This concept of a time billionaire really hits home for me, because one of my favorite movies is the 2011 movie In Time starring Justin Timberlake. Our society overvalues the former, but undervalues the latter. One has financial resources and the other has life resources. It perfectly breaks down the difference between a time billionaire and a dollar billionaire. I have read this excerpt of the transcript too many times to count at this point. And what’s startling about the picture – again, to this question of how long is a billion seconds – is how short it actually is. So he has 52 circles on the horizontal and then 90 rows so that you can see a 90-year life in weeks. And what he does is he puts a week – he does a circle for each week. And I find his writing style and the topics he is interested in just amazing. So I was trying to capture – I heard Tim Urban on your podcast. But I don’t know that I live every day that way. I don’t know how I’d price it because my kids are of a certain age that they’ll never be again. What would he pay if he could take the next five years of someone’s 20-year-old healthy body, mind, etc.? And for that 20-year-old, how would they price it? Because I was thinking at various points of my career, I might have sold the next five years for something.Īnd over time, my pricing has gone vertical because the next five years, if I were to lose – and the key to this question is that you can’t sell the five at the end of your life. And I was thinking about how if you could – what would Rupert Murdoch, who’s worth $20 billion – he’s 87 years old. But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires. And I was thinking of time billionaires that when I see, sometimes, 20-year-olds – the thought I had was they probably have two billion seconds left. And we deify dollar billionaires in a way that – it’d be nice to co-opt that term the way Tyler Cowen did with cultural billionaires. I feel like in our culture, we’re so obsessed, as a culture, with money. In one of his books, he talks about cultural billionaires. And I was thinking about – Tyler Cowen has a thing about cultural billionaires – A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years. Graham Duncan: A million seconds is 11 days. That’s a hell of a way to think about it. He said a million seconds is like 11 days. And he was saying people don’t really understand the difference between billionaires and millionaires. Graham Duncan: I was listening to a guy introduced a speaker a while ago. Here is the transcript from the podcast conversation: This insight was flagged by my friend Blake Robbins who described it as “truly profound.” I actually think Blake may be understating how incredible this idea is. ![]() He spoke of a concept during that conversation that I can’t stop thinking about - the idea of “time billionaires.” Graham Duncan, the co-founder of East Rock Capital, appeared on the Tim Ferris podcast in March 2019.
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