Kickstarter Co-Founder Shows Why It's Time to Re-Evaluate the Economy | Yancey Strickler

[Music] the the fascinating opportunity that we have now is that the the ability to define new values to distribute goods to make decisions has has never been greater everyone this episode is brought to you by our sponsor better help an online counseling company with the mission to make professional counseling accessible affordable and convenient I hope you enjoy everybody welcome to impact theory today's guest is Yancey Strickler he's the co-founder and former CEO of the game-changing company Kickstarter which gave birth to the now massively successful crowdfunding model he's also an author and speaker who was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a young global leader and by Fast Company on their vaunted most creative people list Roofing has bonafides as a very unique thinker in his new book this could be our future a manifesto for a more generous world he has given birth to an incredible new idea that he calls bento ism something he hopes will radically overhaul our approach to living life and defining what's valuable Nancy welcome to the show man thanks that was so rad I'm like looking for the other person in the call so I guess congratulate them yeah I think we will find them very rapidly dude I love love the way that you talk about being a CEO the way that you talk about dealing with insecurities and feeling like you weren't the you know the sort of thing that everybody holds up is the typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur there is something about the way that you think about the world and that you process through it that I find not only engaging but very accessible and so when I think about people that are gonna help shape how we move forward it's people that can process like that and I'd love to hear your assessment of what the the problem is how we've sort of gotten obsessed with perhaps the wrong value system and then we'll obviously get into bento ism and all that but first I think hitting people with sort of where you think things have gone off the rails a bit would be super useful yeah I mean I mean I'm an optimistic person it's a part of me says where to begin with where things have gone wrong but also feeling like loving the world loving human beings like very feeling very optimistic about you know maybe less in this moment than in a normal time but still you know I grew up I grew up in South West Virginia on a farm I grew up Christian evangelical Christian and like had no neighbors just read books all the time and like dreamed of being a writer and was always on that path like moved to New York became a music critic and then met a friend got in Perry Chen who'd had the idea for crowdfunding he thought of this notion and and at the time I like worked at a web site like an editorial role so that maybe the most technical person I think he had met and so we start making this company and I'll derail you but I found this super interesting is it true he was a waiter yes yes I mean yet he was an artist you know he waited tables at a cool a cool restaurant it's not like he was roomed with you know he was in Silicon Valley as part of Y Combinator which is how people think the stuff normally stars I had no idea that that was sort of the humble beginnings of Kickstarter which is pretty extraordinary yeah I mean he's just a creative I mean the three of us who are co-founders myself to Charles Sadler and Perry were all creative people who you know the kinds of things that we liked were very hard to fund you know if you're the the creative industry before Kickstarter you only got money for things if if they would be profitable right because it's an investment and but of course most creative idea is like maybe you hope they'll become profitable but really you're just trying to make the thing in your mind be real in the world like that's every artist driving motivation but yet that that motivation is irrational and and inadequate in that world before so what was interesting it's like we didn't want to be entrepreneurs that wasn't like a dream but the idea was so powerful of Kickstarter and what came to be called crowdfunding and like to make it true it had to be a company so we just had to figure out how to do these things that we had never had interested in before and what's interesting is that like there's it's quite painful quite painful to be learning so iteratively but also it lets you second-guess a lot of assumptions that other people just like don't even think about you're just like why why does it work that way and and so that led to like maybe a slower processing in some way it's like we wouldn't immediately jump to like what the obvious move is like an early example is the company was like six people and it was growing about a year we've been around for but a year and we needed to hire another customer service person a seventh person and we suddenly realized that hiring that seventh person would mean we would have to add a second table in our office because we had one table that could fit six chairs around it or the way we need the seventh person we realize we can't fit it there and we have this crisis of we're gonna have to get a second table and if we get a second table that's not just opening up the seventh seat that's opening up eight nine ten eleven twelve and like and what does that mean and you would think like growing and staffing is automatically a good thing but for us it's like what does that do for control what does that do for our goals are we sure so there's that kind of mentality that that just comes up like I don't belong here like I'm not native here so it's just like the customs are aren't as ordinary what really changed for me was that what I really saw you know from the beginning we said we never want to sell the company and we never want to try to IPO we we thought that for us coming from like music backgrounds and creative backgrounds the idea of selling out which is like to make something that other people enjoy and then it's financially exploiting that to remove yourself from your community to us is like the worst thing you could do so we always said to potential investors and everyone else like think of Kickstarter as the Green Bay Packers of the internet we want to be a public trust we fulfill our role we don't go don't do things we shouldn't do we're not stupid you know but you're just trying to do that one thing and be bound to the public interest for all time you know we're only taking 5% as a fee that's enough to keep the lights on but we're not going to get super rich off of this and it's like a fair deal and this is what the world needs and success for Kickstarter is the long-term meaningless of that which was a weird thing to do which is a weird still a weird thing to do and the paradigm that we were in of tech and VC is like you raise huge funding rounds you know the I became CEO about three and a half four years in just being live and within a month of me taking over our two most significant competitors at the time raised sixty million dollars in VC funding from like the biggest funds there were and we took a lot of pride in being scrappy not doing that kind of thing but you have this gut check moment of like wow do we need do we need to do what everyone else is doing but what we saw is that by them taking that money they are in effect signing a post day to check where every decision must work its way backwards to justifying whatever that valuation was and that actually that's gonna harm them over the long term it's not gonna bind them with the interests of their community it's gonna create a lot of weird things but what we saw over and over was that everyone which is optimizing for this financial profit maximization that that every decision laddered back to that and this is where you would see a company sending like two newsletters a day and spamming you know this is where like the weird things would happen we're good like why why did this company start treating me like [ __ ] all of a sudden like why did this happen well it's the answers they had to grow right they had to grow so can we remove ourselves from that game and so this led us to become a public benefit corporation so like we reincorporated the company to where we wouldn't just be expected to maximize profits as a for-profit company is traditionally expected to do but that we would legally be required to balance our financial goals our financial responsibilities with producing a positive benefit to society and and our idea was like there are more people out there like us who don't quite fit into this world but who but like could have a big impact business is an awesome way to have an impact it's like so wide open like people like us should definitely be going into business and maybe maybe if we carve out this path it could be a little bit of a template so the next person that comes up says yeah I'm gonna go the Kickstarter route and instead of every potential funder looking at them like what are you even talking about which was what we got instead they might say okay well I could see what that looks like yes that means a 3x return instead of a hundred X return what whatever those things might be really fast to decide start to take a tangent really fast tell me a little bit more I don't know about public benefit corporations so obviously I know enough about your story to know that the big thing was it would keep you from getting a fiduciary lawsuit from your shareholders saying you guys weren't maximizing their shareholder value that I get but is that the sole reason they exist or is there some other functional benefit that it provides there's no functional benefit there's no there's no like tax breaks or anything like that there's no special status it was created by three entrepreneurs who actually started the and one street basketball league really yes who became private equity guys and then while doing private equity just really felt like this notion that only financial valuations mattered was stupid they're just like this is dumb and so they these three guys went state-by-state to argue for a new classification of corporation that would have to balance these things that would take the additional responsibility of producing a public benefit and that would be legally held responsible do that it started it started in Pennsylvania and they went state-by-state but it was entirely around like this model that we've been using is outdated and and and really the selling point for a company is that you are distinguishing yourself from your competitors of saying we're not like them but for us with Kickstarter what we cared about was that the our Charter which lays out like 15 commitments the company's has made is is a legal document that all future leaders of the company will be held accountable to so like a constitution where you can change it with a certain number of yeah we have with two thirds of shareholder votes you can change you can amend it you also needed two-thirds of votes to approve it in the first place so it is it is amendable but it's a you know requires a process and yeah and we just saw this as a distinguishing ourselves and and laying out those commitments in such a way that in the event that we as founders got hit by a bus or the company changed hands they wouldn't just be relying on oh well good people work here thus we make good decisions instead there is a more fundamental structural framework that says how decisions should be approached I was CEO when we made this conversion and to be honest I didn't know if it was going to be [ __ ] or not like I did like just a piece of paper or what is this going to be real and and it was real what I found what I found was that the kinds of things we wrote in our PPC charter were like things that have always been true of us maybe we didn't never articulated it but like nothing in there is weird or out of character but before values were like a guardrail you would you would bump up against maybe if you're like going astray it's just sort of keep you on a path as a PPC instead I felt like these values they were like middle the road mandated like I have to maximize the value of like elevation of respect for creative people and in culture and like that needs to be a way that we think about our responsibility and so to me it made it made our values less of a passive thing and more of like a an imperative to act and and so yeah just things would come up and you're like what we have to we have to be like we're PBC you have to do this and and even when we face like failure for instance not long after this we had the worst to like project failure to date like a project that it raised a couple million dollars to make a drone just like just vanish basically just had an oblique message without without saying much but hey we're PBC so what are we supposed to do so we win and we found the toughest investigative journalists we knew of who had been like really hard on us in the past and we hired them and we said we want to pay you to write the story of what happened here you can interview me you can interview everyone you can we will promote the story because we just want people to we want to try to solve for this so that like this could be a learning moment and we don't want to hide from this but like this feels like the accountable thing to do so like there are there were those kinds of days of thinking that just felt I don't just a different mind a different mindset all right so this feeds into the whole concept behind the book and what our future could look like that I find so interesting so you've got this basically the hypothesis and correct me where I go wrong here the hypothesis is basically we've gotten into financial optimization to the exclusion of all others we've sort of forgotten about the the humanity behind all of this and if we're focusing on GDP gross domestic product and we think that that tells us whether the world is going in the right direction or the wrong direction we don't factor in happiness joy accountability things like that that where we are going to have a very serious sort of emotional existential crisis of nothing else is that relatively accurate yeah yeah I mean I you know I think that over the last 50 years we've become obsessed with financial growth and and as a country or as a globe I would say the West primarily I would say the West and that and that has had a lot of power it began in the US and and this belief that all decisions like I believe there's an implicit belief that the the correct choice and a decision is whichever option makes the most money and I've been in enough executive meetings that Kickstarter and other companies where routinely you face 50/50 decisions where option a has a clear financial outcome and then there's some downsides that are hard to quantify but like they're there and there's option B that has a lesser financial outcome and less of the and also less of those downsides and nine times out of ten they're gonna choose option a because it's justifiable you can only defend option B in a crisis where you feel like you have to apologize that's the only time you generally go for the one that's not maxing out for that and it sounds innocent enough it sounds innocent enough but when that happens repeatedly you see a decay in other spaces but I think are focused on financial value has been has been perfectly rational you know there's like a Kenzi in like economic argument Milton Friedman argument for like the rationality of financial value GDP does correlate to many positive things about society there's a lot there for sure it's not like we've been off the rails wrong but it's gotten out of control and the the fascinating opportunity that we have now is that the the ability to define new values to distribute goods to make decisions has never been greater right technology technology allows us to measure things in such more intricate ways like if you can imagine in the past someone says let's let's make a decision other than money it's like okay well what what are we looking at what are we counting here it's it's hard to say but in the book I give an example of Adele the pop star Adele she goes on tour when her tickets go on sale they immediately get bought by scalpers and then people have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars more Adele found this startup that had built an algorithm that would measure how loyal a fan was to her as an artist it analyzed their listening data whatever and allowed her to invite the top 20 percentile adele fans in each market offer them a ticket for 50 bucks they could resell the ticket if they want but and the show still adele made money but the idea was that for maximizing for this loyal communal value set that there would be a different kind of experience one thing that I think is important to note about that story is that now you talk about this in the book that artists can actually cooperate with Ticketmaster maybe others to actually get a portion of the scalped price so it's not like where Adele it didn't matter she actually could have benefited benefitted from that which I found it made the argument even more compelling to me yeah and so for Adele Adele is just looking at this with it a different value set right she's still thinking of herself interest like she's playing shows she's like making money but yet what she is optimizing for is not her own take she's optimizing for a fans experience and and again it's that's very basic but like to do this in a way that's mathematical that's replicable that's scalable to me suggests a different kind of transaction a different kind of decision where it is building on top of that financial value like this wouldn't work for Adele she was losing money every show right like what it works she's satisfying a threshold but the point is that she's only trying to satisfy that threshold and the opportunity she sees as a layer above that now what's interesting is that this is self-interested for Adele right if she does this she creates more loyalty and that probably creates even longer-term fans and you could very easily argue well this works out better for Adele in the long run and that's exactly it that's exactly it could work out better for the long run for all of us to write this ain't the same kind of thinking in the same way of approaching our goals of not just maximizing for now me is that's that's the secret that's the secret that's the secret to more meaningful success that's the secret to to be meaningful in culture and so Adele's choice is yes it's it's easier for someone like her or Taylor Swift to give up some of the money right but we also all know that there are moments where you don't take the job at the higher salary because the commutes too long basically requires too many other sacrifices right we as individuals I think know how to navigate those kinds of situations they're hard they're hard they're especially hard if we're in a place of desperation but collectively collectively it's like we've given up we aren't even trying to make decisions for anything other than financial outcomes in part because we've lacked the language or the justification and so I believe my my book is a part of a not this is not the only person making this argument but I think that this is the trend that's happening now and and I think in this idea proposal been to ISM I think I have a practical way for us to get there like very don't don't tell people a dues yet yeah we're gonna go hard on that first one thing that I found really helpful in the book you have this key idea that you touch on which is hey look I know it feels like it has always been this way but I promise you it hasn't you outlined the three-point shot and basketball and you talked specifically about the economists there are arguments that have led to where we're at now that it's not as long-term of a thing as we think it is and I was shocked by that I was like whoa like because as I was born after this started it does feel to me like this is the only way when I started my last company dude we honestly everybody was like all right this is just dumb we were like we're no longer going to make profitability our highest value we're gonna make adding value to the customer the thing that we're a total slave to and that just seemed so counterintuitive but we were reacting to the way that we had done business before and felt like we were suffering forget like I'm sure the customer was getting less value than they could have from us as well but like even that felt like even if we're serving the customer well we're not having fun like this isn't fun like trying to be a slick marketer just is not interesting to me and so after doing that for years realizing that money wasn't making me happy we had this total reaction against that we said all right we have a new North Star and that North Star is going to be value creation and so but I felt like I'm going against like the way the world is it never occurred to me that there was like a demarcation point not that long ago where it was like hey everybody gather around real quick we're gonna optimize financially and boom and now we're sort of seeing the world carried out a process give us some of those quick benchmarks of how this comes to be yeah well I mean it's it's if you look at how companies operated in the 1940s 50s 60s it really 1970 is kind of the point where the mentality shifts but then those earlier decades like the idea of stakeholder capitalism which is like the most progressive idea like that was normal that was like the non woke boring thing to do there's a great visualization that GN made in 1955 to show their year and it shows like how money was distributed and they bragged about the high taxes they pay they brag about the worker raises like base they showed everyone benefits from GM like here as here is why we are a good company you know companies were judged by the number of employees like employees were judged by their loyalty to the company and vice versa and this was just the value set and and my theory for why this was the dominant value set for American capitalism in the 1950s and 60s I think it's about the Cold War we think of the u.s. like a cold war is the US and the Soviet Union locked in this like militant they taunt and there was that competition but there was also a economic competition to see which system of social organization capitalism or communism could best provide for the middle class like which system could produce the biggest middle class so really the scoreboard of the Cold War was the middle class of the Soviet Union versus the middle class of Americans and so that bound every company in everyone America to this common purpose of bettering the middle class because we got a win like capitalism faced this existential competition and competition made it better now what happened is capitalism crushed communism and then it became a lot of lethargic monopolist as often happens when you don't have anyone to push you anymore but it really changed when there was a clear moment in 1970 Milton Friedman you know amazing a economist thinker made this case that that idea that businesses should be thinking about social responsibility the stakeholder model idea that we've been in that what it would a stakeholder model so stake so stakeholder capitalism means that you make decisions thinking about all stakeholders which are employees investors suppliers and the community around your business so like the families of your employees this is like my favorite business guru is a man named Konosuke Matsushita this Japanese man who started Panasonic he was a big proponent of this but it's just this idea that like you as a company have a lot of responsibility you're a meeting point of many different parts of society this is what makes business so powerful and that power comes with responsibility and and in the Vietnam War era this really got kicked up a notch where people were saying well what what accompanies need to be doing for the greater good like Americans are sacrificing their lives people are dying but like what what does it need for a company to do that and that's when Friedman came out with this essay that said the only social responsibility that a business has is to profit and profit is the only goal and profit maximization is the only rational outcome of business to pursue and this idea change how businesses ran and and and it and it what was so perfect for it was that in 1973 America had a major economic crisis there was the oil crop the oil crash inflation stagflation and this is the moment when Nixon in the u.s. moved off of the gold standard and decided it would no longer be fiat money or it would be fiat money and that we would just print our way out of this crisis and from that point on America's policy became we must produce economic growth every year no matter what even if just to pay down the debt that we're building up on an annual basis but like the operating mentality for every business began to change and and and you started seeing things like private equity start to reach in and take control these companies and you know if you trace the wages of American workers there's a point where productivity keeps growing wages stay flat if you if you track like job security if you track all kinds of things there's just this great divergence where inequality really began and in the book I call it the mullet economy where I say you know for most people it's like business in front like the mullet where their earnings are getting cut every year like that's 90 percent of people like offshoring no more raises greater job insecurity meanwhile for the for the top one to ten percent it's this glorious mullet going down the back we're over the same period of time since 1973 the average American workers gotten a 10% raise adjusted for inflation over those same years the average American executive has gotten a 1000% raise these are directly correlated these are directly correlated so this was like a philosophical shift for business and and again that like made sense because there was a crisis moment of hey our companies have become too big the economy is not working the way we thought Vietnam has screwed us up where the hell are we and a crisis you go looking for what how do we solve this and Friedman had this very simple idea we should just orient around economic growth if we only focus on economic growth that will solve the rest of it and you know because we can convert money into any other values if you make enough money people can give money way to charity to solve the social ills that come of that and so this was just this thesis and it I mean it's not it's wrong I believe that it is incomplete I believe it's incomplete and so just we've been operating on that playbook for the last 50 years one of the ways one of the ways I show how it took took hold is this amazing study that UCLA has done since the 1960s where ever year UCLA asks incoming college freshmen all across the u.s. a lot of questions and one of them is about their goals in life and it lists like 10 different life goals like having a family being good at your job being an artist and and one of them has to do with money being well-off financially and in in 1970 the percentage of incoming college freshmen who said being well-off financially was essential or very important was just 28% just 28% that year the number one life goal was to quote develop a meaningful philosophy on life 84 percent of students said that was essential can you imagine can you imagine the most recent year this study came out 2017 the biggest life goal and on college freshmen to be rich 82 percent say that is essential less than half say that having a philosophy on life is essential anymore and if you look at these numbers over 50 years every year and surveyed 50 60 million students have taken this like every value is flat like having a family stay the same being creative say the same beauty being good at your job those rates have stayed the same it's this growth of being rich that has just really it's it's shocking when you look at it it's just like just a straight up into the right line so at just our whole value system has become has really shifted dramatically and but you know it's it's hard to recognize the water you swim in right yeah David Foster Wallace this is water you talk about generational change it takes about 30 years that change and that brings us to bento ISM the bento box the bang now I'm dying I needed people to understand all of that so that we can get into this it's a really interesting concept lay that out for people and then know that I'm gonna press you until I understand oh yes my bento box to get to decision-making well I you know I just I'm a curious person I love to read I love to understand and I'm like I'm very non-judgmental like I really I there's a I learned a phrase recently of meta modernism after post Mountain modernism as meta modernism and meta modernism is to look at things without judgment and simply look for what's useful and the idea is as my vision this is them this is the current view is that like you can hate Amazon while also reading like Bezos the shareholder letter every year because he's like brilliant right you know what it's like there is this you're just simply looking for the utility of things and that this is like this an emergent mindset so I I again I'm like I'm not a I'm not a bomb thrower I'm a reformer I'm like you know I love that about your book honestly I wasn't I'm never sure when people have sort of this grand idea of where we're gonna go if it's just a reaction against what we have or if it's like you said finding the utility and that comes across and every every interview I've heard with you certainly in the book it's very even-handed like you said it's not like capitalism is some evil thing it's just incomplete and so you know where do we get what do we take that's working what do we discard that's not I find that very useful I started giving talks while I was CEO about this idea of like there is this value system that's running away I first started talking about it when I saw my neighborhood in New York City the Lower East Side flipped from gentrification and just like watching this insanity of every storefront around me turning into a bank and being like what how does this make sense and and just started talking about this in a way that it was like people could feel it so I spent I spent a couple years or many years just trying to understand this reading a lot of philosophy a lot of economics like kind of going to the sources like what is the what is the argument for utilitarianism why is money the most utilitarian value what is the how have we defended other values and my belief my assumption was always that financial value is simply the first value we've learned to rationally express that financial value is a proxy for goodness that is mathematical that is tradable and that is universal and that that process can be repeated for other values and that's simply the money is simply the first way that we did that and but like but what is this justification for money mattering and so one day I was just doodling in my notebook and I drew a hockey stick graph you know a chart this is classic Silicon Valley chart of a line slipping up to the right and I was just drawing I was trying to visualize self-interest so I drew this hockey stick chart and and I had this thought of like this x-axis along the bottom it's measuring time and so it goes all the way from now far into the future so I just my notebook I just drew that line out farther and I thought this y-axis measuring self-interest it also grows because as our self-interest grows so do our responsibilities like for me the difference between being single and having a family is enormous or being a solo entrepreneur and having employees is enormous so that Y goes from me to us as it goes up as your self-interest grows so to set responsibilities and so suddenly this like hockey stick was just a tiny slice of this large picture that was quite mysterious to me what is all this others face and so I turned it into a very simple two-by-two just drawing lines through it and suddenly I had these four boxes and they they lined up with these axes where in the bottom left there was now me is this the hockey stick graph this is what what I want to need right now this is how I think of my selfish desires on a day-to-day basis on the bottom right was future me and future me is this older wiser version of me that either becomes true or not true every day based on the choices I make you know I think of my future me is like my obi-wan my inner obi-wan Kenobi how how do I get there like who'd what decisions does obi-wan make today to become obi-wan my now uh so the top left is now us that that uh space and now us is like the the people I rely on and who rely on me my friends my family and early on I had to say that like us us is not every living thing in the world it's not the global humanists us it is the us of like the people that you really care about the people you have to look out for and then finally in the top right there's future us which is imagining that same group of people 30 years from now so probably your kids and their kids too and I had this flash of like whoa my my self-interest is not just this now me space which is all I've ever really been able to think about it's actually all four of these spaces because every decision I make impacts future me it impacts and now us like my footprints are all over the place even though I have no idea that's what I'm doing as I drew this graph and next to it I thought what is this a picture of and I just wrote beyond near-term orientation like this is just a simple two by two matrix to see beyond your near-term orientation and then I realized that was an acronym for bento bento and just a week before my wife had shown me this book about a key guy Japanese life's purpose a key guy and it talked about the bento box and she just pointed out to me because it said the bento has the four compartments and a lid that lets you have a variety of dishes not too much of any one thing and that the bento honors a Japanese dieting philosophy called Hara Hachi Bou which says the goal of a meal is to be 80% full that way you're still hungry for tomorrow and I thought oh my goodness this is this is a bento box but for my values and decisions a way for me to not just over indulge on right now but to leave space for tomorrow and to think about these other parts of my life and so that immediately began became really kind of the UI I used to make all decisions in my life and to navigate my life because what you realize is that and each one of those spaces our values our priorities our goals are things that are uniquely important to you and the opportunity that we have is to make decisions that light up all four of those boxes that are self coherent and like the fullest possible way and once you see that and once you begin making choices like that you discover that like this is what it means to be in a flow state of life right like we know how there being a flow state maybe when we're working out or like dancing or hiking or do drugs or whatever those things are but like how do you get in a flow State on a Tuesday at 3 o'clock when like you don't like anything you have to do this shows you right this shows you what it means to to live up to yourself to to step into the fullest version of yourself to be coherent um can you so yeah I think I know what you mean by self coherent you talked a lot about that in the book yeah I like the concept but I think giving its people in like a fully yeah I may be useful you know I think of it as being you know in integrity with Who I am and that like my best moments my best moments are when I am like actual izing all parts of myself and I'm making a choice that like fulfills my goals that it out give a couple examples of like ways I've used this to show what I mean um you know one of the ways I make a living is by doing uh speaking like paid speaking and and I well sometimes get invited to speak by companies that I don't like that feeling off values to me and I've always said no and and not long after I had came up come up with the bento I got asked to do another one of these and when I made my bed to I went through this process of a self inquiry to find what was in each space for me so I I said well what is my now me want to need and I thought well what about what do I need on a day-to-day basis well I need you know financial security I need a challenge intellectual challenge I need my health you know basically you need the bottom two rows of Maslow's hierarchy so I like list of all those things out and I want to come up with a simple phrase to encapsulate what was most me about that so I said show people the matrix my now me the I used to show people the matrix whenever I'm doing something that's showing people a matrix like that's me and sync with Who I am my future be voice well I came to realize that's the voice that says don't sell out this is this voice that's always telling me it's like made Kickstarter be what it has to be like be law be true to your values never let go of that that's what's so important and value and also that I need to create harmony I'm a child of divorce and so I'm always like trying to bridge conflict so my future me values are are don't sell out and create harmony so when I make decisions I'm always looking to do that my now us is about deep time real deep time with select number of friends and my future us is about building a better matrix and so when I got asked to do this talk I I saluted and asked each of these voices what it should say just simple yes/no so I asked my now mean should I do a talk for a company I don't like my now me wants me to show people the matrix so it said yeah dude that sounds cool let's do it like this is what we're about my now ah so that was a check yes my now says deep time it's like well you know an hour and a half to talk about ideas that's cool check yeah well we're in my future us wants to build a better matrix says yo dude you can't be preaching to the choir like if you want to build a better matrix like this is where you got a be like double check for a future us and then my future me voice which says don't sell out says no your selling out you're just trying to do this for the money you're trying to justify something that is actually against your values and suddenly that voice that have been pissed off in the past I saw it for what it was it was this bouncer it was this big dude looking out for my values right he just stand-in there being like nah you can't come in but yet I could see the full picture I could see that that gave me the agency to tap the bouncer on the shoulder and say no no it's cool I've got this and I ended up making a 180-degree different decision than I would have before starting that process and I did it knowing that I was coherent that I wasn't betraying who I was that I wasn't is one something I need to feel guilty about this is actually something that truly reflects what is important about me and and allowed me to overrule what it felt like one of the most important parts of me right that I don't do things like this and and so that ability to just sort of put myself in context let me let me make a wiser choice and and so I approach all decisions in that way now and the bento shows like I show how for a smoker a smoker like smoking is rational from a now--my perspective because now me is addicted to nicotine and quitting sucks even though for a future me now us future us all though say dude you what are you doing but but now me want you to keep smoking in the same way sacrifice is unthinkable if we only see now me because sacrifice means giving up something now to get something more later even though if you like put the question of sacrifice to your bento you would see a red X and now me and you'd see a green check than the other three boxes for the world today where we only see now me that is an unthinkable decision right sacrifice is unthinkable why would I do that that's irrational and so it became this way of sort of a bird's-eye view to take yourself out of this like interrogation box view of the world of like we're only seeing 24 hours ahead of us and I've come to think of it as I have expanded my perimeter of self-interest right if you expand your perimeter that's what you have to defend that's what you have to be mindful of and so my perimeter includes us and my perimeter includes the future and what that means is that I can think about future events before they happen I don't have to wait for something to reach me to act I can position myself I can anticipate I can try to manipulate the future to what I want it to be not that I'm going to be 100% successful at this but honestly most people are blind right so the one-eyed King rule so even just having a sense of that space gives you such a leg up and allows you to consistently make decisions towards a destination and that you know my experience as a CEO everything like that is a single hardest thing to do so any tool that allows you to make consistent choices in a direction like the the exponential compound interest of that it is just like out of this world especially when most people have no idea what they're doing talk to me about how you develop or here maybe is the right word the voices of the different boxes on the bento box I know you've done a lot of journaling you seem to have an uncommon level of self-awareness and I'm curious if there's a process behind that that people can leverage that maybe aren't as aren't at the same level of self-awareness I don't know if that comes naturally or if you developed it but if you know assume that somebody doesn't have a high degree how would you what tools and tactics do you have for them to use I make every serious decision my wife and I both make every serious decision using the bento like asking each box just like does this is this vibe with us or not and we even have a family bento and then I do a weekly journaling where I use the bento to create my to-do list right because my to-do lists are always just like whatever the work stuff errands I have to do but yet like to manifest the world I want I have to move beyond that now me space right and so that's it's become a ritual way to reshape my time so it's it's become a like I really think of it as a user interface for life it's a UI you know what's really about philosophy is that lets us understand the world what's hard about philosophy is that doesn't exactly give us a tool to apply it I think the philosophy of the 21st century is UI it's UI it's things it's the meta modernism what can we apply what can we use what's useful what has utility and I believe that this shift of expand that expanding our self interest from now me to these four spaces that perimeter self interest that expansion I believe that is the linchpin change that like everything else changes as a result of all right so assuming that we can get people to adopt that let's take a harder case with a bento box that you covered in the book it was whether or not you took a family vacation man I was like following the checkmarks I'm like yeah he's going on the vacation they're like we didn't take the vacation so it's because how do you how do you weight the different boxes like because you I think three of the four boxes if I remember right we're all yes take it but one said known you ended up not taking it so how in that moment did you decide to weight the different boxes well because certain decisions have more relevance to certain spaces than others so it's like you know if you're having a decision about that involves other people you know like that us-based probably is the rightful ruler of that outcome rather than like the now me space so it's not that I don't think all four boxes are always weighted the same and just someday they are they take more importance so in that one my now me was that I had a deadline for the book and if I go on vacation I'm definitely not my deadline and it's like I think that ultimately has to overrule these things but it's you know it's you do get into a lot of I mean I've like taught the bento model to a couple thousand people at this point and workshops and and I help people make decisions and frequently people get stuck to bento say one thing to say another thing three say one one say the other and you're like what do we do and what you see is that this maps out why certain decisions are bad for us you can use the bento to see what short-termism is to see what sacrifice looks like to see what probably the most common mixed response I get are people who's there now us now me answers to the question or know their future us future me questions or yes and this is always about a dream it's always about where they want to go the job they really want to have the thing they really want to do and now says no but future says yes and so then they say well what do I do I'm stuck but this is where by seeing that full picture you are empowered because I say to them well then we have a next question which is what does it take for your now us and now need to say yes why do they say no is it you need emotional validation is it financial validation like what is it that that needs okay let's break that down let's make a goal let's imagine well what is the point in which Nami could become a yes right and let's that could be very simple you know unless it's like iterate towards that but rather than being stuck with this like these emotional feelings like I would be when you know weird company would ask me to speak and I would just be mad like let's not be mad let's not be frustrated let's let's take our power let's take our seat let's have some agency in this let's break this down and so you know my experience is that CEOs leaders I mean everyone's just trying to do the best they can the best they can with what we know and I think that this is the this is the missing information that can allow us to make even better decisions dude well said well said and thank you for taking that - such a tactical place I love the way you think I love how thoughtful you are about this stuff where can people connect with you and continue to engage with you and these ideas I'm all over the place well there's bento ism or you can like it guides you through the process it's like a web version of teaching you how to build out your bento it's also just an awesome website it's like it's like going to a spa it's so relaxing I just I would really encourage you to do it I also do these 20 minutes every Sunday I get on zoom' with whoever joins normally about 50 people or so and we do journaling together we journal our week ahead so we we tap into our pintos together we all write together we have some shared accountability there's a Google Doc where we all say here's what I'm going to do this week and that's just a very organic community that I don't know once covin started I'm like well I'm doing this anyway why not just turn on the camera and that's becoming something really special and then I'm just online at Y Strickler calm but folks are well are welcome to join the weekly bento that's just bitly / weekly bento i send out invites on thursdays and people can come but you know i'm all about just giving people practical tools to help them get where they they know they need to go like people are smart people know people know when things are right or not right like you know we all have this capacity it's just we're lacking the language we're lacking the tools and but they're here they're here alright I think I have guess as to what you're gonna say but my final question what's the impact that you want to have on the world I want to expand how we define our self interests from just now me to be now me future me now us and future us I think our world is trapped by a limited perspective and expanding the perimeter of self-interest is what will finally let us make choices that benefit us not just now but in the future as well I would say that is very coherent with your message man thank you dude so much for coming on I really really enjoyed your book I think that you're thinking about some incredible things you've got an amazing idea for a way forward thank you for sharing it with us guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care everybody it's time to talk about all of our favorite sub mental health is there something holding you back or preventing you from achieving your goals or even just interfering with your happiness do any of you suffer from depression or anxiety as a lot of you guys 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