[Music]
we all know the old cliche that time is
money but have we ever thought to turn
that around and think that maybe money
is time
Andy George the host of the YouTube
series how to make everything spend six
months and $1,500 growing a garden
turning ocean water into salt making
cheese and killing a chicken all so that
he could make a sandwich entirely from
scratch upon tasting it his review was
it's not bad that's about it it's not
bad he should have just gone down to his
local Vietnamese bakery and had a
delicious and satisfying pork roll all
for seven dollars in five minutes that's
a saving of five months 30 days 23 hours
and 55 minutes and 1493 dollars but this
experiment got me thinking how much
would you pay for a minute my next
thought was why do we always connect
money and time and why are we so anxious
about both of these things the most
basic human conundrum is that we have an
unlimited list of things that we want a
need to do but only a limited number of
resources to take items off that list
the most limited resource of all is time
we have an unknown but finite amount and
once it's gone there's no getting it
back we try to save time avoid
unpleasant experiences and invest time
now for future awards so that we can
make the most of it so that we can be
the most satisfied let's dwell on
satisfaction for a moment we get
satisfaction when we fulfill our needs
and wants using Harvard professor clay
Christensen's framework
this might include completing a
functional task feeling a particular
emotion or engaging in a certain social
interaction some activities might
include all three of these
take for example eating a Vietnamese
pork roll it quails your hunger it makes
you feel good with interesting textures
and flavors
it demonstrates to others that you have
a sophisticated and exotic palate the
most important bit here though is time
if we can fulfill more needs in less
time then we've got more satisfaction
out of that time and we have more free
time to fulfill other needs and wants
imagine if you had to do everything for
yourself this morning with no help from
technology or from anyone else just to
get here waking up you'd be heating the
water for your shower over a fire for
which you would have had to gather the
wood for breakfast do you be foraging
for fresh leaves and mushrooms that
certainly be no smashed ever on toast
then after walking here you'd have to
bar Toa and trading something that the
person on the door wanted you'd be lucky
to have got an inside by sunset and
you'd have missed all the entertaining
and insightful talks here at Ted
Paleolithic how deeply unsatisfying
fortunately society has evolved to help
us minimize this waste and inefficiency
by specializing instead of just solving
all our own needs each of us focuses on
fulfilling a particular need or want for
ourselves and for other people we seek
help from technology so that we can do
it faster and better by specializing we
save time for other people and we stop
them adding a whole pile of needs and
wants to their already extensive lists
compared to just buying a sandwich and
making sure it's fresh Andi George had a
bunch of integrated needs worrying about
whether the chickens were fed the
veggies were watered and the cheese was
ripe all long before he could eat so
when we specialized we hope others
better balance their needs and their
time and shouldn't we be rewarded for
that so what we've done over time is
built a system to do just that to swap
share and accumulate all the time that
we've saved this system is money if you
can help others improve how they spend
that time you get a little bit of that
time back for yourself it's this
phenomenon that drives our quest for
growth with money as a proxy for time
saved and improved it follows that as an
economy grow
we fulfill more needs in less time
giving us back more time to take items
off that infinite list as someone who
works to make people's interactions with
the world easier and better I think
about these choices a lot I've tried to
codify it with a very rough equation and
I want to apologize in advance because I
know there are lots of exceptions and
distortions to this humans have
unlimited needs and limited but unknown
time most people are very uncomfortable
with this uncertainty and so we'll try
to fit as many needs into the least time
as possible
therefore the value of a product or
service can be understood by considering
how many needs it fulfills in the time
taken to fulfill them that is how
satisfying is it the more satisfying
something is the more valuable it is and
producers or creators can capture part
of that value for themselves
for example stripe is a business to
business startup whose mission is to
grow the GDP of the internet
functionally they help entrepreneurs set
up their companies with the right legal
and banking arrangements accept payments
and understand customers emotionally
they help entrepreneurs feel secure and
certain navigating the complexity of
setting up a business and socially they
make it really easy for the end
customers to pay for stuff the best bit
is that this all takes two weeks and
five hundred dollars instead of the six
months and thousands of dollars it could
have cost otherwise instead
entrepreneurs are able to spend that
time doing stuff that's core to their
business winning customers and
delivering valuable things for those
customers it's no wonder that stripes
only six years old but it's already
worth nine billion dollars all because
of how much time it gives back to their
customers so they can make better more
productive more satisfying use of that
time if we apply this equation a little
bit more broadly we can understand why
particular industries and organizations
have been and are valuable mass
production for time-saving devices into
the hands of millions more people than
ever had them before supermarkets and
shopping malls put the solutions to so
many needs and wants under a single roof
and from the printing press to my
media platforms publishers condense
hours and hours of work into easily
digestible bite-sized pieces so you'd
think that over thousands of years of
learning technological development and
specialization we'd be moving towards a
pretty good place with time coming back
to us left right and center we might
even be moving towards John Maynard
Keynes vision for the future of humanity
where our biggest problem would be how
to occupy the leisure which science and
compound interest will have one for us
to live wisely and agreeably and well
that is how do we use all this free time
that we've created for ourselves and
it's true we do have more time we're
living longer and technology is helping
us fulfill more and more of our needs
but in 2017 I don't think it really
feels like that as individuals we're
busier than ever and increasingly
focused on the short-term and as a
society we're replacing people with
technology without the structures to
support that shift and I think that the
culprit is specialization we've gone so
far down the path of breaking down and
speeding up how we fulfill our wants and
needs that we've lost the context and
the interplay between them yes on a per
individual need basis we are spending
our time more efficiently but as whole
people we need a more complete view of
how our wants and needs intersect so
that we can find the balance between
specialization and integration I suspect
it lies somewhere between the farmyard
and the Subway sandwich so this leaves
us with two big questions that we have
to ponder the first if people
fundamentally want to be satisfied how
do we create a shared understanding of
wants needs and time and the balance
that we need to strike between them and
as a structure of work technology and
labor changes what do we need to do to
make sure that everyone can live a life
that's valuable for others and
satisfying for themselves now I realized
that every moment of yours here is one
that you can't get back and might very
well be your last so
so it won't take up any more of them an
indefinite number of them trying to
answer these questions but fundamentally
humans are resourceful and inventive and
I do believe that in the long term we
will find new ways to save and to share
time and to fairly measure and
distribute the spoils our government
institutions and indeed our culture will
have to change to support this to bring
everyone along for the ride the biggest
barrier is definitely going to be
ourselves a pessimist might say that
humans are just fundamentally too
self-interested for this to work but
given the odds that we've overcome in
the past I reckon we'll be just fine and
we will learn how to live wisely and
agreeably and well thank you
[Applause]