Would you buy someone's time?

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Would you buy someone's time?

4y ago 17:42

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So, would you buy and sell people's time if it were available on an open market? People are doing that now on a platform called Human IPO. But, of course, you can also sell your own time. But before we get into that, I want to remind you all that today is Mother's Day.

Now, depending on when you're listening to this podcast, it might be too late. And for that, I'm sorry.

Now, I want you to think about this. In a survey conducted, the AARP found that 40% of young adults spend less than one day per week with their parents. As you can imagine, an adult grows up over time, and this is going to go up and down. Maybe they have young kids, so maybe for a portion of time, they'll spend a little bit more time. Still, I think overall, you're going to spend a little less time with your parents because as you grow your own family or as you accumulate other friends and responsibilities, you'll naturally have less time to be able to share.

So if you put this into perspective, By the time you graduate college, you'll most likely have spent the vast majority of all the time you will ever spend with your parents. You've already spent it. It's gone. So, whether you're younger now or whether you're an adult or, perhaps, you are a mother, this is an excellent opportunity to remind ourselves to take that extra moment, spend that time value it because. It's finite. There's not an infinite amount of that time.

And that reminds me. I better also carve out some time for the wife today.
So it's time for today's tip of the day tip of the week, tip of the podcast, whatever you want to call it. The advice for today is to follow the Boy Scout rule. So what is the Boy Scout rule? The Boy Scout rule is you leave a place better than you found it. Or, more specifically, when you leave a room, you leave it better than you found it. So, I'm saying it's a little bit different from the batching methodology that I talked about in a previous episode. So rather than maybe trying to clean the whole house at once. Who often gets time to do just that?

Now, you may be thinking that it sounds inefficient to stop what I'm doing in a room to try to clean it every single time I'm in a room. But, if you think about it, a lot of the time you spend in your home is just traveling from room to room—moving from here to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the living room, et cetera, et cetera. So, what you want to do is while you're in the room, do what you have to do. But the moment that you're transitioning from one room to another, take a glance. And in that movement from one room to the other, remove the things in the room that don't belong there or organize the papers a little bit before you get up.

And that doesn't add much time, if at all. And so you end up slipping in a lot of cleaning and maintaining the overall organization and cleanliness of the house without having to have separate time dedicated for that.

To give you some more specific examples, what this reminds me of is my wife constantly, not nagging, gently reminding me that I've left cups all over the house. And so I go end up running around and hunting for these cups every, every day. And what I now do is make sure that, hey, when I get up, if there's a cup here, I take that cup with me. I don't leave it there. So even if I think I'm going to come back, I might not.

And so just doing that little thing is useful and, it just makes the day a lot more seamless.

We have three little kids, and so they are just leaving stuff everywhere. And so it's a huge battle. For us to say, okay, stop playing, coming, clean this room, then go clean that room. And it creates a lot of friction. And so, sometimes I'll pick up for them. And sometimes, when I notice that they're leaving the room, I'll remind them and say, Hey, pick that thing up on your way to the kitchen. Pick that thing up on the way back to the bedroom. And so we're starting to build that habit with them.

Okay. So back to buying and selling people's time. This is interesting. So, visualize this for a moment. You go to the website. Okay. And I'm sure many of you have googled for a ticker symbol for a stock to see what the current price was right. And so you go to this homepage. So it's much like the homepage of these stock market websites where you see all of the different ticker symbols, and you see the current price and whether it's trending upwards and downwards. The only difference is that these ticker symbols now are people's names. And, the price of what's going up and down is the price of an hour of their time.

Before you get your undies in a knot here, I want to note that these people voluntarily do this. So they've chosen to put their time up and their likeness up on this site called Human IPO. So I think it's an extremely innovative concept. I'm not sure how I feel about doing it myself, But I do find it fascinating that people are ticker symbols that you can invest in a person, and there's a lot of good things about that, and there's a lot of concerning things about that as well that I'd like to talk about.

So why in the world would you buy an hour of someone's time? Like what intrinsic value could that possibly have.

The thesis of the site is that you are investing in people today that you believe have a high potential in the future to achieve many more things. So you look at their achievements today, look at their track record, and much like a stock on the public stock market. Then, you try to forecast whether you believe that person will accomplish greater and better things in the future.

Now, a share of stock is a percentage of a public company's equity or ownership, so the equivalent thing here is the person's time. That's what we're saying has value. It's saying, you own a percentage of their life too, in a very indirect way, because obviously life is time. As we say, life is what you choose to do with your time, and if you've sold your time, then someone else is going to decide what you're doing with that time.

Now, they can't make you do anything. So it's mainly to have a conversation with that person to pick their brain, get their advice, or maybe it's just clout to say, Hey, I can call this famous person because they sold their time a long time ago, but either way.

The intrinsic value here is the value of talking to that person. To me, that seems a little on the edge of this is an ethical or moral issue now? I'm not saying it is. I'm saying it's on the edge of maybe we need to consider what that means because we're not valuing an hour of their work. We are valuing an hour of a conversation with them. Or do I go back to schoolyard days? How cool are they?

Okay. Here's some data to consider. The US Bureau of labor statistics, as of 2020, and I tried to pick a category that I thought would equate the best, so I looked at professional services... the average hourly rate for someone working in professional services is $36 an hour.

Now, looking through the Human IPO site, most rates were much higher than that. You're talking a 100. I saw as high as $900 for someone who was a very wealthy investor. And so, really interesting to me that there was such a delta these are not normal people. You can almost say that you're already looking at the cream of the crop. It's not intended for someone who is, say, just out of school and thinking that they want to sell their time.

These are people that have had some moderate success in some cases, a lot of success, but we're betting that they'll have even more success in the future, to the extent that hour that we're buying will appreciate. Or we'll want to redeem it. Now redeeming is using it. And so that is one interesting thing about Human IPO versus the public markets is that you can't, you can sell a share, you can buy a share, but it's not destroyed. For a...

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