Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason
Speaker 1: Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. All right, so I'm gonna make
Speaker 1: a confession here on air. We talked about a lot
Speaker 1: of books and we get to read a lot of books,
Speaker 1: or we get handed a lot of books, and you know,
Speaker 1: we sort of flipped through them and we have discussions
Speaker 1: with authors. There are very very few that I pick up.
Speaker 1: I flip them open on the train and then I'm
Speaker 1: just in. And I was totally in on this book
Speaker 1: from the get go. It's called This Could Be Our Future.
Speaker 1: It's a manifesto for a more generous world. Yancy Strickler,
Speaker 1: he's the co founder of Kickstarter, former CEO. He is
Speaker 1: the author of this book with us. Yeah, it's really great.
Speaker 1: It's really great. He's here with us in New York City.
Speaker 1: Is based out in l A, but here in our studio.
Speaker 1: And I have to say, there's so many questions I
Speaker 1: have for you, But I guess the first is why
Speaker 1: this book? Why now? Um? Yeah, great, great question. I
Speaker 1: mean it's it started from me with when I lived
Speaker 1: here in the city. I lived here for almost twenty years,
Speaker 1: and I lived in Lower East Side and there was
Speaker 1: a crystallizing moment where there was an old punk dive
Speaker 1: bar in the neighborhood called Mars Bar. We got turned
Speaker 1: I got torn down and replaced by a ted A
Speaker 1: merrit Trade bank. And what's crazy is it was the
Speaker 1: fourth one within a fifteen minute walk of that same corner.
Speaker 1: And as someone who lived in the neighborhood, I'm like,
Speaker 1: is there some glitch in the matrix where random storefronts
Speaker 1: get switched to like, you know, cell phone and cell
Speaker 1: phone stores and banks over nine And it was just
Speaker 1: it was that dramatic, and they end up being Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal reporting around that at the time. Why are
Speaker 1: there so many banks? And there have been an increase
Speaker 1: of almost a thousand banks in the city over the
Speaker 1: previous ten years, And so I just started asking why
Speaker 1: and um, and so I end up connecting. I came
Speaker 1: to think that the same reason why they were banks
Speaker 1: everywhere was the same reason why every movie was a sequel,
Speaker 1: the same reason why Taylor Swift is on the cover
Speaker 1: of every magazine. And it's this implicit belief that the
Speaker 1: right choice in any decision is just which her option
Speaker 1: makes the most money, and that's become a simple sort
Speaker 1: of calculus that we used to organize and operate our decisions.
Speaker 1: That works some of the time, but then you have
Speaker 1: weird moments where your neighborhood gets overtaken by bank branches
Speaker 1: and you're like, wait, what what what is the logic here?
Speaker 1: And that your life, almost without you having any say
Speaker 1: in it, fundamentally changes. Your daily experience fundamentally changes because
Speaker 1: of these forces that truly are beyond your control. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I think what's interesting is what happened, you know, where
Speaker 1: it went from making money was a good thing and
Speaker 1: many people benefited as a result of it too, making
Speaker 1: money became such a terrible thing hands of just a few. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't think it's a terrible thing. I
Speaker 1: think that I think that there's some I think that
Speaker 1: the goal of financial growth is an intelligent one, but
Speaker 1: we keep expecting that if we just grow the capital base,
Speaker 1: that we can just use that money to solve everything else.
Speaker 1: But I think we're finding that the transaction fees for
Speaker 1: that are very high, and pricing in externalities is very different.
Speaker 1: Cold like the fact that you can still get a
Speaker 1: thirty year mortgage on beachfront property in America right now
Speaker 1: is crazy, like we are not yet really registering what's
Speaker 1: happening around us. So as I thought about this question,
Speaker 1: and I'm a huge optimist about the world and human beings,
Speaker 1: and I look at what we've created in the pursuit
Speaker 1: of money, and it's it's truly amazing what we've created.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at look at the building we're in,
Speaker 1: I mean the city we're in. It's it's truly amazing. Um,
Speaker 1: But what would happen, What would happen if we if
Speaker 1: we switched gears, What would happen if we if we
Speaker 1: saw something different? And I came to think that maybe
Speaker 1: the biggest potential for us could be a real expansion
Speaker 1: of how we see our self interest and how we
Speaker 1: see value, because we right now we operate according the
Speaker 1: belief that what's in our rational self interest is what
Speaker 1: we want and need right now, it's just all about now.
Speaker 1: We talk about this certainly with the retail markets. In
Speaker 1: the shopping market, we've had the author of fashion Opolis
Speaker 1: on and how you're starting to slowly see kind of
Speaker 1: this pushback against fast fashion, because first of all, it's
Speaker 1: we all just end up having so much stuff. You
Speaker 1: also have workers who are making not a lot of
Speaker 1: money to produce all of it, like there's just some
Speaker 1: really bad consequence. The phrase, the phrase I use in
Speaker 1: the book to talk about that is, I say, the
Speaker 1: image that comes to mind when I picture what's happening
Speaker 1: is the mullet, and the mullet is the pinnacle of
Speaker 1: eighties hair technology, you know, business in front, party in
Speaker 1: the back. And so we are living in we are
Speaker 1: living in the mullet economy where for nine of people,
Speaker 1: for workers, it is business in front with wage freezes, layoffs,
Speaker 1: more job in security than ever before. And then for
Speaker 1: the top one to ten percent is the party in
Speaker 1: the back of CEO compensation or executive compensation up a
Speaker 1: thousand percent since the seventies. And so we're on this
Speaker 1: track where people they keep losing out of Americans can't
Speaker 1: pay their bills every month right now, and it just
Speaker 1: keeps going to this top group and it's just not
Speaker 1: you know, a mullet's cool. But you talked about the
Speaker 1: two stories of getting these you know, big bonuses again
Speaker 1: for like the third year in a row, and then
Speaker 1: we had another story about a lot of people tapping
Speaker 1: into these you know, mega a debt middle class getting
Speaker 1: hooked on debt with rates like the dichotomy that is
Speaker 1: going on right now, and that's the big like the
Speaker 1: most red stores. I have. I have a I have
Speaker 1: a chart in the book that I made that shows
Speaker 1: the the pay rates of American workers and and show
Speaker 1: where these froze, like nineteen seventy three, workers really stopped
Speaker 1: getting raises. At the high point for the average American
Speaker 1: worker for paper product productivity was nineteen seventy three, the
Speaker 1: same year Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon came out.
Speaker 1: It's a long time ago and now we're all comfortably
Speaker 1: numb to this new normal. But I have this chart
Speaker 1: where I layer over top of the income, I layered
Speaker 1: the introduction of the credit card, which was the first
Speaker 1: credit cards happened in nineteen sixty six. There was zero
Speaker 1: credit card debt in America in nineteen sixty six. Starting
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventies, when income stopped growing, credit cards filled
Speaker 1: the gap. So if you actually look at the amount
Speaker 1: of credit card debt held by American families, those are
Speaker 1: the pay raises. So you can imagine that instead of
Speaker 1: giving people raises, we gave them credit cards instead because
Speaker 1: it makes more money. If it's future debt. Right, it's
Speaker 1: following the same mentality. So people are getting by, but
Speaker 1: they're doing with debt now instead of pay And I
Speaker 1: don't know, it wasn't with your parents, but like my parents,
Speaker 1: there's like no debt, like they bought their house, like
Speaker 1: they didn't the credit card things were paid off. I
Speaker 1: remember when he got my father got the first credit card,
Speaker 1: like it was but they used it responsible. Sorry, Jason,
Speaker 1: So I just have to ask you, because we only
Speaker 1: have about a minute left. You do strike a pretty
Speaker 1: optimistic tone actually throughout this book, and the second half
Speaker 1: is really sort of what do we do you look
Speaker 1: forward to twenty fifty. You talk about, you know, the
Speaker 1: next generations who will sort of run this stuff and
Speaker 1: a different sort of way of doing it, and it
Speaker 1: in part you have a window into it because of Kickstarter,
Speaker 1: which you found. It help us understand where we may
Speaker 1: go from here. I wish we had more time, but
Speaker 1: but let us know. The future is about balancing financial
Speaker 1: and non financial values, right, and and currently when we
Speaker 1: have discussions of financial versus non financial it's like a
Speaker 1: rational versus an emotional argument. But we need to get
Speaker 1: in place where both of these are rational arguments. Where
Speaker 1: we agree on the importance of the sustainability of our lifestyles,
Speaker 1: where we agree on the importance of social cohesion, and
Speaker 1: that those things can be really put into our decision making.
Speaker 1: So I create a framework I called bentoi is um,
Speaker 1: which is a way to do that. But to me,
Speaker 1: expanding our self interests, expanding what we think of as
Speaker 1: rational value. That's how we keep playing to our strengths
Speaker 1: as human beings, and we keep bettering this just as
Speaker 1: all of our ancestors did for us, Like this is
Speaker 1: our moment to step up for all the generations to follow. Well,
Speaker 1: I do certainly feel like it's a conversation that more
Speaker 1: and more folks are having, including the corporate community. Um
Speaker 1: so and I and I do think we both have teenagers.
Speaker 1: I think teenagers are having this conversation in a very
Speaker 1: uh and I say that in a very optimistic way.
Speaker 1: It's a phenomenal book. I couldn't recommend it more. This
Speaker 1: could be our future manifesto for a more generous world.
Speaker 1: Yancy Strickler is the author, co founder, former CEO of
Speaker 1: Kickstarter