There’s more to life than profit
Yancey Strickler on climate change, founding Kickstarter and the perils of profit
November 21, 2019
1 hr 32 min
276
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Episode 276 · November 21, 2019
There’s more to life than profit
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There’s more to life than profit
Summary
Yancey Strickler is the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and he’s just released a new book, This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. In Strickler’s telling, our society has been so thoroughly captured by the value-system of financial maximization, that we don’t even view it as such. Kickstarter was an affront to that value-system, a way that groups could fund ideas outside of the realm of profit. And this new book is trying to dig deeper into that worldview, unveil its fallibility, and offer an alternative way of imagining our society.
So, in this conversation we talk about profit and the economy, but also about climate change, the founding story of Kickstarter, what makes great fiction so great, Alan Moore’s notion of the “idea space,” the bizarre way that Strickler went about writing his book, and much more.
Book recommendations:
Time Loops by Eric Wargo
Value and Ethics in Economics by Elizabeth Anderson
Dune by Frank Herbert
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My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.
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Credits:
Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld
Researcher - Roge Karma
Engineers - Cynthia Gil & Chris Shurtleff
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