Writer, creative entrepreneur and co-founder of Kickstarter, Yancey Strickler, on his career from a music journalist to launching crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, how he overcomes creative anxiety and his manifesto for creating a better future using the Bento model of decision making.
In this episode we speak with writer and co-founder of Kickstarter, Yancey Stricker, about his origins as a writer, tools he’s used to overcome creative anxiety, why it's important to share your ideas early and how he wrote his book: This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. He explains why the Bento model - rethinking short-term interest - can create a better future for us all.
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SHOWNOTES
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ABOUT YANCEY
Yancey Strickler is the founder of The Bento Society, the cofounder of Kickstarter, and the cofounder of the artist resource The Creative Independent. His book This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, explores a vision for building a society that looks beyond money and toward maximizing the values that make life worth living.
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QUOTES FROM YANCEY:
“Holding ideas is bad. You have got to, you know, even if it's just a close friend, you gotta let ideas feel the oxygen. You have got to try to talk them through”
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RESOURCES
Connect with Yancey:
Twitter: @ystrickler
Instagram: @ystrickler
Other links:
For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit podcast.londonwriterssalon.com
For free writing sessions, join free Writers’ Hours: writershour.com
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Matt: Hello, and welcome to season two of the London Writers’ Salon podcast. I'm Matt.
Parul: I’m Parul. And each week we sit down with a writer that we admire to talk about the craft of writing and the art of building a successful and sustainable writing career.
Matt: These interviews are recorded live with our global writing community. If you would like to join us for the next recording or write with us at our daily Writers’ Hour writing sessions, head to londonwriterssalon.com for more information.
Parul: In this episode, we interview the entrepreneur and writer, Yancey Strickler. He's one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, a platform and a movement that popularised words like creator and crowdfunding, and actually revolutionised how writers, artists, and entrepreneurs fund their projects and their ideas.
Matt: We speak with Yancey about how he moved from working as a music journalist to launching and running Kickstarter and how, when returning to writing years later, he faced self-doubt and the simple mindset change he used to trick himself into completing his book. We
Parul: We actually dive into his book. This could be our future and manifesto for a more generous world. And Yancey walks us through one of the concepts in his book, the bento model. It's a way of making decisions that helps you and society create a better future. And by the way, we'll share his slides in the show notes so that you can see the visual representation of the bento model.
Matt: Yancey is such a fascinating person, and this was such a fun and thought-provoking conversation about entrepreneurship, changing careers, creativity, writing, and so much more. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Yancey Strickler. If we could be holding this interview anywhere in the world, imagine the three of us with a bunch of people, where would you love us to be right now?
Yancey: I would pick a place called Scarr's Pizza on the Lower East Side corner of Orchard and Canal. It's a great pizza spot, my favourite block in New York. Yeah, there's probably no place I'd rather be at the second.
Matt: All right. We've booked out the pizza place. Here we are. Everyone's got a slice, a tall cup of something. So Yancey, before you were known as the co-founder of Kickstarter and your other endeavours, you also worked as a music critic and your early career was spent almost a decade as a music critic. And we're curious, is there any wacky or weird story, or maybe what's the wackiest or the weirdest story from your time writing about music?
Yancey: Well, I'm excited to do this interview because I am, I'm a writer who I be—who became an entrepreneur. And in most conversations, I'm like an entrepreneur who did some other stuff before is like the frame people see me through. And so like from age seven, I have been a writer. You know, I wrote, I wrote science fiction books like in composition books, series of them as a kid. And that was always my dream and ambition. And so my first decade or so of my professional career, I hacked together living reviewing records and interviewing bands for anyone that would publish me. My very first piece of published writing was for Pitchfork, which was pretty amazing. But I was just doing the grind for 10 years. The grind of like 75 words live preview in The Village Voice for an upcoming show, you know, and that was just enough to get like my initials in the paper. And so, yeah, I did, I did that for a, a long time and, you know, moments I remember, I mean, as a writer, I remember interviewing the band The Rapture who are a really big band at the time in New York. During the middle of the New York City blackout. We were like mid-interview when all the power went out and we spent the blackout together. That was super interesting. And then I was also an editor at some online publications and got to assign writing to some great writers. And one in particular I remember is that we had Harvey Pekar, creator of, you know, comic books, American Splendors interviewed him. We had Harvey Pekar reviewing jazz records for us and Harvey didn't use the, didn't use email so he would just call us on the phone. And we talked to him about records, do, do edits like over the phone together. And so doing that with like a true legend, like a classic phone line edit was something I will never forget.
Matt: That’s great. Imagine. What a, a wild early career, especially in New York during that time. In your book, you talk about your dream was to be a writer and you had made it.
Yancey: Yeah.
Matt: You had gotten there, you were doing what you loved. What then tempted you to go and leave and do this thing with Kickstarter that ended up being so big and those early days?
Yancey: I loved writing, but you know, I always liked making stuff happen, doing stuff. I made zines. I had multiple zines I created and I started a record label where I just saw so many young bands. I was just, I was like, I just wanna put your CDRs that you sell at shows online and created a record label to just digitally release and put out great records. I mean, bands that are still, that still matter today, uh, starting out that way. So I just always had this like impulse to do things. I didn't think of that as being entrepreneurial. It was just sort of fun, you know, it's just like, I, I don't know. I, I have a lot of energy and then it was during that period of time that I made a new friend, this person named Perry Chen, who at the time he was working in a restaurant in Brooklyn where I was a regular. And he asked me to hang out after service one night and he told me about the idea for crowdfunding, that he had been wanting to throw a concert in New Orleans a few years before, was gonna have to front $20,000 to make it happen, which he couldn't do. And he's had this thought of what if I could propose the idea for the concert online, people put up their credit cards, but they're only charged if the show sells out and that way I don't have to make this decision like collectively the public does. And so that just became this like this super fun secret project to, to conspire, uh, with a friend about, you know, and the farther we went with it, the more that we believed that it was something real, but that gap between that first conversation to then Kickstarter being live was four years in between that time. And during that time, Perry was full-time working on the ado, so was Charles Adler, also a co-founder of Kickstarter. We met a bit later. But I still had my day job during that time. I had my day job as an editor, as an editor in chief of an online magazine, as a writer. And I honestly didn't want to give that up. And it was so central to my identity. Kickstarter was live for four months before I quit that because that was who I was. And I remember having dinner with a friend of mine who was the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork at the time. And talking about this decision of should I leave and I really worried about my identity, no longer being a writer, no longer being a critic. And I was worried like, will I love music anymore? Will I ever write anymore? I actually ended up loving music more than ever cause I no longer had to have an opinion. I could just listen to Fleetwood Mac all the time and it was fine. And then for writing, you know, you learn, oh actually writing a good email was actually just as hard as writing a good essay and knowing how to express yourself clearly is advantageous everywhere. So I ended up finding I'm still a writer. I'm actually like writing in an even wavier way. And, and stepping away from Kickstarter four years ago, you know, I just jumped right back into being a writer again, although I wasn't, I wasn't sure that was gonna happen, but at the core, that is me. You know, I just found out that that—being thoughtful about how you express yourself as a writer is something that comes through in any, in any channel where you operate.
Parul: I really like that flexibility actually cause I think there is a lot of fear around stepping away from something that we think as identity, particularly something like writing. I'm curious when you were—so you’re at Kickstarter, were you journaling, were you writing for yourself in any way?
Yancey: Once in a blue moon, I would. The job was so all-consuming that there was not really space for that. I think I wrote, I mean, I have like on my website, actually, I'm changing my website right at this moment so it's not there now, but I've blogged a lot since the year 2000. And you know, I blog daily for years online. Most of that has taken offline, but there's like a good 10-year gap once Kickstarter happens where I really just stopped doing that. There are a couple of pieces here and there, but I, I just didn't have, um, space for it anymore, but did a lot, the about page on kickstarter.com to this day, you know, it's—I spend a lot of time writing that there are terms of use. I spend a lot of time writing that. I mean, literally, those parts are things that, you know, I would write as well.
Matt: I’m curious how important was writing—you talk about the, about page, but as far as communicating the vision, communicating to employees, how important was that when you were—
Yancey: Everything. It's a, it's everything. I mean, there's what you tell people it is, and there's how people experience it. And those, those mix of things is kind of the truth. But I think that language is, is especially important. During that four-year period between us as founders have any idea and then the idea being live, there were approximately 500 million conversations of us trying to pitch an artist like here's this idea. And all those conversations, for a long time, were just us finding the language that let people understand what the hell we were talking about. There's a lot of explanation with Kickstarter, conditional purchasing of, you know, crowdfunding had never existed, direct supporting of artists online did not happen, like it did not happen. The word creator to describe someone who makes things online did not exist. Like that's a phrase that we created. There's so much educating you had to do. But what I would realise is you have so many of those conversations and you can see the moment when someone stops listening to you. You can see the moment where their eyes glaze over and they're just bored by what you're saying or you got too technical, you overexplain. And through those conversations, you sort of iterate to find what the story is. And so I found it's like a verbal exploration will tell you, like you'll feel in your heart and, and what's alive in a conversation, what matters and what doesn't. And then you're trying to translate that into the page, but that was like years of. iteration through sometimes awkward conversations. I'm just trying to figure out how in the world do you explain this thing. That process kind of never stopped. You know, I can even remember some of our big controversies, emergency moments, which are some of my favourite moments as a CEO where it's like, you're locked in a room with the four other smartest people in the company, and you have to figure out an impossible problem, you know, in 24 hours, no matter what. I can remember multiple times having this moment. You're, you're grinding on copy, trying to get the right corporate phrasing. And then someone will say, what are we trying to say? And then you have to try to just tell it to that person like they're a person. It's in that moment that you start to realise, oh right, we're trying to say that we really messed up actually so let's, let’s make that the first sentence. We, we kind of skipped over that part, you know? So I, I find that conversation is what reveals so much of what is truthful in our ideas, in our phrasing all that.
Matt: I love it. I'm picturing myself in the room with you and, and trying to wrestle with these, these big questions, what a time. And before we even go, go deeper into this, just a thank you for what you and your co-founders have paved the way for, for us. I mean, the, the concept of creator, uh, and I know we'll go into it a little bit later, but you know, we use Patreon as a, a, a platform to help our organisation. And in large part, I—sure they have to credit you for kickstarting–no pun intended–all of that. So thank you, Yancey, for everything you've given to this community of creatives.
Parul: Absolutely. I second that.
Yancey: Yeah.
Parul: It's like, you've invented a language.
Yancey: Well, we're all just standing on the shoulders of others, right? The best projects are the one where you get to add a sentence to something that someone else started and someone else adds a sentence to what you did. And so Kickstarters are part of a chain of a lot of things happening and yeah, we're very proud to be part of that chain.
Matt: Well, so now we'd like to go a little bit into your book here so This Could Be Our Future, a beautiful book. You've written this and you've called it a manifesto. What is your aim and hope with the book?
Yancey: Well, manifesto's a funny word. My editor put it in the title and I was so scared of it. You know, I'm like, oh wait, wait are you sure? Are you sure? But she's, you know, she was adamant. She's like, “That is what this is.” The whole process of coming to write this I—maybe I'll just start with that. So I was full-time on Kickstarter for 10 years, the CEO for four, I got burnt out and really tired. It wore me down. I left in 2017. I left the company entirely. I just said I wanna throw away that part of my brain for a while. And I wasn't sure what was gonna happen next. Our public benefit corporation will never go public. We'll never sell. So it's not like we didn't personally enrich ourselves in some grotesque way, but I wasn't sure what I was gonna do. And I ended up thinking, you know, I have spent all this time planning the company's resources, figuring out what we do as an organisation, what if I imagine myself as a company? I'm Yancey, Inc. And I've gotta do like my strategic planning for the next 18 months of this entity of Yancy. And so I spent like a week filling up a notebook, doing SWOT analysis of myself, writing down everything I'd ever done before, everything I was good at, everything I was bad at, everything I dreamed of being. I created a list of what are possible jobs I could do. A lot of those ended up being media related. So then I had a list of what are jobs I could do where no one would ever know I did them, you know, and just tried to force myself through all these exercises. And at the end of the week, like there were pretty clearly five potential paths that were there for me that like came up over and over, played to my strengths, things I've been interested in the past. And I really wasn't sure what the next step would be after that. I thought I need to try to be these things. And so the next week I created this strategy, this, this plan where each day I would wake up and I would fully commit to being one of those five jobs for the whole day. So the first thing was being a teacher. And so the entire day that Monday, I woke up and I thought, okay, I'm a teacher. I don't know everything about being, being a teaching. I know a fair amount, but I'm gonna like create a lesson plan. I'm gonna imagine, like, what do I teach and just try to spend a day in that world. Uh, day two was like a, a film project that I've been thinking about. Day three was turning a side project as a full-time job like being a CEO again, and day four was to write this book based on this one talk I'd given while I was at Kickstarter that had like gone nerd viral. And I thought I could turn that—what if that talk were a book? And the day I sat down and pretended that I was writing a book, I could just feel on my body this is what I should do. Like every sense in me just said, yeah, oh, I, I've got this. Like, this is flowing. I think I know how to do this. And so I then create more structures for myself. I said, okay, this is September. I was like, by the end of the year, I must have an agent or else I'm going to abandon this so I like did that. And for a month went and, you know, asked everyone. I knew who had ever written a book before who could they talk to, blah, blah, blah. I met six or seven people, all of them very nice. All these agents telling me, write a book about kickstart your life. Like, go do it. It's gonna be great, you know, whatever, just super encouraging. And there's one agent I met who is very sceptical of me. And he's just like, “I don't know. I'm not—I don't know, man. I don't know.” And I really wanted to work with him cause I thought if I could get convinced the sceptic that like my proposal is good, that tells me that what I'm doing is for real. These other people, they want my business, but this guy, like I have to earn his business so I want him. So he, he became my target of who I wanted to work with and he agreed he would like work with me. And so I sent him three drafts of an outline before he was like, “This is something we could send.” And then that, you know, started that next part of talking to, to publishers. And then I ended getting this, the publishing deal with, with Viking. Like I met all these editors. One meeting felt right. Felt right being with Emily, my editor. Felt like, oh, this is what a writer being with an author, being with an editor feels like. And because of that, I was hoping it would work out that way and it, it did. Um, but even after all that, so I like, I get the deal, you know, I've set all these structures. I like checked all the boxes. Finally, I can do it. And then I'm just terrified. I'm terrified. It's my first week. It's like January 2nd. I gave myself one year to write the book because I wanted this job to kick my ass cause I thought that'll get the best work out of me. If I can spend six months having lunch with people telling them I've just sold a book, like I'm never gonna do it. I will get all the, all the social design, you know, all the social rewards outta this without doing anything. So I can't do that. So this like has to be a hard job. And so I went to a space that had no internet. I just went there with my computer and books. And my second day, I was just so angry all day and I felt angry the way I did when I was like a CEO. And I felt like people were demanding my time, too much of my time or something, just kind of being pissy. When I was a CEO and I’ve had those feelings, I could always blame someone else, but here it was just me in a room by myself with my ideas. And it just made me realise how, how much deeper I was gonna have to go than I realised. And that night I was sitting at home and saying to my wife, like, “I don't know if I can do this. Like, I don't know if I can do this. Like, why me?” I felt so insecure about it. And she just responded saying, “Well, whatever it is, just know that what you're doing right now isn't working for you and it's not gonna work.” This notion of me just wondering, can I do this? Like, this is a losing situation. And when she told me that, I flashed instantly to this, this book I'd read a couple months before. It was about the Beatles, a whole book just about the year 1966, which is the year the Beatles wrote, recorded and released Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Sergeant Peppers’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. So three, three of the greatest albums of all time, all written and made in one calendar year. It was also the first year the Beatles took a vacation. They all took two months off that year. And on their vacations, they all went separate ways. And Paul McCartney, for his vacation, decided he wanted to drive across France and Spain by himself, but it was the height of Beatlemania. So that was gonna be kind of nuts. So he went in disguise, he slipped his hair back, he wore fake glasses and he had a moustache. And for those six weeks, Paul was unrecognised. He had an assumed name and he managed to just be a regular person, really for the first time in his whole life not having to be like the Paul McCartney. Paul returned to London at the end of this experience and called the other Beatles and told them and said, “You will never believe what happened to me. I changed how I looked and I didn't have to be a Beatle anymore. For our next record, we can't be Beatles. It's gonna be too much pressure. We all have to be someone else.” And this is the idea where Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band came from. And so when my wife told me, “You wondering if you can do this is not gonna work for you. You need to find something else,” I instantly thought I have to grow a moustache because the, the nice guy version of me looks in the mirror and wonders, can I do this? Do I have permission? Like, can I write a manifesto? But the version of me with a moustache doesn't care what anyone thinks. He hopes someone thinks they're writing a manifesto. Like he wants people to be scared. And if I couldn't make myself be that I needed to trick myself into thinking and feeling that way. And so I did that. The entire time I wrote the book, I had this moustache that was always this reminder to me to not be myself, this reminder to me that I'm, I'm in service of this larger role that like to do this project, I needed to have a certain kind of mindset. It served me incredibly well. And you know, I just thought of this as like, I'm a human, I'm so weak, I can't get outta my own way, I need things to force me to break that. I need like a big ugly thing on my face. Like that's, that's how much of a reminder I need. Through the entire process of drafting, writing everything I was, I, I was constantly creating these kinds of structures and games with myself. I'm just trying to talk to myself and trying to, trying to get me to perform the way I knew needed to happen. And I ended up finding a lot of sort of indirect and experiential ways to get there.
Parul: That's a great story. And I love this idea of trying to game yourself into figuring out whether it's a moustache or whatever it is to change your mindset. I love it. And I'd love to talk a little bit about your book and, and what you ended up writing and the content of that. And my very simple takeaway is that it's a book about how to be happy and how to, how to approach society, how to, how to approach every single day in our—the decisions that we make. But actually you, you break down the book into two parts. This is the first part, which is where you talk about this idea—I had never heard it before—financial maximisation as this problem. And then the solution is in part two, which is about the bento box and bentoism, and I wonder if you could maybe just explain some of these concepts for anyone who doesn't know. So first off you talk about this—so troublesome paradigm that we live in, where maximizing for money is, is our norm. Why is that the boogeyman?
Yancey: I write about how the world has been overtaken by an invisible belief that the right choice in any decision is whichever option makes the most money. In the past, we're rule—a world ruled by values, moral notions of right and wrong, what's just, what's beautiful and then over the past 50 or 60 years, we've been ruled by a slightly different concept called value, which is basically a numerical or mathematical expression of values. But today value is always translated as money and as price. And so we have an entire society, especially in the West, that is optimising for financial outcomes. And the challenge here is that when you only optimise for financial outcomes, you have negative consequences on other dimensions of planetary existence like pollution or paying workers too little, creating large degrees of inequality, management keeping profits for themselves and offshoring jobs. There's all sorts of issues that happen when, when we optimise for that one metric. A lot of decisions that are clear, clearly, plainly not in our self-interest are justifiable. And so this is like the, the place where we're currently trapped. And I view this as like not we're so evil or so dumb. I think we're doing the best we can with what we know. This is what we've known, but in the digital age, our notion of what is valuable and, for a variety of reasons, our notion of self is quite different. We tend to think of our self-interest as being what I, as an individual person want or need right this second, uh, our self-interest is now me. Actually, our self-interest is something that's bigger. And so I'm going to show the screen for just a moment, um, and show this concept. This is how I show it in the book. This is how we think of value success today. It's, it's a hockey stick graph, a chart where whatever it is that you want is growing so fast, the line slopes up into the right. You can imagine this self-interest here, could show money, power, you know, fans, whatever it is you might want. And so this is what we think of like the world's best-case scenario. This is where the world of money makes tons of sense. But when you take a step back, you could see that this is actually just a small slice of a much larger picture because the X axis representing time goes now as far into the futures we might, we might want. And the Y axis of self-interest also extends cause as our self-interest grows, so do our responsibilities. The difference between being single and having a family is huge or uh, being an employee or being a boss, huge differences in how you think about things. And so we can actually imagine there being four distinct spaces of our self-interest. There's now me, what I as an individual want to need right now. In the bottom right there's future me, what the older wiser version of me that I hope to someday, someday become what that person wants me to do. You know, they become real or not real based on the decisions I make at any moment. There's now us, the people in my life who I care about and who care about me and there's future us thinking about the world my kid will inhabit, the future for all of us will live in. The secret is that every decision we make leaves a footprint in all these spaces and all these spaces shape our choices. However, today, we're functionally blind to everything other than now me. These other dimensions of life are less rational, more emotional. We, we have a harder time talking about them. They're not as clearly understood as this now me space, and this is what limits us. Um, so when I first drew this little sketch, I wrote a simple description next to it. This is beyond near-term orientation. It's a very simple two by two that helps you see passes now me and I realised that made an acronym for a bento, and I thought, oh, the, the bento box, you know, the Japanese packed lunch with compartments and a lid lets you always have a balanced, uh, meal of a variety of dishes without anything getting spoiled. And the bento honours this Japanese dieting philosophy called hara hachi bu, which says the goal of a meal is to be 80% full that way, you're still hungry for tomorrow. So the bento is the same idea, but for our values and decisions, a way to make choices, not just thinking about this now me space, but to see the full dimensions of our self-interest and give you one quick example of showing how it works, this is actually a tool and interface, right? And we can imagine a smoker asking their bento, should I quit smoking? In this case, the smoker’s now us, which thinks of their family and friends says, “Yes, you should quit. Like my family hates it. Let's quit right now.” The smoker's future us, which thinks about the, their future, their kids will inhabit says “Yes, quit right now. Imagine if your kids smoke because of you.” The smoker’s future me, well, there’s not going to be a future me so it says, “Quit now. Yeah, we want a long life.” But the smoker's now me, it says, “No, let's not quit smoking. Like I'm addicted to nicotine. Quitting’s gonna suck. Hell no.” And the point here is that each one of these voices is correct.
No one is wrong here. No one's making anything up. Every, every one of these perspectives has a rational point of view based on what it's seeing, but in a world like we have today, where we have this kind of passive awareness, we struggle to see these other spaces and we're just trapped in these now me kind of decisions. And so that is what's happened with financial maximisation. That is what's happened with a lot of how we think about things, but this is changing in huge ways. I mean, we can all feel it since COVID. The internet has turned us into networked organisms. Like the us space, the future space, climate change is, is bringing the future into the present. This is changing in a huge way, and I believe that this expansion of self-interest rather than ourselves being defined as the limited notion of our current individual self, but instead ourselves are our current physical selves, our relationships, our reputations, our goals, the things that drive us, all of that is who we are. And this is a way to, to really operate with that, to, to make that functional and a part of every single decision you make. So I've lived according to my bento for three plus years, you know, hundreds of people do, thousands of people have been, have built their bentos, but it is a rock solid way to know what's important to you and to make decisions that are consistently contributing to the destination that you desire.
Matt: It's really great. And what's so nice about is how, how simple it is, but how effective in placing yourself in these four different points of perspective. And you say people use this to make decisions. You talk about it in the book, how you use it to make decisions. How do people use it? I, I know you mentioned you have it up on your board every time you have a big decision. How do you use it, or how do you see other people using it?
Yancey: Part of how we get together as the bento societies, we have something called the weekly bento. You can sign up at bento.org/events, but every Sunday at 12:00 PM Eastern, we hop on a zoom call and we make our—this is my bento for this week. We make our bento for each week. And so what you do is you have your now me goals. Your now me goals are like your to-do list. This talk is on my now me list. Um, so your now me is just like errands, things you have to take care of. My now us is like the people in my life who I need to talk to this week. Who are the people that I care about, that I feel less in touch with? Let me make sure they're on the list. I crossed out three other names yesterday. I called them. My future us, I think about if I actually care about the things I say I care about. What can I do practically in the next seven days to contribute to that. So this always comes down to contributing my time to something bigger than me, learning about something or teaching something. And then finally for my future me voice is like telling me kind of who I wanna be. Here's what my future me said for this week. What am I supposed to think about, uh, provider for my family, not insecure, very helpful. I'm motivated by truth. I speak what feels true. I aggressively manage my time. I live up to myself. So each week I talk back to myself through this list every week and I always have it open to me next to my desk. And when I have those five minutes after I finished a task, I look down at this to see what am I gonna do with my brain right now rather than my inbox, rather than Twitter. And so this as like a weekly grounding is amazing. I also have a quarterly bento where I will look back at everything that happened the past quarter. What are the main things I wanna accomplish next quarter. Like I have one I'm working on now and it's like giving your planning mind the power over your reactive mind. And again, you mentioned the simplicity, but like these four boxes, it's hard to be like more simple, dumber than these four boxes. You know, I'm three years into this. I'm writing a book just about bento at the moment. There, there's so much to learn from this still every day. Some, someone revealed in a, in a one weekly bento, not long ago, like we've been using this as group. We've used this for like a year and someone has asked, you know, where's now. And we suddenly realised now is like, actually this centre line. Now is like this precipice between now and the future. And we, you know, you just have these fascinating conversations to think about, oh, we're always on this, this verge of the future. How do we think about that? It is so basic yet the more I spend with it, and I think this is true for all of us, there's just a lot there. There's just a lot there. And so I am a, I'm a student of it, you know? And I, I don't think of it as like a—I mean, I guess I created the idea, but it's, you know, it's something I found, it's something I found. It is true and I found it and, um, and it ends up being very helpful. It's great.
Matt: It’s great. I'm, I’m already thinking how we can use it. We, we do a goal-setting workshop every month and I'm already thinking, I'm sure Parul and I will put our heads together and think, how do we implement this into next month?
Yancey: The bento society has a bento. It works for organisations like it's, it's a, it's a tool for, for any goal-setting individual collective, you know, what are we here for? This is like, it's a compass. It's a usable compass that lets everyone make decisions using the same, you know, same information, same ideas.
Parul: I particularly love how it gives you the freedom to explore the things that you care about in the future, today, this week, things that we say that we want to be or that the society we'd like to be part of. I really love that. I love that in your book, you explore bento in different ways. And I, as an editor and a writer, I particularly love how you explore the character and you explore John Travolta's character Butch in Pulp Fiction and you talk us through why he makes a decision. Could you tell us that story?
Yancey: Yeah. It's, it's Butch, Bruce Willis's character in Pulp Fiction. He's the boxer and there's a scene in the movie where he has to decide whether to go back and get his father's watch, which is like left behind in his apartment. And he knows there's like gangsters waiting for him. So he faces a choice of should he go get his watch or not? And I had just happened to be reading the original Pulp Fiction script, and it had a scene, a monologue that was cut out of the final. But it's a scene of the Butch character pacing back and forth in front of his house, debating whether or not to go get his father's watch. He has this internal, this monologue where it's like, but you're so stupid and how could you do this? Think about Fabienne and think about your, you know, your lover, but you know what our family legacy is. We never step back from a fight, you know, and he ends up like sort of jacking himself up to go in and do this. And I map this monologue to the bento because all four boxes easily line up with what is happening for him. What he reveals by sort of thinking this through each perspective is that actually to live up to his ideal self, this sort of future me, future us, he has to go and do this, whether he dies or not. And so he makes what from a, you know, classic game theory perspective is an irrational decision, you go into the place where gangsters are, but for him to be true to his Butch nest, he has no choice actually. And you know, in the end he survives, he survives because he follows his true essence and talks—I, I will give examples of Brian Eno's career and Madonna's career by making their bentos and sort of imagining—even someone like Madonna who is always reinventing.—what is the framework through that she as an artist might be thinking through to where her, her approach to her career makes sense, and you break it down, it's—you kind of see, oh, this is the essence of Madonna. It's like take back sexuality from the patriarchy. Never repeat yourself. Make things that like New York City, uh, people of colour, downtown New York would think is cool and like be an icon and, you know, that's your future us goal, be an icon. And so what you find is that making a great decision is often about finding those unique paths that successfully hold the tension between the different parts of you. It's not always that everything is easy, but it's like, I need to satisfy this while also satisfying this and getting it to there. And that will show you what kind of project to do, what are ways to execute it. It will tell you a lot about the flavour of how, of, how you get there. Especially for me as a music critic, there's certain artists that seem like how in the world do they think of the things that they do. But actually, I have found repeatedly that the bento actually unpacks it fairly well and lets you give a sense of maybe this is what's important to someone. It might be wrong, but like maybe if these things were important, then maybe this career would be true.
Parul: I love it. And I can think of characters that I like in books and stories. And I can imagine that if I were to unpack why I love their characters, it's because they have been thinking about their future self or the future us in their, in their day-to-day decisions. Thanks. That's a, that's an excellent tool for me to add to my editor toolbox.
Matt: We all most need to use it for, yeah, for character development. Maybe there's a, a bento for, for writing your characters, which is great. So kind of wanna dance around a little bit, Yancey, so in this book, kind of stepping away from bento a little bit, you're, you're very honest about when you were the CEO of Kickstarter, some of the anxiety or the imposter syndrome that you felt that you dealt with as, as a CEO. And I'm, I'm curious. Did you feel any of that self-doubt imposter syndrome worrying about success when you were writing this book?
Yancey: Oh, of course. I dunno if you can see it, like self-doubt, is sitting right here and failure is sitting right here right next to me. And they both have—they're like tapping, tapping anxiously on the table right now next to me. So yeah, they're, they're here. They're always here, but I think media images of what I was supposed to be as a tech founder, as whatever the CV kind of credentials would say. As silly as it seems, those media expectations of what that looked like affected me cause I could see like the hard-charging kind of ruthless icon of what a great leader was. I don't know that there were more hours I could work every day and like I, you know, I only think about this, but like, I don't think I'm as hard as those things, you know, I don't think I—am I hungry enough in those ways. Am I, you know, and, and it just put me in a place of constantly feeling inadequate and, and feeling like there's this bar that I struggle to measure up to. And so much of it just came from even the, the decisions that look good for Kickstarter now, like becoming a public benefit corporation or, uh, being focused on creative projects, not, not trying to be as big as possible, you know, in those moments, uh, all of those decisions can look questionable, you know, on the wrong day, on the wrong day, you can convince yourself your’re, you're wrong about everything. And so I, yeah, I, I had a lot of self-conversation where I, you know, in the same way that I'm a writer who became an entrepreneur, I just felt my oddball-ness and say, rather than trusting in like, that's part of what got me here, I would doubt it or I would fight it. You know, I would wanna rub off those rough edges, be more what I imagined someone else would be. I, I always imagined the give or play game like Mario Kart. There will be like a ghost version of you, like the best, the best lap of the track and you can race the ghost of that person. I always pictured like the ghost Yancey was so much better than me at everything. And I was always, always looking at ghost Yancey up ahead, and just, just feeling so upset with myself. Things changed for me a little bit when I found, I found a couple of books in particular book by, uh, an author named Konosuke Matsushita called Not for Bread Alone. That was like the first leadership role model I connected to. I was like, oh, I'm not, I'm not one of one possibly broken. I am following someone that helped so much, that helped so much, but I, that was always a struggle with me. You know, writing a book. I did the moustache thing to help, but I think that I have reached a point in this process, although it never totally stops of just, I don't know if I've satisfied the voice or not, but, hmm, I'm just kind of ready to get on with it, you know, I've, I've made my commitments to who I am. One thing I've learned is that—and it came up when I was saying to my wife, like, I don't know if I could do this book, but like wondering, wondering is not helpful. Like I wanna move from wondering to learning as much as possible, you know? So if I'm wondering about something, well then how can I, can I try it? Can I talk to someone? Can I test it? Like how can I get myself out of the loop in my head and put, you know, get some traction again. And so I feel like that, that's been a bit of how I've learned how to ground that, to where the voices that tell me I have no value or worth, and that everyone is smarter than me. I mean, those voices are here all the time. Like I said, they're, they're sitting on either side of me at this moment, but I've learned how to talk to myself in such a way to say, I know that's not real. I know that's not real. And I sometimes listen. I, I was just interviewing the artist, amazing artist, Hank Willis Thomas, a couple weeks ago and he talked about how he is always practising trying to get better talking to himself cause he's like, “What better upgrades can I make? Of course, I listen to myself, so I need to talk to myself better. How do I talk to myself?” And I, I thought that was a nice, very direct way of putting it, that I think is, is really true.
Parul: Hmm. What are some of the self-talk that you have if you are feeling particularly doubtful or anxious or you have imposter syndrome? Is there anything you say to yourself?
Yancey: Yeah, I have like an absurd Quixotic idea that's—has a made-up name and it's hard to explain and like everyone that's not writing me right now to tell me how great my idea is, is like mocking me instead. There's a, there's a big group chat where everyone in the world is mocking me and it's happening right at this moment, you know? So there are always those thoughts, but then I just think so much of what has helped me is other people. You know, when I first had the idea for the bento, it was exactly like drawing that picture. It was mid-writing the book and I thought it was true, but I needed to know so I, I called a friend—I was living in LA.—and asked her if she could host a salon for me in her house cause I wanted to try sharing an idea. And so two weeks later, I was standing in her living room in front of 35 strangers and I presented the idea of bento to these people. And I wanted to see if I could say the idea without throwing up. And I wanna see what people would say and people had amazing questions. It became more alive in that moment as people said things back and it like was a strong affirmation that I am not crazy. I am not crazy. And so now I think the biggest source of grounding I have is the community of people who I know very well and know deeply and dear friends that make me up, but all I have to do is look at my life, look at their lives, look at our lives to say I don’t that I could explain all this, you know, if you, if you put me on 60 minutes, like, but am I gonna say all the best things? No. But would I be able to say for my soul that this is truly valuable? Yeah, yeah. And I could do it not just on my own experience. That is knowledge, right? I mean, I don't know what more knowledge there is in that. The knowledge for me has been seeing it live, not just in my heart and in my brain, and my soul, but other people's. And that just lets me say, all right, give it a break. This is, you know, you don't, you don't need to worry about this anymore.
Parul: I like the bravery of actually just taking it out there, pushing it out, even when you're uncomfortable and seeing—
Yancey: You have to. I mean, that was the same lesson of Kickstarter, just trying to tell people about your idea. Holding ideas is, is bad. You gotta, you know, even if it's just a close friend, you gotta let ideas feel the oxygen. You gotta try to talk 'em through. I do a lot of, like, I've talked to myself on the phone using Otter.ai, the app, and like auto transcribe my own words, like Trump's genius at Twitter, uh, RIP, was that he tweeted like he talked. In language, written language that reads like someone talks comes across is way more authentic than written language that reads as something that was written. And so I think like talking things out helps a lot. Yeah. And when having those ideas about how you want it to feel—I also had in writing the book, I created this system for myself. I don't know that this is a real system, but there's like a punchiness and a simplicity that I wanted to have to the writing. And I thought I'm writing kind of complicated things so it needs to be very basic. And so there are a few things that had to be true. Number one, every sentence had to be factual. So I always wanted to be stringing together factual sentences. Like every sentence on a, on its own has to stand as like being true. I wanted no sentence to be longer than 12 words. If something could be two sentences rather than one long one, better to be two sentences. And I wanted no paragraph longer than five lines. I imagined like the spaciousness of a reader looking at the page. And so I, as I was writing and that, that was like the rhythm I was imagining and I read a lot, read out loud a lot to myself when I would, when I would do it. The way the words were gonna look and feel on the page and what the rhythm and the staccato of the language would say to a person reading it were all like, you know, stylistically intentional of how to communicate this idea in the way that it felt it needed to be communicated.
Parul: And that really came across, man, I were commenting about how it was so drinkable, easy, easier to just turn the pages and, and be immersed in what I—what's could at first glance seemed like a complex idea. So that makes sense.
Matt: Yeah. And, and, and how much you were thinking about the reader through it, I mean, that, that really came through, you respected the reader. You wanted us to get it. It's, it's lovely to see behind the scenes, the x-ray of the finished product, what went into it.
Yancey: Yeah. I'm, I'm a, I'm a full-time reader, a part-time writer, you know? So I, yeah, definitely think, think, and think in terms of the reader.
Matt: Were there any role models that you looked to as far as either authors or books that you kind of said I, I want it to be like this. I wanna sit on the shelf next to this, or I want it to feel like this kind of book?
Yancey: Yeah. I mean, those are more thematic. My dream is that it sits in the bookshelf next to E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful. That might be the number one book I would wish it to be associated with, but there's, uh, just simple books that, you know, are expressing a thought, but like a, an intimate thought, but in a way that, you know, is ownable for someone else. It's, it's hard for me to pick favourite books or, I mean, I just read so much and I, I steal from, you know, and learn from everybody.
Matt: That's great.
Parul: I'd love to talk about this, this book in the context of the community you're building and the movement, I think, that you are, you are passionate about and that you are bringing people along to and to be, be part of. And there are many writers in our community who are exploring different ideas and perhaps growing their own, you know, communities. So I'm curious to understand how you think about building a community, whether you have any methods, I'm—maybe not the right word, but what's your way of trying to grow this community and bring people on board?
Yancey: Yeah, I mean, the community happened because I had this idea of ending the last chapter with a sci-fi novela. And there's actually is a, is a full sci-fi novela that did not make the book, that I cut like a 60-page novela, but there's a five-page version, uh, that was there. And I spent like a month, you know, imagining that future world. Trying to imagine where my idea would go. It’s my editor was kind of encouraging me to do this. And it was in that that I imagined there's a group called the bento society and they are average people who become kind of public researchers and who become these sort of knowledge workers working on this collective project to define non-financial values and to stand for the values that are important in their lives and that this becomes a real community. And so I wrote in the book a scene of a bento society chapter in the Lower East Side, where people are sharing their research and it's like one of 60 meetings happening that month. And that was just what came alive to me when I, I don't know, just imagining. I love to just get myself in trouble with my ideas, where I also had this notion when I wrote the book. Originally, the last page was gonna have a location and a date one year after the book's top publication, where people would meet and there'd be some sort of space together. And I was just like, this needs to manifest something bigger. And so I've really just been following that. And I've just been following that vision I saw of the way that this comes true is these groups of people launching these sorts of projects, this research that creating a groundswell, leading to a 30-year change in how all of Western society sees itself. And I continue to believe that's true. And I feel like the steps of now creating this group of the bento society, which is, you know, uh, a little over a year old at this point, and it's on a 30-year mission. And it's just following this, the things that I saw when writing the book. I think most of us come for some mix of like wanting to change the macro structures of the world and then also finding this personally useful. A lot of our time is spent working on ourselves, the things we wanna do, the jobs, careers we wanna have, the relationships we wanna be in and then it's also just tying that into, well, what is, what's the world we want for all of us to have? And like just shrinking the, the gap between those things on a regular basis. Maybe I'll just go to the same language I've had before, but like, it is true. What we're doing is true. And you know, the next phase of this is pooling together a money. So it is a people can pay to pay what you want community and we're giving quarterly grants to research projects in line with our mission. We’ll be announcing the first grant very soon. We've already given it, but it's a very in line with the book's mission project that we're gonna be the first $1,500 in to make it happen. And so over time, those of us who are in the bento society, we are gonna be pulling together our energy, our resources to be manifesting this larger world. I'm continuing to operate on that plan. And it really came from just visioning and visioning and just following what felt true in that.
Parul: This sounds, sounds beautiful and I definitely like this idea of hope, that it takes time to change, but it can happen. You talk about the 30-year cycles, but so practically were you just reaching out to everyone you knew and inviting them in? So did it spread through word of mouth?
Yancey: I've been blogging, writing emails forever so like I've sent it out to my email list, letting people know, but honestly, I've been, I've been secretive about it. I've been quiet about it. It's felt sacred and precious, and it's like a hard thing to get thirsty about on Twitter while feeling true to the real essence of it. So talking about it and growing it has been a challenge for me because I'm not personally driven by that. And to me, this is about truth and meaning. And so I can feel like because this is bringing value to people, more people should experience it, but I myself am not motivated by that at all, which is potentially problematic. Eventually, I think we'd love a great growth-motivated partner who has the right notion of growth that, that wants to do that. You know, I feel like I'm still trying to create the, the dogma a little bit, the doctrine. Discover what's true. This, the book I'm writing now is called How To Think Like A Bentoist. And it's like, just what have I learned in these three years? What have we gone through together? And so I'm still in such a learning mode that to be fully promotional feels a little disingenuous, right? Cause I'm still a student too. So there's a relationship there that I haven't yet sorted out. Sometimes I feel guilty with myself, but I think I, I'm doing what is, what is true. I'm not betraying anything by how, how I'm behaving now and the trick is to do that while still growing.
Matt: Definitely shows. We're also spearheading growing a community of writers here. And, and a lot of what you said has resonated so much, but you know, sometimes it feels like, yes, we've created this, but also we're kind of just on the ride of it wants to be something.
Yancey: Yeah.
Matt: And I'm curious, how do you think of yourself as the leader of this versus enabling the community to run with it? How do you, how do you think about that?
Yancey: It's it's interesting. I mean, I have moments where I don't want that responsibility. I would like to just be the writer student. And a lot of the time I am that, you know, probably most of the time I am that. There are other roles that are less, you know, natural for me to play. I'm not the promoter of this idea. I'm really bad at being the promoter. There, there are ways that, uh, garden needs to be watered, uh, when it's first starting and you know, you, you just have to do it. And what I've been fortunate to find, and I'm sure you have too, is that members of the community appear and there are people who are good at things you're bad at, and there are people who care about things you didn't think to care about and your spaces are made better by that. So can you both have a space that like has a firm hold of why everyone's there, but also isn't entirely written, you know, and allows it to be shaped by who's a part of it? I don't think I've cracked a code by any means on this, again, cause I think I'm, you know, I'm maybe too close to it to, to, to do what a kind of work that needs to be do. But again, I just think this is just what it has to be for now. Um, and when it's ready to be something else, it will happen. You know, I, I don't know. I've dealt with the forces of lifelong enough to know that they don't always make sense, but like fighting with them is not—rarely works out for you. Like it's good, good to roll with it a little bit.
Matt: It's great. Yeah, it's great to get your perspective. Wow. What a, a conversation. I think, uh, we're definitely gonna have to revisit this one, Yancey. There's so much to chew on. Anything else that we can do to help you on your, your mission and what, what you're doing?
Yancey: No, I, you know, I love being in a room full of other writers today. So I really am grateful for that. If you like these ideas, check us out, bentoism.org/join. If you go to bentoism.org/events, you can sign up for a weekly bento and just come.
Matt: Great. Yancey, this has been, uh, such a delight.
Parul: Such an honour.
Matt: Yeah, we can't wait to see where you go with this. Good luck on the new book too. And, and keep us posted when that one's ready to go. We'd love to talk about it and share it.
Yancey: Yeah.
Parul: Thank you for tuning in to the London Writers’ Salon podcast. If you enjoyed our chat and you'd like to join us for the next one, please visit londonwriterssalon.com. For more information on how to become a member as a member, you will have access to our interview archive to our workshops and our cosy online writing community. Whatever kind of writer you are, it is an excellent place to make new creative connections and focus on your craft.
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