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This Could Be Our Future by Yancey Strickler - Book Summary · 7 Minute Books: Free Book Summaries

• 0:01
  Sam: Hey, welcome to 7 Minute Books. I'm Sam, and today we're talking about This Could Be Our Future by Yancey Strickler, the co-founder of Kickstarter. Sophie, I have to ask, did this book make you feel a little bit called out like it did me?
• 0:15
  Sophie: Oh, completely. It's one of those books that quietly rearranges how you see your own choices. Strickler's whole argument is that we're living inside a single story about value, and it's narrower than we think.
• 0:29
  Sam: Right, and that story has a name. He calls it billionaire logic. It's not about hating rich people. It's about a mindset that says the only rational goal is to maximize money, and everything else is just noise.
• 0:44
  Sophie: Exactly. And the part that really lands is how invisible it's become. We don't even notice we're doing it. A hedge fund guy moving money around gets treated as more valuable than a teacher shaping kids, and we just nod along.
• 0:59
  Sam: Yeah, and he gives this image that stuck with me. A company pollutes a river, makes a profit, and we call it successful. The river itself gets valued at basically zero because it doesn't show up on a balance sheet.
• 1:13
  Sophie: That's the core critique. If it can't be priced, we pretend it doesn't exist. Love, beauty, community, and meaning. None of it shows up on the spreadsheet, but it's the stuff that actually makes life worth living.
• 1:27
  Sam: So what's his answer? Because I was bracing for something preachy, and then he pulls out a bento box, which I did not see coming.
• 1:34
  Sophie: Right, this is the fun part. He calls it bentoism, named after the Japanese lunchbox with little compartments. The point isn't to maximize one ingredient. It's about balance across several.
• 1:47
  Sam: And there are four compartments. The present self, which wants comfort and pleasure right now. The future self, which saves and exercises and delays gratification. Those two are pretty well served already, honestly.
• 2:02
  Sophie: Yeah, and then the two that get ignored. The present collective is the people around us right now, our families, our coworkers, and our communities. And the future collective is everyone who inherits the world after us.
• 2:15
  Sam: Okay, so I actually pushed back on this when I first read it. I thought, fine, nice metaphor, but how do you actually use it on a Tuesday afternoon when you have real decisions to make?
• 2:27
  Sophie: That's fair, and he does try to answer it. In business it means measuring success by impact on employees and communities and the environment, not just profit. In personal life it means picking work that fits your values, not just your bank account.
• 2:43
  Sam: The one I keep thinking about is voting. He says we should support policies that help future generations even when they cost us something today. That's genuinely hard. I'm not gonna pretend I do that consistently.
• 2:56
  Sophie: Nobody does. And I like that he doesn't demand sacrifice. He argues that when you look at all four compartments, what's good for the future collective is often good for you too. Clean air, strong communities, meaningful work.
• 3:11
  Sam: Right, so it's not asceticism. It's expanding what counts as a good life. Where does he think this billionaire logic actually came from, though? Because it feels like it's been with us forever.
• 3:23
  Sophie: He traces a lot of it to the late twentieth century, the rise of neoliberalism, the idea that markets should organize everything. Thinkers like Milton Friedman, politicians like Reagan, and honestly both parties bought in.
• 3:36
  Sam: And he says the roots go even deeper, back to the Enlightenment. The idea that everything can be measured and quantified, that progress is linear, that value is objective. Science and reason got hijacked by a narrow economic worldview.
• 3:53
  Sophie: Which is his sharpest move, I think. He's not anti-science. He's saying we confused what's measurable with what's real, and we've been paying for that confusion ever since.
• 4:04
  Sam: So what do we actually do about it? Because the forces on the other side are enormous. He's not naive about that, right?
• 4:11
  Sophie: No, he's pretty clear-eyed. His main lever is stories. He says the stories we tell shape our values more than any policy ever could, so telling different stories is the real work.
• 4:23
  Sam: And he points at Kickstarter as a small example. Success there isn't just how much money a project raises. It's the community it builds and the creative work it makes possible. Different logic entirely.
• 4:36
  Sophie: Then he zooms out and asks the bigger questions. What if banks invested in communities instead of extracting from them? What if corporations had to consider all stakeholders, not just shareholders?
• 4:48
  Sam: I like that he keeps bringing it back to individual action too. You don't have to wait for the system. You can spend your money in ways that match your values, and you can talk about it with people around you.
• 5:00
  Sophie: And that's the part I found genuinely moving. He's not asking for heroism. He's asking for small, repeated choices that add up. That's a much more livable version of change.
• 5:12
  Sam: Okay, but let me be the skeptic here. I found the framework a little vague. When the present self and the future collective genuinely conflict, the bento box doesn't tell you which compartment wins.
• 5:25
  Sophie: Yeah, I had the same reaction. He admits those tensions exist but he doesn't fully resolve them. And he doesn't offer a detailed political program either. His focus is on minds and hearts, not laws.
• 5:40
  Sam: Which, to be fair, might be the right call. He's a storyteller, not a policy wonk. He even cites Keynes predicting we'd be working way less by now and just enjoying life. Obviously that didn't happen.
• 5:54
  Sophie: But the question he leaves you with is a good one. If the story we're living inside is making us miserable, why do we keep telling it? That's not a policy question. That's a human one.
• 6:06
  Sam: Honestly, the thing I'm taking away is smaller than I expected. It's just the habit of asking, before a decision, who else this affects. Present me, future me, the people around me, and the people after me.
• 6:20
  Sophie: Yeah, and if you want to go deeper, the whole library lives over at 7minutebooks.com/app, with over 6,000 fiction and nonfiction titles you can read or listen to in any language, starting at $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 once for lifetime access.
• 6:43
  Sam: It's a book that says the future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we build, one ordinary choice at a time. And that's weirdly hopeful.
• 6:52
  Sophie: Yeah. Money matters, but it was never the whole meal. The future is something we make, and we'll see you in the next one.