There’s more to life than profit

Photo illustration by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek/Getty Images

Former Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler discusses climate change, founding Kickstarter and the perils of profit on The Ezra Klein Show.

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.

You can listen to this conversation — and others — by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.

Yancey Strickler’s book recommendations:

Time Loops by Eric Wargo

Value and Ethics in Economics by Elizabeth Anderson

Dune by Frank Herbert

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