Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altiger Show. Today on The James Altiger Show. When the massive disruptions happen in life as we're seeing right now, it is the brands in the category that have meaning, that create non financial values with their customers that I think end up lasting. And so the more that you can create that other source of value, I think that creates long term meaning that is critical in crises. That's like a north star during confusing moments, which every company is gonna run through. And ultimately, like, we'll let your work be meaningful and not just like, we're trying to swizz we're trying to make some more money at the widget factory today. You know, when your job gets that abstracted, it's it's it's hard to get excited. Yeah. And so how do you this all assumes somebody has core values. And now I'm not saying if you're without core values, I'm not saying you're immoral or anything. You just maybe never sat down and thought about, hey. What what is future me that I'm aiming for? I've been so much just trying to survive, and now here in this quarantine, I was just fired and I I gotta do this. How do you how does someone who's hasn't built that muscle exercise it and build it? So happy to welcome to the podcast Yancy Strickler who if you don't know who he is, he is the founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, which I'll let him describe more accurately, but it's basically if you have a project, like an artistic project, a creative project, mill millions of kinds of projects, you can get your initial funding or or money to support this project on Kickstarter. And I also view Kickstarter as not only a great place to raise money for an idea that you have, but it's a great way to see if an idea is good. Is there an audience for an idea that you have? So sometimes the goal of starting a Kickstarter project should not be to raise money, but to see, hey. Can I get thousands of people to preacquire my project? Whether it's an art project or furniture you're making or a concert you wanna give, like, whatever. And, also, I just wanna add we're gonna be talking about this quite extensively. Yancey is also the author of a a a a great new book, This Could Be Our Future. Kind of it's kind of like the future of capitalism, and it's particularly important. And and it gives a new way, a kind of value driven way or values driven way of looking at a company or an entrepreneurial project and so on. And it's particularly important in this day and age of lockdown and coronavirus where I think a lot of values about consumerism and and maximalism are are beginning to change, and we'll see if they actually change. But sorry for the long intro, Yancy. Welcome to the podcast. I'm thank you. I'm just furiously nodding along with everything you're saying there. Tote totally agree. I mean, especially, especially how you talk about Kickstarter as not just getting funding, but as that way of the public letting you know whether you're crazy or not, to think that your idea is worth doing. I mean, at at the very beginning, we were, so there are 3 cofounders of Kickstarter, Perry Chen, who first had the idea, Charles Adler and myself. And at the very beginning, we're very driven by this idea that as a creative person or as any kind of person, like, you're stuck pitching your idea to executives, to a small group of people who are looking for looking to make an investment. And but most often, creative ideas, you know, maybe they're gonna make money if you're lucky. And those sorts of ideas are just totally blocked. And you as an artist, as a creative person, and and I've certainly been there, you get stuck with this idea that you believe in, but you don't know, how do I how do I know whether it's real or not? And you, like, drive your family and your friends crazy with talking about it. But, like, how do you take that step? And that step is really tough. It's it's scary. And so what we imagine for Kickstarter is, like, this is the way that people can just, like, proudly, you know, with with all their dignity, like, stand up and say, here's my idea. Here's a way to be a part of it. It's not about charity. It's about making something together. And and it's letting every creative person, every entrepreneur just get so much more information about do people actually care or not, because it's, you know, the the the challenge of of sticking too long on an idea that ultimately people aren't gonna go for is, is a really tough place to find yourself. So the more you can accelerate that that learning of just getting other information, I think it's helpful. So even if a Kickstarter project, quote, unquote, fails, that is still valuable information. It says, hey. Go back to the drawing board. Yeah. You know, I agree with you. I view, first off, a lot of people think in terms of, if I have an idea, it should be a a tech company and I should get venture capital funding for it. Those are kind of like we we've sort of limited ourselves, you know, society wide that the only good ideas are these ideas that could be like Uber and make a $100,000,000,000. And then you need venture capitalists, which is a specific type of person who will validate your idea. They want to make a $100,000,000,000 too. So I I I always think in terms of experiments and the way you were just describing it as the end, creating a quick Kickstarter project is like doing an experiment. Here's, an idea I have for a a toilet, and it's very unique and very innovative. It's a toilet that, senses your body temperature and and, you know, tells you if you have coronavirus or whatever. And will other people is it this is I, you know, and I always say people have smoking crack bias. So at first, when you have an idea, you're you're you're constantly smoking crack and you think it's the best. But Kickstarter is a good way to say, hey, everybody. Here's, an implementation of my idea. I made 1. Should I make a a bunch more? And then the crowd and this is where crowdfunding started with Kickstarter. The crowd will tell you through through their money, and and they give money at different tiers, and there's different awards for each tier. The crowd will tell you if it's a good idea or not, and it's a great experiment. Like you said, if it fails, well, that's incredibly valuable because then you know not to make your smart toilet at scale, and you can move on to the next project. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's what's interesting is that, you know, Kickstarter as we're speaking today, today is Kickstarter's 11th birthday. So in 2,002,009, Kickstarter launched. And, you know, at the time, there had been crowdfunding experiments before, but nothing had really worked. Nothing had broken through. And and we Kickstarter did. And early on, it definitely had that experimental phase of just, like, really cool people doing it. And let me just see how this works and trying stuff out. And as the site gained in popularity and became, you know, one of the most famous websites on the Internet, and once there were projects making 1,000,000 of dollars, became like the people's lottery ticket, like this thing where anybody could get $1,000,000 overnight for an idea. I mean, like, nothing like that had existed before. And so this, like, experimental place shifted into this place with higher stakes for a while where, you know, bigger name people were using it, and just there was a more professionalization of the platform. That is really an interesting challenge for any kind of platform because you you know, maybe you're getting bet quote, unquote, better projects, and, like, the that everything is growing, but yet it's raising the bar in such a way that maybe the experimentation that you imagined as being the, what the site would be all about becomes harder because there's, like, this social pressure and people don't wanna fail, and it means something to do with Kickstarter. And and so just watching even how those those energies change as a as a community changes, and, especially, you know, we saw this with, like, the Apple App Store where you have, like, Flappy Bird breaks out, and it's like, wow, anyone can make a game. Look at how look at look at how, like, amateur games can break through. And then that was kind of like the last moment that ever happened. Right. You know? Then it just got so professionalized. It's like, no, there will never be something like Flappy Bird again. And so it's just funny how these marketplaces and platforms evolve with sort of this race to the top of, you know, just more and more professional, practices becoming normalized. And and, you know, do you mind if I ask you a couple questions about Kickstarter? Because I I do and and a lot of it is related to your book because you mentioned there were other attempts at crowdfunding. They didn't quite work out. And I think a lot of the success of Kickstarter is due to your kind of core philosophy about business, which you expressed in this book. But, like, what what do you think caused Kickstarter to not only succeed but become one of the most popular websites out there? I mean, it's it's Kickstarter is almost synonymous with crowdfunding right now. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's I think that we provided a door where a door was needed and no one realized it. You know? And I think I think we were you know, the notion of, creative people need a direct way to speak to their audiences and and that they can be trusted to facilitate their own exchanges, I think was like a big just just so much there's just there's a power in the platform. But in terms of what made Kickstarter itself stand out, I think it's it was the discreet focus on creative projects. So we saw when Perry first had the idea And no investing. There's no investing in There's no investing. Right? Like, all the award the awards are not allowed to be equity. Correct. Correct. Yeah. There's no financial upside. So no one's we're not we don't want anyone to put on their business hat when they're looking at a project. We just want them to react and say, this is cool or that creator seems nice or, you know, they work they seem like they're working really hard, whatever whatever those other qualities might be. But, you know, so Kickstarter's focused just on creative projects. And from the beginning, we saw that, like, you could buy Jenny a prom dress. You could pay for someone's medical bills. Like, saw the GoFundMe universe would happen, but said from the beginning, we don't want charitable projects on the site. We want, for creative people to be able to ask for money. They need a place that brings dignity. They need a place that's not about guilt. They need a place that's about, like, positively constructing the future. And so we limited it all to projects that were, yep, making something, producing something. We had an internal rule of no bummers. We didn't want any projects that felt depressing. Again, because to us, like, fundraising in 2008, to me, it was like Jerry Lewis telethons and school bake drives and guilt. You know, Sally Struthers commercials. Fundraising was guilt or or investment. Yeah. Right? And so we're trying to create this space of, like, it's not it's none of those things. It's actually like a it's this positive way to spend money. It's it's a truly beneficial way to move money around. And so I think that discreet focus and and also just the fact that the 3 of us who started the company, we ourselves are creative people. Perry is an artist. I'm a writer. Charles is a graphic designer. We're not business people. We're not even technologists. We were, like, kind of the worst people to start a website, but the perfect people to start Kickstarter. Because it meant from the beginning, we said, you know, we we're not trying to make this to sell out. We don't wanna go public. Like, the most meaningful thing the most meaningful success would be if Kickstarter can be like the Green Bay Packers of the Internet, where it's like this kind of public trust that does what it's supposed to do, that, like, fulfills its purpose, that is purely beneficial, that always tries to live up to this higher standard. And that, as we just imagined, like, having no idea whether anyone would care about our idea, We were just very clear. We all we always saw and eye that, like, that's that's what it meant to succeed. And so I think all that, like, binds the company with the creative community that it serves. So I think those are all, like, positive feedback loops. Was there any one moment where it was like, oh, yeah. Now everybody's heard about us, so this is gonna really take off. Like, for instance, Amanda Palmer raising I think she was the first one on the platform to raise over a million. And I spoke with her about it actually shortly after she raised the money, but I forgot what she was raising my oh oh, for an album. Of course. Mhmm. And, that kind of created some notoriety for her because her fans were like, oh, did you sell out? And she was like, no. This is what it costs to make an album. Mhmm. But I think that kind of helped put Kickstarter a little I mean, that was already at around 2013 or something like that. That was 20 that was 2012. We we launched in 2009, and then the start of 2012, the first project raised $1,000,000 across the $1,000,000 threshold. And 2 did it in the same day, and one was from Double Fine Adventure, Tim Schafer, the video game maker. And this is like the it's like the David Lynch of video games, like the cult classic guy who can never get a break. Here is 1st game in, like, 10 years, and it raises $1,000,000 in 24 hours. And, like, the whole Internet is watching. We are too. Like, you the whole Internet's refreshing Kickstarter. And, like, the site's taking, you know, 30 seconds to load because we hadn't planned for anything like this before. And that that was in February 2012. And, I remember that day super clearly. And from that moment on, yeah, the there was just a different kind of trajectory. You know, we became the place where you could get $1,000,000. You know, I think that the there started to be people coming to the site because they were interested in how much money could be gotten. You know, one of the reasons why projects did so well in Kickstarter is we're so thoughtful about governance and really, you know, tried to take care about the kinds of projects that were on the site. But then we came to realize later in that year that the amount of care we put into the platform made people trust it maybe more than they should. And so during the midst of this, like, runaway period of just, like, so much money moving to the platform, and we're still 30 employees. And, you know, around that time, we launched this set these new rules called Kickstarter is not a store. And they were, like, very draconian very draconian, set all these limits for product related projects to make it so that they couldn't raise as much money so easily. We prohibited photo realistic renderings, which people were so mad about. We required I I I just wanna say about that. I thought that was a key key decision. Because if I could if I had an idea for a smart toilet and I made a photorealistic rendering in the description, that's a little too easy. Like, oh, I could just do Kickstarter project after Kickstarter project, raise a million, and then go off. But if I have to actually, like, find a man you know, so so what you do is instead of the photorealistic rendering, I have to actually make one, and this is a real one. So that means I've manufactured it. I figured out all the nuanced issues about how to make this. I really understand the details of the full manufacturing process and how much it costs. Now I've got skin in the game as the content creator, as the creative. And if I just put up, like, a Photoshop thing, there's not enough skin in the game for even me, the creative person, to take it seriously. So I thought that was a a key decision. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, it was, you know, we we just wanted to set a clear bar. You know, when I when we made this decision to ban photorealistic renderings, I called I reached out to a lot of, like, top design people I knew in advertising and in schools who I'd who had helped educate me about, like, industrial design, the product world as this had been happening. And I told them about this idea to prohibit renderings, and they're like, that's crazy. They're like, that's all any advertising is. And I'm like, well, exactly. I think I think maybe that's a problem. And I think in this case, for Kickstarter, we don't wanna be advertising. We wanna be the site that's about making the thing, not selling it when it's over. That was always a clear distinction. We wanna be about making. So we wanted to people to show the working prototype, like, show the breadboard. Don't hide that stuff. Like, this is a community that likes that, that will improve upon it. But, you know, it's it's funny because there's you get into a lot of whack a mole with this because you have some creators don't wanna show those things, and they want to they wanna be all sizzled because for whatever reasons they have. And then you get into this back and forth of governance of, like, asking people to edit their videos. Hey. Can you take this out? Hey. Can you could show more of this? And it's gets very granular, and very intensive. And and the company still does all those things, still does those things for these projects that are, that are higher that are more challenging in terms of governance. But, you know, it just shows me how there's not a lot of reward for that grind of moderation work on the Internet. You know, that you get a lot of people getting mad at you when you try to moderate them. It's very emotionally draining work to do. No one can do that for longer than a year or 2 without getting really burnt out. Because people are the they're always gonna push back and say, why did you tell me I have to take this down? It's this is censorship. What are you doing? Yeah. Every conversation is emotionally fraud. And you take that home with you. How can you not? And the people that put up the steel wall, like, they they end up crashing eventually too. And so but, like, sites need that to not go to s**t. And this is what's so hard is you have to have that that human layer to protect, the the essence, the culture of a place. But yet with a global scale, the Internet, everyone wanting in, especially when you're like a hot property, it becomes really exhausting. So we you know, part of what I think about in those years after the $1,000,000 projects, us instituting the new rules is just, like, 3 plus years of just a lot of minute back and forths with creators who are, I'm sure, many very well meaning, but just getting into the weeds of, like, really hard stuff, to yeah. So so, I mean, there there's also some great projects that Kickstarter funded. I, myself, am a big player of Cards Against Humanity with my kids. And, how much did that raise when it was, a Kickstarter project? That's a great card game. Just $10. Yeah. Card that was Max Simkin. That was in, like, 2010. I think that was maybe 700 people, $10. My exploding kitten started. Oculus started. You know? There's many Academy Award winners. What's the weirdest project that surprisingly made raised money? The one I think about is a father and daughter in Atlanta did a project to conduct a squirrel census of their local park, and they raised, like, $7 to do a squirrel census. And I have a poster of, like, the 87 squirrels of whatever Peachtree Park in Atlanta. That was just, bizarre. But, yeah, I mean, they raise the money? Yeah. They did. That was successful. It was successful. That was what that that's part of what was so surprising about it. And, you know, I, what I really appreciate in the idea is how you winnowed it down to this niche of, only supporting artists and creatives. Like, first first, there's the overall crowd investing or crowdfunding domain, which includes, investing crowd investing. And then so you you got rid of that idea, then you got rid of the kind of GoFundMe charity type idea because GoFundMe is fine for that, and you don't wanna be too many things to too many people. And then, also, you know, another site is that almost reminds me of it, but it's different is Patreon. You're not a Patreon site. You're focused on funding for very specific projects, not an ongoing, hey. I'm gonna be a patron of your podcast, sort of thing. So you really kind of it's just like how PayPal, I feel, with Peter Thiel. 1st, he was gonna do all payment transactions, and he kept whittling the idea down until it was just transactions between eBay users, and then he built up from that. So I think that's a very smart approach. Like, where are you gonna be the monopoly, and then you build up from that? Yeah. And what what do you understand? I mean, I think part of it for us is that, like, the you know, when we would talk to potential investors, and this is between 2005 and 2009, trying to get started, you know, the type of person that we were working with, there was a name for at the time. It was called a starving artist. It was called a starving artist. And, literally, in these meetings, investors would say potential investors would say, well, aren't they starving for a reason? Like, why what's the business here? You know, like, my kid, sure. My kid, like, wasted my money at art school. Like, they're a starving artist. Why does he wanna support them? So, like, there was this the notion of, like, creative people that exist without outside of this narrow mainstream definition were just seen as worthless, truly worthless, because individually, none of them are going to produce, you know, that much money for somebody. And again, that is the only value that's being perceived here. And instead, when you aggregate them, when you create communities of them, there's just this great flourishing. So now it's almost $5,000,000,000 that's changed hands on Kickstarter, you know, close to 200,000 creative projects funded. None of it, like, economically rational. You know, none of it none of it, like, makes sense according to a lot of textbooks about what it means to change money. But yet it's just it is it is such an open platform that just permits ideas to happen for whatever values and motivations someone has. And that's the secret of it. Is it just it just says, like, money is just a fuel, and whatever get causes you to share that money is is correct. And, like, now go forth and do things. You know? Yeah. And it's interesting that people do wanna support projects they love. There is community around creativity, not just around, like, oh, message boards for stocks on Yahoo Finance or whatever. Now I I've had 2 I've only I always encourage people to launch projects on Kickstarter because like what you said earlier, to to test to see if an idea is good. I've I've done only one project on Kickstarter, and it was taken down almost immediately by I think it was taken down algorithmically by the Kickstarter. And then also I in in fall of 2017, I actually visited, Kickstarter in in Brooklyn. And I forgot the guy I met, but I had this idea. I I own a among other things, I own a comedy club. And so I had this idea that comedians could kick start, their comedy specials and rather than waiting for Netflix to fund them or whatever. And then I thought to myself, well, wouldn't it be interesting if, you know, what what is Netflix, but really just a very highly trafficked website that now shows videos? That's like the new TV channel or base basically, all highly traffic websites could be platforms for what used to be considered television shows. Like, Uber had a little documentary directed by Spike Lee, for instance, on their website. And so I was thinking, oh, I I was curious if Kickstarter could not only help these comedians get funding for their specials, but maybe even have, like, a channel because they're so popular to to mon they could monetize and the comedians could monetize by showing their shows on Kickstarter. But wasn't part of your business model, so I understood that. But it was an interesting meeting. Yeah. The the irony is that, like, yeah. For ideas that could be business ideas. Kickstarter, weirdly, doesn't make sense because you just get a lot of people being, like, why why would I give that money again? Like, I get that I would get a ticket eventually, but, like, why? But it's funny. It is more like it's funding things for altruism or because there is an you know, just the end product inspires you in some way. But kind of anything that doesn't fall in those buckets is is, yeah, just seems strange. It seems strange. Yeah. That's why software projects don't do that well. I'll tell you the the one project I posted there that failed, but it was so interesting to me. And then I wanna get go at first into your book. But the project was, I wanted to buy Greenland. And, you know, remember, like Sure. Trump Trump tweeted, oh, I wanna buy Greenland. And then Denmark, the prime minister of Denmark tweeted, well, it's not for sale. And And I'm thinking to myself, why are these world leaders tweeting about buying, like, this huge, massive land? And so I did some research and came up with some reasons, and I figured, well, you know what? I don't want any world leader to buy it. I wanna buy it and kind of take care of it for the world. And so I I I posted that I wanted to raise a $100,000,000 on Kickstarter, and I gave and I gave all the reasons why. And I gave awards like, oh, if you give $10, I'll make you a citizen. $100, I'll make you an earl. $1,000, I'll give you a 100 acres of land. $10,000, you have your own national holiday. But, anyway, Kickstarter, I I hit post, and Kickstarter immediately took it down. Probably because I was asking for too much. Possibly. Possibly. There are there are checks for these sorts of things. Yes. And then but it was interesting because it was it was a new way for me of posting an article in that format. It was, like, a weird format to post an article, and it got me experience doing a crowdfunding project, a tiny bit of experience. There we had a peer we had a period where we, like, we we you know, early on, we embraced experimentation like that. But at a certain point, like, you know, someone said the joke a couple times, and then, you know, then you're like, how how how much can you play along with trolling before you're getting trolled? You know, what's that line? It's it's it's hard. I was serious, though. I wasn't trolling, but I but I get it. I get it. That can be perceived as trolling. So so I really wanna talk about your book, this could be our future, a manifesto for a more generous world. And, you basically talk about this idea that we were in an era of what you call financial maximalism, which is is, the idea that, hey, if, the kind of Adam Smith idea from wealth of nations that if you, focus on profit first, that is the most moral thing you can do. Well, I would say I I think so I would say, you know, it's that my definition is just that, I think for the last 50 years or so, we've run off of this, like, shorthand auto autopilot decision, decision matrix where the the right outcome in any decision is whichever option makes the most money. And that we're often in this position where there is a clear, maybe, financial outcome on one path, the other path, a lesser financial outcome, but maybe a more pro values outcome in other ways that feel emotionally positive but are tough to defend in a business meeting. And that, 9 times out of 10, we choose the option that makes the most money. And the only option the only time we choose the one that doesn't is really when there's a crisis and we feel like we have to apologize for something. But that is basically, like, how my my theory is that is essentially how the world has operated, yeah, since since the early 19 seventies. Right. And and that very much goes along with how you came up with the business model for Kickstarter because, again, the what would have made the most profit is if you accepted all the charity stuff and the Patreon style model, maybe even flirted with the crowdinvesting and created this whole crowdfunding empire. And instead, you just you you stayed in your lane focused on what you what you were interested in and what you thought would have the highest value for the community you came out of, and that worked. Like, your your longer term I would almost say and I'm curious what you think of this. Is it a is it more of a battle? Is it a battle of profit versus values, or is it a bot battle of short term thinking versus long term thinking? Yeah. I think it's like the finite versus infinite game kind of idea of it is about just staying relevant, staying meaningful. Because the world in which you try to be the Walmart of crowdfunding and own everything, you will immediately begin poorly serving some markets. You'll create, you know, new opportunities for others to step in. But even if you manage to lock it down, like, I think the world is worse off by that happening, a world in which companies are focusing deeply on just like artists and focusing deeply on the needs of another community and another community. I think that's what produces, the better outcome because then everyone gets to maximize for the local values that make sense for them. So, for example, in GoFundMe GoFundMe, there's no, all or nothing funding model. Everyone gets every dollar they can, which makes sense because it's a charitable website. But on Kickstarter, we always we always thought all or nothing was so important because there's nothing worse as a creator than being stuck with, like, half a budget for something that you like want to execute at a certain level. So the notion that like, it should only be full budgets that causes money to change hands on Kickstarter is something that you can only do when that's like a native product, thinking about the needs of that community. If you roll it all up, then you're just trying to say, how can we squeeze an extra 2% out of everything this month? So I feel like by by taking that more narrow stance, it allows you to deliver more value. And I think that gives you the opportunity to last longer, and especially when, like, the massive disruptions happen in life as we're seeing right now. It is it is the brands in the category that have meaning that create non financial values with their customers that I think end up lasting. Like, I I I was very influenced by living in New York when, the the music industry collapsed from digital music. And when I first moved to New York in 2000, there were record stores literally everywhere. And I would go spend money I didn't have at all of them all the time. And then and then digital music happens, and then all of a sudden, the record stores start going out of business. The first ones to go out of business, HMV, you know, Virgin, Tower, the big chains the big chains that, by that point, were just mass retailers that happened to sell records. The ones that lasted the longest were, like, other music, generation records, Academy records, ones that were very specialized on niches because those were serving a purpose. They weren't just a store to buy things. They served a purpose for a community. They were a discovery zone. There were all kinds of things. And so the more that you can create that other sorts of value, I think that creates long term meaning that is critical in crises. That's like a North Star during confusing moments, which every company is gonna run through. And, ultimately, like, we'll let your work be meaningful and not just like, we're trying to squeeze we're trying to make some more money at the widget factory today. You know, when your job gets that abstracted, it's it's it's hard to get excited. Yeah. And so so your point in the in the well, you kind of describe this very interesting philosophy, and I love the name and the philosophy of decision making, which you call bentoism. And so a bento box is this traditional Japanese box mothers would instead of a lunch box, mothers in Japan would pack a bento box for their kids. It's got these 4 components of 4 different foods. And the idea of the bento box initially is that and it and it it corresponds to this other philosophy in in Japan that you essentially should be you should stop eating when you're 80% full. And so with the bento box, it's a little easier to stop eating, when you finish, let's say, 3 of the 4 boxes. And, you use it as a decision making matrix, which if if if you're kind of focusing on the right things in each box, and and we'll discuss what those things are. If 3 of the 4 boxes suggest a decision, then that's the decision you should make. And I'm and I'm skipping over the what you're putting in the box, but I'll I'll let you describe because it's a very interesting way of making a decision rather than making a decision based purely on profit, also on how you feel at the core, how you see your future, how you see your relationships with others, and then and making a decision around that. Yeah. I mean, I you know, for me, like, more than a decade working on Kickstarter as a cofounder and then for 4 years as CEO, you know, just made me obsessed with decision making. You know? And, like, whether that's beating myself up over decisions that I questioned or agonizing over things. And and, like, always feeling like in this sort of self examination process, like, getting better, doing a lot of navel gazing, but ultimately getting better, but still feeling like, how do I how do I help myself consistently make good make good decisions? And and, and so I end up coming up with this tool. And it happened one day. I was doodling in my notebook, and I drew, like, a hockey stick graph, like, a simple chart with an x and y axis where the line is sloping up into the right. And, like, in business, this is seen as the ultimate, you know, example of, you know, making it, this success, the the hockey stick graph. And I draw this graph in my notebook, and then I just had this thought of, like, don't both of these axes extend? The x axis along the bottom, which measures time, it goes now as far into the future as you'd want it to. So on my little drawing, I extended that axis. And then I looked at this y axis, which was measuring, like, your self interest, power, money, whatever it was. And I just thought, well, actually, doesn't your self interest grow too? Because if I think about, say, the difference between being a solo entrepreneur and, say, Kickstarter becoming successful, like, that was responsibility. Like, there was it went from me to us. Right? There's just, like, another dimension of thought that happened there. So I extended that line too. And suddenly, that little hockey stick graph was a 2 by 2, where there are these 4 distinct boxes of self interest. There was now me in the bottom left corner where the hockey stick graph is. That's what I want and need right now. This is how we see the world today. In the bottom right corner, there's future me. Right? Future me. Thinking about the older, wiser version of myself that either becomes true or doesn't become true based on the decisions I make every single day. So so can I can I ask a question? So so now me, an example might be, I'm broke, and I need money to feed my family. That's I'm gonna make it you know, if I'm just thinking in that box Our now me needs decision that feeds my family. Yeah. Well, like, our now me we all have now me needs. Our now me needs are, like, the bottom two rows of Maslow's hierarchy. It's just like you need to feel safe. You need to feel secure. It's even just like I need to exercise every day. I need some sunshine. What whatever it is for you to feel like yourself. That's your now me. And everyone has that every day. And like most of our to do lists and errands are our now me needs. But the the trick is, though, is that that's just one dimension of ourselves. There's also this future me, which is like, what are we working towards? What is our purpose? What is like the Obi Wan Kenobi version of ourselves whispering to us to say, here's what matters? Like, there's this obituary version of ourselves that we want to have happen, that we have to live up to, we have to manifest. And then in the top left of this 2 by 2, there's now us. So now us is thinking about your friends, your family, your coworkers, whoever you have an emotional relationship with, whoever you feel accountable to, and and incorporating their needs. And in the top right, there is future us. Future us are those same people in your now us just 30 years from now. It's your kids and their families, your grandkids, you know, a world different than the one that is today. And so the the inside of of so I drew this graph and thought, wow. You know, every choice I make leaves a footprint in each of these spaces. It affects now me. It affects future me. It affects now us. It affects future us. What's the difference between future us and future me? I was trying to keep track of the distinctions. For future me is is purely to me, that's like that is literally the ultimate version of me. Like, the the the version of me that it's like a 10 out of 10 on every decision. Like, that person that person that, like, is wise, that person that's generous, that person that's loving, that is like a a personal bull's eye that I'm working towards. And using the Bento has let me identify, like, write down what those values are for me. The future us is thinking it's thinking about everybody else. So when I future us is my kids, the the world they'll have. Like, my future me goals are always about it's like self development. It's reading. It's learning. It's like developing a practice. My future us goals are are more like you know, it's something more like activism, or or more like thinking about how the projects I'm working on might might have a a longer term impact. So, for example, after my book came out, I got stuck in the trap of, like, looking for positive affirmation on the Internet about it and myself. And I was just refreshing Twitter, looking for, you know, all the all the things you look for in those moments. And I had this realizing I was just debilitating myself with this obsession. And I I thought I need to draw this Bento. I need to draw the 4 boxes of the Bento to, like, break this loop. And so I drew a blank Bento. And at the top, I wrote, how should I use my energy? And the now me box of my Bento, says self promote. Do a livestream. Like, do a sweepstakes. Yeah. Whatever you have to do to get attention, do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. It was like flashing neon. When I asked my future me voice what it thought I should do, it said, hey. You should read this book you keep meaning to read that you know is gonna, like, deepen your understanding of this thing you're trying to write about. You know, my now us tells me, like, you're gonna be with your family today. Like, that's totally value positive time. Why are you thinking about this book thing? And then future us future us said, you know, you wrote the book because you wanted to talk about bentoism, and you wanted to evolve how we think about self interest. Why are you obsessing over something that's already over? The book is done. Like, there's this larger project to work on. Like, you're taking your eye off the ball. And so I use this simple exercise of letting each of these voices speak to, like, make my to do list each week, to hold myself accountable, to make sure I'm not getting stuck in these, like, selfish loops. And I even think about the design of my days in such a way where I'm trying to do something that satisfies each of those spaces. So, like, I could be a workaholic. Right? And so I can think of my social time as like an airport layover. It's like a non time. I'm just waiting to get back to work. But yet looking at it this way, you know, I've made, like, calling a friend every single day, a different friend every day on the phone is, like, a must have on my to do list every single day. Because I know when I do that, I feel better. I feel better. And so I'm, like, I'm more I'm more consciously, designing my time. And but my belief is that all of us have all 4 of these spaces. We all have now me, future me, now us, future us. Most of us operate with a kind of passive awareness where all we really see is now me. We're acting like with 48 hours of, you know, vision ahead of us. But to develop an active awareness means to to to understand all those places, to make choices knowing knowing your ultimate goals, thinking about other people, doing that consistently. And and I believe that that that sort of transformational shift in how we define self interest from just being about our immediate self interested needs to being instead just this slightly larger perimeter. It's only slightly larger. And I would argue that it's absolutely reflective of the truth of our lives. And that once you do that, I think I think the world opens up. Because a a world driven only on now me thinking, that's like the world before Kickstarter. That is creative projects before Kickstarter. I'll fund your project if it helps me. But what Kickstarter does is it opens up all those other spaces to why something is worth existing. Why do it? Well, the now us of, like, the community likes it. Why do it? Well, the future us. It's cool tech. Like, yeah, it's not practical now, but we should totally fund these things. Why do this future me project? Well, this person's been working on it for 20 years. We should give them money. Like, this is this is awesome. Right? And so it just opens up the valid and rational reasons for action, and it opens up new dimensions of metrics. And so I think that this this shift of very near term selfish definition of self interest, that that that is the limitation of today that we find so hard to see. But that 20 years from now, 30 years from now, I think, is gonna be so normal how people see their place in the world. And I think it's gonna allow us to finally collaborate to make collective decisions, in a much better way than we do today. So it's almost like 2 different styles of decision making in bentoism. 1 is, like, you say when you when you outline your day, it's almost like, what are little goals you can do that satisfy each of the 4 boxes? You know? Now me, now us, future us, future me. But then there's also this idea, and you have many examples in the book where, okay, should should the small ad agency work for the big companies or the small companies? You know, 3 she covered the the person you mentioned covers 3 out of the 4 boxes. And even the now me, she was able to focus it in certain way by thinking in this way. But 3 out of 4 of the boxes kind of suggested that the decision should be a yes or no, whatever it was. And so it's like 2 types of decision making. 1 is how can I satisfy everything throughout the day, even if it's one at a time or or throughout a year or throughout a life? And the other is, here's a specific decision I have to make yes or no on. Does it satisfy 3 or 4 out of the 4 boxes? Yeah. And I think the the larger the even the layer above that, and what I think is so critical is that it creates coherence between your actions and your values and coherence on a continuous basis. So my my experience as a CEO, taught me that the having an idea about where you wanna go is trivially easy. Getting people to get there together is extraordinarily difficult, and you end up getting in a place where a leader will micromanage or a leader won't properly articulate the destination, and you just get into these hard hard positions if you're not making progress. Mhmm. And what you really want what I always wanted as a leader and I tried many different ways to develop it, and I think never successfully as Bento ism, which I didn't have while I was leading Kickstarter. But how can you give everyone the same compass to everyone's making decisions from the same perspective? And so how I'm using the Bento now, and I'm I'm advising several companies on this, is using this to identify your goals as an organization and empowering everyone in the org to make a decision using it. So if you think about the Bento in a corporate context, then every company's now me is like their whatever this year's KPIs are. Here's what we're trying to do. We're trying to grow 10%. Okay. That's your now me goal. Everyone clear on that? Great. The company's future me goal, Remember, the future me is, like, the best possible version of you. So the company's future me is its brand promise. It's brand promise, which the company will probably never fully live up to, but, hopefully, like, spiritually lives up to at least. But, like, you know, it's Apple's brand promise is think different. Right? It's like Apple products are always gonna think differently than other things. So that's something you you always expect from them. So that's the future me of a company. The now us of a company, that's like its relationships. That's where a company has to identify who are its core constituents and what is that promise we're making to them. What expectation do they have? So for Apple, their customers, they expect Apple to be pro privacy. They expect Apple to be a just works technology. You know, developers expect Apple to be a walled garden. You know, there there are certain sort of expectations Apple has set, that's different from what other company companies' other expectations might have. And then the the future us for a company is its vision. And for every company, its vision is like a world where they are more powerful and successful than they are today for various reasons. But so, for a company, they could identify these. They could write in their now me. Here's our goal for this year. They could write in the future me. Our brand promise is this. They would write in their now us. Our core constituents are these 3 groups. Here's what they expect from us, these three things. Our future us is this vision statement. They could hand that to their employees, and they could say every decision we make needs to satisfy all these conditions. Needs to satisfy them. Needs to hold needs to successfully hold that tension of, like, the brand promise with the customer promise. And products that do that successfully, like an Apple product that just works and thinks different, is like has a chance to succeed because it feels it, quote, unquote, feels Apple. And so by identifying what are those, like, core poles that always must be true that you have to successfully hold that tension between that's the difference between projects or products that work and that don't work for for an organization. So how do you this all assumes somebody has core values. And now I'm not saying if if if you're without core values, I'm not saying you're immoral or anything. You just never maybe never sat down and thought about, hey. What what is future me that I'm aiming for? I've been so much just trying to survive. And now here in this quarantine, I was just fired, and I gotta do this. How do you how do you like, you're used to coming up with core values. You're a writer, and you brought that into, your definition of Kickstarter and your definition of how you how you ran it. How does someone who's hasn't built that muscle exercise it and build it? Yeah. I mean, well, muscle is the right word. I mean, it I think for most people, it has to start with a recognition that that space matters. You know, for a lot of people, there's a life moment. Maybe it's having a family. Maybe it's something bad happening. Your plan's not going as expected. But for a lot of folks, there's a a moment of reckoning where kind of the autopilot that they were on doesn't work anymore. And now, in this crisis, it's that for everybody. So a lot of people are having to do a lot of internal confrontation. So I think it really starts with desire. And I and it's amazing that the amount of people I speak to who have a strong desire to develop this part of themselves who never cared before in their lives, but maybe reach a point where they realize, wait. I'm deficient. Like, I I maybe I'm I'm I'm I have wealth success, but in other ways, I'm not. So it's just a practice. And so I, I've been teaching people in a couple of ways. So I've been doing regular workshops, in people's living rooms, and we could still do that kind of thing. And then online where I guide people through a process of building out their Bentos. Like, I ask sort of leading questions to get them to brainstorm and to write down, you know, what what is at the heart of your relationships? Are you, are you the shoulder to cry on? Are you do you give good advice? Do you, like, do adventurous things together? You know, what what kind of person are you? And and being clear on those things because it's like, if you're the good time friend, your friends aren't expecting you to be, like, the shoulder to cry on friend. You don't have to be everything. But people expect us to, like, live up to the essence of who we are. So that's why we need to know these things. We need to know these things about ourselves. But I just guide people through a discovery process. They get paired with a stranger. You have to mirror and share with one another, which is really amazing. And then I've also started a a weekly practice that I do on Sundays that's just 20 minutes. It's something I was already doing where I describe that journaling exercise where I write into a blank bento, like, what do I wanna do this week? I started doing that. I've done that every week now for, like, 6 months, and it's amazing. And, and so after COVID, I thought, well, I'm doing this at, like, the same time every Sunday morning anyway. Why not, like, turn on a Zoom screen and just let journal together? We could just silently journal together. So I've been doing that. And so that, you know, that's like, you know, like, 50 people or so coming together. And I That's great. And I lead us through a simple exercise. But the whole idea is just, like, let's just get comfortable with these different places. Like, to think about your now us, I say, think about everybody that's important to you in your life. Cram them all in that sectional. Get your pets in there too. Now take a Polaroid. And, like and now let's spend a minute with our eyes closed, like, looking at each of those faces and just feel the warmth of them. You know? Just experience them. And it's especially important to do that now when it's so much harder to do that. But just try to let people be in touch with these things because we all have these spaces. This is like this is real stuff. It's just stuff that we have struggled to, articulate, that has just felt less real, but for all kinds of reasons. I think the, our collective our collective needs are gonna be more and more important. And then the future, you know, the the future planning is, we've been treating that as as a nice to have these past 30 years or so, and, boy, are we paying the price. So I think those are things that are really gonna shift our focus from short termism to long termism and and individualism to collectivism. I think those are all swings that are that are about to happen. And just just so I further understand, everything's I'm gonna I'm gonna try this exercise also of Let's do it. Setting my goals for the week using the the Bento Box. When, or or using Bentoism, when does the future me differ from future us? So I could imagine maybe if, if future me is very hermit like and just wants to be outside with my loved ones, and that's it. But maybe future us, I want to see the world I live in better. Maybe there's kind of differing decisions that could happen there. I mean, I'm looking so I just turned to the one I have my notebook in front of me, so I looked at my Binto from a couple days ago. So my future me is, like, read this book, how to measure anything, that a friend of mine suggested I read. About to do a trip and be in the right headspace for this trip I have to do. But my future us is, like, set a good example for my child by being present, you know, by being a good teacher to him. Keep flattening the curve. Like, keep in mind, like, these larger things that larger things are supposed to be contributing to. I mean, it's really just a a line between to me, the future me is still quite selfish. It's just sort of like they're just longer term projects. You know, now my now me is just like it's just all it's my to do list. And my now us is a list of, like, here are 5 friends that I I wanna talk to this week. I haven't you know, I I kinda talk to everybody every 3 weeks or so now, some people more often, but I'm like, alright. Who do I need to hit up? And, and it's just an it's yeah. It's just it's just a means of personal accountability. And and the way I think about it is just that, like, you know, we know what flow states are when it comes to music or being in nature or exercise or dancing or drugs or, like, these various ways you can reach a flow state. But what does it mean to be in a flow state at a Tuesday at 4 o'clock in the afternoon? You know, when there's nothing inspiring happening around you, how do you know what it means to This podcast is inspiring me. Yes. What does it mean to be in integrity with who you are? And it's possible. It's possible. Of course, it's possible. It requires self awareness self awareness that doesn't have to be, you know, frou frou or scary or BS. You know? Self awareness that's, like, very very rationally driven of just, like, you wanna be better at things that are important, and and to try to get us closer to that that state of of of coherence. I mean, a way a way I've been talking about it recently is just that when there's when there's an alien invasion, you know, everybody runs from the aliens. Most people are running from the aliens, but a small number of people, normally Tom Cruise, are running towards something with a plan. So, like, how do you beat Tom Cruise? You know, most people, the extras in the movie, they all have the passive awareness of they're just thinking, now me, get away. Tom Cruise has the full bentoactive awareness that he's thinking about future me. He's thinking about now us. He's thinking about future us. He he is fully cognizant. He has turned on at that moment. You know, the the passive response to, COVID is maybe it's like buying toilet paper. The active response is buying a bidet. You're solving it not just for now, but for all future states. But so this ability to see that full space, to affect the future, to extend your perimeter farther along so that you can shape things before they reach you, these are all ways that, that I had just personally felt myself develop. And then I think a bentoist type of approach, can really bring value to people. And so I wanna ask you about one of the examples in the book because it feels like in the book, there might be a disconnect between the the profit motive, which is this financial maximalism, and taking a more values oriented collectivist, you know, approach. And you give a great example of Adele. So Adele has these concerts. And when you she puts tickets up for sale, people who are in the scalping business buy all the tickets in the first three seconds and then scalp the tickets on, you know, either outside the venue or online or whatever. And so her true fans don't get to see her unless they pay an enormous amount of money from the scalpers. And so she figured out a way to identify who her, you know, biggest fans were so she could reward them by making sure they did get tickets at the normal price, and they weren't essentially cheated by the scalpers. And your your point was is that she's thinking about, you know, her her future me, which is her personal brand say and how she wants her fans to to think of her in the future. And she's thinking about her now us, which is the fans and how she can do something that benefits them. And then future us, which is just that here's how music this the scalping is unfair for the music industry in general, and then perhaps the music industry would would have more loyal followings and would grow better if, you know, this approach was taken by everyone. And as opposed to just a pure profit motive of maximizing the amount of dollars created, by her concert, and then and then the the fans being the people who spend the most money on her. And my my feeling was when I read that was that, a, she did a great thing, and that's that's kind of shows again, it was a great example to show the success of your approach, this bentoist approach. But, b, to me, it struck me that she's also maximizing her profit because she as long as she stays consistent with her personal view of, you know, her view of herself and her loyalty to her fans, that ultimately makes the fans more and more loyal. It creates word-of-mouth about her so that people know that she's the artist to go see. She they they know they won't get ripped off if they see her in concert. And, ultimately, in the long run again, that's why I say it's short term thinking versus long term thinking. In the long run, she's probably gonna make more money, or her fans are more likely to buy her album the second it's released because they're loyal to her. They're part of her family. Yeah. I think I think that's very well could be true. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, I'm not I'm not I'm definitely not arguing that people should be selfless. You know, I still think, I still think we are driven by selfishness, and that that is like trusting people to operate according to their self interest is fine. It's just that there's a if you're only optimizing for one space, then I think you you leave a lot of value on the table. You capture you probably capture more value than you create. It might be a net negative transaction. Like if you imagine smoking, smoking is a positive now me behavior because it satisfies a craving for nicotine. Your now me as a smoker is always gonna wanna smoke even though every other space of your Bento is telling you to quit. But the now me says, this is rational. I desire nicotine. I'm being delivered nicotine. So it it's that it's that we could be selfish, but, like, a broader notion of selfishness will bring different sorts of results. So I think Adele here is not It might not even be considered selfish. She might say it's maybe she doesn't calculate, oh, if I just if I do the best thing for the fans here, I'm gonna make the most money. It might not be so calculated. It just might work out that by thinking in this bent bento box fashion that without being selfish in terms of what she's thinking, without being selfish, she's still gonna maximize profit. In fact, she might even this this bento box style of thinking, she'll make more profit. Just like your Apple description earlier. Yeah. If Apple suddenly made an Android like phone, which was sort of, like, you know, open source the platform, sell it to different, you know, phone companies and and so on, probably their fans are gonna be like, Apple just lost the only thing I liked about them. I'm switching to Android now. Anyway, so so if Apple Apple as long as they stay true to these higher values, they basically maintain their profits or grow their profits as opposed to if they took a short term profit incentive to spike this year's profits, they might lose in the long term. Absolutely. Because what we fail to see is that decisions driven by short term profits might not be truthful to who we are. They might be false to who we are as a brand or who we are as a person. And people get into these desperate trades. Right? We have desperate moments in life where we do we we do have to give up something that we care about. But, the danger of the short termism is that it is destructive. It is it can be destructive to trust to those longer term needs. And and under a under a short termist view, it's a limited set of things that make sense. Stockpiling PPE makes no sense from a profit maximizing short term view. I mean, I I love Marc Andreessen's essay about it's time to build and we should have done all these things. But, like, how would he have rationalized stock stockpiling goods when, like, he is a venture capitalist who's looking to maximize financial returns? How how would he have justified that? Of course, he would say, well, there's this other value that's important. Okay. Well, then where else is that value important? What and what other ways are we not getting to that because it is in competition with a financial motive? And and and my belief is that it's this very limited definition of self interest that only considers now me that produces these that saves us from having these harder conversations, and that allows us to believe that we can earn ourselves, through any crisis. Yeah. So so, like, I I have I have some questions. Let's say you're Apple. And let's say 1 year, you, focused on the NowMe, and you said, oh, if we could sole if we licensed our operating system to every phone maker, then we'll spike in market share the 1st year. And then that's all I care about because my bonus is just based on this year if I'm, like, the CEO or whatever. And let's say you do that. And now year 2, your brand is fractured. You kind of sense a little bit more grumbling on message boards across the Internet. There's a danger. You know, business could fall. Market share could fall because of what you did. How do you rep how do you repair a broken bento box? Yeah. Well, I mean, great question. I mean, we saw we saw Steve Jobs do it, you know, in the earlier Apple era. And I think we just saw Satya Nadella just do with Microsoft, where you have to kill things that don't make sense. You have to create coherence. You know, everything you do has to live up to a core thesis about what you do. If you're like, our job is this, with the exception of these other four things, these special projects that get run because, you know, they got hired early and they get a special team and they have to be on the executive level and all early and they get a special team and they have to be on the executive level and all the weird ways you can torture yourself, as an organization. Yeah. You're just gonna be less effective. People aren't gonna believe you. You know, people aren't gonna care. It's but it's hard. It's hard to be coherent in that way. I mean, who's good at social media? People that know how to hit the same note over and over again in slightly different ways. Like, the the the well rounded person who has nuance takes about everything is less interesting, because you just sort of like, I wanna fill my the slot of, like, the angry sportsperson I follow or of the jaded, you know, book critic or whatever. There's just, like, types that we go for, these essences, that, you know, that we just kind of expect different places to fill. And this is where the notion of, like, pluralism is so exciting because we compete with one another. There's this great quote I have in the afterword from, Blaise Pascal, the French, like, mathematician, about how the the the the intelligent compete against the strong and the beauty the beautiful compete against the witty, and and everyone's trying to, like, win in this overall game rather than recognizing that they're all part of separate games and that they actually have nothing to fear from one another and that the world benefits from all of their existence and that they're all fulfilling individual values and goals that are important and critical on their own, And that if they could merely just be happy with the critical value they provide, like, the world would be fine. But yet we foolishly, like the strong the strong wants to lead in the kingdom of the wise, when in reality, there are sort of like rightful values and ways of thinking that that that govern our choices. This is like the the operating system of of of society, of culture, that's like, you know, the the thousands of years of our our evolution. So I think it's just it's it's it's trying to honor those things. It's it's it's honoring the truth of them. And and I think that, in particular, technological management technological measurement, as in the case with Adele, where Adele has an algorithm to help her identify a, quote, loyal fan, I think technological measurement is going to allow us to approximate moral values and different distributions of goods and services than as we've really seen in a very long time. And I think things are gonna get weird for a while, and and that we're on the cusp of this. Yeah. What do you think will happen? Do you think Well, I think, like, there I I saw an interesting example last week where there's a new video game that, is available to people that watch certain number of hours of Twitch streams. Right? There's, like, deal there's extra content. You can't buy it, but it's about, like, this time given kind of metric instead. I think that the the the COVID crisis is gonna produce extreme wealth scarcity for so many people, and then extreme, like, wealth abundance for other people. And that weirdly, the midpoint between these two groups is gonna be this notion of new values. Because if you're someone that, doesn't have money, you will still need goods and services. You will still need a way a means of exchange. Right now, if you don't have money, like, how do you pay for things? You pay for things with your time. You watch pre roll ads on YouTube, things like that. Someone who has money pays the 10 $10 a month to not get it. But we're gonna find new ways for people to pay for things. So I I I'm imagining this way that, like, people without money are gonna want access to goods and services. People that make those goods and services are gonna want a wide enough audience that they're gonna extend membership to people who cannot literally afford it. And then people who have money are going to invest themselves and also in the growth of nonfinancial values because just growing more money is gonna seem boring and not interesting. It's not gonna be an interesting challenge anymore. So I think we're gonna come to this midpoint of, of what I would call post capitalism, which is building, growing values on top of financial value. This is not a world where, like, capitalism goes away. It gets curb stomped. Like, capitalism remains dominant. And it just became it remains become so dominant that other people start building things on top of it. So, Adele running concerts in a way that makes her enough money, but also is maximizing for another value on top of that, I think, is gonna be the new kind of transaction, where there's, like, a financial outcome and a nonfinancial outcome. And we're gonna become very sophisticated about how those things get get dialed and coded. Was there ever a point where afterwards you thought, boy, I really messed up in terms of I did the now me, but I didn't think of the other 3 boxes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, Yeah. So so one of the ways I, make a living is is that I do talks for for companies. And, and sometimes I get asked to do talks by companies that I don't really like. And and I've always said no to those things. I had this instinctual sort of revulsion to that, and I even feel kind of, like, pissed off or even being invited for some reason. But not long after making coming up with the bento, I got asked to do one of these. And before saying no, I thought, you know, I should ask my bento what it says. And so I've gone through the process before I've identifying my core value in each in each space. So I'll tell you what those are as I walk you through this decision. So I asked my Bento, should I do a talk for a company I don't like? And I asked my now me box. And my now me core value, after doing these exercises I've designed, my now me value is to show people the matrix. When am I at my best? It's when I'm talking about ideas, connecting different puzzle pieces together, helping people see the world in a new way. That's, like, I think what most make makes me most distinctly me. So when I asked my now me voice, should I do a talk for a company I don't like? The now me voice said, yeah, totally do it. Yes. Then I asked my now us voice. Now my now us is about deep time with friends and family. I'm, like, hyper focused, hyper present. I'm terrible, like, texting phone, but I'm great in person. When I asked that voice, do I wanna do a talk for an hour and a half? It said, sure. This seems like this is cool. This is what we like to do. Then I asked my futurist voice. My futurist, its value is to build a better matrix. I'm not saying I wanna get rid of the matrix. I'm saying how can we make a world where the defaults sort of are more positive in how they affect us? So my future us voice, which wants to build a better matrix says, yo. You should definitely talk for these people. Like, these these are the people that are gonna reform and lead this change. Like, you shouldn't be preaching to the choir. So I got in 3 yeses, and then I got to this future me voice. And my future me value is don't sell out. When I first went through this exercise, this notion of always being true to my values and especially never letting money come before my values, like, they rang very true to me. This this comes from growing up an evangelical Christian, being into punk rock, growing up poor. A lot of this is, like, affects, you know, just the way I think about this. And so when that future me voice said, should I do this talk for a company I don't like, it said, no. You're just selling out. And, suddenly, that voice that had been angry in the past, that had told me no, I I saw it. I could see it for what it was, and I realized it was my future me. And then my future me was like a bouncer looking out for my values, this big dude standing outside. And I I could go and I could tap him on the shoulder and say, no. No. It's cool. I got this. But I could only do that because I could see this bigger picture. I had the active awareness to see that, actually, for these three other parts of myself, this totally makes sense. And, actually, this is something I should do. So in that case, I made up a 180 degree different decision than what I normally would have done, and I, like, felt good about it. I didn't feel weird about it. I thought I am actually making a choice and integrity with who I am even though it's the opposite of what I thought I would have done this morning. That's that that's really interesting. That's also a great example of when future me doesn't necessarily agree with future us. Yeah. Definitely. Because Yeah. Because you could change the world talking to the company you don't like, but it still could feel like selling out, and you kinda use this the the the bento approach to moderate between those two disparate feelings. Yeah. My my feeling is that and especially having taught this to, you know, over a 1000 people at this point is, we all we we have these internal dialogues all the time. Like, there's a post I'll do soon that shows how we can use the bento to illustrate, like, sacrifice or to illustrate short termism or to illustrate, like, how we get stuck in different kinds of decisions. So by, like, being able to distinguish the voices a little bit more and and each let them have their say, I think you give yourself more agency, to act. You know, we we can get trapped by our emotions. We can get trapped by our mental patterns, our loops that we go through. I'm a very self critical person. Right? I can get trapped in those kinds of things. And so for me, I just think, like, if I if I'm gonna love myself, if I'm gonna care for myself, if I'm gonna try to make sure I'm as effective as I want to be, then I need to give myself a tool. I need help. You know, I'm not strong enough to, like, always think about the future the way I know I should. I'm not good enough at thinking about other people for who I say I want to be. So I need help. I need a tool, just like I need a tool to to do anything else. And so I really approach this as like a I'm just trying to step up as a human being, and try to be a you know, just to to really maximize is such a funny word to use considering what my book is about, but really just to live up to to my potential. And and that It's a different kind of maximize. Like Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's it's it's it's kind of a way here here's how I view this because I'm bleep I know I don't know if people say this, but I'm gonna do it. I love love this approach. I'm gonna make decisions using this Bento idea. And the way I see it is this is a way to kind of bridge that gap between short term thinking and long term thinking. Because, otherwise, the it's a methodology. It's the steps you could take to to get the long term picture in better perspective and how your decisions, fall into that, you know, between short term and long term. I mean, I had this you know, I I came up with this idea, the bento idea, you know, maybe almost 3 years ago. And shortly afterwards, I asked a friend who hosts some salons in Los Angeles where I was living. Hey. Can I, like I wanna share an idea with a group of people in in person, because I just wanted to try saying this out loud and see whether I would throw up and to see, like, what what people's faces would say? And and I could just see that it made sense to people, that it was meaningful. And afterwards, this, like, very macho Italian guy slapped me on the back and said, you got some balls, kid, which which I was like, woah. Woah. What am I doing here? But I but, you know, shortly after that, I I started trying to make Bentos for various people. So I made apples bento. You know, I tried making Donald Trump's bento. But, like, how how do these people think? And and I had this interesting experience of I I imagine, let let me do a bento for, like, someone who's a racist or someone who's a, you know, extreme nationalist or a jihadist. Like, what does their bento look like? And and I not that I can put myself exactly in those shoes, but what came out is, like, you know, hatred. What comes out is, like, all the things that they believe in. And I was felt really bummed because I thought I wanted the bento to, like, make us all virtuous. And and instead, when I saw that, actually, this could make someone more effective at a ideology I disagree with, I really had to think about that for a while and whether I thought, you know, is that is that okay quote, unquote, okay? And, eventually, I came to think, actually, this is great because it means I I'm not imposing any value system on anybody. All I'm all I'm doing is trying to create a a basic scaffolding to to let you make sense of what's already happening inside of you. And Well, also, it's a it's a great exercise to understand other people. So Charlie Munger, who's Warren Buffett's number 2 guy, he has this technique he calls invert, which is that you can't argue against somebody until you can take their side of the argument even better than they can. And so I think when you do the bento for these other people, you're you're allowing yourself to build a big picture perspective of whatever insanity they believe in and maybe find kind of where there might be a sane strain in it that is is the this weird skewed bigger picture, and then you could suddenly argue their side better than they can. Yeah. I I I love the idea of Charlie Munger as Warren Buffett's number 2. Like, still at 96 or whatever you're you're Yeah. It's the same 20. It's the same way I think of, Ron Wood as being not a real Rolling Stone even though he's been in the band since 1969. You know? Right. But somehow he's not real. But, anyway anyway It's true, though. Like, Buffett's worth, like, I don't know, 80,000,000,000 and Munger, it's about only about 2,000,000,000, something like that. So, you know We never buys the Dairy Queen milkshakes when they go out. Right. Right. When they go out. Well, Yancy Yancy Strickler, founder of Kickstarter, CEO former CEO of Kickstarter, one of my favorite sites to just browse around. But more importantly, the discussion of this podcast was about bentoism, which you described in your book. This Could Be Our Future, a manifesto for a more generous world. And I love the, you know, your the people you have on the back. Adam Grant, Seth Godin, Amanda Palmer. This is like this is like a who's who of people who have been on my podcast several times. So, it was it was a natural fit, and I and and I love this strategy. Can I can I write write about your strategy? I'll always refer to you in your book. Please. I want you know, my my dream is that it's just helping people left and right. And, you know, and I would say there's, bentoism.org. You can go and there's a simple tutorial that will, like, teach you how to build your bento. And then these weekly bento things I do are open to anybody. And if you just go to bitly /weeklybento, bitly like the shortened URL, bitly slash weekly bento, you can just drop your email address, and you'll know when they're happening. Yeah. And your email list, you could sign up on, on your said, the bentoist.org site. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Well, Yancey, thanks so much.
Comments