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