What People Want

On a sweltering June day in front of a velvet curtain at Barclays Bank in north London. The man took a piece of paper out of his pocket and pressed it into the beckoning slot on the beige box. The crowd watched, murmuring amongst themselves with the confused eyes, the box seemingly happy with the paper it had been given, spit a crisp 10 pound bill into his waiting hand. As struck by this as the crowd, he slowly stepped away, inspecting the bills, though maybe it wasn't real.

But the next person went, and the next Barclays staff assuring the people not only was the money real, but that this was the way everyone would get money out of their account from now on. The murmurs turned into conversations, which turned into rumors, which turned into the nearly universal belief that the people whose job it was to hand cash to everyone through a window were definitely, and without a question, about to be out of a job.

Exactly like the conversation we're having today. This was the birth of the ATM and it was obvious. Why would we need bank tellers anymore? But as a surprise to just about everyone, including bank executives, everybody in the industry, as the number of ATMs climbed, the number of bank tellers climbed, doubling over the next 50 years until reaching a peak in 2007. ATM spreadsheets, photography, the printing press. Claude Is AI going Take my job.

This video is brought to you by Commentaire Coffee. More on them later. This is exactly what the scene called for a perfect pyramid cut into five layers, each layer a different color, moveable, able to be stacked one on top of another. A visual representation of the five things every human needs to become the peak version of themselves. This layer, right above food, shelter, and water is what this video is about. Security.

Your job solve security and you can move on to belonging, then to achievement. And should you be lucky enough onto what they call self-actualization, the peak of human experience. And this pyramid is exactly the thing that no matter how hard I tried, I could not buy that no one could buy because it simply did not exist. In the seemingly infinite selection of things you can buy in the world. Not on Amazon, not Etsy, not even by negotiating directly from factories located in China.

Because unless, you know, thousands of people want to buy exactly this type of pyramid, same colors, same size, it would be a pure gamble to go through the effort to make them. So let's play a game. You're sitting there thinking, Maybe I could make and sell them. It's kind of cool. How much do you think it would cost to make the first 1000 of these? The pyramid is six inches tall by six inches wide. are five pieces to it, and each piece is a different color.

It's basic plastic. There's nothing special about the material. 75,000. $30,000. Okay. All right. Well, really only want one. How about just one? $17,000. An aluminum mold engraved with an indent. The shape of each layer to hold melted plastic needs to be made for each of the five layers. That's the cost of the molds. About $17,000. So they just break even. On your first thousand, you'd have to sell them for $30 a piece, and even that doesn't take into account packaging time.

Everything that goes into getting this to a customer, so nobody makes it and nobody bought it. And the market recorded nothing. A zero in a column that could have been a one meet. Yet this pyramid is here. It's real. And it is the only one that exists. I did not know it at the time, but once I had it, this thing was the perfect representation of all the things we don't know. People want that simply aren't created because there's too much uncertainty.

It takes far too much time, money, both like the tip of an iceberg above the surface. What we know, what we can see, what's under it we cannot see hidden by water. The true size of the iceberg is always much, much larger than what's visible to the eye. This pyramid, the tip of an iceberg, hints at the unknown, yet infinite number of ways to arrange atoms of bits into things. Experiences that people find delightful. Find safety, comfort, utility.

Things that we take for granted, like electricity. 250 years ago, nobody had any idea that spinning a bunch of copper around a magnet would produce lightning that could be harnessed and channeled into a little plug on the wall that lets you create winter in a box so you can always have fresh food. Things that might make people 250 years from now go. They only looked like 87 back then. You believe that? But amongst this optimism, the idea of infinite possibility represented by this pyramid, which I will explain how it came to be here in a minute.