lead people using the philosophy that we're going to, we'll talk about later in bentoism. Like, I lead people in workshops. I help people discover what they're about. And there's an exercise I often do called draw your life where you like draw a line, snaking up a piece of paper. And at the bottom you write your birth at the top you write now.

And then you just fill in what are the dots of your life between here and there? And after you do that, you have to identify like what is the crucible moment? What is that moment that really shifted your direction in life? You know, maybe where you, instead of staying in the groove of what you were supposed to do, just like something in you changed. And when I first went through that exercise, I had thought, like, my key moment, the most critical thing was going to be starting Kickstarter, that that would be the proudest moment, the defining moment. And instead, it was moving to New York after college. When I really looked at it, I was like, actually, that was the riskiest thing I did.

That was the thing that most changed my story of myself. And if that hadn't happened, like, none of these other things would have happened. And so, yeah, I'm totally with you on the question. And yeah, I feel it. Yeah. So let's talk about your career journey before Kickstarter. From my understanding, you had a dream of being a writer. So what were some of the things that you did before you actually started Kickstarter?

Yeah, I was in college. I studied English and cultural studies. And I just did a lot of writing and reading. And I got, while I was in college, I started just randomly writing record reviews. And I managed to get a couple album reviews and pitch. Pitchfork and what pitchfork was just starting then, but like, it was amazing, you know, I was one of the first, whatever, 30 people to write for pitchfork. And that, that was exciting.

And then I moved to New York and got basically like entry level editorial slash production jobs. First at like a radio station, then at like a website. And at the start, all these jobs were basically some sort of data entry or like using a CMS, you know, take our stuff and put it in here. goes on the website. But what I found was there's a lot of opportunity in those places, especially coming in as someone who was comfortable with the internet and technology. And this is when the world is still shifting, beginning to shift in that way. And I discovered something interesting for me, which is, you know, I'd always wanted to be a writer. I thought of myself as a

writer. But like the organizational questions, thinking strategically, getting people to like come to consensus around ideas, I discovered that. that those things came very naturally to me. And I didn't expect it. I didn't even want it. I actually felt like almost like a sellout or like a class trader for being good at those things because I thought of myself as a creative person.

But just being inside young organizations that were changing gave me enough opportunity and enough challenges to chew on that it let me discover these other capabilities that I had. And in all cases it came in from like taking the, I mean, my first job was $18,000 a year, taking that job and then just like every day you're just showing up, just thinking, how can I be useful other than doing the 10 things that I have to do? And yeah, and that was really it. That's really cool. And so like I mentioned previously, you co-founded Kickstarter, which basically created a whole new economy based on the generosity of people.

Kickstarter has placed billions of dollars in the hands of creative people since it launched in 2009, more than 100,000 new ideas have generated because of it. And it was actually Perry Chen, who is one of your co-founders, who originally had the idea. So take us back to that moment back in 2009 when Perry first brought up the idea to you. What did you think about that idea? Did you understand it? And were you on board right away?

Yeah. Perry had first had the idea in 2001, or 2001, 2002. So he had been sitting on. it for a while. And he'd wanted to throw a concert and realized that he was going to have to front something like $20,000 to make the show happen and thought, what if instead I could propose the concert to the public? People could put up their credit cards to buy tickets, but no one would be charged unless the show sold out. And so there was this notion of a conditional transaction. It would only happen if people wanted it to. And so that was the idea for Kickstarter. He shared it with me four years later. So

In 2005, we met in a restaurant in Brooklyn where he worked and I was a regular. And my first reaction to the idea was actually not liking it. It reminded me of American Idol. And I'm just like, why do we need people voting on stuff? Like, is that how we want culture to happen, you know, really? And we just end up talking about how, you know, think about the niche artist or the person who has the online community that's like so dispersed in the real world, but, you know, if they could only gather the people on the web, you know, something would be possible. And so, you know, we started

working on it and found our third co-founder, Charles Adler, about a year later. And what was interesting was like, you know, crowdfunding didn't exist yet. And there had been some experiments, but it wasn't, there wasn't any kind of platform. It wasn't a normal thing. And we were focused on the very beginning on just helping creative projects and artists and creative people. That was just like, that's who we were, that's where we came from, that's what we cared about. And so that meant from the beginning, you know, just like closing ourselves off to a lot of potential opportunity, just like taking a stronger focus than you might think. But, you know, but in that way, just like authentically representing a need, you know,

of like creative ideas not being appreciated and especially creative people not being appreciated. And I even think the way that creators are lauded now on the web and Patreon, even YouTube framing itself around creators, like that is not a language that existed before Kickstarter. Even before Kickstarter, it's like there are musicians and filmmakers and, you know, these are all discrete things. And instead, now we think of them as they're all kind of a similar creative practice. So it's, it was, it remains a great tool and something that just allows self-determination and creative ideas and things that wouldn't otherwise to happen to happen. Yeah. So like you said, it wasn't a phrase that people knew about. People didn't know what

crowdfunding was when you first launched Kickstarter. That phrase didn't exist. You guys kind of were one of the first pioneers in the space. So when you were bringing on investors or even content creators on the platform, what kind of pushback did you receive in terms of the idea? Yeah, it was so painful to explain. You get lost in the mechanics of, and then there's a pledge and they don't get charged. So many things that we take for granted are really hard to explain at first. The first two years, every Kickstarter video is someone trying to explain to their friends. Here is this new thing.

Honestly, business people would say no one is going to use this because I want to get a cut. I should get a piece of the action. But we would say, but listen, the whole idea is that projects aren't meant to be good business. are just like interesting or cool or funny or, you know, it's all the other things. And so for a more traditionally minded of business person, they're just like this, what need does this possibly serve? For creative people, they immediately would see it. They immediately saw it and said, yeah, you know, I have so many projects and I have to go

knock on doors and beg to get them made. Like I would, if I could just present my idea and I don't have to get permission from anyone, like, that's amazing. But there was a question of, but will people actually? actually support me. You know, because there's, still at that point, we're used to an artist fan relationship of I buy a ticket when your movie comes out. I buy, you know, it's just that, it's after the fact.

And here we're saying, you know, just support this person for being them. Support an idea because it's a good idea. And that's requiring a different level of trust. And so, you know, I think everyone had the attitude of like, well, sure, this sounds great, but having that, you know, healthy, grizzled veterans, you know, skepticism of, but we'll see, you know, we'll see if people actually do this kind of thing. But if you look at, you know, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Patreon, you know, it's even now only fans, right? I mean, like the degree to which we are willing and excited to directly support one another is just,

you know, it seems so obvious now, but it really was not, that connection was not there before, about 10 years ago. Was there some sort of like a tipping point when you guys started where you guys were trying to get people to join your platform to use it? Like what was the moment in which you were like, oh, wow, this is really going to work? I was three weeks in. It was a project by a woman from Athens, Georgia named Allison Weiss. It was like to make a new EP. And she was a YouTuber. And she just made like the best video that was just personal and alive and you just felt like you were with her and she offered these rewards like writing a song about you and and it just it felt like she took this form that we've made and she just she just turned it into something that was truly

alive and you know just seeing that was like oh so this is really something and it's not like things took off at that point. But I think it was just seeing a really skilled storyteller, look at this and think, oh, this is like, I can play with this, right? And you hope, you dream that someone thinks of your tool that way. And Allison just nailed it. And honestly, I think like almost every crowdfunding video, and even the structure of crowdfunding campaigns is still based on her. Like, she did stretch goals in the first campaign, like things that people still think of as like nascent new things and crowdfunding like she was doing it in the third week that this existed. So, so, you know, but it was, so it's that, it's that collision in between

your idea and in the real world and then finding that, oh, it really does mean something. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day we're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate, even though I'm so picky, because when it comes to hiring, Indeed, is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post noticed. Indeed, sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast by boosting your posts to the top relevant candidates. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored ones according to Indeed data worldwide. I'm so glad I found

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the CEO role at the company? What were some of the challenges that you had in terms of being a leader and not really having too much business experience? Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm still waiting to see if imposter syndrome ends, you know, just somehow even as you change, you think, oh, but I'm, But am I really this? Yeah, there's a lot of that because it wasn't an aspiration. I mean, Perry was the CEO for the first five years, and I stepped in after that. And it's not something that I wanted or had, you know, spent my life preparing for. And that's a good and a bad thing.

You know, it's a good thing because especially if your company like Kickstarter, where you're trying to, you know, we're trying to set a different kind of example. We're really trying to uphold a lot of values that are personal to us. You don't want to do things the way everybody else does them because that laziness can just trap you. We saw it happen to many of our friends. But also, you know, it just means that as everyone else is chasing hypergrowth and large valuations, and you're not chasing those things, that, you know, other folks get their, like, trophy moment. And, you know, you don't.

Yours is more subtle. And there are days where you can feel good about it and you could think, you know, it doesn't matter. And then there are days where you think, what if everyone else is right? And I'm like the one sucker who didn't, you know, who didn't like realize. So, you know, for me, it was hard that I just didn't see many role models. Like I, you know, have people on my board I loved. But certainly as I looked around the startup universe, I didn't see anyone reflecting this idea of like trying to build a long. term institution, trying to align our self-interest with our users and employees. Like,

you know, just the things that to me felt like the hardest things to get right, honestly, just seemed like no one else even cared about. So that's hard. That's hard. And it's even something that like even inside the company, there is, you know, because we all live in the same world. And so employees say, my, hey, can we raise a lot of money to go chase growth to match what a competitors doing. And so it's not just that like there are these Scrooge McDuck like sitting somewhere. It's we're all we're all a part of this. I'm a part of it too. Right. And so there's a lot that you end having to balance there. You know, in the end, in the end, what I found is that I was ultimately able to just act in a way that is deeply true to who I am. You know, I don't really

look at anything I did and see any moment where I think that I was out of alignment with what I believe is important, what I care about. You know, did I always make the right decision? No. Did I, you know, things always work out? No. But on that deeper level, I think it was always on point to some degree. And again, I have friends who were founder, CEOs, more successful, funny phrase to use

in this context, but more successful, became very wealthy, all, you know, followed the same, the traditional path. And I think there you find there's. still a lot of regret. There's guilt, you know, do I deserve this? There's, you know, did I do things the right way or not? You know, maybe I took some shortcuts that are possibly creating some challenges now. How do I feel about that? So there's a lot you end up carrying. But yeah, so having, just having the confidence to be yourself in a job like that, you know, I definitely don't feel like I mastered that, but I think I held the line well enough. Yeah, for sure. I definitely think that

you did. Just to give my listeners some context, Kickstarter is a public benefit corporation, correct? And that's a PBC is what people call it. And I personally never heard of this company structure before researching you. It turns out there are a few other large corporations like Patagonia and method products that are also PBCs. But explain to our listeners what that is and how that makes you different from other companies and startups or how that makes Kickstarter different, because I think it will help them understand what you were just talking about a little bit more. Yeah, a PBC is a for-profit company that has taken upon itself and has a legal classification where it is required to balance the financial interests of share.

shareholders, which is what every company in America is held by over the last 50 years, but you're meant to balance the financial interests of shareholders with producing a positive benefit to society. And so most companies have the attitude that you make as much, you just maximize for profit, you create a corporate giving program to apologize later for all the rivers you polluted. And we hope that works out in the long run. I think we can look around us to see how well that strategy plays out. As a PBC, you're saying that these things must be one to one. Like, you're directly incorporating these things into how you act, how you behave in all aspects. And when you become a PBC, you write a charter that says what you're going to be legally held liable to.

And so Kikstarters lays out a dozen or so provisions that include things like donating 5% of our after-tax profits to organizations giving arts education and schools and organizations fighting systemic inequality, or pledging to not use legal but esoteric tax avoidance strategies to avoid paying the company's fair share. But what's important about a PBC structure is that, you know, there are a lot of good companies, but those that are operating as a traditional for-profit company, they are just relying on having good people in their leadership positions. You know, they ultimately are still being held to this goal of maximizing a financial gain. and they just happen to have nice people doing it that aren't willing to do all the things that you can do.

As a PBC, the company is legally held to this, and it can't change. Like the company, you know, I'm no longer the CEO of Kickstarter. The CEO now is he's Asani has to follow these same ideals. The same will be for the next Kickstarter CEO and on and on. So we ultimately felt like this was a structural way to keep us honest, a structural way to keep the company aligned with its community of creative people. And we as founders said from the beginning, we didn't want to sell the company. We weren't trying to IPO.

Just like, can we create a thing that does what it's supposed to do that doesn't screw it up, that fulfills that purpose? And so I think the PPC is a structural way to do that. It's not perfect. It doesn't solve it. But I think it is a model and definitely more people are using it. Yeah. So you just brought up financial maximization. So I think that's a great transition into our next topic, which is what you really focus on now, like speaking about and bentoism.

So this idea of financial maximization, it boils down to meaning that the right choice is whatever option makes the most money. And this concept was first introduced by the famous economist Milton Friedman in 1970. And so we're so used to this way of the world where money drives everything, profit drives everything, even like GDP is how our country is measured on our success as a country. So tell us about, you know, this economist who put out this op-ed in New York Times and how that really changed the world. What was the world like before that and what happened after that? Yeah. I mean, Milton Friedman is a brilliant economist with, you know, many, many great additions to our knowledge of the world. And it was 50 years ago, actually, to this week,

he wrote this New York Times essay that said that the social responsibility of a business is to increase profits. And that at a moment when companies were really held to this notion of the public good and companies were celebrated for being things like GM saying, what's good for America is good for GM, that it was an argument that that all that was wrong and that actually they were over-complicating things and businesses should just focus on maximizing profits. Now, I think there's some wisdom to what he says, but that became a license to basically just absolve for business to absolve themselves of any responsibility other than their own returns. And so you see this dramatic shift in how America functioned that happened in 1973 where basically worker wages just stopped growing.

From 1973 to today, the average American's wage has grown by about 10%. That's 10% since 1973, the same year, Pink Floyd's dark side of the moon came out. It's like 50 years, 10% raised. Meanwhile, the cost of everything are crazy higher, education, housing, healthcare, everything else. So people are like getting pinched in this crazy way. There's a study that just came out today from the Rand Corporation, which is I write about in the book, a very reputable government organization that did a study to say, you know, what if wages kept growing after 1973 that the way they had for the previous 30 years, which you think of as the golden age of capitalism, the average American salary today would be jumping from something like $70,000 to like

$110,000. And what they found is that every single income group, like the lowest paid person, would be getting $68,000 a year. And the only group, the only group that loses out on income is the 1%. Even the 99th percentile person sees their incomes gain. But yet the way the system worked changed. It fundamentally changed. And it changed to optimizing for shareholders.

And that produced private equity. That produced companies offshoring jobs. That produced the fragility of the American industrial sector today. That produced all. They think they're all justified by this notion of, well, if it maximizes our financial interests, then it's good. But we have reached the end of that story. We've reached the end of that story. It has not worked.

It has not worked. America is falling apart. Our environment is incredibly unstable. We're going to find it very hard to just be, we already are, thinking about the normal, let's all grow our businesses, whatever, 10% when there's so much instability and where the weather can wipe out billions of dollars of capital investment in a day, you know, overnight. And so we're in a moment where that mindset is shifting, but it really took such a strong hold in the world. Maybe my favorite place is in a study of college students that's happened every year since the 1960s that is about their goals in life. And in 1970, the most important life goal for a college freshman was to, quote,

develop a meaningful philosophy on life. Eighty-four percent of college students said that was essential. That year, the number of people who said being rich was essential was about 28 percent, 28% of college students in 1970. The most recent year, the study came out in 2017, 82% of college students said being rich was essential. And only 40% said having a meaningful philosophy on life was. And this is a rational response to how our world has changed. And so, you know, this is something that I think is at the moment of a breakdown. Kind of an empire is breaking down at this moment.

But I really have come to feel that this invisible assumption that the right outcome is the financially maximizing it has just been this sort of invisible litmus test that has been applied to the world continually over the recent decades. Yeah, totally. And can you tell us more about this? You have a chapter in your book called The Maximizing Class. I know you touched on it a little bit. But tell us more about who these people are, what they did, how they changed the way that the world works, and even how they ended up increasing credit card debt on society. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of what we're talking about as a consulting class. And in particular, like a McKinsey, BCG, Bain, consultants coming in with a private equity background, or they're being brought in by management to say, find us where we can maximize profits. Where can we cut costs? Where can we maximize profits? I have a quote in the book from someone saying that McKinsey's responsible for more job losses than anyone else in human history. And so this was just a new strategy. And so, people People are trained in this strategy in business schools and law schools. And this has become just an assumed way of doing business. You know, you squeeze workers, you try to remove their rights, you try to dismantle the unions, you take more and more profits to the top.

Your board is never going to get mad at you. Your shareholders are never going to get mad at you for doing that. And meanwhile, we're heading towards a world where, honestly, the future of business doesn't really involve people. The future of business is robots and algorithms. like the 20% of the population that will still be able to afford their products. You know, the future of businesses sees people as increasingly irrelevant. And so, yeah, it is a mindset that in a healthy society is checked by the other parts of

civil society. It's checked by government. It's checked by a strong social fabric. It's checked by the family. And you have a business community that is serving, you know, working hard, doing all those things. But it's just balanced in the context of everything else. This is how things work out well.

This is how a rainforest stays balanced, right? But what we've had, especially in the U.S., is just the business community and the financial mindset becomes so powerful to even now we can only conceive of answers that are like theirs. And I fall into this too. We want businesses. We want Patagonia to solve climate change.

No, Patagonia will never solve climate change. You know, states will solve climate change. Science will solve climate change. But yet we've put so much of our faith then business and entrepreneurship, which I believe in, which I believe in, but they are just a part of the piece of the puzzle. And every time we continue to rely on the business community as solving that, creating that answer, ultimately we are tilting more and more of our society to ultimately a financial outcome. So we're stuck in a dangerous loop. But I think it's breaking.

I mean, I think that the disaster of where we are is breaking this. Yeah. So let's talk about values a bit, because I think values. are really important in this whole conversation. Right now, the world and America and with capitalism, we value money and maximizing money. What are some of the other values that we could have in play that could mean success? Like what other measures of success are there? Yeah, well, I think that, you know, mastery is a great one. You know, mastery is the act of just getting better at something. You know, if you follow like the James Clear atomic habits world, you know, that that is like the true art of gross is actually you yourself getting better. You're not demanding anything more of anyone else. You're just personally improving. There are values like fairness. There are values like community ship. There are values like purpose that we see are incredibly important. But, you know, we see it. Like we assume that all those things must take a backseat to providing for your own financial. needs, right? I mean, to pursue a job or a career with purpose, to some degree is seen as

indulgent. It's privileged. And in a sense, it is because for half the population that really is a hard ask to make, just because the degree to which opportunity is not being evenly distributed. But so I think that those values are very alive. I mean, in that survey of college freshmen, I mean, the same percentage of college freshman want to have a family every year. Like, that has not really change. We still value these same things, but the issue is that they're getting more and more squeezed by our need to make financial lens meet, by our need to have health care, and then we tie our notion of self-worth and self-esteem to getting those things. And then you get into that dangerous loop where you are making enough. You're making more than enough, but you build a lifestyle to match it.

Nothing feels like enough. And then you become the heavy-polluting Uber-consum. that is making themselves unhappy and is destroying the earth at the same time. And you look at anyone that has like a VPSVP level job at like a big company, there's a high chance that their life is something like that. And this is like these notions of success, they box us into these just these corners where we're really causing a lot of damage, even though we don't recognize it. What's up, Yap Gang? If you're a serious entrepreneur like me, you know your website is one of the first touch points every single cold customer has with your brand. Think about that for a second. When people are searching on Google, everybody who interacts with your brand first is seeing your dot com

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Yeah. And what are role models? How do role models impact the way that society views our values? and what values that we find, you know, most impressive. Yeah, I mean, they really, they embody, you know, we embody them. I mean, there's such a funny degree to which in the U.S., whose president really does seem to set a kind of a tone for the country. You know, I've lived through five or six presidents at this point. And it's really true. I was seeing something the other day that said it was like the most desirable brand attributes. And like some 2015, 2014, smart and social were like the two most desire brand attributes.

the most desire brand attribute today was talks like a regular person. And I thought, oh, Obama, smart and, you know, smart and social, Trump talks like a regular person. Like we are, like there are these, these sort of models we're being, we're sort of seeing and we embody. You know, for me as a, when I was in the CEO seat, I read, you know, all the fast companies, the inks, all those sorts of things. And you're just, you know, you're looking for tips. How could I be better? And of course, I'm, I'm, I'm just drawing so many hidden assumptions in doing that, right? Just ways of working that, you know, I either judge myself for not having or think,

do I need to develop this more? And so they have a huge impact. I mean, now we're in a funny world where we have, you know, micro role models, right? I mean, I, like, the other week I got a retweet from someone that I'm sure no one on this listening to this podcast has heard of, but it had me. like in my office, jumping up and down, you know, excited because I felt seen by this person that to me is a hero. But, you know, they might even be surprised to hear that. And so I think today it's, you know, it's a bit different where we look to for that inspiration. Yeah. So let's get into

bentoism. And from my understanding, it's a tool or a values processor that can help people decide which four different choices they should pick in every different scenario. The choices include now me, now us, future me, and future us. Can you talk to us about this decision-making methodology that you've came up with? Maybe give us a real example of how you can use it? Sure, yeah. Yeah, so one day while I was working on the book, I was sketching in my notebook and I drew what's called a hockey stick graph, you know, just a simple X, Y, axis chart, and then a line sloping up into the right. And I drew this as a graph of self-interest, what I thought we thought of as self-interest today. And after I drew that graph, I realized that the x-axis, which

represents time, it could extend. It can go from all the way from now to the future. And the y-axis, which measured, which I thought reflected your self-interest, how popular you were, how, you know, how powerful you were becoming, that that also had a dimensionality. Because as our self-interest grows, so does our responsibilities. So I thought that actually goes from me to us. So I'm extending these lines, and instead of this simple hockey stick graph, I had these four quadrants,

and I labeled each one, now me and the bottom left, what I want to need right now, future me and the bottom right, what the older, wiser version of me wants me to do. Like that person becomes real or not every day based on my choices. There's in the top left, now us,

my friends, my family, the people I care most about, they're impacted by everything I do. And then in the top right, future us, my kids, or if I have them, or everybody else's kids, if I don't. And I realize that even though when I'm making decisions, I'm really only thinking about now me, for the most part, actually, every choice I make leaves a footprint in all these spaces. I'm constantly shaping them. So I wrote down next to this a simple description of what I draw on and I wrote, beyond near-term,

orientation. This was like a simple graph that helped me see beyond my near-term orientation. And I just suddenly realized that was an acronym for bento. And I thought about the Japanese bento box that has four or five compartments in a lid that lets you carry a variety of dishes. So not too much of anyone thing. It's all about balance. And the bento also honors a Japanese dieting philosophy called Hata Hachibu, which says the goal of a meal is to be 80% full. that way you're still hungry for tomorrow. So I thought bento, the bentoism, bentoism is the same thing but for my values and my choices,

a way for me to not just listen to what now me wants, but to see this bigger picture. So just a simple example is you can imagine a smoker asking their bento, because it's actually a tool, a UI, a smoker asking their bento whether they should quit smoking. So what you would do is you'd ask each of these boxes individually and just see what it has to say. So a smoker asks there, now us, which thinks of their family, should I quit smoking?

And that bento says, yeah, you should quit. Like, we hate that you smoke. The smoker asks their future us, which thinks are their children, should I quit smoking? And it says, yeah, what if I smoke because of you? Quit. The smoker asks their future me. Should I quit smoking? Future me says, I want there to be a future me.

Let's quit. And then the smoker asks there now me. And the now me says, hell no, I'm addicted to nicotine. Quitting's going to suck. No, we definitely shouldn't quit. And this is where we often get stuck, right? We listen to this now me voice. We have a harder time seeing these other spaces.

They're irrational. They're deferred. The outcomes are deferred. They're harder to make those kinds of decisions. But this is where we individually get stuck. And this is where, as a world, have gotten stuck. It's just optimizing for now me and not doing a good enough job of thinking about the people in our lives and thinking about the long-term impact of our decisions. And so the bento is as simple as you could get.

get four boxes, and you can build your own values inside of them. And I lead a community called the Bento Society, several hundred people, and we come together every week to build our Bento's, to go through creative exercises, to better understand what we want, to better think about the future, what we're working towards, to feel connected with others. And the goal of all this work is to redefine what the world sees as valuable and in our self-interest in 30. years, by 2050, this can happen. By 2050, the same way that we view short-term individualism, that every decision's about now me, that we just take that as a given. In 30 years, this notion, this bentoist view that now in the future, me as an individual and me and us as a group,

those are all things that I must balance that that way of thinking can become just as assumed, just as deeply ingrained as society, and that that's what begins to unlock what are the next evolutions. That is what allows us to deal with climate change. That is what allows us to better create social value with one another to increase the trust with each other. It's this kind of thinking that I think unlocks all of our best outcomes. Yeah. So 30 years from now is really actually not a lot of time at all. So why do you think that we have a chance to do this within 30 years? Like there's a lot of, in my research for the book, I found a lot of history, meaningful ideas, going from really nothing to just so deeply ingrained in 30 years.

And I think there are those generational shifts that happen. Some 30-year changes are things like exercise. Believe it or not, before the 1950s, like exercise wasn't a thing that people did. Like, exercise had to be invented. Hip-hop goes from, like, not existing to dominating the charts in 30 years. Gay marriage goes from, like, unthinkable to know. normal within 30 years, there are these incremental changes, this exponential growth that happens in that kind of timeline. And I think that why this happens with us is that really for anyone

under the age of 40, you are growing up already with a networked notion of the world. Like the internet is built into our mind. The way that we're connected to each other is like deeply part of us. Yes, we feel lonely, yes, but like, but we're so much more connected than other generations too. And ultimately, the challenges that we face are forcing us to think about the future, right? COVID is forcing us to think about the future. But that we can do those things blindly. We can do those things feeling lost. We can do those things feeling defensive.

Or we could do those things in a way that we have a structured way of thinking, where we have a shared map that we're using. And maybe we can start to create almost like genres of value. Like what does it mean to create future us value? What kinds of actions do that? What kinds of actions harm that? And so as I look at the 30-year process of this change, I think it starts with individuals just seeing their own lives differently. And this has now happened for thousands of people at this point.

And the Bento Society is like a weekly practice of that. The second step is people sharing this perspective in their workplaces and in their homes, like the other places where we're leaders. Just like, hey, have we thought about kind of the future us consequences of this? and just beginning to share this perspective. It's not hard to get a hold of, and it instantly clicks for people, I find. And finally, the third and kind of the slowest moving flywheel, but the biggest, is how our norms get redefined by these kinds of changes.

And this is where I think you're getting to that 30-year perspective of, can we define new sorts of values and metrics that businesses use to guide behavior? Can we, say, normalize long-term and short-term thinking through, like, our digital products somehow? Like how, what are ways that these things can be just practically a part of our life? And that takes longer time. And so the Bento Society, we're thinking about all three levels of that. And those longer term projects, the goal is to be funding things, to be just supporting, you know, whether it's businesses, one-off projects, art that are fulfilling this notion of growing non-financial values and balancing our self-interest. And I think just stepping up to

where we are in the world, like just stepping up as humans, like doing our ancestors as solid and not blowing this. You know, this is like where we are. This is like the biggest choke job, the biggest choke job, the fact that we are struggling so much from where we are. I mean, we're just giving this away. And so I think that we have to get real. And to me, it's at this level of structural change that isn't huge, but it's just how we see ourselves and our responsibility. And that is more powerful than any technology or anything else. And I have a lot of faith in that. Yeah. When I was reading your book, I was like mind blown. I really helped open up my perspective to all of this, especially when you were you were writing about how, you know,

the population is exploding right now. And think about how much garbage we have and carbon pollution and all of that. And just thinking about how many more people are going to be around, and even with COVID and who knows what that's going to be like with an increased population. And it's just scary. And we do need to kind of change what we value and how we work as a society for sure. Yeah, I think we're going over a precipice right now. And I think that a certain regime is ending. And I think the falls of regimes are messy and scary and painful and are often violent and deadly, and there is much to be fearful of. But, you know, my feeling is that 15 years from now, 10 years from now, I think we're going to find ourselves in just a dramatically better

position, asterisk climate change, asterisk, climate change in a major way, like, who knows what that is. But I have, I'm an optimist about human beings. I think we always do the best we can with what we know. And part of my drive and thinking about bentoism, and this model, was just, you know, what new knowledge could we possess that would really allow us to step into our responsibility to see it? Because no one wants to leave a worse world. Like, no one intentionally desires these things, but we've become so careless and we've become so trapped in our narratives. But the world is going to take them away from us whether people are ready or not. Yeah. So my last question before we close out is really on Tesla. So I think

they're a great example of how you can prioritize future us instead of, you know, me now. Can you give us that example? Yeah, well, just Tesla. I mean, not only that it's an electric car company, but, you know, even Tesla's patents that they developed several years ago, I think in 2014, Tesla and Elon Musk decided to make all their patents available to anyone and said, our goal is not to be the biggest electric car company in the world. It's our goal is for electric cars to be what everyone drives in the world. And we think that this is what makes this happen. You know, that's the perfect kind of decision that we need, you know, because we, you know, because we are, we tell ourselves a story that we are competing, but we, there is one planet here.

And all of our competitions are so puny and so small compared to what's really at stake. And so I think gestures like that show the truth of our situation. And I think there are more of those coming. Very cool. And the last question I ask all my guests is, what is your secret to profiting in life? I think it's really knowing yourself. and acting in a way that's in integrity and coherent with who you most deeply are. When you're doing that, it's hard to go wrong.

And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? Yeah, you can find me online at why strickler.com. You can find out more about bentoism at bentoism.org. And if you want to join the weekly practice we do, that's just Bitley slash weekly bento. We'd love to have you there. Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much, Yancey. I loved this conversation. Thank you so much.

Thanks. You too. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or comment on YouTube, SoundCloud, or your favorite platform. Reviews make all the hard work worth it.

They're the ultimate thank you to me and the Yap team. The other way to support us is by word of mouth. Share this podcast with a friend or family member who may find it valuable. Follow Yap on Instagram at Young and Profiting, and check us out at young and profiting.com. You can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name, Hala Taha.

Until next time, this is Hala, signing off.